Mark Fenske
University of Guelph, Psychology, Faculty Member
- Cognitive neuroscientist, professor, and author. Understanding and enhancing brain function and human performance.edit
Research Interests:
Response inhibition negatively impacts the emotional and motivational significance of associated stimuli. Current accounts question whether this stimulus devaluation effect occurs immediately via negative affect elicited by inhibition, or... more
Response inhibition negatively impacts the emotional and motivational significance of associated stimuli. Current accounts question whether this stimulus devaluation effect occurs immediately via negative affect elicited by inhibition, or only occurs later via a misattribution of decreased fluency as unpleasantness in the context of an explicit affective-evaluation task. Using facial electromyography, we recorded indirect physiological markers of affective response during a response-inhibition (Go/No-go) task to test opposing predictions arising from the immediate-affect and delayed-misattribution hypotheses. Engagement of the corrugator supercilli-a muscle closely associated with negative affect-was greater during periods when response inhibition was applied (No-go trials) than when not applied (Go trials). Moreover, corrugator engagement during response-inhibition predicted the magnitude of stimulus devaluation measured behaviorally in subsequent subjective ratings (How cheerful?), with greater engagement during No-go trials that contained abstract-art stimuli later rated negatively than during trials that contained items later rated positively. These results support the immediate-affect hypothesis and converge with prior neuroimaging evidence to suggest that the negative impact of inhibition promptly alters the coding of stimulus value. In contrast, none of the delayed-misattribution based predictions were confirmed.
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ABSTRACT—Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional... more
ABSTRACT—Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can influence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stopsignal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as ‘‘more trustworthy’ ’ and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as ‘‘less trustworthy.’’ For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is ‘‘on a lighter background’’ vs. ‘‘on a darker background’’). These results suggest that attentional inhibition ...
Social-emotional evaluations of unfamiliar people are negatively impacted by ignoring or withholding motor-responses from images that depict them; an effect attributed to the propensity of inhibition to affectively devalue associated... more
Social-emotional evaluations of unfamiliar people are negatively impacted by ignoring or withholding motor-responses from images that depict them; an effect attributed to the propensity of inhibition to affectively devalue associated stimuli. Prior findings suggest that the social-emotional consequences of inhibition may be mediated by category-level representations that impact all members of a corresponding group. Here we assess whether social devaluation by inhibition also operates on item-level representations of specific individuals. Participants memorized individual identities of a group of fellow students before completing a Go/No-go response-inhibition task designed to associate item-level representations of each previously-memorized person with inhibition (No-go trials) or no inhibition (Go trials). Social identities associated with inhibition were consistently rated as less trustworthy in subsequent evaluations than those associated with Go trials that were not inhibited. T...
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Ignoring or withholding a response from a stimulus causes it to become affectively devalued. Leading accounts posit that this is due to negative affect elicited by neurocognitive inhibition when it is applied to resolve conflict from... more
Ignoring or withholding a response from a stimulus causes it to become affectively devalued. Leading accounts posit that this is due to negative affect elicited by neurocognitive inhibition when it is applied to resolve conflict from distracting or otherwise inappropriate stimulus/response representations. Other research, however, suggests that stimulus/response conflict may itself elicit negative affect and devalue stimuli, raising questions about whether effects previously attributed to inhibition may instead reflect the emotional impact of conflict, per se. To address this, we measured affective ratings of art-like patterns that previously appeared on critical trials of a task-switching paradigm (ABA vs. CBA task sequences) known for its capacity to distinguish behavioural effects of inhibition and conflict. Stimuli from the ABA-sequence experimental condition showing behavioural evidence of backward inhibition (n-2 repetition costs) received more negative ratings than those from...
Research Interests: Psychology and Cognition
Changes in mood can influence the allocation of attention. Positive affect, for example, is often associated with a broadening of attention, whereas negative affect is often associated with a narrowing of attention. Here we examine... more
Changes in mood can influence the allocation of attention. Positive affect, for example, is often associated with a broadening of attention, whereas negative affect is often associated with a narrowing of attention. Here we examine whether the link between mood and visuospatial attention also works in the opposite direction. Can changes in the breadth of attention affect subsequent mood? We assessed mood both before and after a global/local visual-perception task that required participants to adopt a relatively broad, neutral, or narrow attentional focus. We found that the Broad-focus task resulted in mood ratings that were higher in both affective valence and arousal than those following the Narrow-focus task and Neutral-focus task. These results build on prior findings to show that changes in the focus of attention can have affective consequences that include altered valence and arousal.
