Task-irrelevant Features Research Articles

Influence of spatial and non-spatial feature continuity on cortical alpha oscillations

In everyday environments, listeners face the challenge of parsing the sound mixture reaching their ears into individual sources. Perceptual continuity of acoustic features, such as pitch or location, has an obligatory effect on auditory attention even when a feature is not task relevant. Cortical alpha oscillations (8-12 Hz) are thought to functionally inhibit the processing of task-irrelevant information. Here, we hypothesize that discontinuities in a task-irrelevant feature disrupt the attentional modulation of alpha rhythms. Using electroencephalography in humans, we compare physiological measures during a selective auditory attention task where listeners were asked to attend to either talker, based on gender (male or female) or location (left or right). On half of the trials, a discontinuity was introduced in the task-irrelevant acoustic feature. When listeners attended to the talker, there was no evidence of alpha power lateralization, and no effect of a discontinuity in location. In contrast, when listeners attended to location, parieto-occipital alpha power increased ipsilateral to the attended location; moreover, a discontinuity in talker reduced alpha power and disrupted alpha lateralization. Our findings support the importance of parieto-occipital alpha in suppressing sources when listeners focus spatial, but not non-spatial, attention, and show that task-irrelevant discontinuities affect these alpha rhythms.

Effects of task-irrelevant grouping on visual selection in partial report.

Perceptual grouping modulates performance in attention tasks such as partial report and change detection. Specifically, grouping of search items according to a task-relevant feature improves the efficiency of visual selection. However, the role of task-irrelevant feature grouping is not clearly understood. In the present study, we investigated whether grouping of targets by a task-irrelevant feature influences performance in a partial-report task. In this task, participants must report as many target letters as possible from a briefly presented circular display. The crucial manipulation concerned the color of the elements in these trials. In the sorted-color condition, the color of the display elements was arranged according to the selection criterion, and in the unsorted-color condition, colors were randomly assigned. The distractor cost was inferred by subtracting performance in partial-report trials from performance in a control condition that had no distractors in the display. Across five experiments, we manipulated trial order, selection criterion, and exposure duration, and found that attentional selectivity was improved in sorted-color trials when the exposure duration was 200 ms and the selection criterion was luminance. This effect was accompanied by impaired selectivity in unsorted-color trials. Overall, the results suggest that the benefit of task-irrelevant color grouping of targets is contingent on the processing locus of the selection criterion.

"Should I stop or should I go? The role of associations and expectancies": Correction to Best et al. (2016).

Reports an error in "Should I stop or should I go? The role of associations and expectancies" by Maisy Best, Natalia S. Lawrence, Gordon D. Logan, Ian P. L. McLaren and Frederick Verbruggen (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2016[Jan], Vol 42[1], 115-137). In the article, there is an error in Table 3 of the Results and third paragraph of the Results section labeled Test phase. In Experiment 4, the study performed an exploratory post-hoc test of the go reaction times in the training phase, contrasting stop-associated and go-associated items. Control items were excluded. Instead of reporting the results of the full analysis (with all three items types included), the authors incorrectly reported the results of this post-hoc analysis in Table 3 and in the main text. The correct analysis is presented below. Note that all other analyses reported in the tables and main text are correct. The R code shared via Open Research Exeter data repository (http://hdl.handle .net/10871/17735) is also correct. The interaction between image type and block is no longer significant when control items are included (p .094; p .037 for the post-hoc test). (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2015-40003-001.) Following exposure to consistent stimulus-stop mappings, response inhibition can become automatized with practice. What is learned is less clear, even though this has important theoretical and practical implications. A recent analysis indicates that stimuli can become associated with a stop signal or with a stop goal. Furthermore, expectancy may play an important role. Previous studies that have used stop or no-go signals to manipulate stimulus-stop learning cannot distinguish between stimulus-signal and stimulus-goal associations, and expectancy has not been measured properly. In the present study, participants performed a task that combined features of the go/no-go task and the stop-signal task in which the stop-signal rule changed at the beginning of each block. The go and stop signals were superimposed over 40 task-irrelevant images. Our results show that participants can learn direct associations between images and the stop goal without mediation via the stop signal. Exposure to the image-stop associations influenced task performance during training, and expectancies measured following task completion or measured within the task. But, despite this, we found an effect of stimulus-stop learning on test performance only when the task increased the task-relevance of the images. This could indicate that the influence of stimulus-stop learning on go performance is strongly influenced by attention to both task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimulus features. More generally, our findings suggest a strong interplay between automatic and controlled processes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Cognitive and movement measures reflect the transition to presence-at-hand

