Melissa R Beck

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Louisiana State University

Biophilic design, incorporating natural elements, is known to enhance stress recovery. Immersive virtual environments (IVEs) are increasingly utilized for biophilic design validation and research, but their efficacy in replicating the restorative effects of real environments remains uncertain. Varying responses to virtual settings suggest that spec...

The study investigated the influence of a green wall and its size on stress and restoration within the biophilic design integrating natural objects into environments. Despite its benefits in enhancing access to nature and stress reduction, visual stimuli properties may affect design outcomes. This research employed Immersive Virtual Environments (I...

Working memory (WM) serves current goals while enabling future ones to be planned and maintained. This latter role of WM is crucial, as everyday activities require finding task-relevant objects in a timely manner and therefore prioritizing WM representations with respect to moment-by-moment task-relevance of items held in WM. How this level of prio...

In hybrid visual search, observers must maintain multiple target templates and subsequently search for any one of those targets. If the number of potential target templates exceeds visual working memory (VWM) capacity, then the target templates are assumed to be maintained in activated long-term memory (aLTM). Observers must search the array for po...

Natural environments potentially have positive impacts on stress recovery by restoring depleted sources. Integrating natural objects into the built environments can create a restorative built environment. On the other hand, some factors, such as visual stimuli and their properties, can impede the design intentions of such restorative environments....

The current study examined how viewing nature vs. urban scenes impacts the duration of the attentional blink. Nature scenes produce a broader allocation of attention, allowing attention to spread and reduce the ability to disengage attention. Urban scenes produce a narrowed allocation of attention, allowing efficient encoding of relevant informatio...

Loss aversion is a psychological bias where an increase in loss is perceived as being larger than an equivalent increase in gain. In the present study, two experiments were conducted to explore whether attentional control reflects loss aversion. Participants performed a visual search task. On each trial, a red target and a green target were present...

Previous research is inconclusive on when visual working memory (VWM) can be object-based or feature-based. Prior event-related potential (ERP) studies using change detection tasks have found that amplitudes of the N200-an ERP index of VWM comparison- are sensitive to changes in both relevant and irrelevant features, suggesting a bias toward object...

Restorative environments are known as places where human stress can be decreased through restoration of depleted psychological resources. Since the efficiency of natural environments in restoration is supported by the literature, designing a restorative built environment can be obtained by integrating natural objects into built environments. Howeve...

Kim and Beck (2020b) demonstrated that value-driven attention is based on relative value rather than absolute value, suggesting that prospect theory is relevant to our understanding of value-driven attention. To further this understanding, the present study investigated the impacts of diminishing sensitivity on value-driven attention. According to...

Spatial reasoning is a critical skill in many everyday tasks and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. The current study examined how training on mental rotation (a spatial reasoning task) impacts the completeness of an encoded representation and the ability to rotate the representation. We used a multisession, multimeth...

Talking on a cell phone can impair driving performance, but the dynamics of this effect are not fully understood. We examined the effects of leaving a voicemail message on driving when there are critical driving targets to attend to (crosswalks and pedestrians). Participants engaged in an ecologically-valid “voicemail” task while navigating a virtu...

Contexts that predict characteristics of search targets can guide attention by triggering attentional control settings for the characteristics. However, this context-driven search has most commonly been found in the spatial dimension. The present study explored the context-driven search when shape contexts predict the color of targets: non-spatial...

Biophilic design is a popular form of sustainable building design because of its potential to contribute to human health and wellbeing. While many design processes are now mediated by computer technologies such as immersive virtual environments (IVEs), the reliability of IVEs to create the same benefits of biophilic designs as in-situ is yet to be...

Valuable stimuli receive attentional priority. However, it is unknown whether the mechanism of the attentional priority is based on relative (e.g., higher) or absolute (e.g., 45 points) values. Therefore, we manipulated the relative and absolute values independently in a modified value-driven attentional capture paradigm. In the training phase, whe...

To improve maintenance of task-relevant information in visual working memory (VWM), previously encoded, but no longer relevant, information can be suppressed or forgotten. However, it is unclear whether a cue directing attention to a subset of stimuli leads to complete forgetting for non-cued stimuli. The current study utilized a novel method of te...

Public Significance Statement Throughout the day we are often searching for various items that we need to use. We may need to search for our car keys multiple times: at home, at work, and at a friend’s place. Or we may have to search for the toy we just bought our child, the file we just received from our boss, and the mail right after we put it do...

