Salient Cues Research Articles

The roles of inflammation, affect, and interoception in predicting social perception

“Sickness behavior” is an orchestrated suite of symptoms that commonly occur in the context of inflammation, and is characterized by changes in affect, social experience, and behavior. However, recent evidence suggests that inflammation may not always produce the same set of sickness behavior (e.g., fatigue, anhedonia, and social withdrawal). Rather, inflammation may be linked with different behavior across contexts and/or across individuals, though research in this area is under-developed to-date. In the present study (n = 30), we evaluated the influence of affective context and individual differences in difficulty detecting bodily sensations (i.e., interoceptive difficulty) on social perception following an inflammatory challenge. Inflammation was induced using the influenza vaccine and inflammatory reactivity was operationalized as changes in circulating levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6) before the vaccine and approximately 24 h later. Twenty-four hours after administration of the influenza vaccine, we manipulated affective context using a well-validated affect misattribution task in which participants made trustworthiness judgments of individuals with neutral facial expressions following the rapid presentation of “prime” images that were positive or negative in affective content. Interoceptive difficulty was measured at baseline using a validated self-report measure. Results revealed significant interactions between inflammatory reactivity to the influenza vaccine and affective context on social perception. Specifically, individuals with greater inflammatory reactivity were more biased by affective context when judging the trustworthiness of neutral faces. In addition, interoceptive difficulty and affective context interacted to predict social perception such that individuals with greater interoceptive difficulty were more biased by affective context in these judgments. In sum, we provide some of the first evidence that inflammation may amplify the saliency of affective cues during social decision making. Our findings also replicate prior work linking interoceptive ability to the use of affect-as-information during social perception, but in the novel context of inflammation.

Expectancy or Salience?-Replicating Senders' Dial-Monitoring Experiments With a Gaze-Contingent Window.

In the 1950s and 1960s, John Senders carried out a number of influential experiments on the monitoring of multidegree-of-freedom systems. In these experiments, participants were tasked with detecting events (threshold crossings) for multiple dials, each presenting a signal with different bandwidth. Senders' analyses showed a nearly linear relationship between signal bandwidth and the amount of attention paid to the dial, and he argued that humans sample according to bandwidth, in line with the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. The current study tested whether humans indeed sample the dials based on bandwidth alone or whether they also use salient peripheral cues. A dial-monitoring task was performed by 33 participants. In half of the trials, a gaze-contingent window was used that blocked peripheral vision. The results showed that, without peripheral vision, humans do not effectively distribute their attention across the dials. The findings also suggest that, when given full view, humans can detect the speed of the dial using their peripheral vision. It is concluded that salience and bandwidth are both drivers of distributed visual attention in a dial-monitoring task. The present findings indicate that salience plays a major role in guiding human attention. A subsequent recommendation for future human-machine interface design is that task-critical elements should be made salient.

Attention to multilingual job ads: an eye-tracking study on the use of English in German job ads

Abstract In many non-English-speaking countries, English loanwords in job ads seem to be very common. The question is whether this linguistic choice is advantageous, especially when the job advertised does not involve working in an international environment. Previous research of English loanwords in job ads has revealed that their effect in terms of the evaluation of the company, the job and the ad is limited if effects can be shown at all. Suggestions that English loanwords draw readers’ attention because this language choice deviates from what readers expect and, in addition, take more processing time (because they are foreign) lack empirical evidence. The eye-tracking and behavioural data of our experiment did not provide any empirical evidence for the attention-drawing function of English loanwords nor an influence on their effectiveness in job ads geared to graduate students in Germany. We suggest that loanwords need a certain amount of processing to be identified as foreign. This means they are different from other salient cues that were shown to draw readers’ attention because they are not subject to automatic processes. In addition, our participants were sufficiently proficient in English so that differences in processing time were not reflected in their eye-movement data.