Abstract The phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger's proposed transition from readiness-to-hand to presence-at-hand and the hypothesis of extended cognition were addressed empirically in an experiment on tool use. It involved a video game of steering erratically moving objects to a target while performing a secondary cognitive task. A strong perturbation of the hand-pointer linkage in the video game induced the transition from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand. In Experiment 1, this perturbation resulted in decreased motor performance and improved recall of task-irrelevant features. Experiment 2 replicated these results and addressed additional questions. Measures of movement variability based on the multifractal formalism confirmed the hypothesized decrease in functional integration of the tool during the perturbation. Dynamical interactions allow user and tool to act as a system. The tool is properly described as ready-to-hand during normal operation but as present-at-hand during perturbation. Physiological measures showed that the ready-to-hand to present-at-hand transition does not necessarily lead to a stress response.

To OBE or Not To OBE? Revisiting Object-based Encoding (OBE) in in Visual Working Memory

It has been suggested that visual working memory (VWM) adopts an object-based encoding (OBE) manner to extract perceptual information into VWM. That is, whenever even one feature-dimension is selected for entry into VWM, the others are also extracted automatically. Almost all extant studies revealing OBE were conducted by probing an "irrelevant-change distracting effect", in which a change of stored irrelevant-feature dramatically affects the change detection performance of the target feature. However, the existence of irrelevant feature change may affect the participants' processing manner, leading to a false positive result. In the current study, we conducted a strict examination of OBE in VWM, by keeping the irrelevant feature of the memory item constant while probing whether task-irrelevant feature can guide the early deployment of attention in visual search. In particular, we required the participants to memorize an object's color while ignoring shape. Critically, we inserted a visual search task into the maintenance phase of VWM, and the participants searched for a target line among distractor lines, each embedded within a different object. One object in the search display could match the shape, the color or both dimensions of the memory item, but this object never contained the target line. Relative to a neutral baseline (no match between the memory and the search displays), we found that the search time was significantly prolonged in all the three match conditions. Moreover, this pattern was not modulated by the exposure time of memory array (100 or 1000ms), suggesting that similar to the task-relevant feature color, the task-irrelevant shape was also extracted into VWM, and hence affected the search task in a top-down manner. Therefore, the OBE exists in VWM. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016

Garner-Interference in Skilled Right-Handed Grasping is Possible.

According to the Perception-Action-Model (PAM), the human visual cortex consists of the ventral vision-for-perception and the dorsal vision-for-action streams. Performance decrements with increasing variation of nominally task-irrelevant stimulus features (Garner-Interference) was suggested as an empirical tool for identifying contributions of these streams: vision-for-perception, but not visionfor-action, should suffer from Garner-Interference, but inconsistencies in this argument were revealed by several studies. We here used a new manipulation to induce Garner-Interference in a dorsal task: The stimulus objects did not differ in their lengths but in the side to which they were weighted. In Experiment 1, Garner-Interference was found in a ventral perceptual judgment task. Notably, we did also find Garner-Interference in skilled right-handed grasping in Experiment 2. These findings suggest that the presence or absence of Garner-Interference does not consistently index the contribution of different processing streams for perception and action, but the coprocessing of nominally task-irrelevant stimulus features in general, be it for perception of action.

Visual working memory simultaneously guides facilitation and inhibition during visual search.

