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1
Xiao, Mei, May Wong, Michelle Umali, and Marc Pomplun. "Using Eye-Tracking to Study Audio — Visual Perceptual Integration." Perception 36, no. 9 (September 2007): 1391–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/p5731.
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Perceptual integration of audio—visual stimuli is fundamental to our everyday conscious experience. Eye-movement analysis may be a suitable tool for studying such integration, since eye movements respond to auditory as well as visual input. Previous studies have shown that additional auditory cues in visual-search tasks can guide eye movements more efficiently and reduce their latency. However, these auditory cues were task-relevant since they indicated the target position and onset time. Therefore, the observed effects may have been due to subjects using the cues as additional information to maximize their performance, without perceptually integrating them with the visual displays. Here, we combine a visual-tracking task with a continuous, task-irrelevant sound from a stationary source to demonstrate that audio—visual perceptual integration affects low-level oculomotor mechanisms. Auditory stimuli of constant, increasing, or decreasing pitch were presented. All sound categories induced more smooth-pursuit eye movement than silence, with the greatest effect occurring with stimuli of increasing pitch. A possible explanation is that integration of the visual scene with continuous sound creates the perception of continuous visual motion. Increasing pitch may amplify this effect through its common association with accelerating motion.
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Chepeliuk, Anastasia A., and Marina G. Vinogradova. "The Performance of Visual Perceptual Tasks in Patients with Schizotypal Personality Disorder." Psychology in Russia: State of the Art 14, no. 2 (2021): 42–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.11621/pir.2021.0204.
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Background. The most significant features for clinical diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) are cognitive-perceptual and disorganized symptoms. Experimental study of visual perceptual processes is important to elucidate the psychological mechanisms of cognitive-perceptual impairment in SPD. Objective. To research the performance of visual perceptual tasks in SPD. Design. Series I and II presented the subjects with visual perceptual tasks with different types of instructions (vague, verbal, or visual perceptual cues). The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-R) was also administered. The participants were 39 SPD patients, 36 obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) patients (F.21.8, F.60.5 in ICD-10, respectively), and 102 healthy controls. Results. SPD patients had a significantly lower number of correct answers in conditions of vague instruction and verbal cues in Series I of a visual-perceptual task in comparison with healthy subjects (р ≤ 0.01). With visual perceptual cues in Series II, patients with SPD had the same number of correct answers as controls, whereas OCPD patients had the same number of correct answers as controls with verbal cues in Series I. SPD patients had significantly lower scores in most verbal and nonverbal WAIS-R subtests in comparison with controls. SPD patients differed from OCPD patients in that they had lower scores in the “Information” (p ≤ 0.05) and “Comprehension” (p ≤ 0.05) subtests. Conclusion. With visual-perceptual cues, SPD patients were able to achieve normative results in the performance of visual-perceptual tasks, whereas patients with OCPD demonstrated lower productivity. In SPD patients, the basic impairments were associated with difficulties in inhibition of peculiar responses, stability of a subjective manner of performance and inability to revise it, low orientation to the model, and slipping into subjective associations with the stimuli.
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Goda, N., S. Takahashi, and Y. Ejima. "Luminance and Colour Cues in Perceptual Transparency." Perception 26, no. 1_suppl (August 1997): 159. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/v970360.
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A series of experiments was carried out to determine the dependence of the perception of transparency on colour relationships in a four-region pattern comprising two non-overlapping regions, an overlapping region, and a background. The proportion of trials where the pattern was perceived as transparent, and the relative layering in depth of the two perceived surfaces, were determined as a function of the luminance of colour of the overlapping region while those of the non-overlapping regions were kept constant. It was found that perceptual transparency could arise from displays where the four regions were isoluminant but different in colour. The function obtained for isoluminant colour-varying patterns was quite similar to that obtained for isochromatic luminance-varying patterns. In both types of patterns, the background condition strongly affected perceptual transparency and perceived depth order in a similar way. These results suggest that perceptual transparency for both the isochromatic and the isoluminant pattern was specified in a common manner by contrast relations in a certain region of the image, and was not always constrained by the physics of transparency. The dependence of perceptual transparency on the contrast relation may be accounted for by mechanisms incorporating the filling-in process associated with antagonistic luminance and opponent-colour responses.
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Yildiz, Gizem Y., Bailey G. Evans, and Philippe A. Chouinard. "The Effects of Adding Pictorial Depth Cues to the Poggendorff Illusion." Vision 6, no. 3 (July 18, 2022): 44. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/vision6030044.
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We tested if the misapplication of perceptual constancy mechanisms might explain the perceived misalignment of the oblique lines in the Poggendorff illusion. Specifically, whether these mechanisms might treat the rectangle in the middle portion of the Poggendorff stimulus as an occluder in front of one long line appearing on either side, causing an apparent decrease in the rectangle’s width and an apparent increase in the misalignment of the oblique lines. The study aimed to examine these possibilities by examining the effects of adding pictorial depth cues. In experiments 1 and 2, we presented a central rectangle composed of either large or small bricks to determine if this manipulation would change the perceived alignment of the oblique lines and the perceived width of the central rectangle, respectively. The experiments demonstrated no changes that would support a misapplication of perceptual constancy in driving the illusion, despite some evidence of perceptual size rescaling of the central rectangle. In experiment 3, we presented Poggendorff stimuli in front and at the back of a corridor background rich in texture and linear perspective depth cues to determine if adding these cues would affect the Poggendorff illusion. The central rectangle was physically large and small when presented in front and at the back of the corridor, respectively. The strength of the Poggendorff illusion varied as a function of the physical size of the central rectangle, and, contrary to our predictions, the addition of pictorial depth cues in both the central rectangle and the background decreased rather than increased the strength of the illusion. The implications of these results with regards to different theories are discussed. It could be the case that the illusion depends on both low-level and cognitive mechanisms and that deleterious effects occur on the former when the latter ascribes more certainty to the oblique lines being the same line receding into the distance.
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Donato, Rita, Adriano Contillo, Gianluca Campana, Marco Roccato, Óscar F. Gonçalves, and Andrea Pavan. "Visual Perceptual Learning of Form–Motion Integration: Exploring the Involved Mechanisms with Transfer Effects and the Equivalent Noise Approach." Brain Sciences 14, no. 10 (September 30, 2024): 997. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci14100997.
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Background: Visual perceptual learning plays a crucial role in shaping our understanding of how the human brain integrates visual cues to construct coherent perceptual experiences. The visual system is continually challenged to integrate a multitude of visual cues, including form and motion, to create a unified representation of the surrounding visual scene. This process involves both the processing of local signals and their integration into a coherent global percept. Over the past several decades, researchers have explored the mechanisms underlying this integration, focusing on concepts such as internal noise and sampling efficiency, which pertain to local and global processing, respectively. Objectives and Methods: In this study, we investigated the influence of visual perceptual learning on non-directional motion processing using dynamic Glass patterns (GPs) and modified Random-Dot Kinematograms (mRDKs). We also explored the mechanisms of learning transfer to different stimuli and tasks. Specifically, we aimed to assess whether visual perceptual learning based on illusory directional motion, triggered by form and motion cues (dynamic GPs), transfers to stimuli that elicit comparable illusory motion, such as mRDKs. Additionally, we examined whether training on form and motion coherence thresholds improves internal noise filtering and sampling efficiency. Results: Our results revealed significant learning effects on the trained task, enhancing the perception of dynamic GPs. Furthermore, there was a substantial learning transfer to the non-trained stimulus (mRDKs) and partial transfer to a different task. The data also showed differences in coherence thresholds between dynamic GPs and mRDKs, with GPs showing lower coherence thresholds than mRDKs. Finally, an interaction between visual stimulus type and session for sampling efficiency revealed that the effect of training session on participants’ performance varied depending on the type of visual stimulus, with dynamic GPs being influenced differently than mRDKs. Conclusion: These findings highlight the complexity of perceptual learning and suggest that the transfer of learning effects may be influenced by the specific characteristics of both the training stimuli and tasks, providing valuable insights for future research in visual processing.
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Sperandio, Irene, Irene Sperandio, and Philippe A. Chouinard. "The Mechanisms of Size Constancy." Multisensory Research 28, no. 3-4 (2015): 253–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22134808-00002483.
