Relative Salience Research Articles

Exploring distinct and joint contributions of the locus coeruleus and the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area complex to reward and valence processing using high-resolution fMRI

Abstract Dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA) are classically viewed as key mediators in reward processing, while noradrenergic cells in the locus coeruleus (LC) are thought to modulate (negative) saliency processing. However, this conventional distinction is being revised by more recent research in animals. To explore the respective contributions of both the LC and SN/VTA in reward and valence processing in humans, we assessed fMRI data during stimulus encoding and response phase of a rewarded emotion-discrimination task (n = 38). Participants responded significantly faster to reward predicting and negative valence stimuli compared with their non-salient counterparts. LC activity was overall higher during trials involving reward prospect, and in particular for reward trials featuring positive valence, demonstrating an additive effect of reward and positive valence in LC. Moreover, LC activity was differentially increased for negative compared with positive valence in the response phase, indexing its role in invigorating responses to negative events. The SN/VTA showed increased activity in the response phase of reward trials (neutral valence) and negative valence trials (no reward), which aligns with coding relative saliency of these events in their respective contexts. LC modulations were accompanied by covariations in occipital cortex, suggesting noradrenergic contributions to visual prioritization of salient events. The findings underscore the sensitivity of both LC and SN/VTA to reward prospects and negative valence, challenging the dominant view of SN/VTA’s involvement in merely positive events and emphasizing their essential role in action invigoration above and beyond mere stimulus encoding. The intricate roles of the DA and NA system in reward and emotional valence processing in humans warrant further exploration and validation, given the limitations inherent to neuroimaging of deep brain structures.

The Effects of Cues to Ambient Darkness on Women's Willingness to Engage With Physically Strong Men.

Despite the overall desirability of men's upper body strength, women's preference for such features remains bounded to contexts in which the benefits exceed the potential costs. The relative salience of these costs could be augmented within ostensibly threatening environments, which could include one of ambient darkness. This study sought to determine whether women's interest in strong men would become downregulated in the presence of these cues. A sample of sorority women reported their reactions to meeting a hypothetical man on campus who was manipulated to appear either strong or weak with the image manipulated to be either at night or during the day. Although women reported feeling more comfortable around the weak man in the dark compared to the strong man, no difference emerged in their evaluations of strong men during the day and night. These findings suggest that women functionally shift their interest in strong men based on environmental cues that could implicate men as costly.

Coordination in stag hunt games

Stag hunt games display a tension between a payoff superior option (stag) and a less risky but payoff inferior alternative (hare). We explore that tension by proposing a selection criterion (which we denote as relative salience) where subjects choose to coordinate in one option by comparing the salience of stag’s main aspect (its payoff) to the salience of hare’s main aspect (its risk) by accounting for both payoff-relevant factors and unobservable individual-specific (idiosyncratic) preferences. Using data from 10 experiments, we find that this criterion is a significant determinant of individual choices in stag-hunt games, outperforming other selection methods.

A hybrid spatiotemporal distribution forecast methodology for IES vulnerabilities under uncertain and imprecise space-air-ground monitoring data scenarios

The weak spots in an integrated energy system that may jeopardize the overall reliability call for timely and efficient Inspection and Maintenance (I&M). One core step is the reasonable allocation and deployment of limited I&M personnel or apparatus to the regions or periods with higher event risks, which requires a pinpoint spatiotemporal distribution forecast of future vulnerabilities. This paper presents a hybrid forecast methodology, the Saliency-Rough Fuzzy Utility Pattern recognition ensemble, in light of space-air-ground multi-source-heterogeneous input data. A parallel learning architecture is established and identifies the critical components with higher yields to enhance efficiency. Accordingly, more reasonable quantitative and qualitative evaluations can be carried out concurrently. Potential imprecise and uncertain data scenes are handled in quantitative assessments, both the failure hazard path sets and survival function likelihood boxes are incorporated in the designed relative path-Fussell Vesely Saliency (rp-FVS) model; and in qualitative analyses, the underlying perilous components can be distinguished via a combination of the variable precision-rough model. The rp-FVS-based fuzzy inference logic configures all membership functions identically according to components’ impacts. These two parts are integrated into the rough-fuzzy Utility Measure to discover concealed component-vulnerability interconnection patterns. Finally, an empirical case study is conducted for validation.

