Michael Spivey

Decision making is a dynamic process. Alternatives compete over time, and this competition plays ... more Decision making is a dynamic process. Alternatives compete over time, and this competition plays out in sensorimotor processes. This is true not just for perceptual decisions or simple categorisation tasks, but also for moral decisions, which are the outcome of a complex interplay of intuition, emotion and reasoning. In this experiment, we first establish a descriptive and causal link between gaze and moral judgement. We then use eye movements to track the time course of participants' moral decisions and show that by interrupting their decision process based on their gaze position, we are able to influence what they decide. We interpret this as evidence for a dynamical systems view of decision making and argue that our results provide new insights into how judgements are reached and constructed in our embodied minds.

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A linking hypothesis for eyetracking and mousetracking in the visual world paradigm

Brain Research, 2025

For a linking hypothesis in the visual world paradigm to clearly accommodate existing findings an... more For a linking hypothesis in the visual world paradigm to clearly accommodate existing findings and make unambiguous predictions, it needs to be computationally implemented in a fashion that transparently draws the causal connection between the activations of internal representations and the measured output of saccades and reaching movements. Quantitatively implemented linking hypotheses provide an opportunity to not only demonstrate an existence proof of that causal connection but also to test the fidelity of the measuring methods themselves. When a system of interest is measured one way (e.g., ballistic dichotomous outputs) or another way (e.g., smooth graded outputs), the apparent results can differ substantially. What is needed is one linking hypothesis that can produce both types of outputs. The localist attractor network simulation of spoken word recognition demonstrated here recreates eye and mouse movements that capture key findings in the visual world paradigm, and especially relies on one particularly powerful theoretical construct: feedback from the actionperception cycle. Visual feedback from the eye position enhancing the cognitive prominence of the fixated object allows the simulation to fit a wider range of findings, and points to predictions for new experiments. When that feedback is absent, the linking hypothesis simulation no longer fits human data as well. Future experiments, and improvements of this network simulation, are discussed. ☆ This article is part of a special issue entitled: '30 Years Visual World Paradigm: The State of the Art' published in Brain Research.

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A linking hypothesis for eyetracking and mousetracking in the visual world paradigm

Brain Research, 2025

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Incremental Information Mediates Visual Search

Cognitive Science, 2011

Recent studies show that visual search often involves a combination of both parallel and serial s... more Recent studies show that visual search often involves a combination of both parallel and serial search strategies. Consequently, computational models and theoretical accounts of visual search processing have evolved from traditional parallel or serial descriptions to a continuum from "efficient" to "inefficient." In our first experiment, we demonstrate with various control conditions that search efficiency does not increase with simultaneous delivery of target features in a conjunction search task. In the second experiment, we explore effects of incremental nonlinguistic information delivery and discover improvement of search efficiency. We find a facilitatory effect when visual non-linguistic delivery of target features is concurrent with the visual display onset, but not when the target features are delivered prior to display onset. The results support an interactive account of visual perception that explains linguistic and non-linguistic mediation of visual search as chiefly due to the incrementality of target feature delivery once search has begun.

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A one-stage distributed processing account of linguistic negation

Cognitive Science, 2011

Linguistic negation can be comprehended with the inclusion (or absence) of features and categorie... more Linguistic negation can be comprehended with the inclusion (or absence) of features and categories associated with the senses in a single step. Under this view, there is no need for explicit logical operators, as the negating word or phase is treated no differently than any other word. Negation provides additional context, whereby visualizing negation as a trajectory in a distributed, grounded perceptual simulation space can easily characterize the comprehension of negated sentences. A mousetracking experiment was conducted to explore how this kind of process may be enacted in the brain and to tease apart hypotheses of logical manipulations vs. analogue signals performing this work.