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The motivational incentive of sexual stimuli can be a salient force in determining the focus of thought and behaviour. Here we show that the simple act of not pressing a key during the perception of sexual content reduces its motivational... more
The motivational incentive of sexual stimuli can be a salient force in determining the focus of thought and behaviour. Here we show that the simple act of not pressing a key during the perception of sexual content reduces its motivational incentive and subsequent capacity to elicit sexual arousal. Undergraduate participants (N=116) completed a Go/No-go task that required them to inhibit responses to either sexual or non-sexual images. Later they watched sexually explicit videos and reported moment-to-moment changes in self-reported sexual arousal, while thermography was used to record changes in genital physiological arousal. Participants who previously inhibited sexual images experienced lower levels of both self-reported and physiological arousal than those who inhibited non-sexual images. These results extend prior research to suggest that a by-product of motor-response inhibition is a negative alteration of stimulus-value representations for associated items— the kind of value t...
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Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items; a phenomenon attributed to the affective consequences of attentional inhibition. Here we investigated the generality of this ‘distractor... more
Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items; a phenomenon attributed to the affective consequences of attentional inhibition. Here we investigated the generality of this ‘distractor devaluation’ phenomenon by asking whether ignoring stimuli represented internally within visual working memory has the same affective consequences. In two experiments we presented participants with two or three visual stimuli and then, after the stimuli were no longer visible, provided an attentional cue indicating which item in memory was the target they would have to later recall, and which were task-irrelevant distractors. Participants subsequently judged how much they liked these stimuli. Previously-ignored distractors were consistently rated less favorably than targets, replicating prior findings of distractor devaluation. To gain converging evidence, in Experiment 2, we also examined the electrophysiological processes associated with devaluation by m...
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The multiple state theory of working memory suggests that representations are divided into two states: a focused-on active representation and accessory memories held for later use. Here, we tested two competing hypotheses regarding the... more
The multiple state theory of working memory suggests that representations are divided into two states: a focused-on active representation and accessory memories held for later use. Here, we tested two competing hypotheses regarding the neurocognitive mechanisms responsible for this separation: (1) that accessory memories undergo inhibition or (2) that accessory memories are amplified less than active representations. We explored if accessory memories undergo affective devaluation, a known index of the involvement of inhibition in a visual task. On each trial participants memorized four items, were cued to focus on one, and then completed a visual search or an affective evaluation task. While search distractors matching the colour of an active item slowed search, those matching an accessory memory did not, replicating previous findings that only active items guide search. Also, accessory items were affectively devalued compared to baseline and active items, supporting the hypothesis ...
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Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items, a phenomenon attributed to the affective consequences of attentional inhibition. Here we investigated the generality of this "distractor... more
Ignoring visual stimuli in the external environment leads to decreased liking of those items, a phenomenon attributed to the affective consequences of attentional inhibition. Here we investigated the generality of this "distractor devaluation" phenomenon by asking whether ignoring stimuli represented internally within visual working memory has the same affective consequences. In two experiments we presented participants with two or three visual stimuli and then, after the stimuli were no longer visible, provided an attentional cue indicating which item in memory was the target they would have to later recall, and which were task-irrelevant distractors. Participants subsequently judged how much they liked these stimuli. Previously-ignored distractors were consistently rated less favorably than targets, replicating prior findings of distractor devaluation. To gain converging evidence, in Experiment 2, we also examined the electrophysiological processes associated with devalu...
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Stimuli appearing as visual distractors subsequently receive more negative affective evaluations than novel items or prior targets of attention. Leading accounts question whether this distractor devaluation effect occurs through... more
Stimuli appearing as visual distractors subsequently receive more negative affective evaluations than novel items or prior targets of attention. Leading accounts question whether this distractor devaluation effect occurs through evaluative codes that become associated with distractors as a mere artefact of attention-task instructions, or through affective consequences of attentional inhibition when applied to prevent distractor interference. Here we test opposing predictions arising from the evaluative-coding and devaluation-by-inhibition hypotheses using an electrophysiological marker of attentional inhibition in a task that requires participants to avoid interference from abstract-shape distractors presented while maintaining a uniquely-colored stimulus in memory. Consistent with prior research, distractors that matched the colour of the stimulus being held in memory elicited a Pd component of the event-related potential waveform, indicating that their processing was being activel...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Attention, Electroencephalography, and 15 moreAdolescent, Medicine, Affect, Brain, Evoked Potentials, Humans, Female, Male, Inhibition, Event Related Potentials, Neuropsychologia, Distractor Devaluation, Neurosciences, Neuropsychological Tests, and Stimulus Onset Asynchrony
Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be inhibited to prevent interference with goal-directed behaviour. Growing evidence suggests that the impact of inhibition is not limited to... more
Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be inhibited to prevent interference with goal-directed behaviour. Growing evidence suggests that the impact of inhibition is not limited to reduced neurocognitive processing, but also includes negative affective consequences for any associated stimuli. The link between inhibition and aversive response has primarily been studied using tasks involving attentional- or response-related inhibition of external sensory stimuli. Here we show that affective devaluation also occurs when inhibition is applied to fully-encoded stimulus representations in memory. We first replicated prior findings of increased forgetting of words whose memories were suppressed in a Think/No-think procedure (Experiment 1). Incorporating a stimulus-evaluation task within this procedure revealed that suppressing memories of words (Experiment 2) and visual objects (Experiment 3) also results in their affective devaluation. G...