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Size constancy is the result of cognitive scaling operations that enable us to perceive an object as having the same size when presented at different viewing distances. In this article, we review the literature on size and distance perception to form an overarching synthesis of how the brain might combine retinal images and distance cues of retinal and extra-retinal origin to produce a perceptual visual experience of a world where objects have a constant size. A convergence of evidence from visual psychophysics, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, electrophysiology and neuroimaging highlight the primary visual cortex (V1) as an important node in mediating size–distance scaling. It is now evident that this brain area is involved in the integration of multiple signals for the purposes of size perception and does much more than fulfil the role of an entry position in a series of hierarchical cortical events. We also discuss how information from other sensory modalities can also contribute to size–distance scaling and shape our perceptual visual experience.
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Shapcott, Katharine A., Joscha T. Schmiedt, Kleopatra Kouroupaki, Ricardo Kienitz, Andreea Lazar, Wolf Singer, and Michael C. Schmid. "Reward-Related Suppression of Neural Activity in Macaque Visual Area V4." Cerebral Cortex 30, no. 9 (April 30, 2020): 4871–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaa079.
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Abstract In order for organisms to survive, they need to detect rewarding stimuli, for example, food or a mate, in a complex environment with many competing stimuli. These rewarding stimuli should be detected even if they are nonsalient or irrelevant to the current goal. The value-driven theory of attentional selection proposes that this detection takes place through reward-associated stimuli automatically engaging attentional mechanisms. But how this is achieved in the brain is not very well understood. Here, we investigate the effect of differential reward on the multiunit activity in visual area V4 of monkeys performing a perceptual judgment task. Surprisingly, instead of finding reward-related increases in neural responses to the perceptual target, we observed a large suppression at the onset of the reward indicating cues. Therefore, while previous research showed that reward increases neural activity, here we report a decrease. More suppression was caused by cues associated with higher reward than with lower reward, although neither cue was informative about the perceptually correct choice. This finding of reward-associated neural suppression further highlights normalization as a general cortical mechanism and is consistent with predictions of the value-driven attention theory.
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Schaller, Mark. "The behavioural immune system and the psychology of human sociality." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1583 (December 12, 2011): 3418–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0029.
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Because immunological defence against pathogens is costly and merely reactive, human anti-pathogen defence is also characterized by proactive behavioural mechanisms that inhibit contact with pathogens in the first place. This behavioural immune system comprises psychological processes that infer infection risk from perceptual cues, and that respond to these perceptual cues through the activation of aversive emotions, cognitions and behavioural impulses. These processes are engaged flexibly, producing context–contingent variation in the nature and magnitude of aversive responses. These processes have important implications for human social cognition and social behaviour—including implications for social gregariousness, person perception, intergroup prejudice, mate preferences, sexual behaviour and conformity. Empirical evidence bearing on these many implications is reviewed and discussed. This review also identifies important directions for future research on the human behavioural immune system—including the need for enquiry into underlying mechanisms, additional behavioural consequences and implications for human health and well-being.
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Palmer, Colin J., Nathan Caruana, Colin W. G. Clifford, and Kiley J. Seymour. "Perceptual integration of head and eye cues to gaze direction in schizophrenia." Royal Society Open Science 5, no. 12 (December 2018): 180885. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.180885.
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The perceptual mechanisms that underlie social experience in schizophrenia are increasingly becoming a target of empirical research. In the context of low-level vision, there is evidence for a reduction in the integration of sensory features in schizophrenia (e.g. increased thresholds for contour detection and motion coherence). In the context of higher-level vision, comparable differences in the integration of sensory features of the face could in theory impair the recognition of important social cues. Here we examine how the sense of where other people are looking relies upon the integration of eye-region cues and head-region cues. Adults with schizophrenia viewed face images designed to elicit the ‘Wollaston illusion’, a perceptual phenomenon in which the perceived gaze direction associated with a given pair of eyes is modulated by the surrounding sensory context. We performed computational modelling of these psychophysical data to quantify individual differences in the use of facial cues to gaze direction. We find that adults with schizophrenia exhibit a robust perceptual effect whereby their sense of other people's direction of gaze is strongly biased by sensory cues relating to head orientation in addition to eye region information. These results indicate that the visual integration of facial cues to gaze direction in schizophrenia is intact, helping to constrain theories of reduced integrative processing in higher-level and lower-level vision. In addition, robust gaze processing was evident in the tested participants despite reduced performance on a theory of mind task designed to assess higher-level social cognition.
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Merfeld, Daniel M., Sukyung Park, Claire Gianna-Poulin, F. Owen Black, and Scott Wood. "Vestibular Perception and Action Employ Qualitatively Different Mechanisms. II. VOR and Perceptual Responses During Combined Tilt&Translation." Journal of Neurophysiology 94, no. 1 (July 2005): 199–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00905.2004.
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II. VOR and perceptual responses during combined Tilt&Translation. To compare and contrast the neural mechanisms that contribute to vestibular perception and action, we measured vestibuloocular reflexes (VOR) and perceptions of tilt and translation. We took advantage of the well-known ambiguity that the otolith organs respond to both linear acceleration and tilt with respect to gravity and investigated the mechanisms by which this ambiguity is resolved. A new motion paradigm that combined roll tilt with inter-aural translation (“ Tilt&Translation”) was used; subjects were sinusoidally (0.8 Hz) roll tilted but with their ears above or below the rotation axis. This paradigm provided sinusoidal roll canal cues that were the same across trials while providing otolith cues that varied linearly with ear position relative to the earth-horizontal rotation axis. We found that perceived tilt and translation depended on canal cues, with substantial roll tilt and inter-aural translation perceptions reported even when the otolith organs measured no inter-aural force. These findings match internal model predictions that rotational cues from the canals influence the neural processing of otolith cues. We also found horizontal translational VORs that varied linearly with radius; a minimal response was measured when the otolith organs transduced little or no inter-aural force. Hence, the horizontal translational VOR was dependent on otolith cues but independent of canal cues. These findings match predictions that translational VORs are elicited by simple filtering of otolith signals. We conclude that internal models govern human perception of tilt and translation at 0.8 Hz and that high-pass filtering governs the human translational VOR at this same frequency.
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Merfeld, Daniel M., Sukyung Park, Claire Gianna-Poulin, F. Owen Black, and Scott Wood. "Vestibular Perception and Action Employ Qualitatively Different Mechanisms. I. Frequency Response of VOR and Perceptual Responses During Translation and Tilt." Journal of Neurophysiology 94, no. 1 (July 2005): 186–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00904.2004.
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To investigate the neural mechanisms that humans use to process the ambiguous force measured by the otolith organs, we measured vestibuloocular reflexes (VORs) and perceptions of tilt and translation. One primary goal was to determine if the same, or different, mechanisms contribute to vestibular perception and action. We used motion paradigms that provided identical sinusoidal inter-aural otolith cues across a broad frequency range. We accomplished this by sinusoidally tilting (20°, 0.005–0.7 Hz) subjects in roll about an earth-horizontal, head-centered, rotation axis (“ Tilt”) or sinusoidally accelerating (3.3 m/s2, 0.005–0.7 Hz) subjects along their inter-aural axis (“ Translation”). While identical inter-aural otolith cues were provided by these motion paradigms, the canal cues were substantially different because roll rotations were present during Tilt but not during Translation. We found that perception was dependent on canal cues because the reported perceptions of both roll tilt and inter-aural translation were substantially different during Translation and Tilt. These findings match internal model predictions that rotational cues from the canals influence the neural processing of otolith cues. We also found horizontal translational VORs at frequencies >0.2 Hz during both Translation and Tilt. These responses were dependent on otolith cues and match simple filtering predictions that translational VORs include contributions via simple high-pass filtering of otolith cues. More generally, these findings demonstrate that internal models govern human vestibular “perception” across a broad range of frequencies and that simple high-pass filters contribute to human horizontal translational VORs (“action”) at frequencies above ∼0.2 Hz.
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Zhao, Xinxian, and Xiaohu Yang. "Aging affects auditory contributions to focus perception in Jianghuai Mandarin." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 155, no. 5 (May 1, 2024): 2990–3004. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0025928.
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Speakers can place their prosodic prominence on any locations within a sentence, generating focus prosody for listeners to perceive new information. This study aimed to investigate age-related changes in the bottom-up processing of focus perception in Jianghuai Mandarin by clarifying the perceptual cues and the auditory processing abilities involved in the identification of focus locations. Young, middle-aged, and older speakers of Jianghuai Mandarin completed a focus identification task and an auditory perception task. The results showed that increasing age led to a decrease in listeners' accuracy rate in identifying focus locations, with all participants performing the worst when dynamic pitch cues were inaccessible. Auditory processing abilities did not predict focus perception performance in young and middle-aged listeners but accounted significantly for the variance in older adults' performance. These findings suggest that age-related deteriorations in focus perception can be largely attributed to declined auditory processing of perceptual cues. Poor ability to extract frequency modulation cues may be the most important underlying psychoacoustic factor for older adults' difficulties in perceiving focus prosody in Jianghuai Mandarin. The results contribute to our understanding of the bottom-up mechanisms involved in linguistic prosody processing in aging adults, particularly in tonal languages.
