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Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon that reflects slower target detection when the target appears at a previously cued rather than uncued location. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which IOR occurs in three-dimensional (3D) scenes comprising pictorial depth information. Peripheral cues and targets appeared on top of 3D rectangular boxes placed on the surface of a textured ground plane in virtual space. When the target appeared at a farther location than the cue, the magnitude of the IOR effect in the 3D condition remained similar to the values found in the two-dimensional (2D) control condition (IOR was depth-blind). When the target appeared at a nearer location than the cue, the magnitude of the IOR effect was significantly attenuated (IOR was depth-specific). The present findings address inconsistencies in the literature on the effect of depth on IOR and support the notion that visuospatial attention exhibits a near-space advantage even in 3D scenes consisting entirely of pictorial depth information., Competing Interests: Declarations. Ethics approval: The study was approved by the McMaster University Research Ethics Board. Consent to participate: Participants completed an informed consent form before starting the experiment. Consent for publication: Participants signed informed consent regarding publishing their data. Open practices statement: None of the data or materials for the experiments reported here are currently available, and none of the experiments were preregistered. Conflicts of interest: All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest or competing interests to disclose., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Three experiments explored how the repetition of a visual search display guides search during contextual cuing under conditions in which the search process is interrupted by an instructional (endogenous) cue for attention. In Experiment 1, participants readily learned about repeated configurations of visual search, before being presented with an endogenous cue for attention towards the target on every trial. Participants used this cue to improve search times, but the repeated contexts continued to guide attention. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the presence of the endogenous cue did not impede the acquisition of contextual cuing. Experiment 3 confirmed the hypothesis that the contextual cuing effect relies largely on localized distractor contexts, following the guidance of attention. Together, the experiments point towards an interplay between two drivers of attention: after the initial guidance of attention, memory representations of the context continue to guide attention towards the target. This suggests that the early part of visual search is inconsequential for the development and maintenance of the contextual cuing effect, and that memory representations are flexibly deployed when the search procedure is dramatically interrupted., Competing Interests: Declarations. Ethics Approval: Ethical approval was granted by the Department of Psychology Ethics Committee, Lancaster University, conforming to the British Psychological Society Code of Ethics and Conduct. Consent to Participate: All participants gave informed consent to participate in the study. All data was stored anonymously at the point of collection. Consent for Publication: All participants gave informed consent for their (anonymized) data to be used in publication., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The perceptual system must integrate information from various points in time and space to interpret continuous sensory input into meaningful units, such as visual objects or events. To explore the relationship between the perception of spatial objects and temporal events, we modified the missing element task, a typical temporal integration task, by inserting a simple spatial object. The aim was to determine whether the perceptual processing of the object would have an impact on the frequency of temporal integration and segregation. Temporal integration was most successful when the missing element was located within the object, less successful when there was no object, and least successful when the missing element appeared outside the object. The advantage of the location of the missing element within the object was observed at display durations from 30 ms to 150 ms. Interestingly, the object provided the same benefit for integration and segregation despite their opposing perceptual demands. This study demonstrates the relationship that exists between the processing of temporal events and spatial objects, and shows how such spatial information can facilitate temporal integration., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Target and distractor templates play a pivotal role in guiding attentional control during visual search, with the former template facilitating target search and the latter template leading distractor suppression. We first investigated whether task-irrelevant colors could earn their value through color-target contingency in the training phase and bias attention when they became a distractor in search for a singleton shape during the test phase. Colors provided useful information for target selection, with high- and low-informational values, respectively, in Experiments 1 and 2. Experience-based attentional biases were observed in the first half of the former experiment, and null results were observed in the latter. Experiment 3 verified whether the null results were elicited because the response-relevant feature inside of the singleton shape was also a singleton. Colors were task defined in the training phase, and the test display was the same as that used in Experiment 2. Experience-based attentional biases were observed in the first half of the test phase. In Experiment 4, we tested whether decreasing the consistency of distractor processing can lengthen the duration of experience-based attentional biases by increasing the number of possible response-relevant features inside of the colored distractor. The results showed experience-based attentional biases throughout the test phase. The results highlight the ideas that the informational value provided by a feature dimension for facilitating target selection can modify a target template and that the consistency of rejecting a distractor feature can play a role in the formation of a distractor template., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Our brain sometimes represents visual information in a biased manner. Multiple visual features presented simultaneously or sequentially may interact with each other when we perceive them or maintain them in visual working memory (WM), giving rise to report bias. How goal-directed attention influences target representation is not fully understood, especially concerning whether attention towards distractors modulates report bias for the target. Our study investigated the WM biases of the target when it is concurrent with (1) one attended distractor only, (2) one unattended distractor only, and (3) both kinds of distractors during perception. It was found that the target WM is reported as being repelled away from concurrent distractors, attended or unattended, suggesting attention is not necessary for the occurrence of repulsion bias during perception. Furthermore, goal-directed attention towards the distractors modulates the strength of interitem interaction, and the repulsion bias was found to be stronger when attention was directed toward the distractor than when it was not. However, the exaggerated repulsion associated with the attended distractor is likely due to increased relevance to the memory task and (or) WM load instead of spatial attention. In contrast, spatial attention towards the distractor increases the chances of misreporting the distractor for the target., Competing Interests: Declarations Conflicts of interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have influence the work reported in this paper. Ethics approval The study was approved by the Ethics Committee at Soochow University, China. Consent to participate All participants gave their written informed consent to participate in this study. Consent for publication All participants gave their written informed consent to have their data published in a journal article., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

