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Nous voilà attablés à dix mains sur clavier pour écrire ce que rend possible notre écart à la discipline sociologique, une même envie de bouger quelque chose dans l’étau des spécialités académiques, un « vouloir savoir » autrement que nous partageons sur notre site web avec un accent grave pour entrer dans la matière du social, de la vie quotidienne, de la vie ordinaire. D’abord le récit tiré d’une longue enquête suivi d’une courte observation pour illustrer deux modalités de cet « Écouter – Voir » qui nous autorise à passer du « nous » au « je » sans mal dire, le « je » de l’observation directe dans la narration, et le « nous » dans l’action où l’échelle est plus éloignée. Viendra ensuite dans une seconde partie une discussion sur le rapport entre la littérature et la sociologie lorsqu’il s’agit d’ouvrir les yeux sur la pauvreté et le chômage. Pour élargir « les vues », nous avons besoin d’accroître les mots et le langage. Il s’agira enfin dans une troisième partie de pointer les textes qui interrogent les sciences sociales en se tenant à la périphérie de la littérature sans céder à la sanctification de l’œuvre. Here we stand, with our ten hands on the keyboard, to explain how we try to differ from sociology, and how we aim for an opening of the disciplinary constraints, a “desire to know” shared with others on our website, with gravity and emphasis when it comes to dealing with social issues, or with daily, ordinary life. First there is the narrative of a long period of fieldwork, followed by a short period of observation, in order to illustrate this “Listening-Seeing” that allows us to come and go without restriction between “us” and “I,” the “I” of direct observation in the narrative, and the “we” in the narrative of action. In the second part of this paper we discuss the relationship between literature and sociology, arguing for the value of enlarging our perspectives in the case of poverty and unemployement. To widen the perspective one must enlarge words and language. In the third and last part of the paper, we distinguish texts that call out to social sciences by remaining in the periphery of the literature while resisting any sanctification of artistic work. more...

Spontaneous neural oscillations are key predictors of perceptual decisions to bind multisensory signals into a unified percept. Research links decreased alpha power in the posterior cortices to attention and audiovisual binding in the sound-induced flash illusion (SIFI) paradigm. This suggests that controlling alpha oscillations would be a way of controlling audiovisual binding. In the present feasibility study we used MEG-neurofeedback to train one group of subjects to increase left/right and another to increase right/left alpha power ratios in the parietal cortex. We tested for changes in audiovisual binding in a SIFI paradigm where flashes appeared in both hemifields. Results showed that the neurofeedback induced a significant asymmetry in alpha power for the left/right group, not seen for the right/left group. Corresponding asymmetry changes in audiovisual binding in illusion trials (with 2, 3, and 4 beeps paired with 1 flash) were not apparent. Exploratory analyses showed that neurofeedback training effects were present for illusion trials with the lowest numeric disparity (i.e., 2 beeps and 1 flash trials) only if the previous trial had high congruency (2 beeps and 2 flashes). Our data suggest that the relation between parietal alpha power (an index of attention) and its effect on audiovisual binding is dependent on the learned causal structure in the previous stimulus. The present results suggests that low alpha power biases observers towards audiovisual binding when they have learned that audiovisual signals originate from a common origin, consistent with a Bayesian causal inference account of multisensory perception. more...

Although we know sensation is continuous, research on long-lasting and continuously changing stimuli is scarce and the dynamic nature of ongoing cortical processing is largely neglected. In a longitudinal study, 38 participants across four sessions were asked to continuously rate the intensity of an applied tonic heat pain for 20 min. Using group-independent component analysis and dual regression, we extracted the subjects’ time courses of intrinsic network activity. The relationship between the dynamic fluctuation of network activity with the varying time courses of three pain processing entities was computed: pain intensity, the direction of pain intensity changes, and temperature. We were able to dissociate the spatio-temporal patterns of objective (temperature) and subjective (pain intensity/changes of pain intensity) aspects of pain processing in the human brain. We found two somatosensory networks with distinct functions: one network that encodes the small fluctuations in temperature and consists mainly of bilateral primary somatosensory cortex (SI), and a second right-lateralized network that encodes the intensity of the subjective experience of pain consisting of SI, secondary somatosensory cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the thalamus. We revealed the somatosensory dynamics that build up toward a current subjective percept of pain. The timing suggests a cascade of subsequent processing steps toward the current pain percept. more...

