Contextual Stimuli Research Articles

Poster Session: A direct measure of adaptation and visual salience.

One hypothesized function of adaptation is to increase the salience of novel targets by discounting the properties of the ambient environment. Previous studies have suggested this by finding faster search times for novel targets when searching on backgrounds observers are currently adapted to. However, this provides only an indirect measure of salience. Here, we developed a more direct measure of the impact of adaptation on feature salience. Backgrounds were oriented 1/f noise images with power confined within 15 deg of horizontal or vertical. Targets were 5 c/deg Gabor patches centered on the 8 deg backgrounds. Observers simultaneously adapted to the horizontal or vertical backgrounds shown on the left or right of fixation. A 250ms test probe then showed the Gabor patch on the same background (horizontal or vertical) on both sides. The target orientation was adjusted on one side until it appeared as conspicuous as a fixed target on the other side. Settings were made for fixed targets ranging from 10 to 45 deg from the backgrounds. For most conditions/observers, the salience matches required a smaller orientation offset on the same- vs. different-adapt background. These results support a functional role of adaptation in highlighting novelty by potentially "unmasking" the target from its background, and emphasize the importance of considering adaptation aftereffects not only for isolated targets but within the stimulus contexts they are embedded in.

Arbeitsschutz „im Huckepack“ – ein alternatives Konzept zur Ansprache von Unternehmen auf Sicherheits- und Gesundheitsthemen. Teil II: Erprobung in einer Maßnahme für Kleinunternehmen

Occupational safety “piggybacked” – an alternative concept for addressing companies with safety and health issues. Part II: Implementation in a measure for small businesses Background: Entrepreneurs in small businesses represent a challenging but also underestimated target group for occupational safety and health (OSH) prevention activities. Objective: Referring to the article published in ASU 6/2023 on the theoretical foundation of the “piggyback method”, an alternative concept for addressing small business owners on OSH issues is being developed and implemented. Method: OSH issues were linked by content to topics preferred by the target group and presented according to the principles of second-order conditioning. The interactive events were marketed by two chambers and evaluated by an online survey with a random sample of n = 40. Results: The procedure and implementation were rated positively overall by the participants. The OSH issues (target stimulus) were rated as just as relevant as the lack of skilled workers and self-care (context stimuli). Conclusions: The results speak for the usefulness of the “piggyback method” for OSH prevention activities. However, the results are not sufficient as a proof of effectiveness; this requires further practical tests and evaluations. Keywords: occupational safety and health – small businesses – entrepreneurs – evaluation

Professional Status: Teachers' Difficulties in Compiling Questions Based on Higher Order Thinking Skills

Higher-order thinking skills are needed in dealing with 21st-century learning. The teacher's role is crucial in improving students' higher-order thinking skills. However, implementing HOTS-based questions is rarely used by teachers who have or have not held professional status. This study analyzes teachers' difficulties in compiling HOTS-based questions regarding professional status. This study used a descriptive quantitative approach. The population in this study were all teachers in Cluster. Sampling in this study was carried out by cluster sampling, then proportional random sampling in each Cluster. The sample in this study was 34 teachers, who were divided into two groups, namely teachers who had not yet held professional status and had. Data collection used an instrument in the form of a questionnaire. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics in mean, standard deviation, and percentages converted to PAP. The results of this study were that teachers who are not yet professional in compiled HOTS-based questions were in the very high category, while the difficulties of teachers who already hold professional status in compiled HOTS-based questions were in the high category. Teachers who are not yet professional in compiling HOTS-based questions have difficulty understanding cognitive levels, determining cognitive levels, choosing KKO, and compiling contextual stimuli. For teachers with professional status, the difficulties experienced are chosen KKO, compiled contextual stimuli, and compiled stimuli that are easy for students to understand.