The present study investigated the effect of object representation on attentional priority regarding distractor inhibition and target search processes while the statistical regularities of singleton distractor location were biased. A color singleton distractor appeared more frequently at one of six stimulus locations, called the 'high-probability location,' to induce location-based suppression. Critically, three objects were presented, each of which paired two adjacent stimuli in a target display by adding background contours (Experiment 1) or using perceptual grouping (Experiments 2 and 3). The results revealed that attention capture by singleton distractors was hardly modulated by objects. In contrast, target selection was impeded at the location in the object containing the high-probability location compared to an equidistant location in a different object. This object-based suppression in target selection was evident when object-related features were parts of task-relevant features. These findings suggest that task-irrelevant objects modulate attentional suppression. Moreover, different features are engaged in determining attentional priority for distractor inhibition and target search processes., Competing Interests: Declarations Conflicts of interests The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. Ethics approval All experiments in this study were approved by the Institutional Review Board at Korea University (KUIRB-2022-0181-01). All necessary ethical considerations were addressed in accordance with institutional guidelines. Consent to participate Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Consent for publication Human research participants provided informed consent for publication., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

To investigate whether attentional suppression is merely a byproduct of target facilitation or a result of independent mechanisms for distractor suppression, the present study examined whether attentional suppression takes place when target facilitation hardly occurs using a spatial cueing paradigm. Participants searched for target letters that were not red, i.e., a negative color. On each trial, a target color was randomly chosen among 12 colors to prevent establishing attentional control for target colors and to reduce intertrial priming for target colors. Immediately before a target display, a noninformative spatial cue was presented at one of the possible target locations. The cue was rendered in a negative color, which was to be ignored, to detect targets or the reference color, which was never presented for target and non-target letters. Experiment 1 showed that negative color cues captured attention less than reference color cues, suggesting feature-based attentional suppression. The suppression effect was replicated when the temporal interval between the onsets of the cue and target displays was reduced in Experiments 2 and 3, suggesting proactive suppression. Experiment 3 directly confirmed no attentional control settings for target colors and intertrial priming. These findings suggest that distractor features can guide attention at the pre-attentive stage when target features are not used to attend to targets., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Visually searching for a frequently changing target is assumed to be guided by flexible working memory representations of specific features necessary to discriminate targets from distractors. Here, we tested if these representations allow selective suppression or always facilitate perception based on search goals. Participants searched for a target (i.e., a horizontal bar) defined by one of two different negative features (e.g., not red vs. not blue; Experiment 1) or a positive (e.g., blue) versus a negative feature (Experiments 2 and 3). A prompt informed participants about the target identity, and search tasks alternated or repeated randomly. We used different peripheral singleton cues presented at the same (valid condition) or a different (invalid condition) position as the target to examine if negative features were suppressed depending on current instructions. In all experiments, cues with negative features elicited slower search times in valid than invalid trials, indicating suppression. Additionally, suppression of negative color cues tended to be selective when participants searched for the target by different negative features but generalized to negative and non-matching cue colors when switching between positive and negative search criteria was required. Nevertheless, when the same color - red - was used in positive and negative search tasks, red cues captured attention or were suppressed depending on whether red was positive or negative (Experiment 3). Our results suggest that working memory representations flexibly trigger suppression or attentional capture contingent on a task-relevant feature's functional meaning during visual search, but top-down suppression operates at different levels of specificity depending on current task demands., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

When a movement triggers effects with incompatible features, conflict between action and effect features creates costs for action planning and initiation. We investigated whether such action control costs also factor into action choices in terms of the principle of least effort. Participants completed a reaction-time experiment, where they were instructed to perform left and right mouse swipes in response to directional cues presented on the screen. Participants could select between two action options on each trial: Depending on which part of the screen (upper or lower) the action was performed in, the swipe resulted in a visual stimulus moving in the same (compatible) or in the opposite (incompatible) direction as the mouse. Incompatible action-effect mappings did indeed incur action control costs. In accordance with effort avoidance, the proportion of compatible choices was significantly above chance level, suggesting that action selection and initiation costs factor into participants preferences. Interestingly, however, participants' choice tendencies were not predicted by the actual increase in action-initiation costs in the incompatible condition. This indicates that effort-related decisions are not simply based on monitoring performance in the actual task, but they are also influenced by preestablished notions of action-planning costs., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Many tasks require one to search for and find important objects in the visual environment. Visual search is strongly supported by cues indicating target objects to mechanisms of selective attention, which enable one to prioritise targets and ignore distractor objects. Besides selective attention, a major influence on performance across cognitive tasks is phasic alertness, a temporary increase of arousal induced by warning stimuli (alerting cues). Alerting cues provide no specific information on whose basis selective attention could be deployed, but have nevertheless been found to speed up perception and simple actions. It is still unclear, however, how alerting affects visual search. Therefore, in the present study, participants performed a visual search task with and without preceding visual alerting cues. Participants had to report the orientation of a target among several distractors. The target saliency was low in Experiment 1 and high in Experiment 2. In both experiments, we found that visual search was faster when a visual alerting cue was presented before the target display. Performance benefits occurred irrespective of how many distractors had been presented along with the target. Taken together, the findings reveal that visual alerting supports visual search independently of the complexity of the search process and the demands for selective attention., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The orientation of sketch maps of remote but familiar city squares produced from memory has been shown to depend on the distance and airline direction from the production site to the remembered square (position-dependent recall, Röhrich et al. in PLoS One 9(11): e112793, 2014). Here, we present a virtual reality version of the original experiment and additionally study the role of body orientation. Three main points can be made: First, "immersive sketching" is a novel and useful paradigm in which subjects sketch maps live on paper while being immersed in virtual reality. Second, the original effect of position-dependent recall was confirmed, indicating that the sense of being present at a particular location, even if generated in a virtual environment, suffices to bias the imagery of distant places. Finally, the orientation of the produced sketch maps depended also on the body orientation of the subjects. At each production site, body orientation was controlled by varying the position of the live feed in the virtual environment, such that subjects had to turn towards the prescribed direction. Position-dependent recall is strongest if subjects are aligned with the airline direction to the target and virtually goes away if they turn in the opposite direction. We conclude that the representation of out-of-sight target places depends on both the current airline direction to the target and the body orientation., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Animals can use two variants of the magnetic compass: the 'polar compass' or the 'inclination compass'. Among vertebrates, the compass type has been identified for salmon, mole rats, birds, turtles and urodeles. However, no experiments have been conducted to determine the compass variant in anurans. To elucidate this, we performed a series of field and laboratory experiments on males of the European common frog during the spawning season. In field experiments in a large circular arena, we identified the direction of the stereotypic migration axis for a total of 581 frogs caught during migration from river to pond or in a breeding pond. We also found that motivation of the frogs varied throughout the day, probably to avoid deadly night freezes, which are common in spring. The laboratory experiments were conducted on a total of 450 frogs in a T-maze placed in a three-axis Merritt coil system. The maze arms were positioned parallel to the natural migration axis inferred on the basis of magnetic field. Both vertical and horizontal components of the magnetic field were altered, and frogs were additionally tested in a vertical magnetic field. We conclude that European common frogs possess an inclination magnetic compass, as for newts, birds and sea turtles, and potentially use it during the spring migration. The vertical magnetic field confuses the frogs, apparently as a result of the inability to choose a direction. Notably, diurnal variation in motivation of the frogs was identical to that in nature, indicating the presence of internal rhythms controlling this process., Competing Interests: Competing interests The authors declare no competing or financial interests., (© 2024. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.)

