Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Spontaneous eye blinks have long been linked to cognitive processing, yet how task demands shape blink timing and its relationship to behavioral performance remains unclear. We examined spontaneous blink behavior in 576 adults performing two variants of the Continuous Performance Task (CPT). Blink occurrence and timing were most strongly modulated by the experimental condition in the more demanding CPT-AX task, whereas their association with response time was stronger in the CPT-X task, where more consistent blink timing predicted faster responses. This dissociation suggests that task structure changes not only blink behavior but also the behavioral relevance of blink timing. These findings are consistent with an adaptive scheduling account of spontaneous blinking and provide a conceptual framework for understanding when and why blink timing contains chronometric information about ongoing cognition.

Motor imagery and overt action are proposed to share common planning mechanisms while relying on distinct processes during movement performance. To investigate how repetition affects physical and imagined movements, participants physically or mentally drew paths while avoiding barriers. The barrier orientations were either repeated or different across consecutive trials, and the modality (execution or imagery) of the trials either changed or remained the same for two consecutive trials. Reaction time and movement time were analysed as measures of movement planning and task performance, respectively. Imagined movements produced longer reaction times and movement times than physical movements. Repetition of orientation reduced reaction times in both physical and imagined trials, indicating that trajectory repetition facilitated movement preparation. In contrast, previous trial type influenced reaction times only for physical movements, which were only initiated faster when preceded by another physical trial. Different effects emerged for movement time. Physical movements were faster when the same trajectory was repeated no matter the previous trial type, whereas imagined movements were unaffected by orientation and instead showed shorter durations when preceded by another imagined trial. The findings indicate that physical and imagined movements rely on more similar trajectory representations during the planning stage, but diverge during task performance. While physical movements appear to benefit from the persistence of previously generated movement trajectories, imagined trials seems more influenced by modality-specific cognitive processes. These results provide behavioural support for the Motor-Cognitive model and contribute to understanding how movement repetition influences overt and imagined actions.

Recognising people precedes and informs most social interactions, yet it is not clear why individuals differ so markedly in face recognition ability. Exposure-based accounts propose that it is shaped by visual experience with faces, known as 'face diet', but most prior work treats exposure as passively acquired, thereby masking the active and dynamic nature of visual attention in natural settings. Here we examined whether spontaneous attention to faces in everyday environments predicts face recognition ability. Eighty participants wore mobile eye-tracking glasses while walking through a busy university campus and during a face-to-face interaction, before completing standard measures of face recognition ability. Fixations directed to faces showed stable individual differences in both settings. People who looked more at faces scored higher on our composite measure of face recognition ability, and gaze in the two settings predicted ability independently, together accounting for 22% of its variance. These findings suggest that differences in how people actively sample visual information from their environments may be an overlooked source of variance in perceptual expertise.

Attentional selection not only increases behavioural performance and neural information for attended stimuli but, in some instances, induces changes in stimulus appearance. While reported appearance changes have mostly concerned the effects of attending to a particular spatial location, here we report a shift in appearance that occurs when attention is directed to one component of a stimulus rapidly alternating at a single spatial location. Our stimuli included two frames of different colors, which alternated at 3.75Hz or 7.5Hz. Participants reported the perceived dominance of one frame's color in the reference stimulus, by comparison with a target stimulus. We found that when one stimulus frame was more salient than the other, with a greater likelihood of capturing exogenous attention, there was an illusory perception that the frame was physically present for a greater proportion of time. When the frames were matched in salience, a task encouraging participants to endogenously direct their attention to one frame produced a smaller shift in appearance. Our results add to the body of literature demonstrating that attention can change appearance, in this case altering the appearance of attended versus unattended stimuli that are presented at the same spatial location. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that at the 'temporal transparent' alternation rate of 7.5Hz, where rapidly alternating stimuli are perceived as two translucent surfaces, attentional selection of one surface can account for the apparent paradox that feature conjunctions are perceived at stimulus alternation rates higher than predicted by the temporal limits of feature binding for other stimuli.

