Xia Wu

Background: Heavy media multitasking has been linked to poorer cognitive control, but findings are heterogeneous, and claims of an inverted-U relationship have rarely been tested with methods that establish curve shape. Methods: Using a publicly available dataset, we analyzed 278 adults who completed up to seven cognitive-control paradigms (219 completed all seven), yielding nine behavioral outcomes. The Media Multitasking Index (MMI) was treated as continuous. Linear and quadratic regressions were complemented by two-lines tests and restricted cubic splines for every outcome, and equivalence tests and Bayes factors quantified evidence for the null. Results: MMI showed a small negative linear association with cognitive control capacity and a small positive association with conflict-resolution efficiency; the latter was sensitive to the exclusion criterion. No outcome met the two-lines criterion for a U-shaped or inverted-U relationship. Reactive control showed curvature, but performance did not increase reliably at moderate MMI levels and declined at higher levels. Six of nine outcomes were statistically equivalent to zero (|r| < 0.20), with Bayes factors of 6.82–18.67 favoring the null. Conclusions: Associations between media multitasking and cognitive control are small, and an inverted-U relationship was not supported when curve shape was tested directly.

The widespread use of beauty-enhancement technology has raised questions about how beautified faces are evaluated and prioritized during attentional processing. This study combined an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a dot-probe task to examine relative evaluative compatibility and attentional responses to beautified and non-beautified (original) synthetic same-gender (female) and opposite-gender (male) target faces among 45 heterosexual female university students. The results showed greater relative compatibility for the beautified-positive/original-negative mapping than for the reversed mapping, while evidence that this compatibility effect varied by target face gender remained inconclusive. Furthermore, participants showed early attentional orienting toward opposite-gender beautified faces at 100 ms, whereas the reversed validity pattern at 500 ms was not statistically significant. Additionally, the opposite-gender D-score was negatively associated with the opposite-gender 100 ms attention-bias index. Given the well-documented psychometric constraints of reaction-time difference scores in dot-probe tasks, this individual-difference association should be treated as preliminary and requires further replication. In the present sample, the direction of this association was compatible with a habituation-based account, although exposure history and habituation were not directly assessed. These findings provide evidence concerning relative evaluative compatibility and early attentional responses to beautified versus non-beautified synthetic faces in heterosexual female university students.

Trust decisions involve both social evaluation and uncertainty processing, yet standard trust game paradigms do not fully dissociate trust-specific social computation from more general risk- and value-related processes. In this exploratory whole-brain fMRI study, we examined how objective risk and social distance were associated with trust decisions within a 2 × 2 trust game. Twenty-three adults completed the task, and 20 were included in the fMRI analyses after exclusion for excessive head motion. Behaviorally, trust rates were significantly lower under high than low objective risk, whereas neither the main effect of social distance nor the interaction between objective risk and social distance was significant. Relative to baseline, task performance engaged prefrontal and parietal regions. Compared with distrust decisions, trust decisions were associated with greater activation in prefrontal and visual regions, along with stronger negative activation in the insula. Objective risk was associated with differential activation in temporal, supramarginal, and precentral regions. Under the present manipulation, we did not observe significant neural modulations by social distance. These findings suggest that, in this low-context paradigm, objective risk was a more robust source of behavioral and neural variation than social distance. Given the exploratory design, modest sample size, and the task’s limited ability to separate social trust from generic risk/value processing, the findings should be interpreted cautiously.

Visual search can be guided and facilitated by a category-specific attentional template (CAT) when searching for a target embedded into a set of categories. While previous research has proven that CATs can be pre-activated, it has caused confusion due to inconsistent task difficulty and unbalanced target-defined dimensions. To avoid the unbalanced dimensions and investigate the effects of category frameworks on the time course of the pre-activation of CAT, we defined the targets as a color-defined category based on prototype (warm, cool), semantic (garden, ocean), and strategy (red–blue, yellow–green). Moreover, to maintain the consistency of task difficulty, we employed the identification task to all frameworks of CAT within the RSPP paradigm and tracked the time course of CAT pre-activation by measuring N2pcs elicited by the probes sequentially occurring prior to the target. ERP and MVPA results found that the semantic-based CAT (involving in experience and learning) was pre-activated first, approximately 1200 ms before the search display, followed by the prototype-based CAT (involving in perceptual similarity) at about 900 ms, and finally the strategy-based CAT (involving in learning) at around 600 ms before the search display. By balancing the target dimensions and maintaining the difficulty of tasks, the findings provide further evidence for differences in the activation patterns of various constitutive CATs.

Objectives: This study investigated the temporal dynamics of category-based attentional orienting (CAO) under the influences of prediction (top-down) and perceptual load (bottom-up) across color and shape dimensions, combining behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures. Methods: Across two experiments, we manipulated predictive validity and perceptual load during a visual search for category-defined targets. Results: The results revealed a critical dimension-specific effect of prediction: invalid predictions elicited a larger N2pc component (indexing attentional selection) for shape-defined targets, but not color-defined targets, indicating that shape CAO relies more heavily on predictive information during early processing. At the behavioral level, a combined analysis of the two experiments revealed an interaction between prediction and perceptual load on accuracy, suggesting their integration can occur at later stages. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that prediction and perceptual load exhibit distinct temporal profiles, primarily independently modulating early attentional orienting, with their interactive effects on behavior being more nuanced and dimension-dependent. This study elucidates the distinct temporal and dimensional mechanisms through which top-down and bottom-up sources of uncertainty shape attentional orienting to categories.