Keeping it real: Looking beyond capacity limits in visual cognition

Research within visual cognition has made tremendous strides in uncovering the basic operating characteristics of the visual system by reducing the complexity of natural vision to artificial but well-controlled experimental tasks and stimuli. This reductionist approach has for example been used to assess the basic limitations of visual attention, visual working memory (VWM) capacity, and the fidelity of visual long-term memory (VLTM). The assessment of these limits is usually made in a pure sense, irrespective of goals, actions, and priors. While it is important to map out the bottlenecks our visual system faces, we focus here on selected examples of how such limitations can be overcome. Recent findings suggest that during more natural tasks, capacity may be higher than reductionist research suggests and that separable systems subserve different actions, such as reaching and looking, which might provide important insights about how pure attentional or memory limitations could be circumvented. We also review evidence suggesting that the closer we get to naturalistic behavior, the more we encounter implicit learning mechanisms that operate “for free” and “on the fly.” These mechanisms provide a surprisingly rich visual experience, which can support capacity-limited systems. We speculate whether natural tasks may yield different estimates of the limitations of VWM, VLTM, and attention, and propose that capacity measurements should also pass the real-world test within naturalistic frameworks. Our review highlights various approaches for this and suggests that our understanding of visual cognition will benefit from incorporating the complexities of real-world cognition in experimental approaches.

Business risks: psychological features of risk assessment in business

The risk analysis of the enterprise allows to avoid not only substantial material losses, but also irreplaceable damage and even bankruptcy. Risk is the probability of damage (loss, failure) due to the uncertainty of the result. Entrepreneurial risk arises from any type of entrepreneurial activity related to the production and sale of products, commodity-money and financial transactions. The purpose of the work to study the factors of particular entrepreneurial even risks. To achieve the stage of this goal, the following natural tasks were set optimally for energy resources: to reveal the concept of the most and the essence of entrepreneurial high risk; characterize the investment types of entrepreneurial risk; display the developmental features of the interaction classification of financial and operational optimal leverage and the estimated price of the total risk receives. Conclusion: Avoiding risk in business is almost impossible, but you can reduce the degree of risk. Risk management consists of predicting adverse events and taking measures to some extent preventing the negative consequences of these events.

The perception of colour and material in naturalistic tasks

Perceived object colour and material help us to select and interact with objects. Because there is no simple mapping between the pattern of an object's image on the retina and its physical reflectance, our perceptions of colour and material are the result of sophisticated visual computations. A long-standing goal in vision science is to describe how these computations work, particularly as they act to stabilize perceived colour and material against variation in scene factors extrinsic to object surface properties, such as the illumination. If we take seriously the notion that perceived colour and material are useful because they help guide behaviour in natural tasks, then we need experiments that measure and models that describe how they are used in such tasks. To this end, we have developed selection-based methods and accompanying perceptual models for studying perceived object colour and material. This focused review highlights key aspects of our work. It includes a discussion of future directions and challenges, as well as an outline of a computational observer model that incorporates early, known, stages of visual processing and that clarifies how early vision shapes selection performance.

The perception of color and material in naturalistic tasks

Perceived object color and material properties help us to select and interact with objects. Because there is no simple mapping between the pattern of an object’s image on the retina and its physical reflectance, our perception of color and material are made more useful through sophisticated visual computations. A long-standing goal in vision science is to describe how these computations work, particularly as they act to stabilize perceived color and material against variation in scene factors extrinsic to object surface properties, such as the illumination. If we take seriously the notion that perceived color and material are useful because they help guide behavior in natural tasks, then we need experimental that measure and models that describe how they are used in such tasks. To this end, we have developed selection-based methods and accompanying perceptual models for studying perceived object color and material. This focused review highlights key aspects of our work. It includes a discussion of future directions and challenges, as well as an outline of a computational observer model that incorporates early, known, stages of visual processing and that clarifies how early vision shapes selection performance.

The Best of Both Worlds: Adaptation During Natural Tasks Produces Long-Lasting Plasticity in Perceptual Ocular Dominance

In human vision, one eye is usually stronger than the other. This is called ocular dominance. Extremely imbalanced ocular dominance can be found among certain patient groups, for example, in patients with amblyopia. Here, we introduce a novel method to rebalance ocular dominance. We developed an altered-reality system that subjects used to interact with the natural world, the appearance of which was changed through a real-time image process. Several daily adaptation sessions lasting 3 hr each reduced sensory ocular dominance in adults who were not diagnosed with amblyopia and improved vision in patients with amblyopia. Surprising additional strengthening was found over the subsequent 2 months, when subjects experienced natural vision only. Our method effectively trains subjects to use both eyes in the wide variety of everyday tasks. The transfer of this training to everyday vision likely produced the continuing growth in effects during the months after the training. These findings are promising for the application of this method in future clinical research on amblyopia.