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Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processes that occur during an instance of boredom. Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom,... more
Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processes that occur during an instance of boredom. Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom, we argue that boredom is universally conceptualized as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.” We propose to map this conceptualization onto underlying mental processes. Specifically, we propose that boredom be defined in terms of attention. That is, boredom is the aversive state that occurs when we (a) are not able to successfully engage attention with internal (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external (e.g., environmental stimuli) information required for participating in satisfying activity, (b) are focused on the fact that we are not able to engage attention and participate in satisfying activity, and (c) attribute the cause of our aversive state to the environment. We believe that our definition ...
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Abstract Complex abstract images that are ignored in a simple localization task are subsequently judged more negatively in an emotional evaluation task than previously unseen or attended images, suggesting that attentional inhibition may... more
Abstract Complex abstract images that are ignored in a simple localization task are subsequently judged more negatively in an emotional evaluation task than previously unseen or attended images, suggesting that attentional inhibition may have affective consequences (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, in press). We examined the generality of this finding by asking whether inhibitory processes might also influence the generation of emotional responses to unfamiliar faces. To do this, we incorporated an emotional ...
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Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their prod-ucts are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Da Capo Press was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been... more
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their prod-ucts are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Da Capo Press was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters. ...
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Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emerging evidence suggests that attention may mediate such acts, but little is known about the specific operations through which attention might... more
Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emerging evidence suggests that attention may mediate such acts, but little is known about the specific operations through which attention might influence self-regulation. Here we test this often-implicit assumption by manipulating attention mechanisms in two ways: one controlling the inhibition of inappropriate responses; the other controlling the breadth of attention. Participants significantly improved their performance on a self-regulation task after practice on a response inhibition task (Experiment 1) and after the induction of a broad focus of attention in a visual discrimination task (Experiment 2). We propose that such manipulations enhance self-regulation by engaging mechanisms that enhance the salience of goal-related representations and reduce the activation of competing goal-irrelevant neural representations. By more efficiently resolving conflict among the signals vying to drive behavior, pre-engaging attention may also help to conserve resources needed for continued self-regulation.
Research Interests:
Social-emotional evaluations of unfamiliar people are negatively impacted by ignoring or withholding motor-responses from images that depict them; an effect attributed to the propensity of inhibition to affectively devalue associated... more
Social-emotional evaluations of unfamiliar people are negatively impacted by ignoring or withholding motor-responses from images that depict them; an effect attributed to the propensity of inhibition to affectively devalue associated stimuli. Prior findings suggest that the social-emotional consequences of inhibition may operate on category-level representations that impact all members of a corresponding group. Here we assess whether such social-emotional consequences of motor-response action versus inaction also operate on item-level representations of specific individuals. Participants memorized individual identities of a group of fellow students before completing a Go/No-go response-inhibition task designed to associate item-level representations of each previously-memorized person with action (Go trials) or inaction (No-go trials). Social identities associated with action were consistently rated as more trustworthy in subsequent evaluations than those associated with inaction. This suggests that the social-emotional consequences of motor-response execution versus inhibition can operate on item-level stimulus representations in memory.
