Explicit Cues Research Articles

Combining verbal and visual cueing: Fostering learning pictorial content by coordinating verbal explanations with different types of visual cueing

Multimedia learning scenarios in which a picture is the main focus often use combinations of verbal and visual cueing. Based on models of picture processing and multimedia learning, the present study examined the effect of verbal and visual cueing on two basic aspects of pictorial learning: retention and localization of pictorial elements. Videos of three paintings were presented with verbal cueing (naming of pictorial elements), either alone or in combination with visual frames (explicit cues) or zoom-ins (implicit cues), in a 2 × 3 × 3 mixed design (n = 86) with the factors verbal cueing (uncued vs. cued elements, within-subjects) × visual cueing (no vs. explicit vs. implicit, between-subjects) × film (Mantegna vs. Rubens vs. Marsh, within-subjects). The three films were used to check whether our results are generalizable across different pictorial contents. The retention of pictorial elements was measured by open questions, and the localization of the pictorial elements was measured by asking the participants to place picture snippets at the correct location on an area representing the dimensions of the respective painting. The combination of verbal and visual cueing increased the difference between the cued and the less well retained uncued elements and compensated a disadvantage of verbal cueing for localization performance. This was compensated by both types of visual cueing. Regarding retention and localization, explicit and implicit cueing were equally effective. The study provides a differentiated insight into the interplay of verbal and visual cueing regarding cognitive processing in multimedia learning scenarios in which pictures are the main learning focus.

Cereal Deal: How the Physical Appearance of Others Affects Attention to Healthy Foods.

This eye-tracking study investigated whether the physical appearance of another consumer can influence people's visual attention and choice behavior in a grocery shopping context. Participants (N = 96) took part in a lab-based experiment and watched a brief video recording featuring a female consumer standing in front of a supermarket shelf. The appearance and body type of the consumer was manipulated between conditions, such that she was perceived as 1) healthy and of normal weight, 2) unhealthy by means of overweight, or 3) unhealthy through visual signs associated with a potentially unhealthy lifestyle, but not by means of overweight. Next, participants were exposed to a supermarket shelf with cereals and were asked to choose one alternative they could consider buying. Prior exposure to a seemingly unhealthy (vs. healthy) consumer resulted in a relative increase in participants' visual attention towards products perceived to be healthy (vs. unhealthy), which prompted cereal choices deemed to be healthier. This effect was stronger for products that holistically, through their design features, managed to convey the impression that they are healthy rather than products with explicit cues linked to healthiness (i.e., the keyhole label). These results offer important implications regarding packaging design for marketers, brand owners, and policy makers. Moreover, the findings highlight the value of technological tools, such as eye-tracking methodology, for capturing consumers' entire decision-making processes instead of focusing solely on outcome-based metrics, such as choice data or purchase behavior.

Communicating Brands in Television Advertising

Many studies have quantified the effects of TV ad spending or gross rating points on brand sales. Yet this effect is likely moderated by the different types of brand-related messages or cues (e.g., logo, brand attributes) embedded in the ads and by the ways (e.g., explicitly or implicitly) these cues are conveyed to TV audiences. The authors thus measure 17 cues often used within ads to build brand awareness (or salience) and brand image and investigate their influence on ad effectiveness. Technically, the study builds a dynamic model to quantify the effects of advertising on sales; builds a robust and interpretable (i.e., nonparametric and sparse) factor model that integrates correlated, left-censored branding cues; and then models the effects of advertising as a function of the factors identified by these cues. An analysis of 177 campaigns aired by 62 brands finds that salience cues (e.g., logo) and benefit and attribute messages moderate ad effectiveness. It also finds that explicit cues are more effective than implicit ones; nonetheless, the primary drivers of ad effectiveness are visual salience cues: the duration and frequency with which the logo and the duration with which the product are displayed. The study can thus suggest ways brand and ad agency managers can improve the effects of creative ad content on sales.

