Psychological Science

Where and how we move our eyes through a natural scene depends jointly on the scene and on the viewer. How the spatial and temporal organization of viewing changes across the lifespan, and whether those changes relate to memory, remains unclear. We recorded eye movements from a lifespan cohort (N = 179, ages 5-79) during free viewing of naturalistic scenes, then tested recognition across graded levels of image degradation. Characterizing each observer by how closely their viewing corresponded to that of age peers, young adults, and a stimulus-driven salience model, we found a developmental dissociation: consistency in where the eyes were directed increased monotonically with age, whereas consistency in how they moved -- saccade direction, length, and fixation duration -- followed an inverted-U peaking in young adulthood. Recognition sensitivity followed an inverted-U of the same form. Across all three reference frames, typicality in how the eyes moved, but not in their spatial targeting, predicted recognition.

How children come to evaluate social-affective cues is shaped within the family, yet the neural expression of this process and its dependence on family relationships remain unclear. We tested whether parent-child similarity in the neural coding of affective judgment varies with family environment, and whether it relates to youth affective distress. Twenty-five parent-child dyads (youth, mean age 11.8; parents mean age 42 years) judged faces morphed along an angry-to-happy continuum as positive or negative during fMRI. For each participant, we defined an evaluative choice axis distinguishing faces judged positive from negative, independent of expression intensity. Using searchlight-based parent-child cross-decoding, we tested whether one dyad member's evaluative coding predicted the other member's judgments, indexing shared evaluative coding rather than shared sensitivity to expression intensity. Inference focused a priori on medial prefrontal cortex. There was no reliable average parent-child neural similarity across the sample. Instead, higher family conflict was associated with lower parent-child neural similarity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Demonstrating specificity to negative relational strain, this effect was not observed for complementary dimensions of family cohesion or identity. Moreover, the effect was specific to true dyads rather than random pairings and to vmPFC rather than a face-selective network or other medial prefrontal regions. Lower vmPFC similarity showed a preliminary association with higher youth affective distress. These findings indicate that affective valuation, rather than sensory encoding, may be a representational level at which perceived family conflict is reflected in parent-child neural similarity.

The attentional blink is a well-known phenomenon illustrating the limitations of human attention: When two visual targets are presented in rapid succession, identification of the second target is often impaired. While the attentional blink is known to attenuate when targets share perceptual features or category membership, real-world objects are also linked through contextual associations, shaped by objects typically occurring within the same environments. Here, we devised an attentional blink experiment in which we orthogonally manipulated contextual and categorical relationships between the two targets while controlling for their perceptual similarity. As the key result, contextual associations facilitated identification of the second target but impaired identification of the first target. These findings suggest that contextual associations yield distinct benefits and costs for visual cognition, where enhanced attentional access to subsequent targets is traded off against increased interference between targets.

How conceptual knowledge is organized in the mind remains difficult to observe directly in natural behavior. Here we show that explaining knowledge to others brings out spatially structured representations of conceptual memory in naturalistic speech. Participants with varying schizotypy traits learned associations between two conceptual dimensions through either image-based or language-based input, and subsequently described their memory strategies or explained how they would teach the information to others. Spatial structure was more likely to emerge during teaching than reflection, particularly following image-based learning. As predicted by prior evidence that visual input requires the active construction of internal relational scaffolding, cognitive disorganization selectively attenuated spatial expression after image-based, but not language-based, learning. These findings establish naturalistic speech as a behavioral readout of conceptual map structure, and suggest that a common mechanism links map construction and cognitive disorganization across task performance and verbal communication.

