Perception最新文献

It is well established that observers overestimate the surface orientation of geographical, virtual, and man-made hills. We investigated whether the v' theory-that observers use the angle of regard-or the relationship between the direction of gaze and the slope of the hill, to make their slope estimates. We tested whether the perceived steepness of hills changes across dramatic differences in eye heights across a wide range of surface orientations, while controlling for distance of the surface from the observer. We found that people use the angle of regard to make their slope estimates across a wide range of surface orientations and eye heights while controlling for distance, standing on the surface, and posture. The dramatic manipulation in eye height caused corresponding changes in slope perception as predicted by the angle of regard. The angle of regard seems to be a perceptual regularity that is constant across changes of position of the observer and surface slope, and also predicts observed changes in eye height and distance of the surface from the viewer.

This research investigates crossmodal correspondences between auditory stimuli, specifically musical modes, and olfactory mental imagery, represented by fragrance families. Building on the emerging literature on crossmodal correspondences, this research explores different mechanisms that might help to explain these crossmodal correspondences such as their shared connotative meaning and identity-based meaning. The first study evaluated the fragrance families and subfamilies and musical modes and assessed potential mechanisms behind these associations. The second study examined the associations between the musical modes and fragrance families and subfamilies through a matching task. The results revealed consistent matches between different musical modes and corresponding fragrance families and subfamilies, indicating a crossmodal association between auditory and olfactory mental imagery. What is more, major modes were perceived as brighter and less intense, and were more liked than minor modes, with floral and fresh fragrances similarly rated as brighter and more liked than oriental and woody fragrances. These results suggest that crossmodal correspondences between auditory and olfactory stimuli are influenced by brightness, intensity, and hedonic factors. Understanding such crossmodal associations can potentially benefit various fields, including marketing, product design, and those interested in creating multisensory experiences.

People across cultures engage in various practices that alter their appearance (e.g., makeup, tanning, facial aesthetic treatment). Theories in social and evolutionary psychology propose that the primary function of these practices is to create an appearance perceived more positively by others, ultimately resulting in more favorable outcomes in social, romantic, or professional relations. In two preregistered studies that improved upon and extended prior work, we tested the effect of popular types of minimally invasive facial aesthetic treatment on how people are perceived by others. Study 1 (2,720 raters, 114 targets) showed that treatment significantly increased perceived attractiveness (a 0.09-point change on a seven-point scale), but not perceived approachability (e.g., trustworthiness) or capability (e.g., competence). Study 2 (481 raters, 81 targets) showed that treatment significantly increased targets' desirability as a short-term romantic partner (a 0.10-point change on a seven-point scale) and as a platonic friend (a 0.08-point change on a seven-point scale), but not their desirability as a long-term romantic partner. Thus, our results suggest that a single session of minimally invasive facial aesthetic treatment leads to more positive perceptions on dimensions related to attractiveness, but these effects are relatively small.

Balance is controlled by visual, somatosensory, and vestibular sensory inputs. Older adults rely on visual information for balance control, and those with a history of falls have been reported to exhibit higher visual dependence. Additionally, high visual dependence may affect velocity-related parameters, such as gait speed. However, whether visual dependence is related to specific measures of postural control in older adults remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between visual dependence and balance in older adults. This was a single-center, cross-sectional, observational study involving 50 healthy older adults with a mean age of 72.0 ± 4.6 years. Visual dependence was assessed by measuring the static and dynamic subjective visual vertical (SVV) using a smartphone-based virtual reality method. Balance function was assessed using stabilometry and the mini-balance evaluation systems test (Mini-BESTest). The main outcome was medial-lateral sway velocity. Multivariate analysis was performed with each balance function (Mini-BESTest score, sway path, amplitude, and mean sway velocity) as the dependent variable and age, height, static SVV, and visual dependence as the independent variables. The results indicated that visual dependence was significantly associated with medial-lateral mean sway velocity in the eyes-closed foam surface condition (β = 0.41, p = .011, R² = 0.19). This suggests that older adults with high visual dependence may experience reduced static balance under conditions of limited visual and somatosensory inputs. These findings highlight the importance of considering visual dependence in balance assessment and rehabilitation programs for older adults with balance disorders.

