Yang Seok Cho

• Ph.D
• Korea University

It has been proposed that the control mechanism underlying the congruent sequence effect (CSE) resolves spatial conflict by suppressing an automatic link between spatial stimulus and response codes. However, previous explanation for the inhibitory influence on the automatic link was based solely on demonstrating that the control mechanisms are spec...

Objective. In the pursuit of refining P300-based brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), our research aims to propose a novel stimulus design focused on selective attention and task relevance to address the challenges of P300-based BCIs, including the necessity of repetitive stimulus presentations, accuracy improvement, user variability, and calibration...

The congruency sequence effect (CSE), a hypothesized marker of top-down cognitive control, refers to a reduced congruency effect after incongruent trials compared to congruent trials. Although this effect has been observed across various distractor interference tasks, the nature of the control processes underlying the CSE remains a topic of active...

Simon effects have been observed to arise from different modes of spatial information (e.g., physical location, arrow direction, and location word). The present study investigated whether different modes of spatial information elicit a unitary set of spatial codes when triggering a spatially corresponding response code. A pair of two different Simo...

The present study investigated the effect of object representation on attentional priority regarding distractor inhibition and target search processes while the statistical regularities of singleton distractor location were biased. A color singleton distractor appeared more frequently at one of six stimulus locations, called the ‘high-probability l...

Objective. In the pursuit of refining P300-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), our research aims to propose a novel stimulus design focused on selective attention and task relevance to address the challenges of P300-based BCIs, including the necessity of repetitive stimulus presentations, accuracy improvement, user variability, and calibration...

To investigate whether attentional suppression is merely a byproduct of target facilitation or a result of independent mechanisms for distractor suppression, the present study examined whether attentional suppression takes place when target facilitation hardly occurs using a spatial cueing paradigm. Participants searched for target letters that wer...

Reactive control is the cognitive ability to adjust thoughts and behaviors when encountering conflict. We investigated how this ability to manage conflict and stress distinguishes suicidal from nonsuicidal individuals. The hypothesis was that suicidal individuals would show poorer reactive control when faced with conflict generated by emotional tha...

One of the prime measures of cognitive control is the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which refers to a reduced congruency effect following incongruent trials compared to congruent trials. Some researchers have argued that the conflict resolution process exerts its effect at the level of whole task-set, whereas others have argued that the control...

Objective: To investigate how the visual complexity of head-up displays (HUDs) influence the allocation of driver's attention in two separate visual domains (near and far domains). Background: The types and amount of information displayed on automobile HUDs have increased. With limited human attention capacity, increased visual complexity in the...

Value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) refers to a phenomenon by which stimulus features associated with greater reward value attract more attention than those associated with smaller reward value. To date, the majority of VDAC research has revealed that the relationship between reward history and attentional allocation follows associative learnin...

Unlabelled: Neural coding of auditory stimulus frequency is well-documented; however, the cortical signals and perceptual correlates of pitch have not yet been comprehensively investigated. This study examined the temporal patterns of event-related potentials (ERP) in response to single tones of pitch chroma, with an assumption that these patterns...

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 studies on value-driven attentional capture (VDAC) have demonstrated that the uncertainty of reward value modulates attentional allocation via associative learning. However, it is unclear whether such attentional exploration is executed based on the amount of potential reward information available for refining value prediction or the absol...

The present study investigated how response mode determines the specificity of control responsible for the congruency sequence effect (CSE), especially when conflict arises from spatial dimensions. Horizontal and vertical Simon tasks were presented in turn, while response mode (Experiment 1) or task-relevant stimulus dimension (Experiment 2) was ma...

The present study develops an artificial agent that plays the iterative chicken game based on a computational model that describes human behavior in competitive social interactions in terms of fairness. The computational model we adopted in this study, named as the self-concept fairness model, decides the agent’s action according to the evaluation...

The contingent capture account of involuntary attention claims that it is guided by top-down factors, such as volitional goals or task instructions. The contrasting rapid disengagement account holds that the contingent capture account relies on the spatial precueing paradigm, which is vulnerable to the elimination of the cue-validity effect through...

The human brain carries out cognitive control for the inhibition of habitual behaviors by suppressing some familiar but inappropriate behaviors instead of engaging specific goal-directed behavior flexibly in a given situation. To examine the characteristics of neural dynamics related to such inhibition of habitual behaviors, we used a modified rock...

The current study aimed to investigate whether induced anxiety, as well as trait anxiety, would lead to the failure of the regulation of emotional conflict. To measure the regulation of emotional conflict, the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which is a reduced effect of task-irrelevant distractor after incongruent trials compared to congruent tri...