Task irrelevant information in visual working memory (VWM) may affect attention guidance and disengagement. The contents of VWM may capture attention during visual search with a long-term memory (LTM; Gunseli, Olivers, & Meeter, 2016) or VWM template (van Moorselaar, Theeuwes, & Olivers, 2014). In the current study, participants held a colored shap...

An interesting set of findings has emerged from the literature regarding schizotypy. Individuals with psychometric schizotypy self-report pathology in certain neuropsychological, affective experiential, expressive and olfactory abilities and subjective quality of life at levels between one and two standard deviations more severe than their non-schi...

Attention allocation determines the information that is encoded into memory. Can participants learn to optimally allocate attention based on what types of information are most likely to change? The current study examined whether participants could incidentally learn that changes to either high spatial frequency (HSF) or low spatial frequency (LSF)...

While operating a motor vehicle, drivers must pay attention to other moving vehicles and the roadside environment in order to detect and process critical information related to the driving task. Using a driving simulator, this study investigated the effects of an unexpected event on driver performance in environments of more or less clutter and und...

The contents of visual working memory (VWM) can capture attention during visual search (Dowd & Mitroff, 2013) and a consistent target can lead to a long-term memory (LTM) representation that can capture attention (Carlisle et al, 2011). Can information attended during VWM capture lead to a LTM representation that can capture attention? Participants...

This article is free to download from the journal website. Follow the doi above. Two experiments were conducted to directly test the feature set hypothesis and the relational set hypothesis in an inattentional blindness task. The feature set hypothesis predicts that unexpected objects that match the to-be-attended stimuli will be reported most. Th...

Are the attention strategies associated with better performance on a mental rotation task evident through eye movements? Previous research suggests that experts and novices use different attention strategies during mental rotation tasks. Experts tend to use feature-based strategies by only rotating select parts of objects, whereas novices tend to u...

The limited capacity of visual working memory (VWM) can be maximized by combining multiple features into a single representation through grouping principles such as connection, proximity, and similarity. In this study, we sought to understand how VWM organizes information by investigating how connection and similarity cues are used either alone or...

When briefly presented with global and local visual information, individuals report global information more quickly and more accurately than local information, a phenomenon known as the global precedence effect (GPE; Navon, 1977). We investigated whether a bias toward global information persists in visual working memory (VWM) and whether the VWM re...

Most et al. (2001) demonstrated that an unexpected object (UEO) is noticed when it is similar to the target but dissimilar to the distractors. The authors concluded that inattentional blindness is influenced by attentional sets based on relationships among targets and distractors (e.g., lighter or darker). The present study further examined the rol...

In this study, we investigated whether the ability to learn probability information is affected by the type of representation held in visual working memory. Across 4 experiments, participants detected changes to displays of coloured shapes. While participants detected changes in 1 dimension (e.g., colour), a feature from a second, nonchanging dimen...

Are statistical summary representations (SSRs) for multiple dimensions processed independently or are they part of a bound scene gist representation? Previous research suggests that multiple SSRs, the means for two sets of circles, can be computed with no cost (Chong & Treisman, 2005). However, there appears to be a cost for encoding averages from...

The ability to remember feature bindings is an important measure of the ability to maintain objects in working memory (WM). In this study, we investigated whether both object- and feature-based representations are maintained in WM. Specifically, we tested the hypotheses that retaining a greater number of feature representations (i.e., both as indiv...

Increasing the number of changes in trajectory has been shown to negatively impact tracking accuracy (Ericson & Beck, 2013). Additionally, unexpected changes in trajectory have been known to attract attention (Howard & Holcombe, 2010). However, whether or not there is some attentional resource priority given to target items that have recently chang...

Background / Purpose: We examined the ability to implicitly learn whether low or high spatial frequency changes were more probable, and then use this information to modify the allocation of attention. Main conclusion: When high spatial frequency changes were more probable, participants learned to allocate attention locally (i.e. to look direc...

Responses are quicker to predictable stimuli than if the time and place of appearance is uncertain. Studies that manipulate target predictability often involve overt cues to speed up response times. However, less is known about whether individuals will exhibit faster response times when target predictability is embedded within the inter-trial relat...

Our aim was to examine the specificity of the effects of acquiring expertise on visual working memory (VWM) and the degree to which higher levels of experience within the domain of expertise are associated with more efficient use of VWM. Previous research is inconsistent on whether expertise effects are specific to the area of expertise or generali...

In this study, we tested the ability to have attentional access to two features of an object in parallel. Participants viewed two study features (20-50ms), simultaneously or sequentially, followed by a single test feature. Equal performance for both presentation types indicates parallel access to both features, while higher accuracy for the sequent...

