Search results for "Percept"

Different World Views

2010

When we study communication systems in other animal species, we are led to the conclusion that extraterrestrial intelligent beings are likely to have systems of communication similar to the human one in at least some aspects. That is to say, communication is accomplished by means of the combination of certain information elements playing a role analogous to words, or that the system is a symbolic language (or even both things simultaneously). But in communication, it is also very important how information is transmitted (pictorially, by means of ideograms, letters, etc.), which is going to be strongly determined by the species’specific perception of the world.

The Mona Lisa effect: Testing the limits of perceptual robustness vis-à-vis slanted images

2014

We report three experiments that test the limits of the Mona Lisa effect. The gaze of a portrait that is looking at us appears to follow us around as we move with respect to the picture. Even if our position is shifted considerably to the side, or if the picture is severely slanted, do we feel the gaze to be directed at us? We determined the threshold where this effect breaks down to be maximally 70? of picture slant relative to the observer. Different factors modulate this remarkable robustness, among them being the display medium and the nature of the picture. The threshold was considerably lower when the picture was mounted on a physical surface as opposed to a computer simulation of sla…

Influence of Global Structure on Musical Target Detection and Recognition

1998

The present study adapted a paradigm used in visual perception by Biederman, Glass, and Stacy (1973) and analyzed the influence of a coherent global context on the detection and recognition of musical target excerpts. Global coherence was modified by segmenting minuets into chunks of four, two, or one bar. These chunks were either reordered (Experiments 1, 3, 4, 5) or transposed to different keys (Experiment 2). The results indicate that target detection is influenced only by a reorganization on a very local level (i.e. chunks of one bar). Context incoherence did not influence the recognition of the real targets, but rendered the rejection of wrong target excerpts (foils) more difficult. Th…

Relational priming is to analogy-making as one-ball juggling is to seven-ball juggling

2008

Relational priming is argued to be a deeply inadequate model of analogy-making because of its intrinsic inability to do analogies where the base and target domains share no common attributes and the mapped relations are different. The authors rely on carefully handcrafted representations to allow their model to make a complex analogy, seemingly unaware of the debate on this issue 15 years ago. Finally, they incorrectly assume the existence of fixed, context-independent relations between objects. Although relational priming may indeed play some role in analogy-making, it is an enormous – and unjustified – stretch to say that it is “centrally implicated in analogical reasoning” (sect. 2, para…

Perceiving One’s Own Body

2008

Taste perception and behavior in rodents and flies

2010

Taste, one of the five senses, plays a key role in food ingestion. The recent identification of molecular markers for taste cells (e.g., taste receptors and signaling components) has provided tools to investigate the functional organization of the gustatory system. This new information contributes to our understanding of taste-associated behaviors.

Transposed-Letter Priming Effects for Close Versus Distant Transpositions

2009

Transposing two internal letters of a word produces a perceptually similar item (e.g., CHOLOCATE being processed as CHOCOLATE). To determine the precise nature of the encoding of letter position within a word, we examined the effect of the number of intervening letters in transposed-letter effects with a masked priming procedure. In Experiment 1, letter transposition could involve adjacent letters (chocloate-CHOCOLATE) and nonadjacent letters with two intervening letters (choaolcte-CHOCOLATE). Results showed that the magnitude of the transposed-letter priming effect – relative to the appropriate control condition – was greater when the transposition involved adjacent letters than when it i…

The Relative Importance of Local and Global Structures in Music Perception

2004

Research in experimental psychology has emotion in music is developed by L. B. Meyer.2 shown two paradoxes in music perception. By According to Meyer, listeners are not passive, mere exposure to musical pieces, Western lis- but rather constantly develop perceptual expectteners acquire sensitivity to the regularities ancies about the possible evolution of the underlying tonal music. This implicitly acquired music. Emotions arise from the way the comknowledge allows listeners to perceive subtle poser (or the improvising performer) fulfills relations between musical events and permits or frustrates these expectancies. To some musically untrained listeners to behave as music- extent, music perc…

Do happy faces really modulate liking for Jackson Pollock art and statistical fractal noise images?

2017

Flexas et al. (2013) demonstrated that happy faces increase preference for abstract art if seen in short succession. We could not replicate their findings. In our first experiment, we tested whether valence, saliency or arousal of facial primes can modulate liking of Jackson Pollock art crops. In the second experiment, the emphasis was on testing another type of abstract visual stimuli which possess similar low-level image features: statistical fractal noise images. Pollock crops were rated significantly higher when primed with happy faces in contrast to neutral faces, but not differently to the no-prime condition. Findings of our study suggest that affective priming with happy faces may be…

Encoding into Visual Working Memory: Event-Related Brain Potentials Reflect Automatic Processing of Seemingly Redundant Information.

2013

Encoding and maintenance of information in visual working memory in an S1-S2 task with a 1500 ms retention phase were investigated by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants were asked to decide whether two visual stimuli were physically identical (identity comparison (IC) task) or belonged to the same set or category of equivalent patterns (category comparison (CC) task). The stimuli differ with regard to two features. (1) Each pattern can belong to a set of either four (ESS 4) or eight (ESS 8) equivalent patterns, mirroring differences in the complexity with regard to the representational structure of each pattern (i.e., equivalence set size (ESS)). (2) The set of pat…