The confound-minimized cross-task design has been widely used to examine the characteristics of top-down cognitive control underlying the congruency sequence effect (CSE) without feature integration and contingency learning confounds. The present study reanalyzed our previous data obtained with the confound-minimized cross-task design, this time in...

Searching familiar faces in the crowd may involve stimulus-driven attention by emotional significance, together with goal-directed attention due to task-relevant needs. The present study investigated the effect of familiarity on attentional processes by exploring eye fixation-related potentials (EFRPs) and eye gazes when humans searched for, among...

Two experiments were conducted to examine how cognitive control is modulated by response-contingent reward (Experiment 1) and response-contingent punishment (Experiment 2). The congruency sequence effect (CSE), which is the reduction of the congruency effect after incongruent trials compared to the effect after congruent trials, was analyzed as an...

The majority of previous studies on the value modulation of attention have shown that the magnitude of value-driven attentional bias correlates with the strength of reward association. However, relatively little is known about how uncertainty affects value-based attentional bias. We investigated whether attentional capture by previously rewarded st...

The present study examined the cognitive locus of Stroop dilution using a psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. Participants were asked to perform a tone discrimination task via a bimanual keypress response and a modified Stroop task via a vocal response serially as Task 1 and Task 2, respectively. In Task 2, a neutral word was added on h...

Previous research indicates that visual attention can adapt to temporal stimulus patterns utilizing the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. However, how the temporal dynamics of an attentional pulse adapt to temporal patterns has not been explored. We addressed this question by conducting an attentional component analysis on RSVP performa...

Objective: Based on the ideation-to-action framework of suicidality, this study aimed to examine whether suicide attempters differ from suicide ideators or nonsuicidal controls in response inhibition under emotional context. Method: A total of 142 community adults with lifetime history of suicide ideation or attempt as well as nonsuicidal controls...

It has been demonstrated that a reward-associated stimulus feature captures attention involuntarily. The present study tested whether spatial attentional orienting is biased via reinforcement learning. Participants were to identify a target stimulus presented in one of two placeholders, preceded by a non-informative arrow cue at the center of the d...

The congruency sequence effect (CSE) refers to the reduced distractor interference following conflict trials compared to following non-conflict trials. According to the affective account, the enhancement of cognitive control necessary to resolve the negative affect caused by conflict drives the CSE. Research supporting this view has shown that the...

It is widely accepted that task-irrelevant threats utilize processing resources, resulting in impaired cognitive processes. However, if some subcomponents of the cognitive processes are activated by a threat, these cognitive processes may be facilitated. In the present study, we investigated whether task-irrelevant threats enhance cognitive control...

It has often been reported that gamers temporarily team up with their enemies in games that prohibit teaming in pursuit of accomplishing the final objective of the game. This behavior, referred to as “teaming”, is frequently observed in free-for-all games and spoils the enjoyment of other players. The current study analyzed data from an iterated ec...

Inhibition-induced forgetting refers to impaired memory for the stimuli to which responses were inhibited. The present study aimed to examine if it would be modulated by the processing of threatening facial expressions. Angry and neutral faces were presented in a go/no-go task and subsequent memory for faces was measured in a surprise recognition t...

It has often been reported that gamers temporarily team up with their enemies in games that prohibit teaming in pursuit of accomplishing the final objective of the game. This behavior, referred to as “teaming”, is frequently observed in free-for-all games and spoils the enjoyment of other players. The current study analyzed data from an iterated ec...

Visual working memory (VWM) for faces is facilitated when they display negative facial expressions. The present study manipulated the emotional heterogeneity of the encoding display in a change detection task to examine whether VWM is enhanced by having a separate memory store or by a bias in the allocation of limited attentional resource. When the...

Previous studies have demonstrated that attentional capture occurs based on attentional control settings. These settings specify what features are selected for processing as well as what features are filtered out. To examine how attentional control settings are flexibly constructed when target and/or distractor features are uncertain, the current p...

Sequential modulation between two task congruencies has been examined to investigate the nature of the cognitive control mechanism underlying the congruency sequence effect (CSE). Previous results regarding what consecutive tasks must have in common to engender the cross-task CSE are inconsistent. The present study examined the roles of stimulus-re...

An attentional control setting (ACS), which is based on the task goal, induces involuntary attentional capture by a stimulus possessing a target-defining feature. It is unclear whether ACSs are maintained for multiple targets defined as conjunctions of a color and location. In the present study we examined the possibility of local ACSs for dual tar...