Speech Rate and Turn-Transition Pause Duration in Dutch and English Spontaneous Question-Answer Sequences

The duration of inter-speaker pauses is a pragmatically salient aspect of conversation that is affected by linguistic and non-linguistic context. Theories of conversational turn-taking imply that, due to listener entrainment to the flow of syllables, a higher speech rate will be associated with shorter turn-transition times (TTT). Previous studies have found conflicting evidence, however, some of which may be due to methodological differences. In order to test the relationship between speech rate and TTT, and how this may be modulated by other dialogue factors, we used question-answer sequences from spontaneous conversational corpora in Dutch and English. As utterance-final lengthening is a local cue to turn endings, we also examined the impact of utterance-final syllable rhyme duration on TTT. Using mixed-effect linear regression models, we observed evidence for a positive relationship between speech rate and TTT: thus, a higher speech rate is associated with longer TTT, contrary to most theoretical predictions. Moreover, for answers following a pause (“gaps”) there was a marginal interaction between speech rate and final rhyme duration, such that relatively long final rhymes are associated with shorter TTT when foregoing speech rate is high. We also found evidence that polar (yes/no) questions are responded to with shorter TTT than open questions, and that direct answers have shorter TTT than responses that do not directly answer the questions. Moreover, the effect of speech rate on TTT was modulated by question type. We found no predictors of the (negative) TTT for answers that overlap with the foregoing questions. Overall, these observations suggest that TTT is governed by multiple dialogue factors, potentially including the salience of utterance-final timing cues. Contrary to some theoretical accounts, there is no strong evidence that higher speech rates are consistently associated with shorter TTT.

Enhancing 360 Video Streaming through Salient Content in Head-Mounted Displays.

Predicting where users will look inside head-mounted displays (HMDs) and fetching only the relevant content is an effective approach for streaming bulky 360 videos over bandwidth-constrained networks. Despite previous efforts, anticipating users' fast and sudden head movements is still difficult because there is a lack of clear understanding of the unique visual attention in 360 videos that dictates the users' head movement in HMDs. This in turn reduces the effectiveness of streaming systems and degrades the users' Quality of Experience. To address this issue, we propose to extract salient cues unique in the 360 video content to capture the attentive behavior of HMD users. Empowered by the newly discovered saliency features, we devise a head-movement prediction algorithm to accurately predict users' head orientations in the near future. A 360 video streaming framework that takes full advantage of the head movement predictor is proposed to enhance the quality of delivered 360 videos. Practical trace-driven results show that the proposed saliency-based 360 video streaming system reduces the stall duration by 65% and the stall count by 46%, while saving 31% more bandwidth than state-of-the-art approaches.

Gaze patterns reflect and predict expertise in dynamic echocardiographic imaging.

Echocardiography is the most important modality in cardiac imaging. Rapid valid visual assessment is a critical skill for image interpretation. However, it is unclear how skilled viewers assess echocardiographic images. Therefore, guidance and implicit advice are needed for learners to achieve valid image interpretation. Using a signal detection approach, we compared 15 certified experts with 15 medical students in their diagnostic decision-making and viewing behavior. To quantify attention allocation, we recorded eye movements while viewing dynamic echocardiographic imaging loops of patients with reduced ejection fraction and healthy controls. Participants evaluated left ventricular ejection fraction and image quality (as diagnostic and visual control tasks, respectively). Experts were much better at discriminating between patients and healthy controls ( of 2.58, versus 0.98 for novices). Eye tracking revealed that experts fixated diagnostically relevant areas earlier and more often, whereas novices were distracted by visually salient task-irrelevant stimuli. We show that expertise status can be almost perfectly classified either based on judgments or purely on eye movements and that an expertise score derived from viewing behavior predicts diagnostic quality. Judgments and eye tracking revealed significant differences between echocardiography experts and novices that can be used to derive numerical expertise scores. Experts have implicitly learned to ignore the salient motion cue presented by the mitral valve and to focus on the diagnostically more relevant left ventricle. These findings have implications for echocardiography training, objective characterization of echocardiographic expertise, and the design of user-friendly interfaces for echocardiography.

