Michael Puntiroli | Université de Genève (original) (raw)
Papers by Michael Puntiroli
Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2020
Technological advancements spawn products that tend to be useful when placed in the appropriate h... more Technological advancements spawn products that tend to be useful when placed in the appropriate hands. Here we investigated whether potential benefits of owning a feedback device were driven by individual differences in environmental values (i.e. biospherism), or whether the device alone is sufficient to reduce energy over time. We examined a total of 276 households, 138 equipped with a feedback device formed our treatment group, and 138 control households selected from a wider pool of households (+2000) based on their similarity to the treatment households, according to a statistical matching procedure. The results indicated that individuals with low bio-spheric values fail to decrease their electricity expenditure when paired with a feedback device. Conversely, highly biospheric individuals do engage in more pro-environmental behaviour when they receive feedback, but only when they have owned the device for about three years or more. We obtained additional insights, by focusing on differences within the treatment group that suggest, once again, that only highly biospheric individuals who owned the device for over three years successfully implement changes in the household. Overall, these results indicate that feedback devices such as smart meters can be important tools in achieving energy reductions only when paired with environmentally concerned individuals. Given the current trend towards increased feedback technology, policy implications for decision makers are discussed.
Journal of Business Research, 2020
This paper sheds light on the reasons why conventional messages prove largely ineffective at fost... more This paper sheds light on the reasons why conventional messages prove largely ineffective at fostering pro-environmental behaviors among individuals with high egoistic values. We conducted three experiments comparing the effectiveness of prevention-focused and promotion-focused messages at promoting pro-environmental behaviors. We found that egoistic individuals exposed to prevention-focused messages tended to perceive pro-environmental efforts as less worthy, compared to those exposed to promotion-focused messages. This effect, in turn, decreased their willingness to take environmental action. We also observed that the negative effect prevention -focused messages have on egoists is attributable to a defense mechanism. Egoistic people exposed to prevention-focused messages seem to deny the veracity of the message, which in turn decreases the perceived worthiness of the environmental effort and thus the intention to act. The findings highlight the best way to frame environmental communication to reach those who are least likely to adopt eco-responsible behavior, i.e., egoistic people.
SCCER CREST, 2017
The Swiss Household Energy Demand Survey (SHEDS) has been developed as part of the research agend... more The Swiss Household Energy Demand Survey (SHEDS) has been developed as part of the research agenda of the Competence Center for Research in Energy, Society, and Transition (SCCER CREST). It is designed to collect a comprehensive description of the Swiss households’ energy-related behaviors, their longitudinal changes and the existing potentials for future energy demand reduction. The survey has been planned in five annual waves thus generating a rolling panel dataset of 5,000 respondents per wave. The first two waves of SHEDS were fielded in April 2016 and April-May 2017. This paper elaborates on SHEDS’s general objectives, design, and implementation. It also reports a series of practical examples of how the datasets are being used in empirical analyses
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2019
Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spont... more Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spontaneously retrieve a simple attribute of a visual object (e.g., its color) for conscious report, even though the object had just been the target in a visual task. Attribute amnesia has been suggested to reflect a lack of consolidation of the task-irrelevant attribute in visual working memory. Here, we tested whether saccadic selection eliminate or attenuates attribute amnesia. Saccade targets have been shown to be preferentially encoded into visual working memory and may therefore be spared. We used simple color pop-out displays, asking participants to indicate the location of the color singleton letter target on each trial either by keypress or by making a saccade towards it. After a couple of trials and unannounced to the participants, we asked for the color and identity of the last target letter on a surprise trial. We found that saccade targets were not spared from attribute amnesia: participants were as bad in correctly reporting the color in the saccade as in the keypress condition. For letter identity, the effect was attenuated, but not abolished when the target was foveated for a short period of time. We argue that the current results do not refute an obligatory coupling between saccadic selection and encoding in visual working memory. However, the encoded information may not necessarily be stored in a manner that is robust enough to persist in the face of a surprise question.
Scientific Reports, 2019
When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immedia... more When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immediate vicinity. Here we show that this does not hold true when saccades are prepared toward a recently extinguished target. We obtained detailed maps of orientation sensitivity when participants prepared a saccade toward a target that either remained on the screen or disappeared before the eyes moved. We found that attention was mainly focused on the immediate surround of the visible target and spread to more peripheral locations as a function of the distance from the cue and the delay between the target's disappearance and the saccade. Interestingly, this spread was not accompanied with a spread of the saccade endpoint. These results suggest that presaccadic attention and saccade programming are two distinct processes that can be dissociated as a function of their interaction with the spatial configuration of the visual scene.
