Category: papers

New paper: Exploring the feasibility of mitigating VR-HMD-induced cybersickness using cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR) (pp. 123-129). IEEE.

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/224089/

Li, G., Varela, F. M., Habib, A., Zhang, Q., McGill, M., Brewster, S., & Pollick, F. (2020, December). Exploring the feasibility of mitigating VR-HMD-induced cybersickness using cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR) (pp. 123-129). IEEE.

Many head-mounted virtual reality display (VR-HMD) applications that involve moving visual environments (e.g., virtual rollercoaster, car and airplane driving) will trigger cybersickness (CS). Previous research Arshad et al. (2015) has explored the inhibitory effect of cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on vestibular cortical excitability, applied to traditional motion sickness (MS), however its applicability to CS, as typically experienced in immersive VR, remains unknown. The presented double-blinded 2x2x3 mixed design experiment (independent variables: stimulation condition [cathodal/anodal]; timing of VR stimulus exposure [before/after tDCS]; sickness scenario [slight symptoms onset/moderate symptoms onset/recovery]) aims to investigate whether the tDCS protocol adapted from Arshad et al. (2015) is effective at delaying the onset of CS symptoms and/or accelerating recovery from them in healthy participants. Quantitative analysis revealed that the cathodal tDCS indeed delayed the onset of slight symptoms if compared to that in anodal condition. However, there are no significant differences in delaying the onset of moderate symptoms nor shortening time to recovery between the two stimulation types. Possible reasons for present findings are discussed and suggestions for future studies are proposed.

New paper: A Review of Electrostimulation-based Cybersickness Mitigations. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR) (pp. 151-157). IEEE.

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/224088/

Li, G., McGill, M., Brewster, S., & Pollick, F. (2020, December). A Review of Electrostimulation-based Cybersickness Mitigations. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR) (pp. 151-157). IEEE.

With the development of consumer virtual reality (VR), people have increasing opportunities to experience cybersickness (CS) –- a kind of visuallyinduced motion sickness (MS). In view of the importance of CS mitigation (CSM), this paper reviews the methods of electrostimulation-based CSM (e-CSM), broadly categorised as either “VR-centric” or “Human-centric”. “VR-centric” refers to approaches where knowledge regarding the visual motion being experienced in VR directly affects how the neurostimulation is delivered, whereas “Human-centric” approaches focus on the inhibition or enhancement of human functions per se without knowledge of the experienced visual motion. We DIFFERENT E-found that 1) most e-CSM approaches are based on visual-vestibular sensory conflict theory –- one of the generally-accepted aetiologies of MS, 2) the majority of eCSM approaches are vestibular system-centric, either stimulating it to compensate for the mismatched vestibular sensory responses, or inhibiting it to make an artificial and temporary dysfunction in vestibular sensory organs or cortical areas, 3) Vestibular sensory organbased solutions are able to mitigate CS with immediate effect, while the real-time effect of vestibular cortical areas-based methods remains unclear, due to limited public data, 4) Based on subjective assessment, VRcentric approaches could relieve all three kinds of symptoms (nausea, oculomotor, and disorientation), which appears superior to the human-centric ones that could only alleviate one of the symptom types or just have an overall relief effect. Finally, we propose promising future research directions in the development of e-CSM.

New paper: Up-regulation of Supplementary Motor Area activation with fMRI Neurofeedback during Motor Imagery.

https://www.eneuro.org/content/8/1/ENEURO.0377-18.2020

Al-Wasity, S., Vogt, S., Vuckovic, A., & Pollick, F. E. (2020). Up-regulation of Supplementary Motor Area activation with fMRI Neurofeedback during Motor Imagery. eNeuro.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) neurofeedback (NF) is a promising tool to study the relationship between behavior and brain activity. It enables people to self-regulate their brain signal. Here, we applied fMRI NF to train healthy participants to increase activity in their supplementary motor area (SMA) during a motor imagery (MI) task of complex body movements while they received a continuous visual feedback signal. This signal represented the activity of participants’ localized SMA regions in the NF group and a prerecorded signal in the control group (sham feedback). In the NF group only, results showed a gradual increase in SMA-related activity across runs. This upregulation was largely restricted to the SMA, while other regions of the motor network showed no, or only marginal NF effects. In addition, we found behavioral changes, i.e., shorter reaction times in a Go/No-go task after the NF training only. These results suggest that NF can assist participants to develop greater control over a specifically targeted motor region involved in motor skill learning. The results contribute to a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of SMA NF based on MI with a direct implication for rehabilitation of motor dysfunctions.

New paper: Understanding and supporting law enforcement professionals working with distressing material: Findings from a qualitative study.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242808

Denk-Florea, C. B., Gancz, B., Gomoiu, A., Ingram, M., Moreton, R., & Pollick, F. (2020). Understanding and supporting law enforcement professionals working with distressing material: Findings from a qualitative study. Plos one, 15(11), e0242808.