Eye movements have been shown to reveal the cognitive processes underlying spatial ability, but most studies investigating gaze behaviour in spatial cognition use a single, screen-based task. Therefore, it is unknown whether these gaze behaviours are preserved across naturalistic task environments, or whether their relationship with spatial performance is domain-general or task-specific. The present study tested whether established gaze behaviours are preserved and generalizable across diverse, naturalistic spatial tasks. N = 30 young adults completed three naturalistic spatial tasks varying in perceptual, cognitive, and visuomotor demands: Q-bitz, the Brick Building Task (BBT), and the Mental Rotation Test (MRT). Gaze was measured using the Pupil Labs Neon eye tracker. Within-task analyses were conducted to assess whether gaze behaviours were preserved, and cross-task analyses were conducted to assess the generalizability of preserved gaze behaviours. Within-task analyses identified source inspection and transition rate as gaze behaviours that were consistently sensitive to changing task demands. Cross-task analyses showed that source fixation duration was a domain-general predictor of performance, whereas the relationship between transition rate and performance differed by task. Exploratory sex-separated analyses also suggested a more consistent gaze-performance relationship in males. These findings show that source fixation duration may represent a common cognitive process underlying performance across naturalistic spatial tasks.

Motivational incentives are known to improve working memory (WM) when items differ in value, but whether they enhance performance when all items are equally valued, and if so, by what mechanism, remains unclear. Improvements could reflect enhanced memory-based representations or speed-accuracy trade-offs, whereby incentives promote slower, more cautious responding without improving memory itself. Here, we tested these alternatives across two experiments using an auditory WM task in which incentives varied across trials, but all items on a trial were equally incentivised. In Experiment 1,we allowed participants to resubmit their responses if desired. Reward-related improvements in WM performance were selectively observed when memory load was high, and only at serial positions associated with greater interference. These improvements were also dissociated from systematic response slowing and resubmission behaviour. This indicated that the benefits of incentives were unlikely to be attributable to response caution. Critically, in Experiment 2, motivational benefits persisted under strict response deadlines, where speed cannot be traded for accuracy. Computational modelling showed that reward selectively improved the precision of memory-based responses without reducing guessing. Together, these findings indicate that motivational incentives improve WM by enhancing the quality of memory-based representations, rather than by strategic slowing or altering response strategies.

Changes in pupil size have been widely used as an indirect measure of attention. However, attention engages on a faster timescale than the pupillary response. Therefore, the slow time course of the pupil response makes it difficult to distinguish attentional responses to stimuli presented in close temporal succession. Although signal deconvolution has been used in previous research to estimate latent attentional responses from the pupil signal, existing methods primarily model dilation without considering the visual stimulus evoked constriction phase of the pupil. Here, we introduce a dual-kernel deconvolution model that models constriction and dilation using separate impulse response functions. Using an RSVP paradigm with emotional faces as target stimuli, we demonstrate that the proposed model estimates latent attentional response despite substantial overlap in the measured pupil signal. Importantly, the recovered attentional response resembles the time course of attentional allocation previously predicted by several models of Attentional Blink. Together, these findings demonstrate that the dynamics of latent attentional episodes can be recovered from the pupil response with a temporal resolution previously obscured by the sluggishness of the pupillary response. The proposed method is also provided as a usable software package that serves as a general tool for investigating the temporal dynamics of attention in rapid visual paradigms.

How cognitive control influences the correction of motor errors is an important question. In this study, we examined how the slow and fast processes that constitute motor adaptation are modulated by cognitive load. To address this question, we used a novel approach that differed from traditional dual-task experiments that have assessed the role of fast processes by decreasing attention to the motor adaptation task. Here, cognitive load was manipulated using a decision-making task with easy and hard difficulty levels, while simultaneously adapting to a perturbation and maintaining attention on the task. Our results showed that the hard decision-making task increased cognitive load relative to the easy task, resulting in attenuated steady-state learning. The relative contributions of the fast and slow components were assessed using a dual state-space model, which showed that the former was larger under the high-load condition, whereas the latter was larger under the easy-load condition, consistent with a competition model in which a shared error signal is partitioned between the two processes. We also showed that the effect of cognitive load on fast processes was not attributable to increased reaction times or task performance. Taken together, these results support the notion that faster explicit motor adaptation processes derive from cognitive processes involved in action selection.

