Zhiguo Wang

Zhejiang University | ZJU · Center for Psychological Sciences

Several Python programming books feature tools designed for experimental psychologists. What sets this book apart is its focus on eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is a widely used research technique in psychology and neuroscience labs. Research grade eye-trackers are typically faster, more accurate, and of course, more expensive than the ones seen in con...

Drowsiness poses a serious challenge to road safety and various in-cabin sensing technologies have been experimented with to monitor driver alertness. Cameras offer a convenient means for contactless sensing, but they may violate user privacy and require complex algorithms to accom-modate user (e.g., sunglasses) and environmental (e.g., lighting co...

The programming of rapid eye movements or “saccades” involves a large collection of neural substrates. The subcortical oculomotor center—the superior colliculus (SC)—contains a topographical motor map that encodes saccade vectors. Using a visual distractor task, the present study examined a classic model of the SC motor map, which assumes a symmetr...

Ensuring safe human-robot interactions is a crucial concern in robotics research and development. However, controlling the social distance between quadruped robots and humans poses a significant challenge due to the large motion range of robots and the lack of specific social distance rules for human safety. This study proposes an innovative framew...

Most commercially available eye-tracking devices rely on video cameras and image processing algorithms to track gaze. Despite this, emerging technologies are entering the field, making high-speed, camera-less eye-tracking more accessible. In this study, a series of tests were conducted to compare the data quality of MEMS-based eye-tracking glasses...

The short-run production and customization are increasingly common in the manufacturing industry, which results in the frequent adjustments of production lines. Industrial robots in these production lines are also required to quickly learn to perform new grasping tasks. However, the traditional approaches in grasping points selection, which rely on...

In this paper, we introduce a new solution to the problems that robots face when handling containers filled with liquid. A novel capacitive proximity skin was developed that can be integrated into various robot gripper configurations to measure liquid state before grasping. This technology has the potential to improve robotic systems in industries...

Service robots are often required to determine the liquid level inside a container. However, traditional approaches using camera-based or ultrasonic wave sensors are unreliable and can introduce challenges in movement trajectory planning. In this study, we developed a novel gripper system that is equipped with a capacitive proximity sensor, enablin...

Attention flexibly shifts between spatial locations to accommodate task demands. The present study examined if the dynamics of attentional shifting are seen in microsaccades whose direction has been shown to accompany the shifts of covert attention. In a spatial cueing task, the cue predicted the target location on 100%, 75%, or 50% of the trials....

Both spatial and temporal context play an important role in visual perception and behavior. Humans can extract statistical regularities from both forms of context to help process the present and to construct expectations about the future. Numerous studies have found reduced neural responses to expected stimuli compared with unexpected stimuli, for...

How does the brain maintain spatial attention despite the retinal displacement of objects by saccades? A possible solution is to use the vector of an upcoming saccade to compensate for the shift of objects on eye-centered (retinotopic) brain maps. In support of this hypothesis, previous studies have revealed attentional effects at the future retina...

Humans show a clear left-side bias in face processing. A chimeric face constructed with the left side (from the viewer’s perspective) of a face and its mirror image is usually rated as more resemblant to the original face than a chimeric face constructed with the right side of the same face. Previous studies have characterized the left-side bias ma...

Inhibition of return (IOR), an inhibitory aftereffect of attentional orienting, usually reveals itself in slower responses to targets appearing at previously attended locations in spatial cueing tasks. Many of the neural substrates underlying visual working memory are also closely linked to attention. The present study examined whether the contents...

Both spatial and temporal context play an important role in visual perception and behavior. Humans can extract statistical regularities from both forms of context to help processing the present and to construct expectations about the future. Numerous studies have found reduced neural responses to expected stimuli compared to unexpected stimuli, for...

Developmental dyslexia is known to involve dysfunctions in multiple brain regions; however, a clear understanding of the brain networks behind this disorder is still lacking. The present study examined the functional network connectivity in Chinese dyslexic children with resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. EEG data were recorded...

The amount of the striate cortex devoted to the lower visual field (LVF) is larger than that devoted to the upper visual field (UVF). A similar anatomical asymmetry also exists in the LGN. Here we take advantage of an experimental task that is known to modulate the direction of saccades to demonstrate the visual field asymmetry on oculomotor maps....

Mathematical learning difficulties (MLD) refer to a variety of deficits in math skills, typically pertaining to the domains of arithmetic and problem solving. The present study examined the time course of attentional orienting in MLD children with a spatial cueing task, by parametrically manipulating the cue-target onset asynchrony (CTOA). The resu...

Stimuli related to the self are processed more efficiently in a variety of cognitive tasks. Recent studies have shown that this self-referential processing bias is modulated by emotion. However, a clear understanding of how emotional valence and arousal affect self-referential processing is still lacking. With a label–shape matching task, Experimen...