Introduction: The role of cardiovascular risk factors in the occurrence and progression of cognitive impairment is relevant in aging studies. In this condition, attention is one of the processes less studied, but preliminary evidence suggests an association between cardiometabolic alterations and attentional decline. Attention is not a unitary process but a set of independent systems (Alerting, Orienting, Executive), which can interact in certain conditions to ensure maximum behavioral efficiency., Methods: We investigated attentive networks and their interactions in patients with Takostubo syndrome (TTS). In all, 20 participants with TTS and 20 individuals without cardiovascular pathologies performed an Attention-Network Task for Interaction, which assesses attentional networks and their interactions., Results: Patients with TTS showed an atypical orienting effect when compared to the control group. Moreover, only the control group exhibited an interaction between orienting and alerting., Conclusion: These findings establish the relevance of brain-heart interaction in identifying attentional impairment as a prodrome of progressively severe cognitive impairment in TTS., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

There is disagreement regarding the major components of the brain network supporting spatial cognition. To address this issue, we applied a lesion mapping approach to the clinical phenomenon of topographical disorientation. Topographical disorientation is the inability to maintain accurate knowledge about the physical environment and use it for navigation. A review of published topographical disorientation cases identified 65 different lesion sites. Our lesion mapping analysis yielded a topographical disorientation brain map encompassing the classic regions of the navigation network: medial parietal, medial temporal, and temporo-parietal cortices. We also identified a ventromedial region of the prefrontal cortex, which has been absent from prior descriptions of this network. Moreover, we revealed that the regions mapped are correlated with the Default Mode Network sub-network C. Taken together, this study provides causal evidence for the distribution of the spatial cognitive system, demarking the major components and identifying novel regions., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permission@oup.com.)

Many behavioural phenomena have been replicated using web-based experiments, but evaluation of the agreement between objective measures of web- and lab-based performance is required if scientists and clinicians are to reap the benefits of web-based testing. In this study, we investigated the reliability of a task which assesses early visual cortical function by evaluating the well-known 'oblique effect' (we are better at seeing horizontal and vertical edges than tilted ones) and the levels of agreement between remote, web-based measures and lab-based measures. Sixty-nine young participants (mean age, 21.8 years) performed temporal and spatial versions of a web-based, two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) orientation-identification task. In each case, orientation-identification thresholds (the minimum orientation difference at which a standard orientation could be reliably distinguished from a rotated comparison) were measured for cardinal (horizontal and vertical) and oblique orientations. Reliability was assessed in a subsample of 18 participants who performed the same tasks under laboratory conditions. Robust oblique effects were found, such that thresholds were substantially lower for cardinal orientations compared to obliques, for both web- and lab-based measures of the temporal and spatial 2AFC tasks. Crucially, web- and lab-based orientation-identification thresholds showed high levels of agreement, demonstrating the suitability of web-based testing for assessments of early visual cortical function. Future studies should assess the reliability of similar web-based tasks in clinical populations to evaluate their adoption into clinical settings, either to screen for visual anomalies or to assess changes in performance associated with progression of disease severity., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Daytime migrants are known to orientate using the position of the sun, compensating for its changing position throughout the day with a 'time-compensated sun compass'. This compass has been demonstrated in many migratory species, with various degrees of accuracy for the actual movement of the sun. Here, we present a model for differing levels of compensation for the solar ephemeris that shows that a high degree of efficiency, in terms of distance travelled, can be achieved without full time compensation. In our model, compensating for the sun's position had a diminishing return with an accuracy of 80% leading to only a 2% reduction in distance travelled. We compare various modes of time compensation-full, partial, time averaged and step-revealing their directional efficiency in terms of distance travelled under an autumn migration scenario. We find that the benefit of time compensation varies with latitude, with time averaging performing very well, especially at all high latitudes, but step compensation performing better at very low latitudes. Importantly, even rudimentary adjustment can dramatically increase the efficiency of migration, which suggests an easy pathway for the independent evolution of time compensation.