Blind image deblurring via hybrid deep priors modeling

Blind image deblurring is a challenging low-level vision problem which aims to restore a sharp image only from the blurry observation. Few known information makes this problem fundamentally ill-posed. Most recent works focus on designing various priors on both latent image and blur kernel based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) model to restrict the solution space. However, their performance is highly related to these hand-crafted explicit priors. In fact, the pre-designed explicit priors may have less flexibility to fit different image structures in real-world scenarios. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a novel framework, named Hybrid Deep Priors Model (HDPM), to simulate the propagation of sharp latent image used in kernel estimation and final deconvolution. Specifically, we introduce the learnable implicit deep prior and hand-crafted explicit prior as regularizations into the MAP inference process to extract the detailed texture and sharp structures of latent image, respectively. In HDPM, we can successfully take the advantages of explicit cues based on task information and implicit deep priors from training data to facilitate the propagation of sharp latent image which is beneficial for the kernel estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art deblurring methods on benchmarks, challenging scenarios and non-uniform images.

The effects of age on reward magnitude processing in the monetary incentive delay task

Previous studies have suggested age-related differences in reward-directed behavior and cerebral processes in support of the age effects. However, it remains unclear how age may influence the processing of reward magnitude. Here, with 54 volunteers (22–74 years of age) participating in the Monetary Incentive Delay Task (MIDT) with explicit cues ($1, ¢1, or nil) and timed response to win, we characterized brain activations during anticipation and feedback and the effects of age on these regional activations. Behaviorally, age was associated with less reaction time (RT) difference between dollar and cent trials, as a result of slower response to the dollar trials; i.e., age was positively correlated with RT dollar – RT cent, with RT nil as a covariate. Both age and the RT difference ($1 - ¢1) were correlated with diminished activation of the right caudate head, right anterior insula, supplementary motor area (SMA)/pre-SMA, visual cortex, parahippocampal gyrus, right superior/middle frontal gyri, and left primary motor cortex during anticipation of $1 vs. ¢1 reward. Further, these regional activities mediated the age effects on RT differences. In responses to outcomes, age was associated with decreases in regional activations to dollar vs. cent loss but only because of higher age-related responses to cent losses. Together, these findings suggest age-related differences in sensitivity to the magnitude of reward. With lower cerebral responses during anticipation to win large rewards and higher responses to outcomes of small loss, aging incurs a constricted sensitivity to the magnitude of reward.

The effect of implicit and explicit extrinsic cues on hedonic and sensory expectations in the context of beer

While the demand for non-alcoholic beer has increased, consumers often complain about its inferior sensory characteristics. As expectations mediate the effect of extrinsic product cues on sensory perception, we could utilise these cues to improve consumers’ experience of such products. The current study, comprising four repeated measures experiments, investigated the role of extrinsic cues in generating sensory and hedonic expectations of beer. A hundred and sixty-six beer drinkers viewed realistic beer labels, which varied in their colour, design, labelled alcohol content and sensory descriptor, in response to which they rated their expectations of bitterness, smoothness, sweetness, refreshment, beer colour, body and liking. In summary, across these four experiments, label colour, labelled alcohol content and sensory descriptor all had significant and replicable effects on consumer expectations. However, the size of these effects depended on how explicit or implicit the information of a cue was relative to the presence and specificity of other cues on the label. For example, red and brown labels increased expected bitterness (F(3,108) = 16.58, p < 0.001, ηg2 = 0.102), but this effect decreased (F(1,38) = 7.92, p = 0.008, ηg2 = 0.026) when labelled alcohol content was also manipulatedand disappeared (F(1, 37) = 2.1, p = 0.156) when an explicit cue, a sensory descriptor, was added. Overall, the study provides new insights into how labelling shapes expectations, and illustrates the disproportionate influence of different extrinsic cues. Finally, the findings highlight the need to use realistic stimuli: the information different extrinsic cues carry and the way we combine theminfluences expectations.

