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The article focuses on the concept of Intentionalism, a thesis stating that the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences depends on the content of perceptual representations. It explores the ambiguity in Intentionalism; addressing the implicit assumption of One-to-One Intentionalism; where the dependence relation links the phenomenal character of one perceptual experience to its representational content; and aim to formulate and defend Many-to-One Intentionalism.

This paper combines the personalized and diversified features of modern aesthetic vision, highlighting the static and dynamic performance of pattern visuals. The visual communication of brand pattern is based on computer graphic image design to interpret the information in a visual medium, and the image processing method is used to sample the visual image of brand modeling, extract the edge contour feature amount of the visual image of brand modeling, construct the 3D visual reconstruction model, and carry out 3D feature analysis and sparse surface feature reconstruction. The visual communication art cognition of the brand pattern is analyzed from the analysis of the visual perceptual, psychological evaluation of the pattern and the analysis of the effect of the pattern diameter and spacing. If the pattern's brightness and background brightness are higher, the livelier the space feels. However, the relationship between the lively and solemn sense of space and the patterns' graph diameter and spacing was not obvious, with correlation coefficients of -0.618 and -0.345, respectively, p

In The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience , David Papineau offers some metaphysical reasons for rejecting representationalism. This paper overviews these reasons, arguing that while some of his arguments against some versions of representationalism succeed, there are versions of phenomenal intentionalism that escape his criticisms. Still, once we consider some of the contents of perceptual experiences, such as their perspectival contents, it is clear that perceptual experience does not present us with the world as we take it to be. This leads to a rather attenuated form of representationalism, perhaps one that even Papineau could come close to agreeing with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Prolegomena: Journal of Philosophy is the property of Society for the Advancement of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent evidence shows that people have the meta-metacognitive ability to evaluate their metacognitive judgments of confidence. However, it is unclear whether meta-metacognitive judgments are made by a different system and rely on a separate set of computations compared to metacognitive judgments. To address this question, we asked participants (N  = 36) to perform a perceptual decision-making task and provide (i) an object-level, Type-1 response about the identity of the stimulus; (ii) a metacognitive, Type-2 response (low/high) regarding their confidence in their Type-1 decision; and (iii) a meta-metacognitive, Type-3 response (low/high) regarding the quality of their Type-2 rating. We found strong evidence for the existence of Type-3, meta-metacognitive ability. In a separate condition, participants performed an identical task with only a Type-1 response followed by a Type-2 response given on a 4-point scale. We found that the two conditions produced equivalent results such that the combination of binary Type-2 and binary Type-3 responses acts similar to a 4-point Type-2 response. Critically, while Type-2 evaluations were subject to metacognitive noise, Type-3 judgments were made at no additional cost. These results suggest that it is unlikely that there is a distinction between Type-2 and Type-3 systems (metacognition and meta-metacognition) in perceptual decision-making and, instead, a single system can be flexibly adapted to produce both Type-2 and Type-3 evaluations recursively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is it about our current digital technologies that seemingly makes it difficult for users to attend to what matters to them? According to the dominant narrative in the literature on the "attention economy," a user's lack of attention is due to the large amounts of information available in their everyday environments. I will argue that information-abundance fails to account for some of the central manifestations of distraction, such as sudden urges to check a particular information-source in the absence of perceptual information. I will use active inference, and in particular models of action selection based on the minimization of expected free energy, to develop an alternative answer to the question about what makes it difficult to attend. Besides obvious adversarial forms of inference, in which algorithms build up models of users in order to keep them scrolling, I will show that active inference provides the tools to identify a number of problematic structural features of current digital technologies: they contain limitless sources of novelty, they can be navigated by very simple and effortless motor movements, and they offer their action possibilities everywhere and anytime independent of place or context. Moreover, recent models of motivated control show an intricate interplay between motivation and control that can explain sudden transitions in motivational state and the consequent alteration of the salience of actions. I conclude, therefore, that the challenges users encounter when engaging with digital technologies are less about information overload or inviting content, but more about the continuous availability of easily available possibilities for action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptual decision-making is often conceptualized as the process of comparing an internal decision variable to a categorical boundary or criterion. How the mind sets such a criterion has been studied from at least two perspectives. One idea is that the criterion is a fixed quantity. In work on subjective phenomenology, the notion of a fixed criterion has been proposed to explain a phenomenon called "subjective inflation"—a form of metacognitive mismatch in which observers overestimate