Perception results from the interplay of sensory input and prior knowledge. Despite behavioral evidence that long-term priors powerfully shape perception, the neural mechanisms underlying these interactions remain poorly understood. We obtained direct cortical recordings in neurosurgical patients as they viewed ambiguous images that elicit constant perceptual switching. We observe top-down influences from the temporal to occipital cortex, during the preferred percept that is congruent with the long-term prior. By contrast, stronger feedforward drive is observed during the non-preferred percept, consistent with a prediction error signal. A computational model based on hierarchical predictive coding and attractor networks reproduces all key experimental findings. These results suggest a pattern of large-scale information flow change underlying long-term priors’ influence on perception and provide constraints on theories about long-term priors’ influence on perception., Priors learnt from lifetime experiences influence perception. The authors show that when perception is congruent with a long-term prior, there is increased top-down input in the ventral visual stream, whereas bottom-up input is enhanced when perception is incongruent with prior. more...

The governments need beforehand to perceive the innovative relationship risk because they are one of the innovation subjects in those industry collaborative innovation alliances. However, it is difficult for innovation subjects to quantify the risks for industry collaborative innovation alliances due to the complexity, nonlinear, and dynamic condition. This paper firstly constructs an ordered logistic model, uses the following as independent variables: the collaborative degree, the ratio of science technology expenditure to GDP, the ratio of education expenditure to GDP, the ratio of finances to GDP, and uses the levels of risk as the dependent variable. Then, this paper uses the panel data of 30 provinces in China (Hainan is not included) from 2010 to 2018 to fit the model. Based on the fitting results, the research has gained the relationship risk prewarning model in industry collaborative innovation alliances by using the collaborative degree as an independent variable. The governments at all levels can use this relationship risk prewarning model to percept risk levels and reckon the corresponding probability which exists in industry collaborative innovation alliances. Furthermore, there are regional influences existing in the prewarning relationship risk levels in industry collaborative alliances. The east and middle areas have significant regional influence, but it does not exist among west areas and others. The governments at all levels may consider the regional differences. more...

When stimulus inputs from different senses are integrated to form a coherent percept, inputs from a more precise sense are typically more dominant than those from a less precise sense. Furthermore, we hypothesized that some basic stimulus features, such as orientation, can be supramodal-represented at a conceptual level that is independent of the original modality precision. This hypothesis was tested with perceptual learning experiments. Specifically, participants practiced coarser tactile orientation discrimination, which initially had little impact on finer visual orientation discrimination (tactile vs. visual orientation thresholds = 3:1). However, if participants also practiced a functionally orthogonal visual contrast discrimination task in a double training design, their visual orientation performance was improved at both tactile-trained and untrained orientations, as much as through direct visual orientation training. The complete tactile-to-visual learning transfer is consistent with a conceptual supramodal representation of orientation unconstrained by original modality precision, likely through certain forms of input standardization. Moreover, this conceptual supramodal representation, when improved through perceptual learning in one sense, can in turn facilitate orientation discrimination in an untrained sense. more...