Search asymmetry has been called a "litmus test" for basic visual features. The letter Q is thought to contain a basic feature because (i) it can be found quickly, no matter how many O's it is hiding amongst and (ii) it is much harder to find an O amongst Q's. We tested the possibility that a basic visual feature is created when two perpendicular Gabor patterns are superimposed to form a "plaid." We found relatively large effects of set size on reaction time whenever participants tried to find a Gabor hiding among plaids. Set-size effects were smaller when participants tried to find a 2- or 4-cycle-per-degree plaid that was hiding among its component Gabors. The implication is that these plaids contain a basic visual feature, which is not present in its component Gabors. This feature may be an intrinsic two-dimensionality that is extracted from the visual intensity map. Mixed-frequency plaids did not pop out from their component Gabors. This last result suggests that the visual system separates intrinsically two-dimensional image regions (e.g., corners and junctions) from intrinsically one-dimensional image regions (e.g., straight edges) after the scene is segregated into parallel spatial frequency channels.

This study renders the visual saltation illusion (VSI) into an expansion and a contraction transformation mode, diverging from traditional experiments using translation. Small-, medium-, and large-sized stimuli were used to create conditions akin to VSI translation experiments. Participants fixated on a cross while three stimuli (expanding or contracting) flashed 25.9° below. Despite actual size, observers consistently misperceived the second flash as medium-sized relative to the first and third flash. Further experiments were conducted to determine whether stimulus duration or interstimulus interval had more of an effect inducing the VSI. These results showed that for expansion and contraction, the VSI did not favor either parameter, but overall favored short stimulus onset asynchronies below 317 ms. These findings shed more light on the VSI phenomenon and open the doors on presenting the VSI in other modes.

The composite face effect (CFE) provides evidence for holistic face processing by demonstrating that when halves of different faces are aligned to resemble a single face, recognition of the component identities is disrupted. However, if the face halves are misaligned, the component identities become easier to recognise. While the horizontal CFE - wherein the top and bottom halves of the face are aligned - has been extensively studied, the existence of a vertical CFE - involving the combination of left-right face halves - remains unclear. This study investigated the vertical CFE using composite stimuli created by pairing familiar and unfamiliar faces. Participants made familiarity judgements for aligned and misaligned vertical and horizontal composites. Familiarity judgements were made more accurately and with faster response times with misaligned compared to aligned composites. The magnitude of the vertical CFE was comparable to the horizontal CFE and was unaffected by identity priming or which half of the face was attended. However, the size of the CFE was reduced when attention was not directed to a specific face half. These findings suggest that both the vertical and horizontal CFE reflect a common mechanism for integrating facial information across the visual field, underscoring holistic processing as a fundamental process in face recognition.

The effect of face orientation and exposure duration on facial identity recognition and matching are well-documented but has scarcely been examined for facial age perception. Using a facial age categorisation task (i.e., classifying faces as over and under the age of 18) with ambient faces, we manipulated facial orientation (upright and inverted) and exposure duration (250 and 2000 ms) to examine their unique and interactive effects on age classification accuracy. Across two experiments, age classification accuracy was impaired by inverting faces. Additionally, overall accuracy was improved when participants were required to view the faces for the full length of the long duration (2000 ms) (experiment 2), but not when they had the opportunity to respond earlier than the end of stimuli (experiment 1). However, there was no interactive effect of exposure duration and facial orientation. These findings suggest that accurate age classification relies on facial information that is disrupted when inverted.

Multisensory processing critically depends on the perceived timing of stimuli in the different sensory modalities. Crossmodal stimuli that fall within rather than outside an individual temporal binding window (TBW) are more likely to be bound into a multisensory percept. A number of studies have shown that a short perceptual training in which participants receive feedback on their responses in an audiovisual simultaneity judgment (SJ) task can substantially decrease the size of the TBW and hence increase crossmodal temporal acuity. Here we tested whether multisensory perceptual learning in the SJ task is specific for the spatial locations at which the audiovisual stimuli are presented during training. Participants received feedback about the correctness of their SJ responses for audiovisual stimuli which were presented in one hemifield only. The TBW was assessed separately for audiovisual stimuli in each hemifield before and one day after the training. In line with previous findings, the size of the TBW was significantly reduced after the training phase. Importantly, an equally strong reduction of TBW size was observed in both the trained and the untrained hemifield. Thus, multisensory temporal learning completely generalized to the untrained hemifield, suggesting that the improvement in crossmodal temporal acuity was mediated by higher, location-invariant processing stages. These findings have implications for the design of multisensory training protocols in applied settings such as clinical interventions by showing that training at multiple spatial locations might not be necessary to achieve robust improvements in crossmodal temporal acuity.