Empathy has been linked to facial emotion recognition, but whether empathy is associated with the structural representation of facial affect (how observers position different affects relative to one another in face-shape space) remains largely unexplored. 53 adults completed a genetic-algorithm face task that generated prototypes for 13 affects using the Basel Face Model, and completed the 60-item Empathy Quotient (EQ). The genetic-algorithm task produced structurally distinct prototypes for all 13 affects (all paired tests p < .001 Bonferroni-corrected; Cohens dz 1.74-3.13), confirming that participants generated reliable, affect-specific face representations. A 13 x 13 between-affect distance matrix was then compared between higher-EQ (n = 30) and lower-EQ (n = 23) groups. 1 pair survived full correction across all 156 off-diagonal cells: Amusement x Contempt (Cohens d = -1.31), with higher-empathy participants representing these two affects as structurally closer to each other. Both amusement and contempt are social-evaluative affects that share overlapping facial action components, and this convergence may reflect heightened sensitivity to shared expressive structure among higher-empathy observers. In exploratory analyses, permutation testing and continuous-EQ correlations pointed to a broader pattern centered on social-evaluative affects (Amusement, Awe, Contempt, Fear, Happiness, Pride, Sadness, Interest). Individual differences in empathy appear most prominently associated with how social-evaluative affects are structurally positioned in face-shape space, suggesting that empathy modulates not just emotion recognition accuracy but the representational geometry of facial affect itself.

Human language processing can be studied through both behavior and brain activity, yet it remains unclear whether these two data types reflect sensitivity to the same information. One influential view holds that both behavioral and neural responses are largely determined by processing effort, often estimated by word surprisal together with the context-independent properties of word frequency and length. At the same time, neural responses have been shown to encode richer aspects of linguistic content, including meaning. Here, we use neural network language models to operationalize these alternatives and systematically compare, within the same analytic computational framework, the predictive power of low-dimensional effort-based predictors and high-dimensional embedding representations that encode contextualized linguistic content, including meaning. Across 8 behavioral datasets and 5 neural datasets (4 fMRI and 1 ERP), we find that processing effort captures substantial variance in both behavioral and neural measures of language processing, in line with much previous work. However, for brain responses---but not for behavioral measures---embedding representations carry substantial predictive power beyond the estimates of processing effort. These results therefore suggest that neural data provide access to rich, high-dimensional dynamics of language comprehension, whereas behavioral data reflect a bottlenecking of these dynamics into a small set of theoretically motivated properties of contextualized linguistic input.

Brands increasingly express their positions on social issues through advertising, social media, and public campaigns. How such messages shape consumer perception is an ongoing area of investigation. Addressing a gap in brand activism research in marketing, this study uses eye- tracking technology to examine its impact on brand attitude, eye movement behavior, and memory retention. We tested these variables across three experimental tasks: an online survey, a free- viewing task, and a surprise memory recognition test. As a result, disagreement increased reading time for text statements, while agreement increased visual engagement (fixations) with the depicted product. Positive brand attitude also enhanced memory recognition for advertisements. Overall, disagreement appears to trigger effortful processing of conflicting information, while agreement facilitates visual absorption and strengthens product recognition. These findings highlight the cognitive risks and rewards of brand activism and provide a foundation for future research on its underlying perceptual and cognitive mechanisms.

Psychophysical and neuroimaging studies have repeatedly suggested that perceived numerosity is susceptible to adaptation, involving high-level number representations. However, whether adaptation to low-level visual features contributes to numerosity adaptation remains unclear. Here, we provide evidence that numerosity adaptation involves not only high- but also low-level visual processing stages. Through a series of psychophysical experiments, we found that the effect of numerosity adaptation was significantly reduced, but not eliminated, when the contrast polarity of stimuli was inverted relative to the preceding adaptor. Follow-up experiments confirmed that the persistence of the aftereffects was not due to retinal adaptation or top-down decision bias. Finally, a computational model incorporating both high- and low-level adaptation successfully reproduced the behavioral pattern. These findings suggest that numerosity adaptation involves at least two stages of visual processing: adaptation to low-level visual features at early sensory stages and to numerosity at higher levels of the visual processing hierarchy. HighlightsO_LINumber adaptation is sensitive to mismatches in contrast polarity C_LIO_LIMismatched stimuli reduce aftereffects but do not eliminate them C_LIO_LIEarly sensory adaptation may modulate higher stage numerosity processing C_LI