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Stimuli that resemble humans, but are not perfectly human-like, are disliked compared to distinctly human and non-human stimuli. Accounts of this "Uncanny Valley" effect often focus on how changes in human resemblance can evoke... more
Stimuli that resemble humans, but are not perfectly human-like, are disliked compared to distinctly human and non-human stimuli. Accounts of this "Uncanny Valley" effect often focus on how changes in human resemblance can evoke different emotional responses. We present an alternate account based on the novel hypothesis that the Uncanny Valley is not directly related to 'human-likeness' per se, but instead reflects a more general form of stimulus devaluation that occurs when inhibition is triggered to resolve conflict between competing stimulus-related representations. We consider existing support for this inhibitory-devaluation hypothesis and further assess its feasibility through tests of two corresponding predictions that arise from the link between conflict-resolving inhibition and aversive response: (1) that the pronounced disliking of Uncanny-type stimuli will occur for any image that strongly activates multiple competing stimulus representations, even in the ...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Emotion, Computer Graphics, Animation, and 12 moreFacial Recognition, Virtual Reality (Computer Graphics), Computer Animation, Cognition, Uncanny Valley, Visual perception, Cognitive Dissonance, Affect/Emotion, Cognitive Neuroscience, The uncanny, Affect, and Frontiers in Psychology
Stimuli appearing as visual distractors subsequently receive more negative affective evaluations than novel items or prior targets of attention. Leading accounts question whether this distractor devaluation effect occurs through... more
Stimuli appearing as visual distractors subsequently receive more negative affective evaluations than novel items or prior targets of attention. Leading accounts question whether this distractor devaluation effect occurs through evaluative codes that become associated with distractors as a mere artefact of attention-task instructions, or through affective consequences of attentional inhibition when applied to prevent distractor interference. Here we test opposing predictions arising from the evaluative-coding and devaluation-by-inhibition hypotheses using an electrophysiological marker of attentional inhibition in a task that requires participants to avoid interference from abstract-shape distractors presented while maintaining a uniquely-colored stimulus in memory. Consistent with prior research, distractors that matched the colour of the stimulus being held in memory elicited a Pd component of the event-related potential waveform, indicating that their processing was being actively suppressed. Subsequent affective evaluations revealed that memory-matching distractors also received more negative ratings than non-matching distractors or previously-unseen shapes. Moreover, Pd magnitude was greater on trials in which the memory-matching distractors were later rated negatively than on trials preceding positive ratings. These results support the devaluation-by-inhibition hypothesis and strongly suggest that fluctuations in stimulus inhibition are closely associated with subsequent affective evaluations. In contrast, none of the evaluative-coding based predictions were confirmed.
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Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be inhibited to prevent interference with goal-directed behaviour. Growing evidence suggests that the impact of inhibition is not limited to... more
Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be inhibited to prevent interference with goal-directed behaviour. Growing evidence suggests that the impact of inhibition is not limited to reduced neurocognitive processing, but also includes negative affective consequences for any associated stimuli. The link between inhibition and aversive response has primarily been studied using tasks involving attentional-or response-related inhibition of external sensory stimuli. Here we show that affective devaluation also occurs when inhibition is applied to fully-encoded stimulus representations in memory. We first replicated prior findings of increased forgetting of words whose memories were suppressed in a Think/No-think procedure (Experiment 1). Incorporating a stimulus-evaluation task within this procedure revealed that suppressing memories of words (Experiment 2) and visual objects (Experiment 3) also results in their affective devaluation. Given the critical role of memory for guiding thoughts and actions, these results suggest that the affective consequences of inhibition may occur across a far broader range of situations than previously understood.
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Social pain is often associated with social rejection and shares neural correlates with the bothersome aspect of physical pain, which may also indicate an overlap in function. Pain has been described as a motivational signal to respond to... more
Social pain is often associated with social rejection and shares neural correlates with the bothersome aspect of physical pain, which may also indicate an overlap in function. Pain has been described as a motivational signal to respond to the source of the pain in an adaptive way, such as by altering behavior. We tested whether social pain causes similarly adaptive alterations in behavior. Participants played computerized ball-tossing tasks with putative players-one who passed to and one who excluded the participant from play-in both a social and nonsocial version. We assessed the behavioral consequences of social pain by comparing the number of throws to each stimulus (social rejector vs. nonsocial rejector) over the course of the task. Posttask questionnaires assessed subjective feelings of social pain. A decrease in throws to the rejecting stimulus was only observed in the social version, indicating that rejection that is social in nature leads to change in behavior. Moreover, pa...