Weaker number sense accounts for impaired numerosity perception in dyscalculia: Behavioral and computational evidence.

Impaired numerosity perception in developmental dyscalculia (low "number acuity") has been interpreted as evidence of reduced representational precision in the neurocognitive system supporting non-symbolic number sense. However, recent studies suggest that poor numerosity judgments might stem from stronger interference from non-numerical visual information, in line with alternative accounts that highlight impairments in executive functions and visuospatial abilities in the etiology of dyscalculia. To resolve this debate, we used a psychophysical method designed to disentangle the contribution of numerical and non-numerical features to explicit numerosity judgments in a dot comparison task and we assessed the relative saliency of numerosity in a spontaneous categorization task. Children with dyscalculia were compared to control children with average mathematical skills matched for age, IQ, and visuospatial memory. In the comparison task, the lower accuracy of dyscalculics compared to controls was linked to weaker encoding of numerosity, but not to the strength of non-numerical biases. Similarly, in the spontaneous categorization task, children with dyscalculia showed a weaker number-based categorization compared to the control group, with no evidence of a stronger influence of non-numerical information on category choice. Simulations with a neurocomputational model of numerosity perception showed that the reduction of representational resources affected the progressive refinement of number acuity, with little effect on non-numerical bias in numerosity judgments. Together, these results suggest that impaired numerosity perception in dyscalculia cannot be explained by increased interference from non-numerical visual cues, thereby supporting the hypothesis of a core number sense deficit. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: A strongly debated issue is whether impaired numerosity perception in dyscalculia stems from a deficit in number sense or from poor executive and visuospatial functions. Dyscalculic children show reduced precision in visual numerosity judgments and weaker number-based spontaneous categorization, but no increasing reliance on continuous visual properties. Simulations with deep neural networks demonstrate that reduced neural/computational resources affect the developmental trajectory of number acuity and account for impaired numerosity judgments. Our findings show that weaker number acuity in developmental dyscalculia is not necessarily related to increased interference from non-numerical visual cues.

The effect of chord duration on the relative salience of chord-type and voicing changes

This study investigates the effect of chord duration on the relative salience of chord-type and voicing changes. Participants ( N = 111) with varying levels of musical training were presented with sequences of five block chords on the piano and asked to indicate which chord sounded most different. Each sequence consisted of three identical chords and two oddballs, one with a voicing change and one with a chord-type change. All possible chord-type pairings between standard and oddball formed of major, minor, dominant seventh, major seventh, and minor seventh chords were tested. In addition, each sequence of five chords was tested using three chord duration conditions (500, 1,000, and 1,500 ms), and the durations were pseudo-randomized throughout the experiment. Chord-type changes became more salient with longer durations and this effect could be seen for all participants regardless of their levels of musical training. However, with higher level of musical training, chord-type changes became more salient across all duration conditions. Leman’s model of tonal contextuality suggests that the effect of duration in our experiment could be explained by sensory mechanisms related to echoic memory. The potential contribution of other factors to the effect of duration is discussed.

Frames and semantic roles in metaphorical mappings

Abstract Conceptual Metaphor Theory describes metaphorical mappings as correspondences between domains. Nevertheless, the interrelations of the mapped elements still need to be characterised. This study analyses metaphorical mappings from one situational frame in the cooking domain in American English and Peninsular Spanish. The aims are to elucidate to what extent each language primes particular semantic roles in the boiling frame for metaphorisation and explore the possible cultural implications of these cross-linguistic differences. The qualitative analysis reveals the contrastive relevance of semantic roles in frame mappings. In addition, the frequencies of boil and hervir metaphorical senses determine the degree of entrenchment and salience of metaphors cross-linguistically. The results suggest that the English boiling frame has a considerably broader scope as a source than the Spanish hervir frame. Additionally, the paper contrasts the relative saliency of the semantic roles mapped in those metaphors shared by both languages. Finally, cultural implications are discussed.

