Search results for "Visual Perception"
showing 10 items of 387 documents
Implicit visual analysis in handedness recognition.
1998
In the present study, we addressed the problem of whether hand representations, derived from the control of hand gesture, are used in handedness recognition. Pictures of hands and fingers, assuming either common or uncommon postures, were presented to right-handed subjects, who were required to judge their handedness. In agreement with previous results (Parsons, 1987, 1994; Gentilucci, Daprati, & Gangitano, 1998), subjects recognized handedness through mental movement of their own hand in order to match the posture of the presented hand. This was proved by a control experiment of physical matching. The new finding was that presentation of common finger postures affected responses differ…
Anger superiority effect for change detection and change blindness
2013
Abstract In visual search, an angry face in a crowd “pops out” unlike a happy or a neutral face. This “anger superiority effect” conflicts with views of visual perception holding that complex stimulus contents cannot be detected without focused top-down attention. Implicit visual processing of threatening changes was studied by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) using facial stimuli using the change blindness paradigm, in which conscious change detection is eliminated by presenting a blank screen before the changes. Already before their conscious detection, angry faces modulated relatively early emotion sensitive ERPs when appearing among happy and neutral faces, but happy faces only…
Kinematic features of movement tunes perception and action coupling
2005
How do we extrapolate the final position of hand trajectory that suddenly vanishes behind a wall? Studies showing maintenance of cortical activity after objects in motion disappear suggest that internal model of action may be recalled to reconstruct the missing part of the trajectory. Although supported by neurophysiological and brain imaging studies, behavioural evidence for this hypothesis is sparse. Further, in humans, it is unknown if the recall of internal model of action at motion observation can be tuned with kinematic features of movement. Here, we propose a novel experiment to address this question. Each stimulus consisted of a dot moving either upwards or downwards, and correspond…
Exploring the relationship between semantics and space
2009
The asymmetric distribution of human spatial attention has been repeatedly documented in both patients and healthy controls. Biases in the distribution of attention and/or in the mental representation of space may also affect some aspects of language processing. We investigated whether biases in attention and/or mental representation of space affect semantic representations. In particular, we investigated whether semantic judgments could be modulated by the location in space where the semantic information was presented and the role of the left and right parietal cortices in this task. Healthy subjects were presented with three pictures arranged horizontally (one middle and two outer picture…
Encoding of faces and objects into visual working memory: an event-related brain potential study.
2013
Visual working memory (VWM) is an important prerequisite for cognitive functions, but little is known on whether the general perceptual processing advantage for faces also applies to VWM processes. The aim of the present study was (a) to test whether there is a general advantage for face stimuli in VWM and (b) to unravel whether this advantage is related to early sensory processing stages. To address these questions, we compared encoding of faces and complex nonfacial objects into VWM within a combined behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) study. In detail, we tested whether the N170 ERP component - which is associated with face-specific holistic processing - is affected by mem…
The preview benefit for familiar and unfamiliar faces
2013
Abstract Previewing distracters improves visual search – the preview benefit ( Watson & Humphreys, 1997 ). Recent fMRI evidence suggests that the preview benefit rests on active inhibition in brain regions concerned with spatial memory, as well as in content selective areas ( Allen, Humphreys, & Matthews, 2008 ). Using familiar and unfamiliar faces in a preview search task we show that search performance is much better with familiar than with unfamiliar faces. With both types of stimuli we obtained preview benefits of at least 10%, measured in terms of the advantage in reaction time relative to the no preview condition. The preview benefit increased up to 30% when distracter faces and their…
Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex enhances memory-guided responses in a visuospatial working…
2014
Several studies have shown that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is able to enhance performances on verbal and visual working memory (WM) tasks. Available evidence points to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) as a critical area in visual WM, but to date direct comparisons of the effects obtained by stimulating the left versus the right DLPFC in the same subject are lacking. Our aim was to determine whether tDCS over the right DLPFC can differently affect performance as compared with left DLPFC stimulation. Ten healthy subjects performed a memory-guided visuospatial task in three conditions: baseline, during anodal stimulation applied over the right and during ano…
Visuospatial processing in schizophrenia: Does it share common mechanisms with pseudoneglect?
2011
International audience; ''Schizophrenia patients demonstrate behavioural and cerebral lateralised anomalies, prompting some authors to suggest they exhibit a mild form of right unilateral neglect. To better describe and understand lateralised visuospatial anomalies in schizophrenia, three experiments were run using tasks often utilised to study visuospatial processing in healthy individuals and in neglect patients: the Behavioural Inattention Test (BIT), the manual line bisection task with and without a local cueing paradigm, the landmark task (or line bisection judgement), and the number bisection task. Although the schizophrenia patients did not exhibit the full-blown neglect syndrome, th…
The Doors and People Test: The Effect of Frontal Lobe Lesions on Recall and Recognition Memory Performance
2016
Objective: Memory deficits in patients with frontal lobe lesions are most apparent on free recall tasks that require the selection, initiation, and implementation of retrieval strategies. The effect of frontal lesions on recognition memory performance is less clear with some studies reporting recognition memory impairments but others not. The majority of these studies do not directly compare recall and recognition within the same group of frontal patients, assessing only recall or recognition memory performance. Other studies that do compare recall and recognition in the same frontal group do not consider recall or recognition tests that are comparable for difficulty. Recognition memory imp…
fMRI signal increases and decreases in cortical areas during small-field optokinetic stimulation and central fixation
2001
Small-field optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) was performed in seven healthy volunteers in order to analyze the activation and deactivation patterns of visual motion, ocular motor, and multisensory vestibular cortex areas by means of fMRI during coherent visual motion stimulation. BOLD signal decreases (deactivations) were found in the first and second long insular gyri and retroinsular areas (the human homologue of the parietoinsular vestibular cortex and the visual posterior sylvian area in the monkey) of both hemispheres, extending into the transverse temporal gyrus and inferior-anterior parts of the superior temporal gyrus (BA 22), and the precentral gyri at two separate sites (BA 4 and 6). F…