Stefanie I Becker

The University of Queensland | UQ · School of Psychology

In the current EEG study, we used a dot-probe task in conjunction with backward masking to examine the neural activity underlying awareness and spatial processing of fearful faces and the neural processes for subsequent cued spatial targets. We presented face images under different viewing conditions (subliminal and supraliminal) and manipulated th...

Previous research has identified three mechanisms that guide visual attention: bottom-up feature contrasts, top-down tuning, and the trial history (e.g., priming effects). However, only few studies have simultaneously examined all three mechanisms. Hence, it is currently unclear how they interact or which mechanisms dominate over others. With respe...

When searching for a lost item, we tune attention to the known properties of the object. Previously, it was believed that attention is tuned to the veridical attributes of the search target (e.g., orange), or an attribute that is slightly shifted away from irrelevant features towards a value that can more optimally distinguish the target from the d...

In the current EEG study, we used a dot-probe task in conjunction with backward masking to examine the neural activity underlying awareness and spatial processing of fearful faces and the neural processes for subsequent cued spatial targets. We presented face images under different viewing conditions (subliminal and supraliminal) and manipulated th...

Visual working memory (VWM) allows for the brief retention of approximately three to four items. Interestingly, when these items are similar to each other in a feature domain, memory recall performance is elevated compared to when they are dissimilar. This similarity benefit is currently not accounted for by models of VWM. Previous research has sug...

It is well-known that visual attention can be tuned in a context-dependent manner to elementary features, such as searching for all redder items or the reddest item, supporting a relational theory of visual attention. However, in previous studies, the conditions were often conducive for relational search, allowing successfully selecting the target...

It has been repeatedly claimed that emotional faces capture attention readily, and that they are processed without awareness. Yet some observations cast doubt on these assertions. Part of the problem may lie in the experimental paradigms employed. Here, we used a free viewing visual search task and simultaneously recorded electroencephalography and...

Previous research on the relationship between attention and emotion processing have focused essentially on consciously-viewed, supraliminal stimuli, while the attention-emotion interplay remains unexplored in situations where visual awareness is restricted. Here, we presented participants with face pairs in a backward masking paradigm and examined...

Voxel-wise meta-analyses of task-evoked regional activity were conducted for healthy individuals during the unconscious processing of emotional and neutral faces with an aim to examine whether and how different experimental paradigms influenced brain activation patterns. Studies were categorized into sensory and attentional unawareness paradigms. T...

It remains unclear to date whether spatial attention towards emotional faces is contingent on, or independent of visual awareness. To investigate this question, a bilateral attentional blink paradigm was used in which lateralised fearful faces were presented at various levels of detectability. Twenty-six healthy participants were presented with two...

The relationship between visual attention and visual awareness has long been hotly debated. There has been limited evidence on whether the neural marker of spatial attention precedes or succeeds that of visual awareness in the processing of emotional faces. The current study aims to investigate the temporal sequence between the electrophysiological...

It is well known that attention can be automatically attracted to salient items. However, recent studies show that it is possible to avoid distraction by a salient item (with a known feature), leading to facilitated search. This article tests a proposed mechanism for distractor inhibition: that a mental representation of the distractor feature held...

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is an important resource that allows temporarily storing visual information. Current theories posit that elementary features (e.g., red, green) are encoded and stored independently of each other in VSTM. However, they have difficulty explaining the similarity effect, that similar items can be remembered better than d...

The attentional template is often described as the mental representation that drives attentional selection and guidance, for instance, in visual search. Recent research suggests that this template is not a veridical representation of the sought-for target, but instead an altered representation that allows more efficient search. The current paper co...

Attention is an important function that allows us to selectively enhance the processing of relevant stimuli in our environment. Fittingly, a number of studies have revealed that potentially threatening/fearful stimuli capture attention more efficiently. Interestingly, in separate fMRI studies, threatening stimuli situated close to viewers were foun...

Areas in frontoparietal cortex have been shown to be active in a range of cognitive tasks and have been proposed to play a key role in goal-driven activities (Dosenbach, N. U. F., Fair, D. A., Miezin, F. M., Cohen, A. L., Wenger, K. K., Dosenbach, R. A. T., et al. Distinct brain networks for adaptive and stable task control in humans. Proceedings o...

Visual attention allows selecting relevant information from cluttered visual scenes and is largely determined by our ability to tune or bias visual attention to goal-relevant objects. Originally, it was believed that this top-down bias operates on the specific feature values of objects (e.g., tuning attention to orange). However, subsequent studies...