Knowledge Graph Dataset for Semantic Enrichment of Picture Description in NAPS Database

This data description introduces a comprehensive knowledge graph (KG) dataset with detailed information about the relevant high-level semantics of visual stimuli used to induce emotional states stored in the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS) repository. The dataset contains 6808 systematically manually assigned annotations for 1356 NAPS pictures in 5 categories, linked to WordNet synsets and Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) concepts presented in a tabular format. Both knowledge databases provide an extensive and supervised taxonomy glossary suitable for describing picture semantics. The annotation glossary consists of 935 WordNet and 513 SUMO entities. A description of the dataset and the specific processes used to collect, process, review, and publish the dataset as open data are also provided. This dataset is unique in that it captures complex objects, scenes, actions, and the overall context of emotional stimuli with knowledge taxonomies at a high level of quality. It provides a valuable resource for a variety of projects investigating emotion, attention, and related phenomena. In addition, researchers can use this dataset to explore the relationship between emotions and high-level semantics or to develop data-retrieval tools to generate personalized stimuli sequences. The dataset is freely available in common formats (Excel and CSV).

Fear lies in the eyes of the beholder-Robust evidence for reduced gaze dispersion upon avoidable threat.

A rapid detection and processing of relevant information in our environment is crucial for survival. The human eyes are drawn to social or threatening stimuli as they may carry essential information on how to behave appropriately in a given context. Recent studies further showed a centralization of gaze that reminded of freezing behaviors in rodents. Probably constituting a component of an adaptive defense mode, centralized eye movements predicted the speed of motor actions. Here we conducted two experiments to examine if and how these presumably survival-relevant gaze patterns interact. Subjects viewed images including social, that is, faces (Experiment 1, N = 50) or threatening stimuli, that is, snakes or spiders (Experiment 2, N = 50) while awaiting an inevitable (shock), no (safety), or an avoidable shock (flight) they could escape from by a fast button press. The social and threatening cues within the scenes differed in their distance from the image center and we acquired eye-tracking and autonomic physiological data. Although we observed an initial orienting toward social and threatening stimulus aspects, this exploration pattern vanished towards the end of flight trials when a pronounced centralization of gaze emerged. Replicating previous findings, the amount of this center bias predicted the speed of motor reactions, and we observed a concurrent activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Taken together, the exploration of potentially relevant cues seems to be part of a reflexive-orienting response regardless of contextual valence. However, centralization of gaze may be a threat-specific action-preparatory response that occurs across a wide range of stimulus contexts.

Exploring the relationship between emotion regulation, inhibitory control, and eating psychopathology in a non-clinical sample.

The present study aimed to explore the relationship between difficulties in emotion regulation and deficits in inhibitory control, and the role of these processes in eating psychopathology in a non-clinical sample. We also explored the specificity in which deficits in inhibitory control may underlie eating psychopathology, namely whether they can be conceptualised as context specific or more extensive in nature. Participants were 107 healthy individuals recruited at a major Portuguese university, aged between 18 and 43years-old (M=21.23, SD=4.79). Two computerised neuropsychological tasks (i.e., emotional go/no-go and food go/no-go tasks) were used to assess response inhibition in the presence of general versus context-specific stimuli. A set of self-report measures was used to assess variables of interest such as emotion regulation and eating psychopathology. Results indicated higher response inhibition deficits among participants with higher difficulties in emotion regulation comparing to those with lower difficulties in emotion regulation, particularly in the context of food-related stimuli. In addition, the relationship between difficulties in emotion regulation and eating psychopathology was moderated by inhibitory control deficits in both the context of food and pleasant stimuli. The present findings highlight inhibitory control as an important process underlying the relationship between difficulties in emotion regulation and eating psychopathology in non-clinical samples. Findings have important implications for clinical practice and the prevention of eating psychopathology in healthy individuals and individuals with eating disorders.

Renewal of cocaine seeking using social and nonsocial contextual stimuli.

Various nonsocial cues have been used as stimuli to examine the contextual control of drug seeking behavior, but little is known about the role of social stimuli. This study determined if renewal of cocaine seeking is differentially controlled using a context consisting of either a social peer and/or house light illumination. In Experiment 1, male and female rats trained to self-administer cocaine in the presence of a same-sex social peer and house light illumination (context A). Following self-administration, rats were randomly assigned to either an AAA (control) or ABA (renewal) group for extinction. For AAA rats, extinction consisted of the same context A as self-administration; for ABA rats, extinction occurred without the peer or house light (context B). Following extinction, renewal of cocaine seeking occurred by testing the peer alone, house light alone, and the peer + house light combination. Experiment 2 was conducted to ensure that the house light alone was sufficiently salient to produce renewal. Both experiments showed that rats acquired cocaine self-administration and extinguished lever pressing. In Experiment 1, the ABA group renewed cocaine seeking to the peer and peer + house light, but not to the house light alone. In Experiment 2, ABA rats renewed cocaine seeking to the house light alone, indicating it was sufficiently salient to produce renewal. The AAA group did not show renewal in either experiment. Social peers serve as powerful stimuli that can overshadow nonsocial visual stimuli in the renewal of cocaine seeking.