Does our personality predict what we see? This question was studied in 100 university students with binocular rivalry paradigm by presenting incompatible images to each eye, allowing multiple interpretations of the same sensory input. During continuous binocular presentation, dominance of perception starts to fluctuate between the images. When neither of the images is fully suppressed, the two images combine into mixed percepts. We focused on the link between mixed percepts, big-five traits, and empathy. The results revealed that openness and agreeableness correlated with the occurrence of mixed percepts after the first dominant perception. However, these correlations of openness and agreeableness were mediated by cognitive empathy. In addition, openness had a direct association with reporting the initial percept in the onset of stimulation as a mixed percept, suggesting a mechanism that is separate from the one mediated by cognitive empathy. Overall, the results provide preliminary evidence suggesting that personality predicts what we see. Such individual differences in perceptual interpretations may be linked to both higher level cognitive mechanisms as well as lower level visual mechanisms. more...

Perception metaphor refers to the use of a perceptual concept as a source or target domain (e.g. “sweet voice,” “heavy job,” “have smell”) in metaphorical conceptualization, grounded in our percept... more...

Traffic signal optimization is a significant means for smoothing urban traffic flow. However, the operation of traffic signals is currently seriously constrained by the data available from traditional point detectors. In recent years, an emerging technology, connected vehicle (CV), which can percept the overall traffic environment in real time, has drawn researchers’ attention. With the new data source, traffic controllers should be able to make smarter decisions. A lot of work has been done to develop a new traffic signal control pattern under connected-vehicle environment. This paper provides a comprehensive review of these studies, aiming at sketching out the state of the arts in this research field. Several basic control problems, communication, control input, and objectives, are briefly introduced. The commonly used optimization models for this problem are summarized into three types: rule-based models, mathematical programming-based models, and artificial intelligence-based models. Then some major technical issues are discussed in detail. Finally, we raise the limitation of the existing studies and give our perspectives of the future research directions. more...

When we draw, we are depicting a rich mental representation reflecting a memory, percept, schema, imagination, or feeling. In spite of the abundance of data created by drawings, drawings are rarely used as an output measure in the field of psychology, due to concerns about their large variance and their difficulty of quantification. However, recent work leveraging pen-tracking, computer vision, and online crowd-sourcing has revealed new ways to capture and objectively quantify drawings, to answer a wide range of questions across fields of psychology. Here, I present a tutorial on modern methods for drawing experiments, ranging from how to quantify pen-and-paper type studies, up to how to administer a fully closed-loop online experiment. I go through the concrete steps of designing a drawing experiment, recording drawings, and objectively quantifying them through online crowd-sourcing and computer vision methods. Included with this tutorial are code examples at different levels of complexity and tutorials designed to teach basic lessons about web architecture and be useful regardless of skill level. I also discuss key methodological points of consideration, and provide a series of potential jumping points for drawing studies across fields in psychology. I hope this tutorial will arm more researchers with the skills to capture these naturalistic snapshots of a mental image. more...

Previous studies have shown that for high-rate click trains and low-frequency pure tones, interaural time differences (ITDs) at the onset of stimulus contribute most strongly to the overall lateralization percept (receive the largest perceptual weight). Previous studies have also shown that when these stimuli are modulated, ITDs during the rising portion of the modulation cycle receive increased perceptual weight. Baltzell, Cho, Swaminathan, and Best [(2020). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 147, 3883–3894] measured perceptual weights for a pair of spoken words (“two” and “eight”), and found that word-initial phonemes receive larger weight than word-final phonemes, suggesting a “word-onset dominance” for speech. Generalizability of this conclusion was limited by a coarse temporal resolution and limited stimulus set. In the present study, temporal weighting functions (TWFs) were measured for four spoken words (“two,” “eight,” “six,” and “nine”). Stimuli were partitioned into 30-ms bins, ITDs were applied independently to each bin, and lateralization judgements were obtained. TWFs were derived using a hierarchical regression model. Results suggest that “word-initial” onset dominance does not generalize across words and that TWFs depend in part on acoustic changes throughout the stimulus. Two model-based predictions were generated to account for observed TWFs, but neither could fully account for the perceptual data. more...