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The Role of Preview and Incremental Delivery on Visual Search

Cognitive Science, 2012

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Spectral convergence in tapping and physiological fluctuations: coupling and independence of 1/f noise in the central and autonomic nervous systems

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Sep 11, 2014

When humans perform a response task or timing task repeatedly, fluctuations in measures of timing... more When humans perform a response task or timing task repeatedly, fluctuations in measures of timing from one action to the next exhibit long-range correlations known as 1/f noise. The origins of 1/f noise in timing have been debated for over 20 years, with one common explanation serving as a default: humans are composed of physiological processes throughout the brain and body that operate over a wide range of timescales, and these processes combine to be expressed as a general source of 1/f noise. To test this explanation, the present study investigated the coupling vs. independence of 1/f noise in timing deviations, key-press durations, pupil dilations, and heartbeat intervals while tapping to an audiovisual metronome. All four dependent measures exhibited clear 1/f noise, regardless of whether tapping was synchronized or syncopated. 1/f spectra for timing deviations were found to match those for key-press durations on an individual basis, and 1/f spectra for pupil dilations matched those in heartbeat intervals. Results indicate a complex, multiscale relationship among 1/f noises arising from common sources, such as those arising from timing functions vs. those arising from autonomic nervous system (ANS) functions. Results also provide further evidence against the default hypothesis that 1/f noise in human timing is just the additive combination of processes throughout the brain and body. Our findings are better accommodated by theories of complexity matching that begin to formalize multiscale coordination as a foundation of human behavior.

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On the temporal dynamics of language-mediated vision and vision-mediated language

Acta Psychologica, Jun 1, 2011

Recent converging evidence suggests that language and vision interact immediately in non-trivial ... more Recent converging evidence suggests that language and vision interact immediately in non-trivial ways, although the exact nature of this interaction is still unclear. Not only does linguistic information influence visual perception in real-time, but visual information also influences language comprehension in real-time. For example, in visual search tasks, incremental spoken delivery of the target features (e.g., "Is there a red vertical?") can increase the efficiency of conjunction search because only one feature is heard at a time. Moreover, in spoken word recognition tasks, the visual presence of an object whose name is similar to the word being spoken (e.g., a candle present when instructed to "pick up the candy") can alter the process of comprehension. Dense sampling methods, such as eye-tracking and reach-tracking, richly illustrate the nature of this interaction, providing a semi-continuous measure of the temporal dynamics of individual behavioral responses. We review a variety of studies that demonstrate how these methods are particularly promising in further elucidating the dynamic competition that takes place between underlying linguistic and visual representations in multimodal contexts, and we conclude with a discussion of the consequences that these findings have for theories of embodied cognition.

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Towards a situated view of language

Advances in consciousness research, Feb 22, 2016

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The Role of Grammatical Aspect in the Dynamics of Spatial Descriptions

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010

What role does grammatical aspect play in the time course of understanding spatial language, in p... more What role does grammatical aspect play in the time course of understanding spatial language, in particular motion events? Although processing differences between past progressive (was walking) and simple past (walked) aspect suggest differences in prominence of certain semantic properties, details about the temporal dynamics of aspect processing have been largely ignored. The current work uses mouse-tracking [1] to explore spatial differences in motor output response to contextual descriptions and aspectual ...

Am I a Robot? How Verb Agency and Agent Description Influence Perspective-Taking in Visual Scenes

Am I a Robot? How Verb Agency and Agent Description Influence Perspective-Taking in Visual Scenes... more Am I a Robot? How Verb Agency and Agent Description Influence Perspective-Taking in Visual Scenes Michelle D. Greenwood University of California, Merced Teenie Matlock University of California, Merced Michael J. Spivey University of California, Merced Justin L. Matthews University of California, Merced Abstract: People often take an egocentric perspective when describing space. However, they occasionally take an alternative perspective. When and why? In a series of experiments that followed work on perspective, we explored this question. In one experiment, participants were given photographs of two objects on a table. Objectively, the scene could be described from either the perspective of the person viewing the picture or from the opposite perspective (i.e., facing the viewer). To test which viewpoint would be elicited, we asked participants to describe where an object was relative to another. In one experiment, a toy humanoid robot (facing the participant) was included in the scen...

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Darkness and the Imagination

The Oxford Handbook of Light in Archaeology, 2017

Darkness has profound effects on human behaviour and the ability to perform everyday activities. ... more Darkness has profound effects on human behaviour and the ability to perform everyday activities. It can influence our ability to function, our moods, emotions, and cognition. Here we examine the relationship between darkness and supernatural beliefs. This work is informed by cross-cultural cave research, which suggests that cave dark zones are used as the settings for rituals from the advent of modern humans to the present. How can this phenomenon be explained? The chapter reviews research on the effects of darkness on the human mind and presents results of our own experimentation. We argue that shared human reactions to darkness, including embodied responses, stimulate the imagination in similar ways, leading to what we refer to as transcendental or imaginary thinking that lies at the heart of supernatural beliefs. Our work suggests that the natural environment is not a passive player but a causative agent in this process.