During visual search, visual working memory (VWM) supports the guidance of attention in two ways: It stores the identity of the search target, facilitating the selection of matching stimuli in the search array, and it maintains a record of the distractors processed during search so that they can be inhibited. In two experiments, we investigated whether the full contents of VWM can be used to support both of these abilities simultaneously. In Experiment 1, participants completed a preview search task in which (a) a subset of search distractors appeared before the remainder of the search items, affording participants the opportunity to inhibit them, and (b) the search target varied from trial to trial, requiring the search target template to be maintained in VWM. We observed the established signature of VWM-based inhibition-reduced ability to ignore previewed distractors when the number of distractors exceeds VWM's capacity-suggesting that VWM can serve this role while also representing the target template. In Experiment 2, we replicated Experiment 1, but added to the search displays a singleton distractor that sometimes matched the color (a task-irrelevant feature) of the search target, to evaluate capture. We again observed the signature of VWM-based preview inhibition along with attentional capture by (and, thus, facilitation of) singletons matching the target template. These findings indicate that more than one VWM representation can bias attention at a time, and that these representations can separately affect selection through either facilitation or inhibition, placing constraints on existing models of the VWM-based guidance of attention.

Memory for a single object has differently variable precisions for relevant and irrelevant features.

Working memory is a limited resource. To further characterize its limitations, it is vital to understand exactly what is encoded about a visual object beyond the "relevant" features probed in a particular task. We measured the memory quality of a task-irrelevant feature of an attended object by coupling a delayed estimation task with a surprise test. Participants were presented with a single colored arrow and were asked to retrieve just its color for the first half of the experiment before unexpectedly being asked to report its direction. Mixture modeling of the data revealed that participants had highly variable precision on the surprise test, indicating a coarse-grained memory for the irrelevant feature. Following the surprise test, all participants could precisely recall the arrow's direction; however, this improvement in direction memory came at a cost in precision for color memory even though only a single object was being remembered. We attribute these findings to varying levels of attention to different features during memory encoding.

Cognitive control, dynamic salience, and the imperative toward computational accounts of neuromodulatory function.

We draw attention to studies indicating that phasic arousal increases interference effects in tasks necessitating the recruitment of cognitive control. We suggest that arousal-biased competition models such as GANE (glutamate amplifies noradrenergic effects) may be able to explain these findings by taking into account dynamic, within-trial changes in the relative salience of task-relevant and task-irrelevant features. However, testing this hypothesis requires a computational model.

No templates for rejection: a failure to configure attention to ignore task-irrelevant features

ABSTRACTKnowing the colour of an upcoming target allows one to bias attention towards objects of that colour. It is far less clear whether knowing the colour of an up-coming distractor can allow one to suppress attention to items of that colour. Arita, Carlisle, and Woodman (2012) suggest that people can create a template for rejection. However, the method used in Arita et al. may have allowed people to adopt a strategy of internally generating a positive cue for the target colour or target hemifield. Here we use a method very similar to theirs, but manipulate the display layouts and the number of un-cued colours in ways that should thwart such strategies. Across three experiments, we find a negative cuing benefit only in a very special circumstance that encourages a strategic shift to internally generating a positive cue (the same circumstance used by Arita et al.). We conclude that people are unable to use a negative feature-cue on a trial-by-trial basis to suppress attention to upcoming distractors, and attribute the finding in Arita et al. to a strategic shift rather than a template for rejection.

It wasn’t me! Motor activation from irrelevant spatial information in the absence of a response

Embodied cognition postulates that perceptual and motor processes serve higher-order cognitive faculties like language. A major challenge for embodied cognition concerns the grounding of abstract concepts. Here we zoom in on abstract spatial concepts and ask the question to what extent the sensorimotor system is involved in processing these. Most of the empirical support in favor of an embodied perspective on (abstract) spatial information has derived from so-called compatibility effects in which a task-irrelevant feature either facilitates (for compatible trials) or hinders (in incompatible trials) responding to the task-relevant feature. This type of effect has been interpreted in terms of (task-irrelevant) feature-induced response activation. The problem with such approach is that incompatible features generate an array of task-relevant and –irrelevant activations [e.g., in primary motor cortex (M1)], and lateral hemispheric interactions render it difficult to assign credit to the task-irrelevant feature per se in driving these activations. Here, we aim to obtain a cleaner indication of response activation on the basis of abstract spatial information. We employed transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to probe response activation of effectors in response to semantic, task-irrelevant stimuli (i.e., the words left and right) that did not require an overt response. Results revealed larger motor evoked potentials (MEPs) for the right (left) index finger when the word right (left) was presented. Our findings provide support for the grounding of abstract spatial concepts in the sensorimotor system.