Efficient motion perception requires integrating immediate sensory evidence with internal representations shaped by experience. This influence of recent history can produce serial dependence effects (SDEs), in which current judgments are biased toward or away from the source of previous information. We examined SDEs in auditory, visual, and cued audiovisual motion-direction discrimination using aggregate psychometric measures and trial-level generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMMs), which estimated the independent contributions of the previous stimulus direction and the participant's previous response. Participants completed unisensory (n=57) and cued audiovisual (n=48) motion-discrimination tasks. Aggregate analyses indicated attractive SDEs in auditory conditions, repulsive SDEs in visual conditions, and no net SDE in the audiovisual-cued condition. Trial-level modeling revealed a more nuanced structure: previous stimulus direction produced repulsive effects in both unisensory conditions, with previous visual direction influencing judgments across all conditions containing visual motion, whereas previous response produced attractive effects only when visual information was task-relevant. In the audiovisual-cued condition, the absence of a net psychometric shift was consistent with the opposing influences of an attractive response-history effect and a repulsive visual stimulus-history effect rather than an absence of serial dependence. These findings suggest that serial dependence in motion perception reflects dissociable and concurrently operating processes, including a predominantly visual, adaptation-like stimulus-history effect and a task-dependent, decision-related response-history effect.

Task demand has a long-standing history in experimental psychology, with numerous investigations of the capacity of different systems and processes under varying cognitive load. Whilst demand is a broadly used term in the literature, it is limited by a lack of cross-domain operationalisation, and thus can be a confound in many inter-domain investigations. To address this, we generated and validated two large-scale, open-source, widely applicable stimuli sets that: (i) can probe a wide, continuous range of objective behaviourally-measured processing demand, and (ii) can be directly matched across two highly contrastive cognitive domains (semantic and visuospatial processing). We normed these tasks in a large, online cohort of healthy adults, enabling future studies to utilise and benefit from reliable baseline measures of demand. Using a matching algorithm that takes into account both speed and accuracy, we then closely paired each semantic judgement trial with a trial of comparable difficulty from the corresponding visuospatial task to produce a cross domain matched set of over 400 items. Finally, we analysed the psycholinguistic and perceptual properties of these stimuli to explore some of the underlying factors driving demand.

Mice are widely used to study the neural basis of perceptual decision-making, often with the ultimate goal of extrapolating insights to humans. Yet, whether humans and mice rely on similar computational strategies remains rarely tested, partly because the two species acquire knowledge differently. Animals learn from experience, while humans usually receive verbal task instructions. Here, we explicitly contrast these modes of learning in humans who perform a perceptual decision-making task adapted from a standardized rodent task. Specifically, we present an open behavioral dataset from 80 human participants who performed 600 trials of a visual contrast-discrimination task, matched to the standardized International Brain Laboratory task for mice (International Brain Laboratory et al., 2021, 2025). Participants either received verbal instructions ('Instructed') or were only told to discover the rules of the task by playing ('Uninstructed'). The dataset contains choices, response times, continuous cursor trajectories, eye-tracking and pupil recordings. Descriptive analyses show that Uninstructed participants were less accurate and had higher lapse rates than Instructed participants. They improved over the first 200 trials, approaching the performance of Instructed participants. These data provide a benchmark for testing whether computational strategies identified in mice also describe human behavior.

Predicting when an event will occur is key to perceiving and evaluating dynamic sensory inputs, such as speech. The utility of temporal predictions hinges on perceptual timing precision (PTP), the sensitivity to deviations between actual and predicted sound onset times. Past work suggests that PTP is primarily determined by acoustic properties of target sounds, regardless of the acoustics of preceding sound cues. In contrast, in four experiments, we discover that PTP is best when context and target sound spectra and temporal envelopes match, with only minor effects of individual sound acoustics. This ability to utilize contextual continuity improved with musical aptitude. Theoretical modeling showed that spectrally tuned oscillatory entrainment to sound onsets and offsets is necessary to account for our results. In sum, the precision of temporal predictions is defined not by the acoustics of individual sounds but by the continuity of spectral and temporal content within a sound stream.

When objects are embedded in a complex lighting environment, the illumination they receive depends on their geometric relationship to the environment. We measured performance in an odd-one-out color constancy task, with objects rendered in complex lighting environments. Observers identified the odd object among four objects, with two rendered under each of two lighting environments, sampled from a wide range of object orientations and camera positions. Constancy was high. The presence of a surrounding context increased accuracy. Gloss provided no measurable benefit. We also tested a condition in which the global color impression provided misleading information about the lighting environment, but this impaired performance only slightly. These findings suggest that human color constancy remains robust even under complex lighting environments, contrary to predictions of many simple models of illuminant discounting.