When attending to visual objects with particular features, neural processing is typically biased toward those features. Previous work has suggested that maintaining such feature-based attentional sets may involve the same neural resources as visual working memory. If so, the extent to which feature-based attention influences stimulus processing sho...

It is well-known that we can tune attention to specific features (e.g., colors). Originally, it was believed that attention would always be tuned to the exact feature value of the sought-after target (e.g., orange). However, subsequent studies showed that selection is often geared towards target-dissimilar items, which was variably attributed to (1...

Recent attentional capture studies with the spatial cueing paradigm often found that target-dissimilar precues resulted in longer RTs on valid than invalid cue trials. These same location costs were accompanied by a contralateral positivity over posterior electrodes from 200 to 300 ms, similar to a PD component. Same location costs and the PD have...

A highly debated question in attention research is to what extent attention is biased by bottom-up factors such as saliency versus top-down factors as governed by the task. Visual search experiments in which participants are briefly familiarized with the task and then see a novel stimulus unannounced and for the first time support yet another facto...

Research and theories on visual search often focus on visual guidance to explain differences in search. Guidance is the tuning of attention to target features and facilitates search because distractors that do not show target features can be more effectively ignored (skipping). As a general rule, the better the guidance is, the more efficient searc...

It is well-known that visual attention can be tuned in a top-down controlled manner to various attributes. Amongst other search strategies, previous research has identified a feature search mode in which attention is tuned to the target feature (e.g., colour) vs. a singleton search mode, where all salient items can attract attention. A short review...

Attention allows selection of sought-after objects by tuning attention in a top-down manner to task-relevant features. Among other possible search modes, attention can be tuned to the exact feature values of a target (e.g., red, large), or to the relative target feature (e.g., reddest, largest item), in which case selection is context dependent. Th...

Present day models of visual search focus on explaining search efficiency by visual guidance: The target guides attention to the target's position better in more efficient than in less efficient search. The time spent processing the distractor, however, is set to a constant in these models. In contrast to this assumption, recent studies found that...

There is currently a debate about the relationship between feature-based attention (FBA) and visual working memory (VWM). One theory proposes that the 2 constructs should be synthesized into a single concept (Kiyonaga & Egner, 2013). In this unified theory, VWM is defined as attention directed toward internal representations that competes with atte...

The visual search paradigm has been used in emotion research to examine the relation between facial expressions of emotion and attention. Here, the better performance in a search for one facial expression category (e.g., a happy face) compared to a second category (e.g., an angry face) has been often interpreted as indicating better guidance of att...

In completing daily activities, the eyes make a series of saccades by gazing at stimuli in succession. The duration of gaze on each stimulus has been used to infer how the initiation of a saccade is timed relative to the underlying mental processing. In reading, gaze dwells longer on a word that occurs infrequently in English text (low frequency) t...

Neural activity in frontoparietal cortex shows overlap across cognitive domains and has been proposed to reflect flexible information processing according to current task demands (Dosenbach et al., 2007; Duncan, 2001). However, a strong assertion of flexibility requires investigating activity across stages of cognitive processing. The current study...

Attention selects behaviorally relevant stimuli for further capacity-limited processing and gates their access to awareness. Given the importance of attention for conscious perception, it is important to determine the factors and mechanisms that drive attention. A widespread view is that attention is biased to the specific feature values of a conju...

APA is celebrating 125 years this year and at the journal we are commemorating this milestone with a special issue. The inspiration came from our editorial team, who wished to acknowledge the links between game-changing articles that have influenced our research community in the past—we call them classics for short—and contemporary works. The main...

Prominent models of overt and covert visual search focus on explaining search efficiency by visual guidance. That some searches are fast whereas others are slow is explained by the ability of the target to guide attention to the target’s position. Comparably little attention is given to other variables that might also influence search efficiency, s...

Some targets in visual search are more difficult to find than others. In particular, a target that is similar to the distractors is more difficult to find than a target that is dissimilar to the distractors. Efficiency differences between easy and difficult searches are manifest not only in target-present trials but also in target-absent trials. In...

Can emotional expressions automatically attract attention in virtue of their affective content? Previous studies mostly used emotional faces (e.g., angry or happy faces) in visual search tasks to assess whether affective contents can automatically attract attention. However, the evidence in support of affective attentional capture is still contenti...

Most theories of visual search maintain that attention is selectively tuned to the attributes of the search target (e.g., orange). Conversely, according to the relational account, attention is biased to the relative feature of the target (e.g., redder). However, previous studies that supported the relational account mainly measured mean response ti...

