Subjects: Psychology >> Other Disciplines of Psychology submitted time 2024-06-06
Abstract： The sensory dominance is a phenomenon in which the brain selectively processes specificsensory information when presented with multisensory inputs, thereby enhancing humanperception of external stimuli. Previous studies have discussed the sensory dominance atperceptual and response levels. However, how the intermediate processing level betweenperceptual and response levels affects the sensory dominance remains unknown. Therefore, thepresent study adopted the cross-modal 2-1 mapping paradigm and manipulated object categoriesthrough three studies to investigate the role of the intermediate processing level on sensorydominance in cross-modal conflict. In this paradigm, based on key mapping, cognitive processing levels can be defined intopreresponse level (included perceptual and semantic levels) and response level. The differencebetween the audiovisual incongruent condition and the audiovisual congruent condition was calledthe conflict effect, and the sensory dominance can be obtained by comparing the conflict effect ofattention to vision and auditory. Experiment 1 manipulated the degree of difference in objectcategories to explore its impact on sensory dominance. Experiments 1a~c involved animal objects(small differences), tool objects (moderate differences), and animal and musical instrument objects(large differences), 30 participants were recruited for each experiment. Because visual picturesreach perceptual representation earlier, while auditory sounds reach semantic representation earlier. Therefore, Experiment 2 (34 participants) changed visual pictures into visual words on the basis ofExperiment 1c to explore effects of visual presentation way of object categories on sensorydominance. In Experiment 3 (20 participants), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) wasused on the left anterior temporal lobe, an important brain region responsible for processing objectcategories to further causally study effects of object category on the sensory dominance of theresponse level. The results of Experiment 1 showed that, no matter what the difference of object categories, at the preresponse level, the conflict effect of attention to auditory was significantly greater thanthat of attention to vision, that is, visual dominance. However, at the response level, visualdominance appeared when the object category difference was small (Experiment 1a), no sensorydominance was observed when the object category difference was moderate (Experiment 1b), auditory dominance appeared when the object category difference was large (Experiment 1c). Itwas found that the results of Experiment 2 and Experiment 1c were consistent, that is, auditorydominance, indicating that this behavior pattern was not affected by the bottom-up visualpresentation way. The results of Experiment 3 showed that under cathodal tDCS condition, thepreresponse level still showed visual dominance, but the response level no longer showed sensorydominance. This result showed that effects of object categories on the sensory dominance of theresponse level from the causal level. The mechanism of sensory dominance is still under investigation. The present study was firstto find that object categories affected the sensory dominance of the response level. Fromtheperspective of cognitive processing level, intermediate processing level played a regulating role inthe sensory dominance of the response level, enriching the explanatory theory of sensorydominance and providing a new perspective for the study of sensory dominance in cross-modalconflict.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2023-04-16
Abstract： Perceiving animacy from moving entities is vital to human survival, reproduction, and social interaction. Motion cues that trigger animacy perception can be divided into two types: movements with biological motion patterns and movements conveying intention, both of which contain some specific motion features that are key to animacy perception. The existing theoretical hypotheses explain the above phenomena from the perspectives of visual information processing and social cognition, respectively. Animacy perception from the two types of motion cues engages multiple cortical and sub-cortical brain regions, which may constitute a brain network serving the purpose of life-signal detection as well as high-level functions like intention understanding and reasoning. Future studies need to systematically reveal the distinct roles of the two types of motion cues in animacy perception and their interactive mechanisms from cognitive, behavioral genetic, and neural aspects. Meanwhile, the organization and connection of the brain network for animacy perception and the exact function of each individual node in this network remain to be illuminated. In addition, exploring the computational principle of animacy perception from motion cues and treating the deficits in such ability as a potential marker of social cognitive disorders would help promote its application in the fields of artificial intelligence and mental disorder diagnosis.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Social interaction can be defined as a process that one individual delivers his communicative intention through body or spoken languages, and the other individual makes a reaction according to his understanding of the intention. As inherently social beings, humans are equipped with a remarkable ability to rapidly recognize and decipher the communicative intentions embedded in others’ social interaction. This ability is not only fundamental to the development and survival of humans, but also to our daily interpersonal interaction. Recently, researchers have attached great importance to the cognitive characteristics and neural mechanisms underlying the social interaction processing from the third-person perspective. In their experiments, social interaction can be displayed through pictures, videos, the movements of point-light figures, and even simple geometric shapes that depicting biological motions. There are some prerequisites for ones’ activities being perceived as engaging in social interaction. Specifically, two agents should be spatially close and face-to-face, and their actions should be temporally contingent on each other and have definite meanings. Overall, there are two main cognitive characteristics manifested by the perception of social interaction: configuration integrity and action contingency. On the one hand, facing dyads engaging in social interaction