As digital media technology expands, so does the need for an instrument capable of measuring how human psychology interacts with it.The Digital Media Overuse Scale (dMOS) is a new instrument designed to index problematic overuse of digital media while remaining capable of adapting to changes in the digital media landscape as they emerge.The dMOS is modularly structured, meaning that each domain contains highly similar language reflecting behaviors and attitudes often observed in individuals reporting clinical issues or disorders related to digital media.Here the dMOS was used to investigate clinically relevant behaviors and attitudes as they relate to five digital media domains: general smartphone use, internet video consumption, social media use, gaming, and pornography use.Latent class analysis was conducted on data from 800 college-aged dMOS respondents.Latent class analysis revealed-two to three latent classes for each digital media domain, with notable differences.There was little indication of an overall "digital media overuse" profile, but instead, domain-specific patterns of overuse likely reflect design differences in technologies interacting with human psychology.Initial indications are that the dMOS is a reliable, valid, and extendible clinical instrument capable of providing clinically relevant scores within and across digital media domains.A manual for interpreting subject-level data from the dMOS is being produced, and replicative extensions of the questionnaire into new domains are underway.

Objective: Posttraumatic irritability after traumatic brain injury (TBI) may become a chronic problem and contribute to impaired everyday function, either alone or in combination with alcohol use disorder. The authors hypothesized that divalproex sodium (VPA) would improve posttraumatic irritability and result in lessened alcohol use. Methods: This randomized, placebo-controlled double-blind clinical trial recruited participants with an index TBI occurring 1 or more years prior to enrollment, a history of alcohol use disorder, and posttraumatic irritability corroborated by a knowledgeable informant. An 8-item subset of the Agitated Behavior Scale served as the primary outcome measure of VPA efficacy. Doses of VPA were titrated to standard serum concentrations of 50 µg/ml to 100 µg/ml. Results: Forty-eight persons completed this clinical trial (VPA, N=22; placebo, N=26). At baseline, participants rated their posttraumatic irritability as less severe than did their informants (p<0.05). During the trial, informants reported significant and sustained reduction of posttraumatic irritability (p=0.03) in the study participants. Biweekly averages during drug exposure confirmed this (p<0.03, Cohen's d=0.44). Treatment efficacy was not related to measures of anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, sedation, or veteran versus nonveteran status. Alcohol use did not change as a result of treatment. There were no serious adverse events. Conclusions: This study demonstrated an effect of VPA on posttraumatic irritability, and VPA was well tolerated. Further definition of treatment efficacy and safety requires a large-scale multisite trial, using a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled design.

BACKGROUND Early clinical experience during the COVID-19 pandemic has begun to elucidate that the disease can cause brain function changes that may result in compromised cognition both acutely and during variable recovery periods. Reports on cognitive assessment of patients with COVID-19 are often limited to orientation alone. Further assessment may seem to create an inappropriate burden for patients with acute COVID-19, which is characterized by fatigue and confusion, and may also compromise examiner safety. OBJECTIVE The aims of this study were to assess cognition in patients with COVID-19 as comprehensively as possible in a brief format, while observing safety precautions, and to establish a clear face value of the external validity of the assessment. METHODS We adapted a brief cognitive assessment, previously applied to liver transplant candidates and medical/surgical inpatients, for remote use in patients hospitalized for COVID-19 treatment. Collecting quality assurance data from telephone-administered assessments, this report presents a series of 6 COVID-19 case vignettes to illustrate the use of this 5-minute assessment in the diagnosis and treatment of brain effects. Primary medical teams referred the cases for neuropsychiatric consultation. RESULTS The age of the patients varied over four decades, and none of them were able to engage meaningfully with their surroundings on admission. On follow-up examination 6 to 10 days later, 4 of the 6 patients had recovered working memory, and only 1 had recovered calculation ability. Of the 6 patients, 2 were capable of complex judgment responses, while none of the cases completed frontal executive function testing in the normal range. CONCLUSIONS Cognitive assessment in patients with COVID-19 using this remote examination reveals patterns of cognitive recovery that vary among cases and are far more complex than loss of orientation. In this series, testing of specific temporal, parietal, and frontal lobe functions suggests that calculation ability, judgment, and especially frontal executive functions may characterize the effects of COVID-19 on the brain. Used widely and serially, this examination method can potentially inform our understanding of the effects of COVID-19 on the brain and of healing from the virus.

