Colored-Speech Synaesthesia Is Triggered by Multisensory, Not Unisensory, Perception

2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 529-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Bargary ◽  
Kylie J. Barnett ◽  
Kevin J. Mitchell ◽  
Fiona N. Newell

Although it is estimated that as many as 4% of people experience some form of enhanced cross talk between (or within) the senses, known as synaesthesia, very little is understood about the level of information processing required to induce a synaesthetic experience. In work presented here, we used a well-known multisensory illusion called the McGurk effect to show that synaesthesia is driven by late, perceptual processing, rather than early, unisensory processing. Specifically, we tested 9 linguistic-color synaesthetes and found that the colors induced by spoken words are related to what is perceived (i.e., the illusory combination of audio and visual inputs) and not to the auditory component alone. Our findings indicate that color-speech synaesthesia is triggered only when a significant amount of information processing has occurred and that early sensory activation is not directly linked to the synaesthetic experience.

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-215
Author(s):  
Ashley S. Waggoner ◽  
Eliot R. Smith

Previous work has shown that compared to passive perceivers who view preselected information about target persons, active perceivers are less confident in their impressions, do not show increased confidence with increased amounts of information, and like targets less. The authors now explain these findings, postulating that perceivers without control over the amount of information they receive should be motivated to form impressions earlier, altering their information-processing strategies. Study 1 predicted and found that content-only active perceivers who control the content, but not the amount, of information show the same positive relationship between confidence and amount of information as passive perceivers, as well as the same reading-time patterns and level of liking. Study 2 used clearly valenced target stimuli and found support for the hypothesis that passive perceivers form more extreme early impressions, leading to greater liking when early information is positive but less liking when it is negative.


2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bodo Winter ◽  
Marcus Perlman ◽  
Lynn K. Perry ◽  
Gary Lupyan

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell). First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularity between form and meaning). We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English.


1992 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank R. Kardes ◽  
Gurumurthy Kalyanaram

Several studies have shown that pioneering brands are preferred to later entrants. The “pioneering advantage” is remarkably robust and has been observed across a wide variety of products and contexts. Two longitudinal experiments were conducted to investigate judgmental mechanisms that contribute to this advantage. In experiment 1, the amount of information presented was held constant across brands. Nevertheless, subjects learned more about the pioneer than about later entrants and consequently judgments of the pioneer were more extreme and were held with greater confidence. Furthermore, the pioneering advantage increased over time, especially when subjects were exposed repeatedly to the features of the pioneer. Experiment 2 demonstrated that order-of-entry effects on consumer memory and judgment are eliminated when information about a set of brands is presented simultaneously as opposed to sequentially. Furthermore, the results revealed that sequential information processing benefits the pioneer even when product information is processed incidentally. Implications of the results for understanding and managing order-of-entry effects are discussed.


Author(s):  
Osama Alfarraj ◽  
Amr Tolba

Abstract The computer vision (CV) paradigm is introduced to improve the computational and processing system efficiencies through visual inputs. These visual inputs are processed using sophisticated techniques for improving the reliability of human–machine interactions (HMIs). The processing of visual inputs requires multi-level data computations for achieving application-specific reliability. Therefore, in this paper, a two-level visual information processing (2LVIP) method is introduced to meet the reliability requirements of HMI applications. The 2LVIP method is used for handling both structured and unstructured data through classification learning to extract the maximum gain from the inputs. The introduced method identifies the gain-related features on its first level and optimizes the features to improve information gain. In the second level, the error is reduced through a regression process to stabilize the precision to meet the HMI application demands. The two levels are interoperable and fully connected to achieve better gain and precision through the reduction in information processing errors. The analysis results show that the proposed method achieves 9.42% higher information gain and a 6.51% smaller error under different classification instances compared with conventional methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minjing Peng ◽  
Zhicheng Xu ◽  
Haiyang Huang