This research analyzes the philosophical relationship between Samuel Rawet’s “Contos do Migrante” with the construction of consciousness in terms of “I”, “you”, and “he”. This study also operates from Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of aesthetic figure, percept, affect, and sensation bloc. Ultimately, this work has two goals. On the one hand, I aim to show the effects of the (re)reading of “Contos do Migrante” following the Judeo-Christian figure of the inverted parable. On the other hand, I examine the construction of consciousness as simile of the existence of other “interior I”—or an “absolute I”, in Rawer’s terms. Keywords: I-you-he; Consciousness; The other; Parable; Philosophy-literature. more...

Brain waves, determined by electrical and magnetic brain recordings (e.g., EEG and MEG), and fluctuating behavioral responses, determined by response time or accuracy measures, are frequently taken to support discrete perception. For example, it has been proposed that humans experience only one conscious percept per brain wave (e.g., during one alpha cycle). However, the proposed link between brain waves and discrete perception is typically rather vague. More importantly, there are many models and aspects of discrete perception and it is often not apparent in what theoretical framework brain wave findings are interpreted and to what specific aspects of discrete perception they relate. Here, we review different approaches to discrete perception and highlight issues with particular interpretations. We then discuss how certain findings on brain waves may relate to certain aspects of discrete perception. The main purpose of this meta-contribution is to give a short overview of discrete models of perception and to illustrate the need to make explicit what aspects of discrete theories are addressed by what aspects of brain wave findings. more...

Visual perception is biased by the preceding visual environment. A well-known perceptual bias is the negative bias where a current percept is biased away from the preceding image (adaptor). The preceding adaptor induces augmentation of early visual evoked potential (the P1 enhancement) of the following test image; the adaptor may invoke certain visual processing for the subsequent test image. However, the visual mechanism underlying P1 enhancement remains unclear. The present study assessed what the P1 alteration reflects in relation to the occurrence of the negative bias. In terms of inter-individual differences, we report that the P1 enhancement of the Necker lattice significantly correlated with the reduction of the reverse-bias effect. Further analyses revealed that the P1 enhancement was insusceptible to neural adaptation to the adaptor at the level of perceptual configuration. The present study suggests that prolonged exposure to a visual image induces modulatory visual processing for the subsequent image (reflected in the P1 enhancement), which is relevant to counteraction of the negative bias. more...

Age-related deficits are often observed in emotion categorization tasks that include negative emotional expressions like anger, fear, and sadness. Stimulus characteristics such as facial cue salience and gaze direction can facilitate or hinder facial emotion perception. Using two emotion discrimination tasks, the current study investigated how older and younger adults categorize emotion in faces with varying facial cue similarity and with direct or averted gaze (Task 1) and in faces that appear on actors in congruent or incongruent contexts (Task 2). When context was included, the target’s gaze direction was averted toward emotionally laden objects in the background context on half of the trials. In both tasks, younger adults generally outperformed older adults. Discrimination performance was best when cue similarity was minimal. Negative facial emotion cues were interpreted through the lens of the context in which they appear, as facial emotion judgments in both age groups were impacted by background contextual emotion cues, especially when highly confusable negative emotions were evaluated. Although the contextual emotion cues were deemed irrelevant within task instructions, these cues were nevertheless integrated into one's percept. When emotion discrimination proved difficult, older adults were more inclined than younger adults to use the additional context to support their decision, suggesting that context plays a pivotal role in older adults’ everyday evaluation of emotion in social partners. more...

While a large body of evidence has demonstrated the effects of attention on spatial processes, we know much less about attentional effects on the complementary temporal aspects of visual perception. To narrow this knowledge gap, we examined the effects of endogenous attention-the voluntary component of spatial attention-on temporal integration using the Ternus display. In a typical Ternus display, horizontally aligned discs shift by one position across alternating frames that are separated by a varying interframe interval. This display can induce two different motion percepts: all three discs moving together back and forth (group motion), or the two central discs seeming to remain static and the outer disk jumping across them (element motion). Several studies suggest that element motion reflects temporal integration. Thus, we used the rate of element motion percept to measure temporal integration. Attention was manipulated via the degree of certainty regarding the discs' location (Experiment 1), or with central informative arrows (Experiment 2). The pattern of results was similar in both experiments: The participants reported perceiving element motion more often when attention was allocated in advance to the discs' location. These results suggest that attention prolongs the period of time over which information is integrated. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved). more...