The congruency effect of a task-irrelevant distractor has been found to be modulated by task-relevant set size and display set size. The present study used a psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm to examine the cognitive loci of the display set size effect (dilution effect) and the task-relevant set size effect (perceptual load effect) on...

The goal of this study was to investigate the role of explicit and implicit learning processes in adjusting the temporal distribution of visual attention when stimulus timing is consistent in an RSVP task. Specifically, the uncertainty of the target position in the RSVP series and length of practice were manipulated among experiments, and the degre...

An important factor affecting preference formation is the context in which that preference decision takes place. The current research examined whether one’s preference formed for a previously presented stimulus influences the processing of a subsequent preference decision, henceforth referred to as the preference sequence effect. Using a novel sequ...

Dataset of experiments. (ZIP)

As documented by Darwin 150 years ago, emotion expressed in human faces readily draws our attention and promotes sympathetic emotional reactions. How do such reactions to the expression of emotion affect our goal-directed actions? Despite the substantial advance made in the neural mechanisms of both cognitive control and emotional processing, it is...

Background: Developing valid emotional facial stimuli for specific ethnicities creates ample opportunities to investigate both the nature of emotional facial information processing in general and clinical populations as well as the underlying mechanisms of facial emotion processing within and across cultures. Given that most entries in emotional fa...

Poster presentation

Current theories assume that there is substantial overlap between visual working memory (VWM) and visual attention functioning, such that active representations in VWM automatically act as an attentional set, resulting in attentional biases towards objects that match the mnemonic content. Most evidence for this comes from visual search tasks in whi...

The recovery account states that exogenous visual attention is allocated in a stimulus-driven manner, and then it is rapidly disengaged from the attended location, thereby leaving no sign of attentional capture behind. The present study was conducted to measure a signature of recovery, under an experimental setting designed to encourage capture by...

Introduction: This study assessed bias in selective attention to facial emotions in negative symptoms of schizophrenia and its influence on subsequent memory for facial emotions. Methods: Thirty people with schizophrenia who had high and low levels of negative symptoms (n = 15, respectively) and 21 healthy controls completed a visual probe detec...

Emotional information can easily capture our attention compared to neutral information. Evidences suggest that the amount of induced attentional capture is correlated with arousal levels of processed information. On the other hand, the speed (onset latency) of attentional capture seems to be determined by the valence of the emotional information. I...

The present study was aimed to investigate how information processing by spatial attention is modulated by cue’s contingency and validity. In our version of the spatial-cuing paradigm, bars (Experiment 1) or letters (Experiments 2 & 3) were added inside four placeholders of the cue display in which one of the placeholders was cued by color. Partici...

We investigated whether attention could be modulated through the implicit learning of temporal information in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. Participants identified two target letters among numeral distractors. The stimulus-onset asynchrony immediately following the first target (SOA1) varied at three levels (70, 98, and 126 ms) ra...

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been focused on providing direct communications to the disabled. Recently, BCI researchers have expanded BCI applications to non-medical uses and categorized them as active BCI, reactive BCI, and passive BCI. Neurocinematics, a new application of reactive BCIs, aims to understand viewers’ cognitive and affectiv...

Facial preference that results from the processing of facial information plays an important role in social interactions as well as the selection of a mate, friend, candidate, or favorite actor. However, it still remains elusive which brain regions are implicated in the neural mechanisms underlying facial preference, and how neural activities in the...

People consider fairness as well as their own interest when making decisions in economic games. The present study proposes a model that encompasses the self-concept determined by one's own kindness as a factor of fairness. To observe behavioral patterns that reflect self-concept and fairness, a chicken game experiment was conducted. Behavioral data...

Performance is better when a high pitch tone is associated with an up or right response and a low pitch tone with a down or left response compared to the opposite pairs, which is called the spatial-musical association of response codes effect. The current study examined whether polarity codes are formed in terms of the variation in loudness. In Exp...

Using a modified version of pre-cuing paradigm, the present study was conducted to investigate whether cues containing non-target property is capable of capturing exogenous attention. Participants were to identify a color-defined arrow target which was pointing left or right, preceded by a cue display having arrows in all placeholders. When the cue...

The magnitude of congruency effects, such as the flanker-compatibility effects, has been found to vary as a function of the congruency of the previous trial. Some studies have suggested that this congruency sequence effect is attributable to stimulus and/or response priming, and/or contingency learning, whereas other studies have suggested that the...