Unexpected changes in object trajectory can attract attention (Howard & Holcombe, 2010) and, increasing the number of changes in target trajectories during a multiple object-tracking (MOT) task negatively influences tracking accuracy (Ericson & Beck, OPAM 2011). Therefore, attention may be preferentially allocated to items that have recently change...

In tasks requiring an eye movement to the onset of a target, the appearance of a distractor 300 ms prior to the target produces shorter saccade reaction times (SRT) (Hermens & Walker, 2010; Walker, Kentridge, & Finlay, 1995). Time was a requirement for sufficient processing leading the distractor to act as a temporal warning cue to prepare a saccad...

People have the ability to attentively select and successfully track several moving objects, a process known as multiple-object tracking (MOT; Pylyshyn & Storm Spatial Vision 3: 179-197, 1988). Various factors have been known to influence MOT performance, such as speed, number of distractors, and proximity, while recent work has suggested that obje...

Clutter can slow visual search. However, experts may develop attention strategies that alleviate the effects of clutter on search performance. In the current study we examined the effects of global and local clutter on visual search performance and attention strategies. Pilots and undergraduates searched for an elevation marker in charts of high, m...

When briefly presented with global and local information, individuals perceive the global information faster, a phenomenon known as the global precedence effect (Navon, 1977). In this study we investigated whether, in visual working memory (VWM), binding features to global and local levels is more likely to occur than other types of feature binding...

The current study further examined the hypothesis that post-cues can encourage the retrieval of long-term memory (LTM) representations and lead to improved change detection performance (Beck & van Lamsweerde, 2011) using a gaze contingent change detection task. Nine objects were presented and after seven objects were fixated, a brief blank screen w...

The current study tested two hypotheses of feature binding memory: The attention hypothesis, which suggests that attention is needed to maintain feature bindings in visual working memory (VWM) and the volatile representation hypothesis, which suggests that feature bindings in memory are volatile and easily overwritten, but do not require sustained...

Background / Purpose: We investigated whether binding global or local information was preferred or better in visual working memory. Using Navon figures we measured participant performance in a sequential change detection task. Main conclusion: We found that participants are better at performance when binding global information compared to that...

Compared to other techniques used to study memory, recording eye movements can be relatively unobtrusive. In addition, recording eye movements also allows the investigator to ask questions that might not be answerable using conventional behavioural methods. In this chapter we present a brief history of the use of eye movement techniques to study sc...

Statistical properties in the visual environment can be used to improve performance on visual working memory (VWM) tasks. The current study examined the ability to incidentally learn that a change is more likely to occur to a particular feature dimension (shape, color, or location) and use this information to improve change detection performance fo...

When briefly presented with global and local information, individuals perceive the global information faster, a phenomenon known as the global precedence effect (Navon, 1977). In this study we investigated whether visual working memory (VWM) is also biased toward global information and if binding features to global and local levels occurs more read...

In the typical visual search experiment, participants search for targets that are present on half of the trials and absent on the other half. However, many real-world tasks involve targets that are present only occasionally. Given this, it is important to know how people deal with the problem of finding targets they have little experience with. One...

Reports an error in "Measuring search efficiency in complex visual search tasks: Global and local clutter" by Melissa R. Beck, Maura C. Lohrenz and J. Gregory Trafton ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied , 2010[Sep], Vol 16[3], 238-250). The copyright for the article was incorrectly listed. The correct copyright information is provided in...

Affective disturbances in social domains are characteristic features and potential vulnerability markers of schizophrenia-spectrum pathology. The present study employed a comprehensive and multidimensional approach to understanding affect in individuals with psychometrically defined schizotypy and the controls. Measures were employed assessing trai...

Recent research indicates that people greatly overestimate change detection ability. This metacognitive error is referred to as change blindness blindness (CBB). CBB persists even when subjects are reminded of the role memory plays in detecting changes and when long delays are inserted between the pre- and postchange views. Here, we examine subject...

People are poor at detecting changes in their visual environment (change blindness). In addition, people predict they will notice more changes than they actually do (change blindness blindness). Here we explore whether change blindness, and possibly change blindness blindness, is affected by object stability. Object stability refers to the plausibi...

In visual change detection tasks, providing a cue to the change location concurrent with the test image (post-cue) can improve performance, suggesting that, without a cue, not all encoded representations are automatically accessed. Our studies examined the possibility that post-cues can encourage the retrieval of representations stored in long-term...

