audreysiqiliu - Research

[VSS 2024] Adjudicating between stimulus properties, prior experience, and individual difference factors in a naturalistic visual search task

What matters more for visual search: stimuli and search array features, prior experience specific to each person, or individual differences in aptitude?

Traditional experimental approaches do not offer sufficient power and variability to examine these three factors in conjunction. To translate basic science into practice, we utilize data from a massive database (> 15.6 million users) of mobile app gameplay, to probe the relative importance of stimulus features, personnel training, and selection in predictive behavioral models.

Siqi-Liu_VSS_2024.pdf

Cognitive flexibility in human task performance

In daily life, some situations require us to quickly switch between related-tasks - for example, tending to multiple cooktops while making dinner. In other situations it may be more important to focus on the current task and ignore distractions - for example, when you are writing an essay in a noisy student lounge. How do we become more or less flexible to respond to these different environmental demands? Can we be flexible about recruiting flexibility?

Related publications:

Siqi-Liu, A., Longman, C. S., Dr, & Egner, T. (2024, April 6). Domain-specific cognitive flexibility: Shift-readiness adaptations for task- and attention-switching are non-transferrable. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/qy6wz

Egner, T., & Siqi-Liu, A. (2024). Insights into control over cognitive flexibility from studies of task-switching. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 55, 101342.

Siqi-Liu, A., & Egner, T. (2023). Task sets define boundaries of learned cognitive flexibility in list-wide proportion switch manipulations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 49(8), 1111.

Siqi-Liu, A., Egner, T., & Woldorff, M. G. (2022). Neural Dynamics of Context-sensitive Adjustments in Cognitive Flexibility. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 34(3), 480-494.

Bejjani, C., Siqi-Liu, A., & Egner, T. (2021). Minimal impact of consolidation on learned switch-readiness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Siqi-Liu, A., & Egner, T. (2020). Contextual adaptation of cognitive flexibility is driven by task-and item-level learning. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 20(4), 757-782.

Task response time and error rate data show that people become relatively faster at switching between tasks in environments where they switch more frequently.

Event-related potentials (ERP) representing averaged electroencephalogram (EEG) brain wave recordings show that the task environment affects how the brain processes task switches as early as ~180 ms after people are instructed to switch tasks.

After performing a time-frequency decomposition, we can visualize which brain waves frequencies are most prevalent when people process task switches in different environmental contexts. Here we focus on differences in alpha band activity, which reflects how much attention people were paying to the task on each trial.

Mental simulation of observed body movements may help us process other's emotions

When we watch someone performing an action, such as gripping a cup, our brain activates in a similar way as when we are gripping a cup ourselves. These common brain activations are thought to to show that we automatically simulate of the actions we observe. Do these mental simulations help us understand what people intend to do with their movements, or even how they are feeling in the moment? In this project, we looked at how people's brain waves changed when they observe point-light walkers of neutral body movements (e.g. jumping jacks) versus emotional ones (e.g. jumping for joy) to see if mental simulation of these movements is related to social processing.

Related publications:

Siqi-Liu, A., Harris, A. M., Atkinson, A. P., & Reed, C. L. (2018). Dissociable processing of emotional and neutral body movements revealed by μ-alpha and beta rhythms. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 13(12), 1269-1279.

People viewed coherent point-light walker videos of human body movements versus versions of the same videos where the point-lights were scrambled. The scrambled videos acted as experimental controls.

ERPs (average brain wave responses) show that coherent videos of emotional body movements are processed differently than emotionally neutral body movements.

We observed stronger brain wave signatures (mu power) for mental simulation of body movements when people watched emotional compared to neutral body movements.