Cognitive Psychology seminars

Following the seminal structure mapping theory by Dedre Gentner, the process of mapping the corresponding structures of relations defining two analogs has been understood as a key component of analogy making. However, not without a merit, in recent years some semantic, pragmatic, and perceptual aspects of analogy mapping attracted primary attention of analogy researchers. For almost a decade, our team have been re-focusing on relational structure mapping, investigating its potential mechanisms across various analogy tasks, both abstract (semantically-lean) and more concrete (semantically-rich), using diverse methods (behavioral, correlational, eye-tracking, EEG). I will present the overview of our main findings. They suggest that structure mapping (1) consists of an incremental construction of the ultimate mental representation, (2) which strongly depends on working memory resources and reasoning ability, (3) even if as little as a single trivial relation needs to be represented mentally. The effective mapping (4) is related to the slowest brain rhythm – the delta band (around 2-3 Hz) – suggesting its highly integrative nature. Finally, we have developed a new task – Graph Mapping – which involves pure mapping of two explicit relational structures. This task allows for precise investigation and manipulation of the mapping process in experiments, as well as is one of the best proxies of individual differences in reasoning ability. Structure mapping is as crucial to analogy as Gentner advocated, and perhaps it is crucial to cognition in general.

Visual perception is traditionally studied in isolation from other sensory systems, and while this approach has been exceptionally successful, in the real world, visual objects are often accompanied by sounds, smells, tactile information, or taste. How is visual processing influenced by these other sensory inputs? In this talk, I will review studies from our lab showing that a sound can influence the perception of a visual object in multiple ways. In the first part, I will focus on spatial interactions between sound and sight, demonstrating that co-localized sounds enhance visual perception. Then, I will show that these cross-modal interactions also occur at a higher contextual and semantic level, where naturalistic sounds facilitate the processing of real-world objects that match these sounds. Throughout my talk I will explore to what extent sounds not only improve visual processing but also alter perceptual representations of the objects we see. Most broadly, I will argue for the importance of considering multisensory influences on visual perception for a more complete understanding of our visual experience.

Face detection is an initial step of many social interactions involving a comparison between a visual input and a mental representation of faces, built from previous experience. Whilst emotional state was found to affect the way humans attend to faces, little research has explored the effects of emotions on the mental representation of faces. Here, we examined the specific perceptual modulation of geometric properties of the mental representations associated with state anxiety and state depression on face detection, and to compare their emotional expression. To this end, we used an adaptation of the reverse correlation technique inspired by Gosselin and Schyns’, (2003) ‘Superstitious Approach’, to construct visual representations of observers’ mental representations of faces and to relate these to their mental states. In two sessions, on separate days, participants were presented with ‘colourful’ noise stimuli and asked to detect faces, which they were told were present. Based on the noise fragments that were identified as faces, we reconstructed the pictorial mental representation utilised by each participant in each session. We found a significant correlation between the size of the mental representation of faces and participants’ level of depression. Our findings provide a preliminary insight about the way emotions affect appearance expectation of faces. To further understand whether the facial expressions of participants’ mental representations reflect their emotional state, we are conducting a validation study with a group of naïve observers who are asked to classify the reconstructed face images by emotion. Thus, we assess whether the faces communicate participants’ emotional states to others.

A high-resolution central fovea is a prominent design feature of human vision. But how important is the fovea for information processing and gaze guidance in everyday visual-cognitive tasks? Following on from classic findings for sentence reading, I will present key results from a series of eye-tracking experiments in which observers had to search for a target object within static or dynamic images of real-world scenes. Gaze-contingent scotomas were used to selectively deny information processing in the fovea, parafovea, or periphery. Overall, the results suggest that foveal vision is less important and peripheral vision is more important for scene perception and search than previously thought. The importance of foveal vision was found to depend on the specific requirements of the task. Moreover, the data support a central-peripheral dichotomy in which peripheral vision selects and central vision recognizes.

The predictive map hypothesis provides a promising framework to model representations in the hippocampal formation. I will introduce a tractable implementation of a predictive map called the successor representation (SR), before presenting data showing that rats and humans display SR-like navigational choices on a novel open-field maze. Next, I will show how such a predictive map could be implemented using spatial representations found in the hippocampal formation, before finally presenting how such learning might be well approximated by phenomena that exist in the spatial memory system - namely spike-timing dependent plasticity and theta phase precession.

How does our brain generate consciousness, that is, the subjective experience of what it is like to see face or hear a sound? Do we become aware of a stimulus during early sensory processing or only later when information is shared in a wide-spread fronto-parietal network? Neural correlates of consciousness are typically identified by comparing brain activity when a constant stimulus (e.g., a face) is perceived versus not perceived. However, in most previous experiments, conscious perception was systematically confounded with post-perceptual processes such as decision-making and report. In this talk, I will present recent EEG and fMRI studies dissociating neural correlates of consciousness and task-related processing in visual and auditory perception. Our results suggest that consciousness emerges during early sensory processing, while late, fronto-parietal activity is associated with post-perceptual processes rather than awareness. These findings challenge predominant theories of consciousness and highlight the importance of considering task relevance as a confound across different neuroscientific methods, experimental paradigms and sensory modalities.

Perception and action are biased by our recent experiences. Even when a sequence of stimuli are randomly presented, responses are sometimes attracted toward the past. The mechanism of such bias, recently termed serial dependence, is still under investigation. Currently, there is mixed evidence indicating that such bias could be either from a sensory and perceptual origin or occurring only at decisional stages. In this talk, I will present recent findings from our group showing that biases are decreased when disrupting the memory trace in a premotor region in a simple visuomotor task. In addition, we have shown that this bias is stable over periods of up to 8 s. At the end, I will show ongoing analysis of a recent experiment and argue that serial dependence may rely on distributed memory representations of stimuli and task relevant features.

