Poster list

Substance use represents a risk factor for an individual's physical and mental health. Research on exposure to drug use within family contexts extensively covers how parental or partner substance use impacts young individuals, whereas the effects on siblings of drug users remain underrepresented. This study aims to focus on how siblings of substance users perceive their family relationships and support. A convenience sample of 105 emerging adults (age 18–30, M = 22.6±3.41; 77% female; n = 80 with at least a sibling) completed an anonymous online survey, self-reporting their own and their sibling's use of illicit substances in the last year, on the Perceived Parental Support Scale, the Brief Family Relationship Scale (Cohesion, Conflict), and the Adult Sibling Relationship Questionnaire (Warmth, Conflict). Individuals were more likely to self-report substance use if their siblings did (Odds Ratio = 4.29). Family and sibling relationships varied based on the interaction between personal and sibling substance use: when sibling discordance in substance consumption was reported, perceived parental support and family cohesion were lower compared to concordant no-use, and perceived sibling warmth was lower for discordant use compared to concordant consumption. Sibling substance use represents a risk factor for personal consumption, and discordance in sibling substance use is associated with a self-reported fragmented family climate — suggesting the need for psychological interventions that include siblings, beyond the core young user–parent family unit.

Digital images of widely varying quality have become ubiquitous in everyday vision, and judging how good an image looks differs from recognizing what it depicts. A central question in Gestalt psychology concerns how fragmented visual information is organized into meaningful percepts, yet how the quality of available visual evidence shapes this organization as portions of a scene are revealed over time remains poorly understood. Using a dynamic adaptation of the Bubbles technique, twenty participants categorized 520 low- and high-quality images depicting natural or man-made scenes. Discrimination sensitivity was significantly reduced for low-quality images, and categorization errors were asymmetric across categories, with low-quality man-made images disproportionately misclassified as natural. Response-locked feature-temporal maps for spatial frequency, sharpness and colour revealed that, for man-made scenes, image degradation shifted diagnostic information from higher to lower spatial frequencies, while natural scenes showed broader distributions of diagnostic frequencies; sharpness and chromatic/achromatic information also varied across categories and quality levels. Together, these findings suggest that image degradation not only reduces categorization performance but reshapes the visual information supporting perceptual decisions, revealing a flexible, context-dependent weighting of visual information as scene representations emerge over time.

Facial expressions carry both coarse, low-spatial-frequency (LSF) and fine, high-spatial-frequency (HSF) information, which may contribute differently to the resulting percept. This study investigated how conflicting emotional signals across spatial scales influence facial emotion judgments, and whether momentary affect modulates their relative weighting, using hybrid faces in which LSF and HSF components independently conveyed happy or sad expressions. In a brief-exposure binary-judgment task (Experiment 1, N = 34) and a longer-exposure continuous-rating task (Experiment 2, N = 24), LSF information strongly dominated emotional judgments — responses followed the LSF component in roughly 73% of incongruent trials, and continuous ratings revealed an almost perfectly additive contribution of the two scales, with an approximately threefold advantage for LSF. Incongruent expressions produced a 34% reduction in the magnitude of valence ratings and greater response variability; neither positive nor negative affect reliably predicted the relative weighting. These findings suggest that facial emotion judgments preserve contributions from conflicting information across spatial scales, pointing to an asymmetrically weighted combination of emotional signals whose group-level regularity coexists with marked individual variability.

Visual information acquired in peripheral vision can facilitate subsequent foveal processing across saccades, but peripheral and foveal vision differ in their sensitivity to spatial frequency (SF), suggesting that exact physical correspondence between a preview and a target may not be optimal. Across two experiments, participants executed successive saccades to a Gabor patch whose SF either matched or differed from its peripheral preview. In Experiment 1 (N = 15), a significant interaction revealed a directional asymmetry: lower-SF previews followed by higher-SF targets produced shorter fixations than unchanged previews, while higher-SF previews followed by lower-SF targets produced longer fixations. Experiment 2 (N = 33) varied preview SF across five octave ratios relative to fixed targets; fixation duration varied nonlinearly, reaching a minimum at approximately −0.77 octaves. Together, these findings show that fixation duration was minimized when peripheral previews were moderately coarser than their subsequent foveal targets, rather than when they matched it physically, suggesting that trans-saccadic processing is shaped by the relationship between peripheral and foveal spatial-frequency information rather than by physical similarity alone.