Previous work has shown that inefficient attentional orienting is likely a causal factor for dyslexia, however, the nature of this attentional dysfunction remains unclear. The process of attentional orienting is characterized by an early facilitation effect, resulting from the successful engagement of attention, and a later inhibitory effect—freque...

Young children are frequently exposed to environmental prints (e.g., billboards and product labels) that contain visual word forms on a daily basis. As the visual word forms in environmental prints are frequently used to convey information critical to an individual’s survival and wellbeing (e.g., “STOP” in the stop sign), it is conceivable that an...

An inhibitory aftereffect of attention, frequently referred to as inhibition of return (IOR), operates at a previously attended location to discourage perseverative orienting. Using the classic cueing task, previous work has shown that IOR is not restricted to a previously attended location, but rather spreads to adjacent visual space in a graded m...

Visual working memory (VWM) representations can be strengthened by pre-cues presented before, and retro-cues presented after, the memory display, providing evidence that attentional orienting plays a role in memory encoding and maintenance. It is unknown whether attentional orienting to VWM stimuli can also have adverse effects (known as inhibition...

Background/aim: Face is the most distinctive physical feature of a person. Previous work has shown that one’s own face (self-face) is advantageous in perception. Here we investigate how aging influences the configural and featural processing of self-face. Methods: Older and young adults searched for their own faces and faces of strangers (Experimen...

Studies of visual working memory (VWM) have reported that different features belonging to the same object (conjunctions) are better retained than the same features belonging to spatially separated objects (disjunctions). This conjunction benefit has been taken as evidence for the theory that VWM representations are object-based. However, compared t...

Previous studies have shown that visual working memory (VWM) representations can be strengthened by pre-cues presented prior to the memory display, as well as retro-cues presented after the memory display, providing evidence for attentional orienting playing a role in memory encoding and maintenance. However, it is known from attentional orienting...

Recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that visual features such as color and orientation can be stored or retrieved independently in visual working memory (VWM), even in cases when they belong to the same object. Yet it remains unclear whether different feature dimensions have their own capacity limits, or whether they compete for shared b...

Neurons in various brain regions predictively respond to stimuli that will be brought to their receptive fields by an impending eye movement. This neural mechanism, known as predictive remapping, has been suggested to underlie spatial constancy. Inhibition of return (IOR) is a bias against recently attended locations. The present study examined whe...

With two cueing tasks, in the present study we examined output-based inhibitory cueing effects (ICEs) with manual responses to arrow targets following manual or saccadic responses to arrow cues. In all experiments, ICEs were observed when manual localization responses were required to both the cues and targets, but only when the cue-target onset as...

Inhibition of return (IOR), typically explored in cueing paradigms, is a performance cost associated with previously attended locations and has been suggested as a crucial attentional mechanism that biases orientation towards novelty. In their seminal IOR paper, Posner and Cohen (1984) showed that IOR is coded in spatiotopic or environment-centered...

It is currently unclear whether a person’s own face has greater capacity in absorbing his/her attention than faces of others. With two visual distractor tasks, the present study assessed the extent to which a person’s own face attracts his/her attention, by measuring face distrac- tor elicited distortion of saccade trajectories. Experiment 1 showed...

Previous studies have shown that saccades may deviate towards or away from task irrelevant visual distractors. This observation has been attributed to active suppression (inhibition) of the distractor location unfolding over time: early in time inhibition at the distractor location is incomplete causing deviation towards the distractor, while later...

Sensory adaptation and oculomotor inhibition of return (IOR) have been extensively modeled using a one-dimensional dynamic neural field (DNF) model of the superior colliculus (SC). However, a great deal of paradigms are incapable of being simulated in a single dimension, limiting the generality of previous implementations. Here, we expand on previo...

Inhibition of return (IOR) operationalizes a behavioral phenomenon characterized by slower responding to cued, relative to uncued, targets. Two independent forms of IOR have been theorized: input-based IOR occurs when the oculomotor system is quiescent, while output-based IOR occurs when the oculomotor system is engaged. EEG studies forbidding eye...

Visual-working-memory (VWM) is crucial for complex cognitive tasks, such as learning and reasoning. Previous studies suggest that VWM stores integrated object, rather than independent features (Luck & Vogel, 1997). Memory accuracy is the same whether the participant needs to maintain one or all features from the same object. Several recent studies,...

Previous studies have shown that saccades may deviate towards or away from task irrelevant visual distractors (Van der Stigchel, Meeter, & Theeuwes, 2006). The deviation away from distractors is stronger for targets in the lower visual field (LVF) than those in the upper visual field (UVF). Using a distractor task, three experiments were conducted...

