Target Cue Research Articles

The influence of emotional target cues on prospective memory performance in depression

This study investigated the impact of emotional valence on event-based prospective memory performance in depression. Thirty individuals with depression and 29 healthy adults performed a prospective memory task in which the emotional valence of the prospective targets was manipulated (positive, neutral, negative). Collapsed across all valence conditions, healthy adults outperformed individuals with depression in the prospective memory task. This effect was qualified by planned contrasts indicating that the two groups only differed when responding to positively valenced cues, reflecting a positivity effect in healthy adults. These data are in line with previous research, which shows that healthy participants better remember positively valenced cues, but are the first to show an absence of this effect in those with depression.

Prospective memory and aging: preserved spontaneous retrieval, but impaired deactivation, in older adults

Prospective remembering is partially supported by cue-driven spontaneous retrieval processes. We investigated spontaneous retrieval processes in younger and older adults by presenting prospective memory target cues during a lexical decision task following instructions that the prospective memory task was finished. Spontaneous retrieval was inferred from slowed lexical decision responses to target cues (i.e., intention interference). When the intention was finished, younger adults efficiently deactivated their intention, but the older adults continued to retrieve their intentions. Levels of inhibitory functioning were negatively associated with intention interference in the older adult group, but not in the younger adult group. These results indicate that normal aging might not compromise spontaneous retrieval processes but that the ability to deactivate completed intentions is impaired.

Event-related potential evidence for the use of external coordinates in the preparation of tactile attention by the early blind

Recent studies have suggested that visual experience in childhood is crucial for the automatic activation of an external spatial reference frame in tactile perception. These findings are largely based on behavioural work, with limited exploration using event-related potentials (ERPs). The present study examined the role of external spatial frameworks on tactile perception by recording ERP correlates of both preparatory processes and somatosensory processing during a tactile attention task for a group of early blind participants and age-matched sighted controls who carried out the task in darkness. Participants had to shift attention to one hand or the other as indicated by an auditory cue presented at the start of each trial, in order to detect infrequent tactile targets delivered to the attended hand. Spatial information about the external environment was acquired in advance during tactile exploration of the testing booth. ERPs measured during the cue-target interval indicated a conflict between anatomical and external spatial reference frames for both early blind and sighted participants, as marked by the delayed onset of the anterior directing attention negativity, although the delay was more pronounced in the sighted. A delay was also observed, irrespective of visual experience, on the onset of attentional modulations of somatosensory ERPs elicited by tactile stimuli. Although these results confirm that neither concurrent nor developmental vision is necessary for the default use of an external spatial framework in tactile attention, they suggest that the relative impact of an external vs. an anatomical spatial coordinate system may be affected by visual experience.

Electrophysiological Explorations of the Cause and Effect of Inhibition of Return in a Cue–Target Paradigm

Facilitation and inhibition of return (IOR) are, respectively, faster and slower responses to a peripherally cued target. In a spatially uninformative peripheral cueing task, facilitation is normally observed when the interval between the cue and target stimulus, the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), is shorter than 250 ms, while IOR is normally observed when an SOA greater than 250 ms is used. Since Posner and Cohen's (Attention and performance X, 1984) seminal study, IOR has become an actively investigated component of orienting. In this study, using ERPs and the source localization algorithm, LORETA, we seek to examine the brain mechanisms involved in IOR by localizing the different stages of processing after the appearance of a cue that captures attention exogenously. Unlike previous ERP investigations of IOR, this study analyzes the neural activity (via EEG) produced in response to the cue, prior to the appearance of the target. Neural activations were approximately divided into three stages. In the early stage (110-240 ms), involved activations are in the prefrontal cortex, the bilateral intraparietal cortex, and the contralateral occipito-temporal cortex. In the middle stage (240-350 ms), activations are primarily found in the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex. In the late stage (350-650 ms), the main activations are in the occipito-parietal cortex, but unlike in the early stage, the activation areas have shifted to the hemisphere ipsilateral to the cued location. These findings indicate that IOR is related to both attentional and motor response processes and suggest that the time course of initial facilitation and IOR is concurrent and mediated by two neural networks. Building upon our results, electrophysiological, electroencephalographic, and behavioral results in the literature and extending previous spatial theories of IOR, we propose here a spatio-temporal theory of IOR based upon post-cue dynamics.

