Search results for "masking"

2013

To identify factors limiting performance in multitone intensity discrimination, we presented sequences of five pure tones alternating in level between loud (85 dB SPL) and soft (30, 55, or 80 dB SPL). In the “overall-intensity task”, listeners detected a level increment on all of the five tones. In the “masking task”, the level increment was imposed only on the soft tones, rendering the soft tones targets and loud tones task-irrelevant maskers. Decision weights quantifying the importance of the five tone levels for the decision were estimated using methods of molecular psychophysics. Compatible with previous studies, listeners placed higher weights on the loud tones than on the soft tones i…

Effect of luminance on photopic visual acuity in the presence of laser speckle

1988

Visual acuity in coherent and incoherent light has been determined by using square-wave gratings of 100% contrast. Luminance was varied from 3 to 400 cd/m2. Coherent illumination resulted in a 40% loss of visual acuity. This is probably due to the masking effect of coherent spatial noise (speckle). However, the most interesting finding is the change in shape of the photopic visual-acuity-luminance function. With coherent illumination, the function is vertically displaced and of a different gradient. An increase in luminance produces a decrease in visual acuity. This indicates that the masking effect of the speckle is dependent on luminance. Two observers were used, and similar results were …

Breaking down the word length effect on readers’ eye movements

2015

Previous research on the effect of word length on reading confounded the number of letters (NrL) in a word with its spatial width. Consequently, the extent to which visuospatial and attentional-linguistic processes contribute to the word length effect on parafoveal and foveal vision in reading and dyslexia is unknown. Scholars recently suggested that visual crowding is an important factor for determining an individual’s reading speed in fluent and dyslexic reading. We studied whether the NrL or the spatial width of target words affects fixation duration and saccadic measures in natural reading in fluent and dysfluent readers of a transparent orthography. Participants read natural sentences …

Wine bouquet: the perceptual integration of chemical complexity

2011

Although hundreds of chemical compounds have been identified in grapes and wine, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that only a small fraction of these compounds in reality contribute to the flavor of wine. These compounds have the ability to activate at least one of the chemical senses located in the mouth and in the nose. Even if the actual number of flavor compounds is reduced, when compared to wine chemical complexity, the mixture of stimuli is transformed into a mixture of sensory signals that is integrated all along the sensory pathways to give rise to the wine’s bouquet. During this integration process, perceptual interactions, within and between senses, are likely to occur [1]. Bei…

Functional reorganization of the attentional networks in low-grade glioma patients: a longitudinal study.

2015

International audience; Right brain damage often provokes deficits of visuospatial attention. Although the spatial attention networks have been widely investigated in stroke patients as well as in the healthy brain, little is known about the impact of slow growing lesions in the right hemisphere. We here present a longitudinal study of 20 patients who have been undergoing awake brain surgery with per-operative line bisection testing. Our aim was to investigate the impact of tumour presence and of tumour resection on the functional (re)organization of the attention networks. We assessed patients' performance on lateralized target detection, visual exploration and line bisection before surger…

In praise of artifice reloaded: Caution with natural image databases in modeling vision

2019

Subjective image quality databases are a major source of raw data on how the visual system works in naturalistic environments. These databases describe the sensitivity of many observers to a wide range of distortions of different nature and intensity seen on top of a variety of natural images. Data of this kind seems to open a number of possibilities for the vision scientist to check the models in realistic scenarios. However, while these natural databases are great benchmarks for models developed in some other way (e.g., by using the well-controlled artificial stimuli of traditional psychophysics), they should be carefully used when trying to fit vision models. Given the high dimensionalit…

Eye-Hand Coordination in Rhythmical Pointing

2009

International audience; The authors investigated the relation between hand kinematics and eye movements in 2 variants of a rhythmical Fitts's task in which eye movements were necessary or not necessary. P. M. Fitts's (1954) law held in both conditions with similar slope and marginal differences in hand-kinematic patterns and movement continuity. Movement continuity and eye-hand synchronization were more directly related to movement time than to task index of difficulty. When movement time was decreased to fewer than 350 ms, eye-hand synchronization switched from continuous monitoring to intermittent control. The 1:1 frequency ratio with stable pi/6 relative phase changed for 1:3 and 1:5 fre…

Meta-analytical definition and functional connectivity of the human vestibular cortex.

2012

Contrary to most other sensory systems, no consensus has been reached within the scientific community about the exact locations and functions of human cortical areas processing vestibular information. Metaanalytical modelling using activation likelihood estimation (ALE) for the integration of neuroimaging results has already been successfully applied to several distinct tasks, thereby revealing the cortical localization of cognitive functions. We used the same algorithm and technique with all available and suitable PET and fMRI studies employing a vestibular stimulus. Most consistently across 28 experiments vestibular stimuli evoked activity in the right hemispheric parietal opercular area …

Masked priming effects are modulated by expertise in the script.

2010

In a recent study using a masked priming same–different matching task, García-Orza, Perea, and Muñoz (2010) found a transposition priming effect for letter strings, digit strings, and symbol strings, but not for strings of pseudoletters (i.e., [Formula: see text] produced similar response times to the control pair [Formula: see text]). They argued that the mechanism responsible for position coding in masked priming is not operative with those “objects” whose identity cannot be attained rapidly. To assess this hypothesis, Experiment 1 examined masked priming effects in Arabic for native speakers of Arabic, whereas participants in Experiments 2 and 3 were lower intermediate learners of Arabi…

Pervasive access to MRI bias artifact suppression service on a grid.

2009

Bias artifact corrupts magnetic resonance images in such a way that the image is afflicted by illumination variations. Some of the authors proposed the Exponential Entropy Driven - Homomorphic Unsharp Masking (E2D-HUM) algorithm that corrects this artifact without any a priori hypothesis about the tissues or the Magnetic Resonance image modality. Moreover, E2D-HUM does not care about the body part under examination and does not require any particular training task. People who want to use this algorithm, which is Matlab-based, have to set their own computers in order to execute it. Furthermore, they have to be Matlab-skilled to exploit all the features of the algorithm. In our work we propos…