Neural Correlates of Crowding in Macaque Area V4.

Visual crowding refers to the phenomenon where a target object that is easily identifiable in isolation becomes difficult to recognize when surrounded by other stimuli (distractors). Many psychophysical studies have investigated this phenomenon and proposed alternative models for the underlying mechanisms. One prominent hypothesis, albeit with mixed psychophysical support, posits that crowding arises from the loss of information due to pooled encoding of features from target and distractor stimuli in the early stages of cortical visual processing. However, neurophysiological studies have not rigorously tested this hypothesis. We studied the responses of single neurons in macaque (one male, one female) area V4, an intermediate stage of the object-processing pathway, to parametrically designed crowded displays and texture statistics-matched metameric counterparts. Our investigations reveal striking parallels between how crowding parameters-number, distance, and position of distractors-influence human psychophysical performance and V4 shape selectivity. Importantly, we also found that enhancing the salience of a target stimulus could alleviate crowding effects in highly cluttered scenes, and this could be temporally protracted reflecting a dynamical process. Thus, a pooled encoding of nearby stimuli cannot explain the observed responses, and we propose an alternative model where V4 neurons preferentially encode salient stimuli in crowded displays. Overall, we conclude that the magnitude of crowding effects is determined not just by the number of distractors and target-distractor separation but also by the relative salience of targets versus distractors based on their feature attributes-the similarity of distractors and the contrast between target and distractor stimuli.

The Privileges We Do and Do Not See: The Relative Salience of Interpersonal and Circumstantial Benefits.

People attend more to disadvantages in their lives than to advantages, a phenomenon known as the Headwinds/Tailwinds Asymmetry. In seven studies (N = 1,526), we present an important caveat to this pattern: When people do notice and acknowledge their advantages, they mostly focus on the benefits they receive from other people (i.e., interpersonal benefits), as opposed to benefits they receive because of their demographics, personal traits, and life circumstances (i.e., circumstantial benefits). We demonstrate that people notice and remember others who helped them rather than hurt them and that they notice the help they receive from people more than from favorable, non-interpersonal factors. Finally, we find that the tendency to notice interpersonal advantages is related to a social norm requiring people to acknowledge helpful others (but not other advantages) and that changing the salience of this norm affects people's likelihood of acknowledging the support they have received from others.

Different self-damaging behaviours, similar motives? Testing measurement invariance of motives for nonsuicidal self-injury, disordered eating and substance misuse.

Theory and research suggest that distinct self-damaging behaviours (SDBs; e.g., nonsuicidal self-injury [NSSI], restrictive eating, binge eating, drug misuse, alcohol misuse) share similar motives. However, few studies have used a common self-report inventory to investigate the shared relevance and relative salience of motives for SDBs. Accordingly, the present study: (1) examined whether self-report scales assessing intrapersonal motives (i.e., relieving negative emotions, enhancing positive emotions, punishing oneself) and interpersonal motives (i.e., bonding with others, conforming with others, communicating distress, communicating strength, reducing demands) have invariant factor structures across SDBs; and (2) compared the salience of these motives across SDBs. 1018 adults (54.6% men, Mage = 35.41 years) with a history of SDBs were allocated to the following groups: NSSI (n = 213), restrictive eating (n = 200), binge eating (n = 200), drug misuse (n = 200) or alcohol misuse (n = 205). Participants reported on their motives for engaging in their allocated SDB. Measurement invariance analyses compared the factor structures and latent means of the motive scales across SDBs. The motive scales had comparable factor structures across SDBs. Intrapersonal motives were most strongly endorsed for NSSI and drug misuse. Interpersonal motives were most strongly endorsed for drug and alcohol misuse. All motives were least salient to restrictive eating. Results suggest that common motives underlie distinct SDBs and that they can be adequately assessed using a single self-report inventory. However, certain motives are more relevant to some SDBs than others, with restrictive eating being the most motivationally distinct SDB. This knowledge can inform transdiagnostic models and interventions for SDBs.