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Johnson, Krista L., Trent G. Nicol, Steven G. Zecker, and Nina Kraus. "Auditory Brainstem Correlates of Perceptual Timing Deficits." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19, no. 3 (March 2007): 376–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2007.19.3.376.
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Children with language-based learning problems often exhibit pronounced speech perception difficulties. Specifically, these children have increased difficulty separating brief sounds occurring in rapid succession (temporal resolution). The purpose of this study was to better understand the consequences of auditory temporal resolution deficits from the perspective of the neural encoding of speech. The findings provide evidence that sensory processes relevant to cognition take place at much earlier levels than traditionally believed. Thresholds from a psychophysical backward masking task were used to divide children into groups with good and poor temporal resolution. Speech-evoked brainstem responses were analyzed across groups to measure the neural integrity of stimulus-time mechanisms. Results suggest that children with poor temporal resolution do not have an overall neural processing deficit, but rather a deficit specific to the encoding of certain acoustic cues in speech. Speech understanding relies on the ability to attach meaning to rapidly fluctuating changes of both the temporal and spectral information found in consonants and vowels. For this to happen properly, the auditory system must first accurately encode these time-varying acoustic cues. Speech perception difficulties that often co-occur in children with poor temporal resolution may originate as a neural encoding deficit in structures as early as the auditory brainstem. Thus, speech-evoked brainstem responses are a biological marker for auditory temporal processing ability.
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Mast, Fred W., and Charles M. Oman. "Top-Down Processing and Visual Reorientation Illusions in a Virtual Reality Environment." Swiss Journal of Psychology 63, no. 3 (September 2004): 143–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1024/1421-0185.63.3.143.
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The role of top-down processing on the horizontal-vertical line length illusion was examined by means of an ambiguous room with dual visual verticals. In one of the test conditions, the subjects were cued to one of the two verticals and were instructed to cognitively reassign the apparent vertical to the cued orientation. When they have mentally adjusted their perception, two lines in a plus sign configuration appeared and the subjects had to evaluate which line was longer. The results showed that the line length appeared longer when it was aligned with the direction of the vertical currently perceived by the subject. This study provides a demonstration that top-down processing influences lower level visual processing mechanisms. In another test condition, the subjects had all perceptual cues available and the influence was even stronger.
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Kobayashi, Maori, and Masato Akagi. "Difference of phonemic restoration between professional and non-experts’ voices." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154, no. 4_supplement (October 1, 2023): A35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0022714.
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It is generally thought that the voices of professional announcers are clearer and easier to hear than those of non-professional speakers. This study examined the perceptual mechanisms involved in the higher intelligibility of professional announcers’ voice with the focus on perceptual restoration. The intelligibility of the professional announcers was 10% to 30% higher than that of the non-professional speakers in noisy conditions. The effects of the formants on the higher intelligibility were experimentally examined using test words with one of the frequency bands corresponding to the first to third formants removed. When the formant component was removed, performance declined for both speakers, whereas that of the professional announcers was maintained with noise. An additional experiment showed that a missing component in a professional announcers’ voice is perceptually restored by adding noise. It is thus likely that the voices of professional announcers are rich in phonological cues, enabling phonological restoration to be achieved by adding noise. This may be one of the reasons why the higher intelligibility of their voices in noise.
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Obhi, Sukhvinder S., and Melvyn A. Goodale. "Bimanual Interference in Rapid Discrete Movements Is Task Specific and Occurs at Multiple Levels of Processing." Journal of Neurophysiology 94, no. 3 (September 2005): 1861–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00320.2005.
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It has been suggested that interference in symbolically cued bimanual reaction time tasks is caused primarily by the perceptual processing of stimuli and not by motor preparation of the required movements. Here subjects made movements of the right and left index fingers that varied in their spatial and motor congruence. Spatial congruence was manipulated by presenting symbolic cues (i.e., pairs of letters) on a computer screen cueing the required movement directions. Motor congruence was manipulated by altering hand orientation. Results showed that interference occurs at both the stage of stimulus processing and the stage of motor preparation. These effects were reflected in the latencies of the different bimanual movements with both motor incongruence and spatial incongruence causing significant increases in reaction time. However, spatially incongruent movements that were made in response to incongruent visual cues demonstrated changes in reaction time that were more than double those of movements that required simultaneous activation of nonhomologous muscles. Therefore in symbolically cued bimanual reaction-time tasks, although both motor and spatial constraints operate, there is a clear dominance of spatial incongruence on performance. While motor congruence effects are likely due to cross-facilitation in corticospinal pathways, spatial incongruence effects are probably due to interference between the mechanisms that identify incongruent stimuli and translate these cues into the appropriate movements.
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Richardson, Benjamin N., Jana Kainerstorfer, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, and Christopher A. Brown. "Neural mechanisms of spatial auditory attention with magnified interaural level difference cues." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 155, no. 3_Supplement (March 1, 2024): A306—A307. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0027601.
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Bilateral cochlear implant users struggle in spatial release from masking (SRM) tasks, likely due to restricted access to interaural time difference (ITD) cues. Instead, they must rely on interaural level difference (ILD) cues; however, our previous behavioral experiments suggest that magnification of ILDs can facilitate SRM. Here, we probed the neural mechanisms underlying the benefit of magnified ILDs. We tested 18 normal-hearing subjects in an anechoic chamber. Listeners heard target and masker sequences of object and color words from opposite (left and right) quarterfields and were asked to detect color words in the target stream. Both streams were spatialized using either 50 μS ITD (ITD50), 500 μS ITD (ITD500), a broadband 10 dB ILD (ILD10), or the largest naturally occurring frequency-specific ILD (70 degrees; ILD70n). We recorded task-elicited hemodynamic responses in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. Subjects performed best in the ITD500 and ILD10 conditions. Hemodynamic response magnitudes were smaller for ITD50 than for all other conditions, consistent with frontal activity increasing when perceptual segregation is possible and spatial attention can be deployed successfully. These data show that magnified ILD cues enhance SRM and that the benefit ILDs confer arises because listeners can engage cognitive attentional processes.
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Riani, Massimo, Maria Teresa Tuccio, Antonio Borsellino, Jirina Radilová, and Tomas Radil. "Perceptual Ambiguity and Stability of Reversible Figures." Perceptual and Motor Skills 63, no. 1 (August 1986): 191–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.2466/pms.1986.63.1.191.
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In this work, the results of two experiments on ambiguous patterns are reported, which have been obtained by presenting a series of stimuli designed, in both cases, to reduce gradually the ambiguity of the patterns. Such reduction has been performed by respectively increasing or decreasing the amount of graphic details in the experiments. Data of both experiments show a lengthening of mean reversal time. The increase in the stability of one percept can be regarded as associated with the increasing difficulties encountered by an observer in organizing and restating the alternative “hypochesis” through the perceptual mechanisms. The loss of balance in the durations of percepts is discussed in terms of their different informational contents. Finally, in Exp. 1 an analysis is made to evaluate to what extent an addition of perceptual cues, designed to reinforce a three-dimensional interpretation of a pattern, can influence its figure-ground alternation.
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Arbib, Michael A. "Levels of modeling of mechanisms of visually guided behavior." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10, no. 3 (September 1987): 407–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00023360.
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AbstractIntermediate constructs are required as bridges between complex behaviors and realistic models of neural circuitry. For cognitive scientists in general, schemas are the appropriate functional units; brain theorists can work with neural layers as units intermediate between structures subserving schemas and small neural circuits.After an account of different levels of analysis, we describe visuomotor coordination in terms of perceptual schemas and motor schemas. The interest of schemas to cognitive science in general is illustrated with the example of perceptual schemas in high-level vision and motor schemas in the control of dextrous hands.Rana computatrix, the computational frog, is introduced to show how one constructs an evolving set of model families to mediate flexible cooperation between theory and experiment. Rana computatrix may be able to do for the study of the organizational principles of neural circuitry what Aplysia has done for the study of subcellular mechanisms of learning. Approach, avoidance, and detour behavior in frogs and toads are analyzed in terms of interacting schemas. Facilitation and prey recognition are implemented as tectal-pretectal interactions, with the tectum modeled by an array of tectal columns. We show how layered neural computation enters into models of stereopsis and how depth schemas may involve the interaction of accommodation and binocular cues in anurans.
