Visual processing organizes continuous visual input into discrete events. The boundaries between these events facilitate adaptive forgetting: when the statistics of our immediate environments have dramatically changed, it may be helpful to ‘clear’ memory of previous information that no longer applies to the new event. Event boundaries have been explored in many contexts—from scene cuts in film, chapters in narratives, and even walking through doorways. But one of the clearest and most natural event boundaries we cross is simply going from one day to the next. The time of the day can be marked by external clocks and calendars, but it can also be more implicitly extracted from the position of the sun. Here we asked whether these subtler visual cues are spontaneously encoded, and in turn, then trigger active forgetting. Observers watched virtual animations in which they were situated in a waiting room with three windows. They were shown a list of pseudo-words, after which the animation played simulating the actual movement of the sun over the course of the day. The position of the sun was implied only by the shadows reflected by objects in the room. Observers either saw a sunrise-to-noon or noon-to-sunset transition. Animations were matched for duration and visual complexity, differing only in the direction of lighting changes. Recognition memory was tested immediately after. Results revealed worse memory in the noon-to-sunset compared to the sunrise-to-noon condition. No such memory differences were found in a control experiment with matched internal room lighting changes (i.e., brightening versus dimming light strips), with the sun position remaining constant throughout. This confirms that the observed memory effects were driven by sun position rather than general illumination changes. Altogether, these findings suggest that the visual system uses environmental priors, such as the sun’s position, to regulate memory dynamically.
Our lives are flooded with visual reminders of time slipping away — from ticking clocks to countdowns timers, that all depict a sense of time “running out”. In time perception, the same duration can feel longer or shorter as a function of various factors (e.g., attention, predictability) — but we know less about the factors that influence the perception of how much time is left. In visual processing, a key discovery is that while sensory input may be a continuous wash of light, what we experience — what the mind parses — are discrete objects and events. Here we explored how discreteness structures our sense of time running out. Observers completed a multi-item localization (MILO) task, where they clicked on multiple targets in a sequence. In every trial, there was a black-bordered rectangular ‘timer-bar’ initially filled with a color that emptied over a period (e.g., 3 seconds) to visually depict the passage of time. The color diminished either *continuously*, gradually and evenly depleting throughout, or *discretely*, in which the bar was segmented into discrete chunks that disappeared at regular intervals. To measure perceived urgency of time ‘running out’, we examined inter-click latencies (i.e., the time between clicks). Results revealed longer inter-click latencies for discrete (compared to continuous) timer-bars, suggesting greater urgency in the continuous case. This difference disappeared in a separate experiment, where the bar was instead filled over time continuously or discretely, with a reliable interaction between experiments — suggesting that effects could not simply have been a function of one condition being more distracting than another. Thus, discreteness may have distinct effects on our sense of time running out versus time accumulating. Segmentation in visual depictions of time depletion may make time feel more “manageable,” altering our sense of urgency in time-sensitive tasks.
In order to act in the world — to be in the right place at the right time — visual processing must keep track of time. Psychological time though is malleable, with the same duration seeming longer or shorter, depending on external factors (e.g., how many events occurred) or internal processes (e.g., speed of information processing). But we do not only passively perceive time; we can also make things go faster or slower depending on whether we wait and let time pass, or move things along ourselves. This agency, or the role of the “self” in relation to time, has been often isolated through the following question: “If your Wednesday meeting is moved forward by two days, when is the new meeting?” If you are *moving* toward the meeting (i.e., “ego-moving”), the answer is Friday. If you are *waiting* for the meeting to approach (i.e., “ego-stationary”), it’s Monday. Here we ask whether and how these self-time perspectives change temporal experience. Observers saw an event — a disc flash on a screen. As in typical duration experiments, they reproduced time intervals (i.e., the time elapsed between the start of the trial and the event) via button press. Critically, they also reproduced intervals with their “self” as the reference point (i.e., the time elapsed between now [where you are in time] and the past event). In a large-scale study, ego-moving observers (who reported “Friday”) reproduced shorter durations between themselves and the past event, than did ego-stationary observers (who reported “Monday”) — while no difference was observed for reproductions of intervals between events independent of the “self.” Thus, ego-moving people may be more “ready to act,” so past events are represented as having occurred more recently in time — perhaps because these are still deemed relevant for impending future action.
Visual processing of incoming sensory cues gives rise to the rich colours that fill contours and the contours that form objects. But people can also experience colours and contours in the *absence* of explicit sensory cues, albeit in more fleeting ways — as in the phenomenon of “scaffolded attention”. Consider a regular grid of squares. By definition, there is no structure there, but many people report seeing various shapes and patterns anyway (e.g., horizontal lines, block letters). But beyond *what* people see, perhaps more intriguing is *how* they experience it. Some describe the squares of perceived patterns to be brighter or differently shaded (i.e., “shaders”), while others note the squares as being ‘outlined’ or ‘traced’ (i.e., “bolders”). What determines when people experience one ‘type’ over another? Here observers reported which type they experienced, and reproduced the magnitude of bolding and/or shading through an interactive grid. We then explored the influence of *external* grid features (e.g., white squares with black outlines vs. black squares with white outlines), and *internal* factors (e.g., attentional breadth [via the ‘Functional Field of View task; FFOV], and sensitivity to figure-ground boundaries [via the Leuven Embedded Figures Test; LEFT]). First, the proportions of shaders and bolders overwhelmingly differed across grids, with reliably more bolders for black (93.2%) than for white grids (41.1%) — perhaps because the contrast differences change whether the squares or the lines are seen as figure or ground. Second, only the LEFT (and not FFOV) scores predicted whether people would be a ‘shader’ or ‘bolder,’ highlighting the role of segmentation processes in scaffolded attention. Thus, people’s everyday hallucinations can depend on what the mind selects — the squares on the white grids or the lines of black grids — which may be grouped together through different visual routines.