Why stable interindividual differences in visual performance emerge so consistently, even among healthy observers viewing identical stimuli under identical conditions, remains a fundamental question in vision science. This PCI-RR pre-registered and peer-reviewed study tests the hypothesis that part of this variability is associated with internal neural noise from the observer's side, indexed by the aperiodic component of resting-state EEG, and that this endogenous variability modulates the behavioural consequences of experimentally manipulated task-irrelevant stimulus-side variability. Across the visual processing hierarchy, a four-task psychophysical battery — Gabor contrast detection, reflection symmetry detection, coherent motion detection, and fixed-reference numerosity comparison — asks participants for binary yes/no judgements while task-relevant signal strength and task-irrelevant stimulus-side variability are manipulated independently; resting-state EEG is recorded before and after the battery in eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions. Trial-level accuracy will be analyzed with binomial mixed-effects models to test whether performance varies with signal strength and task-irrelevant variability within each task, whether individual susceptibility to such variability covaries across tasks, and whether resting-state aperiodic activity predicts these behavioural effects — clarifying whether neural noise is a task-general determinant of perceptual performance, a task-specific constraint, or a source of individual differences that depends on its interaction with external variability. The study is currently at the data-collection stage; the poster will present the relevant literature, the approved methodology, hypotheses and expected results, together with a preliminary analysis based on pilot sessions.

Reasoning-based accounts conceptualize tool use as problem solving supported by the integration of multiple sources of information, motivating the action reappraisal hypothesis — that semantic, mechanical, and sensorimotor information is dynamically integrated to evaluate whether and how a tool can be used. In an eye-tracking study, 30 participants freely viewed isolated tools, thematically consistent tool–object pairs, and inconsistent pairs. Within-tool exploration varied across conditions over time: attention initially favoured functional areas, then shifted to manipulation areas, with this shift emerging earlier for isolated tools; later, isolated and consistent conditions stabilized on manipulation areas, whereas inconsistent pairs showed renewed attention to functional areas. In paired scenes, exploration initially favoured the object before shifting to the tool, with attention to the object remaining higher for inconsistent than consistent pairs. These findings suggest that the mere presence of an object initially affects within-tool exploration, while thematic inconsistency further shapes its later evolution, consistent with the action reappraisal hypothesis.

Mirrors provide a familiar means of observing objects and people, yet individuals often make systematic errors when reasoning about the spatial properties of reflections. This study examined how accurately observers perceive the cone of gaze (CoG) — the range of gaze directions perceived as directed toward an observer — comparing judgments made when a person was viewed directly versus through a mirror. Twenty participants' judgments were comparable across the two conditions, indicating no difference in perceived CoG between reflected and directly observed individuals. A separate group of forty participants, however, systematically misplaced a person's mirror reflection in a paper-and-pencil spatial task, biased both vertically toward the mirror plane and horizontally toward its centre. Together, these findings reveal a dissociation between perceptual judgments of gaze, which appear unaffected by the presence of a mirror, and explicit spatial reasoning about reflected objects, which is susceptible to systematic biases — as though, perceptually, the mirror were treated as an aperture rather than a reflective surface.

