The Time Course of Response Activation with Dangerous Objects

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liang Zhao

AbstractThe action property of an object appears to function as an intrinsic part of its mental representation. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in cases where although the grasp response evoked by a visual object is irrelevant to a participant’s task it still appears to be encoded. This is an affordance effect. Recent findings have shown that dangerous objects can modulate the motor system by evoking aversive affordances. However, the way the time course of response activation generated by the dangerous object develops remains unclear. To investigate this process, we used a priming paradigm that varied the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between a prime and a target. Participants were asked to judge a symbol after presentation of a dangerous object. Results showed a significant congruency effect between the affordance of the ignored object and the requisite response when the SOA was 800 and 1,200 ms, (t(29) = 4.13, p < .001; t(29) = 2.56, p < .05, respectively). However, with briefer SOAs (0 and 400 ms), this congruency effect was not observed (ps > .10). Results indicate the time course of response activation with a dangerous object are relatively long-lasting.

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciara K. Kidder ◽  
Katherine R. White ◽  
Michelle R. Hinojos ◽  
Mayra Sandoval ◽  
Stephen L. Crites

Psychological interest in stereotype measurement has spanned nearly a century, with researchers adopting implicit measures in the 1980s to complement explicit measures. One of the most frequently used implicit measures of stereotypes is the sequential priming paradigm. The current meta-analysis examines stereotype priming, focusing specifically on this paradigm. To contribute to ongoing discussions regarding methodological rigor in social psychology, one primary goal was to identify methodological moderators of the stereotype priming effect—whether priming is due to a relation between the prime and target stimuli, the prime and target response, participant task, stereotype dimension, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and stimuli type. Data from 39 studies yielded 87 individual effect sizes from 5,497 participants. Analyses revealed that stereotype priming is significantly moderated by the presence of prime–response relations, participant task, stereotype dimension, target stimulus type, SOA, and prime repetition. These results carry both practical and theoretical implications for future research on stereotype priming.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 770-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
PILAR FERRÉ ◽  
ROSA SÁNCHEZ-CASAS ◽  
MONTSERRAT COMESAÑA ◽  
JOSEP DEMESTRE

In the domain of bilingualism, a main issue of interest has been to determine whether the two languages are shared at a conceptual level and which variables modulate the access to the conceptual system. In this study, we focused on the effects of two variables related to word-type. We tested proficient unbalanced Spanish–English bilinguals in a masked translation priming paradigm conducted in the two translation directions (L1 to L2, and L2 to L1), by orthogonally manipulating for the first time concreteness and cognate status. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was also manipulated (50 ms vs 100 ms). Results revealed modulations in masked priming effects as a function of cognate status and translation direction. However, the effect of concreteness was only observed at the long SOA. The findings are discussed in light of the most relevant models of bilingual memory, mainly the Distributed Feature Model (de Groot, 1992a).


1997 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 923-943 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Brosch ◽  
Christoph E. Schreiner