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Correa, Ángel, Paola Cappucci, Anna C. Nobre, and Juan Lupiáñez. "The Two Sides of Temporal Orienting." Experimental Psychology 57, no. 2 (November 1, 2010): 142–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000018.
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Would it be helpful to inform a driver about when a conflicting traffic situation is going to occur? We tested whether temporal orienting of attention could enhance executive control to select among conflicting stimuli and responses. Temporal orienting was induced by presenting explicit cues predicting the most probable interval for target onset, which could be short (400 ms) or long (1,300 ms). Executive control was measured both by flanker and Simon tasks involving conflict between incompatible responses and by the spatial Stroop task involving conflict between perceptual stimulus features. The results showed that temporal orienting facilitated the resolution of perceptual conflict by reducing the spatial Stroop effect, whereas it interfered with the resolution of response conflict by increasing flanker and Simon effects. Such opposite effects suggest that temporal orienting of attention modulates executive control through dissociable mechanisms, depending on whether the competition between conflicting representations is located at perceptual or response levels.
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Harrington Stack, Caoimhe, and Duane G. Watson. "Pauses and Parsing: Testing the Role of Prosodic Chunking in Sentence Processing." Languages 8, no. 3 (June 28, 2023): 157. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages8030157.
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It is broadly accepted that the prosody of a sentence can influence sentence processing by providing the listener information about the syntax of the sentence. It is less clear what the mechanism is that underlies the transmission of this information. In this paper, we test whether the influence of the prosodic structure on parsing is a result of perceptual breaks such as pauses or whether it is the result of more abstract prosodic elements, such as intonational phrases. In three experiments, we test whether different types of perceptual breaks, e.g., intonational boundaries (Experiment 1), an artificial buzzing sound (Experiment 2), and an isolated pause (Experiment 3), influence syntactic attachment in ambiguous sentences. We find that although full intonational boundaries influence syntactic disambiguation, the artificial buzz and isolated pause do not. These data rule out theories that argue that perceptual breaks indirectly influence grammatical attachment through memory mechanisms, and instead, show that listeners use prosodic breaks themselves as cues to parsing.
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Tardiff, Nathan, Lalitta Suriya-Arunroj, Yale E. Cohen, and Joshua I. Gold. "Rule-based and stimulus-based cues bias auditory decisions via different computational and physiological mechanisms." PLOS Computational Biology 18, no. 10 (October 7, 2022): e1010601. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010601.
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Expectations, such as those arising from either learned rules or recent stimulus regularities, can bias subsequent auditory perception in diverse ways. However, it is not well understood if and how these diverse effects depend on the source of the expectations. Further, it is unknown whether different sources of bias use the same or different computational and physiological mechanisms. We examined how rule-based and stimulus-based expectations influenced behavior and pupil-linked arousal, a marker of certain forms of expectation-based processing, of human subjects performing an auditory frequency-discrimination task. Rule-based cues consistently biased choices and response times (RTs) toward the more-probable stimulus. In contrast, stimulus-based cues had a complex combination of effects, including choice and RT biases toward and away from the frequency of recently presented stimuli. These different behavioral patterns also had: 1) distinct computational signatures, including different modulations of key components of a novel form of a drift-diffusion decision model and 2) distinct physiological signatures, including substantial bias-dependent modulations of pupil size in response to rule-based but not stimulus-based cues. These results imply that different sources of expectations can modulate auditory processing via distinct mechanisms: one that uses arousal-linked, rule-based information and another that uses arousal-independent, stimulus-based information to bias the speed and accuracy of auditory perceptual decisions.
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Lalonde, Kaylah, and Rachael Frush Holt. "Preschoolers Benefit From Visually Salient Speech Cues." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 58, no. 1 (February 2015): 135–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2014_jslhr-h-13-0343.
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Purpose This study explored visual speech influence in preschoolers using 3 developmentally appropriate tasks that vary in perceptual difficulty and task demands. They also examined developmental differences in the ability to use visually salient speech cues and visual phonological knowledge. Method Twelve adults and 27 typically developing 3- and 4-year-old children completed 3 audiovisual (AV) speech integration tasks: matching, discrimination, and recognition. The authors compared AV benefit for visually salient and less visually salient speech discrimination contrasts and assessed the visual saliency of consonant confusions in auditory-only and AV word recognition. Results Four-year-olds and adults demonstrated visual influence on all measures. Three-year-olds demonstrated visual influence on speech discrimination and recognition measures. All groups demonstrated greater AV benefit for the visually salient discrimination contrasts. AV recognition benefit in 4-year-olds and adults depended on the visual saliency of speech sounds. Conclusions Preschoolers can demonstrate AV speech integration. Their AV benefit results from efficient use of visually salient speech cues. Four-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, used visual phonological knowledge to take advantage of visually salient speech cues, suggesting possible developmental differences in the mechanisms of AV benefit.
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Tipper, Christine M., Todd C. Handy, Barry Giesbrecht, and Alan Kingstone. "Brain Responses to Biological Relevance." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20, no. 5 (May 2008): 879–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2008.20510.
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This study examines whether orienting attention to biologically based social cues engages neural mechanisms distinct from those engaged by orienting to nonbiologically based nonsocial cues. Participants viewed a perceptually ambiguous stimulus presented centrally while performing a target detection task. By having participants alternate between viewing this stimulus as an eye in profile or an arrowhead, we were able to directly compare the neural mechanisms of attentional orienting to social and nonsocial cues while holding the physical stimulus constant. The functional magnetic resonance imaging results indicated that attentional orienting to both eye gaze and arrow cues engaged extensive dorsal and ventral fronto-parietal networks. Eye gaze cues, however, more vigorously engaged two regions in the ventral frontal cortex associated with attentional reorienting to salient or meaningful stimuli, as well as lateral occipital regions. An event-related potential study demonstrated that this enhanced occipital response was attributable to a higher-amplitude sensory gain effect for targets appearing at locations cued by eye gaze than for those cued by an arrowhead. These results endorse the hypothesis that differences in attention to social and nonsocial cues are quantitative rather than qualitative, running counter to current models that assume enhanced processing for social stimuli reflects the involvement of a unique network of brain regions. An intriguing implication of the present study is the possibility that our ability to orient volitionally and reflexively to socially irrelevant stimuli, including arrowheads, may have arisen as a useful by-product of a system that developed first, and foremost, to promote social orienting to stimuli that are biologically relevant.
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Harding, Eleanor, Laura Rachman, Ryan Gray, Stefan Smeenk, Anastasios Sarampalis, Etienne Gaudrain, and Deniz Başkent. "Effects of age and musical expertise on perception of speech in speech maskers in adults." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 153, no. 3_supplement (March 1, 2023): A173. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0018564.
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Perceiving “cocktail party” speech, or speech-on-speech (SoS), requires perceptual mechanisms such as segregating target from masking speech using voice cues, and on cognitive mechanisms such as selective attention and inhibition. Both aging and musical expertise have been shown to affect these mechanisms. Voice cues that help distinguish different speakers include mean fundamental frequency (F0), related to voice pitch, and the vocal-tract length (VTL), related to speaker size. Some studies reported older adults’ decreased sensitivity to F0 differences, possibly affecting their ability to discriminate speakers. Furthermore, age-related cognitive changes may lead to difficulties in attention direction and inhibition. Compared to non-musicians, musicians are reported to show enhanced processing of acoustic features such as F0, as well as enhanced cognitive abilities such as auditory attention skills and working memory. While this intuitively could lead to a musician advantage for SoS, reports of musicians outperforming non-musicians are inconsistent across both younger and older adults. Differences across previous SoS paradigms have made comparison of musicianship advantages in SoS in younger and older adults—and underlying mechanisms—difficult. Therefore, we investigated the extent to which older compared to younger adults benefit from either musical expertise or F0 and VTL differences between target and masker voices.
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Rachman, Laura, Almut Jebens, and Deniz Baskent. "Phonological but not lexical processing alters the perceptual weighting of mean fundamental frequency and vocal-tract length cues for voice gender categorisation." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 151, no. 4 (April 2022): A262. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0011271.