When the interval between a transient ash of light (a "cue") and a second visual response signal (a "target") exceeds at least 200ms, responding is slowest in the direction indicated by the first signal. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as inhibition of return (IOR). The dynamic neural field model (DNF) has proven to have broad explanatory p...

When the interval between a transient flash of light (a “cue”) and a second visual response signal (a “target”) exceeds at least 200 ms, responding is slowest in the direction indicated by the first signal. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as inhibition of return (IOR). The dynamic neural field model (DNF) has proven to have broad ex- planat...

Taylor and Klein (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 26:1639-1656, 2000) discovered two mutually exclusive "flavors" of inhibition of return (IOR): When the oculomotor system is "actively suppressed," IOR affects input processes (the perception/attention flavor), whereas when the oculomotor system is "engaged," IOR...

It has recently been demonstrated that there are independent sensory and motor mechanisms underlying inhibition of return (IOR) when measured with oculomotor responses (Wang et al. in Exp Brain Res 218:441-453, 2012). However, these results are seemingly in conflict with previous empirical results which led to the proposal that there are two mutual...

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to the relative suppression of processing at locations that have recently been attended. It is frequently explored using a spatial cueing paradigm and is characterized by slower responses to cued than to uncued locations. The current study investigates the impact of IOR on overt visual orienting involving saccadic...

When two spatially proximal stimuli are presented simultaneously, a first saccade is often directed to an intermediate location between the stimuli (averaging saccade). In an earlier study, Watanabe (2001) showed that, at a long cue-target onset asynchrony (CTOA; 600 ms), uninformative cues not only slowed saccadic response times (SRTs) to targets...

Inhibition of return (IOR) is thought to reflect a mechanism that biases orienting which, under some circumstances, reduces perceptual processing at previously processed locations. Studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) have generally revealed that IOR is accompanied by an amplitude reduction of early sensory ERP components (e.g., P1). While...

When, in relation to the execution of an eye movement, does the recoding of visual information from retinotopic to spatiotopic coordinates happen? Two laboratories seeking to answer this question using oculomotor inhibition of return (IOR) have generated different answers: Mathôt and Theeuwes (Psychological Science 21:1793-1798, 2010) found evidenc...

Contrary to human intuition, saccades (rapid eye movements) rarely go directly to their intended destination, but instead typically deviate from the optimal track. Previous studies have demonstrated that saccades may deviate toward or away from irrelevant distractors. Deviation toward distractors is generally explained with theories of "population...

We propose two explicit mechanisms contributing to oculomotor inhibition of return (IOR): sensory and motor. Sensory mechanism: repeated visual stimulation results in a reduction in visual input to the superior colliculus (SC); consequently, saccades to targets that appear at previously stimulated retinotopic locations will have longer latencies th...

Inhibition of return (IOR) is an orienting phenomenon characterized by slower responses to spatially cued than to uncued targets. In Experiment 1, a physically small digit that required identification was presented immediately following a peripheral cue. The digit could appear in the cued peripheral box or in the central box, thus guaranteeing a sa...

When viewing a scene or searching for a target, an observer usually makes a series of saccades that quickly shift the orientation of the eyes. The present study explored how one saccade affects subsequent saccades within a dynamic neural field model of the superior colliculus (SC). The SC contains an oculocentric motor map that encodes the vector o...

Inhibition of return (IOR) is an orienting phenomenon characterized by slower behavioral responses to spatially cued, relative to uncued targets, when the cue-target onset asynchronies (CTOAs) are long enough that cue-elicited attentional capture has dispersed. Here, we implement a short-term depression (STD) account of IOR within a neuroscientific...

If and when search involves the serial inspection of items by covert or overt attention, its efficiency would be enhanced by a mechanism that would discourage re-inspections of items or regions of the display that had already been examined. Klein (1988, 2000; Klein & Dukewich, 2006) proposed that inhibition of return (IOR) might be such a mechanism...

Studies that followed the covert and overt probe-following-search paradigms of Klein (1988) and Klein and MacInnes (1999) to explore inhibition of return (IOR) in search are analyzed and evaluated. An IOR effect is consistently observed when the search display (or scene) remains visible when probing and lasts for at least 1000ms or about four previ...

In the present study, we investigated the effects of the different traffic on the driver’s situation awareness and the mental workload (MWL). The task used in this study was a medium fidelity, 3-dimensional simulation of a driving environment. The simulation required participants to drive the user’s car and perform a real-world driving task. After...

In this study, we investigated the effects of the different driving experience and gender on the driver's situation awareness (SA) and the mental workload (MWL). A PC-based driving simulator was used to present experiment task and SA task. The MWL measures in this study consisted of the physiological measures and the subjective assessment. The resu...