This study aimed to extend previous research on the experiences and factors that impact law enforcement personnel when working with distressing materials such as child sexual abuse content. A sample of 22 law enforcement personnel working within one law enforcement organisation in England, United Kingdom participated in anonymous semi-structured interviews. Results were explored thematically and organised in the following headings: “Responses to the material”, “Impact of working with distressing evidence”, “Personal coping strategies” and “Risks and mitigating factors”. Law enforcement professionals experienced heightened affective responses to personally relevant material, depictions of violence, victims’ displays of emotions, norm violations and to various mediums. These responses dampened over time due to desensitisation. The stress experienced from exposure to the material sometimes led to psychological symptoms associated with Secondary Traumatic Stress. Job satisfaction, self-care activities, the coping strategies used when viewing evidence, detachment from work outside working hours, social support and reducing exposure to the material were found to mediate law enforcement professionals’ resilience. Exposure to distressing material and the risks associated with this exposure were also influenced by specific organisational procedures implemented as a function of the funding available and workload. Recommendations for individual and organisational practices to foster resilience emerged from this research. These recommendations are relevant to all organisations where employees are required to view distressing content.

New paper: LexOPS: An R package and user interface for the controlled generation of word stimuli

https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758/s13428-020-01389-1?sharing_token=q5qq3sdnK5Cv3KiPQ7jJsJAH0g46feNdnc402WrhzypVLBRCe-RrGW4M8jmeSOlDdGIx8GNei1Rfuxn4LA3t80j01MvBfBvcY19hj5K1lnvki5V4u3a3Nc5roP71wk_KLod3wclVwC7sdyHUGuU_phXsoPsH-DRd89IH5u18y64%3D

LexOPS is an R package and user interface designed to facilitate the generation of word stimuli for use in research. Notably, the tool permits the generation of suitably controlled word lists for any user-specified factorial design and can be adapted for use with any language. It features an intuitive graphical user interface, including the visualization of both the distributions within and relationships among variables of interest. An inbuilt database of English words is also provided, including a range of lexical variables commonly used in psycholinguistic research. This article introduces LexOPS, outlining the features of the package and detailing the sources of the inbuilt dataset. We also report a validation analysis, showing that, in comparison to stimuli of existing studies, stimuli optimized with LexOPS generally demonstrate greater constraint and consistency in variable manipulation and control. Current instructions for installing and using LexOPS are available at https://JackEdTaylor.github.io/LexOPSdocs/.

New paper: Tweet valence, volume of abuse, and observers’ dark tetrad personality factors influence victim-blaming and the perceived severity of twitter cyberabuse

Hand, C.J., Scott, G.G., Brodie, Z.P., Ye, X., & Sereno, S.C. (2021). Tweet valence, volume of abuse, and observers’ dark tetrad personality factors influence victim-blaming and the perceived severity of
twitter cyberabuse. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 3. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245195882100004X

Previous research into Twitter cyberabuse has yielded several findings: victim-blaming (VB) was influenced by victims’ initial tweet-valence; perceived severity (PS) was influenced independently by tweet valence and abuse volume; VB and PS were predicted by observer narcissism and psychopathy. However, this previous research was limited by its narrow focus on celebrity victims, and lack of consideration of observer sadism. The current study investigated 125 observers’ VB and PS perceptions of lay-user cyberabuse, and influence of observers’ Dark Tetrad scores (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism). We manipulated initial-tweet valence (negative, neutral, positive) and received abuse volume (low, high). Our results indicated that VB was highest following negative initial tweets; VB was higher following high-volume abuse. PS did not differ across initial-tweet valences; PS was greater following a high abuse volume. Regression analyses revealed that observer sadism predicted VB across initial-tweet valences; psychopathy predicted PS when initial tweets were ‘emotive’ (negative, positive), whereas Machiavellianism predicted PS when they were neutral. Our results show that perceptions of lay-user abuse are influenced interactively by victim-generated content and received abuse volume. Our current results contrast with perceptions of celebrity-abuse, which is mostly determined by victim-generated content. Findings are contextualised within the Warranting Theory of impression formation.

New paper: Investigating the foreign language effect as a mitigating influence on the ‘optimality bias’ in moral judgements

Bodig, E., Toivo, W., & Scheepers, C. (2019). Investigating the foreign language effect as a mitigating influence on the ‘optimality bias’ in moral judgements. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, DOI: 10.1007/s41809-019-00050-4 .