the quality of their sensory representation in the periphery or at unattended locations. A contrasting view emerging from studies of perceptual decision-making is that the criterion adjusts to the level sensory uncertainty and is thus sensitive to variations in attention. Here, we mathematically demonstrate that previous empirical findings supporting subjective inflation are consistent with either a fixed or a flexible decision criterion. We further lay out specific task properties that are necessary to make inferences about the flexibility of the criterion: (i) a clear mapping from decision variable space to stimulus feature space and (ii) an incentive for observers to adjust their decision criterion as uncertainty changes. Recent work satisfying these requirements has demonstrated that decision criteria flexibly adjust according to uncertainty. We conclude that the fixed-criterion model of subjective inflation is poorly tenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amodal completion is usually characterized as the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. In the case of the visual sense modality, for example, amodal completion is the representation of occluded parts of objects we see. I argue that relationalism about perception, the view that perceptual experience is constituted by the relation to the perceived object, cannot give a coherent account of amodal completion. The relationalist has two options: construe the perceptual relation as the relation to the entire perceived object or as the relation to the unoccluded parts of the perceived object. I argue that neither of these options are viable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study investigated perceptual simulation and its relationship with literacy ability in Chinese children. Ninety-three third-grade Hong Kong Chinese children completed a sentence-picture verification task for perceptual simulation. In this task, a sentence mentioning an object was presented first, followed by a picture involving the object. The picture was either a perceptual match with the preceding sentence or a mismatch. The participants were asked to judge whether the object in the picture was mentioned in the preceding sentence. Literacy ability was measured by a Chinese character reading task. Model analysis revealed a significant mismatch effect: the children gave faster correct responses to the perceptually matched pictures than to the mismatched ones. Furthermore, the children with lower literacy abilities displayed larger mismatch effects than those with higher literacy abilities. The results suggest that children with lower literacy abilities may rely more heavily on reactivated perceptual representations in language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Theoretical Studies of Literature & Art / Wenyi Lilun Yanjiu is the property of Editorial Board of Theoretical Studies in Literature & Art and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Invitational Theory is rooted in three theoretical foundations, the perceptual tradition, self-concept theory, and a democratic ethos (Purkey, Novak, and Fretz, 2020). This essay focuses in on the first of these foundations, which the author intentionally describes as perceptual theory. Perceptual theory provides a theoretical foundation for understanding and explaining human behaviour, and could provide very important insights into the offering and receiving of invitations. In this essay the author seeks to re-introduce the Invitational community to this important theoretical foundation, which could profoundly and positively impact the enacting and application of invitational theory. The author begins by providing an overview of perceptual theory, exploring some of the central tenets and implications. The author then reviews the history of the development of the theory, which the author believes has been overlooked and by-passed: not enough people know about perceptual theory. The author introduces a number of perceptual theory basics, which can be a helpful way of introducing the theory. The essay concludes with an exploration of a number of potential implications and applications for the Invitational community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptual psychology has provided a number of revealing insights into the phenomenon of palaeoart. The value of the discipline is underlined by the fact that it has provided new ways of exploring how Upper Palaeolithic cave art first arose, both on a theoretical and a practical level. Despite this, the approach has been accused of overstating the importance of perceptual factors to the detriment of cultural criteria. In this paper, I demonstrate how perceptual psychology can be exploited to provide useful hypotheses regarding the cultural issues associated with early parietal art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current theories of visual consciousness disagree about whether it emerges during early stages of processing in sensory brain regions or later when a widespread frontoparietal network becomes involved. Moreover, disentangling conscious perception from task-related postperceptual processes (e.g., report) and integrating results across different neuroscientific methods remain ongoing challenges. The present study addressed these problems using simultaneous EEG-fMRI and a specific inattentional blindness paradigm with three physically identical phases in female and male human participants. In phase 1, participants performed a distractor task during which line drawings of faces and control stimuli were presented centrally. While some participants spontaneously noticed the faces in phase 1, others remained inattentionally blind. In phase 2, all participants were made aware of the task-irrelevant faces but continued the distractor task. In phase 3, the faces became taskrelevant. Bayesian analysis of brain responses demonstrated that conscious face perception was most strongly associated with activation in fusiform gyrus (fMRI) as well as the N170 and visual awareness negativity (EEG). Smaller awareness effects were revealed in the occipital and prefrontal cortex (fMRI). Task-relevant face processing, on the other hand, led to strong, extensive activation of