Previous research using visual search tasks and target localization tasks demonstrates that the visual system can implicitly learn base rate information and then use this information to guide visual attention. Furthermore, it appears that this information is often implicit. Here we investigated whether similar effects can be found with a change det...

Many years of research have been devoted to examining the limits of our visual system. Not only are there limits on the amount of information we can attend to, but there also are limits in the number of items we retain from one moment to the next. Previous data from our lab suggests the capacity limits of short-term memory are relevant for incident...

Eye tracking results from a recent visual search experiment suggest 1) people avoid searching in highly cluttered regions of displays, and 2) people tend to start searching in regions with lower clutter and progress to regions with higher clutter as needed. Subjects searched for a symbol randomly placed in displays containing varying amounts of clu...

Set size and crowding affect search efficiency by limiting attention for recognition and attention against competition; however, these factors can be difficult to quantify in complex search tasks. The current experiments use a quantitative measure of the amount and variability of visual information (i.e., clutter) in highly complex stimuli (i.e., d...

The current experiments investigated how learned spatial statistics affect visual short-term memory (VSTM). In all experiments, a VSTM task was used in which a sample array was presented, followed by a 1000ms delay, followed by a test probe. Participants indicated whether the probe was present in the sample array. Sample arrays consisted of six nov...

Expertise in a particular domain can bias visual attention and memory toward expertise relevant information. This bias is generally thought to be domain specific. That is, there are differences in the allocation of attention and memory for information relevant to the domain of expertise, but not for non-relevant information. In the current studies...

Uncertainty and predictability have remained at the center of the study of human attention. Yet, studies have only examined whether response times (RT) or fixations were longer or shorter under levels of stimulus uncertainty. To date, no study has examined patterns of stimuli and responses through a unifying framework of uncertainty. We asked 29 co...

Observers often have difficulty detecting visual changes when they are presented during a disruption, an experience known as change blindness. Successful change detection requires not only focused attention and encoding, but also a comparison process to detect the difference between pre and post presentations of the stimulus. As such, working memor...

Previous research suggests that working memory plays an important role in visual search and change detection tasks. In fact, studies have shown that when visuospatial working memory is occupied by a task, visual search performance is compromised (Woodman & Luck, 2004). However, when an object working memory task is used to occupy working memory, vi...

Previous research using visual search tasks and target localization tasks demonstrates that the visual system can implicitly learn base rate information and then use this information to guide visual attention. Recent findings showing that changes with a high base rate are detected more readily than low base rate changes suggests that this ability m...

Concurrent working memory tasks can degrade search efficiency when they are spatial in nature or require central executive processing (Woodman & Luck, 2004; Oh & Kim, 2004; Han & Kim, 2004). We investigated the role of executive functioning in visual search by tracking the eyes of subjects while they performed a concurrent auditory working memory t...

Serial visual search is efficient in that participants rarely revisit previously examined items. This efficiency is partially due to the ability to remember the spatial locations of previously examined items. The current experiment examined the extent to which the consistency of local spatial layout contributes to search efficiency. Participants co...

In visual search, preattentive processes locate potential target regions. Selective attention is then deployed to these regions to determine if the target is present. Generally, as the number of distractors in a display increases, this process becomes less efficient. The current studies examined the role of global visual clutter in the ability to d...

Although there has been some controversy about whether memory guides attention during visual search, numerous experiments suggest that memory does play some role. For example, Peterson and colleagues (2001) found that when the search task required eye movements, items were rarely reexamined, suggesting that memory can successfully guide search when...

Social attitudes are integral to understanding a wide range of pathological states. The present study adapted the Implicit Association Test, a widely used implicit measure of attitudes, for understanding social attitudes and behavior. In a first study, data from a traditional "Bipolar" IAT and our modified "Unipolar" pleasant and unpleasant IATs we...

A novel model of measuring clutter in complex geospatial displays was compared with human ratings of subjective clutter as a measure of convergent validity. The new model is called the color-clustering clutter (C3) model. Clutter is a known problem in displays of complex data and has been shown to affect target search performance. Previous clutter...

Previous research demonstrates that implicitly learned probability information can guide visual attention. We examined whether the probability of an object changing can be implicitly learned and then used to improve change detection performance. In a series of six experiments, participants completed 120-130 training change detection trials. In four...

Recent evidence has indicated that performing a working memory task that loads executive working memory leads to less efficient visual search (Han & Kim, 2004). We explored the role that executive functioning plays in visual search by examining the pattern of eye movements while participants performed a search task with or without a secondary execu...