Brosch, Michael and Christoph E. Schreiner. Time course of forward masking tuning curves in cat primary auditory cortex. J. Neurophysiol. 77: 923–943, 1997. Nonsimultaneous two-tone interactions were studied in the primary auditory cortex of anesthetized cats. Poststimulatory effects of pure tone bursts (masker) on the evoked activity of a fixed tone burst (probe) were investigated. The temporal interval from masker onset to probe onset (stimulus onset asynchrony), masker frequency, and intensity were parametrically varied. For all of the 53 single units and 58 multiple-unit clusters, the neural activity of the probe signal was either inhibited, facilitated, and/or delayed by a limited set of masker stimuli. The stimulus range from which forward inhibition of the probe was induced typically was centered at and had approximately the size of the neuron's excitatory receptive field. This “masking tuning curve” was usually V shaped, i.e., the frequency range of inhibiting masker stimuli increased with the masker intensity. Forward inhibition was induced at the shortest stimulus onset asynchrony between masker and probe. With longer stimulus onset asynchronies, the frequency range of inhibiting maskers gradually became smaller. Recovery from forward inhibition occurred first at the lower- and higher-frequency borders of the masking tuning curve and lasted the longest for frequencies close to the neuron's characteristic frequency. The maximal duration of forward inhibition was measured as the longest period over which reduction of probe responses was observed. It was in the range of 53–430 ms, with an average of 143 ± 71 (SD) ms. Amount, duration and type of forward inhibition were weakly but significantly correlated with “static” neural receptive field properties like characteristic frequency, bandwidth, and latency. For the majority of neurons, the minimal inhibitory masker intensity increased when the stimulus onset asynchrony became longer. In most cases the highest masker intensities induced the longest forward inhibition. A significant number of neurons, however, exhibited longest periods of inhibition after maskers of intermediate intensity. The results show that the ability of cortical cells to respond with an excitatory activity depends on the temporal stimulus context. Neurons can follow higher repetition rates of stimulus sequences when successive stimuli differ in their spectral content. The differential sensitivity to temporal sound sequences within the receptive field of cortical cells as well as across different cells could contribute to the neural processing of temporally structured stimuli like speech and animal vocalizations.


2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 760-773 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan J. Horner ◽  
Richard N. Henson

Stimulus repetition often leads to facilitated processing, resulting in neural decreases (repetition suppression) and faster RTs (repetition priming). Such repetition-related effects have been attributed to the facilitation of repeated cognitive processes and/or the retrieval of previously encoded stimulus–response (S-R) bindings. Although previous research has dissociated these two forms of learning, their interaction in the brain is not fully understood. Utilizing the spatial and temporal resolutions of fMRI and EEG, respectively, we examined a long-lag classification priming paradigm that required response repetitions or reversals at multiple levels of response representation. We found a repetition effect in occipital/temporal cortex (fMRI) that was time-locked to stimulus onset (EEG) and robust to switches in response, together with a repetition effect in inferior pFC (fMRI) that was time-locked to response onset (EEG) and sensitive to switches in response. The response-sensitive effect occurred even when changing from object names (words) to object pictures between repetitions, suggesting that S-R bindings can code abstract representations of stimuli. Most importantly, we found evidence for interference effects when incongruent S-R bindings were retrieved, with increased neural activity in inferior pFC, demonstrating that retrieval of S-R bindings can result in facilitation or interference, depending on the congruency of response between repetitions.


Perception ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (9) ◽  
pp. 1181-1196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talis Bachmann ◽  
Neeme Kahusk

The two objectives of the present article are (a) to present a brief overview of the effects of systematic variation of the spatial-scale value of quantisation and stimulus duration on the identification of original images that have been degraded by Harmon–Julesz type of image pixelisation by ‘blocking’ and (b) to report the results of two experiments where the effects of selective spatial precuing by local and global peripheral precues on the identification of quantised target stimuli have been studied. Both the overview and the new results reported here demonstrate some counterintuitive effects: (1) abrupt decrease in identification efficiency with only a minor change in the coarseness of quantisation over a critical value of pixels per stimulus; (2) a cost for valid attentional precuing with coarse-quantised images. If physical precues (exposed with stimulus onset asynchrony of 120 ms) were employed in order to orient spatial attention to perceive original or fine-quantised stimuli, then attentional facilitation was found. However, if the precued stimuli were coarse quantised then the facilitative effect crossed over to a detrimental effect of attention. These effects are discussed in the context of the microgenetic approach that presupposes the existence of a perceptual–attentional processing routine that operates according to the coarse-to-fine time-course rule of selective attentional activation of stimulus representations at various spatial scales.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110481
Author(s):  
Yanli Huang ◽  
Chi-Shing Tse ◽  
Jiushu Xie ◽  
Manqiong Shen ◽  
Ruiming Wang