Radiological correlates of pseudobulbar affect: Corticobulbar and cerebellar components in primary lateral sclerosis

IntroductionPseudobulbar affect (PBA) is a distressing symptom of a multitude of neurological conditions affecting patients with a rage of neuroinflammatory, neurovascular and neurodegenerative conditions. It manifests in disproportionate emotional responses to minimal or no contextual stimulus. It has considerable quality of life implications and treatment can be challenging. MethodsA prospective multimodal neuroimaging study was conducted to explore the neuroanatomical underpinnings of PBA in patients with primary lateral sclerosis (PLS). All participants underwent whole genome sequencing and screening for C9orf72 hexanucleotide repeat expansions, a comprehensive neurological assessment, neuropsychological screening (ECAS, HADS, FrSBe) and PBA was evaluated by the emotional lability questionnaire. Structural, diffusivity and functional MRI data were systematically evaluated in whole-brain (WB) data-driven and region of interest (ROI) hypothesis-driven analyses. In ROI analyses, functional and structural corticobulbar connectivity and cerebello-medullary connectivity alterations were evaluated separately. ResultsOur data-driven whole-brain analyses revealed associations between PBA and white matter degeneration in descending corticobulbar as well as in commissural tracts. In our hypothesis-driven analyses, PBA was associated with increased right corticobulbar tract RD (p = 0.006) and decreased FA (p = 0.026). The left-hemispheric corticobulbar tract, as well as functional connectivity, showed similar tendencies. While uncorrected p-maps revealed both voxelwise and ROI trends for associations between PBA and cerebellar measures, these did not reach significance to unequivocally support the “cerebellar hypothesis”. ConclusionsOur data confirm associations between cortex-brainstem disconnection and the clinical severity of PBA. While our findings may be disease-specific, they are consistent with the classical cortico-medullary model of pseudobulbar affect.

Intolerance of uncertainty enhances generalisation of cued conditioned threat: An event-related potential study

Overgeneralisation is one of the aetiologies of anxiety disorders and is closely associated with elevated intolerance of uncertainty (IU) levels. However, the underlying mechanisms are unclear. Considering the inconsistency of previous results and the high sensitivity of IU to uncertainty, the present study investigated the effect of IU on threat generalisation in predictable and unpredictable conditions. We compared self-reported unconditioned stimuli (US) expectancy and event-related potentials (ERPs) during generalisation in high IU (n = 34) and low IU (n = 35) participants. The results indicated that high IU was associated with higher US expectancy for generalisation stimuli (GS) than with low IU. At the electrophysiological level, compared to low IU, high IU showed increased P1 to ambiguous GS as well as decreased early late positive potential (LPP) to GS in unpredictable conditions, and no differential response to GS in late LPP in predictable conditions. These findings suggest that IU enhances threat generalisation and may be related to increased early automatic attention to ambiguous stimulus and inadequate late elaborate processing in a high uncertainty context. These findings might contribute to the treatment of mood disorders characterized by high IU.

Arbeitsschutz „im Huckepack“ – ein alternatives Konzept zur Ansprache von Unternehmen auf Sicherheit und Gesundheit bei der Arbeit

Occupational safety “piggybacked” – an alternative concept for addressing companies on occupational health and safety. Part I: Theoretical foundation Background: Employers are obliged to implement occupational safety measures. However, implementation rates are rising only very slowly. Reservations about the issues and official requirements are widespread among entrepreneurs. Objective: There is still a great need for statutory accident insurance organisations to successfully address entrepreneurs so that they can ensure the health and safety of their workers. Method: Based on findings from cognitive and learning psychology, an alternative approach, known as the “piggyback” method, was developed. Results: By linking the health and safety topics with positively evaluated contextual stimuli, the reservations can be circumvented and a first positive change in attitude can be achieved. For a sustainable change in behaviour, a deeper dive into the issues is necessary. Conclusions: The “piggyback” method can be used especially to reach entrepreneurs who have shown little motivation for implementation so far. The concept can be applied to different fields of prevention, but still requires further testing and evaluation. Ethical aspects must also be taken into account during implementation. Keywords: occupational health and safety– information processing – entrepreneurs – targeting concept

Strategic control of location and ordinal context in visual working memory.

