Psychophysical Studies of Effort and Exertion: Some Historical, Theoretical and Empirical Aspects

1986 ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunnar Borg
Keyword(s):  
Psychophysical Studies

scholarly journals Single units and conscious vision

1998 ◽  
Vol 353 (1377) ◽  
pp. 1801-1818 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
N. K. Logothetis
Keyword(s):  
Binocular Rivalry ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Physiological Data ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Binocular Fusion ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
Multistable Perception ◽  
Visual Areas ◽  
Psychophysical Studies

Figures that can be seen in more than one way are invaluable tools for the study of the neural basis of visual awareness, because such stimuli permit the dissociation of the neural responses that underlie what we perceive at any given time from those forming the sensory representation of a visual pattern. To study the former type of responses, monkeys were subjected to binocular rivalry, and the response of neurons in a number of different visual areas was studied while the animals reported their alternating percepts by pulling levers. Perception–related modulations of neural activity were found to occur to different extents in different cortical visual areas. The cells that were affected by suppression were almost exclusively binocular, and their proportion was found to increase in the higher processing stages of the visual system. The strongest correlations between neural activity and perception were observed in the visual areas of the temporal lobe. A strikingly large number of neurons in the early visual areas remained active during the perceptual suppression of the stimulus, a finding suggesting that conscious visual perception might be mediated by only a subset of the cells exhibiting stimulus selective responses. These physiological findings, together with a number of recent psychophysical studies, offer a new explanation of the phenomenon of binocular rivalry. Indeed, rivalry has long been considered to be closely linked with binocular fusion and stereopsis, and the sequences of dominance and suppression have been viewed as the result of competition between the two monocular channels. The physiological data presented here are incompatible with this interpretation. Rather than reflecting interocular competition, the rivalry is most probably between the two different central neural representations generated by the dichoptically presented stimuli. The mechanisms of rivalry are probably the same as, or very similar to, those underlying multistable perception in general, and further physiological studies might reveal a much about the neural mechanisms of our perceptual organization.

Color naming, unique hues, and hue cancellation predicted from singularities in reflection properties

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 331-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID L. PHILIPONA ◽  
J. KEVIN O'REGAN
Keyword(s):  
Color Naming ◽  
Surface Reflection ◽  
Unique Hues ◽  
Neuronal Representation ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
The One ◽  
Unique Green ◽  
Psychophysical Studies ◽  
Hue Cancellation

Psychophysical studies suggest that different colors have different perceptual status: red and blue for example are thought of as elementary sensations whereas yellowish green is not. The dominant account for such perceptual asymmetries attributes them to specificities of the neuronal representation of colors. Alternative accounts involve cultural or linguistic arguments. What these accounts have in common is the idea that there are no asymmetries in the physics of light and surfaces that could underlie the perceptual structure of colors, and this is why neuronal or cultural processes must be invoked as the essential underlying mechanisms that structure color perception. Here, we suggest a biological approach for surface reflection properties that takes into account only the information about light that is accessible to an organism given the photopigments it possesses, and we show that now asymmetries appear in the behavior of surfaces with respect to light. These asymmetries provide a classification of surface properties that turns out to be identical to the one observed in linguistic color categorization across numerous cultures, as pinned down by cross cultural studies. Further, we show that data from psychophysical studies about unique hues and hue cancellation are consistent with the viewpoint that stimuli reported by observers as special are those associated with this singularity-based categorization of surfaces under a standard illuminant. The approach predicts that unique blue and unique yellow should be aligned in chromatic space while unique red and unique green should not, a fact usually conjectured to result from nonlinearities in chromatic pathways.

Psychophysical Studies of Body-Image

1969 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel S. Cardone
Keyword(s):  
Body Image ◽  
Psychophysical Studies

Specific and General Contour Adaptation Effects Found Using a Selective Adaptation Paradigm

1977 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 551-562
Author(s):  
Edmund R. Goedert ◽  
Albert S. Rodwan ◽  
Paul G. Salmon
Keyword(s):  
Specific Effect ◽  
Selective Adaptation ◽  
Test Figure ◽  
Recognition Time ◽  
Systems Research ◽  
Peripheral Effect ◽  
General Contour ◽  
Complex Test ◽  
Psychophysical Studies ◽  
Adaptation Figure

There is evidence for discrete property analyzers in mammalian visual systems. Research has indicated that prolonged stimulation of such units reduces their sensitivity to subsequent stimulation. Psychophysical studies have employed this effect, termed selective adaptation, to study feature extractors in the human visual system. The purpose of this study was to determine the role of density and deviation in the adaptation figure on the recognition thresholds of simple and complex test figures. A selective adaptation paradigm was employed. A strict property analyzer model suggests that increases in density, deviation, or complexity should lead to an increased recognition time for the test figures. This was not confirmed. The complexity of the test figure had no effect on its recognition time. Both increased density and deviation did have an effect on the recognition times of the test figures. The results thus suggest that contour adaptation involves at least two processes: a general, probably peripheral effect due to the fatigue of visual receptor units and a more specific effect generated by the similarity between test figure and adaptation contours, independent of the site of stimulation.