Playing action video games involves both explicit (conscious) and implicit (non-conscious) expectations of timed events, such as the appearance of foes. While studies revealed that explicit attention skills are improved in action video game players (VGPs), their implicit skills remained untested. To this end, we investigated explicit and implicit temporal processing in VGPs and non-VGPs (control participants). In our variable foreperiod task, participants were immersed in a virtual reality and instructed to respond to a visual target appearing at variable delays after a cue. I will present behavioral, oculomotor and EEG data and discuss possible markers of the implicit passage of time and explicit temporal attention processing. All evidence indicates that VGPs have enhanced implicit skills to track the passage of time, which does not require conscious attention. Thus, action video game play may improve a temporal processing found altered in psychopathologies, such as schizophrenia. Could digital (game-based) interventions help remediate temporal processing deficits in psychiatric populations?

The gradual accumulation of hyperphosphorylated forms of the Tau protein (pTau) in the human brain correlate with cognitive dysfunction and neurodegeneration. I will present our recent findings on the consequences of human pTau aggregation in the hippocampal formation of a mouse tauopathy model. We show that pTau preferentially accumulates in deep-layer pyramidal neurons, leading to their neurodegeneration. In aged but not younger mice, pTau spreads to oligodendrocytes. During ‘goal-directed’ navigation, we detect fewer high-firing pyramidal cells, but coupling to network oscillations is maintained in the remaining cells. The firing patterns of individually recorded and labelled pyramidal and GABAergic neurons are similar in transgenic and non-transgenic mice, as are network oscillations, suggesting intact neuronal coordination. This is consistent with a lack of pTau in subcortical brain areas that provide rhythmic input to the cortex. Spatial memory tests reveal a reduction in short-term familiarity of spatial cues but unimpaired spatial working and reference memory. These results suggest that preserved subcortical network mechanisms compensate for the widespread pTau aggregation in the hippocampal formation. I will also briefly discuss ideas on the subcortical origins of spatial memory and the concept of the cortex as a monitoring device.

Affectively charged analogies are commonly used in literature and art, but also in politics and argumentation. There are reasons to think we may process these analogies differently. Notably, analogical reasoning is a complex process that requires the use of cognitive resources, which are limited. In the presence of affectively charged content, some of these resources might be directed towards affective processing and away from analogical reasoning. To investigate this idea, I investigated effects of affective charge on differences in brain activity evoked by sound versus unsound analogies. The presentation will detail the methods and results for two such experiments, one in which participants saw analogies formed of neutral and negative words and one in which they were created by combining conditioned symbols. I will also briefly discuss future research aiming to investigate the effects of analogical reasoning on brain activity related to affective processing.

To efficiently process sensory information, the brain relies on statistical regularities in the input. While generally improving the reliability of sensory estimates, this strategy also induces perceptual illusions that help reveal the underlying computational principles. Focusing on auditory and visual perception, in my talk I will describe how the brain exploits statistical regularities within and across the senses for the perception space, time and multisensory integration. In particular, I will show how results from a series of psychophysical experiments can be interpreted in the light of Bayesian Decision Theory, and I will demonstrate how such canonical computations can be implemented into simple and biologically plausible neural circuits. Finally, I will show how such principles of sensory information processing can be leveraged in virtual and augmented reality to overcome display limitations and expand human perception.

Unfamiliar face processing (face cognition) ability varies considerably in the general population. However, the means of its assessment are not standardised, and selected laboratory tests vary between studies. It is also unclear whether 1) the most commonly employed tests are reliable, 2) participants show a degree of consistency in their performance, 3) and the face cognition tests broadly measure one underlying ability, akin to general intelligence. In this study, we asked participants to perform eight tests frequently employed in the individual differences literature. We examined the reliability of these tests, relationships between them, consistency in participants’ performance, and used data driven approaches to determine factors underpinning performance. Overall, our findings suggest that the reliability of these tests is poor to moderate, the correlations between them are weak, the consistency in participant performance across tasks is low and that performance can be broadly split into two factors: telling faces together, and telling faces apart. We recommend that future studies adjust analyses to account for stimuli (face images) and participants as random factors, routinely assess reliability, and that newly developed tests of face cognition are examined in the context of convergent validity with other commonly used measures of face cognition ability.

Our ability to perceive the world around us can be affected by a number of factors including the nature of the external information, prior experience of the environment, and the integrity of the underlying perceptual system. A particular challenge for the brain is to maintain a coherent perception from information encoded by the peripheral sensory organs whose function is affected by typical, developmental changes across the lifespan. Yet, how the brain adapts to the maturation of the senses, as well as experiential changes in the multisensory environment, is poorly understood. Over the past few years, we have used a range of multisensory tasks to investigate the role of ageing on the brain’s ability to merge sensory inputs. In particular, we have embedded an audio-visual task based on the sound-induced flash illusion (SIFI) into a large-scale, longitudinal study of ageing. Our findings support the idea that the temporal binding window (TBW) is modulated by age and reveal important individual differences in this TBW that may have clinical implications. However, our investigations also suggest the TWB is experience-dependent with evidence for both long and short term behavioural plasticity. An overview of these findings, including recent evidence on how multisensory integration may be associated with higher order functions, will be discussed.