When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immedia... more When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immediate vicinity. Here we show that this does not hold true when saccades are prepared towards a recently extinguished target. We obtained detailed maps of orientation sensitivity when participants prepared a saccade toward a target that either remained on the screen or disappeared before the eyes moved. We found that attention was mainly focused at the immediate surround of the visible target and increasingly spread to more peripheral locations as a function of the delay between the target's disappearance and the saccade. Interestingly, this spread was accompanied by an overall increase in sensitivity, speaking against a dilution of limited resources over a larger spatial area. We hypothesize that these results reflect the behavioral consequences of the spatio-temporal dynamics of visual receptive fields in the presence and in the absence a structured visual cue.
Journal of Vision, 2018
In the time leading up to a saccade, the saccade target is perceptually enhanced compared to othe... more In the time leading up to a saccade, the saccade target is perceptually enhanced compared to other objects in the visual field. This enhancement is attributed to a shift of spatial attention toward the target. We examined whether the presence of visual objects is critical for the perceptual enhancement at the saccade target to occur. We hypothesized that attention may need an object to focus on in order to be effective. We conducted four experiments using a dual-task design, where participants performed eye movements either to a location demarked by a placeholder or to an empty screen location where no object was displayed. At the same time, they discriminated a probe flashed at the location targeted by the eye movement or at one of two control locations. A strong perceptual advantage at the saccade target location was observed only when placeholders were displayed at the time of probe presentation. The complete absence of placeholders (Experiment 1), the presence of placeholders before but not during probe presentation (Experiment 3), and the presence of objects only around the saccade target (Experiments 3 and 4) led to a strong reduction in the saccade-target benefit. We conclude that placeholders may indeed be necessary to observe presaccadic enhancement at the saccade target. However, this is not because placeholders provide an object to focus attention on, but rather because they produce a masking (or crowding) effect. This detrimental effect is overcome by the presaccadic shift of attention, resulting in heightened perception only at the saccade target object.
conditions were not more pronounced at the slower end of the distributions. In line with Lawrence... more conditions were not more pronounced at the slower end of the distributions. In line with Lawrence and colleagues, we speculate that initial motor preparation, and the subsequent inhibition to counteract a premature response, may induce the anti-Hick's effect.
Prior to an eye movement, attention is gradually shifted towards the point where the saccade will... more Prior to an eye movement, attention is gradually shifted towards the point where the saccade will land. Our goal was to better understand the allocation of attention in an oculomotor capture paradigm for saccades that go straight to the eye movement target and for saccades that go to a distractor and are followed by corrective saccades to the target (i.e., involuntary saccades). We also sought to test facilitation at the future retinotopic location of target and non-target objects, with the principal aim of verifying whether the remapping process accounts for the retinal displacement caused by involuntary saccades. Two experiments were run employing a dual-task design, primarily requiring participants to perform saccades towards a target while discriminating an asymmetric cross presented briefly before saccade onset. The results clearly show perceptual facilitation at the target location for goal-directed saccades and at the distractor location when oculomotor capture occurred. Facilitation was observed at a location relating to the remapping of a future saccade landing point, in sequences of oculomotor capture. In contrast, performance remained unaffected at the remapped location of a salient distracting object, which was not looked at. The findings are taken as evidence that pre-saccadic enhancement occurs prior to involuntary and voluntary saccades alike and that the remapping process also indiscriminately accounts for the retinal displacement caused by either.
