Sensory Awareness – Understanding Your Unique Brain Response to Sensory Input from the World Around You

Author(s):  
Lauren Clark
Author(s):  
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard addresses the role of sound in the creation of presence in virtual and actual worlds. He argues that imagination is a central part of the generation and selection of perceptual hypotheses—models of the world in which we can act—that emerge from what Grimshaw-Aagaard calls the “exo-environment” (the sensory input) and the “endo-environment” (the cognitive input). Grimshaw-Aagaard further divides the exo-environment into a primarily auditory and a primarily visual dimension and he deals with the actual world of his own apartment and the virtual world of first-person-shooter computer games in order to exemplify how we perceptually construct an environment that allows for the creation of presence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 403-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Tacchetti ◽  
Leyla Isik ◽  
Tomaso A. Poggio

Recognizing the people, objects, and actions in the world around us is a crucial aspect of human perception that allows us to plan and act in our environment. Remarkably, our proficiency in recognizing semantic categories from visual input is unhindered by transformations that substantially alter their appearance (e.g., changes in lighting or position). The ability to generalize across these complex transformations is a hallmark of human visual intelligence, which has been the focus of wide-ranging investigation in systems and computational neuroscience. However, while the neural machinery of human visual perception has been thoroughly described, the computational principles dictating its functioning remain unknown. Here, we review recent results in brain imaging, neurophysiology, and computational neuroscience in support of the hypothesis that the ability to support the invariant recognition of semantic entities in the visual world shapes which neural representations of sensory input are computed by human visual cortex.


2019 ◽  
pp. 191-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Hohwy

Andy Clark’s exciting work on predictive processing provides the umbrella under which his hugely influential previous work on embodied and extended cognition seeks a unified home. This chapter argues that in fact predictive processing harbours internalist, inferentialist and epistemic tenets that cannot leave embodied and extended cognition unchanged. Predictive processing cannot do the work Clark requires of it without relying on rich, preconstructive internal representations of the world, nor without engaging in paradigmatically rational integration of prior knowledge and new sensory input. Hence, next to Clark’s image of fluid “uncertainty surfing” is an equally valid image of more emaciated and plodding world-modelling. Rather than underpinning orthodox embodied and extended approches, predictive processing therefore presents an opportunity for a potentially fruitful new synthesis of cognitivist and embodied approaches to cognition.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 283-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarquis Urzua ◽  
Rodrigo Munguía ◽  
Antoni Grau

Using a camera, a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) can perform visual-based navigation in periods or circumstances when GPS is not available, or when it is partially available. In this context, the monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods represent an excellent alternative, due to several limitations regarding to the design of the platform, mobility and payload capacity that impose considerable restrictions on the available computational and sensing resources of the MAV. However, the use of monocular vision introduces some technical difficulties as the impossibility of directly recovering the metric scale of the world. In this work, a novel monocular SLAM system with application to MAVs is proposed. The sensory input is taken from a monocular downward facing camera, an ultrasonic range finder and a barometer. The proposed method is based on the theoretical findings obtained from an observability analysis. Experimental results with real data confirm those theoretical findings and show that the proposed method is capable of providing good results with low-cost hardware.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Root

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which healthy individuals experience additional, automatic, and consistent perceptions unrelated to veridical sensory input. For most of the most common forms of synesthesia, the additional sensation is a color: grapheme-color synesthetes experience specific letters of the alphabet as having specific colors, tone-color synesthetes experience specific sounds as having specific colors, etc. The “gold standard” method to diagnose X-to-color synesthesia is to measure test-retest consistency: synesthetes use a colorpicker to choose the color they experience for a particular stimulus, and then are retested minutes, months, or even years later; genuine synesthetes experience highly consistent associations across time. There is not currently an open source tool to collect color associations from synesthetes. In addition to presenting a technical barrier for entry into synesthesia research, the lack of an open source standard has also led to a proliferation of (slightly) different choices in methodology from lab to lab. In the present work, I use colorpicker experiements in synesthetes and controls to demonstrate that even small methodological details in test-retest experiments can profoundly influence the resulting data. I use this data to generate an online color picker with ideal experimental properties. The colorpicker is open source (available on a Github respository) and can be implemented by anyone with an account on the Qualtrics platform, one of the most common online experimental platforms in the world.