occipitotemporal, frontoparietal, and attentional networks (fMRI). In EEG, it enhanced early negativities and elicited a pronounced P3b component. Overall, we provide evidence that conscious visual perception is linked with early processing in stimulus-specific sensory brain areas but may additionally involve prefrontal cortex. In contrast, the strong activation of widespread brain networks and the P3b are more likely associated with task-related processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People's perceptual reports are biased toward percepts they are motivated to see. The arousal system coordinates the body's response to motivationally significant events and is well positioned to regulate motivational effects on perceptual judgments. However, it remains unclear whether arousal would enhance or reduce motivational biases. Here, we measured pupil dilation as a measure of arousal while participants (N = 38) performed a visual categorization task. We used monetary bonuses to motivate participants to perceive one category over another. Even though the reward-maximizing strategy was to perform the task accurately, participants were more likely to report seeing the desirable category. Furthermore, higher arousal levels were associated with making motivationally biased responses. Analyses using computational models suggested that arousal enhanced motivational effects by biasing evidence accumulation in favor of desirable percepts. These results suggest that heightened arousal biases people toward what they want to see and away from an objective representation of the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jerry Fodor deemed informational encapsulation 'the essence' of a system's modularity and argued that human perceptual processing comprises modular systems, thus construed. Nowadays, his conclusion is widely challenged. Often, this is because experimental work is seen to somehow demonstrate the cognitive penetrability of perceptual processing, where this is assumed to conflict with the informational encapsulation of perceptual systems. Here, I deny the conflict, proposing that cognitive penetration need not have any straightforward bearing on (a) the conjecture that perceptual processing is composed of nothing but informationally encapsulated modules, (b) the conjecture that each and every perceptual computation is performed by an informationally encapsulated module, and (c) the consequences perceptual encapsulation was traditionally expected to have for a perception-cognition border, the epistemology of perception and cognitive science. With these points in view, I propose that particularly plausible cases of cognitive penetration would actually seem to evince the encapsulation of perceptual systems rather than refute/problematize this conjecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal models of appearance and reality have proved fruitful for investigating structural properties of perceptual knowledge. This paper applies the same approach to epistemic justification. Our central goal is to give a simple account of The Preface, in which justified belief fails to agglomerate. Following recent work by a number of authors, we understand knowledge in terms of normality. An agent knows p iff p is true throughout all relevant normal worlds. To model The Preface, we appeal to the normality of error. Sometimes, it is more normal for reality and appearance to diverge than to match. We show that this simple idea has dramatic consequences for the theory of knowledge and justification. Among other things, we argue that a proper treatment of The Preface requires a departure from the internalist idea that epistemic justification supervenes on the appearances and the widespread idea that one knows most when free from error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disjunctivist views in the theory of perception hold that genuine perceptions differ in some relevant kind from misperceptions, such as illusions and hallucinations. In recent papers, Tyler Burge has argued that such views conflict with the basic tenets of perceptual psychology. According to him, perceptual psychology is committed to the view that genuine perceptions and misperceptions produced by the same proximal stimuli must be or involve perceptual states of the same kind. This, he argues, conflicts with disjunctivism. In this paper, I defend epistemological disjunctivism from Burge's inconsistency charge. To this end, I survey the perceptual psychological literature, and reveal that the perceptual kinds they tend to employ differ from and imply nothing about the kinds at issue for the epistemological disjunctivist. I then argue that Burge's concerns with epistemological disjunctivism are best interpreted as motivated not by his commitment to empirical science, but instead by his views in epistemology and about human rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptual constancies have been studied by psychologists for decades, but in recent years, they have also become a major topic in the philosophy of mind. One reason for this surge of interest is Tyler Burge's (2010) influential claim that constancy mechanisms mark the difference between perception and mere sensitivity, and thereby also the difference between organisms with genuine representational capacities and 'mindless' beings. Burge's claim has been the subject of intense debate. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that we cannot hope to settle this debate (as well as related debates in the philosophy of mind) without a clear and substantive theoretical account of what perceptual constancies are. In the first part of this paper, I argue that the standard definitions in the literature fall short of providing such an account. Still, as I aim to show in the second part of the paper, by taking a closer look at some of the paradigm examples, it is possible to construct a plausible general account of perceptual constancies that is both clear and substantive, and that can serve as a firm foundation for settling debates like the dispute about Burge's 'constancy mechanism criterion' for perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose a Husserlian account of perceptual confidence, and argue for perceptual confidence by appeal to the self‐justification of perceptual experiences. Perceptual confidence is the intriguing view, recently developed by John Morrison, that there are not just doxastic confidences but also perceptual confidences, that is, confidences as aspect of perceptual experience, enabling us to account, for example, for the increasing confidence with which we experience an approaching human figure, while telling ourselves, as the viewing distance diminishes, "It looks like this just could be Isaac," "It looks like this is probably Isaac," "It looks like this is almost certainly Isaac." I first present my Husserlian account with a focus on the notion of fulfillment, and the idea that the contents of perceptual experience are fulfillment conditions. I then show that this account can be complemented by PC. Finally, I develop a focus on the idea of perceptual self‐justification, diverting the perceptual confidence debate from its pre‐eminent concern with the relations between perceptual and doxastic confidences, and present an argument to the effect that there are perceptual confidences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typical human perception features stable biases such as perceiving visual events as later than synchronous auditory events. The origin of such perceptual biases is unknown. To investigate the role of early sensory experience, we tested whether a congenital, transient loss of pattern vision, caused by bilateral dense cataracts, has sustained effects on audio-visual and tactile-visual temporal biases and resolution. Participants judged the temporal order of successively presented, spatially separated events within and across modalities. Individuals with reversed congenital cataracts showed a bias towards perceiving visual stimuli as occurring earlier than auditory (Expt. 1) and tactile (Expt. 2) stimuli. This finding stood in stark contrast to normally sighted controls and sight-recovery individuals who had developed cataracts later in childhood: both groups exhibited the typical bias of perceiving vision as delayed compared to audition. These findings provide strong evidence that cross-modal temporal biases depend on sensory experience during an early sensitive period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of the English-language chapters of Sybille Moser-Ernst’s edited collection, Art and Mind – Ernst H. Gombrich: Mit dem Steckenpferd unterwegs, focuses on his complex and continuing influence on basic questions about visual art and its history. Gombrich’s broad interdisciplinary reach is evident in the range of themes and critical approaches offered by the contributors. As cognitive psychologist whose research interests and orientation overlap with many of Gombrich’s core concerns, I discuss the contributions in terms of foci on the past versus future and situate the latter in the context of contemporary psychological and neuroscience research. The implications of this cross-disciplinary dialogue remain fertile, as researchers in many domains continue to play catch-up to Gombrich’s prescient insights.

• Viewing scenery is the 2nd most common activity during visits to U.S. National Forests. • Participation in viewing scenery is associated with the visit's primary activity. • Importance of scenery is associated with the visit's primary activity. • Viewer sensitivity indicator is proposed for VRM and VIA based on primary activity. Consideration of viewer sensitivity is an important part of visual resource management and visual impact assessment. However, there is scant research to support the assessment of viewer sensitivity, particularly across viewers engaged in different recreation activities. This study uses data from the U. S. Forest Service's National Visitor Use Monitoring program to investigate the role of a reported behavior (the frequency of viewing scenery) and perceptual judgement (the importance of a site's scenery to the overall recreation experience) as part of a visit to engage in one of 24 primary recreation activities. The results are recoded as an index of viewer sensitivity for those engaged in each of the primary activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory study was based on the cognitive and perceptual characteristics of 50 cases of near-death experiences (NDEs) collected through the International Association for Near-Death Studies-France. This study resulted in the formulation of a model of perception based on the concept of "global perception" or "global acquisition of information." Further analysis showed that this model is consistent with the concept that these perceptions are not purely hallucinatory but are, in part, modified perceptions of reality. Several clues are then proposed to explain how this type of information could be processed at the cerebral level and beyond. Finally, we offer a clinical research protocol, including a test that could lead to irrefutable proof of veridical perception during NDEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptual decision making is an active process where animals move their sense organs to extract task-relevant information. To investigate how the brain translates sensory input into decisions during active sensation, we developed a mouse active touch task where the mechanosensory input can be precisely measured and that challenges animals to use multiple mechanosensory cues. Male mice were trained to localize a pole using a single whisker and to report their decision by selecting one of three choices. Using high-speed imaging and machine vision, we estimated whisker-object mechanical forces at millisecond resolution. Mice solved the task by a sensory-motor strategy where both the strength and direction of whisker bending were informative cues to pole location. We found competing influences of immediate sensory input and choice memory on mouse choice. On correct trials, choice could be predicted from the direction and strength of whisker bending, but not from previous choice. In contrast, on error trials, choice could be predicted from previous choice but not from whisker bending. This study shows that animal choices during active tactile decision making can be predicted from mechanosensory and choice-memory signals, and provides a new task well suited for