The congruency sequence effect refers to a reduced congruency effect after incongruent trials relative to congruent trials. This modulation is thought to be, at least in part, due to the control mechanisms resolving conflict. The present study examined the nature of the control mechanisms by having participants perform two different tasks in an alt...

Certain facial configurations are believed to be associated with distinct affective meanings (i.e. basic facial expressions), and such associations are common across cultures (i.e. universality of facial expressions). However, recently, many studies suggest that various types of contextual information, rather than facial configuration itself, are i...

Average Normative Valence and Arousal (Standard Deviations) and Picture Identification Numbers from the International Affective Picture System for the Negative, Neutral and Positive Pictures Used (valence scale ranging from 1: negative – 9: positive; arousal from 1: calm – 9: aroused). (DOCX)

Three experiments investigated whether the Stroop color-naming effect is modulated by the likelihood of a color word capturing visual attention. In Experiment 1, a bar or a neutral word was presented at fixation as a color carrier, along with a color word randomly appearing in either an achromatic color (white in the main experiment, gray in a foll...

The present study tested whether coding of tone pitch relative to a referent contributes to the correspondence effect between the pitch height of an auditory stimulus and the location of a lateralized response. When left-right responses are mapped to high or low pitch tones, performance is better with the high-right/low-left mapping than with the o...

Using a variant of spatial cueing paradigm (Folk et al. 1992), we previously reported a negative cueing effect produced by color-singleton cues during selective search for an onset target (Park & Cho, 2010). The present study investigated whether an attentional set for a specific target-property (a bright, white onset) led to facilitation of the co...

On the basis of a recent work (Belopolsky et al., 2010), the present study examined the suppression of nonmatching cues obtained when a top-down set for a specific target was enhanced through inclusion of no-go trials for nonmatching targets. Participants made a response to color targets while withholding their response to onset targets, or in the...

Recent experimental work (e.g., Di Lollo et al., 2000) has noted that strong masking can occur even for a sparse mask (containing only four dots). In experiments where attentional focus is distributed, such a mask can produce strong effects. Recent modeling work (Francis & Hermens, 2002) showed that sparse masks and attentional focus could be model...

In the present study, we investigated the neural correlates underlying the perception of emotion in response to facial stimuli in order to elucidate the extent to which emotional perception is affected by the top-down process. Subjects performed a forced, two-choice emotion discrimination task towards ambiguous visual stimuli consisted of emotional...

Visibility of a target in a backward masking experiment depends on the SOA between the target and mask in one of two ways: either the target becomes more visible as the SOA increases (Type A masking) or the target is least visible at some intermediate SOA value (Type B masking). One explanation of the difference between these types of masking has b...

Visual attention is exogenously oriented to abrupt visual onsets in the display. In this study, we tested the idea that color word recogni- tion in the Stroop task depends on visual attention. Two experiments, in which a color word was presented at one of three placeholders or at nonplaceholder location as a distractor, were conducted to show that...

Left-right keypresses to numerals are faster for pairings of small numbers to left response and large numbers to right response than for the opposite pairings. This spatial numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect has been attributed to numbers being represented on a mental number line. We examined this issue in 3 experiments using a...

A Stroop task with separate color bar and color word stimuli was combined with an inhibition-of-return procedure to examine whether visual attention modulates color word processing. In Experiment 1, the color bar was presented at the cued location and the color word at the uncued location, or vice versa, with a 100- or 1,050-msec stimulus onset asy...

Three experiments tested whether the Stroop color-naming effect is a consequence of word recognition's being automatic or of the color word's capturing visual attention. In Experiment 1, a color bar was presented at fixation as the color carrier, with color and neutral words presented in locations above or below the color bar; Experiment 2 was simi...

When up-down stimulus locations are mapped to left-right keypresses, an overall advantage for the up-right/down-left mapping is often obtained that varies as a function of response eccentricity. This orthogonal stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect also occurs when stimulus location is irrelevant, a phenomenon called the orthogonal Simon eff...

Many studies of cognition and perception use a visual mask to explore the dynamics of information processing of a target. Especially important in these applications is the time between the target and mask stimuli. A plot of some measure of target visibility against stimulus onset asynchrony is called a masking function, which can sometimes be monot...

When lateralized responses are made to the locations of vertically arrayed stimuli, two types of mapping effect have been reported: an overall up-right/down-left advantage and mapping preferences that vary with response position. According to Cho and Proctor's (2003) multiple asymmetric codes account, these orthogonal stimulus-response compatibilit...