Sensory feedback reduces scalar variability effects in perception and action tasks

According to Weber’s law, the variability in a perceptual response scales with physical stimulus magnitude. Such scalar variability effects are widely observed in visual perception, but recent work shows that the kinematics of visually guided actions instead show equivalent variability across stimulus magnitudes. To account for this surprising violation of a supposedly lawful phenomenon, resistance to Weber’s law has been touted as a feature of specialized vision-for-action processing, separate from perceptual processing. In this study, we investigated the alternative hypothesis that limited scalar variability is achieved by movement recalibration based on sensory feedback. In Experiment 1, participants performed a pantomime grasping block without any feedback and a feedback grasping block with visual and haptic feedback. These were alternated with three manual size estimation (MSE) blocks, counterbalancing for task order. Scalar variability affected the maximum grip apertures of pantomime grasps, but not normal grasps. More interestingly, a reduction in Weber’s fraction was observed for MSEs following normal grasping, but not following pantomime grasping. When pantomime and normal grasping were intermixed (but with explicit cues to trial type), scalar variability was absent for both. Next, we investigated whether haptic feedback from grasping plays an irreplaceable role in reducing scalar variability, or if visual feedback in a perceptual task will also suffice. Experiment 2 consisted of three MSE blocks, with no feedback in the first and last blocks, but with visual feedback of the grip aperture relative to the target object in the middle block (two lines around the target displayed immediately upon entering the estimate). Visual feedback significantly enhanced accuracy and precision in the second block while also reducing scalar variability; these effects carried over into the third block. Clearly, sensory feedback plays a central role in the reduction of scalar variability, regardless of any functional distinction between perception and action tasks.

Assessing How Gender, Relationship Status, and Item Wording Influence Cues Used by College Students to Decline Different Sexual Behaviors

Researchers rarely examine college students’ event-level refusals and how refusals may change based on sexual behavior, gender, or relationship status. As such, we assessed how sexual behavior and demographic characteristics influence cues students use to decline sexual activity. As an exploratory aim, we examined the influence of item wording (such as reading the words, not willing/non-consent vs. refusal) on how students reported declining sexual activity. A sample of 615 college students from Canada and the U.S. completed a survey; students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions that manipulated item wording (not willing/non-consent vs. refusal). Students were then prompted with four open-ended questions that asked how they refused/communicated non-consent for four sexual behaviors. An inductive coding procedure was used and five overarching themes emerged. Three themes included explicit and implicit verbal cues and two themes included explicit and implicit non-verbal cues. Wording condition (i.e., not willing/non-consent v. refusal) did not influence the types of cues reported by students. Refusal communication varied by sexual behavior and relationship status but not gender. Sexual assault prevention initiatives should include more information about the variety of refusal cues used by college students in their programming, as many of these cues are currently absent.

Self‐initiated learning reveals memory performance and electrophysiological differences between younger, older and older adults with relative memory impairment

Older adults display difficulties in encoding and retrieval of information, resulting in poorer memory. This may be due to an inability of older adults to engage elaborative encoding strategies during learning. This study examined behavioural and electrophysiological effects of explicit cues to self-initiate learning during encoding and subsequent recognition of words in younger adults (YA), older control adults (OA) and older adults with relative memory impairment (OD). The task was a variation of the old/new paradigm, some study items were preceded by a cue to learn the word (L) while others by a do not learn cue (X). Behaviourally, YA outperformed OA and OD on the recognition task, with no significant difference between OA and OD. Event-related potentials at encoding revealed enhanced early visual processing (70-140ms) for L- versus X-words in young and old. Only YA exhibited a greater late posterior positivity (LPP; 200-500ms) for all words during encoding perhaps reflecting superior encoding strategy. During recognition, only YA differentiated L- versus X-words with enhanced frontal P200 (150-250ms) suggesting impaired early word selection for retrieval in older groups; however, OD had enhanced P200 activity compared to OA during L-word retrieval. The LPP (250-500ms) was reduced in amplitude for L-words compared to both X- and new words. However, YA showed greater LPP amplitude for all words compared to OA. For older groups, we observed reduced left parietal hemispheric asymmetry apparent in YA during encoding and recognition, especially for OD. Findings are interpreted in the light of models of compensation and dedifferentiation associated with age-related changes in memory function.