According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, learned semantic categories can influence early perceptual processes. A central finding in support of this view is the lateralized category effect-namely, the finding that categorically different colors (e.g., blue and green hues) can be discriminated faster than colors within the same color category (e.g.,...

In visual search, the tuning of attention depends not only on the target feature but also on the nontarget ("context") features. How do target and nontarget features interact? The relational theory proposes that when target and nontarget features remain fixed, attention is tuned to relative feature properties (Becker, 2010). In Experiment 1, we sou...

With over 285 million visually impaired people worldwide there is growing interest in sensory substitution -- a non-invasive technology substituting information from one sensory modality (e.g., vision) with another sensory modality (e.g., touch). Previous work has focused primarily on how blind or vision-impaired people discriminate between differe...

How do we select relevant information from cluttered visual environments? The prevalent view is that the intention to search for a particular feature enhances the attentional gain for the target feature or an exaggerated target feature shifted away from the nontarget feature value distribution (optimal tuning; e.g., Navalpakkam & Itti, 2007). By co...

How do we select behaviourally important information from cluttered visual environments? Previous research has shown that both top-down, goal-driven factors and bottom-up, stimulus-driven factors determine which stimuli are selected. However, it is still debated when top-down processes modulate visual selection. According to a feedforward account,...

Our ability to select task-relevant information from cluttered visual environments is widely believed to be due to our ability to tune attention to the particular elementary feature values of a sought-after target (e.g., red, orange, yellow). By contrast, recent findings showed that attention is often tuned to feature relationships, that is, featur...

A number of characteristics of the visual system and of the visual stimulus are invoked to explain involuntary control of attention, including goals, novelty, and perceptual salience. The present experiment tested perceptual salience on a surprise trial, that is, on its unannounced first presentation following trials lacking any salient items, thus...

The rapid orienting of attention to potential threats has been proposed to proceed outside of top-down control. However, paradigms that have been used to investigate this have struggled to separate the rapid orienting of attention (i.e. capture) from the later disengagement of focal attention that may be subject to top-down control. Consequently, i...

With over 285 million visually impaired people worldwide there is growing interest in sensory substitution-­‐-­‐ a non-­‐invasive technology substituting information from one sensory modality (e.g., vision) with another sensory modality (e.g., touch). Previous work has focused primarily on how blind or vision-­‐impaired people discriminate between...

In the context of visual search, surprise is the phenomenon by which a previously unseen and unexpected stimulus exogenously attracts spatial attention. Capture by such a stimulus occurs, by definition, independent of task goals and is thought to be dependent on the extent to which the stimulus deviates from expectations. However, the relative cont...

With over 285 million visually impaired people worldwide there is growing interest in sensory substitution-­‐-­‐ a non-­‐invasive technology substituting information from one sensory modality (e.g., vision) with another sensory modality (e.g., touch). Previous work focused primarily on how blind or vision-­‐impaired people discriminate between diff...

An age-related 'positivity' effect has been identified, in which older adults show an information-processing bias towards positive emotional items in attention and memory. In the present study, we examined this positivity bias by using a novel paradigm in which emotional and neutral distractors were presented along with emotionally valenced targets...

In visual search colours from a different category (blue vs. green) are located faster than colours from the same category (aquamarine vs. turquoise). A number of studies have found that this category effect manifests only when targets are presented in the right hemifield. As such the effect has been linked with the lateralization of language and t...

Suddenly appearing items (onsets) can attract attention and the gaze even when they are completely irrelevant to the task (onset capture). It has been proposed that onsets modulate affect attention at a very early stage of visual processing, when feature-based information is not (yet) available. Hence, feature-based attention can modulate onset cap...

New and unannounced color singletons have been shown to capture attention and induce surprise during visual search; a phenomenon referred to as 'surprise capture' (Horstmann, 2005). Interestingly, it has been reported that the temporal profile of capture by new and unannounced stimuli is distinct from that of capture by expected stimuli (Horstmann,...

An organism's survival depends on the ability to rapidly orient attention to unanticipated events in the world. Yet, the conditions needed to elicit such involuntary capture remain in doubt. Especially puzzling are spatial cueing experiments, which have consistently shown that involuntary shifts of attention to highly salient distractors are not de...

Previous studies showed that attention can not only be top-down tuned to a target’s physical feature (e.g., orange), but also to its relative attributes (e.g., “redder”; Becker, 2012). In the present study, participants (n=24) searched for a target with a pre-defined color among target-context elements (e.g., an orange target in a yellow context, w...

In previous studies, we showed that search for a mirror-reversed target takes longer because observers fail to recognise the target and continue searching even when they have already looked at the target. This failure to recognize the target item as the search target was specific to mirror-reversed targets and did not occur for differently-oriented...