Measuring the memory quality of a task irrelevant feature of an attended object

Measuring the memory quality of a task irrelevant feature of an attended object

Context-sensitive adjustments of cognitive control: Further insights from eye movement behavior

Recent research showed that cognitive control (i.e., the ability to respond to task-relevant while ignoring task-irrelevant features) can be recruited and regulated in a context-sensitive manner. Accordingly, a spatial location can serve as context cue if, for instance, trials with a high probability of response conflicts are presented. This would signal an increased demand of cognitive control engagement as compared to a spatial location with a low probability of response conflicts. As a consequence, interference effects are typically reduced in high conflict compared to low conflict contexts. In the present study we aimed at investigating the underlying cognitive mechanisms that enable such context-sensitive adjustments of cognitive control. We specifically measured eye movements to determine the allocation of attention to high versus low conflict contexts and to get insights into conflict resolution at the respective location. We used a Face-Stroop task, in which simultaneous displays of a face and a name were presented at predefined locations on the screen. The combinations could appear either to the left or right of central fixation. The factor conflict context was manipulated by the frequency of incongruent trials, with high conflict context induced by 80% incongruent trials and low conflict context by 20% incongruent trials. Participants indicated the gender of the names while ignoring the gender of the face. On the behavioral level, we found reduced Stroop effects for locations with a high conflict frequency compared to locations with a low conflict frequency, indicating that more cognitive control was invested. With regard to the eye movement behavior, we will present findings from saccade latency, saccadic landing position and pupil size. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015

Multitasking: Effects of processing multiple auditory feature patterns.

ERPs and behavioral responses were measured to assess how task-irrelevant sounds interact with task processing demands and affect the ability to monitor and track multiple sound events. Participants listened to four-tone sequential frequency patterns, and responded to frequency pattern deviants (reversals of the pattern). Irrelevant tone feature patterns (duration and intensity) and respective pattern deviants were presented together with frequency patterns and frequency pattern deviants in separate conditions. Responses to task-relevant and task-irrelevant feature pattern deviants were used to test processing demands for irrelevant sound input. Behavioral performance was significantly better when there were no distracting feature patterns. Errors primarily occurred in response to the to-be-ignored feature pattern deviants. Task-irrelevant elicitation of ERP components was consistent with the error analysis, indicating a level of processing for the irrelevant features. Task-relevant elicitation of ERP components was consistent with behavioral performance, demonstrating a "cost" of performance when there were two feature patterns presented simultaneously. These results provide evidence that the brain tracked the irrelevant duration and intensity feature patterns, affecting behavioral performance. Overall, our results demonstrate that irrelevant informational streams are processed at a cost, which may be considered a type of multitasking that is an ongoing, automatic processing of task-irrelevant sensory events.

Task-irrelevant stimulus-reward association induces value-driven attentional capture.

Rewards affect the deployment of visual attention in various situations. Evidence suggests that the stimulus associated with reward involuntary captures attention (value-driven attentional capture; VDAC). Recent studies report VDAC even when the reward-associated feature does not define the target (i.e., task-irrelevant). However, these studies did not conduct the test phase without reward, thus the effect may be qualitatively different from those in the previous studies. In the current study, we tested if task-irrelevant features induce VDAC even in the test phase with no reward. We used a flanker task during reward learning to create color-reward associations (training phase), and then tested the effect of color during visual search (test phase). Reward learning with no spatial uncertainty in the flanker task induced VDAC, even when reward signaling color was associated with both target and distractor (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 3, a significant VDAC with a color for all letters indicated that target-distractor discrimination is not necessary for VDAC. Finally, a significant VDAC (Experiment 4) with color rectangular frames around the letters indicated binding reward-associated features to task-relevant letters is not necessary for VDAC. All these effects were obtained in the test phase without reward, thus VDAC in the current study is comparable to previous studies using target-defining features. These findings indicate that task-relevance is not a necessary condition for VDAC from reward-associated features, suggesting that reward-associated learning in VDAC is more indirect.

Irrelevant reward and selection histories have different influences on task-relevant attentional selection.