Selective attention is necessary to sift through, form a coherent percept of, and make behavioral decisions on the vast amount of information present in most sensory environments. How and where selective attention is employed in cortex and how this perceptual information then informs the relevant behavioral decisions is still not well understood. Studies probing selective attention and decision-making in visual cortex have been enlightening as to how sensory attention might work in that modality; whether or not similar mechanisms are employed in auditory attention is not yet clear. Therefore, we trained rhesus macaques on a feature-selective attention task, where they switched between reporting changes in temporal (amplitude modulation, AM) and spectral (carrier bandwidth) features of a broadband noise stimulus. We investigated how the encoding of these features by single neurons in primary (A1) and secondary (middle lateral belt, ML) auditory cortex was affected by the different attention conditions. We found that neurons in A1 and ML showed mixed selectivity to the sound and task features. We found no difference in AM encoding between the attention conditions. We found that choice-related activity in both A1 and ML neurons shifts between attentional conditions. This finding suggests that choice-related activity in auditory cortex does not simply reflect motor preparation or action and supports the relationship between reported choice-related activity and the decision and perceptual process. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We recorded from primary and secondary auditory cortex while monkeys performed a nonspatial feature attention task. Both areas exhibited rate-based choice-related activity. The manifestation of choice-related activity was attention dependent, suggesting that choice-related activity in auditory cortex does not simply reflect arousal or motor influences but relates to the specific perceptual choice. more...

In multistability, perceptual interpretations (“percepts”) of ambiguous stimuli alternate over time. There is considerable debate as to whether similar regularities govern the first percept after stimulus onset and percepts during prolonged presentation. We address this question in a visual pattern-component rivalry paradigm by presenting two overlaid drifting gratings, which participants perceived as individual gratings passing in front of each other (“segregated”) or as a plaid (“integrated”). We varied the enclosed angle (“opening angle”) between the gratings (experiments 1 and 2) and stimulus orientation (experiment 2). The relative number of integrated percepts increased monotonically with opening angle. The point of equality, where half of the percepts were integrated, was at a smaller opening angle at onset than during prolonged viewing. The functional dependence of the relative number of integrated percepts on opening angle showed a steeper curve at onset than during prolonged viewing. Dominance durations of integrated percepts were longer at onset than during prolonged viewing and increased with opening angle. The general pattern persisted when stimuli were rotated (experiment 2), despite some perceptual preference for cardinal motion directions over oblique directions. Analysis of eye movements, specifically the slow phase of the optokinetic nystagmus (OKN), confirmed the veridicality of participants’ reports and provided a temporal characterization of percept formation after stimulus onset. Together, our results show that the first percept after stimulus onset exhibits a different dependence on stimulus parameters than percepts during prolonged viewing. This underlines the distinct role of the first percept in multistability. more...

