scholarly journals Auditory speed processing in sighted and blind individuals

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. e0257676
Author(s):  
Giorgia Bertonati ◽  
Maria Bianca Amadeo ◽  
Claudio Campus ◽  
Monica Gori
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Discrimination Performance ◽  
Temporal Cues ◽  
Stimulus Speed ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Speed Perception ◽  
Speed Discrimination ◽  
The Time Domain ◽  
Blind Individuals ◽  
The Relationship

Multisensory experience is crucial for developing a coherent perception of the world. In this context, vision and audition are essential tools to scaffold spatial and temporal representations, respectively. Since speed encompasses both space and time, investigating this dimension in blindness allows deepening the relationship between sensory modalities and the two representation domains. In the present study, we hypothesized that visual deprivation influences the use of spatial and temporal cues underlying acoustic speed perception. To this end, ten early blind and ten blindfolded sighted participants performed a speed discrimination task in which spatial, temporal, or both cues were available to infer moving sounds’ velocity. The results indicated that both sighted and early blind participants preferentially relied on temporal cues to determine stimuli speed, by following an assumption that identified as faster those sounds with a shorter duration. However, in some cases, this temporal assumption produces a misperception of the stimulus speed that negatively affected participants’ performance. Interestingly, early blind participants were more influenced by this misleading temporal assumption than sighted controls, resulting in a stronger impairment in the speed discrimination performance. These findings demonstrate that the absence of visual experience in early life increases the auditory system’s preference for the time domain and, consequentially, affects the perception of speed through audition.

scholarly journals Barycenter Theorem in Phase Characteristics of Symmetric and Asymmetric Windows

Symmetry ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 329
Author(s):  
Jiufei Luo ◽  
Haitao Xu ◽  
Kai Zheng ◽  
Xinyi Li ◽  
Song Feng
Keyword(s):  
Frequency Estimation ◽  
Random Noise ◽  
Estimation Algorithm ◽  
Frequency Component ◽  
Phase Response ◽  
Numeric Simulation ◽  
Simulation Results ◽  
The Time Domain ◽  
Short Time ◽  
The Relationship

Asymmetric windows are of increasing interest to researchers because of the nonlinear and adjustable phase response, as well as alterable time delay. Short-time phase distortion can provide an essential improvement in speech coding, and also has better performance in speech recognition. The merits of asymmetric windows in the aspect of spectral behaviors have an important function in frequency component detection and parameter estimation. In this paper, the phase response of windows were further studied, and the phase characteristics of symmetric and asymmetric windows are described. The relationship between the barycenter of windows in the time domain, and the phase characteristic at the center of the main lobe in the frequency domain, was established. In light of the relationship, an improved version of the asymmetric window- based frequency estimation algorithm was proposed. The improved algorithm has advantages of straightforward implementation and computational efficiency. The numeric simulation results also indicate that the improved approach is more robust than the traditional method against additive random noise.

scholarly journals Which hand is mine? Discriminating body ownership perception in a two-alternative forced choice task

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Chancel ◽  
H. Henrik Ehrsson
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Forced Choice ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Spatial Congruence ◽  
Perception Action

The experience of one’s body as one’s own is referred to as the sense of body ownership. This central part of human conscious experience determines the boundary between the self and the external environment, a crucial distinction in perception, action, and cognition. Although body ownership is known to involve the integration of signals from multiple sensory modalities, including vision, touch and proprioception, little is known about the principles that determine this integration process, and the relationship between body ownership and perception is unclear. These uncertainties stem from the lack of a sensitive and rigorous method to quantify body ownership. Here, we describe a two-alternative forced choice discrimination task that allows precise and direct measurement of body ownership as participants decide which of two rubber hands feels more like their own in a version of the rubber hand illusion. In two experiments, we show that the temporal and spatial congruence principles of multisensory stimulation, which determine ownership discrimination, impose tighter constraints than previously thought and that texture congruence constitutes an additional principle; these findings are compatible with theoretical models of multisensory integration. Taken together, our results suggest that body ownership constitutes a genuine perceptual multisensory phenomenon that can be quantified with psychophysics in discrimination experiments.

