I-Perception最新文献

Happy and sad moods promote global and local visual processing, respectively. However, it is unclear whether mood also affects the processing level in haptics. Here, we used classical music to induce happy and sad moods in blindfolded participants before they scanned printed, flat 2D embossed configurations with their fingers. We also included a neutral group that did not listen to any music. Global shapes were triangles, circles, or squares (33 mm) composed of smaller local relief shapes (3 mm): either triangles, circles, or squares. Participants explored a probe stimulus with identical local and global shapes, and two comparison stimuli, matching the probe in local or global shape. They reported which comparison stimulus appeared more similar to the probe. In the "sad" group, participants chose the locally matching comparison more frequently than in the "happy" and "neutral" groups, suggesting that unpleasant mood can influence spatial preferences in haptic shape matching. Overall, participants tended to prefer global matches, indicating that under these specific conditions, global-level information may be relatively more prominent in touch.

Stereopsis, the visual experience of palpable depth and solidity, is traditionally thought to depend on the congruence or conflict amongst depth cues. But a more speculative theory is that it depends critically on being able to estimate the absolute depths of objects, and their real-world distances from us. We tested this idea in a perception class, using a picture of some plants, a cardboard box with a monocular viewing hole, and a pair of pinhole glasses. Fourteen of 16 students reported stronger stereopsis with pinhole viewing, contrary to the predictions of the absolute depth theory, but consistent with a traditional account. This classroom exercise offers an empirical challenge for the absolute depth theory, and a vivid teaching tool for the paradoxes of pictorial depth perception.

The human visual system is sensitive to statistical regularities in natural images. This includes general properties like the characteristic 1/f power-spectrum fall-off coefficient observed across diverse natural scenes and category-specific properties like the bias favoring horizontal contrast energy for face recognition. Here, we examined the sensitivity of face pareidolia in adult observers to these image properties using fractal noise images and an unconstrained pareidolic face detection task. We presented participants in separate experiments with (Experiment 1) noise patterns with varying spectral fall-off coefficients and (Experiment 2) noise patterns with bandpass orientation filtering such that either horizontal or vertical contrast energy was limited. In both experiments, we found that face pareidolia rates were sensitive to these manipulations. In Experiment 1, we found that fractal noise patterns with steeper fall-off coefficients (favoring coarser appearance) led to lower rates of pareidolic face detection. In Experiment 2, we found that despite the clear bias favoring horizontal contrast energy in a wide range of face recognition tasks, both horizontal and vertical orientation bandpass filtering reduced rates of face pareidolia relative to isotropic images. We suggest that these results indicate that detecting pareidolic faces depends on the availability of face-like information across many low-level channels rather than a favored scale or orientation that is face-specific.

Earlier research has shown that seven-month-old infants prefer to look at real objects over their referents. Which visual cues determine that preference? Motivated by research on adult observers highlighting the significance of motion parallax over other depth cues contributing to a sense of presence and place, we tested the hypothesis that motion parallax alone is sufficient to cause preferential looking to real objects in infants. We presented pairs of displays of toys in different formats: (a) The real three-dimensional toy; (b) a realistic image of that toy presented on screen; (c) the same image, but with added depth-from-motion-parallax. Infants preferred (a) over (b) (57% vs. 43%, p < .01) and (c) over (b) (52% vs. 48%, p < .05), but showed no significant preference between (a) and (c) (51% vs. 49%, n.s.). This supports the hypothesis that motion parallax alone can induce a looking preference comparable to that observed for real objects.

Olfactory function plays a vital role in daily life but tends to decline with age, affecting health and wellbeing. While previous studies suggest a link between physical activities and olfactory function in older adults, the relationship between cognitive activity and olfactory function remains unclear, as do the combined effects of both activities. This cross-sectional study examined associations between physical and cognitive activity and three domains of olfaction (identification, sensitivity, and memory) in 583 community-dwelling older adults. Both types of activity were positively associated with overall olfactory performance. Physical activity exhibited the strongest link with olfaction identification, while cognitive activity was more closely related to olfaction memory. Furthermore, participants engaging in moderate-to-high levels of both activities achieved the best overall olfactory scores. These findings suggest that a combined lifestyle of physical exertion and cognitive engagement may help preserve olfactory function in aging, with implications for autonomy, safety, and quality of life.