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Listeners use various voice cues to segregate different speakers, or to infer speaker-related information such as perceived gender. Two important anatomically related voices cues used for speaker identification, including perceived gender, are mean fundamental frequency (F0), related to the glottal pulse rate, and vocal-tract length (VTL), correlating with body size. Voice cue processing seems to be affected by linguistic processes, such that voice perception is more precise when listeners hear speakers in their native language compared to a non-native language. In addition, recent research shows that F0 and VTL sensitivity is lower for words compared to time-reversed words, either because time-reversed words are unintelligible or phonemes are distorted in voice-onset times and aspirations, pointing to effects of lexical or phonological processing. However, voice cue sensitivity and using these cues to infer speaker-related information may rely on different mechanisms. Here, we studied effects of lexical and phonological processing on F0 and VTL cue weighting for one aspect of speaker identification, namely voice gender categorisation, by manipulating these cues in three linguistic conditions: meaningful words; phonotactically plausible nonwords; and phonotactically implausible time-reversed nonwords. We found that F0 and VTL weighting for voice gender categorisation was affected by phonological but not by lexical processing.
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Ku, Yixuan. "Selective attention on representations in working memory: cognitive and neural mechanisms." PeerJ 6 (April 2, 2018): e4585. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4585.
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Selective attention and working memory are inter-dependent core cognitive functions. It is critical to allocate attention on selected targets during the capacity-limited working memory processes to fulfill the goal-directed behavior. The trends of research on both topics are increasing exponentially in recent years, and it is considered that selective attention and working memory share similar underlying neural mechanisms. Different types of attention orientation in working memory are introduced by distinctive cues, and the means using retrospective cues are strengthened currently as it is manipulating the representation in memory, instead of the perceptual representation. The cognitive and neural mechanisms of the retro-cue effects are further reviewed, as well as the potential molecular mechanism. The frontal-parietal network that is involved in both attention and working memory is also the neural candidate for attention orientation during working memory. Neural oscillations in the gamma and alpha/beta oscillations may respectively be employed for the feedforward and feedback information transfer between the sensory cortices and the association cortices. Dopamine and serotonin systems might interact with each other subserving the communication between memory and attention. In conclusion, representations which attention shifts towards are strengthened, while representations which attention moves away from are degraded. Studies on attention orientation during working memory indicates the flexibility of the processes of working memory, and the beneficial way that overcome the limited capacity of working memory.
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KRAUZLIS, RICHARD J., and SCOTT A. ADLER. "Effects of directional expectations on motion perception and pursuit eye movements." Visual Neuroscience 18, no. 3 (May 2001): 365–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952523801183033.
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Expectations about future motions can influence both perceptual judgements and pursuit eye movements. However, it is not known whether these two effects are due to shared processing, or to separate mechanisms with similar properties. We have addressed this question by providing subjects with prior information about the likely direction of motion in an upcoming random-dot motion display and measuring both the perceptual judgements and pursuit eye movements elicited by the stimulus. We quantified the subjects' responses by computing oculometric curves from their pursuit eye movements and psychometric curves from their perceptual decisions. Our results show that directional cues caused similar shifts in both the oculometric and psychometric curves toward the expected motion direction, with little change in the shapes of the curves. Prior information therefore biased the outcome of both eye movement and perceptual decisions without systematically changing their thresholds. We also found that eye movement and perceptual decisions tended to be the same on a trial-by-trial basis, at a higher frequency than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, the effects of prior information were evident during pursuit initiation, as well as during pursuit maintenance, indicating that prior information likely influenced the early processing of visual motion. We conclude that, in our experiments, expectations caused similar effects on both pursuit and perception by altering the activity of visual motion detectors that are read out by both the oculomotor and perceptual systems. Applying cognitive factors such as expectations at relatively early stages of visual processing could act to coordinate the metrics of eye movements with perceptual judgements.
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Palmer, Colin J., and Colin W. G. Clifford. "Face Pareidolia Recruits Mechanisms for Detecting Human Social Attention." Psychological Science 31, no. 8 (July 22, 2020): 1001–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797620924814.
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Face pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing facelike structures in everyday objects. Here, we tested the hypothesis that face pareidolia, rather than being limited to a cognitive or mnemonic association, reflects the activation of visual mechanisms that typically process human faces. We focused on sensory cues to social attention, which engage cell populations in temporal cortex that are susceptible to habituation effects. Repeated exposure to “pareidolia faces” that appear to have a specific direction of attention causes a systematic bias in the perception of where human faces are looking, indicating that overlapping sensory mechanisms are recruited when we view human faces and when we experience face pareidolia. These cross-adaptation effects are significantly reduced when pareidolia is abolished by removing facelike features from the objects. These results indicate that face pareidolia is essentially a perceptual phenomenon, occurring when sensory input is processed by visual mechanisms that have evolved to extract specific social content from human faces.
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Deska, Jason C., Steven M. Almaraz, and Kurt Hugenberg. "Of Mannequins and Men." Social Psychological and Personality Science 8, no. 2 (September 29, 2016): 183–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550616671404.
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Recent research has demonstrated that ascribing minds to humanlike stimuli is a product of both their perceptual similarity to human faces and whether they engaged configural face processing. We present the findings of two experiments in which we both manipulate the amount of humanlike features in faces (in a doll-to-human morph continuum) and manipulate perceivers’ ability to employ configural face processing (via face inversion) while measuring explicit ratings of mind ascription (Study 1) and the spontaneous activation of humanlike concepts (Study 2). In both studies, we find novel evidence that ascribing minds to entities is an interactive product of both having strong perceptual similarity to human faces and being processed using configural processing mechanisms typical of normal face perception. In short, ascribing mind to others is bounded jointly by the featural cues of the target and by processes employed by the perceiver.
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Wong, Yvonne J., Adrian J. Aldcroft, Mary-Ellen Large, Jody C. Culham, and Tutis Vilis. "The Role of Temporal Synchrony as a Binding Cue for Visual Persistence in Early Visual Areas: An fMRI Study." Journal of Neurophysiology 102, no. 6 (December 2009): 3461–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00243.2009.
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We examined the role of temporal synchrony—the simultaneous appearance of visual features—in the perceptual and neural processes underlying object persistence. When a binding cue (such as color or motion) momentarily exposes an object from a background of similar elements, viewers remain aware of the object for several seconds before it perceptually fades into the background, a phenomenon known as object persistence. We showed that persistence from temporal stimulus synchrony, like that arising from motion and color, is associated with activation in the lateral occipital (LO) area, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging. We also compared the distribution of occipital cortex activity related to persistence to that of iconic visual memory. Although activation related to iconic memory was largely confined to LO, activation related to object persistence was present across V1 to LO, peaking in V3 and V4, regardless of the binding cue (temporal synchrony, motion, or color). Although persistence from motion cues was not associated with higher activation in the MT+ motion complex, persistence from color cues was associated with increased activation in V4. Taken together, these results demonstrate that although persistence is a form of visual memory, it relies on neural mechanisms different from those of iconic memory. That is, persistence not only activates LO in a cue-independent manner, it also recruits visual areas that may be necessary to maintain binding between object elements.
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Calabro, Finnegan J., and Lucia M. Vaina. "Population Anisotropy in Area MT Explains a Perceptual Difference Between Near and Far Disparity Motion Segmentation." Journal of Neurophysiology 105, no. 1 (January 2011): 200–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00725.2009.
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Segmentation of the visual scene into relevant object components is a fundamental process for successfully interacting with our surroundings. Many visual cues, including motion and binocular disparity, support segmentation, yet the mechanisms using these cues are unclear. We used a psychophysical motion discrimination task in which noise dots were displaced in depth to investigate the role of segmentation through disparity cues in visual motion stimuli ( experiment 1). We found a subtle, but significant, bias indicating that near disparity noise disrupted the segmentation of motion more than equidistant far disparity noise. A control experiment showed that the near-far difference could not be attributed to attention ( experiment 2). To account for the near-far bias, we constructed a biologically constrained model using recordings from neurons in the middle temporal area (MT) to simulate human observers' performance on experiment 1. Performance of the model of MT neurons showed a near-disparity skew similar to that shown by human observers. To isolate the cause of the skew, we simulated performance of a model containing units derived from properties of MT neurons, using phase-modulated Gabor disparity tuning. Using a skewed-normal population distribution of preferred disparities, the model reproduced the elevated motion discrimination thresholds for near-disparity noise, whereas a skewed-normal population of phases (creating individually asymmetric units) did not lead to any performance skew. Results from the model suggest that the properties of neurons in area MT are computationally sufficient to perform disparity segmentation during motion processing and produce similar disparity biases as those produced by human observers.
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Sarolidou, Georgia, John Axelsson, Bruce A. Kimball, Tina Sundelin, Christina Regenbogen, Johan N. Lundström, Mats Lekander, and Mats J. Olsson. "People expressing olfactory and visual cues of disease are less liked." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375, no. 1800 (April 20, 2020): 20190272. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0272.