Functional asymmetries of the avian visual system can be studied in monocularly occluded birds, as their hemispheres are largely independent. Right and left monocularly occluded homing pigeons and control birds under binocular view have been trained in a food localisation task in an octagonal outdoor arena provided with one coloured beacon on each wall. The three groups were tested after the removal of the visual beacons, so to assess their sun compass learning abilities. Pigeons using the left eye/right hemisphere system exhibited slower learning compared to the other monocular group. During the test in the arena void of visual beacons, the three groups of birds, regardless of their visual condition, were generally able to identify the training sector by exclusively relying on sun compass information. However, the directional choices of the pigeons with the left eye/right hemisphere in use were significantly affected by the removal of the beacons, while both control pigeons and birds with the right eye/left hemisphere in use displayed unaltered performances during the test. A subsample of pigeons of each group were re-trained in the octagonal arena with visual beacons present and tested after the removal of visual beacons after a 6 h fast clock-shift treatment. All birds displayed the expected deflection consistent to the sun compass use. While birds using either the left or the right visual systems were equally able to learn a sun compass-mediated spatial task, the left eye/right hemisphere visual system displayed an advantage in relying on visual beacons., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

A novel geometrical optical illusion is reported in this article: the horizontal distances of the contextual structures distort the perceived vertical positions of observed objects. Specifically, the illusion manifests in the form of connected boxes of varying widths but equal heights, each containing a circle at the center. Despite identical vertical positioning of the circles, they appear misaligned. The illusion diminishes when the boxes are removed. Potential underlying mechanisms are discussed.

Visual context modulates perception of local orientation attributes. These spatially very localised effects are considered to correspond to specific excitatory-inhibitory connectivity patterns of early visual areas as V1, creating perceptual tilt repulsion and attraction effects. Here, orientation misperception of small Gabor stimuli was used as a probe of this computational structure by sampling a large spatio-orientation space to reveal expected asymmetries due to the underlying neuronal processing. Surprisingly, the results showed a regular iso-orientation pattern of nearby location effects whose reference point was globally modulated by the spatial structure, without any complex interactions between local positions and orientation. This pattern of results was confirmed by the two perceptual parameters of bias and discrimination ability. Furthermore, the response times to stimulus configuration displayed variations that further provided evidence of how multiple early visual stages affect perception of simple stimuli., (© 2023 Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Ball-rolling dung beetles are known to integrate multiple cues in order to facilitate their straight-line orientation behaviour. Recent work has suggested that orientation cues are integrated according to a vector sum, that is, compass cues are represented by vectors and summed to give a combined orientation estimate. Further, cue weight (vector magnitude) appears to be set according to cue reliability. This is consistent with the popular Bayesian view of cue integration: cues are integrated to reduce or minimize an agent's uncertainty about the external world. Integration of orientation cues is believed to occur at the input to the insect central complex. Here, we demonstrate that a model of the head direction circuit of the central complex, including plasticity in input synapses, can act as a substrate for cue integration as vector summation. Further, we show that cue influence is not necessarily driven by cue reliability. Finally, we present a dung beetle behavioural experiment which, in combination with simulation, strongly suggests that these beetles do not weight cues according to reliability. We suggest an alternative strategy whereby cues are weighted according to relative contrast, which can also explain previous results.

Human vision in the periphery is most accurate for stimuli that point towards the fovea. This so-called radial bias has been linked with the organization and spatial selectivity of neurons at the lowest levels of the visual system, from retinal ganglion cells onwards. Despite evidence that the human visual system is radially biased, it is not yet known whether this bias persists at higher levels of processing, or whether high-level representations are invariant to this low-level orientation bias. We used the case of face identity recognition to address this question. The specialized high-level mechanisms that support efficient face recognition are highly dependent on horizontally oriented information, which convey the most useful identity cues in the fovea. We show that face selective mechanisms are more sensitive on the horizontal meridian (to the left and right of fixation) compared to the vertical meridian (above and below fixation), suggesting that the horizontal cues in the face are better extracted on the horizontal meridian, where they align with the radial bias. The results demonstrate that the radial bias is maintained at high-level recognition stages and emphasize the importance of accounting for the radial bias in future investigation of visual recognition processes in peripheral vision.

Introduction: How does gravity (or lack thereof) affect sensory-motor processing? We analyze sensorimotor estimation dynamics for line segments with varying direction (orientation) in a 7-day dry immersion (DI), a ground-based model of gravitational unloading., Methods: The measurements were carried out before the start of the DI, on the first, third, fifth and seventh days of the DI, and after its completion. At the memorization stage, the volunteers led the leading hand along the visible segment on a touchscreen display, and at the reproduction stage they repeated this movement on an empty screen. A control group followed the same procedure without DI., Results: Both in the DI and control groups, when memorizing, the overall error in estimating the lengths and directions of the segments was small and did not have pronounced dynamics; when reproducing, an oblique effect (higher variability of responses to oblique orientations compared to cardinal ones) was obtained. We then separated biases (systematic error) and uncertainty (random error) in subjects' responses. At the same time, two opposite trends were more pronounced in the DI group during the DI. On the one hand the cardinal bias (a repulsion of orientation estimates away from cardinal axes) and, to a small extent, the variability of direction estimates decreased. On the other hand, the overestimation bias in length estimates increased., Discussion: Such error pattern strongly supports the hypotheses of the vector encoding, in which the direction and length of the planned movement are encoded independently of each other when the DI disrupts primarily the movement length encoding., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Lyakhovetskii, Chetverikov, Zelenskaya, Tomilovskaya and Karpinskaia.)

