Search

Restrictive dieters are those who expect to achieve body shape and weight control through dieting. However, they often have difficulty suppressing the desire to consume food when confronted with it. It has been shown that when high- and low-calorie foods are presented together, the attention of restrictive eaters is preferentially directed to high-calorie foods. However, whether attentional bias occurs when low-calorie foods are present alone and whether the allocation of attentional resources is consistent with that for high-calorie foods has yet to be explored. The present study focused on the effects of high-/low-calorie foods on attentional bias in restrictive dieters. Seventy-eight participants were recruited to participate in the experiment via the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) scale, which is administered in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. The results revealed that failed restrictive dieters had the lowest percentage of correct answers at the lag2 level, indicating attentional bias. Failed restrictive dieters allocated more attentional resources to high-calorie foods than to low-calorie foods. Restrictive dieters showed no attentional bias when low-calorie foods were presented alone. The results suggest that low-calorie foods do not elicit an attentional bias in restrictive dieters and that the allocation of attentional resources is not consistent when compared to that for high-calorie foods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses an issue in attentional distribution in a binocular visual system using RSVP tasks under Attentional Blink (AB) experimental protocols. In Experiment 1, we employed dichoptic RSVP to verify whether, under interocular competition, attention may be captured by a monocular channel. Experiment 2 was a control experiment, where a monoptic RSVP assessed by both or only one eye determines whether Experiment 1 monocular condition results were due to an allocation of attention to one eye. Experiment 3 was also a control experiment designed to determine whether Experiment 1 results were due to the effect of interocular competition or to a diminished visual contrast. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that dichoptic presentations caused a delay in the type stage of the Wyble's eSTST model, postponing the subsequent tokenization process. The delay in monocular conditions may be further explained by a visual attenuation, due to fusion of target and an empty frame. Experiment 2 evidenced the attentional allocation to monocular channels when forced by eye occlusion. Experiment 3 disclosed that monocular performance in Experiment 1 differs significantly from conditions with interocular competition. While both experiments revealed similar performance in monocular conditions, rivalry conditions exhibit lower detection rates, suggesting that competing stimuli was not responsible for Experiment 1 results. These findings highlight the differences between dichoptic and monoptic presentations of stimuli, particularly on the AB effect, which appears attenuated or absent in dichoptic settings. Furthermore, results suggest that monoptic presentation and binocular fusion stages were a necessary condition for the attentional allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eye region conveys considerable information regarding an individual's emotions, motivations, and intentions during interpersonal communication. Evidence suggests that the eye regions of an individual expressing emotions can capture attention more rapidly than the eye regions of an individual in a neutral affective state. However, how attentional resources affect the processing of emotions conveyed by the eye regions remains unclear. Accordingly, the present study employed a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation task: happy, neutral, or fearful eye regions were presented as the second target, with a temporal lag between two targets of 232 or 696 ms. Participants completed two tasks successively: Task 1 was to identify which species the upright eye region they had seen belonged to, and Task 2 was to identify what emotion was conveyed in the upright eye region. The behavioral results showed that the accuracy for fearful eye regions was lower than that for neutral eye regions under the condition of limited attentional resources; however, accuracy differences across the three types of eye regions did not reach significance under the condition of adequate attentional resources. These findings indicate that preferential processing of fearful expressions is not automatic but is modulated by available attentional resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, sound affects participants' recognition of targets. Although many studies have shown that sound improves cross-modal processing, researchers have not yet explored the effects of sound semantic information with respect to different locations and processing modalities after removing sound saliency. In this study, the RSVP paradigm was used to investigate the difference between attention under conditions of consistent and inconsistent semantics with the target (Experiment 1), as well as the difference between top-down (Experiment 2) and bottom-up processing (Experiment 3) for sounds with consistent semantics with target 2 (T2) at different sequence locations after removing sound saliency. The results showed that cross-modal processing significantly improved attentional blink (AB). The early or lagged appearance of sounds consistent with T2 did not affect participants' judgments in the exogenous attentional modality. However, visual target judgments were improved with endogenous attention. The sequential location of sounds consistent with T2 influenced the judgment of auditory and visual congruency. The results illustrate the effects of sound semantic information in different locations and processing modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although emotional expressions conveyed by the eye regions are processed efficiently, little is known regarding the relationship between emotional processing of isolated eye regions and temporal attention. In this study, we conducted three rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) experiments with varying task demands (emotion discrimination, eye detection, eyes ignored) related to the first target (T1) to investigate how the perception of emotional valence in the eye region (T1: happy, neutral, fearful) impacts the identification of a second target (T2: neutral houses). Event-related potential (ERP) findings indicated that fearful stimuli reliably increased N170 amplitude regardless of the emotional relevance of task demands. The P3 component exhibited enhanced responses to happy and fearful stimuli in the emotion discrimination task and to happy eye regions in the eye detection task. Analysis of T2-related ERPs within the attentional blink period revealed that T2 houses preceded by fearful and happy stimuli elicited larger N2 and P3 amplitudes than those preceded by neutral stimuli only in the emotion discrimination task. Together, these findings indicate that attention to affective content conveyed by the eyes can not only amplify the perceptual analysis of emotional eye regions but also facilitate the processing of a subsequent target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been shown that learned temporal information can be exploited to help facilitate the target identification in the attentional blink task. Here, we tested whether similar exploitation also worked on short-term temporal information, even when it did not reliably predict the target onset. In two experiments, we randomly manipulated either the interval between targets (T1 and T2; Experiment 1) or the temporal regularity of stimulus presentation (Experiment 2) in each trial. The results revealed evidence of effects of immediate temporal experience mainly on T2 performances but also occasionally on T1 performances. In general, the accuracy of T2 was enhanced when a longer inter-target interval was explicitly processed in the preceding trial (Experiment 1) or the temporal regularity, regardless of being explicitly or implicitly processed, was present in the stimulus stream, especially after T1 (Experiment 2). These results suggest that, under high temporal uncertainty, both interval and rhythmic cues can still be exploited to regulate the allocation of processing resources, thus, modulating the target identification in the attentional blink task, consistent with the view of flexible attentional allocation, and further highlighting the importance of the interplay between temporal processing and attentional control in the conscious visual perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]