Previous research suggested a role of gaze in preference formation, not merely as an expression of preference, but also as a causal influence. According to the gaze cascade hypothesis, the longer subjects look at an item, the more likely they are to develop a preference for it. However, to date the connection between viewing and liking has been investigated predominately with self-paced viewing conditions in which the subjects were required to select certain items from simultaneously presented stimuli on the basis of perceived visual attractiveness. Such conditions might promote a default, but non-mandatory connection between viewing and liking. To explore whether the connection is separable, we examined the evaluative processing of single naturalistic food images in a 2 × 2 design, conducted completely within subjects, in which we varied both the type of exposure (self-paced versus time-controlled) and the type of evaluation (non-exclusive versus exclusive). In the self-paced exclusive evaluation, longer viewing was associated with a higher likelihood of a positive evaluation. However, in the self-paced non-exclusive evaluation, the trend reversed such that longer viewing durations were associated with lesser ratings. Furthermore, in the time-controlled tasks, both with non-exclusive and exclusive evaluation, there was no significant relationship between the viewing duration and the evaluation. The overall pattern of results was consistent for viewing times measured in terms of exposure duration (i.e., the duration of stimulus presentation on the screen) and in terms of actual gaze duration (i.e., the amount of time the subject effectively gazed at the stimulus on the screen). The data indicated that viewing does not intrinsically lead to a higher evaluation when evaluating single food images; instead, the relationship between viewing duration and evaluation depends on the type of task. We suggest that self-determination of exposure duration may be a prerequisite for any influence from viewing time on evaluative processing, regardless of whether the influence is facilitative. Moreover, the purported facilitative link between viewing and liking appears to be limited to exclusive evaluation, when only a restricted number of items can be included in a chosen set.
The well-known gaze cascade hypothesis proposes that as people look longer at an item, they tend to show an increased preference for it. However, using single food images as stimuli, we recently obtained results that clearly deviated from the general proposal that the gaze both expresses and influences preference formation. Instead, the pattern of data depended on the self-determination of exposure duration as well as the type of evaluation task. In order to disambiguate how the type of evaluation determines the relationship between viewing and liking we conducted the present follow-up study, with a fixed response set size as opposed to the varying set sizes in our previous study. In non-exclusive evaluation tasks, subjects were asked how much they liked individual food images. The recorded response was a number from 1 to 3. In exclusive evaluation tasks, subjects were asked for each individual food image to give one of three response options toward a limited selection: include it, exclude it, or defer the judgment. When subjects were able to determine the exposure duration, both the non-exclusive and exclusive evaluations produced inverted U-shaped trends such that the polar ends of the evaluation (the positive and negative extremes) were associated with relatively short viewing times, whereas the middle category had the longest viewing times. Thus, the data once again provided firm evidence against the notion that longer viewing facilitates preference formation. Moreover, the fact that non-exclusive and exclusive evaluation produced similar inverted U-shaped patterns suggests that the response set size is the critical factor that accounts for the observations here versus in our previous study. When keeping the response set size constant, with an equal opportunity to observe inverted U-shaped patterns, the findings are suggestive of a role for the level of decisiveness in determining the length of viewing time. For items that can be categorically identified as positive or negative, the evaluations are soon completed, with relatively brief viewing times. The prolonged visual inspection for the middle category may reflect doubt or uncertainty during the evaluative processing, possibly with an increased effort of information integration before reaching a conclusion.
Researchers have used eye-tracking methods to infer cognitive processes during decision making in choice tasks involving visual materials. Gaze likelihood analysis has shown a cascading effect, suggestive of a causal role for the gaze in preference formation during evaluative decision making. According to the gaze bias hypothesis, the gaze serves to build commitment gradually towards a choice. Here, we applied gaze likelihood analysis in a two-choice version of the well-known Iowa Gambling Task. This task requires active learning of the value of different choice options. As such, it does not involve visual preference formation, but choice optimization through learning. In Experiment 1 we asked subjects to choose between two decks with different payoff structures, and to give their responses using mouse clicks. Two groups of subjects were exposed to stable versus varying outcome contingencies. The analysis revealed a pronounced gaze bias towards the chosen stimuli in both groups of subjects, plateauing at more than 400 ms before the choice. The early plateauing suggested that the gaze effect partially reflected eye-hand coordination. In Experiment 2 we asked subjects to give responses using a key press. The results again showed a clear gaze bias towards the chosen deck, this time without any influence from eye-hand coordination. In both experiments, there was a clear gaze bias towards the choice even though the gaze fixations did not narrowly focus on the spatial positions of choice options. Taken together, the data suggested a role for gaze in coarse spatial indexing during non-perceptual decision making.
Predictive processing is fundamental to many aspects of the human mind, including perception and decision-making. It remains to be elucidated, however, in which way predictive information impacts on evaluative processing, particularly in tasks that employ bivalent stimulus sets. Various accounts, including framing, proactive interference, and cognitive control, appear to imply contradictory proposals on the relation between prediction and preference formation. To disambiguate whether predictive cues produce congruent biases versus opponent mechanisms in evaluative processing, we conducted two experiments in which participants were asked to rate individual food images. The image database included appetitive and aversive items. In each trial, a cue predicted, with varying degrees of reliability, the valence of the impending food image. In both experiments, we found that the ratings exhibited congruent biases as a function of the reliability of the predictive cue, with the highest evaluations following the most reliable positive-valence predictions. Eye prepositioning further showed a selective spatial bias suggestive of response preparation in line with the predictions. The response times also exhibited a pattern of results consistent with selective preparation, producing slow responses following invalid predictions. The data suggested an active form of evaluative processing, implementing a confirmation bias that aims to accommodate the prediction.
The present study aims to apply multiscale entropy (MSE) to analyse brain activity in terms of brain complexity levels and to use simultaneous electroencephalogram and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (EEG/fNIRS) recordings for brain functional analysis. A memory task was selected to demonstrate the potential of this multimodality approach since memory is a highly complex neurocognitive process, and the mechanisms governing selective retention of memories are not fully understood by other approaches. In this study, 15 healthy participants with normal colour vision participated in the visual memory task, which involved the making the executive decision of remembering or forgetting the visual stimuli based on his/her own will. In a continuous stimulus set, 250 indoor/outdoor scenes were presented at random, between periods of fixation on a black background. The participants were instructed to make a binary choice indicating whether they wished to remember or forget the image; both stimulus and response times were stored for analysis. The participants then performed a scene recognition test to confirm whether or not they remembered the images. The results revealed that the participants intentionally memorising a visual scene demonstrate significantly greater brain complexity levels in the prefrontal and frontal lobe than when purposefully forgetting a scene; p < 0.05 (two-tailed). This suggests that simultaneous EEG and fNIRS can be used for brain functional analysis, and MSE might be the potential indicator for this multimodality approach.
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