Artists and photographers use diagonals to convey dynamism, tension and instability in naturalistic and abstract images. However, the oblique effect in visual perception refers to a reduced sensitivity to oblique compared to cardinal (vertical/horizontal) orientations, linked to anisotropy in the distribution of preferred orientations of primary visual cortex neurons, which reflect the statistical distribution of edge orientations in natural images. Distal diagonals generically project onto oblique orientations on the retina, creating a conundrum between their perceptual salience in art and their reduced sensitivity in vision. We conjectured that global spatial configurations could shape perceived dynamism overriding local orientations. Inspired by van Doesburgs 1929 Arithmetical Composition, we created 60 distinct linear configurations of four identically-shaped rhombi each, in which global and local-edge orientations were independently manipulated to be cardinal or oblique, and measured their perceived dynamism with behavioral, psychophysical, and psychophysiological methods. First, 250 observers rated oblique configurations as more dynamic, tridimensional, and unstable than cardinal configurations, with wedge shapes and element spacing enhancing dynamism. Second, pairwise comparisons (50 observers) yielded a perceptual dynamism scale that confirmed the dominant role of global orientations. Third, pupillometry (35 observers) showed that pupil dilation correlates systematically with subjective dynamism ratings. Perceived dynamism in static images is thus driven primarily by the orientation and shape of spatial configurations, indicating the importance of estimating orientations and shapes of multielement objects beyond decoding local orientations. By linking visual structure to emotional perceptual experience, this investigation provides empirically grounded principles for creating dynamic percepts in visual art. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTDiagonals have been used since Michelangelo to create dynamic compositions in representative and abstract art and photography, but paradoxically humans have been shown to be less sensitive to oblique orientations like those projected on the retina by diagonal edges. We resolve this conflict by distinguishing between global configurations versus local edges and showing through behavioral, psychophysical, and psychophysiological experiments that the global orientation and shape of a multi-element configuration has a much larger effect on perceived dynamism than do the edge orientations of its elements. Neural estimation of orientations and shapes of multi-element configurations is thus essential for image understanding. Our results provide perceptually grounded bases for using diagonal configurations with wedge shapes to create dynamic percepts in visual art.

Eye contact is one of the most potent social signals, but it remains unclear how little visual input is sufficient to register direct gaze, and whether such registration requires conscious awareness. Here, we used a custom tachistoscope to present faces for only 1-5 ms, asking whether gaze direction can shape perception at the very limits of vision. Direct-gaze faces required less visual input to localise than averted-gaze faces and produced higher localisation sensitivity from 3 ms onwards. Crucially, this advantage emerged before participants could explicitly categorise gaze direction, and before perceptual awareness ratings showed metacognitive access to the information driving localisation, both of which appeared only at 4-5 ms. Information-theoretic analyses confirmed that localisation responses carried stimulus-location information before explicit reports and awareness ratings became informative. A second experiment showed that the earliest eye-contact advantage depended mainly on low spatial frequencies, indicating a role for coarse visual information. Finally, autistic traits were associated with a reduced localisation advantage for direct gaze. These findings show that eye contact can influence perceptual processing within just a few milliseconds, with less visual stimulation than is required for conscious access to gaze direction.