scholarly journals Subliminal audio-visual congruency enhances perceptual pleasure

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chenyang Lin ◽  
Maggie Yeh ◽  
ladan shams
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Temporal Alignment ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Temporal Aspect ◽  
The Relationship

Human perception is inherently multisensory, with cross-modal integration playing a critical role in generating a coherent perceptual experience. To understand the causes of pleasurable experiences, we must understand whether and how the relationship between separate sensory modalities influences our experience of pleasure. We investigated the effect of congruency between vision and audition in the form of temporal alignment between the cuts in a video and the beats in an accompanying soundtrack. Despite the subliminal nature of the manipulation, a higher perceptual pleasure was found for temporal congruency compared with incongruency. These results suggest that the temporal aspect of the interaction between the visual and auditory modalities plays a critical role in shaping our perceptual pleasure, even when such interaction is not accessible to conscious awareness.

scholarly journals Shared understanding of color among congenitally blind and sighted adults

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Sein Kim ◽  
Brianna Aheimer ◽  
Veronica Montane Manrara ◽  
Marina Bedny
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Causal Explanations ◽  
Stop Sign ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
Novel Objects ◽  
Blind Individuals

Empiricist philosophers such as Locke famously argued that people born blind could only acquire shallow, fragmented facts about color. Contrary to this intuition, we report that blind and sighted people share an in-depth understanding of color, despite disagreeing about arbitrary color facts. Relative to the sighted, blind individuals are less likely to generate ‘yellow’ for banana and ‘red’ for stop-sign. However, blind and sighted adults are equally likely to infer that two bananas (natural kinds) and two stop-signs (artifacts with functional colors) are more likely to have the same color than two cars (artifacts with non-functional colors), make similar inferences about novel objects’ colors, and provide similar causal explanations. We argue that people develop inferentially-rich and intuitive “theories” of color regardless of visual experience. Linguistic communication is more effective at aligning people’s theories than their knowledge of verbal facts.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Berit Brogaard ◽  
Dimitria Electra Gatzia
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
Action Perception ◽  
Event Perception ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
The Relationship

This volume explores questions not only related to traditional sensory perception, but also to proprioceptive, interoceptive, multisensory, and event perception, expanding traditional notions of the influence that conscious non-visual experience has on human behavior and rationality. Some essays investigate the role that emotions play in decision-making and agential perception and what this means for justifications of belief and knowledge; analyze the notion that some sensory experiences, such as touch, have epistemic privilege over others, as well as the relationship between perception and introspection, and the relationship between action perception and belief; and engage with topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, exploring the role that artworks can play in providing us with perceptional knowledge of emotions.

scholarly journals Which words are most iconic?

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bodo Winter ◽  
Marcus Perlman ◽  
Lynn K. Perry ◽  
Gary Lupyan
Keyword(s):  
Native Speaker ◽  
Statistical Regularity ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Spoken Words ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Taste And Smell ◽  
Shed Light

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.

scholarly journals Attenuation of waves in a viscoelastic peridynamic medium

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (11) ◽  
pp. 3597-3613 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. A. Silling
Keyword(s):  
Attenuation Coefficient ◽  
Material Properties ◽  
Cutoff Frequency ◽  
Material Model ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Spatial Nonlocality ◽  
Dissipative Material ◽  
The Time Domain ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theoretical Results

The effect of spatial nonlocality on the decay of waves in a dissipative material is investigated. The propagation and decay of waves in a one-dimensional, viscoelastic peridynamic medium is analyzed. Both the elastic and damping terms in the material model are nonlocal. Waves produced by a source with constant amplitude applied at one end of a semi-infinite bar decay exponentially with distance from the source. The model predicts a cutoff frequency that is influenced by the nonlocal parameters. A method for computing the attenuation coefficient explicitly as a function of material properties and source frequency is presented. The theoretical results are compared with direct numerical simulations in the time domain. The relationship between the attenuation coefficient and the group velocity is derived. It is shown that in the limit of long waves (or small peridynamic horizon), Stokes’ law of sound attenuation is recovered.

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