the future study of the neural basis of active perceptual decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that perceptual consciousness is constituted by a mental activity. The mental activity in question is the activity of employing perceptual capacities, such as discriminatory, selective capacities. This is a radical view, but I hope to make it plausible. In arguing for this mental activist view, I reject orthodox views on which perceptual consciousness is analyzed in terms of (sensory awareness relations to) peculiar entities, such as, phenomenal properties, external mind‐independent properties, propositions, sense‐data, qualia, or intentional objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Estudios de Filosofía is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Instituto de Filosofia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Within the multidimensional nature of soccer talent, recently there has been an increasing interest in psychological characteristics. The aim of this present research was to systematically review the predictive value of psychological talent predictors and provide better comprehension of the researchers’ methodological approaches and the empirical evidence for individual factors (i.e., psychomotor, perceptual-cognitive and personality-related). Results highlighted heterogeneous study designs (e.g., participants, measurement methods, statistical analyses) which may limit the comparability of studies’ findings. Analyzing the number of included studies, psychomotor (n = 10) and personality-related factors (n = 8) received more consideration within the literature than perceptual-cognitive factors (n = 4). In regard to empirical evidence, dribbling (0.47 ≤ d ≤ 1.24), ball control (0.57 ≤ d ≤ 1.28) and decision-making (d = 0.81) demonstrated good predictive values as well as the achievement motives hope for success (0.27 ≤ d ≤ 0.74) and fear of failure (0.21 ≤ d ≤ 0.30). In conclusion, there is growing acceptance of the need for more complex statistical analyses to predict future superior performance based on measures of current talent. New research addresses the necessity for large-scale studies that employ multidisciplinary test batteries to assess youth athletes at different age groups prospectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to determine the degree of occurrence of certain unusual perceptual experiences in hospital settings often related by nurses, in a follow-up study at 36 hospitals and health centers in Buenos Aires. 344 nurses were grouped as 235 experiencers and 109 nonexperiencers. The most common experiences are sense of presence and/or apparitions, hearing noises, voices or dialogues, crying or complaining, and intuitions and extrasensory experiences as listeners of the experiences of their patients, such as near-death experiences, religious interventions, and many anomalous experiences in relation with children (Parra & Giménez Amarilla 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attentional blink (AB) is a temporary deficit for a second target (T2) when that target appears after a first target (T1). Although sophisticated models have been developed to explain the substantial AB literature in isolation, the current study considers how the AB relates to perceptual dynamics more broadly. We show that the time-course of the AB is closely related to the time course of the transition from positive to negative repetition priming effects in perceptual identification. Many AB tasks involve a switch between a T1 defined in one manner and a T2 defined in a different manner. Other AB tasks are non-switching, with all targets belonging to the same well-known category (e.g., letter targets versus number distractors) or sharing the same perceptual feature. We propose that these non-switching AB tasks reflect perceptual habituation for the target-defining attribute; thus, a ‘perceptual wink’, with perception of one attribute (target identity) undisturbed while perception of another (target detection) is impaired. On this account, the immediate benefit following T1 (lag-1 sparing) reflects positive repetition priming and the subsequent deficit (the blink) reflects negative repetition priming for the realization that a target occurred. In developing the perceptual wink model, we extended the nROUSE model of perceptual priming to explain the results of two new experiments combining the AB and identity repetitions. This establishes important connections between non-switching AB tasks and perceptual dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of consciousness divide over whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse in specific representational content and whether it requires cognitive access. These two issues are often treated in tandem because of a shared assumption that the representational capacity of cognitive access is fairly limited. Recent research on working memory challenges this shared assumption. This paper argues that abandoning the assumption undermines post-cue'based 'overflow' arguments, according to which perceptual consciousness is rich and does not require cognitive access. Abandoning it also dissociates the rich/sparse debate from the access question. The paper then explores attempts to reformulate overflow theses in ways that do not require the assumption of limited capacity. Finally, it discusses the problem of relating seemingly non-probabilistic perceptual consciousness to the probabilistic representations posited by the models that challenge conceptions of cognitive access as capacity-limited. This article is part of the theme issue 'Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers suggest links between mind-wandering and impaired processing of external task stimuli: mind-wandering results in perceptual decoupling. The primary methodology employed to investigate the effects of mind-wandering requires people to report their conscious state and then predicts prior behavior or neurophysiological responses using the person’s self-report. Unfortunately, this method employs reports that occur after the behavior occurs. An alternative methodology employs a word displayed prior to a performance check or catch trial. After the catch trial, participants then report their