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For humans, like other social animals, behaviour acts as a first line of defence against pathogens. A key component is the ability to detect subtle perceptual cues of sick conspecifics. The present study assessed the effects of endotoxin-induced olfactory and visual sickness cues on liking, as well as potential involved mechanisms. Seventy-seven participants were exposed to sick and healthy facial pictures and body odours from the same individual in a 2 × 2 factorial design while disgust-related facial electromyography (EMG) was recorded. Following exposure, participants rated their liking of the person presented. In another session, participants also answered questionnaires on perceived vulnerability to disease, disgust sensitivity and health anxiety. Lower ratings of liking were linked to both facial and body odour disease cues as main effects. Disgust, as measured by EMG, did not seem to be the mediating mechanism, but participants who perceived themselves as more prone to disgust, and as more vulnerable to disease, liked presented persons less irrespectively of their health status. Concluding, olfactory and visual sickness cues that appear already a few hours after the experimental induction of systemic inflammation have implications for human sociality and may as such be a part of a behavioural defence against disease. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Olfactory communication in humans’.
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Conrad, Verena, Marco Pino Vitello, and Uta Noppeney. "Interactions between apparent motion rivalry in vision and touch." Seeing and Perceiving 25 (2012): 26–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187847612x646497.
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Introduction: In multistable perception, the brain alternates between several perceptual explanations of ambiguous sensory signals. Recent studies have demonstrated crossmodal interactions between ambiguous and unambiguous signals. However it is currently unknown whether multiple bistable processes can interact across the senses (Conrad et al., 2010; Pressnitzer and Hupe, 2006). Using the apparent motion quartet in vision and touch, this study investigated whether bistable perceptual processes for vision and touch are independent or influence each other when powerful cues of congruency are provided to facilitate visuotactile integration (Conrad et al., in press). Methods: When two visual flashes and/or tactile vibration pulses are presented alternately along the two diagonals of the rectangle, subjects’ percept vacillates between vertical and horizontal apparent motion in the visual and/or tactile modalities (Carter et al., 2008). Observers were presented with unisensory (visual/tactile), visuotactile spatially congruent and incongruent apparent motion quartets and reported their visual or tactile percepts. Results: Congruent stimulation induced pronounced visuotactile interactions as indicated by increased dominance times and %-bias for the percept already dominant under unisensory stimulation. Yet, the temporal dynamics did not converge for congruent stimulation. It depended also on subjects’ attentional focus and was generally slower for tactile than visual reports. Conclusion: Our results support Bayesian approaches to perceptual inference, where the probability of a perceptual interpretation is determined by combining a modality-specific prior with incoming visual and/or tactile evidence. Under congruent stimulation, joint evidence from both senses decelerates the rivalry dynamics by stabilizing the more likely perceptual interpretation. Importantly, the perceptual stabilization was specific to spatiotemporally congruent visuotactile stimulation indicating multisensory rather than cognitive bias mechanisms.
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Cummings, Shawn N., Jeung-Yoon Choi, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, and Rachel M. Theodore. "Linking lexically guided perceptual learning to statistical patterns in speech input." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 153, no. 3_supplement (March 1, 2023): A343. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0019093.
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Listeners use lexical information to modify the mapping between speech acoustics and speech sound categories. Despite convention to consider lexically guided perceptual learning as a binary outcome, the magnitude of the learning effect varies in the extant literature. We hypothesize that graded learning outcomes can be linked, in part, to statistical characteristics of the to-be-learned input, consistent with the ideal adapter theory of speech adaptation. Following standard methods (i.e., waveform averaging to create ambiguous variants), a lexically guided perceptual learning stimulus set for the /ʃ/-/s/ contrast was created for each of 16 talkers, yielding variability in the statistical cues specifying this contrast across talkers. Experiment 1 will (a) measure lexically guided perceptual learning for each talker, (b) identify input characteristics that are associated with learning magnitude, and (c) examine whether a computational instantiation of the ideal adapter theory can model the input-learning link. Experiment 2 will provide a confirmatory test of the patterns observed in Experiment 1 by manipulating the to-be-learned input holding talker constant. The results will provide a critical test of the ideal adapter framework for speech adaptation, thus informing an understanding of the mechanisms that allow listeners to solve the lack of invariance problem for speech perception.
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Smith, David V., Ben Davis, Kathy Niu, Eric W. Healy, Leonardo Bonilha, Julius Fridriksson, Paul S. Morgan, and Chris Rorden. "Spatial Attention Evokes Similar Activation Patterns for Visual and Auditory Stimuli." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22, no. 2 (February 2010): 347–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21241.
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Neuroimaging studies suggest that a fronto-parietal network is activated when we expect visual information to appear at a specific spatial location. Here we examined whether a similar network is involved for auditory stimuli. We used sparse fMRI to infer brain activation while participants performed analogous visual and auditory tasks. On some trials, participants were asked to discriminate the elevation of a peripheral target. On other trials, participants made a nonspatial judgment. We contrasted trials where the participants expected a peripheral spatial target to those where they were cued to expect a central target. Crucially, our statistical analyses were based on trials where stimuli were anticipated but not presented, allowing us to directly infer perceptual orienting independent of perceptual processing. This is the first neuroimaging study to use an orthogonal-cuing paradigm (with cues predicting azimuth and responses involving elevation discrimination). This aspect of our paradigm is important, as behavioral cueing effects in audition are classically only observed when participants are asked to make spatial judgments. We observed similar fronto-parietal activation for both vision and audition. In a second experiment that controlled for stimulus properties and task difficulty, participants made spatial and temporal discriminations about musical instruments. We found that the pattern of brain activation for spatial selection of auditory stimuli was remarkably similar to what we found in our first experiment. Collectively, these results suggest that the neural mechanisms supporting spatial attention are largely similar across both visual and auditory modalities.
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Del Vicario, Vidheya G., Rossana Actis-Grosso, Nadia Bolognini, and Roberta Daini. "Asymmetrical Pseudo-Extinction Phenomenon in the Illusory Line Motion." Symmetry 12, no. 8 (August 7, 2020): 1322. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/sym12081322.
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Illusory Line Motion (i.e., a static line, presented after a lateral cue, is perceived as movement in the opposite direction to the cue) has been used to study a phenomenon of perceptual asymmetry. We have demonstrated the presence of an illusion of leftward movement, even in the presence of bilateral symmetrical cues. We have classified this phenomenon as one of pseudo-extinction. The paradigm of the four experiments performed was always the same: a white line, briefly presented alone or preceded by one or two lateral cues (150 ms), was judged by a group of young participants to be moving either to one side or the other. The asymmetrical effect in the bilateral cue condition was observed with horizontal lines (Experiment 1 and 4), and not with vertical or oblique (Experiment 2 and 3). These results suggest that the effect is linked to the asymmetry of the horizontal spatial planum and the mechanisms of spatial attention. Experiment 4 verified whether the Illusory Line Motion involves the collicular pathway by using blue stimuli for the cues, which activate less the Superior Colliculus (SC), with negative results. We interpreted the asymmetrical pseudo-extinction phenomenon in terms of a right-space exogenous attention advantage.
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Tse, Cho, and Calvin Yu. "The Effects of Visual Cues, Blindfolding, Synesthetic Experience, and Musical Training on Pure-Tone Frequency Discrimination." Behavioral Sciences 9, no. 1 (December 24, 2018): 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs9010002.
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How perceptual limits can be reduced has long been examined by psychologists. This study investigated whether visual cues, blindfolding, visual-auditory synesthetic experience, and musical training could facilitate a smaller frequency difference limen (FDL) in a gliding frequency discrimination test. Ninety university students, with no visual or auditory impairment, were recruited for this one-between (blindfolded/visual cues) and one-within (control/experimental session) designed study. Their FDLs were tested by an alternative forced-choice task (gliding upwards/gliding downwards/no change) and two questionnaires (Vividness of Mental Imagery Questionnaire and Projector–Associator Test) were used to assess their tendency to synesthesia. The participants provided with visual cues and with musical training showed a significantly smaller FDL; on the other hand, being blindfolded or having a synesthetic experience before could not significantly reduce the FDL. However, no pattern was found between the perception of the gliding upwards and gliding downwards frequencies. Overall, the current study suggests that the inter-sensory perception can be enhanced through the training and facilitation of visual–auditory interaction under the multiple resource model. Future studies are recommended in order to verify the effects of music practice on auditory percepts, and the different mechanisms between perceiving gliding upwards and downwards frequencies.