Eliciting contextual temporal calibration: The effect of bottom-up and top-down information in reproduction tasks

Bayesian integration assumes that a current observation is integrated with previous observations. An example in the temporal domain is the central tendency effect: when a range of durations is presented, a regression towards the mean is observed. Furthermore, a context effect emerges if a partially overlapping lower and a higher range of durations is presented in a blocked design, with the overlapping durations pulled towards the mean duration of the block. We determine under which conditions this context effect is observed, and whether explicit cues strengthen the effect. Each block contained either two or three durations, with one duration present in both blocks. We provided either no information at the start of each block about the nature of that block, provided written (“short” / “long” or “A” / “B”) categorizations, or operationalized pitch (low vs high) to reflect the temporal context. We demonstrate that (1) the context effect emerges as long as sufficiently distinct durations are presented; (2) the effect is not modulated by explicit instructions or other cues; (3) just a single additional duration is sufficient to produce a context effect. Taken together, these results provide information on the most efficient operationalization to evoke the context effect, allowing for highly economical experimental designs, and highlights the automaticity by which priors are constructed.

Spontaneous attention and psycho-physiological responses to others' injury in chimpanzees.

Previous studies have shown that humans experience negative emotions when seeing contextual cues of others' pain, such as injury (i.e., empathic pain), even without observing behavioral expressions of distress. However, this phenomenon has not been examined in nonhuman primates. We tested six chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to experimentally examine their reactions to others' injury. First, we measured viewing responses using eye-tracking. Chimpanzees spontaneously attended to injured conspecifics more than non-injured conspecifics, but did not do so in a control condition in which images of injuries were scrambled while maintaining color information. Chimpanzees did not avoid viewing injuries at any point during stimulus presentation. Second, we used thermal imaging to investigate chimpanzees' physiological responses to others' injury. Previous studies reported that reduced nasal temperature is a characteristic of arousal, particularly arousal associated with negative valence. We presented chimpanzees with a realistic injury: a familiar human experimenter with a prosthetic wound and artificial running blood. Chimpanzees exhibited a greater nasal temperature reduction in response to injury compared with the control stimulus. Finally, chimpanzees were presented with a familiar experimenter who stabbed their (fake) thumb with a needle, with no running blood, a situation that may be more challenging in terms of understanding the cause of distress. Chimpanzees did not physiologically distinguish this condition from the control condition. These results suggest that chimpanzees inspect others' injuries and become aroused by seeing injuries even without observing behavioral cues, but have difficulty doing so without explicit (or familiar) cues (i.e., open wound and blood).

Spontaneous partitioning and proportion estimation in children’s numerical judgments

What do numerical estimates tell us about developing an understanding of number? One theory is that bounded number line estimation (NLE) tasks reveal a “representational shift” from logarithmically to linearly organized mental representations of number over development. According to a different theoretical framework, developmental change in estimation reflects changes in children’s numerical knowledge and their ability to make appropriate relative judgments. Empirical support for this “proportion estimation” framework includes the fact that quantitative models of proportion estimation describe signature patterns of estimation bias. A recent study argued against this latter theory by suggesting that patterns of curvature in number line placements are simply artifacts of a task procedure in which participants receive explicit information about the location of the numerical midpoint. We tested this claim in two experiments with children aged 6–8 years (Experiment 1: N = 47; Experiment 2: N = 104). Results demonstrated that the proportion estimation framework provides a good explanation of children’s number line placement in the absence of explicit midpoint cues, that explicit cues to the midpoint are associated with more frequent use of middle reference points in young children, and that children can use a middle reference point spontaneously in the absence of explicit cues (with this tendency increasing with age). These findings provide novel support for the idea that psychophysical models of proportion estimation successfully account for numerical estimates across development regardless of whether spatial and numerical midpoint cues are provided as part of the NLE task.

Sudden shifts in social identity swiftly shape implicit evaluation

In this research, we examine how sudden shifts in social identity can swiftly shape implicit evaluations. According to dual system models of attitudes, implicit attitude change is often slow and insensitive to explicit cues or goals. However, the social identity approach suggests that the intergroup context can shape nearly every aspect of social cognition from explicit preferences to implicit evaluations. In three experiments, we test whether explicit cues about social identity and the intergroup context can swiftly shape implicit evaluations. We find that people quickly develop an implicit preference favoring their in-group relative to the out-group—even when the group assignments are arbitrary. Importantly, this pattern of implicit intergroup bias quickly shifts following subtle changes in the intergroup context. When we frame the two groups as cooperative (vs. competitive), implicit intergroup bias is eliminated. Finally, being switched from one minimal group to the other reverses implicit intergroup bias, leading people to favor their new in-group (and former out-group). Individual differences in the degree to which people readily switch their implicit intergroup preference are correlated with their need to belong. In sum, these studies provide evidence that social identity cues and goals rapidly tune implicit evaluation. This research not only speaks to the influence of social identity on implicit cognition, but also has implications for models of attitude development and change.