It has been argued that the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect is eliminated with two ideomotor compatible tasks when instructions stress fast and simultaneous responding. Three experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. In all experiments, Task 1 required spatially compatible manual responses (left or right) to the direction of...

When classifying numbers as odd or even with left-right keypresses, performance is better with the mapping even-right/odd-left than with the opposite mapping. This linguistic markedness association of response codes (MARC) effect has been attributed to compatibility between the linguistic markedness of stimulus and response codes. In 2 experiments...

A briefly presented visual target stimulus can be difficult to identify if shown in the context of a mask stimulus. There are several quantitative models that have been used to explain many different masking effects. Here, we look at modeling what has been called object substitution. We analyze four models and show that three of the models work wit...

Stroop dilution is the reduction of the Stroop effect in the presence of a neutral word. It has been attributed to competition for attention between the color word and neutral word, to competition between all stimuli in the visual field, and to perceptual interference. Five experiments tested these accounts. The critical manipulation was whether th...

Differences in performance with various stimulus–response mappings are among the most prevalent findings for binary choice reaction tasks. The authors show that perceptual or conceptual similarity is not necessary to obtain mapping effects; a type of structural similarity is sufficient. Specifically, stimulus and response alternatives are coded as...

Recent advances in the study of visual cognition and consciousness have dealt primarily with steady-state properties of visual processing, with little attention to its dynamic aspects. The First Half Second brings together for the first time the latest research on the dynamics of conscious and unconscious processing of visual information, examining...

It has long been known that a brief target can be rendered invisible if followed by a brief mask. Two general patterns of backward masking have been observed when the strength of the target percept is plotted against the SOA between the target and mask (a masking function). For some kinds of masks, the masking function increases monotonically as th...

Two types of stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect occur with orthogonal stimulus and response sets, an overall up-right/down-left advantage and mapping preferences that vary with response position. Researchers agree that the former type is due to asymmetric coding of the stimulus and response alternatives, but disagree as to whether the lat...

In two-choice tasks for which stimuli and responses vary along orthogonal dimensions, one stimulus-response mapping typically yields better performance than another. For unimanual movement responses, the hand used to respond, hand posture (prone or supine), and response eccentricity influence this orthogonal stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) ef...

When up-down stimuli are mapped to left-right responses, an up-right/down-left mapping advantage is found that is modified by response eccentricity and hand posture. These effects can be attributed to correspondence of asymmetric stimulus and response codes formed relative to multiple reference frames. We examined the influence of stimulus-set loca...

One of the most important findings in recent years regarding response selection is that stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effects occur for situations in which stimulus and response sets vary along orthogonal dimensions. For two-choice tasks, two types of orthogonal SRC effects are found: an overall advantage for the up-right/down-left mapping,...

When unimanual left-right movement responses are made to up-down stimuli, performance is better with the up-right/down-left mapping when responding in the right hemispace and with the up-left/down-right mapping when responding in the left hemispace. We evaluated whether this response eccentricity effect is explained best in terms of rotational prop...

Unimanual left-right responses to up-down stimuli show a stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect for which the preferred mapping varies as a function of response eccentricity. Responses made in the right hemispace and, to a lesser extent, at a midline position, are faster with the up-right/down-left mapping than with the up-left/down-right map...

When up and down stimuli are mapped to left and right keypresses or "left" and "right" vocalizations in a 2-choice reaction task, performance is often better with the up-right/down-left mapping than with the opposite mapping. J. J. Adam, B. Boon, F. G. W. C. Paas, and C. Umiltà (1998) presented evidence that the up-right/down-left advantage is obta...

When up and down stimuli are mapped to left and right keypresses or "left" and "right" vocalizations in a 2-choice reaction task, performance is often better with the up-right/down-left mapping than with the opposite mapping. This study investigated whether performance is influenced by the type of initiating action. In all, 4 experiments showed the...

When up and down stimuli are mapped to left and right keypresses or "left" and "right" vocalizations in a 2-choice reaction task, performance is often better with the up-right/down-left mapping than with the opposite mapping. J. J. Adam, B. Boon, F. G. W. C. Paas, and C. Umiltà (1998) presented evidence that the up-right/down-left advantage is obta...

Stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effects occur when stimulus and response sets are arrayed orthogonally. Two types of orthogonal SRC effect are found, an overall up-right/down-left advantage and orthogonal mapping preferences that vary with response factors such as response location and hand posture. Umiltà's (1991) dual-strategy hypothesis an...