Why we stopped listening to the other side: how partisan cues in news coverage undermine the deliberative foundations of democracy

AbstractRecent theorizing on deliberative democracy has put political listening at the core of meaningful democratic deliberation. In the present experiment (N = 827), we investigated whether news media can improve diverse political listening in the United States via a reduction in party cue salience. Although Republican (Democratic) participants showed a strong preference for listening to speeches given by Republican (Democratic) politicians when party cues were highly salient, this bias in selective political listening was reduced or even absent when news items provided no or only low-salience cues. Conditional process analysis indicated that (automatically activated) implicit and (overtly expressed) explicit party attitudes mediated this effect. There are important implications: Current journalism practices tend to exacerbate tribal us-vs-them thinking by emphasizing partisan cues, nudging citizens toward not listening to political ideas from the other political camp. A more helpful news-choice architecture tones down partisan language, nudging citizens toward more diverse political listening.

Toward neuromarkers for tailored smoking cessation treatments

Neurobiological models of addiction attribute vulnerability to compulsive drug use to dysregulated activity within the neural networks that underlie reward and executive functions. Empirical evidence suggests that (a) attributing high motivational salience to drug-related stimuli leads to compulsive drug seeking and (b) cognitive control deficits lead to compulsive drug taking. Noninvasive neuroimaging techniques enable brain activity monitoring during affective and cognitive processing and could pave the way to precision medicine for substance use disorders. Identifying robust neuromarkers of affective and cognitive dysregulation would allow clinicians to personalize treatments by targeting individual psychophysiological vulnerabilities. However, methodological choices have biased the field toward experimental paradigms that cannot optimally assess individual differences in the motivational salience of drug-related cues and in the ability to control drug-related decisions, hindering the identification of clinically relevant neuromarkers. Here we show that (a) accounting for neuroaffective reactivity to non-drug-related motivationally relevant stimuli when measuring the attribution of motivational salience to drug-related cues, and (b) assessing brain activity while participants make drug-related decisions with immediate consequences, yield replicable neuromarkers with potential clinical relevance. While we use tobacco use disorder as a model, we also show that the methodological issues highlighted here are relevant to other disorders characterized by maladaptive appetitive behaviors.

Effect of time pressure and cue salience on event-based prospective memory

Effect of time pressure and cue salience on event-based prospective memory

The impact of temporally coherent visual and vibrotactile cues on speech recognition in noise.

Inputs delivered to different sensory organs provide us with complementary speech information about the environment. The goal of this study was to establish which multisensory characteristics can facilitate speech recognition in noise. The major finding is that the tracking of temporal cues of visual/tactile speech synced with auditory speech can play a key role in speech-in-noise performance. This suggests that multisensory interactions are fundamentally important for speech recognition ability in noisy environments, and they require salient temporal cues. The amplitude envelope, serving as a reliable temporal cue source, can be applied through different sensory modalities when speech recognition is compromised.

Gaze behavior as a visual cue to animacy.

A characteristic that distinguishes biological agents from inanimate objects is that the former can have a direction of attention. While it is natural to associate a person's direction of attention with the appearance of their face, attentional behaviors are also a kind of relational motion, in which an entity rotates a specific axis of its form in relation to an independent feature of its environment. Here, we investigated the role of gaze-like motion in providing a visual cue to animacy independent of the human form. We generated animations in which the rotation of a geometric object (the agent) was dependent on the movement of a target. Participants made judgements about how creature-like the objects appeared, which were highly sensitive to the correspondence between objects over and above their individual motion. We varied the dependence between agent rotation and target motion in terms of temporal synchrony, temporal order, cross-correlation, and trajectory complexity. These affected perceptions of animacy to differing extents. When the behavior of the agent was driven by a model of predictive tracking with a sensory sampling delay, perceived animacy was broadly tuned across changes in rotational behavior induced by the sampling delay of the agent. Overall, the tracking relationship provides a salient cue to animacy independent of biological form, provided that temporal synchrony between objects is within a certain range. This motion relationship may be one to which the visual system is highly attuned, due to its association with attentional behavior and the presence of other minds in our environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

From Oxytocin to Compassion: The Saliency of Distress.

