Individual differences in emotional information processing may be explained by attentional biases related to personality traits and affective symptoms. The present study examined how personality, anxiety, and depression symptoms relate to visual attention toward emotional facial expressions. Participants (N = 103) from a non-clinical student sample completed the Big Five Personality Inventory (BFI) and Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL-25), followed by an eye-tracking task assessing attention to paired neutral and emotional faces. Attentional processing was assessed using initial orienting (time to first fixation) and sustained attention (fixation duration). Participants showed a general bias toward emotional faces, orienting faster to and fixating longer on emotional compared to neutral stimuli. Higher neuroticism was associated with faster initial orienting to fearful and sad expressions and prolonged fixation on emotional faces overall. Anxiety symptoms were linked to faster initial orienting across emotional expressions, indicating heightened sensitivity to emotional stimuli. Depressive symptoms were associated with longer fixation durations on emotional faces overall, without evidence of mood-congruent bias toward sad expressions. Other personality traits showed limited associations with attentional indices. Gender differences were minimal, although males oriented faster to angry faces. These findings suggest that neuroticism, anxiety, and depression contribute to distinct components of attentional bias, with neuroticism linked to both early and sustained processing of negative emotional stimuli, anxiety to early vigilance, and depression to prolonged attention to emotional cues. Results support models emphasizing both vigilance and maintenance mechanisms in emotional attention and highlight the role of individual differences in attentional processes.
Identifying individual differences in various cognitive constructs has important implications for settings such as clinical and educational assessments. Yet, cognitive tasks themselves often do not measure a single construct. As such, there is value in understanding the mixture of constructs involved in cognitive task performance, as this would allow target constructs to be better isolated. For example, tasks assessing visuospatial working memory (VSWM), in addition to measuring the “of interest” processes of encoding and maintenance, also involve lower-level perceptual processes. Here, we examined perceptual contaminant effects on VSWM using a modified Corsi Block Tapping Task, in which participants observed and reproduced sequences of spatial locations. Two forms of perceptual interference were manipulated: path clutterness, in which distractors appeared near the virtual path connecting successive targets, and endpoint crowding, in which distractors appeared near the target locations themselves. Endpoint crowding produced clear decrements in task performance, whereas path clutterness produced no detectable changes in performance. These findings indicate that perceptual processes, specifically visual crowding, influence VSWM assessment. This underscores the importance of accounting for perceptual processes in the design and interpretation of working memory measures.
Everyday cognition requires observers to find organization in continuous behavior as surface form changes. Behavioral streams can carry a constraint that governs what remains coherent across variation. This study examines whether such a constraint can remain publicly legible when it structures an action stream and remains concealed from observers. The study examined this question in Untitled, Literally, a full-length abstract choreographic work presented in five public performances. Eight sections were constructed with Essence-to-Movement (EtoM), a procedure for preserving a specified behavioral constraint across varied movement conditions. One section, Drink Me, served as an internal contrast. Following the performances, audience members completed an anonymous voluntary questionnaire (N = 393). We tested the hypothesis that observers who reported structural routes into the work would show lower uncertainty, stronger active meaning-making, and lower preference for the internal contrast. The observed profile was consistent with this hypothesis. Structural-entry reports were associated with lower uncertainty, stronger active meaning-making, and sharper within-work discrimination between constraint-governed material and the internal contrast. These associations are interpreted within a post-performance self-report design under concealment.
Goal-directed behaviour requires both efficient task execution as well as adequate task choice. Task choice may reflect deliberate evaluation of costs and benefits, but it may also be biased by bottom-up memory retrieval. Specifically, re-encountering a previously experienced context could retrieve a prior task choice, thereby influencing subsequent decisions. In the present study, using the voluntary task-switching (VTS) paradigm, we examined whether repeating a context would retrieve a task by manipulating whether a task-irrelevant context stimulus repeated or changed across consecutive trials. Based on a feature binding and episodic retrieval framework, we hypothesized that the context-albeit task irrelevant-could become bound with the task in each trial. Consequently, repeating the context would retrieve or reactivate the previous-trial task. Therefore, we predicted that context repetitions would increase task-repetition rates and task-repetition benefits. We used an adaptive VTS procedure (Mittelstädt, Miller, & Kiesel, 2018), wherein the onset of the stimulus affording a task repetition is delayed compared to the stimulus affording a task switch. The delay between the stimuli increases for every consecutive task repetition. We included a task-irrelevant context (a coloured box in Experiments 1 and 2, or a picture in Experiment 3) that could switch or repeat unpredictably in each trial. Contrary to the predictions, we found no evidence that repeating a task-irrelevant context affected either task choice or performance, even when context saliency was enhanced in Experiment 3. We discuss these findings in light of the interplay of performance optimization and task-set availability in VTS.