Reflecting how we organize visual experience in everyday memory, visual working memory is increasingly understood as a system in which individual item representations are organized within structures rather than maintained in isolation. Among these, relational structure may be especially consequential because, by specifying how one item value lies relative to another within a feature space, it could allow information about one remembered value to constrain which values are plausible for the other. Yet demonstrating such constraint is challenging because item-specific mnemonic evidence and relational evidence ordinarily support essentially the same estimate. We broke this equivalence with biased post-encoding feedback for one item, making item-specific and relation-based predictions for the other diverge. Across three experiments, participants remembered two sequentially presented orientations, with feedback for one shifted slightly clockwise or counterclockwise from its actual value. Participants incorporated this bias into memory for the feedback-provided orientation; critically, it also appeared in reports of the other orientation, which received no feedback, in the direction predicted by the signed angular offset linking the two remembered values. This feedback transfer weakened with increasing angular separation but occurred in both directions between the first and second orientations. These findings show that relational structure directly constrains individual value estimates in visual working memory, even for items encountered separately. By dissociating normally coincident item-specific and relation-based predictions, our approach reveals an otherwise hidden relational contribution. A probabilistic account explains these findings through joint inference from uncertain item-specific and relational evidence, with their relative uncertainties governing transfer strength.

Early life adversity is associated with increased risk for psychopathology and shifts in life history (LH) strategies, but the psychological mechanisms underlying these associations remain unclear. Drawing on evolutionary-developmental theory, we examined whether short-term mindsets mediate associations between dimensions of childhood adversity and mental health and LH-related outcomes. In a UK-representative sample of 877 adults, we assessed threat, deprivation, and unpredictability, alongside internalizing and externalizing symptoms, borderline features, and a latent factor capturing reproductive versus somatic maintenance effort. Structural equation models showed that adversity predicted poorer mental health and faster LH strategies. Short-term mindsets, indexed by lower future orientation and higher affective impulsivity, mediated effects of adversity, particularly unpredictability. Further decomposition of unpredictability into short-timescale and long-timescale forms revealed dissociable effects, with short-timescale unpredictability primarily linked to psychopathology and long-timescale unpredictability to reproductive-oriented LH strategies.

Naturalistic behaviors largely lack objective measures of performance, making it difficult to quantify individual differences and establish links between brain and behavior. Here, we propose typicality, the degree to which an individual's response aligns with the group average, as a framework for identifying and relating stable individual differences across behavioral and neural domains. We propose that, when observers share similar objectives and constraints, convergence toward a consensus response may reflect convergence toward an effective or optimal solution, allowing typicality to approximate optimal processing even when objective ground truth is lacking. To evaluate this framework, we combined naturalistic movie viewing during fMRI with a behavioral battery across multiple tasks spanning social and non-social cognition. Behavioral and neural typicality proved highly stable within individuals while remaining sensitive to the specific computations engaged by different stimuli. Crucially, behavioral typicality was related to neural typicality across multiple domains, with different behavioral measures mapping onto neural systems relevant to the corresponding computations. Neural typicality also predicted objectively measured performance in motion prediction and face recognition tasks, extending the framework beyond consensus-based measures alone. Together, these findings establish typicality as a stable, computation-sensitive measure that links individual differences in behavior to the neural systems supporting them. More broadly, they suggest that the group consensus provides more than a reference for quantifying individual differences: under appropriate conditions, proximity to this shared response may provide an empirical approximation of optimal processing. Typically, therefore, offers a framework for linking brain and behavior in complex naturalistic contexts.

Infants actively shape their experience through self-generated movement. They need to move their head efficiently to explore and interact with their environment and to hold their head still to sustain attention. Controlled laboratory studies have documented the importance of head movements in orienting and stabilizing infant visual attention, but little is known about how head control develops as infants go about daily life, the setting in which development actually unfolds. We analyzed 383 hours of egocentric video collected from 88 infants aged 3 weeks to 29 months using head-mounted cameras in infants homes. Using a visual-odometry algorithm, we quantified rotational magnitude, the size of head movements; and rotational efficiency, the directional coherence of head movements. Head-rotation magnitude increased across the first year, and rotational efficiency improved throughout development.