Compassion is a warm response of care and concern for those who are suffering, which drives individuals to devote their resources for the sake of others. A prominent neuroevolutionary framework grounds compassion in the neurobiology of the mammalian caregiving system. Accordingly, it has been suggested that the oxytocinergic system, which plays a central role in parental caregiving and bonding, provides the neurobiological foundation for compassion towards strangers. Yet, the specific role of oxytocin in compassion is far from clear. The current paper aims to target this gap and offer a theoretical framework that integrates the state-of-the-art literature on oxytocin with research on compassion. We suggest that oxytocin mediates compassion by enhancing the saliency of cues of pain and distress and discuss the plausible underlying neurobiological substrates. We further demonstrate how the proposed framework can account for individual differences in compassion, focusing on the effects of attachment on caregiving and support. The proposed framework integrates the current scientific understanding of oxytocin function with compassion-related processes. It thus highlights the largely ignored attentional processes in compassion and taps into the vast variability of responses in social contexts involving pain and suffering.

Evolutionary psychological perspectives on filicide are applicable in modern-day Norway.

Current evolutionary psychological (EP) perspectives on filicide perpetration propose that it is an extreme behavioral manifestation of psychological mechanisms that evolved due to their function toward enabling ancestrally adaptive discriminative parental investment. Predictions concerning the characteristics traits of filicide derived from this hypothesis have been empirically supported cross-culturally. Still, it remains a theoretical and empirical question whether EP perspectives on filicide are applicable in societies where the general population is alleviated from ancestrally salient cues to reproductive conflict between individuals and children in their care and the opportunities for lethal caretaker behaviors are highly constricted. Compiling a national sample of filicide cases in modern-day Norway, the present study catered for testing whether EP perspectives on filicide apply in such a society. As predicted, the majority of incidents (79.5%) were associated with perpetrator psychopathology (psychotic episode or filicide-suicide). This further catered for testing the EP hypothesis that filicides associated with perpetrator psychopathology will be characterized by traits that contradict an ancestrally adaptive logic for discriminant parental investment. A full series of predictions derived from this hypothesis was supported as filicides with this association included no step-parental perpetrators and, when compared against filicides that were not associated with perpetrator psychopathology, had older victims and perpetrators and more often multiple victims. The findings confirm the potential applicability of EP perspectives on filicide in progressive and highly developed welfare states, thus lending support to their universal validity.

A new technique for estimating the probability of attentional capture.

Latency-based metrics of attentional capture are limited: They indicate whether or not capture occurred, but they do not indicate how often capture occurred. The present study introduces a new technique for estimating the probability of capture. In a spatial cueing paradigm, participants searched for a target letter defined by color while attempting to ignore salient cues that were drawn in either a relevant or irrelevant color. The results demonstrated the typical contingent capture effect: larger cue validity effects from relevant cues than irrelevant cues. Importantly, using a novel analytical approach, we were able to estimate the probability that the salient cue captured attention. This approach revealed a surprisingly low probability of attentional capture in the spatial cuing paradigm. Relevant cues are thought to be one of the strongest attractors of attention, yet they were estimated to capture attention on only about 30% of trials. This new metric provides an index of capture strength that can be meaningfully compared across different experimental contexts, which was not possible until now.

Hearing Through Bone Conduction Headsets.