Manipulation of Consonants in Natural Speech

Natural speech often contains conflicting cues that are characteristic of confusable sounds. For example, the /k/, defined by a mid-frequency burst within 1-2 kHz, may also contain a high-frequency burst above 4 kHz indicative of /ta/, or vice versa. Conflicting cues can cause people to confuse the two sounds in a noisy environment. An efficient way of reducing confusion and improving speech intelligibility in noise is to modify these speech cues. This paper describes a method to manipulate consonant sounds in natural speech, based on our a priori knowledge of perceptual cues of consonants. We demonstrate that: 1) the percept of consonants in natural speech can be controlled through the manipulation of perceptual cues; 2) speech sounds can be made much more robust to noise by removing the conflicting cue and enhancing the target cue.

Attentional orienting and awareness: Evidence from a discrimination task

We used several cue-target SOAs (100, 500, 1000 ms) and three different degrees of cue predictability (Non-predictive-50%, Predictive-75%, Counter-predictive-25%), to investigate the role of awareness of cue-target predictability on cueing effects. A group of participants received instructions about the informative value of the cue, while another group did not receive such instructions. Participants were able to extract the predictive value of a spatially peripheral cue and use it to orient attention, whether or not specific instructions about the predictive value of the cue were given, and no matter their ability to correctly report it in a post-test questionnaire. In the non-predictive block, bad estimators who received no instructions showed regular cueing effects, while good estimators exhibited smaller and non-significant facilitatory effects at the short SOA and an absence of significant IOR at longer SOAs. However, for the instructions group, the pattern of results reversed.

Visual search guidance is best after a short delay

Search displays are typically presented immediately after a target cue, but in the real-world, delays often exist between target designation and search. Experiments 1 and 2 asked how search guidance changes with delay. Targets were cued using a picture or text label, each for 3000 ms, followed by a delay up to 9000 ms before the search display. Search stimuli were realistic objects, and guidance was quantified using multiple eye movement measures. Text-based cues showed a non-significant trend towards greater guidance following any delay relative to a no-delay condition. However, guidance from a pictorial cue increased sharply 300–600 ms after preview offset. Experiment 3 replicated this guidance enhancement using shorter preview durations while equating the time from cue onset to search onset, demonstrating that the guidance benefit is linked to preview offset rather than a more complete encoding of the target. Experiment 4 showed that enhanced guidance persists even with a mask flashed at preview offset, suggesting an explanation other than visual priming. We interpret our findings as evidence for the rapid consolidation of target information into a guiding representation, which attains its maximum effectiveness shortly after preview offset.

An investigation of students' knowledge of the delayed judgements of learning effect

Judgements of learning (JOL) of paired associates can be made immediately after learning or after a delay, while viewing the first word (cue) only or both words (cue–target) in a pair. Delayed cue-only judgements are more related to subsequent memory performance than delayed cue–target, immediate cue-only, or immediate cue–target judgements. In two experiments we tested students' knowledge of this delayed JOL effect and whether their knowledge increases as a function of task experience (Experiment 2). The majority of the participants did not choose the more effective judgement strategy and they did not systematically alter their behaviour as a function of task experience. Instead, a subset of the participants selected judgement strategies on the basis of a learning goal, that is, a strategy that let them restudy both words in a pair. In sum, most students appear to be unaware of the powerful influence of delayed cue-only JOLs on monitoring accuracy.

Blocking of potentiation of latent inhibition.

We present a theory of latent inhibition based on the Pearce-Hall (Pearce & Hall, 1980) model for classical conditioning. Its central features are (1) that the associability of a stimulus declines as it comes to predict its consequences and (2) that nonreinforced exposure to a stimulus engages an associative learning process that makes the stimulus an accurate predictor of its consequences (in this case, the occurrence of no event). A formalization of this theory is shown to accommodate the finding that preexposure in compound with another cue can potentiate latent inhibition to the target cue. It further predicts that preexposure to the added cue will eliminate the potentiation effect. An experiment using rats and the flavor-aversion procedure confirmed this prediction.

