The action-specific perception account holds that people perceive the environment in terms of their ability to act in it. In this view, for example, decreased ability to climb a hill because of ...fatigue makes the hill visually appear to be steeper. Though influential, this account has not been universally accepted, and in fact a heated controversy has emerged. The opposing view holds that action capability has little or no influence on perception. Heretofore, the debate has been quite polarized, with efforts largely being focused on supporting one view and dismantling the other. We argue here that polarized debate can impede scientific progress and that the search for similarities between 2 sides of a debate can sharpen the theoretical focus of both sides and illuminate important avenues for future research. In this article, we present a synthetic review of this debate, drawing from the literatures of both approaches, to clarify both the surprising similarities and the core differences between them. We critically evaluate existing evidence, discuss possible mechanisms of action-specific effects, and make recommendations for future research. A primary focus of future work will involve not only the development of methods that guard against action-specific postperceptual effects but also development of concrete, well-constrained underlying mechanisms. The criteria for what constitutes acceptable control of postperceptual effects and what constitutes an appropriately specific mechanism vary between approaches, and bridging this gap is a central challenge for future research.
Imagine a pack of predators stalking their prey. The predators may not always move directly toward their target (e.g., when circling around it), but they may be consistently facing toward it. The ...human visual system appears to be extremely sensitive to such situations, even in displays involving simple shapes. We demonstrate this by introducing the wolfpack effect, which is found when several randomly moving, oriented shapes (darts, or discs with "eyes") consistently point toward a moving disc. Despite the randomness of the shapes' movement, they seem to interact with the disc—as if they are collectively pursuing it. This impairs performance in interactive tasks (including detection of actual pursuit), and observers selectively avoid such shapes when moving a disc through the display themselves. These and other results reveal that the wolfpack effect is a novel "social" cue to perceived animacy. And, whereas previous work has focused on the causes of perceived animacy, these results demonstrate its effects, showing how it irresistibly and implicitly shapes visual performance and interactive behavior.
People often have to listen to someone speak in the presence of competing voices. Much is known about the acoustic cues used to overcome this challenge, but almost nothing is known about the utility ...of cues derived from experience with particular voices—cues that may be particularly important for older people and others with impaired hearing. Here, we use a version of the coordinate-response-measure procedure to show that people can exploit knowledge of a highly familiar voice (their spouse's) not only to track it better in the presence of an interfering stranger's voice, but also, crucially, to ignore it so as to comprehend a stranger's voice more effectively. Although performance declines with increasing age when the target voice is novel, there is no decline when the target voice belongs to the listener's spouse. This finding indicates that older listeners can exploit their familiarity with a speaker's voice to mitigate the effects of sensory and cognitive decline.
In this timely and comprehensive text, Cesare Cornoldi and Tomaso Vecchi describe their recently developed experimental approach to the investigation of visuo-spatial cognition, based upon the ...analysis of individual differences. A review of the most influential theoretical advances in the study of visuo-spatial cognition is presented, including both critical analysis and comparisons between the distinct approaches. In addition, the authors describe recent research into memory for spatial configurations, mental manipulation and the active integration of visuo-spatial information. This includes studies on the effects of congenital blindness on mental imagery abilities, developmental and age-related modifications, gender effects, and the role of genetic syndromes in determining visuo-spatial abilities. The authors draw together these distinct areas of research and integrate the findings within an innovative framework of working memory. This text will be a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, as well as researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and neuroscience.
Introduction. The Study of Individual Differences in Visuo-spatial Abilities. Models and Components of Visuo-spatial Representation and Working Memory. Gender Differences in Visuo-spatial Abilities. Individual Differences in Children's Visuo-spatial Working Memory. Visuo-spatial Working Memory in Ageing. Imagery, Blindness and Visuo-spatial Working Memory. Visuo-spatial Abilities in Genetic Syndromes. A Continuity Approach to Visuo-spatial Working Memory. References.
Cornoldi and Vecchi tackle this topic in a coherent and systematic fashion, giving a very convincing demonstration of the scientific value to be gained from an individual differences approach. - Robert H. Logie, University of Aberdeen, UK An excellent appreciation of the many subtle conceptual and practical issues that arise in attempting to investigate the nature and function of mental imagery. The theoretical analysis of visuo-spatial working memory is highly original and constitutes a serious challenge for previous accounts. - John T. Richardson, Open University, UK
The dominant inferential approach to human 3D perception assumes a model of spatial encoding based on a physical description of objects and space. Prevailing models based on this physicalist approach ...assume that the visual system infers an objective, unitary and mostly veridical representation of the external world. However, careful consideration of the phenomenology of 3D perception challenges these assumptions. I review important aspects of phenomenology, psychophysics and neurophysiology which suggest that human visual perception of 3D objects and space is underwritten by distinct and dissociated spatial encodings that are optimized for specific regions of space. Specifically, I argue that 3D perception is underwritten by at least three distinct encodings for (1) egocentric distance perception at the ambulatory scale, (2) exocentric distance (scaled depth) perception optimized for near space, and (3) perception of object shape and layout (unscaled depth). This tripartite division can more satisfactorily account for the phenomenology, psychophysics and adaptive logic of human 3D perception. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'New approaches to 3D vision'.