The mechanisms underlying geocentric (orientations of an object or the body relative to 'gravity') and egocentric estimates (object orientation relative to the 'body') have each been examined; however, little is known regarding the association between these estimates, especially when the body is nearly upright. To address this, we conducted two psychophysical experiments. In Experiment 1, participants estimated the direction of a visual line (subjective visual vertical; SVV) and their own body relative to gravity (subjective body tilt; SBT) and the direction of a visual line relative to the body longitudinal axis (subjective visual body axis; SVBA) during a small-range whole-body roll tilt. We evaluated the correlations between performance on each of these tasks as covariates of actual body tilt angles. Our results showed a significant correlation of performance (estimation errors) on the SVBA task with performance on the SBT task but not performance on the SVV task at the group level after adjusting for the actual body tilt angles, suggesting a link between the estimates for SVBA and SBT tasks. To confirm this relationship, in Experiment 2, we further assessed whether manipulating the subjective direction of the body axis by providing visual feedback in the SVBA task subsequently affected SBT performance. We found that feedback in the SVBA task significantly shifted the SBT angles even when the actual body angles were identical. The observed association between SVBA and SBT performance supports at least a partially shared mechanism underlying body tilt and egocentric estimates when the body is nearly upright.

With the continued growth of digital device use, a greater portion of the visual world experienced daily by many people has shifted towards digital environments. The "oblique effect" denotes a bias for horizontal and vertical (canonical) contours over oblique contours, which is derived from a disproportionate exposure to canonical content. Carpentered environments have been shown to possess proportionally more canonical than oblique contours, leading to perceptual bias in those who live in "built" environments. Likewise, there is potential for orientation sensitivity to be shaped by frequent exposure to digital content. The potential influence of digital content on the oblique effect was investigated by measuring the degree of orientation anisotropy from a range of digital scenes using Fourier analysis. Content from popular cartoons, video games, and social communication websites was compared to real-life nature, suburban, and urban scenes. Findings suggest that digital content varies widely in orientation anisotropy, but pixelated video games and social communication websites were found to exhibit a degree of orientation anisotropy substantially exceeding that observed in all measured categories of real-world environments. Therefore, the potential may exist for digital content to induce an even greater shift in orientation bias than has been observed in previous research. This potential, and implications of such a shift, is discussed.

Despite the fundamental importance of visual motion processing, our understanding of how the brain represents basic aspects of motion is incomplete. While it is generally believed that direction is the main representational feature of motion, motion processing is also influenced by nondirectional orientation signals that are present in most motion stimuli. Here, we aimed to test whether this nondirectional motion axis contributes motion perception even when orientation is completely absent from the stimulus. Using stimuli with and without orientation signals, we found that serial dependence in a simple motion direction estimation task was predominantly determined by the orientation of the previous motion stimulus. Moreover, the observed attraction profiles closely matched the characteristic pattern of serial attraction found in orientation perception. Evidently, the sequential integration of motion signals strongly depends on the orientation of motion, indicating a fundamental role of nondirectional orientation in the coding of visual motion direction., (© 2022. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Magnetoreception is defined as the ability to sense and use the Earth's magnetic field, for example to orient and direct movements. The receptors and sensory mechanisms underlying behavioral responses to magnetic fields remain unclear. A previous study described magnetoreception in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which requires the activity of a single pair of sensory neurons. These results suggest C. elegans as a tractable model organism for facilitating the search for magnetoreceptors and signaling pathways. The finding is controversial, however, as an attempt to replicate the experiment in a different laboratory was unsuccessful. We here independently test the magnetic sense of C. elegans, closely replicating the assays developed in the original publication. We find that C. elegans show no directional preference in magnetic fields of both natural and higher intensity, suggesting that magnetotactic behavior in the worm is not robustly evoked in a laboratory setting. Given the lack of a robust magnetic response under controlled conditions, we conclude that C. elegans is not a suitable model organism to study the mechanism of the magnetic sense., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Objective: In preterm and very low birth weight (VLBW) infants, attention-related problems have been found to be more pronounced and emerge later as academic difficulties that may persist into school age. In response, based on three attention networks: alerting, orienting, and executive attention, we examined the development of attention functions at 42 months (not corrected for prematurity) as a follow-up study of VLBW (n = 23) and normal birth weight (NBW: n = 48) infants. Method: The alerting and orienting attention networks were examined through an overlap task with or without warning signal. The orienting network was also examined through the distribution of gaze points when exposed to videos of human faces talking and silently looking straight ahead. Executive attention was examined using a parental report measure for temperamental self-regulation, effortful control. Results: In the overlap task, the difference between VLBWs and NBWs was not the latency of attentional disengagement but the fact that VLBWs were less focused on the fixation stimulus (F(1,60) = 10.80, p < 0.01, [eta][superscript 2][subscript p] = 0.071) and seemed to profit more from auditory warning signals than NBWs (F(1,60) = 7.13, p = 0.01, [eta][superscript 2][subscript p] = 0.106). Moreover, there was no intergroup difference regarding lateral (right or left) or feature (eye or mouth) attention bias toward the face videos. Further, longer latencies in overlap condition were significantly positively associated with high effortful control scores only in the NBW group (r = 0.36, p = 0.018). Conclusion: Results indicate that poor underlying alertness and orienting relating to atypical lateralization may affect cognitive and behavioral abnormalities in VLBWs.

This paper draws from a collaborative project in which we piloted a Critical Multilingual Language Awareness approach (CMLA) in a preparatory class for recently arrived secondary school students in Sweden. We adapted material on Language Awareness from "We Are Multilingual" (https://www.wamcam.org). This adapted approach followed the five principles of educational design for multilingual learners, which also relate to cognitive, performative, affective, social and power domains of Language Awareness. Data consist of audio- and video-recorded interactions from classroom observations, student/teacher interviews, and teaching/student-produced material. With a process-oriented focus, we discuss student participation in this co-learning design as contingent upon practices of curiosity. A focus is also on the co-learning process through reflection on activity, and how cultivating "new ways of listening," involving multilingual study mentoring, may spur linguistic participation.

