I-Perception最新文献

A major restoration of Vermeer's "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window" revealed a painting of cupid on the back wall that had been overpainted. The uncovering of this painting within a painting changed the composition of the artwork. We performed an eye tracking study on digital representations of the painting to investigate how the restoration altered the way people perceive this artwork. We show that the painting of cupid draws visual attention from the letter and that viewing behavior depends on knowledge of the other version of the painting. Moreover, lay people prefer the version without cupid.

When participants decide whether a presented tone is loud or soft they react faster to loud tones with a top-sided response key in comparison to a bottom-sided response key and vice versa for soft tones. This effect is comparable to the well-established horizontal Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect and is often referred to as Spatial-Musical Association of Response Codes (SMARC) effect for loudness. The SMARC effect for loudness is typically explained by the assumption of a spatial representation or by the polarity correspondence principle. Crucially, both theories differ in the prediction of the SMARC effect when loudness is task-irrelevant. Therefore, we investigated whether the SMARC effect still occurs in a timbre discrimination task: Participants (N = 36) heard a single tone and classified its timbre with vertically arranged response keys. Additionally, the tone's loudness level varied in six levels. In case of a spatial representation, the SMARC effect should still occur while in case of polarity corresponding principle, the effect should be absent. Results showed that the SMARC effect was still present and that the differences between top-sided and bottom-sided responses were a linear function of loudness level indicating a continuous spatial representation of loudness.

If voluntary action is followed by an effect with a short time delay, the time interval between action and effect is often perceived to be shorter than it actually is. This perceptual time compression is termed intentional binding or temporal binding. We investigated age-related changes in adulthood considering temporal binding and its dependence on action body parts (i.e., hand vs. foot). This experiment included 17 young adults (mean age: 21.71 ± 3.14 years) and 27 older adults (mean age: 74.41 ± 3.38 years). Participants performed a button press task using their index fingers (hand condition) or toes (foot condition). The results showed that older participants exhibited a strong time compression comparable to young participants in the voluntary condition. Older participants also showed a strong time compression in involuntary action, which was induced by a mechanical device, differently from young participants. In line with previous research, the present age-related differences in time compression considering involuntary action suggest that causal belief significantly influences event perception rather than the associated intention of action or sensory afferents. The present results also suggest that the nature of action body parts has no significant influence on temporal binding, independent of age group.

Sometimes we look but fail to see: our car keys on a cluttered desk, a repeated word in a carefully proofread email, or a motorcycle at an intersection. Wolfe and colleagues present a unifying, mechanistic framework for understanding these "Looked But Failed to See" errors, explaining how such misses arise from natural constraints on human visual processing. Here, we offer a conceptual taxonomy of six distinct ways we might be said to fail to see, and explore: how these relate to processes in Wolfe et al.'s model; how they can be distinguished experimentally; and, why the differences matter.

Vection (illusion of self-motion) is known to be induced by watching large field-of-view (FOV) moving scenes. In our study, we investigated vection induced by small FOV stimuli. Three experiments were conducted in 45 sessions to analyze vection provoked by moving scenes covering total FOVs as small as 10 square-degrees. Results indicated that 88% of the participants reported vection while watching two small patches of moving dots (1° horizontal by 5° vertical, each) placed on the left and right sides of the observers. This is less than a quarter of the total visual area of two Apple Watches viewed at a distance of 40 cm. Occlusion of the visual field between the two display patches significantly increased the levels of rated vection. Similarly, increasing the speed of the moving dots of the two display patches from about 5 to 25 °/sec increased the levels of rated vection significantly. The location of the two patches in the horizontal visual field did not affect the vection perception significantly. When the two straight stripes of dots were moving in opposite directions, participants perceived circular vection. The observers connected the two stimuli in their minds and perceived them as parts of a single occluded background. The findings of this study are relevant to the design of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) and wearable technology (e.g., smart watches) with small display areas.

While sunbathing, our skin becomes susceptible to quite remarkable changes in visual appearance, that is, freckles appear or increase in intensity-most obviously on the face. Research on face adaptation repeatedly showed that the inspection of manipulated versions of faces (so-called adaptor faces) leads to robust and sustainable changes in the perception of subsequently presented faces. Therefore, during the adaptation phase of the present study, participants saw faces with either strongly increased or decreased intensities of freckles. After a 5-minute break, during the test phase, participants had to identify the veridical (non-manipulated) face out of two faces (a slightly manipulated face combined with a non-manipulated face). Results showed strong adaptation effects to increased and decreased levels of freckles. We conclude that updating facial representations in memory is relatively fast, and these representation updates seem to sustain over a certain time span (at least 5 minutes). Face-specificity of our effects will be discussed. The results align with our everyday experience that the appearance of freckles in spring is a salient change in a familiar face; however, we seem to not register these changes after a few exposures due to a loss of information quality.