Right up their street? News media framing of the protest activities of far-right movement parties

AbstractFar-right parties have increasingly emphasised their movement-like characteristics as a novel mobilisation strategy. Existing studies of these so-called ‘far-right movement parties’ have concentrated on their internal organisation and communications to understand how they mediate between a movement and party identity through their own actions. Yet research is lacking on how this identity is constructed and presented by the news media: a crucial interface between institutional politics and public opinion. This paper pursues this enquiry with a comparative analysis of the newspaper coverage of two prominent cases—the German AfD and UKIP—and asks how coverage of their increasing involvement in protests has varied cross-nationally and evolved over time. The analysis reveals the relative salience of the protest activities of the far-right, along with the associated social movement actors, issues and frames used in the reporting. It shows that far-right party protest receives a low level of attention and tends to be accompanied by delegitimising framing, particularly when associated (extremist) movements are also present. In both cases analysed, a critical juncture generated increasing attention to far-right party protest, but also more delegitimising frames. The study provides new insights into the structures and processes which influence how the media has responded to the new far-right ‘movement party’ form in Europe, with implications for our understanding of contemporary far-right mobilisation strategies.

Leadership dynamics in musical groups: Quantifying effects of musical structure on directionality of influence in concert performance videos.

Music ensemble performance provides an ecologically valid context for investigating leadership dynamics in small group interactions. Musical texture, specifically the relative salience of simultaneously sounding ensemble parts, is a feature that can potentially alter leadership dynamics by introducing hierarchical relationships between individual parts. The present study extended previous work on quantifying interpersonal coupling in musical ensembles by examining the relationship between musical texture and leader-follower relations, operationalised as directionality of influence between co-performers' body motion in concert video recordings. It was hypothesised that the directionality of influence, indexed by Granger Causality, would be greater for 'homophonic' textures with a clear distinction between melody and accompaniment parts than for 'polyphonic' textures with less distinction between melody and accompaniment. This hypothesis was tested by using pose estimation algorithms to track instrumentalists' body movements in a string quartet and a clarinet quintet, and then applying Granger Causality analysis to their head motion to estimate directional influence between instrumentalist pairs for sections of the pieces that varied in texture. It was found that Granger Causality values were generally higher (indicating greater directionality of influence) for homophonic than polyphonic textures. Furthermore, considering melody and accompaniment instrument roles revealed more evidence for the melody instrument influencing accompanying instruments than vice versa, plus a high degree of directionality among accompanying instruments, in homophonic textures. These observed patterns of directional information flow in co-performer body motion are consistent with changing leader-follower relations depending on hierarchical relations between ensemble parts in terms of the relative salience of melodic material in the musical texture. The finding that automatic pose estimation can detect modulations of leadership dynamics in standard video recordings under naturalistic performance conditions has implications for investigating interpersonal coordination in large-scale music video datasets representing different cultural traditions, and for exploring nonverbal communication in group activities more generally.

What Feathers Flock Together? Examining College Students’ Perceptions of Social Model Similarity

Educators often try to motivate students for learning science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) topics by exposing them to social models with similar characteristics. However, it is not clear what dimensions of similarities are most optimal for motivating students in STEM. The present study investigated different dimensions in which college students perceived similarity to their social models in chemistry (N = 265) and biology (N = 143) and how different dimensions of perceived similarity were related to students’ competence-related beliefs and task values for learning in those fields. Academic similarities—particularly similar abilities, efforts, and interests—were the most frequent dimensions of similarity college students reported perceiving with respect to their STEM social models. Additionally, perceiving similar academic abilities to a social model was associated with greater competence-related beliefs in both studies. The relative salience of different academic similarities and their relations to STEM motivation also differed by study, suggesting that the importance of academic similarity perceptions may differ across learning contexts. Educators should consider emphasizing academic similarities when using social models to recruit or retain college students in STEM, while also acknowledging contextual nuances that may attenuate how different perceptions of similarities motivate students.

Relative saliency affects attentional capture and suppression of color and face singleton distractors: evidence from event-related potential studies.