Task-relevant and physically salient features influence visual selective attention. In the present study, we investigated the influence of task-irrelevant and physically nonsalient reward-associated features on visual selective attention. Two hypotheses were tested: One predicts that the effects of target-defining task-relevant and task-irrelevant features interact to modulate visual selection; the other predicts that visual selection is determined by the independent combination of relevant and irrelevant feature effects. These alternatives were tested using a visual search task that contained multiple targets, placing a high demand on the need for selectivity, and that was data-limited and required unspeeded responses, emphasizing early perceptual selection processes. One week prior to the visual search task, participants completed a training task in which they learned to associate particular colors with a specific reward value. In the search task, the reward-associated colors were presented surrounding targets and distractors, but were neither physically salient nor task-relevant. In two experiments, the irrelevant reward-associated features influenced performance, but only when they were presented in a task-relevant location. The costs induced by the irrelevant reward-associated features were greater when they oriented attention to a target than to a distractor. In a third experiment, we examined the effects of selection history in the absence of reward history and found that the interaction between task relevance and selection history differed, relative to when the features had previously been associated with reward. The results indicate that under conditions that demand highly efficient perceptual selection, physically nonsalient task-irrelevant and task-relevant factors interact to influence visual selective attention.

Asymmetric transfer effects between cognitive and affective task disturbances

Task-irrelevant features of a stimulus can disturb performance on a given task, and this can occur for cognitive reasons such as irrelevant stimulus position, and affective reasons such as high stimulus valence. The human brain adapts to such disturbances in order to ensure successful task performance. Adaptations can occur in a transient manner in response to recent events, and they can also be sustained to account for overall probabilities of disturbances. Here, we study the mutual interplay between affective and cognitive task disturbances under conditions of sustained conflict adaptation. More precisely, we examined the trajectory of finger movements in a speeded classification task and investigated whether adaptation to a high probability of spatial disturbances transfers to the impact of affective disturbances (Experiment 1) and whether adaptation to a high probability of affective disturbances transfers to the impact of spatial disturbances (Experiment 2). Our observations point towards an asymmetric transfer from adaptation to affective onto the processing of cognitive disturbances, but not the other way around.

Experience a conflict-either consciously or not (commentary on Desender, Van Opstal, and Van den Bussche, 2014).

Experience a conflict-either consciously or not (commentary on Desender, Van Opstal, and Van den Bussche, 2014).

Task-irrelevant emotion facilitates face discrimination learning

We understand poorly how the ability to discriminate faces from one another is shaped by visual experience. The purpose of the present study is to determine whether face discrimination learning can be facilitated by facial emotions. To answer this question, we used a task-irrelevant perceptual learning paradigm because it closely mimics the learning processes that, in daily life, occur without a conscious intention to learn and without an attentional focus on specific facial features. We measured face discrimination thresholds before and after training. During the training phase (4days), participants performed a contrast discrimination task on face images. They were not informed that we introduced (task-irrelevant) subtle variations in the face images from trial to trial. For the Identity group, the task-irrelevant features were variations along a morphing continuum of facial identity. For the Emotion group, the task-irrelevant features were variations along an emotional expression morphing continuum. The Control group did not undergo contrast discrimination learning and only performed the pre-training and post-training tests, with the same temporal gap between them as the other two groups. Results indicate that face discrimination improved, but only for the Emotion group. Participants in the Emotion group, moreover, showed face discrimination improvements also for stimulus variations along the facial identity dimension, even if these (task-irrelevant) stimulus features had not been presented during training. The present results highlight the importance of emotions for face discrimination learning.

Facial expression influences face identity recognition during the attentional blink.

Emotional stimuli (e.g., negative facial expressions) enjoy prioritized memory access when task relevant, consistent with their ability to capture attention. Whether emotional expression also impacts on memory access when task-irrelevant is important for arbitrating between feature-based and object-based attentional capture. Here, the authors address this question in 3 experiments using an attentional blink task with face photographs as first and second target (T1, T2). They demonstrate reduced neutral T2 identity recognition after angry or happy T1 expression, compared to neutral T1, and this supports attentional capture by a task-irrelevant feature. Crucially, after neutral T1, T2 identity recognition was enhanced and not suppressed when T2 was angry—suggesting that attentional capture by this task-irrelevant feature may be object-based and not feature-based. As an unexpected finding, both angry and happy facial expressions suppress memory access for competing objects, but only angry facial expression enjoyed privileged memory access. This could imply that these 2 processes are relatively independent from one another.