Background: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) severity follows a bell-shaped curve ranging from mild to severe. Those in the severe range often receive the most intensive treatments, including targeted residential rehabilitation stays. These are expensive and welcome ways to improve their effectiveness. We hypothesized that positive change among subjects treated in a 45-day residential rehabilitation format would be associated with the maturity levels of measurable Psychological Adaptive Mechanisms (PAMs), alternately ego defense mechanisms.Methods: In this association study, adult male patients (N = 115) with a history of combat related PTSD treated in a residential rehabilitation setting completed the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ) on admission, as well as the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist-Military Version (PCL-M) and the Mississippi Scale for Combat-Related Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (M-PTSD) on admission and again at discharge. This allowed prospectively calculated change scores on each of the PTSD measures for each patient. The change scores allowed association testing with averaged admission DSQ scores using Pearson's correlation probability with significance held at p < 0.05.Results: As hypothesized, averaged individual Mature scores on the DSQ were associated with improved change scores on both the PCL-M (p = 0.03) and the M-PTSD (p = 0.04). By contrast neither averaged DSQ Neurotic or Immature scores associated significantly with either PTSD scale change scores.Conclusion: These results, the first of their kind to our knowledge, suggest that patients presenting with predominantly Mature level PAMs are likely to benefit from residential rehabilitation treatment of PTSD. By contrast, those presenting with Neurotic or Immature PAMs predominantly are less likely to encounter positive change in this type of treatment. Although residential treatment is often reserved for the most refractory PTSD cases, it appears that those endorsing Mature level PAMs will make use of residential treatment whereas other forms of treatment may be better suited to those with Neurotic and Immature adjustment mechanisms.

Background: Previously, we reported that the maturity of Psychological Adaptive Mechanism (PAM; alternatively, ego defense mechanism) endorsement, but not depression symptom severity, predicted 5-year survival rates in adult cancer patients and that study controlled for age as a significant variable. In this investigation, we hypothesized that greater PAM maturity would correlate significantly with age and with fewer depression symptoms in a larger sample.Methods: In this cross-section study, adult cancer outpatients (N=293) completed the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and provided additional clinical data. Spearman’s correlation and multiple regression modeling provided statistical tests of the study hypotheses.Results: Contrary to our hypothesis, DSQ PAM maturity endorsement did not correlate significantly with increasing age. Greater PAM maturity ratio on the DSQ (p<0.0001) and current antidepressant use (p<0.05), however, both provided inverse associations with total BDI symptom frequency (p<0.01). Age was inversely associated with BDI mood (p<0.0001) and somatic scores (p<0.04). Items that worsened BDI symptom frequency included self-reported mood-altering anti-cancer medications and any psychiatric history. Cancer stage, time since diagnosis, and chemotherapy treatment did not correlate with DSQ or BDI scores. Multiple regression analysis found that the correlated items accounted for 17.2% of the variance in mood symptoms and 4.9% in somatic symptoms. Specifically, adaptive maturity and age associated with fewer depression symptoms, while cancer medications affecting mood, and a previous psychiatric history each predicted higher frequency of depression scores.Conclusion: The results suggest that PAM maturity likely predicts fewer depression symptoms while younger age associates with more depression symptoms in this clinical sample. Centrally, acting cancer medications, such as glucocorticoids, and any history of psychiatric disorder correlated with increased depression symptom frequencies. In this cross-section study, antidepressant medications indicated higher frequencies of depressive symptoms, likely reflecting their use in persons previously diagnosed with depression. Further research should target factors that improve PAM maturity as a potential treatment target, especially in younger age groups.