Despite the ubiquitous nature of visual search in our daily lives, our knowledge of the underlying mechanisms is almost entirely derived from studies using simple, synthetic stimuli briefly flashed on a computer monitor. In real life, however, visual search occurs in three-dimensional environments over much longer timescales and involves the dynamic coordination of attention, memory, and action planning, generating novel predictions that cannot be tested with traditional approaches. Here, we examined how self-guided visual search unfolds under naturalistic conditions that extend over space and time. We asked participants (N=80) to find specific objects (e.g., a green lamp, an orange shelf) in an immersive, visually rich virtual reality environment using range-limited teleportation (2 m steps). Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that self-guided search engaged a hierarchical information-seeking policy characterized at each stage by recurring plan-and-execute cycles paired with subgoal-specific attentional priorities. Subgoal priorities progressed from wayfinding to identification of clusters of target-similar objects, and then to specific target features. These search priorities progressively narrowed the search space through coordinated eye, head, and body movements that recurred throughout the task. We conclude that naturalistic search is hierarchical, built from sequential subgoals with shifting attentional priorities that single-level tasks cannot capture. Moreover, immersive VR with eye-head-body tracking dissociates motor planning from execution moments and reveals how looking content shifts with each task subgoal while the person moves through space, something desktop tasks cannot capture.

In fully-sighted individuals, pursuit and saccadic eye movements work together to foveate moving targets; pursuit attempts to match target velocity, while catch-up saccades re-align the fovea to the target if it deviates during pursuit. Although saccade-pursuit interactions are well understood in healthy individuals, much less is known about how these mechanisms adapt in the presence of central vision loss. Here, we simulated central vision loss in healthy young adults to examine plasticity in saccade-pursuit mechanisms and investigated whether and how catch-up saccades adapted over five days of visual tracking. Twenty-five fully sighted participants performed a task in which they pursued a moving target that stepped position randomly (designed to elicit catch-up saccades) while viewing with a gaze-contingent central scotoma. The scotoma was shaped like a bitten cookie to encourage use of a specific preferred retinal locus (PRL) corresponding to the peripheral location with the highest acuity. By the end of the five days of repetition, most participants showed catch-up saccade endpoints shifted towards the PRL rather than the fovea. On average, endpoints shifted 0.5 deg towards the PRL between days 1 and 5 (range=0.3-1.5 deg), with significant shifts in 13 of the 25 participants. Adaptation was asymmetric; shifts were largest when the target moved in the direction opposite the scotoma bite and smallest when it moved towards it. In summary, we observed adaptation of saccade-pursuit interactive mechanisms through the re-referencing of catch-up saccades from the fovea to PRL. These results provide a promising avenue for rehabilitation in central vision loss aimed at improving eye movements and encouraging PRL use. Ultimately, such an approach may enhance residual visual function and quality of life.

Serial dependence, whereby current perception is systematically biased toward the most recent sensory experience, has been demonstrated across multiple sensory modalities. However, whether serial dependence occurs during active haptic perception remains unknown. Moreover, because haptic perception of object geometry depends on hand movements for sensory acquisition (i.e., active touch), it remains unclear whether serial dependence, if any, originates from perceptual processing, movement, or both. Here, we investigated whether active haptic perception exhibits attractive serial dependence using a newly developed haptic device that let participants explore virtual slopes of different heights. Participants reported perceived slope heights, and we recorded their kinematics. Perceptual judgments were systematically attracted toward the most recently experienced slope, demonstrating serial dependence during active haptic perception. By contrast, none of the kinematic parameters exhibited corresponding serial dependence. These findings show that serial dependence extends to the somatosensory perceptual domain and suggest that the observed perceptual bias was not mediated by systematic changes in hand movements.

The relationship between neural processes supporting perception, deviance processing, and post-perceptual task demands during auditory processing is not well understood. We used multitone masking and a no-report inattentional deafness paradigm to dissociate neural correlates of auditory perceptual awareness, deviance processing, and task demands. Evoked responses to physically identical target-tone pairs were recorded across three phases differing only in task instructions. In Phase A, human participants remained nave to (and thus unaware of) the target tones. In Phase B, participants were informed about (and thus aware of) the target tones. In Phase C, participants remained aware of the target tones and judged the duration of the silent gap between them, rendering them task-relevant. When participants were aware of them, target tones elicited an auditory awareness negativity and an increased positivity in the P3 window), with larger responses when target tones were additionally task-relevant. Furthermore, though largest in Phase C, deviant stimuli elicited a mismatch negativity across all task conditions, while a significant P3 to deviants was only observed in Phase C. Thus, early and late responses can be independently modulated by awareness, deviance, and task-relevance, indicating that they do not necessarily rely on shared neural mechanisms despite overlapping spatiotemporal profiles.