Kindergarten children's event memory: the role of action prediction in remembering.

In two studies, kindergarteners participated in a series of staged events immediately preceded by pre-event interactions that were designed to identify factors relevant to improving recall. The events were based on preschool science-related activities and the experimental pre-event involved predicting actions to occur during a target event, manipulating types of cues available to support these predictive inferences. Action prediction did improve free recall, and effects may have influenced attentional processes evoked by actions generated and enacted. Although children effectively used outcome cues to predict actions, a one-to-one relation between pre-event action prediction patterns and recall did not occur. In combination with other findings, this result may suggest that increased attention during the target event may have supported the pre-event effect rather than integration of information between the pre-event and target event. Early childhood teachers engaging children in science activities should provide explicit cues to enhance usefulness of preparatory activities for recall.

Corrigendum to: Intentional Preparation of Auditory Attention-Shifts: Explicit Cueing and Sequential Shift-Predictability.

Corrigendum to: Intentional Preparation of Auditory Attention-Shifts: Explicit Cueing and Sequential Shift-Predictability.

Cued distractor rejection disrupts learned distractor rejection

ABSTRACTEffective visual search relies on the ability to ignore distracting information. Explicitly cuing individuals to ignore a stimulus consistently leads to a pattern of visual attention first attending the to-be-ignored stimulus before the system learns to reject it. Individuals can learn to overcome this cued distraction with experience, but the visual attentional system is more adept at learning to reject distractors without explicit cuing (Stilwell, B. T., & Vecera, S. P. (2018). Learned and cued distractor rejection for multiple features in visual search. Attention Perception and Psychophysics. doi:10.3758/s13414-018-1622-8). We asked if learning to reject distracting information prior to explicit cuing would help to counteract the deleterious effects of cuing. In two experiments examining learned and cued distractor rejection, individuals searched through heterogeneously coloured arrays containing reliable, non-target colour information. In Experiment 1, half-way through the experiment, we began explicitly cuing a previously learned-to-ignore distractor feature. Prior to the cue, individuals demonstrated learned distractor rejection, but critically, following the cue, individuals demonstrated cued distraction effects. Critically, the cued distraction effects were eliminated by the end of the experiment. In Experiment 2, we again began cuing participants which colour to ignore half-way through the experiment, but instead, to a colour that had no previous rejection learning. Following the cue, individuals again experienced cued distraction, and critically, these cued distraction effects persisted throughout the remainder of the experiment. These results suggest that learned distractor rejection is better suited to experience-driven learning than explicitly cued distractor learning. Additionally, previous distractor rejection learning does not prevent cued distraction, but does appear to help attention to recover from cued distraction.

An Invitation to Live: Insights from an Older, Long-Term Practitioner of Tai Chi

Background: Hundreds of randomized controlled studies have documented the effectiveness of Tai Chi (TC) to alleviate symptoms from varied medical conditions. Researchers, however, have called for alternate methods to discern participants’ perspectives and to provide additional information regarding the TC protocols, TC teachers’ qualifications, and the social contexts for learning and practicing TC. Purpose: This naturalistic study was designed to explore the perspectives of an experienced TC practitioner and those of her TC teachers as they reflected upon her 9-year journey with TC as she faced varied medical crises. Methods: Using an ethnographic approach, participant observation, the researcher observed participant’s TC classes, conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with the participant and her teachers and informal interviews in the field. Context: Participant was a 72-year-old female, who had suffered from spinal stenosis, hip arthritis, and bladder cancer. The participant attended two types of TC classes: a therapeutic Tai Chi (TTC) including a modified short form (10 forms) taught by a physical therapist and a traditional TC class including the Yang style short form taught by a Tai Chi practitioner with 50 years of experience. Findings: 1) TCC provided explicit cues and links between TC and functional fitness, improving the participant’s balance, daily life activities, and increased exercise efficacy and resilience; 2) TC provided a novel challenge motivating the participant’s continued practice while learning complex TC movements. 3) Traditional TC classes provided a supportive community, facilitating a meditative stance, and enabled the participant to subdue the “monkey mind” of a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Learned and cued distractor rejection for multiple features in visual search.