Looking at the social dynamics of viewpoint

Allocentric perspectives are more common when describing spatial scenes when affordances and lang... more Allocentric perspectives are more common when describing spatial scenes when affordances and language facilitate taking such a point of view (Greenwood et al., 2010). People tend to feel "close" to friends and "distant" from strangers in both a metaphoric and physical sense (Matthews & Matlock, 2010). This work examines the relationship between perspective taking and social distance in a simulated school setting. Participants imagined attending a meeting with two other students: Mary and John. John's friendship with the participant was varied across conditions. Participants viewed a scene of a table and chairs where each member's location was labeled, then described where Mary was sitting. Egocentric frames of reference were more common when participants were familiar/friends with John and less common when participants and John were unfamiliar with one another. Many factors influence an individual's perspective, and these results suggest that information regarding social relationships can also influence perspective-taking.

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Can Correlates of a Memory be Transferred Between Human Subjects? A New False Memory Paradigm

UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal, May 4, 2023

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Team Cognition Research is Transforming Cognitive Science

Topics in Cognitive Science, 2024

Tim van Gelder, as a connectionism-trained philosopher with the leeway to enjoy a 30,000foot view... more Tim van Gelder, as a connectionism-trained philosopher with the leeway to enjoy a 30,000foot view of science, was perhaps in a special position to make his contribution of the Dynamical Hypothesis in Cognitive Science just before the turn of the last century. This special issue commemorates that clarion call he made almost 30 years ago. His Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper (1998), his Journal of Philosophy paper (1995), and his edited volume with Robert Port (Mind as Motion, 1995) were inspirational for many of us. Together, they have been cited more than a few thousand times. For some, that inspiration could manifest as simply shifting away from digital computation and toward a unique form of neural computation as what constitutes cognition . For others, it could trigger a transition to a dynamical systems approach that chases nonlinear trajectories in linguistic state space . For still others, it could transport one all the way to a complex systems approach that allows multiple organisms to engage in one shared cognition . This brief commentary focuses on the special issue articles by Nguyen, Magaldino, Landfair, Amazeen, and Amazeen (2024) and . Rather than comment on them one at a time, like a serial processing sequentialist

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Divergent and Convergent Creativity are Different Kinds of Foraging

Psychological Science, 2024

According to accounts of neural reuse and embodied cognition, higher-level cognitive abilities re... more According to accounts of neural reuse and embodied cognition, higher-level cognitive abilities recycle evolutionarily ancient mechanisms for perception and action. Here, building on these accounts, we investigate whether creativity builds on our capacity to forage in space (“creativity as strategic foraging”). We report systematic connections between specific forms of creative thinking—divergent and convergent—and corresponding strategies for searching in space. U.S. American adults completed two tasks designed to measure creativity. Before each creativity trial, participants completed an unrelated search of a city map. Between subjects, we manipulated the search pattern, with some participants seeking multiple, dispersed spatial locations and others repeatedly converging on the same location. Participants who searched divergently in space were better at divergent thinking but worse at convergent thinking; this pattern reversed for participants who had converged repeatedly on a single location. These results demonstrate a targeted link between foraging and creativity, thus advancing our understanding of the origins and mechanisms of high-level cognition.

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Incremental Information Processing on Visual Search: The Critical Role of Delivery Rate

Cognitive Science, 2013

The online processing of modal verbs: Parallel activation of competing mental models

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2010

A simple audiovisual two-alternative forced-choice task was conducted to examine processing diffe... more A simple audiovisual two-alternative forced-choice task was conducted to examine processing differences between the modal verbs should and must. Unambiguous propositions were either agreed with or disagreed with, and participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard and read the sentence. Reaction times reveal no differences in processing. However, closer time course analyses revealed a divergence in fixations to the target for should. These results suggest two mental models are simultaneously activated, entailing both agreement and disagreement with the statement in question.

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