The hide-and-seek of retrospective revaluation: Recovery from blocking is context dependent in human causal learning.

In a typical blocking procedure, pairings of a compound consisting of 2 stimuli, A and X, with the outcome are preceded by pairings of only A with the outcome (i.e., A+ then AX+). This procedure is known to diminish responding to the target cue (X) relative to a control group that does not receive the preceding training with blocking cue A. We report 2 experiments that investigated the effect of extinguishing a blocking cue on responding to the target cue in a human causal learning paradigm (i.e., A+ and AX+ training followed by A- training). The results indicate that extinguishing a blocking cue increases conditioned responding to the target cue. Moreover, this increase appears to be context dependent, such that increased responding to the target is limited to the context in which extinction of the blocking cue took place. We discuss these findings in the light of associative and propositional learning theories.

The suppressive power of positive thinking: Aiding suppression-induced forgetting in repressive coping

Participants scoring high and low on a measure of repressive coping style (Mendolia, 2002) first learned a series of related word pairs (cue–target). Half of the cues were homographs. In the subsequent think/no-think phase (Anderson & Green, 2001), they responded with targets on some trials and suppressed thoughts of targets on others. Suppressed targets were always emotionally negative, as were targets associated with baseline cues reserved for the final test. Some participants were provided with emotionally benign or positive substitutes to help them suppress, and these substitutes were related to different meanings of the homographic cues, compared to those established by the targets. On the final test, all cues were presented for target recall. Only the repressors significantly benefited from the provision of positive substitutes to aid forgetting of the negative targets, regardless of the nature of the cues.

Inhibition of Return Exaggerates Change Blindness

Peripheral cues trigger attention shifts, which facilitate perceptual processing and enhance visual awareness. However, this facilitation is superseded by an inhibition of return (IOR) effect, which biases attention away from the cued location. While the link between facilitatory effects of visual attention and awareness is well established, no study has reported negative effects of spatial cueing on visual awareness. This failure is puzzling, given the claim that attention is a necessary precondition for awareness. If attention is necessary for awareness, inhibiting attention should also inhibit awareness. This leads to a slightly counterintuitive prediction: Spatial cueing will inhibit awareness at long cue-target latencies. This study shows that subliminal peripheral cues exaggerate change blindness at long cue-change latencies, demonstrating that IOR can suppress visual awareness of changes and suggesting that IOR can directly affect the contents of consciousness.

Where does attention go when it moves?: Spatial properties and locus of the attentional repulsion effect

Reliable effects of spatial attention on perceptual measures have been well documented, yet little is known about how attention affects perception of space per se. The present study examined the effects of involuntary shifts of spatial attention on perceived location using a paradigm developed by S. Suzuki and P. Cavanagh (1997) that produces an attentional repulsion effect (ARE). The ARE refers to the illusory displacement of two vernier lines away from briefly presented cues. In Experiment 1, we show that the magnitude of the ARE depends on cue-target distance, indicating that the effects of attention on perceived location are not uniform across the visual field. Experiments 2 and 3 tested whether repulsion occurs away from cue center of mass or from cue contour. Perceived repulsion always occurred away from the cues' center of mass, regardless of the arrangement of the cue contours relative to the vernier lines. Moreover, the magnitude of the ARE varied with shifts in the position of the cues' center of mass. These experiments suggest that the onset of the cue produces a shift of attention to its center of mass rather than to the salient luminance contours that define it, and that this mechanism underlies the ARE.

Emotionally meaningful targets enhance orienting triggered by a fearful gazing face

Studies investigating the effect of emotional expression on spatial orienting to a gazed-at location have produced mixed results. The present study investigated the role of affective context in the integration of emotion processing and gaze-triggered orienting. In three experiments, a face gazed non-predictively to the left or right, and then its expression became fearful or happy. Participants identified (Experiments 1 and 2) or detected (Experiment 3) a peripheral target presented 225 or 525 ms after the gaze cue onset. In Experiments 1 and 3 the targets were either threatening (a snarling dog) or non-threatening (a smiling baby); in Experiment 2 the targets were neutral. With emotionally valenced targets, the gaze-cuing effect was larger when the face was fearful compared to happy—but only with the longer cue–target interval. With neutral targets, there was no interaction between gaze and expression. Our results indicate that a meaningful context optimises attentional integration of gaze and expression information.

