A Computational Feedforward Model Predicts Categorization of Masked Emotional Body Language for Longer, but Not for Shorter, Latencies

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (7) ◽  
pp. 1806-1821
Author(s):  
Bernard M. C. Stienen ◽  
Konrad Schindler ◽  
Beatrice de Gelder

Given the presence of massive feedback loops in brain networks, it is difficult to disentangle the contribution of feedforward and feedback processing to the recognition of visual stimuli, in this case, of emotional body expressions. The aim of the work presented in this letter is to shed light on how well feedforward processing explains rapid categorization of this important class of stimuli. By means of parametric masking, it may be possible to control the contribution of feedback activity in human participants. A close comparison is presented between human recognition performance and the performance of a computational neural model that exclusively modeled feedforward processing and was engineered to fulfill the computational requirements of recognition. Results show that the longer the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), the closer the performance of the human participants was to the values predicted by the model, with an optimum at an SOA of 100 ms. At short SOA latencies, human performance deteriorated, but the categorization of the emotional expressions was still above baseline. The data suggest that, although theoretically, feedback arising from inferotemporal cortex is likely to be blocked when the SOA is 100 ms, human participants still seem to rely on more local visual feedback processing to equal the model's performance.

2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Aguado ◽  
Ana Garcia-Gutierrez ◽  
Ester Castañeda ◽  
Cristina Saugar

Priming of affective word evaluation by pictures of faces showing positive and negative emotional expressions was investigated in two experiments that used a double task procedure where participants were asked to respond to the prime or to the target on different trials. The experiments varied between-subjects the prime task assignment and the prime-target interval (SOA, stimulus onset asynchrony). Significant congruency effects (that is, faster word evaluation when prime and target had the same valence than when they were of opposite valence) were observed in both experiments. When the prime task oriented the subjects to an affectively irrelevant property of the faces (their gender), priming was observed at SOA 300 ms but not at SOA 1000 ms (Experiment 1). However, when the prime task assignment explicitly oriented the subjects to the valence of the face, priming was observed at both SOA durations (Experiment 2). These results show, first, that affective priming by pictures of facial emotion can be obtained even when the subject has an explicit goal to process a non-affective property of the prime. Second, sensitivity of the priming effect to SOA duration seems to depend on whether it is mediated by intentional or unintentional activation of the valence of the face prime.


1989 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 849-876 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Balota ◽  
Janet M. Duchek

Seventy-two young (mean age = 25 years) and 72 old adults (mean age = 71 years) participated in an experiment that addressed the influence of episodic and semantic prime activation on speeded episodic recognition judgements. On each test block, subjects studied two paragraphs at their own pace to achieve a designated level of episodic recognition performance. Following the study period, subjects were presented a series of prime–target trials for speeded episodic recognition. The primes were either (a) episodically related to the target, (b) semantically related to the target, (c) episodically and semantically related to the target, or (d) episodically and semantically unrelated to the target. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the primes and targets was either 200 msec, 600 msec, or 1000 msec to address age-related changes in the rate at which these different prime types influenced performance. The results indicated that, compared to young adults, the old adults (a) studied the paragraphs for a longer period of time, (b) responded to the targets more slowly, and (c) were less accurate in their episodic recognition decisions. Although there were these main effects of age, the young and old adults were influenced in a similar fashion by the different prime-target relationships and by the interactive influences of the prime–target relationships and SOA. Correlational analyses indicated that the pattern of priming effects was as similar across the two age groups as across two pseudo-groups that were matched on the age dimension. These results were viewed as further support for the notion that the characteristics of the spreading activation mechanism as reflected by prime–target manipulations are relatively stable across young and old adults.


1975 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 791-796 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Abresch ◽  
Viktor Sarris

Perceptual contrast effect was studied from two points of view, as a special anchor effect and as a special figural aftereffect. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of stimulus onset asynchrony on contrast and assimilation effects, induced and measured by different psychophysical methods. Stimuli were circular beams of light projected on screens (Delboef type of illusion). When anchor and series stimuli were shown and the latter were judged by means of a rating scale, stimulus onset asychrony had no substantial influence on the contrast effect (Exp. I). When the constant method was applied, however, the asynchrony altered the shape of the contrast effect considerably (Exp. II).


1986 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette M.B. de Groot ◽  
Arnold J.W.M. Thomassen ◽  
Patrick T.W. Hudson

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ciara K. Kidder ◽  
Katherine R. White ◽  
Michelle R. Hinojos ◽  
Mayra Sandoval ◽  
Stephen L. Crites

Psychological interest in stereotype measurement has spanned nearly a century, with researchers adopting implicit measures in the 1980s to complement explicit measures. One of the most frequently used implicit measures of stereotypes is the sequential priming paradigm. The current meta-analysis examines stereotype priming, focusing specifically on this paradigm. To contribute to ongoing discussions regarding methodological rigor in social psychology, one primary goal was to identify methodological moderators of the stereotype priming effect—whether priming is due to a relation between the prime and target stimuli, the prime and target response, participant task, stereotype dimension, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and stimuli type. Data from 39 studies yielded 87 individual effect sizes from 5,497 participants. Analyses revealed that stereotype priming is significantly moderated by the presence of prime–response relations, participant task, stereotype dimension, target stimulus type, SOA, and prime repetition. These results carry both practical and theoretical implications for future research on stereotype priming.