Background It has been shown that humans adapt their postural sway to oscillatory, visually simulated self-motion. However, little is still known about the way individual body segments contribute to this adjustment of body sway and how this contribution varies with different environmental conditions. Research question How do the centre of pressure (COP) and individual body segments phase-lock to a sinusoidal visual drive depending on the frequency of stimulation? Methods In this study, we introduce phase coupling as a method for assessing full body motion in response to visual stimuli presented in virtual reality (VR). 12 participants (mean age: 31 ± 9 years) stood inside a virtual tunnel which oscillated sinusoidally in the anterior-posterior direction at a frequency of 0.2 Hz, 0.8 Hz or 1.2 Hz. Primary outcome measures were the trajectories of their COP as well as of 25 body segments obtained by a motion tracking system. Results Subjects significantly coupled the phase of their COP and body segments to the visual drive. Our analysis yielded significant phase coupling of the COP to the stimulus for all tested frequencies. The phase coupling of body segments revealed a shift in postural response as a function of frequency. At the low frequency of 0.2 Hz, we found strong and significant phase coupling homogeneously distributed across the body. At the higher frequencies of 0.8 Hz and 1.2 Hz, however, overall phase coupling became weaker and was centred around the lower torso and hip segments. Significance Information on how the visual percept of self-motion affects balance control is crucial for understanding visuomotor processing in health and disease. Our setup and methods constitute a reliable tool for assessing perturbed balance control, which can be utilized in future clinical trials. more...

Visual speech cues play an important role in speech recognition, and the McGurk effect is a classic demonstration of this. In the original McGurk & Macdonald (Nature 264, 746–748 1976) experiment, 98% of participants reported an illusory “fusion” percept of /d/ when listening to the spoken syllable /b/ and watching the visual speech movements for /g/. However, more recent work shows that subject and task differences influence the proportion of fusion responses. In the current study, we varied task (forced-choice vs. open-ended), stimulus set (including /d/ exemplars vs. not), and data collection environment (lab vs. Mechanical Turk) to investigate the robustness of the McGurk effect. Across experiments, using the same stimuli to elicit the McGurk effect, we found fusion responses ranging from 10% to 60%, thus showing large variability in the likelihood of experiencing the McGurk effect across factors that are unrelated to the perceptual information provided by the stimuli. Rather than a robust perceptual illusion, we therefore argue that the McGurk effect exists only for some individuals under specific task situations. Significance: This series of studies re-evaluates the classic McGurk effect, which shows the relevance of visual cues on speech perception. We highlight the importance of taking into account subject variables and task differences, and challenge future researchers to think carefully about the perceptual basis of the McGurk effect, how it is defined, and what it can tell us about audiovisual integration in speech. more...

Neuroimaging studies have suggested that hMT+ encodes global motion interpretation, but this contradicts the notion that BOLD activity mainly reflects neuronal input. While measuring fMRI responses at 7 Tesla, we used an ambiguous moving stimulus, yielding the perception of two incoherently moving surfaces—component motion—or only one coherently moving surface—pattern motion, to induce perceptual fluctuations and identify perceptual organization size‐matched domains in hMT+. Then, moving gratings, exactly matching either the direction of component or pattern motion percepts of the ambiguous stimulus, were shown to the participants to investigate whether response properties reflect the input or decision. If hMT+ responses reflect the input, component motion domains (selective to incoherent percept) should show grating direction stimulus‐dependent changes, unlike pattern motion domains (selective to the coherent percept). This hypothesis is based on the known direction‐selective nature of inputs in component motion perceptual domains versus non‐selectivity in pattern motion perceptual domains. The response amplitude of pattern motion domains did not change with grating direction (consistently with their non‐selective input), in contrast to what happened for the component motion domains (consistently with their selective input). However, when we analyzed relative ratio measures they mirrored perceptual interpretation. These findings are consistent with the notion that patterns of BOLD responses reflect both sensory input and perceptual read‐out., Sousa et al. used an ambiguous moving stimulus, yielding the perception of two incoherently moving surfaces—component motion—or only one coherently moving surface—pattern motion, to induce perceptual fluctuations and identify perceptual organization size‐matched domains in hMT+. Their findings are consistent with the notion that patterns of BOLD responses reflect both sensory input and perceptual read‐out. more...

Several software and hardware advances in the field of deep brain stimulation (DBS) have been realized in recent years and devices from three manufacturers are available. The Percept™ PC platform (Medtronic, Inc.) enables brain sensing, the latest innovation. Clinicians should be familiar with the differences in devices, and with the latest technologies to deliver optimized patient care. more...