Thesis Chapters by Michael Puntiroli
Our visual system is fovea-heavy, which means that in-depth processing occurs only in the centre ... more Our visual system is fovea-heavy, which means that in-depth processing occurs only in the centre of
the retina, forcing the eyes to make constant movements in order to bring visual elements into focus. Despite this, eye movements go largely unnoticed and the environment is perceived as visually stable. Pre-saccadic shifts of attention might be guaranteeing this stability by easing the transition from one foveated image to another. Before an eye movement attention shifts to the location where the eyes will land and visual elements presented there are preferentially processed. A similar mechanism, also based on the allocation of attention in eye-centred coordinates, is known as remapping. It allows attention to be maintained on locations of interest across eye movements, while accounting for the retinal displacement caused by each upcoming movement. In the current thesis, we are concerned with how the visual elements present in the environment shape the allocation of attention before eye movements. We first aimed to determine whether pre-saccadic shifts of attention are a precondition of all saccades, irrespective of goals. We showed that whether the saccade was goal-directed, to the intended target, or involuntary, erroneously directed to a capturing distractor, made little difference to the pre-saccadic shift of attention. Retinal displacement caused by involuntary saccades was also accounted for by the visual system. Next, the project focused on how the presented visual elements affect the programming of eye movements, by investigating how the decision to make an eye movement is affected by the number of target alternatives. We saw evidence that a larger set-size can reduce saccadic reaction times without increasing the error rate, a finding not predicted by a popular model. Further, whether the presence of visual elements in and around the saccade landing point influences the shifts of attention was investigated. We demonstrate that objects and their arrangement shape the distribution of attention, and that the effect is not driven by saccade metrics alone. Finally, we look at the spatial and temporal distribution of visual attention when a saccade target is removed shortly before the eye movement.
Conference Presentations by Michael Puntiroli
When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are deployed towards the saccade target, but do n... more When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are deployed towards the saccade target, but do not spread towards surrounding locations. Here we show that such binding of pre-saccadic attention with the saccade target location only holds when eye movements are prepared towards an object still present, but not towards a recently extinguished one. In our study, participants made 10 degrees saccades toward an object that could either remain present or get extinguished before the saccade onset. We obtained detailed maps of pre-saccadic shift of attention to the saccade target and its surrounds. We observed that when saccades were prepared towards an object currently present, attention was concentrated within a ~2 degree-radius around the object. However, when saccades were prepared towards an object that extinguished shortly before the saccade (~500 ms), although eye movements remained highly precise, attention was reduced at the saccade target. Interestingly, when saccades were prepared towards an object that disappeared long before the eyes moved (~900 ms), attention spread to locations further away (within a ~5 degree-radius) from the memorized object. Our findings therefore suggest that the pre-saccadic shift of attention is a highly malleable process, bound to he saccade target only when a structured visual field can funnel it.
Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2020
Technological advancements spawn products that tend to be useful when placed in the appropriate h... more Technological advancements spawn products that tend to be useful when placed in the appropriate hands. Here we investigated whether potential benefits of owning a feedback device were driven by individual differences in environmental values (i.e. biospherism), or whether the device alone is sufficient to reduce energy over time. We examined a total of 276 households, 138 equipped with a feedback device formed our treatment group, and 138 control households selected from a wider pool of households (+2000) based on their similarity to the treatment households, according to a statistical matching procedure. The results indicated that individuals with low bio-spheric values fail to decrease their electricity expenditure when paired with a feedback device. Conversely, highly biospheric individuals do engage in more pro-environmental behaviour when they receive feedback, but only when they have owned the device for about three years or more. We obtained additional insights, by focusing on differences within the treatment group that suggest, once again, that only highly biospheric individuals who owned the device for over three years successfully implement changes in the household. Overall, these results indicate that feedback devices such as smart meters can be important tools in achieving energy reductions only when paired with environmentally concerned individuals. Given the current trend towards increased feedback technology, policy implications for decision makers are discussed.
Journal of Business Research, 2020
This paper sheds light on the reasons why conventional messages prove largely ineffective at fost... more This paper sheds light on the reasons why conventional messages prove largely ineffective at fostering pro-environmental behaviors among individuals with high egoistic values. We conducted three experiments comparing the effectiveness of prevention-focused and promotion-focused messages at promoting pro-environmental behaviors. We found that egoistic individuals exposed to prevention-focused messages tended to perceive pro-environmental efforts as less worthy, compared to those exposed to promotion-focused messages. This effect, in turn, decreased their willingness to take environmental action. We also observed that the negative effect prevention -focused messages have on egoists is attributable to a defense mechanism. Egoistic people exposed to prevention-focused messages seem to deny the veracity of the message, which in turn decreases the perceived worthiness of the environmental effort and thus the intention to act. The findings highlight the best way to frame environmental communication to reach those who are least likely to adopt eco-responsible behavior, i.e., egoistic people.
