Recent research has shown that as compared with neurotypicals, autistic individuals have lower eye movement consistency in face recognition in addition to poorer performance. This effect is associated with Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) Social Skill, suggesting that it may be related to insufficient social exposure for visual routine development. Here, we aimed to investigate whether this phenomenon could also be observed in visual search tasks with social stimuli or with high scene complexity to understand its generalizability and underlying mechanisms. We compared the performance and eye movement behavior of 33 autistic individuals with matched neurotypicals when searching for either social (human) or non-social (vehicle) stimuli in either low complexity or high complexity real-world scenes. The results showed that they had similar hit rate and precision as well as eye movement pattern and consistency. However, autistic individuals had longer search time and made a larger number of fixations with longer fixation durations, suggesting lower efficiency in identifying potential targets. The longer search time and larger number of fixations were both uniquely predicted by AQ Details/Patterns beyond associated cognitive ability measures, suggesting their relevance to autistic traits of restrictive and repetitive behavior. This difficulty was not limited to social stimuli or complex scenes, supporting a domain-general view of deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Together with findings from face recognition, our results suggest that the manifestation of autistic individuals’ processing difficulties depends on the task demands and related traits. Our findings have important implications for the behavioral markers and core mechanisms of ASD. Identifying objective behavioral markers and the core mechanisms of autism have been central to the research on autism for early diagnosis, intervention planning, and progress monitoring purposes. Previous research has reported that as compared with neurotypicals, autistic individuals showed less consistent eye movement patterns across face recognition trials, and this inconsistency was particularly associated with autistic traits related to poor social skills. This finding suggests that reduced consistency in eye movement patterns when viewing social stimuli may be a potential behavioral marker of autism. Nevertheless, here we show that this effect was not observed in visual search in real-world scenes with either social (people) or non-social (vehicles) targets. Specifically, autistic individuals showed similar eye movement patterns and similar consistency of eye movement patterns across trials to neurotypicals regardless of searching for social or non-social targets. However, they demonstrated repetitive scanning behavior, resulting in a larger number of fixations and longer search time than neurotypicals. This prolonged search time was particularly associated with autistic traits related to restrictive and repetitive behavior. Thus, cognitive tasks with different task demands may induce different processing difficulties in autistic individuals that reflect different aspects of the core mechanisms underlying autism. Identifying the specific manifestation of these processing difficulties, such as reduced consistency in face scanning behavior and repetitive scanning behavior in visual search, could potentially provide easily accessible objective behavioral markers of autism.
The ability to selectively attend to task-relevant information is central to the performance of a variety of cognitive tasks. Accessible and low-risk pharmacological interventions hold promise with respect to maximizing cognitive performance and augmenting attentional abilities. Acute administration of caffeine reflects one such pharmacological intervention, which has been shown to improve some measures of attention. The effects of caffeine on the efficiency of attentional selection during visual search and the degree to which such efficiency can improve with learning have not been investigated, which we tested here. In a single-blind between-subjects design, participants received either 200 mg of caffeine or placebo and completed visual search tasks in which the target (Experiment 1) and a physically salient distractor (Experiment 2) were more likely to be rendered in a particular color. A third task was also implemented to measure the trade-off between physical and attentional effort under the effect of caffeine (Experiment 3). The efficiency of target selection (Experiment 1) and distractor rejection (Experiment 2) were strongly influenced by color-based statistical learning. Participants were sensitive to the trade-off between physical and attentional effort (Experiment 3). However, none of these measures were influenced by caffeine. A beneficial effect of caffeine was observed on the speed of target recognition in Experiment 1 only. Our findings suggest a limited role for the influence of caffeine on the attention system. Caffeine, a substance that is deeply embedded in our daily lives, is colloquially believed to serve as a “cognitive enhancer” with beneficial effects on attention. Despite this popular belief, we know little about the effect of caffeine on attention. Attention is a critical cognitive process that allows individuals to prioritize relevant information while filtering out distractions. The current study offers insight into the effect of caffeine on attention through a series of experiments that probe attentional selection of relevant information, the suppression of irrelevant distractions, and the mental effort involved in controlling attention. By clarifying how caffeine influences attention, this research advances our basic understanding of cognitive control while also informing practical decisions about its use in education, work, and safety–critical tasks. In the present study, caffeine had a limited impact on attention across the three experiments, casting doubt on the effectiveness of caffeine as a pharmacological means of broadly enhancing attentional performance.
