Search results for "perception"
showing 10 items of 3634 documents
Surface Lightness Influences Perceived Room Height
2010
Surprisingly little scientific research has been conducted on the effects of colour and lightness on the perception of spaciousness. Practitioners and architects typically suggest that a room's ceiling appears higher when it is painted lighter than the walls, while darker ceilings appear lower. Employing a virtual reality setting, we studied the effects of the lightness of different room surfaces on perceived height in two psychophysical experiments. Observers judged the height of rooms varying in physical height as well as in the lightness of ceiling, floor, and walls. Experiment 1 showed the expected increase of perceived height with increases in ceiling lightness. Unexpectedly, the perce…
Color and lightness constancy in different perceptual tasks
1998
Color and lightness constancy with respect to changing illumination was studied with three different perceptual tasks: ranking of colored papers according (1) to their lightness and (2) to their chromatic similarity in photopic, mesopic, and scotopic states of adaptation, and (3) recognition of remembered colored papers after changes of illumination in photopic vision. Constancy was found in the second task, only. Excitations of light receptors and luminance channels were computed to simulate the empirical rank orders. Results of the first task can be predicted with the hypothesis that luminance channels are activated, if lightness is asked for. Sequences arranged with respect to chromatic …
From development to aging: Holistic face perception in children, younger and older adults.
2015
Few published reports examine the development of holistic face processing across the lifespan such that face-specific processes are adequately differentiated from general developmental effects. To address this gap in the literature, we used the complete design of the composite paradigm (Richler & Gauthier, 2014) with faces and non-face control objects (watches) to investigate holistic processing in children (8-10years), young adults (20-32years) and older adults (65-78years). Several modifications to past research designs were introduced to improve the ability to draw conclusions about the development of holistic processing in terms of face-specificity, response bias, and age-related differ…
Evidence against preserved syntactic comprehension in healthy aging.
2018
We investigated age-related differences in syntactic comprehension in young and older adults. Most previous research found no evidence of age-related decline in syntactic processing. We investigated elementary syntactic comprehension of minimal sentences (e.g., I cook), minimizing the influence of working memory. We also investigated the contribution of semantic processing by comparing sentences containing real verbs (e.g., I cook) versus pseudoverbs (e.g., I spuff). We measured the speed and accuracy of detecting syntactic agreement errors (e.g., I cooks, I spuffs). We found that older adults were slower and less accurate than younger adults in detecting syntactic agreement errors for both…
The role of animacy in the real time comprehension of Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from auditory event-related brain potentials.
2007
Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese by comparing active and passive sentences in simple verb-final (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). In addition to the voice manipulation (which modulated the assignment of actor and undergoer roles to the arguments), both arguments were either animate or inanimate. This allowed us to examine the interplay of animacy with thematic interpretation. In Experiment 1, we observed no effect of animacy at NP1, but N400 effects for inanimate actor arguments in second position. This result mirrors previous findings in German, thus suggesting that an initial undergoer univer…
Barriers Perceived by Teachers at Work, Coping Strategies, Self-efficacy and Burnout
2010
This study examines the relationships among stressors, coping strategies, self-efficacy and burnout in a sample of 724 Spanish primary and secondary teachers. We understood stressors as barriers perceived by teachers that interfere with their work meeting learning objectives and which cause them stress and burnout. An analysis of teacher responses using hierarchical regression revealed that pedagogical barriers had significant positive effects on the burnout dimensions. Furthermore, the results show not only the moderator role played by coping strategies in the pedagogical barriers- burnout dimensions relationship, but also the association between self-efficacy and the coping strategies use…
The neural mechanisms of word order processing revisited: electrophysiological evidence from Japanese.
2008
We present two ERP studies on the processing of word order variations in Japanese, a language that is suited to shedding further light on the implications of word order freedom for neurocognitive approaches to sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 used auditory presentation and revealed that initial accusative objects elicit increased processing costs in comparison to initial subjects (in the form of a transient negativity) only when followed by a prosodic boundary. A similar effect was observed using visual presentation in Experiment 2, however only for accusative but not for dative objects. These results support a relational account of word order processing, in which the costs of comprehen…
Event-related potentials reflecting the processing of phonological constraint violations
2009
How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC(i)VC(i)). We examined three types of monosyllabic late positive CCVC words: (a) existing words [see text], (b) wellformed novel words [see text] and component (c) illformed novel words [see text] as instances of Obligatory Contour Principle non-word (OCP) violations. Wellformed and illformed novel words evoked an N400 effect processing in comparison to existing words. In addition, illformed words produced an enhanced late posteri…
(De-)Accentuation and the Processing of Information Status: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials
2012
The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs. adjectives) and were elicited via context sentences, which did not – unlike most previous ERP studies in the field – trigger an explicit focus expectation. Target utterances displayed prosodic realizations of the critical words which differed in accent position and accent type. Electrophysiological results showed an effect of information status, maxi…
Tapping doesn't help: Synchronized self-motion and judgments of musical tempo.
2019
For both musicians and music psychologists, beat rate (BPM) has often been regarded as a transparent measure of musical speed or tempo, yet recent research has shown that tempo is more than just BPM. In a previous study, London, Burger, Thompson, and Toiviainen (Acta Psychologica, 164, 70–80, 2016) presented participants with original as well as “time-stretched” versions of classic R&B songs; time stretching slows down or speeds up a recording without changing its pitch or timbre. In that study we discovered a tempo anchoring effect (TAE): Although relative tempo judgments (original vs. time-stretched versions of the same song) were correct, they were at odds with BPM rates of each stimulus…