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The motivational incentive of reward-related stimuli can become so salient that it drives behavior at the cost of other needs. Here we show that response inhibition applied during a Go/No-go task not only impacts hedonic evaluations but... more
The motivational incentive of reward-related stimuli can become so salient that it drives behavior at the cost of other needs. Here we show that response inhibition applied during a Go/No-go task not only impacts hedonic evaluations but also reduces the behavioral incentive of motivationally relevant stimuli. We first examined the impact of response inhibition on the hedonic value of sex stimuli associated with strong behavioral-approach responses (Experiment 1). Sexually appealing and non-appealing images were both rated as less attractive when previously encountered as No-go (inhibited) than as Go (non-inhibited) items. We then discovered that inhibition reduces the motivational incentive of sexual appealing stimuli (Experiment 2). Prior Go/No-go status affected the number of key-presses by heterosexual males to view erotic-female (sexually appealing) but not erotic-male or scrambled-control (non-appealing) images. These findings may provide a foundation for developing inhibition-based interventions to reduce the hedonic value and motivational incentive of stimuli associated with disorders of self-control.
Abstract 1. Affective evaluations of previously ignored visual stimuli are more negative than those of novel items or prior targets of attention or response. This has been taken as evidence that inhibition has negative affective... more
Abstract 1. Affective evaluations of previously ignored visual stimuli are more negative than those of novel items or prior targets of attention or response. This has been taken as evidence that inhibition has negative affective consequences. But inhibition could act instead to attenuate or “neutralize” preexisting affective salience, predicting opposite effects for stimuli that were initially positive or negative in valence.
Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emerging evidence suggests that attention may mediate such acts, but little is known about the specific operations through which attention might... more
Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emerging evidence suggests that attention may mediate such acts, but little is known about the specific operations through which attention might influence self-regulation. Here we test this often-implicit assumption by manipulating attention mechanisms in two ways: one controlling the inhibition of inappropriate responses; the other controlling the breadth of attention. Participants significantly improved their performance on a self- regulation task after practice on a response inhibition task (Experiment 1) and after the induction of a broad focus of attention in a visual discrimination task (Experiment 2). We propose that such manipulations enhance self-regulation by engaging mechanisms that enhance the salience of goal-related representations and reduce the activation of competing goal-irrelevant neural representations. By more efficiently resolving conflict among the signals vying to drive behavior, pre-engaging attention may also help to conserve resources needed for continued self-regulation.
Research Interests:
Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processes that occur during an instance of boredom. Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom,... more
Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processes that occur during an instance of boredom. Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom, we argue that boredom is universally conceptualized as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.” We propose to map this conceptualization onto underlying mental processes. Specifically, we propose that boredom be defined in terms of attention. That is, boredom is the aversive state that occurs when we (a) are not able to successfully engage attention with internal (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external (e.g., environmental stimuli) information required for participating in satisfying activity, (b) are focused on the fact that we are not able to engage attention and participate in satisfying activity, and (c) attribute the cause of our aversive state to the environment. We believe that our definition of boredom fully accounts for the phenomenal experience of boredom, brings existing theories of boredom into dialogue with one another, and suggests specific directions for future research on boredom and attention.
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That associative processing provides the vehicle of thought is a long-standing idea. We describe here observations from cognitive neuroimaging that elucidate the neural processing that mediates this element. This account further allows a... more
That associative processing provides the vehicle of thought is a long-standing idea. We describe here observations from cognitive neuroimaging that elucidate the neural processing that mediates this element. This account further allows a more specific ascription of a cognitive function to the brain’s ‘‘default’’ activity in mindwandering. We extend this account to argue that one primary outcome of associative processing is the generation of predictions, which approximate the immediately relevant future and thus facilitate perception, action, and the progression of thought.
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Gaze direction signals another person’s focus of interest. Facial expressions convey information about their mental state. Appropriate responses to these signals should reflect their combined influence, yet current evidence suggests that... more
Gaze direction signals another person’s focus of interest. Facial expressions convey information about their mental state. Appropriate responses to these signals should reflect their combined influence, yet current evidence suggests that gaze-cueing effects for objects near an observed face are not modulated by its emotional expression. Here, we extend the investigation of perceived gaze direction and emotional expression by considering their combined influence on affective judgments. While traditional response-time measures revealed equal gaze-cueing effects for happy and disgust faces, affective evaluations critically depended on the combined product of gaze and emotion. Target objects looked at with a happy expression were liked more than objects looked at with a disgust expression. Objects not looked at were rated equally for both expressions. Our results demonstrate that facial expression does modulate the way that observers utilize gaze cues: Objects attended by others are evaluated according to the valence of their facial expression.
