Search results for "Perceptual system"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
What can synaesthesia tell us about our minds?
2014
Synaesthesia is considered here as a cognitive phenomenon in the context of developmental, neuropathological and linguistic perspectives. Developmental synaesthesia seems to arise as an effect of interplay between genotype and phenotype, during the implicit learning process in childhood, in those individuals who possess an inborn susceptibility to it. Some connections between synaesthesia and extraordinary experiences, brain restructuration and pain, are examined. Acquired types of synaesthesia may be related to sensory deprivation. The somatosensory cortex may be significant for cognitive synaesthesia, with especial importance placed on a mirror system. It is suggested here that synaesthes…
Introducing implicit learning: from the laboratory to the real life
2010
The dissociation between implicit and explicit cognition has a long history in psychology. As early as 1920, Clark Hull (25) investigated the learning of Chinese ideographs and identified the process of concept formation by abstraction of common elements, a process that occurs without explicit knowledge from the subjects of these regularities. Perceptual learning is another example of those processes that take place largely in the absence of awareness of the rules that govern the stimulations of the environment. Helmholtz (24) was one of the first to refer to implicit inference made by the perceptual system and to perceptual learning. Some years later, the distinction between implicit and e…
Coarse scales are sufficient for efficient categorization of emotional facial expressions: Evidence from neural computation
2010
The human perceptual system performs rapid processing within the early visual system: low spatial frequency information is processed rapidly through magnocellular layers, whereas the parvocellular layers process all the spatial frequencies more slowly. The purpose of the present paper is to test the usefulness of low spatial frequency (LSF) information compared to high spatial frequency (HSF) and broad spatial frequency (BSF) visual stimuli in a classification task of emotional facial expressions (EFE) by artificial neural networks. The connectionist modeling results show that an LSF information provided by the frequency domain is sufficient for a distributed neural network to correctly cla…
Experience influences elemental and configural perception of certain binary odour mixtures in newborn rabbits.
2011
SUMMARY Elemental and configural olfactory perception allows interaction with the environment from very early in life. To evaluate how newborn rabbits can extract and respond to information from the highly complex chemical surroundings, and how experience acts on this sensory, cognitive and behavioural capability, we ran a study in four steps including a total of eight experiments. We mainly used a binary AB mixture comprising ethyl isobutyrate (component A) and ethyl maltol (component B), previously shown as a bearer of blending properties; in rabbit pups (as in human adults), the mixture elicits a weak configural perception, i.e. the perception of a configural odour different from the odo…