awareness of the word occurring, attempt to recognize the word, and also report whether they were on- or off-task. We show that participants’ explicit and implicit awareness of the pre-catch trial word is independent of self-reports of conscious state. This finding conflicts with the perspective that mind-wandering reports indicate perceptual decoupling. Reports of mind-wandering may alternatively be how people explain behavioral outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adult perceivers segregate figure from ground based on image cues such as small size and main axis orientation. The current study examined whether infants can use such cues to perceive figure-ground segregation. Three- to 7-month-olds were familiarized with a pie-shaped stimulus in which some pieces formed a + and other pieces formed an x. The infants were then presented with a novelty preference test pairing the + and x. The bases for the pieces forming the + or x were size and orientation (Experiment 1), size (Experiment 2), and orientation (Experiment 3). In each experiment, infants responded as if they recognized as familiar the shape specified by small size, main axis orientation, or their combination. Control conditions showed that infant performance could not be attributed to spontaneous preference. The findings suggest that infants can achieve figure-ground segregation based on some of the same cues used by adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central and long-standing topic of interest to both psychologists and neuroscientists has been the capacity limited nature of perception, cognition and action. Most often, attention is the term invoked to label the mechanism by which a limited cognitive system can prioritize and select a subset of task-relevant sensory inputs and actions amongst a seemingly unbounded set of possible representations and behaviour. This selective mechanism is often modelled as a unitary and domain-general capacity-limited resource that is dynamically shifted to meet the processing demands invoked by the context. The present work offers a test of the unitary attention hypothesis using a variant of a classic validity manipulation [(Posner, M. I. (1980). Orienting of attention. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32, 3-25)] and the inferential logic of Sternberg (2001. Separate modifiability, mental modules, and the use of pure and composite measures to reveal them. Acta Psychologica, 106, 147-246). The results stand as evidence for at least two modular visual attention systems split according to a spatial and feature-based reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into the visual perception of goal-directed human action indicates that human action perception makes use of specialized processing systems, similar to those that operate in visual expertise. Against this background, the current research investigated whether perception of temporal information in goal-directed human action is enhanced relative to similar motion stimuli. Experiment 1 compared observers’ sensitivity to speed changes in upright human action to a kinematic control (an animation yoked to the motion of the human hand), and also to inverted human action. Experiment 2 compared human action to a non-human motion control (a tool moved the object). In both experiments observers’ sensitivity to detecting the speed changes was higher for the human stimuli relative to the control stimuli, and inversion in Experiment 1 did not alter observers’ sensitivity. Experiment 3 compared observers’ sensitivity to speed changes in goal-directed human and dog actions, in order to determine if enhanced temporal perception is unique to human actions. Results revealed no difference between human and dog stimuli, indicating that enhanced speed perception may exist for any biological motion. Results are discussed with reference to theories of biological motion perception and perception in visual expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sense of agency emerges when our voluntary actions produce anticipated or predictable outcomes in the external world. It remains unclear how the sense of control also influences our perception of the external world. The present study examined perceptual processing of self-generated motion versus non-self-generated motion using steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs). Participants continuously moved their finger on a touchpad to trigger the movements of two shapes (Experiment 1) or two groups of dots (Experiment 2) on a monitor. Degree of control was manipulated by varying the spatial relation between finger movement and stimulus trajectory across conditions. However, the velocity, onset time, and offset time of visual stimuli always corresponded to participants' finger movement. Stimuli flickered at a frequency of either 7.5 Hz or 10 Hz, thus SSVEPs of these frequencies and their harmonics provided a frequency-tagged measurement of perceptual processing. Participants triggered the motion of all stimuli simultaneously, but had greater levels of control over some stimuli than over others. Their task was to detect a brief colour change on the border(s) of one shape (Experiment 1) or of one group of dots (Experiment 2). Although control over shapes/dots was irrelevant to the visual detection task, we found stronger SSVEPs for stimuli that were under a high level of control, compared with the stimuli that were under a low level of control. Our results suggest that the spatial regularity between self-generated movements and visual input boosted the neural responses underlying perceptual processing. Our results support the preactivation account of sensory attenuation, suggesting that perceptual processing of self-generated events is enhanced rather than inhibited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this study was to examine the proportion of people in Argentina who claim to have had more than one premonition in a dream and to explore comparisons between them and those who report one or less premonitions on cognitive and perceptual variables. From 265 questionnaires 234 (88%) were completed. Along with demographic information these contained information based on premonition experiences, beliefs about luck, locus of