The rise of social media has raised concerns about its addictive potential and impairments in mental health and cognitive functions, including distortions in time processing. Emerging evidence suggests social media addicts tend to misestimate the amount of time spent using social media, hinting at possible problems with their cognitive time-processing. This study aimed to investigate the impact of social media addiction on basic time perception using controlled experimental paradigms. Forty participants scoring ≥24 on the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale with ≥5 hr daily usage were recruited, alongside 40 controls. After excluding individuals craving, fear of missing out for social media, or test anxiety during experiment, final samples included 36 addicts and 37 controls. Time reproduction (motor timing) and bisection (perceptual timing) tasks were administered, distinguishing subsecond (<1 s) and suprasecond (>1 s) intervals. Tasks used neutral gray stimuli to avoid social media cues and included pretask rest to control physiological arousal. Social media addicts exhibited significant deficits in suprasecond bisection task, demonstrated by lower subjective equality points (1,430.69 vs. 1,549.32 ms) and higher Weber ratios (0.41 vs. 0.29), indicating both time overestimation and reduced time sensitivity. No significant group differences were observed in reproduction tasks or in subsecond bisection task. These findings establish that social media addiction selectively impairs suprasecond perceptual timing, characterized by overestimation and diminished sensitivity. These findings establish a novel cognitive deficit linked to addictive social media use, with potential clinical implications for intervention strategies targeting distorted time processing.

This study investigates how the method used by participants to assess the beauty of pictures influences their preference for the compositional rules of symmetry, balance, and proximity. The hypothesis that production methods (actively arranging picture elements) prompt a local perspective, favoring proximity, while evaluation tasks (rating precomposed pictures) elicit a global perspective, favoring symmetry and balance, was tested in two experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that (positional) symmetry was preferred over balance, and balance over proximity, when participants rated precomposed pictures. Experiment 2, employing a production method with movable elements, showed a frequent use of proximity, yet also a tendency toward (positional) symmetry. The combined results indicate that assessment methods substantially impact the preferred composition rules.

We discovered a new type of assimilative color induction. An achromatic target with a white background was placed in the center of a concentric chromatic gradient that caused the glare effect. The target frequently appears to be in the same hue as the gradient. We discussed lower-level factors such as lateral inhibition and spatial summation functions, and higher-level factors such as illumination estimation.

The color appearance of #TheDress image varies across individuals. The color of pixels in the image distributes mostly in blue-achromatic-yellow color direction, and so are the perceived color variations. One of the potential causes is differences in the degree of perceiving light-blue pixels as a part of white clothing under a skylight, referred to as "blue bias." A deep neural network (DNN) application was used to simulate individual differences in blue bias, by varying the percentage of such scenes in the training-image set. A style-transfer DNN was used to simulate a "color naming" procedure by learning pairs of natural images and their color-name labels as pixel-by-pixel maps. The models trained with different ratio of blue-bias scenes were tested using the #TheDress image. The averaged results across trials showed a progressive change from blue/black to white (gray)/gold, indicating that exposure or attention to blue-bias scenes could have caused the individual differences in the color perception of #TheDress image. In an additional experiment, we manipulated the relative number of artificially blue- or yellow-tinted images, instead of varying the ratio of blue-bias scenes, to train the DNN. If the blue-bias scenes are equivalent with blue-tinted images of scenes taken under daylight, this manipulation should yield similar result. However, the resulting outputs did not produce a white/gold image at all. This suggests that exposure to skylight scenes alone is insufficient; the scenes must contain unequivocally white objects (such as snow, white clothing, or white road signs) in order to establish a "blue bias" in human observers.

Humans use distinct exploratory procedures (EPs) in active touch, which are typically specialized for materials with particular properties: for example, pressing for deformable objects such as cushions, or stroking to test a fabric's smoothness. Further, humans can use abstract visual priors for fine-tuning of exploratory movement parameters such as exploration direction. We here test the usage of visual priors in the planning of material-specific EPs, using real-life materials and a naturalistic visual virtual reality environment. We show that humans are better at selecting specialized EPs at initial touch when they have access to valid prior visual information on the material: They used specialized EP earlier, with higher probability, and explored materials for a shorter time. We conclude that visual prior information increases the efficiency of haptic explorations by anticipatory planning of appropriate movement schemes.