Whether a cognitive process is operated automatically or in a controlled manner has been a long-standing question in cognitive psychology. However, this issue has not been investigated in the activation of metaphoric association. A primed word valence judgment task is often used to test the activation of metaphoric association, in which participants first see a prime (bright/dark square or fixation point moving up or down from the center of the screen) and then make a valence judgment to a target word. Metaphoric congruency effect occurs when participants make faster judgments to the target with valence being matched with the prime (good followed bright/top prime) than being mismatched with the prime (good followed dark/bottom prime). In the present two experiments, we manipulated prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and proportion of metaphorically congruent trials (congruency proportion) to tease apart the effects of automatic and controlled activation of brightness-valence and spatial-valence metaphoric associations on word valence judgments. Results showed an overall effect of congruency proportion on brightness-valence and spatial-valence metaphoric congruency effect, which was independent of prime-target SOA. The effect was enhanced or reversed when congruency proportion was higher or lower than 0.5, respectively, suggesting that the activation of metaphoric association could be modulated by strategic control. The implications of these findings on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and semantic priming theories are discussed.


1989 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-746 ◽  
Author(s):  
MaryLou Cheal ◽  
Don Lyon

Considerable disagreement exists in the visual attention literature about how attention is allocated over the visual field. One frequently expressed metaphor is that attention moves like a spotlight, and in some variants it is assumed that attention takes longer to shift to targets further from fixation. In order to test this metaphor, five experiments were conducted in which target location was precued and form discrimination accuracy was assessed. By varying the interval between the precue and the target (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA), a time course of attention effects was obtained for targets at 2°, 6°, and 10° eccentricity. In the first three experiments, precueing effects were found, but there were no differences in performance as a function of eccentricity for very short SOAs, with either a peripheral cue or a foveal arrow cue. For long SOAs, however, performance was better for targets that were closer to fixation. In Experiments 4 (peripheral cue) and 5 (foveal cue), the targets were scaled to make them equally discriminable at all eccentricities. Again precueing effects were found, but there were no differences in accuracy as a function of eccentricity for most SOAs. These results suggest that attention shifting is not analogous to a constant-velocity moving spotlight.


Author(s):  
Giulia Baroni ◽  
Antonello Pellicano ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Roberto Nicoletti ◽  
Robert W. Proctor

Two experiments are reported in which we manipulated relevant and irrelevant stimulus dimensions to assess whether an increase in temporal overlap would influence the time course of a “standard” Simon effect (obtained when visual stimuli are presented on the left/right of the screen and left/right responses are performed with uncrossed hands). This procedure is new in two ways: First, the manipulations were intended to reduce, instead of increase, the distance between conditional and unconditional response-activation processes. Second, we manipulated the relevant and irrelevant stimulus dimensions in a manner that did not vary stimulus onset asynchronies, precues, or go/no go trials, or alter the stimulus quality. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that when the two response processes are shifted closer to each other, the Simon effect would be sustained across time, instead of decreasing as typically found. These findings are discussed in line with the temporal overlap hypothesis and with an automatic activation account.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhe Shang ◽  
Yingying Wang ◽  
Taiyong Bi

It has long been suggested that emotion, especially threatening emotion, facilitates early visual perception to promote adaptive responses to potential threats in the environment. Here, we tested whether and how fearful emotion affects the basic visual ability of visual acuity. An adapted Posner’s spatial cueing task was employed, with fearful and neutral faces as cues and a Vernier discrimination task as the probe. The time course of the emotional attention effect was examined by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of the cue and probe. Two independent experiments (Experiments 1 and 3) consistently demonstrated that the brief presentation of a fearful face increased visual acuity at its location. The facilitation of perceptual sensitivity was detected at an SOA around 300 ms when the face cues were presented for both 250 ms (Experiment 1) and 150 ms (Experiment 3). This effect cannot be explained by physical differences between the fearful and neutral faces because no improvement was found when the faces were presented inverted (Experiment 2). In the last experiment (Experiment 4), the face cues were flashed very briefly (17 ms), and we did not find any improvement induced by the fearful face. Overall, we provide evidence that emotion interacts with attention to affect basic visual functions.


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