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Laurinen, Pentti I., Lynn A. Olzak, and Tarja L. Peromaa. "Early Cortical Influences in Object Segregation and the Perception of Surface Lightness." Psychological Science 8, no. 5 (September 1997): 386–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00430.x.
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The apparent brightness of a surface is profoundly influenced by the brightness of an adjacent surface, but these contrast effects are reduced when the surfaces are perceived as separate three-dimensional entities Previous work has suggested that high-level perceptual and cognitive processes involved in scene segmentation may be responsible for modifying a surface s appearance We demonstrate large reductions in contrast effects when the cues available for segmentation are restricted to those that isolate separate groups of early cortical neurons in the visual system Our data contradict standard contrast-signaling models of brightness perception and imply that mechanisms of figure-ground segmentation are already available at low levels of visual processing
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Estelle, Stephen, Kenzo Uhlig, Leonardo Zapata-Fonseca, Sébastien Lerique, Brian Morrissey, Rai Sato, and Tom Froese. "An open-source perceptual crossing device for investigating brain dynamics during human interaction." PLOS ONE 19, no. 6 (June 10, 2024): e0305283. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305283.
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The Perceptual Crossing Device (PCD) introduced in this report is an updated tool designed to facilitate the exploration of brain activity during human interaction with seamless real time integration with EEG equipment. It incorporates haptic and auditory feedback mechanisms, enabling interactions between two users within a virtual environment. Through a unique circular motion interface that enables intuitive virtual interactions, users can experience the presence of their counterpart via tactile or auditory cues. This paper highlights the key characteristics of the PCD, aiming to validate its efficacy in augmenting the understanding of human interactions. Furthermore, by offering an accessible and intuitive interface, the PCD stands to foster greater community engagement in the realm of embodied cognitive science and human interaction studies. Through this device, we anticipate a deeper comprehension of the complex neural dynamics underlying human interaction, thereby contributing a valuable resource to both the scientific community and the broader public.
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Banerjee, Sanjna, Shrey Grover, Suhas Ganesh, and Devarajan Sridharan. "Sensory and decisional components of endogenous attention are dissociable." Journal of Neurophysiology 122, no. 4 (October 1, 2019): 1538–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00257.2019.
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Endogenous cueing of attention enhances sensory processing of the attended stimulus (perceptual sensitivity) and prioritizes information from the attended location for guiding behavioral decisions (spatial choice bias). Here, we test whether sensitivity and bias effects of endogenous spatial attention are under the control of common or distinct mechanisms. Human observers performed a multialternative visuospatial attention task with probabilistic spatial cues. Observers’ behavioral choices were analyzed with a recently developed multidimensional signal detection model (the m-ADC model). The model effectively decoupled the effects of spatial cueing on sensitivity from those on spatial bias and revealed striking dissociations between them. Sensitivity was highest at the cued location and not significantly different among uncued locations, suggesting a spotlight-like allocation of sensory resources at the cued location. On the other hand, bias varied systematically with cue validity, suggesting a graded allocation of decisional priority across locations. Cueing-induced modulations of sensitivity and bias were uncorrelated within and across subjects. Bias, but not sensitivity, correlated with key metrics of prioritized decision-making, including reaction times and decision optimality indices. In addition, we developed a novel metric, differential risk curvature, for distinguishing bias effects of attention from those of signal expectation. Differential risk curvature correlated selectively with m-ADC model estimates of bias but not with estimates of sensitivity. Our results reveal dissociable effects of endogenous attention on perceptual sensitivity and choice bias in a multialternative choice task and motivate the search for the distinct neural correlates of each. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Attention is often studied as a unitary phenomenon. Yet, attention can both enhance the perception of important stimuli (sensitivity) and prioritize such stimuli for decision-making (bias). Employing a multialternative spatial attention task with probabilistic cueing, we show that attention affects sensitivity and bias through dissociable mechanisms. Specifically, the effects on sensitivity alone match the notion of an attentional “spotlight.” Our behavioral model enables quantifying component processes of attention, and identifying their respective neural correlates.
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Elder, James H. "Shape from Contour: Computation and Representation." Annual Review of Vision Science 4, no. 1 (September 15, 2018): 423–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-vision-091517-034110.
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The human visual system reliably extracts shape information from complex natural scenes in spite of noise and fragmentation caused by clutter and occlusions. A fast, feedforward sweep through ventral stream involving mechanisms tuned for orientation, curvature, and local Gestalt principles produces partial shape representations sufficient for simpler discriminative tasks. More complete shape representations may involve recurrent processes that integrate local and global cues. While feedforward discriminative deep neural network models currently produce the best predictions of object selectivity in higher areas of the object pathway, a generative model may be required to account for all aspects of shape perception. Research suggests that a successful model will account for our acute sensitivity to four key perceptual dimensions of shape: topology, symmetry, composition, and deformation.
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Ngo, Vy, Luisa Perez Lacera, Avery Harrison Closser, and Erin Ottmar. "The effects of operator position and superfluous brackets on student performance in simple arithmetic." Journal of Numerical Cognition 9, no. 1 (March 31, 2023): 107–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.5964/jnc.9535.
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For students to advance beyond arithmetic, they must learn how to attend to the structure of math notation. This process can be challenging due to students' left-to-right computing tendencies. Brackets are used in mathematics to indicate precedence but can also be used as superfluous cues and perceptual grouping mechanisms in instructional materials to direct students’ attention and facilitate accurate and efficient problem solving. This online study examines the impact of operator position and superfluous brackets on students’ performance solving arithmetic problems. A total of 528 students completed a baseline assessment of math knowledge, then were randomly assigned to one of six conditions that varied in the placement of higher-order operator and the presence or absence of superfluous brackets: [a] brackets-left (e.g., (5 * 4) + 2 + 3), [b] no brackets-left (e.g., 5 * 4 + 2 + 3), [c] brackets-center (e.g., 2 + (5 * 4) + 3), [d] no brackets-center (e.g., 2 + 5 * 4 + 3), [e] brackets-right (e.g., 2 + 3 + (5 * 4)), and [f] no brackets-right (e.g., 2 + 3 + 5 * 4). Participants simplified expressions in an online learning platform with the goal to “master” the content by answering three questions correctly in a row. Results showed that, on average, students were more accurate in problem solving when the higher-order operator was on the left side and less accurate when it was on the right compared to in the center. There was also a main effect of the presence of brackets on mastery speed. However, interaction effects showed that these main effects were driven by the center position: superfluous brackets only improved accuracy when students solved expressions with brackets with the operator in the center. This study advances research on perceptual learning in math by revealing how operator position and presence of superfluous brackets impact students’ performance. Additionally, this research provides implications for instructors who can use perceptual cues to support students during problem solving.
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Krebs, Julia, Evie A. Malaia, Ronnie B. Wilbur, and Dietmar Roehm. "Visual boundaries in sign motion: processing with and without lip-reading cues." Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 2 (January 27, 2023): 164. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/elm.2.5336.
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Sign languages demonstrate a higher degree of iconicity than spoken languages. Studies on a number of unrelated sign languages show that the event structure of verb signs is reflected in the phonological form of the signs (Wilbur (2008), Malaia & Wilbur (2012), Krebs et al. (2021)). Previous research showed that hearing non-signers (with no prior exposure to sign language) can use the iconicity inherent in the visual dynamics of a verb sign to correctly identify its event structure (telic vs. atelic). In two EEG experiments, hearing non-signers were presented with telic and atelic verb signs unfamiliar to them, which they had to classify in a two-choice lexical decision task in their native language. The first experiment assessed the timeline of neural processing mechanisms in non-signers processing telic/atelic signs without access to lip-reading cues in their native language, to understand the pathways for incorporation of physical perceptual motion features into linguistic processing. The second experiment further probed the impact of visual information provided by lip-reading (speech decoding based on visual information from the face of the speaker, most importantly, the lips) on the processing of telic/atelic signs in non-signers.
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Shayman, Corey S., Robert J. Peterka, Frederick J. Gallun, Yonghee Oh, Nai-Yuan N. Chang, and Timothy E. Hullar. "Frequency-dependent integration of auditory and vestibular cues for self-motion perception." Journal of Neurophysiology 123, no. 3 (March 1, 2020): 936–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00307.2019.