The way we process external stimuli can be shaped by the perception of the body's internal state, namely interoception. It remains unclear how the perception of internal bodily signals, in turn, can be influenced by other types of sensory information concerning the body. Evidence from bodily illusion paradigms points to a reciprocal influence between interoception and body ownership, suggesting that interoceptive signals contribute to bodily self-consciousness, while changes in the sense of body ownership modulate interoception. Much of this evidence comes from the Rubber Hand Illusion, a paradigm where ownership over a rubber hand is induced by synchronously stimulating the participant's hidden real hand and a visible rubber hand; for the illusion to emerge, the participant's perceptual system must reconcile the spatial incongruence between proprioceptive and visual stimuli through reweighting the available sensory information. It therefore remains unclear whether changes in interoception reflect a nonspecific effect of this sensory reweighting or are specifically linked to changes in the sense of body ownership. Virtual reality allows disentangling these possibilities by presenting a virtual body in the same spatial location as the physical body, without introducing visuo-proprioceptive spatial incongruence, testing whether viewing a different body as one's own — and thus altering the sense of body ownership — is sufficient to alter interoceptive processing. In an ongoing study, participants complete a heartbeat discrimination task while viewing a virtual avatar either from a first-person perspective, promoting virtual body ownership, or from a third-person perspective as a control condition. Preliminary results show that participants with higher baseline interoceptive ability have lower interoceptive performance in the first-person condition than in the control condition, consistent with interoception being closely intertwined with the sense of body ownership, such that embodying a virtual avatar may alter how internal bodily signals are perceived — relevant to designing and evaluating immersive virtual experiences given the importance of accurate physiological self-perception for adaptive regulation and emotional awareness.

In Type-B metacontrast masking, performance typically shows a U-shaped relationship with the stimulus onset asynchrony between a target and a following, spatially non-overlapping mask, suggesting a role for feedback-dependent processing. This study investigated whether this masking pattern differs between foveal and peripheral vision, and showed that metacontrast masking also operates on mid-level shape information, including a symmetry discrimination task. By systematically varying stimuli and task — from detecting a missing segment to judging complex symmetry — the authors separated two mechanisms: one depending on tight spatial fit and matching polarity between target and mask, producing facilitation at short SOAs; and a second that specifically produces Type-B masking, operates on mid-level shape information, and produces no facilitation. The results suggest that symmetry perception is an ideal task for studying metacontrast masking, and support a role for feedback in symmetry perception.

During prolonged, repetitive activities, attention can fluctuate toward self-generated thoughts — mind wandering — but whether these fluctuations also affect oculomotor responses to unexpected visual events is unclear. Using a Sustained Attention to Response Task across a high- and a low-target-probability phase, thirty participants' saccadic inhibition to brief visual flashes, pupil dynamics and blink frequency were monitored alongside thought probes assessing task focus versus internal-thought immersion. Commission errors increased, and reported immersion in internal thoughts rose, from the high- to the low-load condition. Saccades were more strongly inhibited in the high-load condition, particularly early on, with the difference diminishing over time; pupil diameter decreased sharply during initial blocks before gradually increasing, while blink frequency progressively increased. These findings suggest that attentional changes during prolonged, repetitive activity are accompanied by reduced oculomotor responsiveness to brief external events when attention is more strongly oriented toward internal thoughts.

The Extended Self Theory proposes that personal possessions, including smartphones, can become integrated into one's sense of self, such that separation from them may affect cognitive functioning and elicit emotional responses. This study disentangled whether previously reported effects of a distant, ringing smartphone result from separation, ringing, or their combination. Seventy participants, assigned to a near or distant smartphone condition, completed two word-search puzzles before and after their smartphone rang, while psychophysiological activity was continuously recorded. Results showed no significant effects of smartphone position, ringing, or their interaction on cognitive performance; for psychophysiological outcomes, ringing was associated with increased electrodermal activity, though not consistently across other measures, and position did not affect perceived extension of the self. These findings do not support the assumption that physical separation from one's smartphone is sufficient to impair cognitive performance, suggesting instead that responses to smartphone-related cues may depend more on specific events — such as incoming notifications — than on physical proximity itself.

The SNARC effect describes the tendency to associate small numbers with the left side of space and large numbers with the right, reflecting a mental number line; stimulus valence is similarly spatially lateralized, with right-handers typically associating negative stimuli with the left and positive stimuli with the right. This study investigated how these dimensions interact when numbers are framed as monetary gains or losses. Across two experiments with right-handed participants (n = 51), a valence-classification task showed no classic SNARC or SNARC-like valence effect, but a main effect of valence, with faster responses for losses than gains; a magnitude-classification task instead revealed a robust SNARC effect together with a significant magnitude × valence compatibility effect, strongest when response hand, magnitude and valence were all aligned. A focused analysis of extreme numerical targets confirmed that valence–space associations emerge more clearly when the spatial coding elicited by numerical magnitude is strongly lateralized. Overall, both number magnitude and valence influenced spatial associations during magnitude-based but not valence-based tasks, suggesting that the economic framing of numbers modulates their mental representation through an integrated spatial-functional coding system.