This article documents the reflections of six African second-year master's students on their international educational experiences in Kazakhstan with a special focus on their challenges, strategic learning efforts and identity development. It is guided by Norton's conceptualisation of investment in identity, language learning, and social change. The qualitative data collected from a written narrative and two subsequent rounds of individual semi-structured interviews suggest that participants pursued their studies at an English-medium instruction university in Kazakhstan mainly because of the fully-funded scholarships. However, their expectations regarding the university and Kazakhstan were unclear, as they received no pre-departure orientation. Despite being satisfied with the high-quality education in the host institution, they faced challenges such as difficulty securing part-time work due to a lack of proficiency in local languages (Kazakh and Russian), enduring prolonged cold weather, and limited opportunities for socialising with other students. Most participants described Kazakhstan as 'a peaceful and progressive country'; however, two participants experienced linguistic racism in the classroom. This study underlines the significance of addressing the issues of graduate employability and linguistic racism, along with implementing pedagogical interventions in all phases of study abroad and fostering a sense of intercultural citizenship among students.

Rare birds known as "accidentals" or "vagrants" have long captivated birdwatchers and puzzled biologists, but the drivers of these rare occurrences remain elusive. Errors in orientation or navigation are considered one potential driver: migratory birds use the Earth's magnetic field-sensed using specialized magnetoreceptor structures-to traverse long distances over often unfamiliar terrain. Disruption to these magnetoreceptors or to the magnetic field itself could potentially cause errors leading to vagrancy. Using data from 2 million captures of 152 landbird species in North America over 60 years, we demonstrate a strong association between disruption to the Earth's magnetic field and avian vagrancy during fall migration. Furthermore, we find that increased solar activity-a disruptor of the avian magnetoreceptor-generally counteracts this effect, potentially mitigating misorientation by disabling the ability for birds to use the magnetic field to orient. Our results link a hypothesized cause of misorientation to the phenomenon of avian vagrancy, further demonstrating the importance of magnetoreception among the orientation mechanisms of migratory birds. Geomagnetic disturbance may have important downstream ecological consequences, as vagrants may experience increased mortality rates or facilitate range expansions of avian populations and the organisms they disperse., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Responding to longstanding calls to develop institutional support for boundary-spanning faculty and staff in ways that enhance collaborative community-university engagement, our study investigated a novel, facilitated approach to building community-university collaboration derived from the collective impact framework. In particular, we present new research on faculty and staff perceptions of a collective impact process that was designed to seed community-university collaboration around pressing public problems. Through semistructured interviews, 23 faculty and staff shared reflections on their participation in the collective impact process. Faculty and staff narratives touched on four categories of boundary-spanning behaviors, including technical-practical, socioemotional, community, and organizational orientations. The presence of these categories of behaviors reinforces the centrality of boundary-spanning concepts to efforts to advance community-university collaboration. Based on this research, we recommend organizational practices that can support professional development innovations for boundary spanners to enhance public good impact.

This research explores how metacognitive strategies influence the metacognitive awareness of undergraduate students enrolled in an online flipped programming course. It specifically focuses on regulatory actions crucial for success in programming instruction and distance education settings. The primary objective is to contribute to the existing literature by investigating the implementation of online flipped programming courses that integrate metacognitive-oriented approaches to support students' metacognitive regulatory actions. The study employed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. A total of 29 university students enrolled in programming courses participated in the study, engaging with instructional videos provided before each 10-week lesson. They were administered the Metacognitive Awareness Scale and supplementary forms designed to assess their metacognitive awareness and regulatory actions. A detailed coding scheme was developed to analyze students' metacognitive regulation activities during programming lessons. The study also evaluated the impact of supportive activities on students' metacognitive awareness. While no statistically significant difference was found in the students' metacognitive awareness through quantitative analysis, qualitative data revealed that activities supporting metacognition significantly enhanced students' comprehension of the programming content.

A vertical target is perceived as tilted against a slightly tilted inducer surrounding it. To identify the temporal resolution and temporal extent of this phenomenon of orientation repulsion in the same paradigm, we used an alternating pair of inducer stimuli having complementary orientation distributions and quantified repulsion at various alternation frequencies. The duration of each inducer stimulus was inversely proportional to the frequency. When an orthogonal pair of D2 patterns, a type of grating whose luminance modulation in a particular orientation was the second-order partial derivative of an isotropic 2D-Gaussian, was used as the inducer, repulsion occurred when the duration exceeded 20 ms and leveled off at 30 ms and beyond. When a custom-made texture with a narrowband orientation distribution and another texture with a complementary orientation distribution were alternated as the inducer, repulsion gradually increased until the inducer duration reached 200 ms. The gradual increase in repulsion was observed regardless of whether the orientation of the inducer that appeared simultaneously with the target was discernible. These findings reveal that contextual modulation in orientation occurs at a high temporal resolution and continues to a long temporal extent under optimal conditions., (Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Previous work has claimed that canonical viewpoints of objects are more readily perceived than noncanonical viewpoints. However, all of these studies required participants to identify the object, a late perceptual process at best and arguably a cognitive process (Pylyshyn, 1999). Here, we extend this work to early vision by removing the explicit need to identify the objects. In particular, we asked participants to make an intact/scrambled discrimination of briefly presented objects that were viewed from either typical or atypical viewpoints. Notably, participants did not have to identify the object; only discriminate it from noise (scrambled). Participants were more sensitive in discriminating objects presented in typically encountered orientations than when objects were presented in atypical depth rotations (Experiment 1). However, the same effect for objects presented in atypical picture plane rotations (as opposed to typical ones) did not reach statistical significance (Experiments 2 and 3), suggesting that particular informative views may play a critical role in this effect. We interpret this enhanced perceptibility, for both these items and good exemplars and probable scenes, as deriving from their high real-world statistical regularity.

