An emotion-based lengthening effect on the perception of durations of emotional pictures has been assumed to result from an arousal-based mechanism, involving the activation of an internal clock ...system. The aim of this study was to systematically examine the arousal effect on time perception when different discrete emotions were considered. The participants were asked to verbally estimate the duration of emotional pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The pictures varied either in arousal level, i.e., high/low-arousal, for the same discrete emotion (disgust or sadness) or in the depicted emotion, e.g., disgust/fear for pictures matched for arousal (high-arousal). The results systematically revealed a lengthening effect on the perception of the duration of the emotional compared to the neutral pictures and indicated that the magnitude of this effect increased with arousal level. Nevertheless, variations in time perception were observed for one and the same arousal level, with the duration of disgust-inducing pictures (e.g., body mutilation) being judged longer than that of fear-inducing pictures (e.g., snake). These results suggest that arousal is a fundamental mechanism mediating the effect of emotion on time perception. However, the effect cannot be reduced to arousal, since the impact of the content of pictures also plays a critical role.
Background Contrast-balanced dichoptic experience with perceptual-learning tasks or simple games has been shown to improve visual acuity significantly in amblyopia. However, these tasks are intensive ...and repetitive, and up to 40% of unsupervised patients are noncompliant. We investigated the efficacy of a potentially more engaging movie method to provide contrast-balanced binocular experience via complementary dichoptic stimulation. Methods Eight amblyopic children 4-10 years of age were enrolled in a prospective cohort study to watch 3 dichoptic movies per week for 2 weeks on a passive 3D display. Dichoptic versions of 18 popular animated feature films were created. A patterned image mask of irregularly shaped blobs was multiplied with the movie images seen by the amblyopic eye and an inverse mask was multiplied with the images seen by the fellow eye. Fellow-eye contrast was initially set at a reduced level that allowed binocular vision and was then incremented by 10% at each visit. Best-corrected visual acuity, random dot stereoacuity, and interocular suppression were measured at baseline and 2 weeks. Results Mean amblyopic eye visual acuity (with standard error of the mean) improved from a logarithm of minimum angle of resolution of 0.72 ± 0.08 at baseline to 0.52 ± 0.09 ( P = 0.003); that is, 2.0 lines of improvement at the 2-week outcome visit. No significant change in interocular suppression or stereoacuity was found. Conclusions Passive viewing of dichoptic feature films is feasible and could be a promising new treatment for childhood amblyopia. The maximum improvement that may be achieved by watching dichoptic movies remains to be determined. No known side effects are associated with this new treatment.
News media have been blamed for sensationalizing Ebola in the United States, causing unnecessary alarm. To investigate this issue, we analyzed US-focused news stories about Ebola virus disease during ...July 1-November 30, 2014. We found frequent use of risk-elevating messages, which may have contributed to increased public concern.
Misremembering is a systematic and ordinary occurrence in our daily lives. Since it is commonly assumed that the function of memory is to remember the past, misremembering is typically thought to ...happen because our memory system malfunctions. In this paper I argue that not all cases of misremembering are due to failures in our memory system. In particular, I argue that many ordinary cases of misremembering should not be seen as instances of memory's malfunction, but rather as the normal result of a larger cognitive system that performs a different function, and for which remembering is just one operation. Building upon extant psychological and neuroscientific evidence, I offer a picture of memory as an integral part of a larger system that supports not only thinking of what was the case and what potentially could be the case, but also what could have been the case. More precisely, I claim that remembering is a particular operation of a cognitive system that permits the flexible recombination of different components of encoded traces into representations of possible past events that might or might not have occurred, in the service of constructing mental simulations of possible future events.
Studies suggest looming motion represents a special class of attentional capture stimulus due to behavioural urgency: the need to act upon objects moving toward us in an environment. In particular, ...one theory suggests that faster reaction times to targets cued by looming relative to receding motion are driven by post-attentional, motor-priming processes beyond the attentional capture effects seen with other stimulus qualities such as colour pop-out. The present study tested this theory using a relative size judgment task where targets were pre-cued by looming and receding optic flow fields. Results show systematic increases in the perceived size of targets that were cued by looming flow fields, consistent with previous attentional capture studies using onset cues. These results challenge theories attributing behavioural changes from looming motion to motor-priming alone.
Given that observing one's body is ubiquitous in experience, it is natural to assume that people accurately perceive the relative sizes of their body parts. This assumption is mistaken. In a series ...of studies, we show that there are dramatic systematic distortions in the perception of bodily proportions, as assessed by visual estimation tasks, where participants were asked to compare the lengths of two body parts. These distortions are not evident when participants estimate the extent of a body part relative to a noncorporeal object or when asked to estimate noncorporal objects that are the same length as their body parts. Our results reveal a radical asymmetry in the perception of corporeal and noncorporeal relative size estimates. Our findings also suggest that people visually perceive the relative size of their body parts as a function of each part's relative tactile sensitivity and physical size.
Sensory modulation symptoms are common in persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASD); however have a heterogeneous presentation. Results from 14 studies indicated a significant high difference ...between ASD and typical groups in the presence/frequency of sensory symptoms, with the greatest difference in under-responsivity, followed by over-responsivity and sensation seeking. Three moderators that reduced the variability in findings among studies were: chronological age, severity of autism, and type of control group. Sensory differences were highest for studies of children ages 6–9 years, samples with more than 80% with an autism diagnosis, and compared to a CA matched versus a MA or DD matched group. It is important to consider these moderators in the design of studies and interventions addressing sensory symptoms.
Rate control is an important technique for practical video coding applications by allocating suitable quantization parameters (QPs) for CTUs or frames to satisfy bandwidth requirement. However, rate ...control may result in video quality fluctuation because neighboring regions are quantized into different quality levels, which may affect viewing experience seriously, especially at low bitrate scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel CTU (Coding Tree Unit) level rate control approach for intra frame of the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard with consistent perceptual quality. In particular, a new perceptual hyperbolic rate distortion (R-D) optimization method is proposed for rate control with the constraint of constant perceptual quality, which shows good compatibility with other R-D models. Herein, a novel CTU level perceptual distortion model is presented to achieve the optimal rate control of intra frames for HEVC, where the Lagrange multiplier is adjusted by taking advantage of the different perceptual characteristics to achieve the minimal perceptual distortion variation across CTUs within one frame. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art CTU level rate control methods by considering R-D performance. In addition, subjective simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm further improves the visual quality of compressed videos by reducing perceptual quality fluctuation.
The feeling that our body is ours, and is constantly there, is a fundamental aspect of self-awareness 1. Although it is often taken for granted, our physical self-awareness, or body image, is ...disrupted in many clinical conditions 2 (see also 3 for a list of such conditions). One common disturbance of body image, in which one limb feels bigger than it really is, can also be induced in healthy volunteers by using local anaesthesia or cutaneous stimulation 4. Here we report that, in patients with chronic hand pain, magnifying their view of their own limb during movement significantly increases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. By contrast, minifying their view of the limb significantly decreases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. These results show a top-down effect of body image on body tissues, thus demonstrating that the link between body image and the tissues is bi-directional.
Comments on the article by K. Pezdek and D. Reisberg (see record 2022-78723-001), which discusses six myths regarding mistaken beliefs about psychological processes (perception, memory, judgment) ...shaping legal evidence, and which offers research to debunk each myth. This comment address the issue of whether police officers' memory could be tainted by body worn camera (BWC) footage. The present authors contend that several nuances of BWCs and their effects on memory combined with the pervasive use of BWCs require a more nuanced solution than that made by Pezdek and Reisberg. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
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