Perception

Vection strength is modulated by the semantic meanings of stimuli. In experiment 1—even though vection stimuli were of uniform size, color, and luminance—when they also had semantic meaning as falling objects, vection was inhibited. Specifically, stimuli perceived as feathers, petals, and leaves did not effectively induce vection. In experiment 2 we used the downward motion of identical dots to induce vection. Participants observed stimuli while holding either an umbrella or a wooden sword. Results showed that vection was inhibited when participants held the umbrella and the stimuli was perceived as rain or snow falling. The two experiments suggest that vection is modulated by the semantic meaning of stimuli.

A sound's duration provides important information about the event producing it. Although many of the sounds we hear every day are ‘percussive’ in nature (ie resulting from two objects impacting) and therefore exhibit decaying/damped amplitude envelopes, perceptual experiments frequently use tones synthesized with ‘flat’ or abruptly ending envelopes. Such sounds afford an estimation strategy involving calculating the elapsed time between tone onset and offset—a strategy that would be problematic for ecologically pervasive decaying sounds. Here we compare duration judgments for tones with percussive (ie gradually decaying) and flat (ie abruptly ending) amplitude envelopes, finding evidence for the use of different strategies. This result is discussed in terms of its implications for dominant theories and models of sensory perception that are often assessed using artificial sounds (ie ‘flat tones’) affording strategies that may not be optimal or even available for everyday listening.

The slopes of hills tend to be greatly overestimated. Previous studies have found that slope estimates are significantly greater when estimated verbally than with a proprioceptive measure. It has yet to be determined whether these estimates are made for the entire extent of the slope, or whether the estimates in closest proximity are estimated using a different process. Since some parietal cortex neurons respond differently to objects within arm's reach, short-distance slope estimation may utilize these or analogous neurons. Alternatively, greater implied effort might make longer slopes seem steeper. We determined that both verbal and proprioceptive reports of slope are overestimates that increase logarithmically with distance from the observer, contradicting both theories. Consistent with previous work, proprioceptive estimates were more accurate at all ranges. Our results can be interpreted as a function of the angle between the observer's gaze and the plane of the hill, modified by depth cues available at only near distances.

We routinely examine linear trends from bar graphs and scatterplots while taking a science class, attending a business presentation, or reading a magazine article. Graphs are placed in different positions on a page or a presentation slide for aesthetic considerations. However, because left and right positions tend to be associated with lower and higher values in the conventional depiction of numerical values, we hypothesized that the perception of positive and negative slopes may be influenced by the placement of a graph. Using a visual search task, with each display containing four bar graphs or scatterplots (one per quadrant), we have demonstrated that the detection of a negative slope is selectively slowed in the upper-right quadrant (for both bar graphs and scatterplots), whereas the detection of a positive slope is selectively slowed in the upper-left quadrant (for bar graphs only). These results suggest that an upper-right position is incompatible with perceiving negative slopes and an upper-left position is incompatible with perceiving positive slopes. Although the origin of these specific associations is unclear, our results have implications for where to place a graph depending on the slope it displays.

The developmental processes underpinning global shape and global motion perception in infancy have been relatively well described. However, the development of the ability to integrate both global motion and global shape information has remained unclear. In this study we employed a slit-viewing task to investigate the ability to integrate spatiotemporal information among infants ranging in age from 3 to 12 months. In experiment 1 each infant was familiarised with a moving object that was only partly visible through a slit. One of the two objects in the test trial was a novel object, and the other object had appeared previously in familiarisation trials. The findings suggested that infants aged 5 months and over looked longer at the novel drawings compared with the more familiar objects in the test trials. This implies that the infants recognised the whole shape of the object under the slit-viewing condition. In experiment 2 each infant was presented with partial images in a random order. In this case the infants were unable to distinguish the whole shape of the object. The findings suggest that infants did not rely on the local cues provided in experiment 1.

Visual environments often contain multiple elements, some of which are similar to one another or spatially grouped together. In the current study we investigated how one can use perceptual groups in representing ensemble features of the groups. In experiment 1 we found that participants' performance improved when items were easily segmented by a grouping cue based on proximity, suggesting that spatial grouping facilitates extracting and remembering ensemble representations from visual arrays consisting of multiple elements. In experiment 2 we found that spatial grouping improved performance only when the grouped subsets were tested for the memory task, whereas it impaired performance when other subsets that were not grouped were tested, suggesting that the benefit from grouping may come from better extraction for storage, rather than later decision processes such as accessibility. Taken together, our results suggest that perceptual grouping of multiple items by proximity facilitates extraction of ensemble statistics from groups of items, enhancing visual memory of the ensembles in a visual array.

In this manuscript, using a novel wide-view visual presentation system that we developed for vision research and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we studied contrast response functions in regions of the brain that are central and peripheral to the entire set of visual areas (V1, V2, V3, V3A, MT+), regions that have not been all investigated in previous vision research. Under the stimulus conditions which were 0–20 deg, 20–40 deg, and 40–60 deg eccentricity black-and-white checkerboard patterns, we measured the blood oxygenation level-dependent fMRI contrast response at five contrast levels (6, 12, 24, 48, and 96%) in the visual areas. On the basis of these data, the central and pericentral visual areas had low-contrast gain, whereas the peripheral visual areas had high-contrast gain. In addition, our results showed that the signals fundamentally shift during visual processing through posterior visual cortical areas (V1, V2, and V3) to superior visual cortical areas (V3A and MT+).

Abacus-based mental calculation (AMC) is a unique strategy for arithmetic that is based on the mental abacus. AMC experts can solve calculation problems with extraordinarily fast speed and high accuracy. Previous studies have demonstrated that abacus experts showed superior performance and special neural correlates during numerical tasks. However, most of those studies focused on the perception and cognition of Arabic numbers. It remains unclear how the abacus numbers were perceived. By applying a similar enumeration Stroop task, in which participants are presented with a visual display containing two abacus numbers and asked to compare the numerosity of beads that consisted of the abacus number, in the present study we investigated the automatic processing of the numerical value of abacus numbers in abacus-trained children. The results demonstrated a significant congruity effect in the numerosity comparison task for abacus-trained children, in both reaction time and error rate analysis. These results suggested that the numerical value of abacus numbers was perceived automatically by the abacus-trained children after long-term training.

We conducted two experiments to test the relationship between Delboeuf's size-contrast illusion and a concomitant lightness contrast effect that can be observed when achromatic disks are employed as targets. In experiment 1 participants were asked to adjust the diameter of a target (D1) surrounded by a small circular size-inducer (C1) to match in size a comparison target (D2) surrounded by a circular size-inducer (C2) either equal or greater in diameter than C1. Experiment 2 was similar to experiment 1, except that D1 and D2 were physically equal in size, and participants were asked to adjust the luminance of D1 to match D2 in lightness. Results confirm an effect of the difference in diameter between C1 and C2 on the magnitude of the size illusion but not on the magnitude of the lightness effect, the emergence of which is linked to the appearance of the size illusion. Results support a percept-percept coupling relationship.