One of the advantages of e-retailers is their capability to provide a large amount of information to consumers. However, when the amount of information exceeds consumers’ information processing capacities, it will lead to worse decision quality and experience, causing the information overload effect. In this study, the event-related potentials (ERPs) were applied to examine the hidden neural mechanism of the impact of information overload on consumers’ decision processes. Behavioral data showed that people would spend more time making decisions when faced with information overload. Neurophysiologically, consumers would invest less attentional resources in the high amount of information (HAI) condition than those in the low amount of information (LAI) condition and lead to less positive P2 amplitudes. The HAI condition would increase decision difficulty than would the LAI condition and result in smaller P3 amplitudes. In addition, an increased late positive component (LPC) was observed for the HAI condition in contrast to the LAI condition, indicating that consumers were more inclined to have decision process regret when consumers were overloaded. We further investigated the dynamic information processing when consumers got over information overload by mining the brain’s time-varying networks. The results revealed that during the decision process and the neural response stage, the central area controlled other brain regions’ activities for the HAI condition, suggesting that people may still consider and compare other important information after the decision process when faced with information overload. In general, this study may provide neural evidence of how information overload affects consumers’ decision processes and ultimately damages decision quality.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keiichi Kitajo ◽  
Takumi Sase ◽  
Yoko Mizuno ◽  
Hiromichi Suetani

AbstractIt is an open question as to whether macroscopic human brain responses to repeatedly presented external inputs show consistent patterns across trials. We here provide experimental evidence that human brain responses to noisy time-varying visual inputs, as measured by scalp electroencephalography (EEG), show a signature of consistency. The results indicate that the EEG-recorded responses are robust against fluctuating ongoing activity, and that they respond to visual stimuli in a repeatable manner. This consistency presumably mediates robust information processing in the brain. Moreover, the EEG response waveforms were discriminable between individuals, and were invariant over a number of days within individuals. We reveal that time-varying noisy visual inputs can harness macroscopic brain dynamics and can manifest hidden individual variations.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guang-Zhong Wang

AbstractThe transcriptional and translational systems are essentially information processing systems. However, how to quantify the amount of information decoded during expression remains a mystery. Here, we have proposed a simple method to evaluate the amount of information transcribed and translated during gene expression. We found that although proteins with a high copy number have more information translated, the average number of bits per amino acid is not high. The negative correlation between protein copy number and bits per amino acid indicates the selective pressure to reduce translational errors. Moreover, interacting proteins have similar bits per residue translated. All of these findings highlight the importance of understanding transcription and translation from an information processing perspective.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Boyle ◽  
Melody M. Terras ◽  
Judith Ramsay ◽  
James M. E. Boyle

Despite enhanced appreciation of the nature and scope of the cognitive advantages of playing games, our understanding of the actual mechanisms responsible for generating and maintaining these remains limited. In this chapter, the authors propose that viewing these changes from the information processing perspective of executive functions will help to elucidate the psychological infrastructure that underpins these gains. They apply Anderson’s model of executive functions to understanding how games support visual-perceptual processing and higher-level thinking and problem solving. As well as extending our appreciation of how digital games can support learning, research on executive functions highlights the implications of the limitations of our cognitive systems for game design.


Author(s):  
Casey O'Callaghan

Crossmodal perceptual illusions such as ventriloquism, the McGurk effect, the rubber hand, and the sound-induced flash demonstrate that one sense can causally impact perceptual processing and experience that is associated with another sense. This chapter argues that such causal interactions between senses are not merely accidental. Interactions between senses are part of typical perceptual functioning. Unlike synesthesia, they reveal principled perceptual strategies for dealing with noisy, fallible sensory stimulation from multiple sources. Recalibrations resolve conflicts between senses and weight in deference to the more reliable modality. Coordination between senses thus improves the coherence and the reliability of human perceptual capacities. Therefore, some perceptual processes of the sort relevant to empirical psychology are multisensory.


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