Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2024-01-25
Abstract： Previous studies have found that perceptual learning can improve the performance on visual search tasks. However, many cognitive processes are involved in visual search, and it is unclear at which visual processing stage perceptual learning facilitates search performance. The current study explored the mechanism of perceptual learning by dividing the eye movement metrics into three visual processing stages: search initiation time (the early visual processing stage), which represents the cognitive process of the time of processing the current location and selecting the next search location; scanning time (the middle visual processing stage), which includes the number and processing time of fixation positions; verification time (the late visual processing stage), which represents determining whether the current stimulus is the target and making a verification.
A 2 (target type: trained vs. untrained triangle) x 2 (pretest vs. posttest) within-subjects design was used to address the above issue. 24 healthy young adults (5 males; mean age: 21.23±2.02 years) participated as paid volunteers in this study. We randomly selected one of the four orientations of the triangle (Up, Down, Left, or Right) as the trained triangle, which would receive three days of training. Moreover, to ensure that the visual search training was specific to the trained triangle, the trained and untrained triangles were tested by recording the behavior results and eye movement before and after training (untrained triangle was randomly selected from the distractors). Each trial started with a fixation cross (When eye movement was recorded, the search display would not appear until the participants fixated on the center cross for more than 500 ms; when eye movement was not recorded, the central fixation cross was presented for 500 ms and then the search screen was presented). Then a search display was presented until the key response or the elapse reached 2000 ms since its onset. The response was recorded only before the fixation cross disappeared. The task of participants was to determine whether or not the target was presented as quickly as possible. Participants pressed the left arrow key to report the presence of a target or the right arrow key to report its absence.
A two-way repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted with the factors of target types (trained vs. untrained triangle) and test stage (pretest vs. posttest). The behavior results found the reduced response time and increased accuracy when searching for trained stimuli after training. However, there was no significant difference in response time or accuracy between pretest and posttest for untrained stimuli. The results of eye movement tracking are as follows: (1) in the early visual processing stage, the search initiation time of the trained stimuli increased significantly after training, and there was no significant difference in the search initiation time between pretest and posttest for untrained stimuli. (2) In the middle visual processing stage, the number of fixations and the average fixation time of trained stimuli were significantly reduced after training, and there was no significant difference for untrained stimuli before and after training. (3) In the late visual processing stage, there was no significant difference in verification time between the pre-test and post-test for both trained and untrained stimuli.
In conclusion, the accuracy and search initiation time of searching for trained stimuli was increased, while the number of fixations and the fixation time decreased. Moreover, the changes in behavior and eye movement indexes did not transfer to untrained stimuli. It is suggested that perceptual learning can affect the early and middle visual processing stages, and may search performance may be improved by increasing the search latency, reducing the number of saccades, and reducing the fixation time
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Abundant studies have explored the processing of emotional faces for high social anxiety participants and intervention work of social anxiety in recent years. Although there are rich findings, some limitations need to be considered. There are fewer types of emotion, dimensions of videos, and durations of videos in the previous dynamic emotional faces in Chinese. Furthermore, recognition of dynamic emotional faces for neural mechanisms in high social anxiety participants has not been examined systematically. The final limitation is that there are controversies on attentional bias training. More specifically, some researchers reported the effects of attentional bias training on participants’ social anxiety while others did not detect such effects. To address these limitations, our dynamic emotional faces in Chinese will enrich types of emotion, dimensions of videos, and durations of videos. Then recognition of dynamic emotional faces for neural mechanisms in high social anxiety participants should be investigated systematically by techniques of neuroscience. Finally, we will employ a working memory training to improve attentional biases of the recognition of dynamic angry faces in high social anxiety participants. We propose a model of the neural mechanism for the recognition of dynamic emotional faces in participants with high social anxiety, which consists of a mechanism and intervention sub-model. Our studies provide a new perspective for the research of processing of dynamic emotional faces and social anxiety. In addition, these studies included three research method (behavioral, electrophysiological and brain imaging method). In sum, our findings contribute to the intervention work of social anxiety, decrease psychological health problems in high social anxiety participants, and ultimately decrease their happiness and quality of life.