Visual perception depends fundamentally on statistical regularities in the environment to make sense of the world. One such regularity is the orientation anisotropy typical of natural scenes; most natural scenes contain slightly more canonical (horizontal and vertical) information than oblique information. This property is likely a primary cause of the oblique effect in which subjects experience greater perceptual fluency with horizontally and vertically oriented content than oblique. Recent changes in the visual environment, including the “carpentered” content in urban scenes and the framed, caricatured content in digital screen media presentations, may have altered the typical (natural) level of orientation anisotropy. The current work evaluated whether digital visual experience, or visual experience with framed digital content, has the potential to alter the magnitude of the oblique effect in visual perception. Experiment 1 successfully established a novel eye-tracking method capable of indexing the visual oblique effect quickly and reliably and demonstrated the oblique effect. Experiment 2 used this method and found that one session of exposure to a specific video game altered visual orientation perception. Taken together, these results indicate that exposure to the realistic, but caricatured scene statistics of digital screen media, can alter visual contour perception in one session.

The everyday auditory environment is complex and dynamic; often, multiple sounds co-occur and compete for a listener's cognitive resources. 'Change deafness', framed as the auditory analog to the well-documented phenomenon of 'change blindness', describes the finding that changes presented within complex environments are often missed. The present study examines a number of stimulus factors that may influence change deafness under real-world listening conditions. Specifically, an AX (same-different) discrimination task was used to examine the effects of both spatial separation over a loudspeaker array and the type of change (sound source additions and removals) on discrimination of changes embedded in complex backgrounds. Results using signal detection theory and accuracy analyses indicated that, under most conditions, errors were significantly reduced for spatially distributed relative to non-spatial scenes. A second goal of the present study was to evaluate a possible link between memory for scene contents and change discrimination. Memory was evaluated by presenting a cued recall test following each trial of the discrimination task. Results using signal detection theory and accuracy analyses indicated that recall ability was similar in terms of accuracy, but there were reductions in sensitivity compared to previous reports. Finally, the present study used a large and representative sample of outdoor, urban, and environmental sounds, presented in unique combinations of nearly 1000 trials per participant. This enabled the exploration of the relationship between change perception and the perceptual similarity between change targets and background scene sounds. These (post hoc) analyses suggest both a categorical and a stimulus-level relationship between scene similarity and the magnitude of change errors.

Research on automated facial expression analysis (FEA) has been focused on applying different feature extraction methods on texture space and geometric space, using holistic or local facial regions based on regular grids or facial anatomical structure. Not much work has been investigated by taking human perception into account. In this paper, we propose to study the facial expressive regions using a reverse correlation method, and further develop a novel 3D local normal component feature representation based on human perceptions. The classification image (CI) accumulated in multiple trials reveals the shape features which alter the neutral Mona Lisa portrait to positive and negative domains. The differences can be identified by both humans and machine. Based on the CI and the derived local feature regions, a novel 3D normal component based feature (3D-NLBP) is proposed to represent positive and negative expressions (e.g., happiness and sadness). This approach achieves a good performance and has been validated by testing on both high-resolution database and real-time low resolution depth map videos.

Human auditory localization ability is generally good for single sources, with errors subtending less than 5 degrees at the midline, and increasing to roughly 12 degrees in the periphery. Errors are generally larger in conditions where task demands are high, such as when multiple simultaneous sources are present. The current study shifts focus from the size of localization errors to the frequency of localization errors, examined under conditions of high and low visual uncertainty. In this study the ability to localize the addition of a new source to a mixture of 4 simultaneous sources was examined under two conditions of visual uncertainty. The task for participants was to listen to two auditory scenes separated by a brief blank interval. The scenes contained sounds edited to 1000ms duration that were representativeof outdoor urban spaces. Each first scene contained four sound sources; the second always contained a change, the addition of a new sound source. At the end of the second scene participants indicated where the change occurred, by pointing to the change location. Change locations were represented as either nine clearly visible and identifiable sound producing targets (speakers) in the free-field (low visual uncertainty condition) or change locations were obscured by occurring within an array of 90 visual targets (positioned 2 degrees apart), creating conditions of high visual spatial uncertainty. In general, performance was poorer when the audio-visual correspondence was reduced. Further, the pattern of results is consistent with other multisource localization studies; performance was most accurate when changes occur directly in front of the listener. Accuracy declined as changes were presented further in the periphery, and the impact of change position was greater under conditions of high visual spatial uncertainty (low audio-visual correspondence). Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015