Emotions have the capacity to make people feel ‘not quite like themselves’. This common expression implies a shift in identity—not in terms of mere facial identity, but a deeper sort, involving a sense of who a person is over time. Questions on identity are long-standing philosophical puzzles that have been difficult to explore empirically. Here, by leveraging a paradigm in visual perception, we ask how perceived emotional transitions (e.g., seeing a neutral face become sad) might interact with identity persistence (i.e., how we represent an individual as persisting over time). We adapted a classic object persistence paradigm, the tunnel effect, in which an object that passes behind an occluder is perceived as the same object, despite changes to superficial features (e.g., shape, color). Observers saw faces pass behind an occluder. These faces were imposed with a target letter, and observers simply reported whether the letter stayed the same or different across the occluder. Critically, we varied the face’s emotions, where sometimes the face maintained its emotion through the occluder (e.g., starting sad and staying sad), or not (e.g., starting neutral and becoming sad). When emotions were maintained across the occluder, response times were facilitated in the same-target condition than in the different-target condition—replicating the basic tunnel effect. This effect, however, disappeared when the face changed emotions across the occluder—despite the face maintaining its superficial identity, with a reliable interaction across conditions. This disruption in identity persistence mimicked the same pattern of results when the actual identity switched (e.g., when a different person’s face emerged from the occluder), while emotion remained constant. These findings first demonstrate that a ‘deeper’ sense of identity is spontaneously tracked in visual processing—and that this may be more contingent on perceived changes in emotion than we might have previously thought.
In the rush of daily experience, visual attention selects relevant information in our environment. While we know the many features that grab our attention in an image (e.g., particular colours or shapes), we know little about how we orient attention in a dynamic world. Here we suggest a novel property of visual events that may capture attention — their (un)finishedness. In higher-level thought, unfinishedness often grabs our internal attention. Is this also true in perception? Across two experiments, observers viewed paths that gradually unfolded through a maze towards an ‘endpoint’. Notably, each path either reached its endpoint or stopped short, remaining unfinished. Once each path unfolded, a probe flashed near an endpoint, and observers reported its direction. Surprisingly, observers were more accurate when probes appeared near completed paths. Visual attention may prioritize events (i.e., fulfilled occurrences), as opposed to non-events (i.e., potential occurrences that haven’t been realized), within a complex scene.
Forgetting is as important as remembering when transitioning between events, and doorways can trigger this process — perhaps serving as a cue for the ending or beginning of an event. But what gets “flushed” from memory? Previous work predominantly used neutral stimuli, while so much of experience varies by emotion. In the broader memory literature, the emotional valence of information can reduce forgetting. Here, we ask how doorways interact with emotional information by presenting observers with both negative and neutral words, after which they virtually walked through a doorway or not. Replicating the basic effect of emotional valence, negative words were better remembered than neutral ones across conditions. Preliminary analysis of individual differences in trait rumination revealed flushing for both negative and neutral content in the doorway condition for high trait ruminators, but not for low ruminators. These findings provide insight into how individuals hold emotional information in working memory.
The em-dash has increasingly been used to ‘propel’ action forward in written language. Is this merely stylistic, or does the em-dash actually shape attentional processing as we read? We adapted a “same-object advantage” paradigm in which observers read sentences one word at a time. They simply pressed a key when presented with coloured words, pairs of which either occurred within the same clause or spanned a punctuation. Performance was disrupted when words spanned a segmented dash, but not an em-dash or semicolon. This suggests the em-dash is better able to “merge,” rather than segment, independent clauses into a whole.
We are all familiar with time seeming to go faster or slower than it actually does. Here, in contrast, we investigate a novel temporal distortion: psychological time as ‘jerky’—momentarily speeding-up or slowing-down—as in individuals with schizophrenia. We recreated this experience in the general population and asked how this is modulated by common psychosis symptoms, like paranoia. Observers engaged in a sustained attention task while a task-irrelevant metronome played. ‘Jerkiness’ was induced by having the beats sometimes arrive sooner or later. High and low-paranoia individuals were differentially impacted by the slow-downs. These results reveal nuanced ways time might be experienced discontinuously.
How did you get here? In theory, one could trace a causal chain all the way back to the ‘big bang’, though there are always more proximal intuitive causes. Are causal chains mere philosophical thought experiments, or might they actually structure perception and enumeration? Whereas causal interactions are typically studied as single cause-effect events, here observers viewed discs collide in a ‘causal chain’ and reported how many discs appeared. Causal chains were underestimated less compared to sequences with identical motions but with spatial gaps between the discs. Thus, causal chains may change what ‘counts’ as an event in experience.