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Attentional templates can facilitate the target search process by enhancing relevant information and suppressing irrelevant information during the search task. According to the results of recent studies on the internal mechanism of attentional templates, the main findings are summarized in terms of the information relied on in the establishment of attentional templates (establishment process), the relationship between attentional templates and memory (stored process), and the mechanism of attentional templates promoting search (function mechanism). Firstly, the semantic information and visual feature information cannot be well separated in the current experimental studies, so it is not clear whether it was based on semantic or visual feature information in the process of establishing the attentional templates. Secondly, in some earlier studies, researchers equate attentional templates with working memory, believing that attentional templates are stored in working memory. However, recent studies have found that attentional templates can be stored in both the working and long-term memory. But the number of templates stored in working memory is still controversial. Some researchers believe that simultaneously searching for two items is worse than searching for one item, as shown by evidence for storing only one template in the working memory. Similar results may be found when two templates are stored in the working memory, such as the following possibilities: when two templates were stored in the working memory simultaneously, each template receive fewer resources compared to storing only one template due to the limited resources of the working memory; when two templates were activated at the same time, the information in the online state will interfere with each other, resulting in poorer performance of searching for two items simultaneously than searching for one item; when two templates are switched to each other, the switch takes time, and the simultaneous memory representation will be damaged, which will also reduce the efficiency of searching for two items at the same time than that of searching for one item. Finally, there are differences in the mechanism of different types of attentional templates. The target template and the template for rejection may promote the search through different mechanisms. The right posterior temporal cortex, anterior superior parietal lobule, bilaterally at the occipital pole and lateral occipital cortex play an important role in promoting the search of the target through the target template. The activation of posterior parietal cortex and the area of posterior parietal cortex bordering precuneus are associated with the templates for rejection in filtering task-irrelevant information. Furthermore, we know very little about how template information is transmitted and used during visual search. The mechanisms by which templates facilitate search may also vary across populations, and that some findings in normal individuals may not be universally applicable. As well as the controversial in active attentional suppression hypothesis and search and destroy hypotheses for explaining the mechanism of template for rejection in the suppression of distractors. Therefore, future research should pay attention to how the internal information is transmitted during the establishment of attentional templates, the neural mechanisms of attentional templates in different populations, and resolve theoretical disputes about the suppression mechanism of rejection templates.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Aggressive behavior plays an important role in the social, emotional and psychological adjustment of children and adolescents. Children and adolescents with aggressive behavior are prone to violate social moral norms, and even commit crimes in serious cases. It is noted that peer victimization is an important predictor of aggressive behavior. Peer victimization refers to that individuals have experienced attacks by peers, such as physical and verbal victimization, attacks on property and social manipulation. Children and adolescents who have been victimized by peers will characterize the attacker as hostility, which will be generalized to the whole peer group, thus showing more aggressive behavior in future interpersonal communication. Several previous studies have examined the relationship between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents. However, due to differences in research design and inconsistent results, there is still some uncertainty about the relationship between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents, and the moderating effect on this relationship is not fully clear. Therefore, the present study employed a three-level meta-analysis to quantitatively synthesize the results of original literatures to obtain reliable estimates of effect sizes and examined a range of moderators (sample, publication, study design, outcome, and assessment characteristics). Through the retrieval of articles published before October 2020, the current meta-analysis identified 40 studies, with 25,605 participants (range of mean age: 6 ~ 19 years) and 333 independent effect sizes. The funnel plot and Egger's test results suggested an absence of publication bias in current meta-analysis. Analysis revealed a significant positive association between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents (r = 0.295, p < 0.001), implying that children and adolescents showed a higher level of aggressive behavior when they experienced higher level of peer victimization. In addition, the present study found a significant moderating effect of peer victimization variable. Compared with physical victimization (r = 0.219, p = 0.005), the association between relational victimization (r = 0.298, p = 0.005) and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents was stronger. Moreover, the overall association was influenced by region. Aggressive behavior in children and adolescents was more strongly associated with peer victimization in Asia (r = 0.351, p = 0.006) than in South America (r = 0.149, p = 0.006). Study design was also a significant moderator. The association between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents was smaller in longitudinal (r = 0.234, p = 0.014) than in cross-sectional studies (r = 0.339, p = 0.014). Finally, the moderator analyses also showed that the informant of peer victimization was a significant moderator. The strength of the association between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents was significantly stronger when peer victimization was reported by teachers (r = 0.476, p = 0.023) than by peers (r = 0.290, p = 0.023). In addition, the present study found that the overall association between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents did not differ in strength across gender, age, publication, variable and informant of aggressive behavior. Moreover, to eliminate the multicollinearity between moderators, the current study built a multivariate model by including all significant moderators that had been identified in the bivariate models. The result indicated that at least one of the regression coefficients of moderators significantly deviates from zero (F (12, 316) = 3.973, p < 0.001). In sum, the results of the current meta-analysis contribute to a better understanding of the association between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents. These results also provide a reference for future empirical studies on explaining aggressive behavior in children and adolescents.