2016 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 2125-2139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Teichert ◽  
Kate Gurnsey ◽  
Dean Salisbury ◽  
Robert A. Sweet

Auditory refractoriness refers to the finding of smaller electroencephalographic (EEG) responses to tones preceded by shorter periods of silence. To date, its physiological mechanisms remain unclear, limiting the insights gained from findings of abnormal refractoriness in individuals with schizophrenia. To resolve this roadblock, we studied auditory refractoriness in the rhesus, one of the most important animal models of auditory function, using grids of up to 32 chronically implanted cranial EEG electrodes. Four macaques passively listened to sounds whose identity and timing was random, thus preventing animals from forming valid predictions about upcoming sounds. Stimulus onset asynchrony ranged between 0.2 and 12.8 s, thus encompassing the clinically relevant timescale of refractoriness. Our results show refractoriness in all 8 previously identified middle- and long-latency components that peaked between 14 and 170 ms after tone onset. Refractoriness may reflect the formation and gradual decay of a basic sensory memory trace that may be mirrored by the expenditure and gradual recovery of a limited physiological resource that determines generator excitability. For all 8 components, results were consistent with the assumption that processing of each tone expends ∼65% of the available resource. Differences between components are caused by how quickly the resource recovers. Recovery time constants of different components ranged between 0.5 and 2 s. This work provides a solid conceptual, methodological, and computational foundation to dissect the physiological mechanisms of auditory refractoriness in the rhesus. Such knowledge may, in turn, help develop novel pharmacological, mechanism-targeted interventions.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. e0251117
Author(s):  
Andrea Polzien ◽  
Iris Güldenpenning ◽  
Matthias Weigelt

In many kinds of sports, deceptive actions are frequently used to hamper the anticipation of an opponent. The head fake in basketball is often applied to deceive an observer regarding the direction of a pass. To perform a head fake, a basketball player turns the head in one direction, but passes the ball to the opposite direction. Several studies showed that reactions to passes with head fakes are slower and more error-prone than to passes without head fakes (head-fake effect). The aim of a basketball player is to produce a head-fake effect for as large as possible in the opponent. The question if the timing of the deceptive action influences the size of the head-fake effect has not yet been examined systematically. The present study investigated if the head-fake effect depends on the temporal lag between the head turn and the passing movement. To this end, the stimulus onset asynchrony between head turn, and pass was varied between 0 and 800 ms. The results showed the largest effect when the head turn precedes the pass by 300 ms. This result can be explained better by facilitating the processing of passes without head fake than by making it more difficult to process passes with a head fake. This result is discussed regarding practical implications and conclusions about the underlying mechanism of the head–fake effect in basketball are drawn.


2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Makoto Kusunoki ◽  
Natasha Sigala ◽  
Hamed Nili ◽  
David Gaffan ◽  
John Duncan

The pFC plays a key role in flexible, context-specific decision making. One proposal [Machens, C. K., Romo, R., & Brody, C. D. Flexible control of mutual inhibition: A neural model of two-interval discrimination. Science, 307, 1121–1124, 2005] is that prefrontal cells may be dynamically organized into opponent coding circuits, with competitive groups of cells coding opposite behavioral decisions. Here, we show evidence for extensive, temporally evolving opponent organization in the monkey pFC during a cued target detection task. More than a half of all randomly selected cells discriminated stimulus category in this task. The largest set showed target-positive activity, with the strongest responses to the current target, intermediate activity for a nontarget that was a target on other trials, and lowest activity for nontargets never associated with the target category. Second most frequent was a reverse, antitarget pattern. In the ventrolateral frontal cortex, opponent organization was strongly established in phasic responses at stimulus onset; later, such activity was widely spread across dorsolateral and ventrolateral sites. Task-specific organization into opponent cell groups may be a general feature of prefrontal decision making.


Perception ◽  
10.1068/p5844 ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (10) ◽  
pp. 1455-1464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Harrar ◽  
Laurence R Harris

Gestalt rules that describe how visual stimuli are grouped also apply to sounds, but it is unknown if the Gestalt rules also apply to tactile or uniquely multimodal stimuli. To investigate these rules, we used lights, touches, and a combination of lights and touches, arranged in a classic Ternus configuration. Three stimuli (A, B, C) were arranged in a row across three fingers. A and B were presented for 50 ms and, after a delay, B and C were presented for 50 ms. Subjects were asked whether they perceived AB moving to BC (group motion) or A moving to C (element motion). For all three types of stimuli, at short delays, A to C dominated, while at longer delays AB to BC dominated. The critical delay, where perception changed from group to element motion, was significantly different for the visual Ternus (3 lights, 162 ms) and the tactile Ternus (3 touches, 195 ms). The critical delay for the multimodal Ternus (3 light – touch pairs, 161 ms) was not different from the visual or tactile Ternus effects. In a second experiment, subjects were exposed to 2.5 min of visual group motion (stimulus onset asynchrony = 300 ms). The exposure caused a shift in the critical delay of the visual Ternus, a trend in the same direction for the multimodal Ternus, but no shift in the tactile Ternus. These results suggest separate but similar grouping rules for visual, tactile, and multimodal stimuli.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document