SCCER CREST, 2017
The Swiss Household Energy Demand Survey (SHEDS) has been developed as part of the research agend... more The Swiss Household Energy Demand Survey (SHEDS) has been developed as part of the research agenda of the Competence Center for Research in Energy, Society, and Transition (SCCER CREST). It is designed to collect a comprehensive description of the Swiss households’ energy-related behaviors, their longitudinal changes and the existing potentials for future energy demand reduction. The survey has been planned in five annual waves thus generating a rolling panel dataset of 5,000 respondents per wave. The first two waves of SHEDS were fielded in April 2016 and April-May 2017. This paper elaborates on SHEDS’s general objectives, design, and implementation. It also reports a series of practical examples of how the datasets are being used in empirical analyses
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2019
Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spont... more Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spontaneously retrieve a simple attribute of a visual object (e.g., its color) for conscious report, even though the object had just been the target in a visual task. Attribute amnesia has been suggested to reflect a lack of consolidation of the task-irrelevant attribute in visual working memory. Here, we tested whether saccadic selection eliminate or attenuates attribute amnesia. Saccade targets have been shown to be preferentially encoded into visual working memory and may therefore be spared. We used simple color pop-out displays, asking participants to indicate the location of the color singleton letter target on each trial either by keypress or by making a saccade towards it. After a couple of trials and unannounced to the participants, we asked for the color and identity of the last target letter on a surprise trial. We found that saccade targets were not spared from attribute amnesia: participants were as bad in correctly reporting the color in the saccade as in the keypress condition. For letter identity, the effect was attenuated, but not abolished when the target was foveated for a short period of time. We argue that the current results do not refute an obligatory coupling between saccadic selection and encoding in visual working memory. However, the encoded information may not necessarily be stored in a manner that is robust enough to persist in the face of a surprise question.
Scientific Reports, 2019
When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immedia... more When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immediate vicinity. Here we show that this does not hold true when saccades are prepared toward a recently extinguished target. We obtained detailed maps of orientation sensitivity when participants prepared a saccade toward a target that either remained on the screen or disappeared before the eyes moved. We found that attention was mainly focused on the immediate surround of the visible target and spread to more peripheral locations as a function of the distance from the cue and the delay between the target's disappearance and the saccade. Interestingly, this spread was not accompanied with a spread of the saccade endpoint. These results suggest that presaccadic attention and saccade programming are two distinct processes that can be dissociated as a function of their interaction with the spatial configuration of the visual scene.
When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immedia... more When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immediate vicinity. Here we show that this does not hold true when saccades are prepared towards a recently extinguished target. We obtained detailed maps of orientation sensitivity when participants prepared a saccade toward a target that either remained on the screen or disappeared before the eyes moved. We found that attention was mainly focused at the immediate surround of the visible target and increasingly spread to more peripheral locations as a function of the delay between the target's disappearance and the saccade. Interestingly, this spread was accompanied by an overall increase in sensitivity, speaking against a dilution of limited resources over a larger spatial area. We hypothesize that these results reflect the behavioral consequences of the spatio-temporal dynamics of visual receptive fields in the presence and in the absence a structured visual cue.
Journal of Vision, 2018
In the time leading up to a saccade, the saccade target is perceptually enhanced compared to othe... more In the time leading up to a saccade, the saccade target is perceptually enhanced compared to other objects in the visual field. This enhancement is attributed to a shift of spatial attention toward the target. We examined whether the presence of visual objects is critical for the perceptual enhancement at the saccade target to occur. We hypothesized that attention may need an object to focus on in order to be effective. We conducted four experiments using a dual-task design, where participants performed eye movements either to a location demarked by a placeholder or to an empty screen location where no object was displayed. At the same time, they discriminated a probe flashed at the location targeted by the eye movement or at one of two control locations. A strong perceptual advantage at the saccade target location was observed only when placeholders were displayed at the time of probe presentation. The complete absence of placeholders (Experiment 1), the presence of placeholders before but not during probe presentation (Experiment 3), and the presence of objects only around the saccade target (Experiments 3 and 4) led to a strong reduction in the saccade-target benefit. We conclude that placeholders may indeed be necessary to observe presaccadic enhancement at the saccade target. However, this is not because placeholders provide an object to focus attention on, but rather because they produce a masking (or crowding) effect. This detrimental effect is overcome by the presaccadic shift of attention, resulting in heightened perception only at the saccade target object.
conditions were not more pronounced at the slower end of the distributions. In line with Lawrence... more conditions were not more pronounced at the slower end of the distributions. In line with Lawrence and colleagues, we speculate that initial motor preparation, and the subsequent inhibition to counteract a premature response, may induce the anti-Hick's effect.