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Emotion recognition has always been a hot topic in psychology. Although some studies have explored the brain mechanisms of dynamic facial expressions, dynamic bodily expressions and emotional voices, empirical studies have their own inevitable defects, which may lead to low statistical test power and effect size and inconsistent results. In addition, the existing meta-analyses of the three emotion carriers still have some deficiencies. Therefore, at present, the overall understanding of the three emotion carriers is relatively incomplete, and the commonness and differences of neural mechanisms among different emotion carriers were still poorly known. So, based on the background of high ecological validity, this study adopted the meta-analysis technique based on large-scale data synthesis method to overcome the above shortcomings. First, three separated activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses were used to identify the brain regions activated by each emotion pattern, and then conjunction and contrast analysis of these activation maps were used to assess common and unique neural activity between the three emotion carriers. It is the first time that meta-analysis is used to explore the brain mechanism of dynamic bodily expressions, and it is also the first time that meta-analysis is used to explore the similarities and differences of neural activity among three emotion carriers: dynamic facial expressions, dynamic bodily expressions and emotional voices, and further improves the overall understanding of the neural mechanisms of dynamic facial expressions and emotional voices by previous meta-analyses. The results of single meta-analysis showed that the brain regions of dynamic facial expressions included superior frontal gyrus (SFG), middle frontal gyrus (MFG), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), precentral gyrus (PG), inferior parietal lobule (IPL), middle occipital gyrus (MOG), inferior occipital gyrus (IOG), fusiform gyrus (FG), superior temporal gyrus (STG), middle temporal gyrus (MTG), inferior temporal gyrus (ITG), parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), cerebellum, amygdala, lentiform nucleus (LN) and insula. Dynamic bodily expressions caused activation of the middle occipital gyrus, inferior occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus, cuneus, lingual gyrus (LING), cerebellum, and parahippocampal gyrus. The activation of emotional voices was concentrated in the middle frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, precentral gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, heschl’s gyrus (HG), insula, amygdala and caudate nucleus (CN). Conjunction analysis suggested that the left middle temporal gyrus and the right superior temporal gyrus were activated by three emotion carrier across the modalities. The results of the contrast analysis proved that the visual stimuli was more advantaged than the auditory stimuli, especially the dynamic facial expressions, the dynamic bodily expressions also played an important role. However, the emotional voices had their own uniqueness. In sum, these findings validate, support, and extend the existing neural models of the three emotion carriers, revealing a central, universal region of the emotional processing, but with each emotion carrier relying on its own reliable specific neural circuits. This study provides consistent results across studies for researchers of emotional problems, and representative reference coordinate points for future region of interest (ROI) analysis, which is conducive to propose and test hypotheses of future researches, and also is conducive to the identification and neural regulation of patients with emotional disorders. Future researches should further validate and extend these findings to explore the neural mechanisms of emotional processing at different ages and their similarities and differences. In addition, it is necessary to study the brain mechanism of each emotion type and the similarity and difference of neural activity of each emotion in different carriers in the case of sufficient data. Examining the connection of different brain regions, and the different functions of a brain region also is necessary. Meanwhile, it is essential to focus on the neural basis of dynamic bodily expressions.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： In successful social interactions, distinguishing between our own and another person's emotions is important. For individuals, both self-related information (such as self-name) and emotional stimuli with high sociality or adaptive meaning can automatically capture one's attention, leading to prior and deep processing. Previous studies have confirmed that self-relevance can affect the processing of emotional words. However, there is currently no research using name as a self-relevance clue to investigate whether and how name influences the cognitive processing of emotional words. In the current study, we used names as self-relevance clues to explore the dynamic temporal characteristics of self-related information affecting emotional information and its integration mechanism. In this study, we used ERP technology and created a 3 (name type: self, friend, unknown) � 3 (emotion type: positive, neutral, negative) within-subjects design. A total of 21 college students (9 males, Mage = 20.4) participated in the experiment. Prior to the experiment, we gathered the participants' own names and their best friends' names, then we found a name that we confirmed was unfamiliar to all participants. All names included three characters. The experimental stimuli were 171 two-character words taken from the Chinese Affective Words System, which included 57 positive, 57 negative and 57 neutral words. The participants were asked to silently read the names (self-name, friend-name and unfamiliar name) and emotional words (positive, neutral and negative) presented in succession, unaware that the presented words were emotional words, while their EEG was recorded. The ERP results showed the following. (1) The main effect of the emotional words was significant in the early processing stage, and the negative words elicited larger EPN amplitudes (200-300 ms) than the positive and neutral words. (2) In the late processing stage, the emotional words were further processed. The negative words elicited reduced N400 (300-450 