would be represented as a single, holistic unit rather than as two independent individuals. By virtual of the global configuration processing, social interactive agents would gain preferential attention and be efficiently stored in memory. On the other hand, the interactive activities are temporally contingent and semantically related, which suggests that they may be processed in a contingent and predictive manner. Such action contingency processing allows observers to predict the upcoming interactive action, which thereby promotes the discrimination of social interaction in noisy environments. The social interaction processing activates three neural networks. The person-perception network is responsible for face and body perception, the action observation network engages in action recognition, and the mentalizing network is implicated in intention understanding. Among them, the person perception network is probably linked to representations of the global configuration of the interactive agents while the action observation network and the mentalizing network collectively support representations of the contingent actions of the interactive agents. It is also worth noting that the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) plays a key role and may serve as a specialized node in the perception of social interaction. From the perspective of hierarchical processing, recent researchers highlighted the importance of the effective connectivity between relevant brain areas in different stages of the social interaction processing. Future studies are encouraged to explore the heritability and neural mechanism of the social interaction processing by combining various technological methods, and to elucidate the cognitive characteristics of the social interaction processing in patients with social-cognitive disorders, which may provide new insights into the diagnosis and intervention for social deficits.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Increasing evidence has indicated that emotional information, and particularly threatening visual input, elicits faster behavioral responses than non-threatening stimuli. This superior processing of threatening information is also found under conditions where consciousness is absent. However, recent studies found that faster unconscious detection of emotion-associated stimuli than neutral stimuli may be due to their unmatched physical characteristics, rather than by their emotional content. Thus, it is necessary to test whether emotional stimuli still have the processing advantage over neutral ones in unconscious conditions when low-level visual properties are matched. In order to investigate whether unconsciously prioritized processing still occurs with emotion-associated stimuli which are physically identical, we used the conditioning paradigm to manipulate the affective significance of Gabor patches. Participants performed two challenging visual detection tasks under the breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (b-CFS) paradigm. In experiment 1, differently oriented Gabor patches (45° and 135°) were used as material. During an initial learning phase, one oriented Gabor patch (e.g., 45°) was paired with an alarm sound (CS+), whereas the other was never paired with the alarm sound (CS–). The emotional rating indicated that negative emotion could be elicited by the alarm sound in the participants. The orientation of CS+ Gabor patches was counterbalanced across participants. In the subsequent testing phase, participants were required to discriminate the location of the Gabor patch relative to the central fixation as quickly and accurately as possible. In this phase, Gabor patches were suppressed by dynamic noise using b-CFS. The procedure in experiment 2 was the same with that in experiment 1, except that the color of the Gabor patches was also varied, between red and green. In experiment 1, there was no difference in the accuracy rates between CS+ stimuli and CS– stimuli (99% vs. 99%). Suppression time results showed that CS+ stimuli emerged from suppression faster than CS– ones. In experiment 2, there was no difference in the accuracy rates for different learning condition. For the analysis of suppression time, the “learning effect” was computed to represent difference between experimental conditions and control condition. Integrated learning showed a significant learning effect, while there was no remarkable learning effect in orientation learning or in color learning condition. These findings revealed an unconscious processing advantage for aversive conditioned stimuli. Furthermore, the learning effect was specific to the conditioned stimuli and could not generalize to other similar objects. Taken together, this study provided further evidence for the optimized processing of affectively significant visual stimuli in unconscious conditions.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2022-12-03
Abstract：
Despite the unlimited capacity of sensory registration, visual system can still provide an efficient summary of a cluttered scene, representing the statistical properties of multiple objects rather than forming detailed representations of individual objects. There is growing interest in the behavioral study of statistical summary representations (SSRs), especially in the exploring of their automatic mechanism as well as the domain-general or domain specific ensemble mechanism. However, the neural underpinnings of SSRs have received far less attention. Future work on SSRs may use neuroimaging methods to investigate their neural substrates directly, which is also important for understanding neural computation.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-11-02
Abstract： The ability to recognize and decipher social interaction of others from a third-person perspective is critical for our daily life. There are two cognitive characteristics accounting for the processing of social interaction: configural integrity and action contingency. A hierarchical neural basis underpins social interaction processing in which the person perception network, the action observation network and the mentalizing network are concurrently engaged, wherein the posterior superior temporal sulcus plays a crucial role. Future research needs to explore the heredity of social interaction, to elucidate its underlying cognitive and neural mechanism by combining various technological methods, and to focus on its application in real life. " "
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
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