Mistakes make up our daily lives. Once a mistake has been committed, it is common to pause before you continue. This slowing is called post-error slowing (PES). Although several theories have been proposed to account for PES in humans, findings across cognitive tasks show variation in how PES occurs, and it is unclear how this phenomenon may translate across modalities to a key model organism of human cognition, macaque monkeys. To determine whether monkeys exhibit PES, we tested three rhesus macaque monkeys in components of cognitive sequential decision-making tasks that used either eye tracking or touch screens to report responses. Here we show that monkeys exhibit non-adaptive, error type-dependent PES across modalities. Task structure and context also modulated PES in the eye tracking task, and no modality improved task performance following PES. These results suggest that monkey PES is a combination of cognitive and non-cognitive related responses to error that are modulated by task structures such as error type and task context. Overall, the flexibility in monkey PES is comparable to that of humans, further supporting the importance of monkeys as a translational model in investigating the mechanisms of PES.

We investigated how auditory and visual presentation of small numerical magnitudes and non- numerical magnitudes are passively processed at the neural level. Earlier research suggests automatic processing of quantities occurs rapidly in the brain. However, there are no studies on passive, pre-attentive change detection of magnitudes utilizing mismatch negativity (MMN) across sensory modalities in same participants, important to understand amodal processing of magnitudes. We recorded EEG in passive auditory and visual multi-feature oddball and control paradigms from the same adult individuals (N=104/105, respectively). In the auditory paradigm, the standard stimulus was a 2-part sound, while the deviant stimuli varied in frequency, intensity, gap length, and number of sounds (1-part and 3-part stimuli). In the visual paradigm, the standard stimulus was a dot array containing two medium-sized dots, while the deviant stimuli varied in numerosity (1 or 3 dots) and dot size (small or large). The results for the auditory paradigm showed significant MMN across all features, including comparisons with deviant-alone control stimuli, except for the 2-part vs. 1-part contrast. The results for the visual paradigm suggested differences in processing across all features apart from large and medium-size stimuli. These results replicate earlier MMN findings that the brain distinguishes pre-attentively changes in sound frequency, amplitude and gap. Auditorily presented small numerical magnitudes also showed pre-attentive processing but less robustly to the contrast 2 vs. 1. Visual pre-attentive processing of small numerical magnitudes was also observed. Together these findings could be interpreted to support the existence of abstract, pre- attentive processing of numerical magnitudes. Highlights* Auditory and visual processing of numerical and non-numerical magnitudes was examined with EEG * Auditory non-numerical magnitudes and medium vs. small dots replicated earlier MMN studies * aMMN and vMMN showed pre-attentive processing of changes in small numerosities 2 vs. 3 and 2 vs. 1 * 2 vs. 1 tone processing was less robust than 2 vs. 3 or the processing of the visual contrasts * The brain processes changes in small non-symbolic magnitudes pre-attentively

Perception combines incoming sensory evidence with priors learned from preceding input. One example is the central tendency effect in which stimulus estimates regress towards a prior based on the mean of the stimulus distribution. Whether such priors are specific to each modality or shared across modalities remains unresolved. Here, we examined this question using speed perception in the visual, auditory and tactile modalities and used central tendency as a behavioral probe. By giving each modality its own speed range, clear predictions emerge when modalities are interleaved: if priors are modality specific, each modality should maintain its own central tendency bias whereas a supramodal prior would exhibit a different mean based on the pooled set of speeds. Moreover, a supra-modal prior should exhibit precision weighting, with the more reliable cue receiving more weight. For vision and touch, speed estimates converged when interleaved: both modalities shifted but the less reliable one shifted more, consistent with a precision-weighted supramodal prior. For vision and audition, the priors remained largely distinct: audition (the less reliable modality) showed a partial shift but did not converge on the precision weighted, supramodal mean. This was not explained by the large audiovisual reliability difference: it persisted when visual precision was reduced. These results show that in the motion domain, visual and tactile signals can combine crossmodally, but auditory and visual signals do not. Supramodal processing of motion therefore depends on which senses are involved and is likely explained by the lack of an early spatial mapping in audition.