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The neural mechanisms subserving visual recognition are traditionally described in terms of bottom-up analysis, whereby increasingly complex aspects of the visual input are processed along a hierarchical progression of cortical regions.... more
The neural mechanisms subserving visual recognition are traditionally described in terms of bottom-up analysis, whereby increasingly complex aspects of the visual input are processed along a hierarchical progression of cortical regions. However, the importance of top-down facilitation in successful recognition has been emphasized in recent models and research findings. Here we consider evidence for top- down facilitation of recognition that is triggered by early information about an object, as well as by contextual associations between an object and other objects with which it typically appears. The object- based mechanism is proposed to trigger top-down facilitation of visual recognition rapidly, using a partially analyzed version of the input image (i.e., a blurred image) that is projected from early visual areas directly to the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This coarse representation activates in the PFC information that is back- projected as ‘‘initial guesses’’ to the temporal cortex where it presensitizes the most likely interpretations of the input object. In addition to this object-based facilitation, a context-based mechanism is proposed to trigger top-down facilitation through contextual associations between objects in scenes. These contextual associations activate predictive information about which objects are likely to appear together, and can influence the ‘‘initial guesses’’ about an object’s identity. We have shown that contextual associations are analyzed by a network that includes the parahippocampal cortex and the retrosplenial complex. The integrated proposal described here is that object- and context-based top-down influences operate together, promoting efficient recognition by framing early information about an object within the constraints provided by a lifetime of experience with contextual associations.
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How does the amount of time for which we see an object influence the nature and content of its cortical representation? To address this question, we varied the duration of initial exposure to visual objects and then measured functional... more
How does the amount of time for which we see an object influence the nature and content of its cortical representation? To address this question, we varied the duration of initial exposure to visual objects and then measured functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal and behavioral performance during a sub- sequent repeated presentation of these objects. We report a novel ‘rise-and-fall’ pattern relating exposure duration and the corresponding magnitude of fMRI cortical signal. Compared with novel objects, repeated objects elicited maximal cortical response reduction when initially presented for 250 ms. Counter-intuitively, initially seeing an object for a longer duration significantly reduced the magnitude of this effect. This ‘rise-and-fall’ pattern was also evident for the corresponding behavioral priming. To account for these findings, we propose that the earlier interval of an exposure to a visual stimulus results in a fine-tuning of the cortical response, while additional exposure promotes selection of a subset of key features for continued representation. These two independent mechanisms complement each other in shaping object representations with experience.
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Processes of selective attention and emotion operate together in prioritizing thoughts and actions. Abundant evidence suggests that emotionally salient stimuli and affective states can determine how visual attention is allocated. However,... more
Processes of selective attention and emotion operate together in prioritizing thoughts and actions. Abundant evidence suggests that emotionally salient stimuli and affective states can determine how visual attention is allocated. However, the brain regions mediating the effects of attention and emotion include shared and reciprocally connected structures. This raises an intriguing question about a reciprocal effect: Does attention also influence emotional responses? Here we review a series of studies that show that indeed it does. The results indicate that attention has a negative affective impact for otherwise neutral visual stimuli (abstract patterns and unfamiliar faces) that must be ignored or otherwise inhibited during the performance of a task. Finding that selective attention has distinct affective consequences for visual stimuli rep- resents a new, fundamental discovery about the relation between the two main systems of prioritization in the human brain.
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Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states... more
Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can influence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stop-signal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as ‘‘more trustworthy’’ and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as ‘‘less trustworthy.’’ For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is ‘‘on a lighter background’’ vs. ‘‘on a darker background’’). These results suggest that attentional inhibition can be associated with socially relevant stimuli, such as faces, and can have specific, deleterious effects on social-emotional judgments.
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Comparisons of emotional evaluations of abstract stimuli just seen in a two-object visual search task show that prior distractors are devalued, as compared with prior targets or novel items, perhaps as a consequence of persistent... more
Comparisons of emotional evaluations of abstract stimuli just seen in a two-object visual search task show that prior distractors are devalued, as compared with prior targets or novel items, perhaps as a consequence of persistent attentional inhibition (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003). To further explore such attention–emotion effects, we measured search response time in a preview search task and emotional evaluations of colorful, complex images just seen therein. On preview trials, the distractors appeared 1,000 msec before the remaining items. On no-preview trials, all the items were presented simultaneously. A single distractor was then rated for its emotional tone. Previewed distractors were consistently devalued, as compared with nonpreviewed distractors, despite longer exposure and being associated with an easier task. This effect was observed only in the participants demonstrating improved search efficiency with preview, but not in others, indicating that the attentional mechanisms underlying the preview benefit have persistent affective consequences in visual search.