Visual perception depends fundamentally on statistical regularities in the environment to make sense of the world. One such regularity is the orientation anisotropy typical of natural scenes; most natural scenes contain slightly more horizontal and vertical information than oblique information. This property is likely a primary cause of the “oblique effect” in visual perception, in which subjects experience greater perceptual fluently with horizontally and vertically oriented content than oblique. However, recent changes in the visual environment, including the “carpentered” content in urban scenes and the framed, caricatured content in digital screen media presentations, may have altered the level of orientation anisotropy typical in natural scenes. Over a series of three experiments, the current work aims to evaluate whether “digital” visual experience, or visual experience with framed digital content, has the potential to alter the magnitude of the oblique effect in visual perception. Experiment 1 established a novel eye tracking method developed to index the visual oblique effect quickly and reliably using no overt responding other than eye movements. Results indicated that canonical (horizontal and vertical) contours embedded in visual noise were detected more accurately and quickly than oblique contours. For Experiment 2, the orientation anisotropy of natural, urban, and digital scenes was analyzed, in order to compare the magnitude of this anisotropic pattern across each image type. Results indicate that urban scenes contain exaggerated orientation anisotropy relative to natural scenes, and digital scenes possess this pattern to an even greater extent. Building off these two results, Experiment 3 adopts the eye tracking method of Experiment 1 as a prepost-test measure of the oblique effect. Participants were eye tracked in the contour detection task several times before and after either a “training” session, in which they played Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) for four hours uninterrupted in a darkened room, or a “control” session, in which they simply did not interact with screens for four hours. It was predicted, based on the results of Experiment 2, that several hours of exposure to the caricatured orientation statistics of the digital stimulus would suffice to alter the magnitude of participants’ oblique effect, as indexed by the difference in the post-test relative to the pre-test. While no accuracy differences were observed in this primary manipulation, detection speed for canonical contours did alter significantly in the Minecraft subjects relative to controls. These results indicate that the oblique effect is quite robust at the level of visual contours and is measurable using eye tracking, that digital scenes contain caricatured orientation anisotropy relative to other types of scenes, and that exposure to naturalistic but caricatured scene statistics for only a few hours can alter certain aspects of visual perception.

Visual contour detection is enhanced by grouping principles, such as proximity and collinearity, which appear to rely on horizontal connectivity in visual cortex. Previous experiments suggest that children require greater proximity to detect contours and that, unlike adults, collinearity does not compensate for their proximity limitation. Over two experiments we test whether closure, a global property known to facilitate contour detection, compensates for this limitation. Adults and children (3-9 years old) performed a 2AFC task; one panel contained an illusory contour (closed or open) in visual noise, and one only noise. The experiments were identical except proximity was doubled in Exp. 2, enabling shorter-range spatial integration. Results suggest children are limited by proximity, and that closure did not reliably improve their performance as it did for adults. We conclude that perceptual maturity lags behind anatomy within this system, and suggest that slow statistical learning of long-range orientation correlations controls this disparity.