control, cognitive style and absorption. Participants were classified as either Experients (i.e., > 1) or Controls (i.e., 1 or <). Comparisons between the two groups revealed that Experients were less intuitive compared to Controls but scored higher on absorption. However, Experients were not significantly higher on the locus of control or a measure assessing belief in luck. Overall, the results suggest that people who tend to have premonitions in dreams may be prone to high levels of absorption and may act to amplify minor somatic symptoms leading to an increased risk of conditions associated with hypersensitivity to internal bodily sensations, during which a person's contact with reality may be blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, in which many premonition experiences also may occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perception of a facial expression can be altered or biased by a prolonged viewing of other facial expressions, known as the facial expression adaptation aftereffect (FEAA). Recent studies using antiexpressions have demonstrated a monotonic relation between the magnitude of the FEAA and adaptor extremity, suggesting that facial expressions are opponent coded and represented continuously from one expression to its antiexpression. However, it is unclear whether the opponent-coding scheme can account for the FEAA between two facial expressions. In the current study, we demonstrated that the magnitude of the FEAA between two facial expressions increased monotonically as a function of the intensity of adapting facial expressions, consistent with the predictions based on the opponent-coding model. Further, the monotonic increase in the FEAA occurred even when the intensity of an adapting face was too weak for its expression to be recognized. These results together suggest that multiple facial expressions are encoded and represented by balanced activity of neural populations tuned to different facial expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Infants typically see more own‐race faces than other‐race faces. Existing evidence shows that this difference in face race experience has profound consequences for face processing: as early as 6 months of age, infants scan own‐ and other‐race faces differently and display superior recognition for own‐ relative to other‐race faces. However, it is unclear whether scanning of own‐race faces is related to the own‐race recognition advantage in infants. To bridge this gap in the literature, the current study used eye tracking to investigate the relation between own‐race face scanning and recognition in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old Asian infants (N = 82). The infants were familiarized with dynamic own‐ and other‐race faces, and then their face recognition was tested with static face images. Both age groups recognized own‐ but not other‐race faces. Also, regardless of race, the more infants scanned the eyes of the novel versus familiar faces at test, the better their face‐recognition performance. In addition, both 6‐ and 9‐month‐olds fixated significantly longer on the nose of own‐race faces, and greater fixation on the nose during test trials correlated positively with individual novelty preference scores in the own‐ but not other‐race condition. The results suggest that some aspects of the relation between recognition and scanning are independent of differential experience with face race, whereas other aspects are affected by such experience. More broadly, the findings imply that scanning and recognition may become linked during infancy at least in part through the influence of perceptual experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psychology and phenomenology of our knowledge of other minds is not well captured either by describing it simply as perception, nor by describing it simply as inference. A better description, I argue, is that our knowledge of other minds involves both through ‘perceptual co-presentation’, in which we experience objects as having aspects that are not revealed. This allows us to say that we perceive other minds, but perceive them as private, i.e. imperceptible, just as we routinely perceive aspects of physical objects as unperceived. I discuss existing versions of this idea, particularly Joel Smith’s, on which it is taken to imply that our knowledge of other minds is, in these cases, perceptual and not inferential. Against this, I argue that perceptual co-presentation in general, and mind-perception in particular, yields knowledge that is simultaneously both perceptual and inferential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) is a rare, and therefore, poorly understood condition linked to hallucinogenic drugs consumption. The prevalence of this disorder is low; the condition is more often diagnosed in individuals with a history of previous psychological issues or substance misuse, but it can arise in anyone, even after a single exposure to triggering drugs. The aims of the present study are to review all the original studies about HPPD in order to evaluate the following: (1) the possible suggested etiologies; (2) the possible hallucinogens involved in HPPD induction; (3) the clinical features of both HPPD I and II; (4) the possible psychiatric comorbidities; and (5) the available and potential therapeutic strategies. We searched PubMed to identify original studies about psychedelics and Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD). Our research yielded a total of 45 papers, which have been analyzed and tabled to provide readers with the most updated and comprehensive literature review about the clinical features and treatment options for HPPD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of saccadic horizontal (bilateral) eye movements upon tests of both conceptual and perceptual forms of explicit and implicit memory were investigated. Participants studied a list of words and were then assigned to one of four test conditions: conceptual explicit, conceptual implicit, perceptual explicit, or perceptual implicit. Conceptual tests comprised category labels with either explicit instructions to recall corresponding examples from the study phase (category-cued recall), or implicit instructions to generate any