Evidence that Tenebrio molitor larvae exhibit goal-directed behaviour challenges the view of insect larvae as governed primarily by simple stimulus–response mechanisms, but how sensory experience shapes their behaviour over time remains poorly understood. This study investigated non-associative learning in response to repeated mechanical vibrations at approximately 25 or 93 Hz, quantifying freezing duration across trials. Repeated stimulation induced increased freezing — consistent with sensitization, and stronger at 93 Hz. Testing persistence across four consecutive days, or across a two-day gap, showed that sensitization persisted and plateaued under daily exposure, and that the sensitized response persisted after a 48-hour interval without stimulation, consistent with long-term retention. These findings reveal that repeated sensory stimulation can induce persistent, experience-dependent behavioural change in T. molitor larvae, with frequency-dependent magnitude and cross-day persistence suggesting that larval responses are shaped not only by immediate sensory input but by the temporal history of stimulation.

Early numeracy skills are fundamental to subsequent mathematical learning, with visuospatial working memory, visuospatial skills and fine motor skills thought to play a central role — though these constructs are rarely examined together in a longitudinal design. In this study, 93 preschool children (mean age 50.5 months) were assessed at two time points on fine motor skills, visuospatial skills, visuospatial working memory and early numeracy. Visuomotor integration and visuospatial skills were substantial predictors of early numeracy over time, whereas visuospatial working memory showed no unique contribution, and mediation analyses indicated that the effect of visuomotor integration on numeracy was fully accounted for by visuospatial skills and prior numeracy skills. These findings highlight the central role of visuospatial processes in early numeracy development and support integrated longitudinal approaches, with implications for the design of educational interventions.

Automatic and involuntary fixational eye movements offer a tool for studying the automaticity of Spatial-Numerical Associations (SNAs); an earlier study reported that gaze shifted leftward for small and rightward for large numbers during passive auditory exposure, but this finding has been challenged on grounds of limited observations. Experiment 1 replicated the original procedure with more participants and trials; Experiment 2 assessed whether gaze was associated with number processing during active magnitude classification. A magnitude effect in Experiment 1 emerged only in the first block of trials (matching the original study's trial count), while in Experiment 2 mixed-effects models showed a magnitude effect consistent across blocks. Experiment 1 therefore replicated the original effect only in initial trials, not supporting strong automaticity, while Experiment 2's effect during explicit classification supports an intermediate account of SNAs — between fully automatic association and the view that spatial and numerical codes must be concurrently activated.

Human visual perception is strongly shaped by recent sensory history: previous visual stimuli systematically bias attentional selection and perceptual judgments toward prior input, away from it, or toward expected features or positions. In visual search, an earlier study reported that performance is facilitated when target positions follow a coherent spatial trajectory across successive trials, suggesting that attention may be biased toward locations predicted by trajectory continuation — but this trajectory-based facilitation had not yet been directly replicated. This study revisited those findings with a direct replication of the original Experiment 1, in which 30 participants performed an orientation-discrimination task with a target and a single distractor, while target positions shifted in congruent or incongruent directions, by a smaller or larger distance, across four-trial sequences. Preliminary results revealed a pattern opposite to the original study: at the fourth trial of the sequence, for larger shifts, responses were significantly faster for incongruent than congruent shifts. One possible explanation is spatial priming, since incongruent shifts returned the target to a location occupied two trials earlier, potentially facilitating attentional selection through positional repetition; alternatively, successive target displacements might generate spatial expectations whose violation attracts attention toward the unexpected position. Both accounts could explain the faster responses to incongruent shifts, but they imply different processes underlying the influence of recent spatial history on visual attention, and further studies will be needed to distinguish between them.