Author(s):  
Ray Guillery

Chapter 2 outlines some of the evidence on which the seemingly strong standard view has been based. The early discovery that ventral nerve roots of the spinal cord provide a motor output and dorsal nerve roots provide a sensory input supported the dichotomy of the standard view. Then as each sensory pathway was traced to the thalamus for relay to the cortex, the separate inputs from the sensory receptors—visual, auditory, gustatory, and so on—could be seen as providing the cortex with a ‘view’ of the world. The nature of this view became strikingly clear once investigators could understand (read) the messages that pass along the nerve fibres on the basis of very brief changes in membrane potentials, the action potentials. However, many branches given off by sensory fibres on their way to the thalamus remain unexplained on the standard view. These are important for the integrative sensorimotor view and their precise functional roles need to be defined.


1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanna Becker ◽  
Geoffrey E. Hinton

We have previously described an unsupervised learning procedure that discovers spatially coherent properties of the world by maximizing the information that parameters extracted from different parts of the sensory input convey about some common underlying cause. When given random dot stereograms of curved surfaces, this procedure learns to extract surface depth because that is the property that is coherent across space. It also learns how to interpolate the depth at one location from the depths at nearby locations (Becker and Hinton 1992b). In this paper, we propose two new models that handle surfaces with discontinuities. The first model attempts to detect cases of discontinuities and reject them. The second model develops a mixture of expert interpolators. It learns to detect the locations of discontinuities and to invoke specialized, asymmetric interpolators that do not cross the discontinuities.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bianca M. van Kemenade ◽  
Gregor Wilbertz ◽  
Annalena Müller ◽  
Philipp Sterzer

AbstractPredictions shape our perception. The theory of predictive processing poses that our brains make sense of incoming sensory input by generating predictions, which are sent back from higher to lower levels of the processing hierarchy. These predictions are based on our internal model of the world and enable inferences about the hidden causes of the sensory input data. It has been proposed that conscious perception corresponds to the currently most probable internal model of the world. Accordingly, predictions influencing conscious perception should be fed back from higher to lower levels of the processing hierarchy. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and multivoxel pattern analysis to show that non-stimulated regions of early visual areas contain information about the conscious perception of an ambiguous visual stimulus. These results indicate that early sensory cortices in the human brain receive predictive feedback signals that reflect the current contents of conscious perception.


Author(s):  
György Buzsáki

The outside-in framework inevitably poses the question: What comes between perception and action? The homunculus with its decision-making power produces unavoidable logical consequences from the separation of perception from action. I promote the alternative view that things and events in the world can acquire meaning only through brain-initiated actions. In this process, the brain builds a simplified, customized model of the world by encoding the relationships of events to each other. I introduce the concept of “corollary discharge,” the main physiological mechanism that grounds the sensory input to make it an experience. This is a comparator mechanism that allows the brain to examine the relationship between a true change in the sensory input and a change due to self-initiated movement of the sensors.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaowei Jiang ◽  
Na Ao ◽  
Yingying Chen ◽  
Huihui Niu ◽  
Chen Yanan ◽  
...  

In recent years, yaoi, as a subculture with a long history, has gradually become increasingly popular among youth interested in Japanese media and has recently become popular around the world. Yaoi is defined as commercial and fan-created media that thematically focuses on romantic love and pornography between two men, often in a sexually explicit way. Despite the widespread popularity of this subculture, there is a lack of empirical studies on the neural mechanism for enjoying yaoi using reliable research methods. The present study aimed to use functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore the neural and behavioral mechanisms exhibited by yaoi fans when they are viewing yaoi images. This study indicated that yaoi begins to influence individuals during puberty, tending to addiction. Also, viewing yaoi images could lead to negative activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of female yaoi fans and affect their behavioral performance. These results embodied a new but taboo sexual orientation evident in the PFC neural response.


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