The role of visual cues in the acquisition and transfer of a voluntary postural sway task

We investigated the acquisition and transfer of a visually guided voluntary postural sway (PS) task that was practiced with the provision of either continuous or end point visual cues. Forty healthy adults were randomly assigned in to one of the four groups that practiced sway using different combinations of target and performance feedback. Participants were asked to voluntarily sway in the sagittal plane at a pre-set frequency (0.23 Hz) by matching the force exerted on a dual force platform to a visual target. Baseline, post-test, transfer and retention (24 h later) tests required performance of the PS task paced by a metronome. Continuous target cues resulted in greater accuracy at the peaks but at the cost of increasing movement intermittency. End-point cues on the other hand, produced more stable sway patterns but target overshooting. These adaptations differently generalized in the auditory-driven workspace, as reflected by more stable sway patterns for the groups practicing with end target cues and an enhancement of the ankle stiffening strategy for the groups practicing with continuous targets. It is suggested that the types of visual cues available during visually driven PS have a strong influence not only on the acquisition of this task but also on its generalization to the audio-motor workspace.

Reorienting of spatial attention in gaze cuing is reflected in N2pc

Research has shown that gaze cuing of attention is reflected in the modulation of P1 and N1 components of ERPs time-locked to target onset. Studies focusing on cue-locked analyses have produced mixed results. The present study examined ERP reflections of gaze cuing in further detail by recording electric brain activity from the scalp of participants engaged in a spatial cuing paradigm with noninformative gaze cues embedded in fearful, disgusted, or neutral faces. Unlike previous work, we focused on N2pc, a recent ERP index of attention shifting over space. Behavioral data showed that gaze-driven orienting was not influenced by facial expression. Importantly, electrophysiological data showed a significant amplitude modulation of the N2pc time-locked to target onset as a function of cue–target spatial congruence. This pattern, however, was independent of facial expression. The results are interpreted as evidence that N2pc can be used as a marker of reorienting of attention in spatially incongruent trials due to gaze cuing. The overall findings support the idea that the effects of facial expression on gaze cuing are weak and likely context-dependent.

Neural substrates of implicit cueing effect on prospective memory

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine the maintenance of intentions during an ongoing task involving implicit cues. Participants were required to detect target words while engaging in the ongoing task. Cues matched to the target category and cues matched to the action for targets were presented implicitly during the ongoing task. Implicit categorical target cues were found to enhance prospective memory performance, and implicit action cues accelerated responses more than irrelevant implicit cues in the prospective memory task. We found increased caudal anterior cingulate cortex (cACC) activity during the ongoing task with both implicit target and action cues, suggesting that alertness or preparatory attentional processes were strengthened by implicit cues. Implicit target cues elicited enhanced activity in the lateral anterior prefrontal cortex (Brodmann's area 10), which may be involved in dual processing of the ongoing task and the maintained intention. These results suggest that implicit cues may boost primitive attention toward an intended action and may be accessible to off-line maintenance. The facilitation of prospective target detection and the action execution by target cues were associated with increased supplementary motor area (SMA) activity. In contrast, we found enhanced premotor cortex (PMC) activation with action cue during the prospective memory task, suggesting that the PMC may be involved in stimulus-induced and rather automatic action. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of implicit cues for examining the maintenance of intention. Overall, we found that implicit target cues can facilitate prospective memory performance, and implicit action cues can accelerate responses. The above-mentioned neural underpinnings suggest that attentional and motor control processes are involved in the enhancement of prospective memory.