Ignoring distracting information is critical for effective visual search. When individuals are cued to ignore a stimulus, they first attend the to-be-ignored stimulus before learning to reject it. Individuals can learn to overcome the initial distraction produced by the explicit cues, although this cued distractor rejection appears for only one distractor feature. Multiple distractor colors cannot be rejected effectively, even with extensive experience. We asked if this apparent limit on distractor rejection was caused by a restriction on the number of different features (i.e., colors) that could be learned and rejected as distractors. To explore this potential capacity limitation, we asked if attention can learn to reject the smallest possible number of multiple distractors, namely, two. In four experiments examining cued distractor rejection, individuals searched through heterogeneously colored arrays containing reliable, non-target color information. In Experiments 1 and 2, we explicitly cued individuals with which of two colors (both colors in Experiment 1 or one color in Experiment 2) could be safely ignored. Cued distractors were not reliably rejected, replicating previous findings. Additionally, in Experiment 2, we presented a to-be-ignored color without explicit cues and we found that these "uncued" distractors were reliably rejected. In Experiments 3 and 4, we presented the to-be-ignored color information without explicit cues; individuals learned to reliably ignore multiple distractor colors without explicit cueing. These results suggest that learned distractor rejection is better suited to experience-driven learning than explicitly cued distractor learning: Explicit cueing reliably interferes with learned distractor rejection.

The Defaultness Hypothesis: A quantitative corpus-based study of non/default sarcasm and literalness production

This study provides converging corpus-based evidence (originally in Hebrew) for (1) findings, supportive of the first prediction of the Defaultness Hypothesis (Giora, Givoni, & Fein, 2015b), regarding the anticipated processing speed superiority of default (spontaneous) interpretations over nondefault (context-dependent) counterparts. Indeed, as shown by Giora et al. (2015b), default negative sarcasm was processed faster than nondefault negative literalness and nondefault affirmative sarcasm, all enjoying equally strong contextual support.Our corpus-based study here tests the second prediction of the Defaultness Hypothesis, (2) expecting relatively slow nondefaultness to be prompted by implicit and explicit cues, rejecting (as unintended) default counterparts. Findings indeed show that (ia) speakers are sensitive to the defaultness of negative sarcasm. Hence, they implicitly preserve conceptually weak syntactic slots for nondefault interpretations; and when (ib) wishing to be polite, speakers mute the sarcastically intended negatives by explicit metalinguistic mitigators (to put it mildly). Furthermore, (iia) when intended compositionally (often literally), speakers dismiss as unintended the default (sarcastic) interpretation of the negative constructions, by explicitly prompting a nondefault (literal) counterpart (by means of but not Y either). Complementarily, (iib) speakers intentionally fool addressees in order to humor them by using explicit cueing (just kidding), rejecting as unintended default (literal) interpretations of affirmative utterances while inviting nondefault (sarcastic) counterparts. Our corpus-based study, then, provides usage-based support for the Defaultness Hypothesis.

Auditory attention switching and judgment switching: Exploring multicomponent task representations.

An auditory attention-switching paradigm was combined with a judgment-switching paradigm to examine the interaction of a varying auditory attention component and a varying judgment component. Participants heard two dichotically presented stimuli-one spoken by a female speaker and one spoken by a male speaker. In each trial, the stimuli were a spoken letter and a spoken number. A visual explicit cue at the beginning of each trial indicated the auditory attention criterion (speaker sex/ear) to identify the target stimulus (Experiment 1) or the judgment that had to be executed (Experiment 2). Hence, the attentional selection criterion switched independently between speaker sexes (or between ears), while the judgment alternated between letter categorization andnumber categorization. The data indicate that auditory attention criterion and judgment were not processed independently, regardless of whether the attention criterion or the judgment was cued. The partial repetition benefits of the explicitly cued component suggested a hierarchical organization of the auditory attention component and the judgment component within the task set. We suggest that the hierarchy arises due to the explicit cuing of one component rather than due to a "natural" hierarchy of auditory attention component and judgment component.