Abstract Bilinguals often display reduced emotional resonance their second language (L2) and therefore tend to be less prone to decision-making biases in their L2 (e.g., Costa, Foucart, Arnon, Aparici, & Apesteguia, 2014; Costa, Foucart, Hayakawa, et al., 2014) – a phenomenon coined Foreign Language Effect (FLE). The present pre-registered experiments investigated whether FLE can mitigate a special case of cognitive bias, called optimality bias, which occurs when observers erroneously blame actors for making “suboptimal” choices, even when there was not sufficient information available for the actor to identify the best choice (De Freitas & Johnson, 2018). In Experiment 1, L1 English speakers (N=63) were compared to L2 English speakers from various L1 backgrounds (N=56). In Experiment 2, we compared Finnish bilinguals completing the study in either Finnish (L1, N=103) or English (L2, N=108). Participants read a vignette describing the same tragic outcome resulting from either an optimal or suboptimal choice made by a hypothetical actor with insufficient knowledge. Their blame attributions were measured using a 4-item scale. A strong optimality bias was observed; participants assigned significantly more blame in the suboptimal choice conditions, despite being told that the actor did not know which choice was best. However, no clear interaction with language was found. In Experiment 1, bilinguals gave reliably higher blame scores than natives. In Experiment 2, no clear influence of target language was found, but the results suggested that the FLE is actually more detrimental than helpful in the domain of blame attribution. Future research should investigate the benefits of emotional involvement in blame attribution, including factors such as empathy and perspective-taking.

Keywords Bilingualism, Foreign Language Effect, attribution, decision-making, blame

New paper: Hierarchical structure priming from mathematics to two- and three-site relative clause attachment

Scheepers, C. , Galkina, A., Shtyrov, Y., & Myachykov, A. (2019). Hierarchical structure priming from mathematics to two- and three-site relative clause attachment. Cognition, 189, 155-166. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.03.021.

Abstract A number of recent studies found evidence for shared structural representations across different cognitive domains such as mathematics, music, and language. For instance, Scheepers et al. (2011) showed that English speakers’ choices of relative clause (RC) attachments in partial sentences like The tourist guide mentioned the bells of the church that … can be influenced by the structure of previously solved prime equations such as 80–(9 + 1) × 5 (making high RC-attachments more likely) versus 80–9 + 1 × 5 (making low RC-attachments more likely). Using the same sentence completion task, Experiment 1 of the present paper fully replicated this cross-domain structural priming effect in Russian, a morphologically rich language. More interestingly, Experiment 2 extended this finding to more complex three-site attachment configurations and showed that, relative to a structurally neutral baseline prime condition, N1-, N2-, and N3-attachments of RCs in Russian were equally susceptible to structural priming from mathematical equations such as 18+(7+(3 + 11)) × 2, 18 + 7+(3 + 11) × 2, and 18 + 7 + 3 + 11 × 2, respectively. The latter suggests that cross-domain structural priming from mathematics to language must rely on detailed, domain-general representations of hierarchical structure.

Keywords Priming, cross-domain, mathematics, syntax

New paper: Pupillary responses to affective words in bilinguals’ first versus second language

Toivo, W., & Scheepers, C. (2019). Pupillary responses to affective words in bilinguals’ first versus second language. PLoS ONE, 14(4), e0210450, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0210450.

Abstract Late bilinguals often report less emotional involvement in their second language, a phenomenon called reduced emotional resonance in L2. The present study measured pupil dilation in response to high- versus low-arousing words (e.g., riot vs. swamp) in German-English and Finnish-English late bilinguals, both in their first and in their second language. A third sample of English monolingual speakers (tested only in English) served as a control group. To improve on previous research, we controlled for lexical confounds such as length, frequency, emotional valence, and abstractness–both within and across languages. Results showed no appreciable differences in post-trial word recognition judgements (98% recognition on average), but reliably stronger pupillary effects of the arousal manipulation when stimuli were presented in participants’ first rather than second language. This supports the notion of reduced emotional resonance in L2. Our findings are unlikely to be due to differences in stimulus-specific control variables or to potential word-recognition difficulties in participants’ second language. Linguistic relatedness between first and second language (German-English vs. Finnish-English) was also not found to have a modulating influence.

Keywords Bilingualism, word processing, emotion, pupillometry

New paper: Random word generation reveals spatial encoding of syllabic word length

Myachykov, A., Chapman, A. J., Beal, J., & Scheepers, C. (2019). Random word generation reveals spatial encoding of syllabic word length. British Journal of Psychology, DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12399.

Abstract Existing random number generation studies demonstrate the presence of an embodied attentional bias in spontaneous number production corresponding to the horizontal Mental Number Line: Larger numbers are produced on right‐hand turns and smaller numbers on left‐hand turns (Loetscher et al.,2008, Curr. Biol., 18, R60). Furthermore, other concepts were also shown to rely on horizontal attentional displacement (Di Bono and Zorzi, 2013, Quart. J. Exp. Psychol., 66, 2348). In two experiments, we used a novel random word generation paradigm combined with two different ways to orient attention in horizontal space: Participants randomly generated words on left and right head turns (Experiment 1) or following left and right key presses (Experiment 2). In both studies, syllabically longer words were generated on right‐hand head turns and following right key strokes. Importantly, variables related to semantic magnitude or cardinality (whether the generated words were plural‐marked, referred to uncountable concepts, or were associated with largeness) were not affected by lateral manipulations. We discuss our data in terms of the ATOM (Walsh, 2015, The Oxford handbook of numerical cognition, 552) which suggests a general magnitude mechanism shared by different conceptual domains.

Keywords SNARC, random word generation, syllabic length, ATOM