The Influence of Cognitive Load on Distractor-Response Bindings

Binding theories postulate an integration of stimulus and response features into temporary episodic traces or event files. In general, in the visual binding literature, attention is considered to be necessary to feature binding, and a higher cognitive load can lead to worse performance. On the other hand, in stimulus-response binding theories, central attention is not regarded as necessary in binding effects. A possible discrepancy between the visual feature binding findings and the findings in stimulus-response binding studies could lie in the amount of central load implemented, whereas another discrepancy was related to a specific type of process that was manipulated. In the present study, load was manipulated in three levels, such as no load, low load, and high load, and the binding effects were tested under each condition. Load was manipulated by using a secondary task, which was to be carried out simultaneously with the primary task. Additionally, the influence of targeting different working memory processes (maintenance and updating) was examined by varying the time point of the presentation of the secondary task. The results indicate that, under high load, binding effects are observed if memory contents are merely maintained, but not observed when memory contents are actively updated.

Effects Of Within-Modal Congruency, Cross-Modal Congruency, And Temporal Asynchrony On The Perception Of Percieved Audio-Visual Distance

When making decisions as to whether or not to bind auditory and visual information, temporal, spatial and congruency factors all contribute to the acceptance or rejection of multi-modal unity. While many of these factors have been studied in isolation, it is important to examine how they interact in a dynamic setting, in addition to evaluating ideas about the intrinsic relation between audition and the processing of time, and vision and the processing of space. Four experiments are presented, placing auditory and visual stimuli in a competitive binding scenario, to compare the effects of temporal and spatial factors both within and between modalities. Results support the dominance of auditory factors in temporal decision-making, and visual factors in spatial decision-making, with additional evidence for the presence of visual looming. With respect to audio-visual binding, the findings indicate precedence for temporal factors, with reliance on congruency factors only when the stimulus pairings are temporally ambiguous.

Effects Of Within-Modal Congruency, Cross-Modal Congruency, And Temporal Asynchrony On The Perception Of Percieved Audio-Visual Distance

When making decisions as to whether or not to bind auditory and visual information, temporal, spatial and congruency factors all contribute to the acceptance or rejection of multi-modal unity. While many of these factors have been studied in isolation, it is important to examine how they interact in a dynamic setting, in addition to evaluating ideas about the intrinsic relation between audition and the processing of time, and vision and the processing of space. Four experiments are presented, placing auditory and visual stimuli in a competitive binding scenario, to compare the effects of temporal and spatial factors both within and between modalities. Results support the dominance of auditory factors in temporal decision-making, and visual factors in spatial decision-making, with additional evidence for the presence of visual looming. With respect to audio-visual binding, the findings indicate precedence for temporal factors, with reliance on congruency factors only when the stimulus pairings are temporally ambiguous.

Spatial Relations Trigger Visual Binding of People

To navigate the social world, humans must represent social entities and the relationships between those entities, starting with spatial relationships. Recent research suggests that two bodies are processed with particularly high efficiency in visual perception, when they are in a spatial positioning that cues interaction, that is, close and face-to-face. Socially relevant spatial relations such as facingness may facilitate visual perception by triggering grouping of bodies into a new integrated percept, which would make the stimuli more visible and easier to process. We used EEG and a frequency-tagging paradigm to measure a neural correlate of grouping (or visual binding), while female and male participants saw images of two bodies face-to-face or back-to-back. The two bodies in a dyad flickered at frequency F1 and F2, respectively, and appeared together at a third frequency Fd (dyad frequency). This stimulation should elicit a periodic neural response for each body at F1 and F2, and a third response at Fd, which would be larger for face-to-face (vs. back-to-back) bodies, if those stimuli yield additional integrative processing. Results showed that responses at F1 and F2 were higher for upright than for inverted bodies, demonstrating that our paradigm could capture neural activity associated with viewing bodies. Crucially, the response to dyads at Fd was larger for face-to-face (vs. back-to-back) dyads, suggesting integration mediated by grouping. We propose that spatial relations that recur in social interaction (i.e., facingness) promote binding of multiple bodies into a new representation. This mechanism can explain how the visual system contributes to integrating and transforming the representation of disconnected body shapes into structured representations of social events.

Spatial relations trigger visual binding of people

To navigate the social world, humans must represent social entities, and the relationships between those entities, starting with the spatial relationships. Recent research suggests that two bodies are processed with particularly high efficiency in visual perception, when they are in a spatial positioning that cues interaction, i.e. close and face-to-face. Socially relevant spatial relations such as facingness may facilitate visual perception by triggering grouping of bodies into a new integrated percept, which would make the stimuli more visible and easier to process. We used electroencephalography and a frequency-tagging paradigm to measure a neural correlate of grouping (or visual binding), while female and male participants saw images of two bodies face-to-face or back-to-back. The two bodies in a dyad flickered at the frequencies F1 and F2, respectively, and appeared together at a third frequency Fd (dyad frequency). This stimulation should elicit a periodic neural response for each single body at F1 and F2, and a third response at Fd, which would be larger for face-to-face (vs. back-to-back) bodies, if those stimuli yield additional integrative processing. Results showed that responses at F1 and F2 were higher for upright than for inverted bodies, demonstrating that our paradigm could capture body-specific activity. Crucially, the response to dyads at Fd was larger for face-to-face (vs. back-to-back) dyads, suggesting integration mediated by grouping. Thus, spatial relations that recur in social interaction (i.e., facingness) may promote binding of multiple bodies into a new representation. This mechanism can explain how the visual system contributes to integrating and transforming the representation of disconnected individual body-shapes into structured representations of social events.

The Dynamic Double Flash Illusion: Auditory Triggered Replay of Illusory Visual Expansion

In the original double flash illusion, a visual flash (e.g., a sharp-edged disk, or uniformly filled circle) presented with two short auditory tones (beeps) is often followed by an illusory flash. The illusory flash has been previously shown to be triggered by the second auditory beep. The current study extends the double flash illusion by showing that this paradigm can not only create the illusory repeat of an on-off flash, but also trigger an illusory expansion (and in some cases a subsequent contraction) that is induced by the flash of a circular brightness gradient (gradient disk) to replay as well. The perception of the dynamic double flash illusion further supports the interpretation of the illusory flash (in the double flash illusion) as similar in its spatial and temporal properties to the perception of the real visual flash, likely by replicating the neural processes underlying the illusory expansion of the real flash. We show further that if a gradient disk (generating an illusory expansion) and a sharp-edged disk are presented simultaneously side by side with two sequential beeps, often only one visual stimulus or the other will be perceived to double flash. This indicates selectivity in auditory–visual binding, suggesting the usefulness of this paradigm as a psychophysical tool for investigating crossmodal binding phenomena.