Prior research has yet to fully elucidate the impact of varying relative saliency between target and distractor on attentional capture and suppression, along with their underlying neural mechanisms, especially when social (e.g. face) and perceptual (e.g. color) information interchangeably serve as singleton targets or distractors, competing for attention in a search array. Here, we employed an additional singleton paradigm to investigate the effects of relative saliency on attentional capture (as assessed by N2pc) and suppression (as assessed by PD) of color or face singleton distractors in a visual search task by recording event-related potentials. We found that face singleton distractors with higher relative saliency induced stronger attentional processing. Furthermore, enhancing the physical salience of colors using a bold color ring could enhance attentional processing toward color singleton distractors. Reducing the physical salience of facial stimuli by blurring weakened attentional processing toward face singleton distractors; however, blurring enhanced attentional processing toward color singleton distractors because of the change in relative saliency. In conclusion, the attentional processes of singleton distractors are affected by their relative saliency to singleton targets, with higher relative saliency of singleton distractors resulting in stronger attentional capture and suppression; faces, however, exhibit some specificity in attentional capture and suppression due to high social saliency.

A Systematic Content Analysis of the Moral Foundations Featured in Celebrities’, Influencers’, and Athletes’ Instagram Content

ABSTRACT Despite the attention that moral media content has received for many years, no research has systematically investigated the moral foundations featured in (visual) user-generated content. This is important because exposure to moral content may influence the relative salience of different moral foundations among consumers, with implications for their moral decision-making and reasoning. This manual content analysis investigated the prevalence and consistency of the moral foundations represented in the Instagram profiles of the 59 most followed Western celebrities, athletes, and influencers. The study coded 1,256 posts and 2,936 stories, documenting the exemplification of moral foundations and their links with gender, endorser type, platform feature (i.e. stories vs. posts), and presence of emojis. Results from multilevel analyses showed that famous individuals posted more content that upheld than violated moral foundations, with an overrepresentation of care and loyalty content. On average, morally laden content represented one-fifth of the posted content, with most personalities sharing moral content at least once. No difference was observed between posts and stories. Men and athletes featured more loyalty than women, celebrities, and influencers. The representation of moral content, especially care, predicted the use of positive emojis. The theoretical implications for the long-term processes of the MIME are discussed.

Team efficacy, feeling of reduced personal accomplishment, and individual creative performance: Team trust as a moderator

We studied the interaction of team efficacy and team trust on feeling of reduced personal accomplishment. Data were obtained from a survey conducted with 270 teams made up of 1,787 individual employees of a multinational shipbuilding corporation headquartered in South Korea. We found that when team trust was low, team efficacy was positively related to individual burnout, whereas the relationship was nonsignificant when team trust was high. The feeling of reduced personal accomplishment, was, in turn, negatively related to individual creative performance. Contrary to common intuition about the positive effects of team efficacy, the results suggest that high team efficacy can lead to increased burnout and, ultimately, have a negative impact on creativity under conditions of low team trust. In the process, we also discussed the relative salience of the team as an extension of the self.

A dynamic model of professional legitimacy: Linking professional logics and jurisdictional threats in the corporate credit rating industry

Abstract Research on the professions argues that inference and routinization are key components of professional practice associated with professional legitimacy. However, the literature fails to provide a mechanism linking these practices to legitimacy. The logic of professionalism literature successfully links professional practices to legitimacy via guiding logics, but ignores the importance of routinized practices in the legitimation process. Furthermore, in explaining the prevalence of routinization versus inference in professional occupations, the organizational literature ignores their contributions to legitimacy and exclusively focuses on their contributions to efficiency and effectiveness in the production process. In this article, I propose to resolve all three issues first by interpreting the professional processes of inference and routinization as deriving from distinct professional logics. As such, they provide professionals with unique ideological rationales for legitimacy buffering them from two specific jurisdictional threats. With data from the corporate credit rating industry, I demonstrate that professional firms shift the degree to which they emphasize inference versus routinization in their production process in response to these jurisdictional threats. Finally, I present a model explaining how professional industries rely on a dynamic combination of inference and routinization to maintain a delicate balance over their claimed jurisdictions. This model links the practices of inference and routinization to professional legitimacy via institutional logics, brings greater attention to the importance that routinization plays in the logic of professionalism, and provides a more comprehensive explanation as to why the relative salience of inference and routinization varies within and between professional industries over time.