Mathematical regularities such as prime numerosities appear in some biological structures, and individuals with Savant syndrome have identified or generated prime numbers without formal mathematical knowledge — pointing to possible non-numerical mechanisms for discriminating primes. This poster presents an overview of comparative-cognition studies testing whether prime numerosities can be discriminated from non-prime sets without training. Day-old domestic chicks, habituated to sets of even numerosities, spent longer near a novel prime than a novel non-prime odd set, showing they could discriminate between and prefer the prime set; the discrimination held even for the more complex 13-vs-15 case when perceptual asymmetry was stressed by colour-grouping. These results point to an early-emerging perceptual mechanism — exploiting the non-factorisation property of primes — supporting numerical discrimination, and the authors note that a similar pattern has recently been reported in 8-month-old nonverbal infants, suggesting the mechanism may be shared across species.

In Italy, students can enroll in any university degree regardless of their high-school track, allowing non-linear educational pathways; this study examined whether math attitudes, academic achievement and gender distinguish students who persist in, leave, or enter STEM fields. Among 486 first-year students classified as STEM persisters, non-STEM persisters, STEM disengagers or STEM engagers, about one in four had changed field. Math utility value and high-school math achievement differentiated persisters from disengagers and engagers, with math utility value showing the strongest associations, while high-school Italian achievement showed the opposite pattern. Among students from non-STEM high-school tracks, women had substantially lower odds of entering STEM, and also reported higher math anxiety and lower math self-concept and utility value; math anxiety and perfectionism showed no unique association with trajectories. Though exploratory given the cross-sectional design, the findings suggest that math utility value, achievement and gender — rather than math anxiety — characterize different STEM trajectories.

Autism spectrum disorder is increasingly recognized for a distinctive visual perceptual profile — including heightened sensitivity to fine detail and a bias toward local over global processing — alongside its hallmark social and communicative features. SCN2A, among the highest-confidence genetic risk factors for autism, encodes a sodium channel central to synaptic maturation; prior work in Scn2a+/− mice showed disrupted excitability that may affect how object representations develop invariance along the visual stream. This study trained Scn2a+/− and wild-type rats to classify gratings as horizontal or vertical, then examined how brief prime stimuli biased perception of subsequent targets. Priming revealed spontaneous invariance to spatial transformations in both groups, but Scn2a+/− rats showed increased sensitivity to high-spatial-frequency stimuli alongside reduced priming for second-order and global patterns — reflecting heightened local processing and impaired global integration that parallels visual processing traits reported in autism.

Creativity is known to be involved in math performance, but its role in word problem-solving — which requires applying mathematical knowledge to verbal, real-life formats — is rarely studied directly. This study examined the unique contribution of domain-general and mathematical creativity to word problem-solving, after controlling for well-documented predictors, across consistent, inconsistent and complex problem types. Among 310 fourth- and fifth-graders, neither general nor mathematical creativity predicted performance on consistent problems; mathematical creativity predicted performance on inconsistent problems; and both general and mathematical creativity predicted performance on complex problems. These results show that the impact of creativity on word problem-solving varies with its domain-general or domain-specific nature and with problem features, suggesting that fostering creativity in mathematical education may help reduce difficulties in math acquisition.

The n-back task recruits working memory by requiring the current stimulus to be evaluated against previously encountered items, whose lingering episodic traces can reduce mnemonic discriminability through familiarity — a dynamic that conventional trial-averaged ERP analyses cannot capture. Using a single-trial framework tracing target matching and continuous episodic familiarity, 39 adults performed a 2-back task with 64-channel EEG. Behaviourally, lures elicited marked proactive interference, and episodic familiarity slowed responses while selectively inflating false alarms. EEG showed familiarity selectively modulated a centro-parietal P3b component, while an earlier frontocentral positivity was unique to target hits; response-locked models revealed a pre-response positivity indexing motor facilitation for hits, suppressed under higher familiarity. The results reframe the n-back as a task in which familiarity-based evidence must be weighed against task rules, with successful performance depending on interference control alongside updating.