In recent research of culture and ethnicity in visual perception, some researchers have found support for the hypothesis that more collectivistic cultures tend to be more influenced by surrounding contextual visual information than more individualistic cultures. This hypothesis suggests that even low-level visual perception may not be universal and has great implications on how vision research should be conducted. The current study reexamines this hypothesis in the rod and frame task, which tests the influence of a tilted contextual frame on orientation perception of the rod. We found no difference between participants of East Asian and Western European descent in this task. Despite not finding the cultural effect, we found a well-reported gender effect in which women were more influenced by the tilt of the frame than men, helping to ensure the quality of the data collected. Our results suggest that contextual influence on visual perception does not affect East Asians and white Western Europeans differently., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Migratory orientation of many animals is inheritable, enabling inexperienced (naïve) individuals to migrate independently using a geomagnetic or celestial compass. It remains unresolved how naïve migrants reliably reach remote destinations, sometimes correcting for orientation error or displacement. To assess naïve migratory performance (successful arrival), we simulate and assess proposed compass courses for diverse airborne migratory populations, accounting for spherical-geometry effects, compass precision, cue transfers (e.g., sun to star compass), and geomagnetic variability. We formulate how time-compensated sun-compass headings partially self-correct, according to how inner-clocks are updated. For the longest-distance migrations simulated, time-compensated sun-compass courses are most robust to error, and most closely resemble known routes. For shorter-distance nocturnal migrations, geomagnetic or star-compass courses are most robust, due to not requiring nightly cue-transfers. Our predictive study provides a basis for assessment of compass-based naïve migration and mechanisms of self-correction, and supports twilight sun-compass orientation being key to many long-distance inaugural migrations., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

The orientation of naive animals during their first migration is extensively studied in birds and sea turtles, whereas the data for other groups such as amphibians are still scarce. To date, it is unknown whether young-of-the-year anurans perform a random or directional search for the hibernation sites, and what cues (global or local) they use. We conducted a series of field experiments to study the orientation behavior of juvenile common frogs during their first wintering migration. We captured 1614 froglets from two subpopulations with different directions of migration and assessed their orientation in large circular outdoor arenas (20 m in diameter) on the opposite sides of the river. Before the migration, froglets used local cues and moved back towards the forest (summer habitat). At the start of migration, the froglets did not move randomly: they navigated towards the river using local cues. Later, however, before approaching the hibernation site, they memorized the compass direction of migration and followed it using global cues. Orientation along a memorized compass heading begins to dominate in the hierarchy of orientation mechanisms, and this predominance is maintained even after reaching the hibernation site. Unlike in birds, no innate direction of migration was found., Competing Interests: Competing interests The authors declare no competing or financial interests., (© 2022. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.)

This study aims to determine the needs, expectations, problems and experiences of international students in the process of distance education. To this end, phenomenology design was used, and university students representing different departments and countries were selected through a purposive sampling method. A total of 11 international students participated in the study. An interview form was used for data collection. According to the findings, it was found that the participants did not experience any problems during the registration and admission process and could get enough support from the institution during the orientation and services process. The most common problem in the academic process is the language used by the lecturer. Also, the students mostly preferred the department they studied in line with their choices. Thanks to the repetition of the courses in distance education, they could overcome the language and communication barriers they experienced during the face-to-face education process. It was also determined that the students' social relations with their peers and lecturers were positive, and they did not experience any adaptation problems. Finally, participants' statements on financial challenges focused on the difficulties in both finding scholarships and supporting themselves.

Hiring practitioners as faculty is not a novel practice in higher education. In their decision to shift from the private sector to the classroom, many practitioners enter the professoriate with little to no formal training in pedagogy. The question for faculty developers is how might Teaching and Learning Centers (TLCs) bridge this gap from practitioner to professor. One initial step is to abandon one-size-fits-all faculty development for a model that supports the individual needs of each practitioner. This article aims to provide recommendations for how Teaching and Learning Centers (TLCs) can serve as the conduit to teaching excellence for practitioners.

The primary sensory modality for probing spatial orientation can vary among psychophysical tasks. In the subjective visual vertical (SVV) task, a visual stimulus is used to measure perceived vertical orientation, while a haptic stimulus is used in the subjective haptic vertical (SHV) task. Here we examined disparity in SHV and SVV task results and asked whether it could be related to biases in probing different spatial estimates by each task. Forty-two healthy volunteers (mean ± SD age, 25 ± 10 years; 19 females; 21 left handed) were recruited. The effect of a task to measure spatial orientation was calculated as the difference between SHV and SVV values, and with the head upright and tilted 20° laterally. There was a task bias regardless of head position related to hand use in the haptic task but not handedness (mean head upright ± SEM: left hand, -3.7 ± 1.1°; right hand, 7.9 ± 1.0°). When this task bias was subtracted out, there was a similar spatial bias using each hand in the SHV task that was also comparable to the SVV task (mean head with left tilt: left hand, 3.9 ± 0.7°; right hand, 4.4 ± 0.7°; SVV, 4.9 ± 0.7°; mean head with right tilt: left hand, -4.6 ± 0.9°; right hand, -4.6 ± 0.8°; SVV, -4.7 ± 1.0°). These findings show that the disparity in visual and haptic measures of spatial orientation is primarily related to a modality-specific bias, and once the effect of hand use is removed from the haptic measurements, the spatial bias becomes comparable to the visual task., (Copyright © 2022 Kim et al.)