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Visual search has been studied extensively, yet little is known about how its constituent processes affect subsequent emotional evaluation of searched-for and searched-through items. In 3 experiments, the authors asked observers to locate... more
Visual search has been studied extensively, yet little is known about how its constituent processes affect subsequent emotional evaluation of searched-for and searched-through items. In 3 experiments, the authors asked observers to locate a colored pattern or tinted face in an array of other patterns or faces. Shortly thereafter, either the target or a distractor was rated on an emotional scale (patterns, cheerfulness; faces, trustworthiness). In general, distractors were rated more negatively than targets. Moreover, distractors presented near the target during search were rated significantly more negatively than those presented far from the target. Target–distractor proximity affected distractor ratings following both simple-feature and difficult-conjunction search, even when items appeared at different locations during evaluation than during search and when faces previously tinted during search were presented in grayscale at evaluation. An attentional inhibition account is offered to explain these effects of attention on emotional evaluation.
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Distinct complex brain systems support selective attention and emotion, but connections between them suggest that human behavior should reflect reciprocal interactions of these systems. Al- though there is ample evidence that emotional... more
Distinct complex brain systems support selective attention and emotion, but connections between them suggest that human behavior should reflect reciprocal interactions of these systems. Al- though there is ample evidence that emotional stimuli modulate attentional processes, it is not known whether attention influences emotional behavior. Here we show that evaluation of the emotional tone (cheery/dreary) of complex but meaningless visual patterns can be modulated by the prior attentional state (attending vs. ignoring) used to process each pattern in a visual selection task. Previously ignored patterns were evaluated more negatively than either previously attended or novel patterns. Furthermore, this emotional devaluation of distracting stimuli was robust across different emotional contexts and response scales. Finding that negative affective responses are specifically generated for ignored stimuli points to a new functional role for attention and elaborates the link between attention and emotion. This finding also casts doubt on the conventional marketing wisdom that any exposure is good exposure.
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Three experiments evaluated whether facial expression can modulate the allocation of focused attention. Identification of emotionally expressive target faces was typically faster when they were flanked by identical (compatible) faces... more
Three experiments evaluated whether facial expression can modulate the allocation of focused attention. Identification of emotionally expressive target faces was typically faster when they were flanked by identical (compatible) faces compared with when they were flanked by different (incompatible) faces. This flanker compatibility effect was significantly smaller when target faces expressed negative com- pared with positive emotion (see Experiment 1A); however, when the faces were altered to disrupt emotional expression, yet retain feature differences, equal flanker compatibility effects were observed (see Experiment 1B). The flanker- compatibility effect was also found to be smaller for negative target faces compared with neutral target faces, and for both negative and neutral target faces compared with positive target faces (see Experiment 2). These results suggest that the constriction of attention is influenced by facial expressions of emotion.
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Increasing cue duration impairs performance in bar-probe partial report when cues are presented peripherally, but not centrally (P. Dixon, R. Gordon, A. Leung, & V. Di Lollo, 1997). Three experiments examined whether this cue-duration... more
Increasing cue duration impairs performance in bar-probe partial report when cues are presented peripherally, but not centrally (P. Dixon, R. Gordon, A. Leung, & V. Di Lollo, 1997). Three experiments examined whether this cue-duration effect reflects processes of exogenous attention. The effect of cue duration on partial report performance with peripheral, but not central, cues was replicated (Experiment 1). Further experiments manipulated the degree that exogenous versus endogenous modes of selection were favored and found that the cue-duration effect for peripheral cues was reduced (1) when blocks contained a high proportion of central cues (Experiment 2) and (2) when the color of the cue indicated the location of the target (Experiment 3). These findings challenge the view that the cue-duration effect is restricted to exogenous attention and are discussed in terms of the process of disengaging attention from the cue to reallocate attention to the target representation.
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Abstract When an emotionally charged prime stimulus (eg a happy or angry face) is presented immediately prior to and at the same location as a target stimulus (eg a novel abstract image), affective evaluation of the target is typically... more
Abstract When an emotionally charged prime stimulus (eg a happy or angry face) is presented immediately prior to and at the same location as a target stimulus (eg a novel abstract image), affective evaluation of the target is typically biased in the direction of the prime's valence. Conventional theories of the affective priming (AP) effect posit that primes initiate a general affective state that 'spreads' to any other stimuli presented immediately thereafter (SOA up to approximately 300 ms). An alternative view, more in line with object- ...