The absence of voluntary visual imagery, known as aphantasia, offers a unique lens into the role of visual imagery in visual memory processes such as face recognition. While aphantasics often report difficulties, behavioral differences in standard tasks have generally been small. One possibility is that the contribution of visual imagery becomes apparent only when face recognition is especially demanding. We compared age- and gender-matched aphantasics and typical imagers on the more challenging long-form version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT+) and on a measure of inverted face recognition. We also included tasks assessing object recognition and face perception. No group differences emerged for face perception or object recognition. By contrast, typical imagers outperformed aphantasics under high visual and mnemonic demands in face recognition in the laboratory cohort, particularly at the highest difficulty level of the CFMT+ and in inverted face recognition. This effect was attenuated or even absent in the online cohort. Drift-diffusion modelling indicated that this discrepancy was primarily driven by reduced response caution in online typical imagers. A meta-analysis of published short-form CFMT studies (total N = 432) revealed a moderate and reliable advantage for typical imagers (hedges g [&le;] 0.41). Finally, across cohorts and tasks, aphantasics reported consistently lower subjective confidence, independent of accuracy. Overall, these findings suggest that visual imagery benefits face recognition, and highlight the need for caution in online testing, the predominant approach in aphantasia research.

Certain conscious contents--such as the covert name of a viewed object--arise involuntarily and resist suppression, a phenomenon captured by the Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT). Whether a subliminal prime can bias which of two simultaneously present objects captures such an involuntary naming response has not been established. We adapted a two-object RIT into a self-contained, browser-based instrument. Thirty-eight adults (M age = 21.6 years, SD = 2.3; 26 female) viewed 24 object pairs and were instructed to fixate a central cross, to refrain from thinking of the objects names, and to click an object whenever its name intruded into awareness. On each trial a masked prime (17 ms, flanked by pattern masks) was either the exact name of one object (Exact Word Prime), a semantic associate of one object (Semantic Prime), or a neutral string (No Prime), defining a primed side per trial. A post-experiment debriefing confirmed that participants noticed the masks but none consciously perceived or could identify the prime words, indicating that the primes were subliminal. Analyses excluded 91 of 912 trials (10.0%) with more than five clicks. The priming effect was robust across measures: an omnibus comparison of clicks across conditions was significant (Friedman {chi}{superscript 2}(2) = 6.59, p = .037); within both prime conditions participants clicked the primed side more than the not-primed side (Exact Word, p = .039; Semantic, p = .005); and the primed-to-not-primed ratio exceeded parity by roughly 57-59% (Laplace-smoothed ratio {approx} 1.58; one-sample Wilcoxon p < .001 for each). A Bayesian Poisson generalized linear mixed model with random participant intercepts confirmed a credible primed-side advantage (incidence rate ratio = 1.72, 95% credible interval [1.57, 1.90]) that did not differ between prime types. No general left/right response bias emerged. An exploratory ight-side x Exact Word Prime interaction was inconsistent across model classes and is reported as hypothesis-generating. The findings indicate that subliminal lexical and semantic primes can steer the spatial locus of involuntary object naming.

Social media users often feel that time vanishes while scrolling, but real feeds confound novelty, rewards, social signals, and self-paced control, leaving the driver of this distortion unclear. We tested whether self-paced visual exploration is sufficient to compress subjective time by comparing active scrolling with passive, yoked viewing and a static baseline. Twenty-three adults viewed sequences of natural images under three within-subject conditions: Scrolling (self-paced mouse clicks), Watching (a passive, yoked replay of their own scrolling sequence), and a Baseline (a static image). Participants estimated the elapsed duration of each block. Subjective duration was most compressed under Scrolling (48% of elapsed time), followed by Watching (51%) and Baseline (65%). Two sources separated these effects. Adding back the empty inter-image fixations brought the image-rich conditions to within seconds of the Baseline, showing that observers barely counted the blank gaps; the Scrolling--Watching difference, by contrast, was independent of these shared gaps, isolating self-paced control as a second source of compression. Electrophysiology linked that control to anticipatory neural states and the timing of early visual responses, with no amplified encoding of individual images. The results favor an attention-weighted account of timing, on which subjective duration tracks how much attention reaches the clock, a resource that a self-paced stream and its uncounted gaps both draw away.