ms) compared to the neutral words, and they enhanced LPP compared with the neutral and positive words during 450-650 ms. (3) More importantly, a significant interaction between the names and emotional words was discovered in the LPP time window. The negative words paired with self-names elicited significantly more positive LPP than the neutral words paired with self-names, while the negative words paired with friend-names elicited significantly larger LPP than the positive words and neutral words paired with friend-names. Nevertheless, no significant difference was found among the LPP amplitudes elicited by the three kinds of emotional words paired with unknown names. Overall, our study demonstrates that there is a processing advantage for negative words in different stages, and self-relevance contained in a name can affect the cognitive processing of emotional words, which mainly occurs in the late stage of emotional lexical processing. Importantly, it seems that individuals first filter information according to whether it is self-related and then process the emotional content (especially negative stimuli) related to themselves or their friends more deeply and elaborately. The negative bias can be explained by the fact that negative stimuli are considered to carry greater informational value than positive stimuli. Therefore, negative stimuli automatically capture more attention and cognitive resources than neutral and positive stimuli, resulting in higher order coding.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2022-05-05
Abstract：
The visual searchability of organisms has a crucial survival significance for adapting to a complex environment. Attentional templates can enhance relevant information and suppress irrelevant information to find the target quickly during the search task. Recent studies indicate that it is not clear whether the process of establishing attentional templates is based on semantic or visual feature information. Moreover, attentional templates can be stored in both the working and long-term memory, and there are differences in the neural mechanisms of different types of attentional templates. Future research should pay attention to how the internal information is transmitted during the establishment of attentional templates, the neural mechanisms of attentional templates in different populations, and resolve theoretical disputes about the suppression mechanism of rejection templates.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2021-11-06
Abstract： Aggressive behavior plays an important role in social, emotional and psychological adjustment of children and adolescents. It is noted that peer victimization is an important predictor of aggressive behavior. Although several previous studies have examined the relationship between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents, the moderating effect on this relationship is not fully clear. Therefore, the present study employed a three-level meta-analysis to obtain reliable estimates of effect sizes and examined a range of moderators. Through the retrieval of articles published before October 2020, the current meta-analysis identified 40 studies, with 25605 participants and 333 independent effect sizes. Analysis revealed a significant positive association between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents. In addition, the present study found a significant moderating effect of peer victimization variable. Compared with physical victimization, the association between relational victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents was stronger. Moreover, the overall association was influenced by region. Aggressive behavior was more strongly associated with peer victimization in Asia than in South America. Study design was also a significant moderator. The association between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents was smaller in longitudinal than in cross-sectional studies. Finally, the moderator analyses also showed that the informant of peer victimization was a significant moderator. The strength of the association between peer victimization and aggressive behavior in children and adolescents was significantly stronger when peer victimization was reported by teachers than by peers. The results of the current meta-analysis indicated that people should pay attention to the influence of peer victimization in children and adolescents when preventing and controlling their aggressive behavior.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-10-12
Abstract： "
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-09-11
Abstract： Abundant studies have explored the processing of emotional faces for high social anxiety participants and intervention work of social anxiety in recent years. Although there are rich findings, some limitations need to be considered. There are fewer types of emotion, dimensions of videos, and durations of videos in the previous dynamic emotional faces in Chinese. Furthermore, recognition of dynamic emotional faces for neural mechanisms in high social anxiety participants has not been examined systematically. The final limitation is that there are controversies on attentional bias training. More specifically, some researchers reported the effects of attentional bias training on participants’ social anxiety while others did not detect such effects. To address these limitations, our dynamic emotional faces in Chinese will enrich types of emotion, dimensions of videos, and durations of videos. Then recognition of dynamic emotional faces for neural mechanisms in high social anxiety participants should be investigated systematically by techniques of neuroscience. Finally, we will employ a working memory training to improve attentional biases of the recognition of dynamic angry faces in high social anxiety participants. We propose a model of the neural mechanism for the recognition of dynamic emotional faces in participants with high social anxiety, which consists of a mechanism and intervention sub-model. Our studies provide a new perspective for the research of processing of dynamic emotional faces and social anxiety. In addition, these studies included three research method (behavioral, electrophysiological and brain imaging method). In sum, our findings contribute to the intervention work of social anxiety, decrease psychological health problems in high social anxiety participants, and ultimately decrease their happiness and quality of life.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2019-12-19
Abstract： "
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
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