Previous work on attentional capture has shown the attentional system to be quite flexible in the stimulus properties it can be set to respond to. Several different attentional "modes" have been identified. Feature search mode allows attention to be set for specific features of a target (e.g., red). Singleton detection mode sets attention to respon...

Prior reports of preferential detection of emotional expressions in visual search have yielded inconsistent results, even for face stimuli that avoid obvious expression-related perceptual confounds. The current study investigated inconsistent reports of anger and happiness superiority effects using face stimuli drawn from the same database. Experim...

The surprise capture hypothesis states that a stimulus will capture attention to the extent that it is preattentively available and deviates from task-expectancies. Interestingly, it has been noted by Horstmann (Psychological Science 13: 499-505. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00488 , 2002, Human Perception and Performance 31: 1039-1060. doi: 10.1037/00961...

It is widely known that irrelevant onsets (i.e., items appearing in previously empty locations) can automatically capture attention and attract our gaze. Some studies have shown that onset capture is stronger when the onset distractor matches the target feature, indicating that onset capture can be modulated by feature-based (top-down) tuning to th...

In visual search, some fixations are made between stimuli on empty regions, commonly referred to as "centre-of-gravity" fixations (henceforth: COG fixations). Previous studies have shown that observers with task expertise show more COG fixations than novices. This led to the view that COG fixations reflect simultaneous encoding of multiple stimuli,...

Recently, D.V. Becker, Anderson, Mortensen, Neufeld, and Neel (2011) proposed recommendations to avoid methodological confounds in visual search studies using emotional photographic faces. These confounds were argued to cause the frequently observed Anger Superiority Effect (ASE), the faster detection of angry than happy expressions, and conceal a...

In visual search for pop-out targets, search times are shorter when the target and non-target colors from the previous trial are repeated than when they change. This priming effect was originally attributed to a feature weighting mechanism that biases attention toward the target features, and away from the non-target features. However, more recent...

What factors determine which stimuli of a scene will be visually selected and become available for conscious perception? Current models of attention assume that top-down control over visual selection is achieved by tuning attention to specific feature values (e.g. red, green, blue). This modulates the output of feature-specific sensory neurons (‘fe...

How do we select relevant information from cluttered visual environments? Current theories of attention and eye movement control have proposed a framework of feature detectors that allows us to attend to potentially important information and ignore irrelevant information. Each feature detector supposedly signals the existence of a single elementary...

Eye fixations allow the viewer to visually perceive with high spatial acuity. Here, we tested the role of fixations for scene memory. If fixations drive scene memory, a viewer should repeat a previous fixation pattern when recognizing a scene (Noton & Stark, 1971; Underwood, Foulsham, & Humphrey, 2009). However, salience of low-level features can a...

How do we select relevant information from cluttered visual environments? The prevalent view is that the intention to search for a particular feature enhances the attentional gain for the target feature or an exaggerated target feature shifted away from the nontarget feature value distribution (optimal tuning; e.g., Navalpakkam & Itti, 2007). By co...

In the context of visual search, surprise is the phenomenon by which a previously unseen and unexpected stimulus exogenously attracts spatial attention. Capture by such a stimulus occurs, by definition, independent of tasks goals and is thought to be dependent on the extent to which the stimulus deviates from expectations (Horstmann, 2005, JEP:HPP)...

One of the most widespread views in vision research is that top-down control over visual selection is achieved by tuning attention to a particular feature value (e.g., red/yellow). Contrary to this view, previous spatial cueing studies showed that attention can be tuned to relative features of a search target (e.g., redder): An irrelevant distracto...

Visual search studies have shown that attention can be top-down biased to a specific target color, so that only items with this color or a similar color can capture attention. According to some theories of attention, colors from different categories (i.e., red, green, blue, yellow) are represented independently. However, other accounts have propose...

Visual search is typically faster when the target from the previous trial is repeated than when it changes. This priming effect is commonly attributed to a selection bias for the target feature value or against the nontarget feature value that carries over to the next trial. By contrast, according to a relational account, what is primed in visual s...

Task switch costs often show an asymmetry, with switch costs being larger when switching from a difficult task to an easier task. This asymmetry has been explained by difficult tasks being represented more strongly and consequently requiring more inhibition prior to switching to the easier task. The present study shows that switch cost asymmetries...

What factors determine which stimuli of a scene will be visually selected and become available for conscious perception? The currently prevalent view is that attention operates on specific feature values, so attention will be drawn to stimuli that have features similar to those of the sought-after target. Here, we show that, instead, attentional ca...