Prior to an eye movement, attention is gradually shifted towards the point where the saccade will... more Prior to an eye movement, attention is gradually shifted towards the point where the saccade will land. Our goal was to better understand the allocation of attention in an oculomotor capture paradigm for saccades that go straight to the eye movement target and for saccades that go to a distractor and are followed by corrective saccades to the target (i.e., involuntary saccades). We also sought to test facilitation at the future retinotopic location of target and non-target objects, with the principal aim of verifying whether the remapping process accounts for the retinal displacement caused by involuntary saccades. Two experiments were run employing a dual-task design, primarily requiring participants to perform saccades towards a target while discriminating an asymmetric cross presented briefly before saccade onset. The results clearly show perceptual facilitation at the target location for goal-directed saccades and at the distractor location when oculomotor capture occurred. Facilitation was observed at a location relating to the remapping of a future saccade landing point, in sequences of oculomotor capture. In contrast, performance remained unaffected at the remapped location of a salient distracting object, which was not looked at. The findings are taken as evidence that pre-saccadic enhancement occurs prior to involuntary and voluntary saccades alike and that the remapping process also indiscriminately accounts for the retinal displacement caused by either.
Our visual system is fovea-heavy, which means that in-depth processing occurs only in the centre ... more Our visual system is fovea-heavy, which means that in-depth processing occurs only in the centre of
the retina, forcing the eyes to make constant movements in order to bring visual elements into focus. Despite this, eye movements go largely unnoticed and the environment is perceived as visually stable. Pre-saccadic shifts of attention might be guaranteeing this stability by easing the transition from one foveated image to another. Before an eye movement attention shifts to the location where the eyes will land and visual elements presented there are preferentially processed. A similar mechanism, also based on the allocation of attention in eye-centred coordinates, is known as remapping. It allows attention to be maintained on locations of interest across eye movements, while accounting for the retinal displacement caused by each upcoming movement. In the current thesis, we are concerned with how the visual elements present in the environment shape the allocation of attention before eye movements. We first aimed to determine whether pre-saccadic shifts of attention are a precondition of all saccades, irrespective of goals. We showed that whether the saccade was goal-directed, to the intended target, or involuntary, erroneously directed to a capturing distractor, made little difference to the pre-saccadic shift of attention. Retinal displacement caused by involuntary saccades was also accounted for by the visual system. Next, the project focused on how the presented visual elements affect the programming of eye movements, by investigating how the decision to make an eye movement is affected by the number of target alternatives. We saw evidence that a larger set-size can reduce saccadic reaction times without increasing the error rate, a finding not predicted by a popular model. Further, whether the presence of visual elements in and around the saccade landing point influences the shifts of attention was investigated. We demonstrate that objects and their arrangement shape the distribution of attention, and that the effect is not driven by saccade metrics alone. Finally, we look at the spatial and temporal distribution of visual attention when a saccade target is removed shortly before the eye movement.
When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are deployed towards the saccade target, but do n... more When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are deployed towards the saccade target, but do not spread towards surrounding locations. Here we show that such binding of pre-saccadic attention with the saccade target location only holds when eye movements are prepared towards an object still present, but not towards a recently extinguished one. In our study, participants made 10 degrees saccades toward an object that could either remain present or get extinguished before the saccade onset. We obtained detailed maps of pre-saccadic shift of attention to the saccade target and its surrounds. We observed that when saccades were prepared towards an object currently present, attention was concentrated within a ~2 degree-radius around the object. However, when saccades were prepared towards an object that extinguished shortly before the saccade (~500 ms), although eye movements remained highly precise, attention was reduced at the saccade target. Interestingly, when saccades were prepared towards an object that disappeared long before the eyes moved (~900 ms), attention spread to locations further away (within a ~5 degree-radius) from the memorized object. Our findings therefore suggest that the pre-saccadic shift of attention is a highly malleable process, bound to he saccade target only when a structured visual field can funnel it.