Prior work has shown that memory typically gets worse over time, and narrative memory is better the more causally connected an event is within the story. Here, we assessed memory for a real-world narrative event, the 2016 US presidential election, which played out over many months. People were asked to recall election-related news stories and write brief headlines. We assessed memory in terms of the amount of time that had passed since the event, as well as the degree to which an event was causally integrated into the larger story. The data from 944 participants involved 1115 distinct news events that were coded in terms of temporal delay and number of causal connections to other events. We used negative binomial regression to examine these influences. Surprisingly, although the amount of time had little impact on memory overall, the number of causal connections was significantly related to memory. Furthermore, memory was driven more by the number of causal consequences that followed from an event rather than those that preceded it, although these had some influence. This indicates that for complex, long-term narratives, even those that play out over many months, the role that events play in a narrative’s causal structure are better predictors of memory than temporal distance. The research reported in this study assessed how principles derived from research on memory for narrative texts (i.e., stories) can be applied to real-world, autobiographically experienced, news-related narratives. While prior basic research emphasized the use of several small, experimenter-derived narratives that are read and tested within the context of a one-hour laboratory experiment, the current study assessed memory for a single, large, authentic story that played out over many months via a variety of news outlets. This work shows that while some laboratory-derived principles, such as the role of narrative causal connectivity among story events (how some events caused other events) can influence performance, other principles, such as the forgetting curve, play a much more minor role, at least within the context of the narrative itself. As such, this research provides insight into how we remember the various autobiographical and societal stories that we experience in our lives.
Repetition increases belief for both true and false statements. This illusory truth effect is pervasive, occurring for general facts (e.g., trivia), political news headlines, and health related claims. The effect is often attributed to the fluency account, in which repetition increases processing fluency, and this ease of processing is used as a cue for truth. Photos can also influence belief through a similar underlying mechanism. Presenting statements with semantically related and unrelated photos increases and decreases belief, respectively. The primary goal of the current study is to investigate whether the two effects interact. That is, does the addition of related and unrelated photos amplify or reduce the effect of repetition on perceived truth, respectively. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 151) rated the truth of trivia statements across three photo conditions (related, unrelated, none). In Experiment 2, participants (N = 201) rated the truth of political headlines across two photo conditions (related, none). In Experiment 3, participants (total N = 604) rated the truth of trivia statements across two photo conditions (related, none) and two stimulus sets, either with or without repetition. Overall, repetition increased belief, the photos did not influence belief, and there was not an interaction effect. The results suggest that when two different factors operating under a similar mechanism are at play in belief formation, the dominant effect (e.g., repetition) may overshadow the weaker effect (e.g., presence of photo). Even without the masking effect of repetition, we find that the effect of photos on belief is weak. In the modern era, people spend a substantial amount of time on social media, repetitively being exposed to an abundance of both true and false information. Millions of users are on these platforms not only for entertainment, but also because people rely on them to learn about important issues about the world, such as health and politics. Critically, the circulating content on social media is often presented with both texts and images. Prior research shows that both repetition and including related photos can increase belief in information. However, it remains unclear how these two factors interact in influencing belief. We addressed this question across three experiments in which participants rated the truth of both new and repeated trivia and political statements, shown either with or without accompanying photos. We found that repetition increased belief for both trivia statements and political headlines, but the presence of related photos had no measurable effect. Importantly, we found no evidence that photos amplify or diminish the effect of repetition. Our results suggest that repeated exposure to information in a media-rich environment can be a powerful driver of belief, and that simply adding photos to a message may not make it seem more credible.
Experts in complex domains make similarity judgments they can demonstrate but cannot articulate. Chess tactics offer a natural laboratory for studying such judgments because they separate what a problem looks like (the board position) from what it requires (the solution). However, no study has used supervised learning on expert-labeled data to decompose which features drive an expert’s similarity criterion or how they are organized. We collected 2866 binary similarity annotations from a competitive chess player on tactical puzzle pairs and trained interpretable classifiers to recover the implicit decision structure. An ablation study reveals a near-total dissociation: dynamic features alone (solution properties) achieve an AUC of 0.901, versus 0.554 for static features—board appearance plays a negligible role. The expert’s implicit decision is well described by a dominant binary criterion with graded refinement: agreement on whether both solutions end in checkmate is near-necessary for a “similar” judgment, after which graded comparison of the solution sequences decides the rest. Inter-rater validation with two additional titled players confirms these criteria are shared, not idiosyncratic. Difference features alone nearly match the full model, supporting a feature-contrast representation of similarity (Tversky, 1977). At the methodological level, the combination of information retrieval, expert annotation, supervised classification, and qualitative re-evaluation constitutes a reusable pipeline for reverse-engineering implicit expert criteria. The qualitative step proved especially informative: the expert reversed 70