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Recent evidence has shown that auditory information may be used to improve postural stability, spatial orientation, navigation, and gait, suggesting an auditory component of self-motion perception. To determine how auditory and other sensory cues integrate for self-motion perception, we measured motion perception during yaw rotations of the body and the auditory environment. Psychophysical thresholds in humans were measured over a range of frequencies (0.1–1.0 Hz) during self-rotation without spatial auditory stimuli, rotation of a sound source around a stationary listener, and self-rotation in the presence of an earth-fixed sound source. Unisensory perceptual thresholds and the combined multisensory thresholds were found to be frequency dependent. Auditory thresholds were better at lower frequencies, and vestibular thresholds were better at higher frequencies. Expressed in terms of peak angular velocity, multisensory vestibular and auditory thresholds ranged from 0.39°/s at 0.1 Hz to 0.95°/s at 1.0 Hz and were significantly better over low frequencies than either the auditory-only (0.54°/s to 2.42°/s at 0.1 and 1.0 Hz, respectively) or vestibular-only (2.00°/s to 0.75°/s at 0.1 and 1.0 Hz, respectively) unisensory conditions. Monaurally presented auditory cues were less effective than binaural cues in lowering multisensory thresholds. Frequency-independent thresholds were derived, assuming that vestibular thresholds depended on a weighted combination of velocity and acceleration cues, whereas auditory thresholds depended on displacement and velocity cues. These results elucidate fundamental mechanisms for the contribution of audition to balance and help explain previous findings, indicating its significance in tasks requiring self-orientation. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Auditory information can be integrated with visual, proprioceptive, and vestibular signals to improve balance, orientation, and gait, but this process is poorly understood. Here, we show that auditory cues significantly improve sensitivity to self-motion perception below 0.5 Hz, whereas vestibular cues contribute more at higher frequencies. Motion thresholds are determined by a weighted combination of displacement, velocity, and acceleration information. These findings may help understand and treat imbalance, particularly in people with sensory deficits.
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Zhao, Zhihui, and Xiangzhen Ma. "Ternary Moral Empathy Model from the Perspective of Intersubjective Phenomenology." Behavioral Sciences 14, no. 9 (September 9, 2024): 792. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs14090792.
Full textAbstract:
The phenomenon of empathy is an intersubjective process of feeling and a particular form of intentionality. Moral empathy refers to a type of empathy that can trigger moral action, with the embodied intersubjectivity laying the foundation for its emergence. This paper attempts to propose a comprehensive theoretical model of moral empathy from the perspective of intersubjective phenomenology, which includes the following. (1) The moral dimension of perceptual empathy: at the subpersonal, unconscious, and perceptual–motor level, embodied empathic practices are essential for the formation of moral consciousness and the emergence of moral empathy. (2) The moral dimension of situational empathy: following the development of shared attention mechanisms, children can direct towards the intentional objects of others through embodied situational cues to perceive the psychological state of others and generate the moral empathy of “ought”, leading to dyadic morality that promotes cooperative behavior. (3) The moral dimension of narrative empathy: the narrative practices of moral empathy refer to the processes by which children could perceive and understand the moral situation of characters within an embodied narrative structure, subsequently generate prosocial motives such as empathic concern, and then accept the “objective” moral norms of the group consciousness embedded in the narrative.
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Patai, Eva Zita, Sonia Doallo, and Anna Christina Nobre. "Long-term Memories Bias Sensitivity and Target Selection in Complex Scenes." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24, no. 12 (December 2012): 2281–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00294.
Full textAbstract:
In everyday situations, we often rely on our memories to find what we are looking for in our cluttered environment. Recently, we developed a new experimental paradigm to investigate how long-term memory (LTM) can guide attention and showed how the pre-exposure to a complex scene in which a target location had been learned facilitated the detection of the transient appearance of the target at the remembered location [Summerfield, J. J., Rao, A., Garside, N., & Nobre, A. C. Biasing perception by spatial long-term memory. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 14952–14960, 2011; Summerfield, J. J., Lepsien, J., Gitelman, D. R., Mesulam, M. M., & Nobre, A. C. Orienting attention based on long-term memory experience. Neuron, 49, 905–916, 2006]. This study extends these findings by investigating whether and how LTM can enhance perceptual sensitivity to identify targets occurring within their complex scene context. Behavioral measures showed superior perceptual sensitivity (d′) for targets located in remembered spatial contexts. We used the N2pc ERP to test whether LTM modulated the process of selecting the target from its scene context. Surprisingly, in contrast to effects of visual spatial cues or implicit contextual cueing, LTM for target locations significantly attenuated the N2pc potential. We propose that the mechanism by which these explicitly available LTMs facilitate perceptual identification of targets may differ from mechanisms triggered by other types of top–down sources of information.
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Hansen, Thorsten, and Heiko Neumann. "Neural Mechanisms for the Robust Representation of Junctions." Neural Computation 16, no. 5 (May 1, 2004): 1013–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/089976604773135087.
Full textAbstract:
Junctions provide important cues in various perceptual tasks, such as the determination of occlusion relationships for figure-ground separation, transparency perception, and object recognition, among others. In computer vision, junctions are used in a number of tasks, like point matching for image tracking or correspondence analysis. We propose a biologically motivated approach to junction representation in which junctions are implicitly characterized by high activity for multiple orientations within a cortical hypercolumn. A local measure of circular variance is suggested to extract junction points from this distributed representation. Initial orientation measurements are often fragmented and noisy. A coherent contour representation can be generated by a model of V1 utilizing mechanisms of collinear long-range integration and recurrent interaction. In the model, local oriented contrast estimates that are consistent within a more global context are enhanced while inconsistent activities are suppressed. In a series of computational experiments, we compare junction detection based on the new recurrent model with a feedforward model of complex cells. We show that localization accuracy and positive correctness in the detection of generic junction configurations such as L- and T-junctions is improved by the recurrent long-range interaction. Further, receiver operating characteristics analysis is used to evaluate the detection performance on both synthetic and camera images, showing the superior performance of the new approach. Overall, we propose that nonlocal interactions implemented by known mechanisms within V1 play an important role in detecting higher-order features such as corners and junctions.
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Botvinik-Nezer, Rotem, Tom Salomon, and Tom Schonberg. "Enhanced Bottom-Up and Reduced Top-Down fMRI Activity Is Related to Long-Lasting Nonreinforced Behavioral Change." Cerebral Cortex 30, no. 3 (August 13, 2019): 858–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhz132.
Full textAbstract:
Abstract Behavioral change studies and interventions focus on self-control and external reinforcements to influence preferences. Cue-approach training (CAT) has been shown to induce preference changes lasting months by merely associating items with neutral cues and speeded responses. We utilized this paradigm to study neural representation of preferences and their modification without external reinforcements. We scanned 36 participants with fMRI during a novel passive viewing task before, after and 30 days following CAT. We preregistered the predictions that activity in memory, top-down attention, and value-processing regions will underlie preference modification. While most theories associate preferences with prefrontal regions, we found that “bottom-up” perceptual mechanisms were associated with immediate change, whereas reduced “top-down” parietal activity was related to long-term change. Activity in value-related prefrontal regions was enhanced immediately after CAT for trained items and 1 month after for all items. Our findings suggest a novel neural mechanism of preference representation and modification. We suggest that nonreinforced change of preferences occurs initially in perceptual representation of items, putatively leading to long-term changes in “top-down” processes. These findings offer implementation of bottom-up instead of top-down targeted interventions for long-lasting behavioral change.
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DeCouto, Brady S., Nicholas J. Smeeton, and A. Mark Williams. "Skilled Performers Show Right Parietal Lateralization during Anticipation of Volleyball Attacks." Brain Sciences 13, no. 8 (August 15, 2023): 1204. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13081204.
Full textAbstract:
Global and local biological motion processing are likely influenced by an observer’s perceptual experience. Skilled athletes anticipating an opponent’s movements use globally distributed motion information, while less skilled athletes focus on single kinematic cues. Published reports have demonstrated that attention can be primed globally or locally before perceptual tasks; such an intervention could highlight motion processing mechanisms used by skilled and less skilled observers. In this study, we examined skill differences in biological motion processing using attentional priming. Skilled (N = 16) and less skilled (N = 16) players anticipated temporally occluded videos of volleyball attacks after being primed using a Navon matching task while parietal EEG was measured. Skilled players were more accurate than less skilled players across priming conditions. Global priming improved performance in both skill groups. Skilled players showed significantly reduced alpha and beta power in the right compared to left parietal region, but brain activity was not affected by the priming interventions. Our findings highlight the importance of right parietal dominance for skilled performers, which may be functional for inhibiting left hemispheric local processing or enhancing visual spatial attention for dynamic visual scenes. Further work is needed to systematically determine the function of this pattern of brain activity during skilled anticipation.