Working memory (WM) requires encoding stimulus identity and context (e.g. where or when stimuli were encountered). To explore the neural bases of the strategic control of context binding in WM, we acquired fMRI while subjects performed delayed recognition of 3 orientation patches presented serially and at different locations. The recognition probe was an orientation patch with a superimposed digit, and pretrial instructions directed subjects to respond according to its location ("location-relevant"), to the ordinal position corresponding to its digit ("order-relevant"), or to just its orientation (relative to all three samples; "context-irrelevant"). Delay period signal in PPC was greater for context-relevant than for "context-irrelevant" trials, and multivariate decoding revealed strong sensitivity to context binding requirements (relevant vs. "irrelevant") and to context domain ("location-" vs. "order-relevant") in both occipital cortex and PPC. At recognition, multivariate inverted encoding modeling revealed markedly different patterns in these 2 regions, suggesting different context-processing functions. In occipital cortex, an active representation of the location of each of the 3 samples was reinstated regardless of the trial type. The pattern in PPC, by contrast, suggested a trial type-dependent filtering of sample information. These results indicate that PPC exerts strategic control over the representation of stimulus context in visual WM.

Connecting tourists to musical destinations: The role of musical geographical imagination and aesthetic responses in music tourism

While the value of music in connecting tourists to destinations is recognized, its mechanism remains unclear. This study adopts aesthetic responses to explore how musical geographical imagination influences tourists' place bonding and subsequent behavioral intentions. This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study: 1) elucidates the connotation and effects of musical geographical imagination integrating with aesthetics in tourism research; 2) shows that tourists' aesthetic cognitive and affective responses to musical geographical imagination strengthen place bonding, and buttresses the importance of affective responses in leveraging behavioral intentions; and 3) indicates that tourists’ responses to musical stimuli differ in direct and indirect destination experience contexts, demonstrating that musical stimulus context moderates on associations of imagination with cognitive responses, and affective responses with behaviroal intentions. This study empirically expands the imagination from individual auditory spaces to a destination and advances tourism aesthetics research; it guides using music in tourism sensory marketing and tourism soundscape design.

Evaluative context and conditioning effects among same and different objects.

We address an apparent discrepancy in the literature on how context stimuli influence evaluations of target stimuli. While a rich literature suggests that target evaluations are often contrasted away from the valence of context stimuli, reported effects of evaluative conditioning (EC) are almost exclusively assimilative. Specifically, when a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) repeatedly co-occurs with a positive unconditioned stimulus (US), the CS is later evaluated more positively. Contrast effects from mere co-occurrences are absent in the EC literature. We hypothesized that this can be explained by the stimulus composition in EC tasks, which usually depict different objects as target (CS) and context (US). In 10 experiments, we confirmed that when target and context stimuli depict different objects, assimilation clearly dominates. Yet, when target and context depict stimuli from the same object class, contrast effects become dominant. These contrast effects are invisible in standard EC tasks because CSs are contrasted with all positive and negative USs of a given stimulus set. The present work thereby identifies a central determinant of the direction that evaluative context and conditioning effects take. While different-object contexts evoke assimilation, same-object contexts increase the likelihood of contrastive evaluations. We discuss the various theoretical and practical implications of our findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Development and psychometric properties of the Stressors in Breast Cancer Scale.

A diagnosis of breast cancer generates psychological stress, due not only to treatment and its side effects but also to the impact on different areas of the patient's daily life. Although there are instruments for measuring psychological stress in the cancer context, there is currently no tool for assessing stressors specific to breast cancer. The aim of this study was to develop the Stressors in Breast Cancer Scale (SBCS). A panel of experts evaluated the clarity and relevance of scale items, providing validity evidence based on test content. Psychometric properties of the scale were then analyzed. Validity evidence based on the internal structure of the SBCS was obtained through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), following a cross-validation strategy. The CFA supported a second-order factor model with five dimensions: physical appearance and sex strains, health and daily difficulties, interpersonal relationship strains, healthcare strains, and worries and concerns about the future. This structure was invariant across two groups distinguished by time from cancer diagnosis (less than 3 and 3 years or more from diagnosis). Reliability, based on McDonald's omega and Cronbach's alpha coefficients, ranged from 0.83 to 0.89 for factor scores, and reached 0.95 for total scores. Validity evidence was also provided by correlations with depression, anxiety, perceived stress, and perceived health and quality of life. The results support the use of the SBCS for measuring stress as a stimulus in the breast cancer context. Implications for clinical practice and research are discussed.