Bone conduction (BC) stimulation has mainly been used for clinical hearing assessment and hearing aids where stimulation is applied at the mastoid behind the ear. Recently, BC has become popular for communication headsets where the stimulation position often is close to the anterior part of the ear canal opening. The BC sound transmission for this stimulation position is here investigated in 21 participants by ear canal sound pressure measurements and hearing threshold assessment as well as simulations in the LiUHead. The results indicated that a stimulation position close to the ear canal opening improves the sensitivity for BC sound by around 20 dB but by up to 40 dB at some frequencies. The transcranial transmission ranges typically between -40 and -25 dB. This decreased transcranial transmission facilitates saliency of binaural cues and implies that BC headsets are suitable for virtual and augmented reality applications. The findings suggest that with BC stimulation close to the ear canal opening, the sound pressure in the ear canal dominates the perception of BC sound. With this stimulation, the ear canal pathway was estimated to be around 25 dB greater than other contributors, like skull bone vibrations, for hearing BC sound in a healthy ear. This increased contribution from the ear canal sound pressure to BC hearing means that a position close to the ear canal is not appropriate for clinical use since, in such case, a conductive hearing loss affects BC and air conduction thresholds by a similar amount.

Dichotomous activity and function of neurons with low- and high-frequency discharge in the external globus pallidus of non-human primates

To date, there is a consensus that there are at least two neuronal populations in the non-human primate (NHP) external globus pallidus (GPe): low-frequency discharge (LFD) and high-frequency discharge (HFD) neurons. Nevertheless, almost all NHP physiological studies have neglected the functional importance of LFD neurons. This study examined the discharge features of these two GPe neuronal subpopulations recorded in four NHPs engaged in a classical conditioning task with cues predicting reward, neutral and aversive outcomes. The results show that LFD neurons tended to burst, encoded the salience of behavioral cues, and exhibited correlated spiking activity. By contrast, the HFD neurons tended to pause, encoded cue valence, and exhibited uncorrelated spiking activity. Overall, these findings point to the dichotomic organization of theNHP GPe, which is likely to be critical to the implementation of normal basal ganglia functions and computations.

Generating Clear Vibrotactile Cues with a Magnet Embedded in a Soft Finger Sheath.

Haptic displays act on the user's body to stimulate the sense of touch and enrich applications from gaming and computer-aided design to rehabilitation and remote surgery. However, when crafted from typical rigid robotic components, they tend to be heavy, bulky, and expensive, while sleeker designs often struggle to create clear haptic cues. This article introduces a lightweight wearable silicone finger sheath that can deliver salient and rich vibrotactile cues using electromagnetic actuation. We fabricate the sheath on a ferromagnetic mandrel with a process based on dip molding, a robust fabrication method that is rarely used in soft robotics but is suitable for commercial production. A miniature rare-earth magnet embedded within the silicone layers at the center of the finger pad is driven to vibrate by the application of alternating current to a nearby air-coil. Experiments are conducted to determine the amplitude of the magnetic force and the frequency response function for the displacement amplitude of the magnet perpendicular to the skin. In addition, high-fidelity finite element analyses of the finger wearing the device are performed to investigate the trends observed in the measurements. The experimental and simulated results show consistent dynamic behavior from 10 to 1000 Hz, with the displacement decreasing after about 300 Hz. These results match the detection threshold profile obtained in a psychophysical study performed by 17 users, where more current was needed only at the highest frequency. A cue identification experiment and a demonstration in virtual reality validate the feasibility of this approach to fingertip haptics.

Thalamus sends information about arousal but not valence to the amygdala

RationaleThe basolateral amygdala (BLA) and medial geniculate nucleus of the thalamus (MGN) have both been shown to be necessary for the formation of associative learning. While the role that the BLA plays in this process has long been emphasized, the MGN has been less well-studied and surrounded by debate regarding whether the relay of sensory information is active or passive.ObjectivesWe seek to understand the role the MGN has within the thalamoamgydala circuit in the formation of associative learning.MethodsHere, we use optogenetics and in vivo electrophysiological recordings to dissect the MGN-BLA circuit and explore the specific subpopulations for evidence of learning and synthesis of information that could impact downstream BLA encoding. We employ various machine learning techniques to investigate function within neural subpopulations. We introduce a novel method to investigate tonic changes across trial-by-trial structure, which offers an alternative approach to traditional trial-averaging techniques.ResultsWe find that the MGN appears to encode arousal but not valence, unlike the BLA which encodes for both. We find that the MGN and the BLA appear to react differently to expected and unexpected outcomes; the BLA biased responses toward reward prediction error and the MGN focused on anticipated punishment. We uncover evidence of tonic changes by visualizing changes across trials during inter-trial intervals (baseline epochs) for a subset of cells.ConclusionWe conclude that the MGN-BLA projector population acts as both filter and transferer of information by relaying information about the salience of cues to the amygdala, but these signals are not valence-specified.