Exposure to textures with center–periphery discontinuities can produce an illusory impression of uniformity, and connecting lines between dots are known to reduce their apparent numerosity. In a first experiment, observers judged whether peripheral dots were connected while the connectedness of a central region was independently manipulated, confirming that the illusion of uniformity extends to dot connectedness — established within 500 ms, likely reflecting the weak boundary between central and peripheral textures. In a second experiment, observers compared peripheral dot density against a central probe to test whether illusory connectedness also biases perceived numerosity; the point of subjective equality tracked peripheral numerosity, but no effect of central connectedness emerged. The authors suggest that other perceptual biases, such as a general reduction in perceived peripheral numerosity, may have dominated these judgements, leaving open how connectedness affects perceived numerosity in peripheral versus central vision.

Although caffeine is widely recognized for its effects on higher-level cognition, its impact on inhibitory and facilitatory lateral interactions in early visual processing is not well established. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover design, twenty-seven participants received 200 mg of caffeine or a placebo in separate sessions, and lateral interactions were assessed via a contrast-detection task with a central Gabor patch flanked at inhibitory, facilitatory and neutral distances. Across sessions, participants showed the expected shift from suppression to facilitation with increasing target-to-flanker distance, replicating classic findings, but caffeine administration did not significantly alter threshold elevation in either condition — a null result confirmed across frequentist and Bayesian analyses. These findings suggest that a single 200 mg dose of caffeine does not alter the neural circuits governing lateral interactions in early vision, indicating that its neuromodulatory effects are highly circuit-dependent.

Most research on numerosity perception relies on simplified dot arrays on uniform backgrounds, leaving unclear how well classic Approximate Number System (ANS) signatures generalize to more ecologically valid scenes, where variability in object identity, texture, illumination and background structure may affect segmentation and estimation. This study introduces a large, open dataset of 6,000 digital photographs of real-world object collections (numerosity range 1–20, three levels of background complexity), captured with handheld smartphones across multiple viewpoints to preserve naturalistic variation in lighting, texture and viewpoint while avoiding occlusion; continuous visual properties (occupied area, convex hull, density, average item size) were extracted for each image via a custom computer-vision pipeline and included as metadata. An online numerosity estimation task (N = 100 participants, 300 images each) provides an initial behavioural validation, with data collection ongoing; both the image dataset and the accompanying behavioural data will be made publicly available. By pairing an ecologically valid, well-structured image set with its metadata and behavioural norms, the dataset is intended to support future research on numerosity perception in natural visual environments and to facilitate comparison with findings from traditional laboratory paradigms.

Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) is increasingly recognized not only as a mechanical spinal condition but as one involving changes in sensorimotor integration. This study linked visual body perception to motor output in females with AIS, combining psychophysical detection thresholds for spinal curvature with single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the primary motor cortex. Individuals with AIS showed significantly lower perceptual detection thresholds for spinal curvature than healthy controls, and these thresholds correlated with subjective body-image distortion scores but not with objective spinal angles — indicating that body-image distortion operates independently of mechanical severity. TMS mapping revealed early peak corticospinal excitability in AIS patients at their lower detection threshold, whereas controls showed excitability peaks only when distortions clearly exceeded detection baselines. These findings point to an elevated corticospinal gain in response to body-relevant visual cues in AIS, suggesting that integrating perceptual-motor training into AIS rehabilitation could be valuable.

This research investigates the online effects of 10 Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) on visual perception, within the tACS Challenge — a pre-registered protocol verifying the presence and effect size of tACS's online effects across 45 laboratories and 880 participants. Using a within-subjects design comparing occipital stimulation against cutaneous and retinal active controls and a sham condition, participants performed a luminance change detection task following threshold titration. Preliminary partial results from the Padova lab alone (n = 20, underpowered and reported as trends) show no reliable overall decrease in performance in the occipital condition relative to sham, but suggest a trend toward phase-dependent modulation of visual perception in the occipital condition — with a similar trend appearing in sham, plausibly reflecting endogenous alpha-phase effects — and no comparable trend in either active control condition, arguing against a simple retinal or expectancy-based account.