A limitation of the ability to rotate the head with respect to the upper body has been associated with turning problems; however, the extent of head constraints on whole-body coordination has not been fully determined. The aim of this study was to limit head on body rotation and observe the effects on whole-body coordination during standing turns at various speeds. Twelve participants completed standing turns at 180°. A Vicon motion system and a BlueGain Electrooculography system were used to record movement kinematics and measure horizontal eye movements, respectively. All participants were tested at 3 randomized speeds, and under 2 conditions with or without their head constrained using a head, neck, and chest brace which restricted neck movement. A repeated-measures analysis of variance found a significant main effect of turning speed on the onset latency of all segments, peak head-thorax angular separation, and step characteristics. Constraining the head rotation had multiple significant effects including delayed onset latency and decreased intersegmental coordination defined as peak head segmental angular separations, increased total step and step duration, and decreased step size. This indicates the contribution of speed, head, and neck constraints, which have been associated with falls during turning and whole-body coordination.

Path integration is a computational strategy that allows an animal to maintain an internal estimate of its position relative to a point of origin. Many species use path integration to navigate back to specific locations, typically their homes, after lengthy and convoluted excursions. Hymenopteran insects are impressive path integrators, directly returning to their hives after hundreds of meters of outward travel. Recent neurobiological insights have established hypotheses for how path integration vectors could be encoded in the brains of bees, but clear ways to test these hypotheses in the laboratory are currently unavailable. Here, we report that the bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, uses path integration while walking over short distances in an indoor arena. They estimate accurate vector distances after displacement and orient by artificial celestial cues. Walking bumblebees also exhibited systematic search patterns when home vectors failed to lead them accurately back to the nest, closely resembling searches performed by other species under natural conditions. We thus provide a robust experimental system to test navigation behavior in the laboratory that reflects most aspects of natural path integration. Importantly, we established this assay in an animal that is both readily available and resilient to invasive manipulations, as we demonstrate with the retention of the homing behavior post-anesthesia and surgery. In the future, our behavioral assay can therefore be combined with current electrophysiological techniques, opening a path toward directly probing the neural basis of the sophisticated vector navigation abilities of bees., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests The authors declare no competing interests., (Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Visual perspective taking may rely on the ability to mentally rotate one's own body into that of another. Here, we test whether participants' ability to make active body movements plays a causal role in visual perspective taking. We utilised our recent task that measures whether participants spontaneously represent another's visual perspective in a (quasi-)perceptual format that can drive own perceptual decision making. Participants reported whether alphanumeric characters, presented in different orientations, are shown in their normal or mirror-inverted form (e.g., "R" vs. "Я"). Between trials, we manipulated whether another person was sitting either left or right of the character and whether participants' movement was restricted with a chinrest or whether they could move freely. As in our previous research, participants spontaneously took the visual perspective of the other person, recognising rotated letters more rapidly when they appeared upright to the other person in the scene, compared with when they faced away from that person, and these effects increased with age but were (weakly) negatively related to schizotypy and not to autistic traits or social skills. Restricting participants' ability to make active body movements did not influence these effects. The results, therefore, rule out that active physical movement plays a causal role in computing another's visual perspective, either to create alignment between own and other's perspective or to trigger perspective taking processes. The postural adjustments people sometimes make when making judgements from another's perspective may instead be a bodily consequence of mentally transforming one's actual to an imagined position in space.

During the observation of a single object, orientation and spatial frequency are jointly coded in an early stage of visual processing, as is evident from studies on the aftereffects of specific combinations of both these features. However, they become independent in the decision-making stage because observers can identify one feature while ignoring the other. Does this separability expand into the perception of ensemble representations? This study investigated the effect of the spatial frequencies of Gabor patches on orientation averaging. In the experiment, the average orientations of all eight patches composed of either homogeneous (i.e., eight 3 cycles/degree or 0.8 cycles/degree patches) or heterogeneous (i.e., four 3 cycles/degree and four 0.8 cycles/degree patches) spatial frequencies were stably estimated if the orientation varied within the range of ±7.7° around the true mean. However, when the range was extended to ±14°, we found that the averaging performance was better in the homogeneous lower spatial frequency than in the homogeneous higher spatial frequency and heterogeneous spatial frequency conditions. These results suggest that an ensemble perception of orientation is modulated by spatial frequency components.

Attention involves three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct neural networks: alerting, orienting, and executive control. This study aimed to analyze the development of attentional networks in children aged between 3 and 6 years using a child-friendly version of the Attentional Network Test for Interaction (ANTI), the ANTI-Birds. The sample included 88 children divided into four age groups: 3-year-old, 4-year-old, 5-year-old, 6-year-old children. The results of this study would seem to indicate that between 4 and 6 years, there are no significant changes in attentional networks. Instead, between 3 and 4 years of age, children significantly improve all their attentional skills., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

Reorientation enables navigators to regain their bearings after becoming lost. Disoriented individuals primarily reorient themselves using the geometry of a layout, even when other informative cues, such as landmarks, are present. Yet the specific strategies that animals use to determine geometry are unclear. Moreover, because vision allows subjects to rapidly form precise representations of objects and background, it is unknown whether it has a deterministic role in the use of geometry. In this study, we tested sighted and congenitally blind mice ( N s = 8-11) in various settings in which global shape parameters were manipulated. Results indicated that the navigational affordances of the context-the traversable space-promote sampling of boundaries, which determines the effective use of geometric strategies in both sighted and blind mice. However, blind animals can also effectively reorient themselves using 3D edges by extensively patrolling the borders, even when the traversable space is not limited by these boundaries.