Descending pathways from the superior colliculus mediating autonomic and respiratory effects associated with orienting behaviour.

The ability to discriminate competing external stimuli and initiate contextually appropriate behaviours is a key brain function. Neurons in the deep superior colliculus (dSC) integrate multisensory inputs and activate descending projections to premotor pathways responsible for orienting, attention and defence, behaviours which involve adjustments to respiratory and cardiovascular parameters. However, the neural pathways that subserve the physiological components of orienting are poorly understood. We report that orienting responses to optogenetic dSC stimulation are accompanied by short-latency autonomic, respiratory and electroencephalographic effects in awake rats, closely mimicking those evoked by naturalistic alerting stimuli. Physiological responses were not accompanied by detectable aversion or fear, and persisted under urethane anaesthesia, indicating independence from emotional stress. Anterograde and trans-synaptic viral tracing identified a monosynaptic pathway that links the dSC to spinally projecting neurons in the medullary gigantocellular reticular nucleus (GiA), a key hub for the coordination of orienting and locomotor behaviours. In urethane-anaesthetized animals, sympathoexcitatory and cardiovascular, but not respiratory, responses to dSC stimulation were replicated by optogenetic stimulation of the dSC-GiA terminals, suggesting a likely role for this pathway in mediating the autonomic components of dSC-mediated responses. Similarly, extracellular recordings from putative GiA sympathetic premotor neurons confirmed short-latency excitatory inputs from the dSC. This pathway represents a likely substrate for autonomic components of orienting responses that are mediated by dSC neurons and suggests a mechanism through which physiological and motor components of orienting behaviours may be integrated without the involvement of higher centres that mediate affective components of defensive responses. KEY POINTS: Neurons in the deep superior colliculus (dSC) integrate multimodal sensory signals to elicit context-dependent innate behaviours that are accompanied by stereotypical cardiovascular and respiratory activities. The pathways responsible for mediating the physiological components of colliculus-mediated orienting behaviours are unknown. We show that optogenetic dSC stimulation evokes transient orienting, respiratory and autonomic effects in awake rats which persist under urethane anaesthesia. Anterograde tracing from the dSC identified projections to spinally projecting neurons in the medullary gigantocellular reticular nucleus (GiA). Stimulation of this pathway recapitulated autonomic effects evoked by stimulation of dSC neurons. Electrophysiological recordings from putative GiA sympathetic premotor neurons confirmed short latency excitatory input from dSC neurons. This disynaptic dSC-GiA-spinal sympathoexcitatory pathway may underlie autonomic adjustments to salient environmental cues independent of input from higher centres.

Motivationally salient cue processing measured using the monetary incentive delay (MID) task with electroencephalography (EEG): A potential marker of apathy in Huntington's disease

We explored the utility of the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task with concurrent encephalography (EEG) as a marker of apathy in people with Huntington's disease (HD) as well as neurotypical controls. Specifically, we assessed between and within-group differences in the amplitude of the P300 and Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) event-related potentials as a function of motivational salience. In contrast to neurotypical controls, HD participants' ERP amplitudes were not differentially modulated by motivationally salient cues (i.e., signalling potential ‘gain’ or ‘loss’) compared to ‘neutral’ cues. Difference waves isolating amplitude specific to the motivationally salient cues were calculated for the P300 and CNV. Only the difference waves for ERPs elicited by ‘gain’ cues differentiated the groups. The CNV difference wave was also significantly correlated with clinical measures of apathy and processing speed in the HD group. These findings provide initial support for the use of the MID with EEG as a marker of apathy in HD, and its potential as a sensitive outcome measure for novel treatment development.