Modulation of smoking cue reactivity by social context—Implications for exposure therapy in virtual reality

Rationale: Social factors are considered important for the initiation and maintenance of drug abuse. Virtual reality (VR) research on cue reactivity and exposure frequently incorporates social stimuli as part of complex drug-intake scenarios. Attempts are rarely made to dissect the impact of the different components and their interactive effects. The present study critically extends this line of research by investigating the modulatory effects of social context on the reactivity evoked by proximal smoking cues.Methods: Thirty-two smokers and 33 never-smokers were presented in VR with proximal cues and neutral stimuli, embedded in a social context or a neutral context. A virtual hand model was used to translate real hand movements into VR. Each trial started with the presentation of the different stimulus–context combinations. Discrete stimuli were presented on the table in front of the participants, and contextual stimuli were presented at the end of the table. Afterward, participants were instructed to grasp the target stimulus (a cigarette vs. a pencil) in front of them. After successful contact, the stimulus appeared in the virtual hand. Modulation of cue reactivity by social context was assessed by self-report, physiological measures, and overt approach behavior.Results: The results revealed modulatory effects of social context on the responses to proximal smoking cues in smokers. In contrast to never-smokers, smoking cues evoked craving in smokers, which was attenuated in a social context. Furthermore, social context increased the latency to approach and contact the cigarette in the group of smokers but did not affect behavioral approach responses in never-smokers. Other data provided indications for interactive, but also main effects of cues and contexts. Interestingly, cue-evoked craving was increased after contact with the virtual cigarette.Conclusion: The present study critically extends previous research by providing evidence for the modulation of cue reactivity by social context. The results are particularly important given the well-established role of drug-associated environmental contexts in the stimulus control of addictive behaviors. Our results emphasize the need to address social context effects on cue reactivity in basic research and treatment and further suggest that changes in the perceived availability of smoking might enhance or inhibit cue-evoked reactivity.

Links between social avoidance and frontal alpha asymmetry during processing emotional facial stimuli: An exploratory study

Individuals who are socially avoidant actively remove themselves from opportunities for social interaction and have a strong desire for solitude. Although social avoidance is associated with a host of adjustment difficulties, its neural substrates remain under-explored. To address this gap, we conducted an exploratory study to compare electroencephalography (EEG) frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) scores during processing emotional facial stimuli in socially avoidant and non-withdrawn comparison individuals. From an original sample of N = 384 undergraduate students, 25 avoidant and 27 comparison individuals were identified. For this subset of participants, EEG modulations and self-reported experience ratings during a picture processing task were assessed. Among the results, the socially avoidant group’s ratings of positive stimuli were significantly lower than the non-withdrawn comparison group. The socially avoidant group also had significantly lower FAA scores in response to positive stimuli than the comparison group. Further, asymmetry scores of the comparison group in the positive conditions were higher than in the negative and neutral conditions. However, there were no significant differences between these three conditions in the socially avoidant group. Our results suggest that socially avoidant individuals may eschew interpersonal relationships because of a relatively greater right hemisphere cortical activity, which may contribute to a withdrawal motivation when confronted with negative emotional stimuli in social contexts.

The Temporal Dynamics of Stop Consonant Perception: Evidence from Context Effects.

Empirical evidence and theoretical models suggest that phonetic category perception involves two stages of auditory and phonetic processing. However, few studies examined the time course of these two processing stages. With brief stop consonant segments as context stimuli, this study examined the temporal dynamics of stop consonant perception by varying the inter-stimulus interval between context and target stimuli. The results suggest that phonetic category activation of stop consonants may appear before 100 ms of processing time. Furthermore, the activation of phonetic categories resulted in contrast context effects on identifying the target stop continuum; the auditory processing of stop consonants resulted in a different context effect from those caused by phonetic category activation. The findings provide further evidence for the two-stage model of speech perception and reveal the time course of auditory and phonetic processing.