corresponding examples that spontaneously came to mind (category-exemplar generation). Perceptual tests comprised of word-fragments with either explicit instructions to complete these with study items (word-fragment-cued recall), or implicit instructions to complete each fragment with the first word that simply 'popped to mind' (word-fragment completion). Just prior to retrieval, participants were required to engage in 30 s of bilateral vs. no eye movements. Results revealed that saccadic horizontal eye movements enhanced performance in only the conceptual explicit condition, indicating that Saccade-Induced Retrieval Enhancement is a joint function of conceptual and explicit retrieval mechanisms. Findings are discussed from both a cognitive and neuropsychological perspective, in terms of their potential functional and neural underpinnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synesthesia is associated with additional perceptual experiences, which are automatically and consistently triggered by specific inducing stimuli. Synesthesia is also accompanied by more general sensory and cortical changes, including enhanced modality-specific cortical excitability. Extensive cognitive training has been shown to generate synesthesia-like phenomenology but whether these experiences are accompanied by neurophysiological changes characteristic of synesthesia remains unknown. Addressing this question provides a unique opportunity to elucidate the neural basis of perceptual plasticity relevant to conscious experiences. Here we investigate whether extensive training of letter-color associations leads not only to synesthetic experiences, but also to changes in cortical excitability. We confirm that overtraining synesthetic associations results in synesthetic phenomenology. Stroop tasks further reveal synesthesia-like performance following training. Electroencephalography and transcranial magnetic stimulation show, respectively, enhanced visual evoked potentials (in response to untrained patterns) and lower phosphene thresholds, demonstrating specific cortical changes. An active (using letter-symbol training) and a passive control confirmed these results were due to letter-color training and not simply to repeated testing. Summarizing, we demonstrate specific cortical changes, following training-induced acquisition of synesthetic phenomenology that are characteristic of genuine synesthesia. Collectively, our data reveal dramatic plasticity in human visual perception, expressed through a coordinated set of behavioral, neurophysiological, and phenomenological changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive models aim to explain complex human behavior in terms of hypothesized mechanisms of the mind. These mechanisms can be formalized in terms of mathematical structures containing parameters that are theoretically meaningful. For example, in the case of perceptual decision making, model parameters might correspond to theoretical constructs like response bias, evidence quality, response caution, and the like. Formal cognitive models go beyond verbal models in that cognitive mechanisms are instantiated in terms of mathematics and they go beyond statistical models in that cognitive model parameters are psychologically interpretable. We explore three key elements used to formally evaluate cognitive models: parameter estimation, model prediction, and model selection. We compare and contrast traditional approaches with Bayesian statistical approaches to performing each of these three elements. Traditional approaches rely on an array of seemingly ad hoc techniques, whereas Bayesian statistical approaches rely on a single, principled, internally consistent system. We illustrate the Bayesian statistical approach to evaluating cognitive models using a running example of the Linear Ballistic Accumulator model of decision making (Brown SD, Heathcote A. The simplest complete model of choice response time: linear ballistic accumulation. Cogn Psychol 2008, 57:153–178). WIREs Cogn Sci 2018, 9:e1458. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1458 This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Computation Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making Psychology > Theory and Methods [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined whether the DRM false memory effect can occur when list words are presented below the perceptual identification threshold. In four experiments, subjects showed robust veridical memory for studied words and false memory for critical lures when masked list words were presented at exposure durations of 43 ms per word. Shortening the exposure duration to 29 ms virtually eliminated veridical recognition of studied words and completely eliminated false recognition of critical lures. Subjective visibility ratings in Experiments 3a and 3b support the assumption that words presented at 29 ms were subliminal for most participants, but were occasionally experienced with partial awareness by participants with higher perceptual awareness. Our results indicate that a false memory effect does not occur in the absence of conscious awareness of list words, but it does occur when word stimuli are presented at an intermediate level of visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We endeavored to replicate Mitchell's (2006) finding of 17-year implicit memory priming. Subjects saw word and picture stimuli in 1999–2000 ( M age = 18.9) and were retested after 11–14 years ( M  = 13.2; M age = 32.1). Via the internet, they completed four implicit memory tasks: picture fragment identification, word fragment completion, word stem completion, and category exemplar generation. Relative to control subjects (matched on stimuli, age, and education), longitudinal subjects revealed priming on picture and word fragment identification (perceptual tasks), but no priming on word stem completion or category exemplar generation (conceptual tasks). Four longitudinal subjects who failed to recall participating in the prior laboratory session had priming similar to the 10 subjects who did remember. Thus, we replicated the longevity of perceptual priming for pictures, and extended this to word fragment priming as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]