Age-related Declines in Prospective Memory: Modulation of the Prospective and Retrospective Components

Prospective memory (PM) is defined as remembering to remember or remembering to perform an intended action, which requires to form and later realize intentions that must be delayed for minutes, hours, or days, such as remembering to take medication with a meal, or to turn off the stove after cooking. Prospective memory is important in our everyday life, especially to those old people with declined (i.e., less efficient) cognitive functions. Better prospective memory performance can help old people maintain their independent lives and improve their quality of life. So the present study focused on the age difference in an event-based prospective memory task. Regarding the internal mechanism of age differences in PM, two contradictive perspectives were proposed: the age deficits exist in prospective component VS in retrospective component. Noticing-search model (Einstein McDaniel, 1996) suggested that the PM deficit in old people came from the searching process. On the other hand, Smith and Bayen (2006) applied a formal multinomial processing tree model of PM and indicated that the deficit existed in the process of recognizing target cues, which was resource-demanding. The present study evaluated the two perspectives and further investigated the related cognitive mechanism using a classic paradigm where the prospective memory task was embedded in a semantic categorization task. 60 young (29 females) and 60 old adults (26 females) participated experiment 1 voluntarily. The experiment compared the effect of age on the prospective component and the retrospective component of PM, manipulating semantic relatedness between cue and intention, and the distinctiveness of the cue. Young adults performed better than old adults in both the prospective component and retrospective component, but the effect size of age was larger in prospective component. When the relatedness was high or the cue was distinctive, old adults performed as well as young adults, however, it showed age deficits when the relatedness was low or the cue was indistinguishable.These findings suggest that both data-driven and conceptually driven processes can improve old people's memory for intentions greatly.Another 68 young (37 females) and 68 old adults (46 females) participated in Experiment 2. The experiment examined the effect of prospective component on the age difference in prospective memory by reducing the demand of retrospective component and manipulating the cognitive resources of prospective memory. Main effect of age, the distractive level of divided attention and the distinctiveness of the target cue were all found in the accuracy of prospective memory. Both the response time of ongoing and PM tasks had a significant decline in the older adults compared to the young ones. Significant age deficits were found when the target was indistinguishable. And the high distractive level task made old adults’ performance even worse. To be summarized, the aging of PM is modulated both by data-driven and conceptually driven processes. Compared to retrospective component, the age effect in PM is greater on the prospective component. The cognitive load in the task influences the age effect in PM since the prospective component is resource-demanding. The age effect is more obvious when the PM task needs more strategic control than automatically processed. These results further reveal the cause of the reasons for age differences in prospective memory.

The associative structure of language: Contextual diversity in early word learning

Previous studies demonstrated that statistical properties of adult generated free associates predict the order of early noun learning. We investigate an explanation for this phenomenon that we call the associative structure of language: early word learning may be driven in part by contextual diversity in the learning environment, with contextual diversity in caregiver speech correlating with the cue–target structure in adult free association norms. To test this, we examined the co-occurrence of words in caregiver speech from the CHILDES database and found that a word’s contextual diversity—the number of unique word types a word co-occurs with in caregiver speech—predicted the order of early word learning and was highly correlated with the number of unique associative cues for a given target word in adult free association norms. The associative structure of language was further supported by an analysis of the longitudinal development of early semantic networks (from 16 to 30 months) using contextual co-occurrence. This analysis supported two growth processes: The lure of the associates, in which the earliest learned words have more connections with known words, and preferential acquisition, in which the earliest learned words are the most contextually diverse in the learning environment. We further discuss the impact of word class (nouns, verbs, etc.) on these results.

The relative contribution of scene context and target features to visual search in scenes

Many experiments have shown that knowing a target's visual features improves search performance over knowing the target name. Other experiments have shown that scene context can facilitate object search in natural scenes. In this study, we investigated how scene context and target features affect search performance. We examined two possible sources of information from scene context--the scene's gist and the visual details of the scene--and how they potentially interact with target-feature information. Prior to commencing search, participants were shown a scene and a target cue depicting either a picture or the category name (or no-information control). Using eye movement measures, we investigated how the target features and scene context influenced two components of search: early attentional guidance processes and later verification processes involved in the identification of the target. We found that both scene context and target features improved guidance, but that target features also improved speed of target recognition. Furthermore, we found that a scene's visual details played an important role in improving guidance, much more so than did the scene's gist alone.