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Search all the public and authenticated articles in CiteULike. Include unauthenticated results too (may include "spam") Enter a search phrase. You can also specify a CiteULike article id (123456),. a DOI (doi:10.1234/12345678).... more
Search all the public and authenticated articles in CiteULike. Include unauthenticated results too (may include "spam") Enter a search phrase. You can also specify a CiteULike article id (123456),. a DOI (doi:10.1234/12345678). or a PubMed ID (pmid:12345678). Click Help for advanced usage. CiteULike, Group: ilyajune, Search, Register, Log in, ...
Abstract Although the attentional processes mediating visual search are well-studied, little is known about how or whether these processes modulate affective evaluation of recently searched stimuli. Our previous research showed that... more
Abstract Although the attentional processes mediating visual search are well-studied, little is known about how or whether these processes modulate affective evaluation of recently searched stimuli. Our previous research showed that stimuli are affectively devalued when initially encountered as distractors in a simple two-item localization task compared to stimuli seen as targets, perhaps due to attentional inhibition of stimuli that compete for control over responding. Here we sought to determine if this devaluation effect would still be evident ...
Research Interests: Visual Search and Vision
Abstract The term priming typically denotes a behavioral change (usually an improvement) in the speed or ability to identify a stimulus following a prior exposure to the same, or a related, stimulus. Experience-based facilitation of... more
Abstract The term priming typically denotes a behavioral change (usually an improvement) in the speed or ability to identify a stimulus following a prior exposure to the same, or a related, stimulus. Experience-based facilitation of object recognition is also achieved through context-specific expectations about which objects are likely to appear together in a specific scene. Seeing a computer mouse, for instance, can facilitate subsequent recognition of contextually related objects such as a keyboard and a monitor. The benefit of prior ...
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Abstract In visual attention tasks, stimuli that must be ignored or otherwise inhibited for accurate performance subsequently receive more negative evaluations than novel stimuli or those seen as the targets of attention (eg, Raymond,... more
Abstract In visual attention tasks, stimuli that must be ignored or otherwise inhibited for accurate performance subsequently receive more negative evaluations than novel stimuli or those seen as the targets of attention (eg, Raymond, Fenske & Tavassoli, 2003). Such distractor devaluation effects have been taken as evidence that the application of attentional inhibition has negative affective consequences for visual stimuli (Fenske & Raymond, 2006). This view predicts that inhibited stimuli should be rated more negatively regardless of their ...
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Ignoring a visual stimulus causes it to subsequently receive more negative affective ratings than novel items or prior targets of attention. This has been taken as evidence that attentional inhibition alters the coding of... more
Ignoring a visual stimulus causes it to subsequently receive more negative affective ratings than novel items or prior targets of attention. This has been taken as evidence that attentional inhibition alters the coding of stimulus-associated value to ensure that previously distracting stimuli can be effectively avoided in future encounters. Previous results have suggested that this 'inhibitory devaluation' effect may operate through affective associations with specific perceptual features that allow distractors to be differentiated from targets. Prior inhibition can thereby impact the affective value both of specific items that have appeared as distractors and of novel items that share a previously ignored feature. But what happens when a distractor shares the same perceptual features as a target being held in visual working memory? Recent electrophysiological evidence suggests that while the similarity may initially cause selective attention to be biased toward such task-irrelevant items, active inhibition may then be triggered to prevent them from interfering with the ongoing task. If inhibition causes affective devaluation, then such findings predict greater devaluation of task-irrelevant stimuli that share the same perceptual features as a target being held in visual working memory than those that do not. To test this, we utilized delayed-match-to-sample trials that required participants to maintain a uniquely-coloured stimulus in working memory while task-irrelevant probe arrays were presented. The probe arrays contained abstract shapes whose colour either matched or did not match that of the stimulus being held in memory. Subsequent affective-evaluation trials revealed that prior memory-matching distractors received more negative ratings than non-matching distractors or a set of previously-unseen shapes. These results converge with prior electrophysiological evidence to suggest that distractors matching the contents of visual working memory are subjected to greater levels of attentional inhibition than other task-irrelevant stimuli, and that the consequences of this inhibition include alterations in affective value. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.
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Abstract We see the world in scenes. In spite of the infinitely diverse appearance of these scenes, they typically include contextual associations that make the identity of the objects therein highly predictable. Such associations can... more
Abstract We see the world in scenes. In spite of the infinitely diverse appearance of these scenes, they typically include contextual associations that make the identity of the objects therein highly predictable. Such associations can give rise to context-based expectations that might benefit recognition of objects within the same setting. For example, seeing a fork will facilitate the recognition of contextually related objects such as a knife and a plate. Building on previous work (Bar, 2003; Bar & Aminoff, 2003), we propose a mechanism for ...