Can different contexts affect memory recall?

To address questions about the dependence of human memory on the contingent context in which events occur, the author review research on contingent context-dependent memory in humans. The relationship between the context in which an item is stored and retrieved has a significant impact on a person's ability to recognize the item. The theoretical approach to this problem stems from Bjork's (1978) experiments on the effects of environmental context on recall and recognition. If a person learns and remembers in the same contextual environment, then learning and memory are dependent on the environmental context in which these activities occur. This paper discusses each of the three mental processes of memory in relation to their stimulus context. For example, the impact of inference methods of retrieval on context-dependent memory methods, and the improvement in retrieval of information by encoding environmental information along with plot specific objects or contexts in the storage information session. Further, this paper explores the effects of contextual stimuli in real-life contexts, particularly in classroom and examination settings of environmental context.

Perceptual warping exposes categorical representations for speech in human brainstem responses

The brain transforms continuous acoustic events into discrete category representations to downsample the speech signal for our perceptual-cognitive systems. Such phonetic categories are highly malleable, and their percepts can change depending on surrounding stimulus context. Previous work suggests these acoustic-phonetic mapping and perceptual warping of speech emerge in the brain no earlier than auditory cortex. Here, we examined whether these auditory-category phenomena inherent to speech perception occur even earlier in the human brain, at the level of auditory brainstem. We recorded speech-evoked frequency following responses (FFRs) during a task designed to induce more/less warping of listeners’ perceptual categories depending on stimulus presentation order of a speech continuum (random, forward, backward directions). We used a novel clustered stimulus paradigm to rapidly record the high trial counts needed for FFRs concurrent with active behavioral tasks. We found serial stimulus order caused perceptual shifts (hysteresis) near listeners’ category boundary confirming identical speech tokens are perceived differentially depending on stimulus context. Critically, we further show neural FFRs during active (but not passive) listening are enhanced for prototypical vs. category-ambiguous tokens and are biased in the direction of listeners’ phonetic label even for acoustically-identical speech stimuli. These findings were not observed in the stimulus acoustics nor model FFR responses generated via a computational model of cochlear and auditory nerve transduction, confirming a central origin to the effects. Our data reveal FFRs carry category-level information and suggest top-down processing actively shapes the neural encoding and categorization of speech at subcortical levels. These findings suggest the acoustic-phonetic mapping and perceptual warping in speech perception occur surprisingly early along the auditory neuroaxis, which might aid understanding by reducing ambiguity inherent to the speech signal.

Improving the validity of neuroimaging decoding tests of invariant and configural neural representation.

Many research questions in sensory neuroscience involve determining whether the neural representation of a stimulus property is invariant or specific to a particular stimulus context (e.g., Is object representation invariant to translation? Is the representation of a face feature specific to the context of other face features?). Between these two extremes, representations may also be context-tolerant or context-sensitive. Most neuroimaging studies have used operational tests in which a target property is inferred from a significant test against the null hypothesis of the opposite property. For example, the popular cross-classification test concludes that representations are invariant or tolerant when the null hypothesis of specificity is rejected. A recently developed neurocomputational theory suggests two insights regarding such tests. First, tests against the null of context-specificity, and for the alternative of context-invariance, are prone to false positives due to the way in which the underlying neural representations are transformed into indirect measurements in neuroimaging studies. Second, jointly performing tests against the nulls of invariance and specificity allows one to reach more precise and valid conclusions about the underlying representations, particularly when the null of invariance is tested using the fine-grained information from classifier decision variables rather than only accuracies (i.e., using the decoding separability test). Here, we provide empirical and computational evidence supporting both of these theoretical insights. In our empirical study, we use encoding of orientation and spatial position in primary visual cortex as a case study, as previous research has established that these properties are encoded in a context-sensitive way. Using fMRI decoding, we show that the cross-classification test produces false-positive conclusions of invariance, but that more valid conclusions can be reached by jointly performing tests against the null of invariance. The results of two simulations further support both of these conclusions. We conclude that more valid inferences about invariance or specificity of neural representations can be reached by jointly testing against both hypotheses, and using neurocomputational theory to guide the interpretation of results.