Identifying Computer-Generated Portraits: The Importance of Training and Incentives

Perception ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (9) ◽  
pp. 1062-1076 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon Mader ◽  
Martin S. Banks ◽  
Hany Farid
Keyword(s):  
Observer Performance ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Realistic Rendering ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
The Past ◽  
Psychophysical Studies

The past two decades have seen remarkable advances in photo-realistic rendering of everything from inanimate objects to landscapes, animals, and humans. We previously showed that despite these tremendous advances, human observers remain fairly good at distinguishing computer-generated from photographic images. Building on these results, we describe a series of follow-up experiments that reveal how to improve observer performance. Of general interest to anyone performing psychophysical studies on Mechanical Turk or similar platforms, we find that observer performance can be significantly improved with the proper incentives.

scholarly journals Transfer Entropy Based Causality From Head Motion To Eye Movement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zezhong Lv ◽  
Qing Xu ◽  
Klaus Schoeffmann ◽  
Simon Parkinson
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movement ◽  
Information Acquisition ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Transfer Entropy ◽  
Movement Behavior ◽  
Head Motion ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Sensorimotor Activity ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Psychophysical Studies

AbstractEye movement behavior, which provides the visual information acquisition and processing, plays an important role in performing sensorimotor tasks, such as driving, by human beings in everyday life. In the procedure of performing sensorimotor tasks, eye movement is contributed through a specific coordination of head and eye in gaze changes, with head motions preceding eye movements. Notably we believe that this coordination in essence indicates a kind of causality. In this paper, we investigate transfer entropy to set up a quantity for measuring an unidirectional causality from head motion to eye movement. A normalized version of the proposed measure, demonstrated by virtual reality based psychophysical studies, behaves very well as a proxy of driving performance, suggesting that quantitative exploitation of coordination of head and eye may be an effective behaviometric of sensorimotor activity.

scholarly journals Mice tune out not in: Violation of prediction drives auditory saliency

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meike M. Rogalla ◽  
Inga Rauser ◽  
Karsten Schulze ◽  
Lasse Osterhagen ◽  
K Jannis Hildebrandt
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Processing ◽  
Choice Model ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Probabilistic Choice ◽  
Auditory Detection ◽  
Irrelevant Distractors ◽  
Serial Correlations ◽  
Low Probability ◽  
Psychophysical Studies

SummarySuccessful navigation in complex acoustic scenes requires focusing on relevant sounds while ignoring irrelevant distractors. It has been argued that the ability to track stimulus statistics and generate predictions supports the choice what to attend and what to ignore. However, the role of these predictions about future auditory events in drafting decisions remains elusive. While most psychophysical studies in humans indicate that expected stimuli serve as implicit cues attracting attention, most work studying physiological auditory processing in animals highlights the detection of unexpected, surprising stimuli. Here, we tested whether in the mouse, target probability is used as an implicit cue attracting attention or whether detection is biased towards low-probability deviants using an auditory detection task. We implemented a probabilistic choice model to investigate whether a possible dependence on stimulus statistics arises from short term serial correlations or from integration over longer periods. Our results demonstrate that target detectability in mice decreases with increasing probability, contrary to humans. We suggest that mice indeed track probability over a time scale of at least several minutes but do not use this information in the same way as humans do: instead of maximizing reward by focusing on high-probability targets, the saliency of a target is determined by surprise.

Are We Asking the Right Questions? Comments on Instructions in Cartographic Psychophysical Studies

1980 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Gimla Shortridge ◽  
Robert B. Welch
Keyword(s):  
The Right ◽  
Psychophysical Studies

scholarly journals Edge orientation perception during active touch

2018 ◽  
Vol 120 (5) ◽  
pp. 2423-2429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Olczak ◽  
Vaishnavi Sukumar ◽  
J. Andrew Pruszynski
Keyword(s):  
Motor System ◽  
Active Touch ◽  
Contact Forces ◽  
Edge Orientation ◽  
Passive Touch ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Orientation Perception ◽  
Psychophysical Studies ◽  
Psychophysical Task ◽  
Better Than

Previous studies investigating the perceptual attributes of tactile edge orientation processing have applied their stimuli to an immobilized fingertip. Here we tested the perceptual attributes of edge orientation processing when participants actively touched the stimulus. Our participants moved their finger over two pairs of edges, one pair parallel and the other nonparallel to varying degrees, and were asked to identify which of the two pairs was nonparallel. In addition to the psychophysical estimates of edge orientation acuity, we measured the speed at which participants moved their finger and the forces they exerted when moving their finger over the stimulus. We report four main findings. First, edge orientation acuity during active touch averaged 12.4°, similar to that previously reported during passive touch. Second, on average, participants moved their finger over the stimuli at ~20 mm/s and exerted contact forces of ~0.3 N. Third, there was no clear relationship between how people moved their finger or how they pressed on the stimulus and their edge orientation acuity. Fourth, consistent with previous work testing tactile spatial acuity, we found a significant correlation between fingertip size and orientation acuity such that people with smaller fingertips tended to have better orientation acuity. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Edge orientation acuity expressed by the motor system during manipulation is many times better than edge orientation acuity assessed in psychophysical studies where stimuli are applied to a passive fingertip. Here we show that this advantage is not because of movement per se because edge orientation acuity assessed in a psychophysical task, where participants actively move their finger over the stimuli, yields results similar to previous passive psychophysical studies.

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