Attention Perception & Psychophysics最新文献

It is widely assumed that attention for peripheral visual information is reduced, especially when such information competes with information closer to the fovea. However, existing evidence for such a peripheral attention deficit has suffered from several confounds. Here we reinvestigated how stimuli presented at different eccentricities compete for attention. Human observers saw two equally relevant orientations (Experiment 1) or colors (Experiment 2), presented at close and far eccentricities. The two patterns were presented sequentially (thus competing little for attention), or simultaneously (thus directly competing for attention), after which participants indicated the seen stimuli using a continuous report scale. Errors increased with eccentricity, but increased markedly more so when the items were presented simultaneously. Thus, in situations of competition for attention, the more peripheral item loses out. The findings are not only relevant for fundamental theories of vision, but also for applied situations in which detection of peripheral stimuli is crucial. The data and materials are available online (https://osf.io/m6xjk/).

Auditory stream segregation was measured using ABA-ABA sequences where A and B were the vowel |α| and A and B differed in fundamental frequency by ΔF0. The aim was to assess the impact of ΔF0 and inter-stimulus interval (ISI) on stream segregation for normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) participants with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. For each ISI, ΔF0 was varied using an adaptive procedure to estimate the temporal coherence boundary (TCB, the ΔF0 for which two streams were mostly reported) and the fission boundary (FB, the ΔF0 for which one stream was mostly reported). The TCB and FB were smallest for an ISI near 50 ms. The increase for smaller ISIs may reflect a tendency for the sequences to be perceived as a single frequency-modulated sound, while the increase for larger ISIs may reflect the effectiveness of F0 differences in promoting stream segregation when a sequence of discrete sounds is perceived. The TCBs were higher for the HI than for the NH participants for all ISIs, while the FBs were higher for the HI participants mainly for ISIs above 50 ms. The higher TCB and FB values for the HI participants probably reflect the reduced salience of fundamental frequency differences.

Previous studies have found evidence of adaptive suppression mechanisms for physically salient stimuli. However, it remains unclear whether a similar mechanism exists for threat-history stimuli. This study used a threat conditioning task to generate stimuli with and without a history of threat. In the subsequent visual search task, the spatial probability of distractors was manipulated to examine the influence of threat-history stimuli on distractor suppression. The results showed that response was slower when the threat-history distractor appeared at low-probability locations compared to the no-threat-history distractor, whereas no such difference was observed at high-probability locations. Furthermore, the learned suppression effect for the threat-history distractor was significantly higher than that for the no-threat-history distractor. Our findings suggest that although threat-history distractors readily capture attention at low-probability locations, they remain subject to the same “blanket” suppression at high-probability locations. This pattern demonstrates that statistical learning adaptively modulates attentional selection for threatening stimuli.

Temporal prediction refers to the conscious perception of the passage of time and the ability to predict when a stimulus will occur. It has been found that different types of temporal predictions and varying foreperiods could impact motor performance. However, there is a lack of discussion on the underlying neural mechanism of temporal prediction. Therefore, in the current study, externally and internally driven temporal predictions, combined with variable foreperiods, were examined to explore the neural mechanism of the effects of temporal cues on motor performance. The results showed that reaction times were significantly faster in the temporal cue condition compared to the neutral cue condition with a foreperiod of 500 ms. Additionally, the amplitude of CNV (contingent negative variation) was greater in the temporal cue condition. These results indicate that motor performance could benefit from the external temporal information with a relatively short preparation time. CNV could reflect movement preparation and anticipatory attention to the target stimulus.

What we see encompasses not only lower-level properties (such as a ball’s shape or motion) but also categorical events (such as a ball bouncing vs. rolling). Recent work demonstrates that such categorical perception occurs spontaneously during passive scene viewing: observers are better able to identify changes in static or dynamic scenes when the change involves different “visual verbs” (e.g., pouring vs. scooping), even when the within-type changes (e.g., across two different scenes of pouring) are objectively greater in magnitude. Might this occur as a part of visual processing itself, even without explicit verbal encoding? To find out, we discouraged verbal labeling via explicit instructions, a concurrent verbal suppression task, or both. In all cases, we continued to observe robust cross-event-type advantages for change detection, while carefully controlling lower-level visual features—in contrasts including pouring versus scooping, bouncing versus rolling, and rotating versus twisting. This suggests that we spontaneously see the world in terms of different “visual verbs” even without explicit verbal labeling.

Languages have evolved in part due to cross-modal associations between shape and sound. A famous example is the Bouba–Kiki effect, wherein humans associate words like bouba/kiki to round/angular shapes. How does the Bouba–Kiki effect work for natural words and shapes that contain a mixture of features? If the effect is holistic, the effect for a composite stimulus would not be explainable using the parts. If the effect is compositional, it will be. Here we provide evidence for the latter possibility. In Experiments 1 and 2, we standardized bouba-like and kiki-like shapes and words for use in subsequent experiments. In Experiments 3–5, we created composite shapes/words by combining bouba-like & kiki-like parts. In all experiments, the Bouba–Kiki effect strength for composite shapes/words was predicted remarkably well as a linear sum of the contributions of the constituent parts. Our results greatly simplify our understanding of the Bouba–Kiki effect, leaving little room for holism.

In contrast to claims of holistic processing, upright aligned composite face morphs were recently shown to be processed in the same manner as inverted or misaligned composite face morphs (Cheng et al. 2018. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 44, 833–862). In the present paper, we replicate that work, using a set of schematic faces which vary second-order features (e.g., lip height and eye separation) in the top and bottom halves of the schematic face. We find that the present stimuli show the hallmarks of holistic processing in a complete composite face task, but differ from composite face morphs in that the best fitting MDS metric is more commensurate with an assumption of integrality (i.e., Euclidean distance). Nevertheless, we also find that, as with morph faces, the processing of upright aligned and upright misaligned faces is consistent with a mixture of serial and parallel processing. Importantly, we found little evidence of any strong holistic pooling of the top and bottom face halves into a single object. These results remain consistent with the idea that composite faces are not processed differently from other objects with separable dimensions but instead that composite faces allow more parallel processing when aligned than when misaligned. Data and code are available from: http://github.com/knowlabUnimelb/SCHEMATICFACERULES.

The visual perception and steering behavior of drivers are known to be influenced by environmental lighting, but the underlying perception mechanisms, particularly the role of optical flow under low-luminance conditions, remain insufficiently understood. In a simulated driving experiment, 32 participants were exposed to five controlled luminance levels while their eye movements and driving performance were recorded. The results indicate that lower environmental luminance leads to prolonged gaze duration, a wider distribution of gaze points, and an increase in lateral steering errors. At moderate luminance, drivers exhibited enhanced optical flow perception and improved steering accuracy. However, under low luminance, degraded optical flow weakened the coupling between gaze and self-motion, caused a misalignment between gaze and vehicle motion, leading to reduced steering accuracy. These findings advance previous work by demonstrating that luminance not only affects gaze behavior but also modulates visual perception through its impact on optical flow processing. These insights may support the development of adaptive driver training programs and human-centered driver assistance systems that respond to perceptual challenges in low-luminance environments.