Attention Perception & Psychophysics最新文献

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.

Information retrieved from long-term memory (LTM) enters working memory (WM), and the amount of information that can be retrieved is constrained to the limits of WM (about three to four items; Fukuda & Woodman, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114 (20), 5306-5311, 2017). Can LTM retrieval occur when WM is near capacity, without consequence to either the retrieved or the maintained information? Liu, Li, Theeuwes, and Wang (NeuroImage, 261: 119513, 2022) presented evidence that even when WM is near capacity, LTM items could still be reported. They argue that retrieved LTM items can bypass WM. We investigated this further by introducing continuous reporting of retrieved information and WM contents to their paradigm. If retrieval bypasses WM, then there should be no impairment of report accuracy to either WM contents or LTM-retrieved information. In the first experiment, WM reports suffered when an LTM item was retrieved. In the second, we found that when WM was near capacity (four items), the fidelity of LTM reports suffered compared to when WM was not (two items or no items). Additionally, WM contents were reported with lower fidelity when an LTM item was retrieved compared to a WM-only condition, under both two-item and four-item WM load. We conclude that LTM retrieval does not bypass WM.

Learned regularities about contextual associations between objects and scenes allow us to form predictions about the likely features of the environment, facilitating perception of noisy visual inputs. Studies have shown that blurred objects that can be predicted based on their scene context appear subjectively sharper than the same objects that cannot. Experiment 1 addressed whether this effect could be modulated by the robustness of context-based predictions. Participants performed a blur-matching task between two images, each depicting a blurred object in context. They had to adjust the blur level of the right object to match that of the left object (Target). Robustness of context-based predictions was manipulated via phase-coherence alteration in scene contexts. Results showed that robustly predicted objects were subjectively perceived as sharper than less predictable objects when the Target object was noisy. Experiment 2 addressed whether object-based predictions also sharpen the perception of scene contexts. Participants performed a blur-matching task between two scenes and had to adjust the blur level of the right scene context to match that of the left one (Target). One scene contained an intact object (predictable context), while the other had a phase-scrambled object (unpredictable context). Results showed that at objectively equal blur levels participants perceived predictable scenes as sharper than unpredictable ones, again only when the Target scene was noisy. These results suggest that perceptual sharpening mainly occurs when the visual signal is noisy and predictions are robust enough to disambiguate it, and reveal reciprocal influences between context- and object-based predictions in shaping visual perception.

Important social information can be extracted from the eyes and gaze of others, such as intentions, states of mind, and the locus of attention. Research investigating people’s ability to interpret social signals has largely focused on the featural properties of the stimuli (e.g., where or how someone looks) and not on the social intent behind those eye movements. To explore this gap, participants were shown eye movement recordings of individuals (“hiders”) selecting hiding locations on a 3 × 3 computer grid. One group of participants was told that these eye movements were from a foe who did not want participants to discover their hiding location (Group Foe). A second group was told that the eye movements were from a friend who wanted participants to discover their hiding location (Group Friend). In fact, both groups saw deceptive (foe) and cooperative (friend) eye movements. When the intent of the hider aligned with participants’ beliefs about that hider—for instance, the hider was acting for a friend and the participants believed the hider was friendly—participants were more likely to correctly select hiders’ locations. Further, participants’ belief of the hider’s intent had a greater impact on interpretation than featural differences in deceptive and cooperative eye movements. The present study reveals that beliefs about someone’s gaze can play a greater role in performance outcomes than any actual changes in the gaze itself. It provides a rigorous and novel paradigm to investigate the complex interaction between the intent of social signals and how those signals are interpreted.

This study investigated ensemble perception of temporal (duration) as well as spatial (size) information with simultaneously and sequentially presented ensembles of different set size. The results showed that summary statistics can be extracted from temporal ensembles as well as from size ensembles, irrespective of whether the ensembles are presented simultaneously or sequentially, demonstrating the domain generality of ensemble perception. Nevertheless, the results also indicate clear domain-specific differences between the two dimensions. For simultaneous ensembles, mean estimates increased with set size for duration ensembles and decreased with set size for size ensembles, suggesting a possible bias by dimension-specific features; in the case of duration by the interoffset intervals, and in the case of size by the overall ensemble size. For sequential ensembles, there was a recency effect for size stimuli but not for duration stimuli, suggesting that the information is integrated for the two dimensions differently. For example, participants might rely on an internal prior formed by memory mixing more strongly in the case of relatively noisy representations of temporal information.