Retinal eccentricity modulates saliency-driven but not relevance-driven visual selection.

Where we move our eyes during visual search is controlled by the relative saliency and relevance of stimuli in the visual field. However, the visual field is not homogeneous, as both sensory representations and attention change with eccentricity. Here we present an experiment investigating how eccentricity differences between competing stimuli affect saliency- and relevance-driven selection. Participants made a single eye movement to a predefined orientation singleton target that was simultaneously presented with an orientation singleton distractor in a background of multiple homogenously oriented other items. The target was either more or less salient than the distractor. Moreover, each of the two singletons could be presented at one of three different retinal eccentricities, such that both were presented at the same eccentricity, one eccentricity value apart, or two eccentricity values apart. The results showed that selection was initially determined by saliency, followed after about 300 ms by relevance. In addition, observers preferred to select the closer over the more distant singleton, and this central selection bias increased with increasing eccentricity difference. Importantly, it largely emerged within the same time window as the saliency effect, thereby resulting in a net reduction of the influence of saliency on the selection outcome. In contrast, the relevance effect remained unaffected by eccentricity. Together, these findings demonstrate that eccentricity is a major determinant of selection behavior, even to the extent that it modifies the relative contribution of saliency in determining where people move their eyes.

Translating what the image conveys or what it arouses?

Abstract An ideal strongly anchored in the realm of translation is that of “translating without additions or modifications.” However, with multimodal texts, one is confronted with the problem posed by the image, its reading, and its interpretation. This article aims to better delineate the interpretative threshold between the global meaning that a still image might convey in and of itself, on the one hand, and the more personal interpretations that this image can arouse in its receiver (including the translator) on the other. In passing, the article also aims to suggest new ways of sensitizing translation students to the existence of such a threshold. The principle, based on Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory and its strong vs. weak implicature continuum, is that the visual and compositional cues of the image, their relative salience, and their eventual semantic convergence, combined with contextual factors in the initial production of the visual document, would constitute the fundamental semiotic data to be considered in the translation process. Conversely, any projection of meaning external to the image, and emanating from the translator-interpreter himself, would have to be treated with more circumspection within that process, since it would amount to recontextualizing the original visual message by coloring it with a particular meaning, in other words modifying it through added meanings. The corpus used for the observations consists of analyses of a photographic image made by MA-level students in Translation Studies.

Listening Behaviors and Musical Coordination in Collective Free Improvisation

While empirical studies on joint music-making have shed light on many aspects of ensemble performance in the past few decades, the role of auditory attention in such a context has remained strikingly understudied. We draw here on a self-annotation methodology to investigate musicians’ listening behaviors in freely improvised performances. Six trios of professional musicians were asked to freely improvise in a recording studio, hearing each other only through headphones. While they were playing, the loudness of each musician as sent to the other two musicians’ headphones was covertly increased/decreased during random periods of time in order to enhance its relative saliency within the musical scene. Immediately after each improvisation, musicians were asked to listen to the improvisation that they had just performed and to continuously indicate, using a specific application, where their listening focus was as they were performing. The results demonstrated that during periods of loudness manipulation, musicians’ attention was significantly drawn to the musician who had been made more salient. Two follow-up studies then investigated the extent to which joint auditory attention correlated with perceived togetherness, as well as whether improvisers’ auditory attention during the performance aligned with that of external listeners attending to the recording of the performance. Taken together, our results suggest that, beyond the effects of saliency, musicians also tend to strategically adapt their listening behavior to the specificities of the interactional context and that musicians’ collective listening behaviors have an impact on the performance, both at an acoustic level and at a perceptual level. By relying on attentional patterns that dynamically emerged from complex, ecological musical interactions, our studies provide a first attempt at assessing the effects of auditory attention on coordination and contribute to establishing sonic interactions as a promising setting for the study of the effects of joint attention.