Object perception and pattern vision depend fundamentally upon the extraction of contours from the visual environment. In adulthood, contour or edge-level processing is supported by the Gestalt heuristics of proximity, collinearity and closure. Less is known, however, about the developmental trajectory of contour detection and contour integration. Within the physiology of the visual system, long-range horizontal connections in V1 and V2 are the likely candidates for implementing these heuristics. While post-mortem anatomical studies of human infants suggest that horizontal interconnections reach maturity by the second year of life, psychophysical research with infants and children suggests a considerably more protracted development. In the present review, data from infancy to adulthood will be discussed in order to track the development of contour detection and integration. The goal of this review is thus to integrate the development of contour detection and integration with research regarding the development of underlying neural circuitry. We conclude that the ontogeny of this system is best characterized as a developmentally extended period of associative acquisition whereby horizontal connectivity becomes functional over longer and longer distances, thus becoming able to effectively integrate over greater spans of visual space.

In this paper, we applied a reverse correlation approach to study the features that humans use to categorize facial expressions. The well-known portrait of Mona Lisa was used as the base image to investigate the features differentiating happy and sad expressions. The base image was blended with sinusoidal noise masks to create the stimulus. Observers were required to view each image and categorized it as happy or sad. Analysis of responses using superimposed classification images revealed both locations and identity of information required to represent each certain expression. To further investigate the results, a neural network based classifier was developed to identify the expression of the superimposed images from the machine learning perspective, which reveals that the pattern which humans perceive the expression is acknowledged by machines.

Reverse correlation with sinusoidal noise is a method useful for estimating the information used during facial emotion classifications. As yet, this method has not been used to test for developmental differences in processing strategy during face classification. We had adult and 7-10 year old participants classify a neutral face (either the Mona Lisa or a neutral face from the NimStim set of faces) overlaid with random sinusoidal noise as either happy or sad. Over relatively few trials, classification images and subsequent quantitative analyses revealed that the information necessary to turn a neutral face into an expressive one differs for adults and children, but not for both stimuli. For the Mona Lisa face, adults and children performed similarly, relying on mid-high spatial frequencies for their classifications. For the real neutral face, adults relied more on lower spatial frequencies, whereas children relied on higher spatial frequencies; this pattern matches data from more traditional experiments. Super-subject data bolster these results, and demonstrates the consistency between 2AFC and 4AFC tasks. For both adults and children, critical regions for classification were not only present around the corners of the mouth, but also on the cheeks, between the eyes, and around the corners of the head. Overall, results indicate that children between 7-10 years employ immature processing strategies within facial emotion processing, and that only real faces are capable of revealing these differences. More generally, reverse correlation is a useful technique for estimating perceptual templates in developmental populations. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013

Research asserting that the visual system instantiates a global closure heuristic in contour integration has been challenged by an argument that behaviorally-detected closure enhancement could be accounted for by low-level local mechanisms driven by collinearity or "good continuation" interacting with proximity. The present study investigated this issue in three experiments. Exp. 1 compared the visibility of closed and open contours using circles and S-contours from low to moderately high angles of path curvature in a temporal alternative-forced choice task. Circles were more detectable than S-contours, an effect that increased with curvature. The closure enhancement observed can, however, be explained by the fact that circles contain more 'contiguity' than S-contours. Additional tests added discontinuities to otherwise closed paths to control for the effects of good continuation and closure independently. Exp. 2 compared the visibility of incomplete circles (C-contours) and S-contours derived from the full circles and S-contours in Exp. 1. Exp. 3a compared the visibility of arc pairs arranged in an enclosed position similar to "()" and a non-enclosed position similar to ")(". Results consistently showed enhanced visibility of contour configurations enclosing a region even after controlling for differences in contiguity and changes of curvature direction. A control test (Exp. 3b) demonstrated that the gap in the contours of Exp. 3a was too large to be bridged by local-level collinearity/proximity alone. The combination of good continuation and proximity alone does not explain the closure effects observed across these tests, as demonstrated through the application of a Bayesian model of collinearity and proximity (Geisler et al., 2001) to the stimuli in Exps. 3a and 3b. These results argue for the presence of a global closure-driven contour enhancing mechanism in human vision.