Contextual word learning is a fundamental mechanism for vocabulary acquisition during childhood. In adults, successful inference of word meaning from context is intrinsically rewarding, and is associated with greater enjoyment and greater activity in reward-related brain regions. Whether similar reward mechanisms support word learning in children, and whether they differ as a function of ability, remains unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine neural responses during contextual word learning in 25 children aged 11-13 years with typical reading skills and in 20 age-matched children with dyslexia. Neurotypical readers showed enhanced activation in core reward-processing regions, including the ventral striatum, when successfully learning the meanings of novel words. In contrast, children with dyslexia did not exhibit comparable reward-related responses despite performing the same task. Crucially, this group difference was specific to word learning, as no significant group differences were observed in ventral striatal responses during a non-linguistic monetary reward task. In addition, to confirm the behavioural relevance of these neural findings, we examined an age-matched, independent sample of children. We found that stronger reading skills were associated with greater enjoyment during successful word learning. Together, these results suggest that interactions between reward and language systems during contextual word learning is influenced by reading proficiency. Reduced intrinsic reward responses to successful language learning may contribute to differences in reading development and have implications for the design of more engaging and effective reading interventions for struggling readers.

Humans rapidly assess the beauty of natural scene images. Previous EEG work suggests neural representations of beauty emerge early and are temporally sustained. Complementary fMRI work pinpoints the neural correlates of beauty to visual, frontal, and default-mode network areas. An integrated view of the spatiotemporal dynamics that give rise to the perception of beauty, however, is lacking. Beyond the beauty of the depicted scene, the quality of the image itself influences its perceived beauty, and it is unknown how the brain separates these two factors. To address these questions, we recorded EEG (N = 52) and fMRI (N = 29) data while participants rated the beauty of 100 natural scene photographs. Another group of participants (N = 46) rated the image quality of the same photographs. Separate representational similarity analyses on the EEG and fMRI data revealed early and sustained beauty-related representations across widespread cortical areas. In contrast, representations of image quality emerged earlier, had markedly different representational dynamics, and were predominantly localized to visual cortex. In a model-based EEG-fMRI fusion analysis, we investigated how the correspondence between temporally resolved EEG signals and spatially resolved fMRI signals is explained by beauty ratings. Our results suggest that beauty-related representations emerge early (from around 165ms and peaking at 275ms post-onset), are long-lasting, and primarily originate from high-level visual cortex. This spatiotemporal signature persisted when controlling for image-quality ratings. Our findings emphasize the importance of perceptual processing for perceived beauty and suggest that the brain represents aesthetic appeal independently of image quality.

In the context of education, attention can be considered the gateway for learning, yet it remains unclear which neural mechanisms of attention identified under controlled laboratory conditions are most relevant when children engage in meaningful learning. Here, we addressed this question by experimentally manipulating attention while 5th- and 6th-grade students learned novel educational content from their own teacher. Working in partnership with an experienced classroom teacher, we co-developed naturalistic auditory and visual learning streams and manipulated whether students prioritized or ignored the speech. Using school-based electroencephalography and temporal response function modeling, we examined whether attention modulated early sensory or later stages of cortical speech processing. Attention selectively modulated speech processing at approximately 170 ms, with no evidence for modulation at earlier sensory stages, supporting a predominant role for late-stage attentional selection during learning. Importantly, individual differences in attentional modulation were associated with learning: students who more strongly increased neural tracking of the speech when it was task-relevant learned more effectively from spoken instruction. The same late-stage neural mechanism also distinguished students whom their teacher independently identified as stronger attenders during everyday classroom learning. Together, these findings connect late-stage attentional modulation across experimental neural dynamics, individual learning outcomes, and teacher observations of classroom behavior. More broadly, they demonstrate how studying attention within educationally meaningful contexts can help identify which neural mechanisms are most consequential for successful learning.