A number of notions in the fields of motor control and kinesthetic perception have been used without clear definitions. In this review, we consider definitions for efference copy, percept, and sense of effort based on recent studies within the physical approach, which assumes that the neural control of movement is based on principles of parametric control and involves defining time-varying profiles of spatial referent coordinates for the effectors. The apparent redundancy in both motor and perceptual processes is reconsidered based on the principle of abundance. Abundance of efferent and afferent signals is viewed as the means of stabilizing both salient action characteristics and salient percepts formalized as stable manifolds in high-dimensional spaces of relevant elemental variables. This theoretical scheme has led recently to a number of novel predictions and findings. These include, in particular, lower accuracy in perception of variables produced by elements involved in a multielement task compared with the same elements in single-element tasks, dissociation between motor and perceptual effects of muscle coactivation, force illusions induced by muscle vibration, and errors in perception of unintentional drifts in performance. Taken together, these results suggest that participation of efferent signals in perception frequently involves distorted copies of actual neural commands, particularly those to antagonist muscles. Sense of effort is associated with such distorted efferent signals. Distortions in efference copy happen spontaneously and can also be caused by changes in sensory signals, e.g., those produced by muscle vibration. more...

The McGurk effect is a multisensory phenomenon in which discrepant auditory and visual speech signals typically result in an illusory percept (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976). McGurk stimuli are often used in studies assessing the attentional requirements of audiovisual integration (e.g., Alsius et al., 2005), but no study has directly compared the costs associated with integrating congruent versus incongruent audiovisual speech. Some evidence suggests that the McGurk effect may not be representative of naturalistic audiovisual speech processing—susceptibility to the McGurk effect is not associated with the ability to derive benefit from the addition of the visual signal (Van Engen et al., 2017), and distinct cortical regions are recruited when processing congruent versus incongruent speech (Erickson et al., 2014). In two experiments, one using response times to identify congruent and incongruent syllables and one using a dual-task paradigm, we assessed whether congruent and incongruent audiovisual speech incur different attentional costs. We demonstrated that response times to both the speech task (Experiment 1) and a secondary vibrotactile task (Experiment 2) were indistinguishable for congruent compared to incongruent syllables, but McGurk fusions were responded to more quickly than McGurk non-fusions. These results suggest that despite documented differences in how congruent and incongruent stimuli are processed (Erickson et al., 2014; Van Engen, Xie, & Chandrasekaran, 2017), they do not appear to differ in terms of processing time or effort. However, responses that result in McGurk fusions are processed more quickly than those that result in non-fusions, though attentional cost is comparable for the two response types. more...

Evidence that affective factors (e.g. anxiety, depression, affect) are significantly related to individual differences in emotion recognition is mixed. Palermo et al . (Palermo et al . 2018 J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 44 , 503–517) reported that individuals who scored lower in anxiety performed significantly better on two measures of facial-expression recognition (emotion-matching and emotion-labelling tasks), but not a third measure (the multimodal emotion recognition test). By contrast, facial-expression recognition was not significantly correlated with measures of depression, positive or negative affect, empathy, or autistic-like traits. Because the range of affective factors considered in this study and its use of multiple expression-recognition tasks mean that it is a relatively comprehensive investigation of the role of affective factors in facial expression recognition, we carried out a direct replication. In common with Palermo et al . (Palermo et al . 2018 J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 44 , 503–517), scores on the DASS anxiety subscale negatively predicted performance on the emotion recognition tasks across multiple analyses, although these correlations were only consistently significant for performance on the emotion-labelling task. However, and by contrast with Palermo et al . (Palermo et al . 2018 J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 44 , 503–517), other affective factors (e.g. those related to empathy) often also significantly predicted emotion-recognition performance. Collectively, these results support the proposal that affective factors predict individual differences in emotion recognition, but that these correlations are not necessarily specific to measures of general anxiety, such as the DASS anxiety subscale. more...