In 1912, Max Wertheimer published his paper on phi motion, widely recognized as the start of Gestalt psychology. Because of its continued relevance in modern psychology, this centennial anniversary ...is an excellent opportunity to take stock of what Gestalt psychology has offered and how it has changed since its inception. We first introduce the key findings and ideas in the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology, and then briefly sketch its development, rise, and fall. Next, we discuss its empirical and conceptual problems, and indicate how they are addressed in contemporary research on perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. In particular, we review the principles of grouping, both classical (e.g., proximity, similarity, common fate, good continuation, closure, symmetry, parallelism) and new (e.g., synchrony, common region, element and uniform connectedness), and their role in contour integration and completion. We then review classic and new image-based principles of figure-ground organization, how it is influenced by past experience and attention, and how it relates to shape and depth perception. After an integrated review of the neural mechanisms involved in contour grouping, border ownership, and figure-ground perception, we conclude by evaluating what modern vision science has offered compared to traditional Gestalt psychology, whether we can speak of a Gestalt revival, and where the remaining limitations and challenges lie. A better integration of this research tradition with the rest of vision science requires further progress regarding the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the Gestalt approach, which is the focus of a second review article. (Contains 24 figures and 6 tables.)
Beyond seemingly lower-level features such as color and motion, visual perception also recovers properties more commonly associated with higher-level thought, as when an upwardly accelerating object ...is seen not just as moving, but moreover as self-propelled, and resisting the force of gravity. Given past research demonstrating the prioritization of living things in attention and memory, here we hypothesized that observers would be more sensitive to an object's speed changes if those speed changes were opposite to natural gravitational acceleration. Across six experiments, we found that observers were more sensitive to objects' accelerations when they moved upward (when those accelerations were opposite to gravity) and less sensitive to their accelerations when they moved downward (when those accelerations were consistent with gravity). Moreover, observers were more sensitive to objects' decelerations when they moved downward (when those decelerations appeared as "braking" against gravity), and less sensitive to their decelerations when they moved upward (when those decelerations were consistent with gravity). This greater visual sensitivity to speed changes opposite to gravity is consistent with previous results suggesting that we readily monitor the world for cues to animacy.
Public Significance StatementWhen an object changes speed, what causes you to notice this? In several experiments, observers were better at noticing a change in an object's speed when it accelerated opposite to natural gravitational acceleration. Greater sensitivity to speed changes opposite gravity may help us to detect the movements of living things.
Temporal simultaneity provides an essential cue for integrating multisensory signals into a unified perception. Early visual deprivation, in both animals and humans, leads to abnormal neural ...responses to audiovisual signals in subcortical and cortical areas 1–5. Behavioral deficits in integrating complex audiovisual stimuli in humans are also observed 6, 7. It remains unclear whether early visual deprivation affects visuotactile perception similarly to audiovisual perception and whether the consequences for either pairing differ after monocular versus binocular deprivation 8–11. Here, we evaluated the impact of early visual deprivation on the perception of simultaneity for audiovisual and visuotactile stimuli in humans. We tested patients born with dense cataracts in one or both eyes that blocked all patterned visual input until the cataractous lenses were removed and the affected eyes fitted with compensatory contact lenses (mean duration of deprivation = 4.4 months; range = 0.3–28.8 months). Both monocularly and binocularly deprived patients demonstrated lower precision in judging audiovisual simultaneity. However, qualitatively different outcomes were observed for the two patient groups: the performance of monocularly deprived patients matched that of young children at immature stages, whereas that of binocularly deprived patients did not match any stage in typical development. Surprisingly, patients performed normally in judging visuotactile simultaneity after either monocular or binocular deprivation. Therefore, early binocular input is necessary to develop normal neural substrates for simultaneity perception of visual and auditory events but not visual and tactile events.
•People with transient early visual deprivation in one or both eyes were tested•Binocular deprivation leads to atypical audiovisual simultaneity perception•Monocular deprivation leads to immature audiovisual simultaneity perception•Visuotactile simultaneity perception is spared from early visual deprivation
Chen et al. demonstrate that transient visual deprivation in early life leads to lower precision in the perception of audiovisual simultaneity, but the perception of visuotactile simultaneity is spared. The results suggest that early visual experience is critical for the development in some, but not all, types of multisensory perception.
This paper is intended to investigate how the Dai Dialect speakers in Dehong Autonomous Prefecture perceive Mandarin tones. Therefore, identification and discrimination experiments were conducted of ...the four Mandarin tone continua with Dai Language speakers. The results suggested that the Dai Language speaker's perception mode of T1-T2 and T2-T4 continua are Categorical Perception, but for T1-T3, T2-T3, T3-T4 and T1-T4 continua are not. These findings indicated that Dai language tone system does have a significant influence on participants' perception of Mandarin tones.
Anthony Chemero makes a proposal for a new way to do cognitive science, arguing that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation & representation.
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