Location-Specific Orientation Set Is Independent of the Horizontal Benefit with or Without Object Boundaries

Chen and Cave (2019) showed that facilitation in visual comparison tasks that had previously been attributed to object-based attention could more directly be explained as facilitation in comparing two shapes that are configured horizontally rather than vertically. They also cued the orientation of the upcoming stimulus configuration without cuing its location and found an asymmetry: the orientation cue only enhanced performance for vertical configurations. The current study replicates the horizontal benefit in visual comparison and again demonstrates that it is independent of surrounding object boundaries. In these experiments, the cue is informative about the location of the target configuration as well as its orientation, and it enhances performance for both horizontal and vertical configurations; there is no asymmetry. Either a long or a short cue can enhance performance when it is valid. Thus, Chen and Cave’s cuing asymmetry seems to reflect unusual aspects of an attentional set for orientation that must be established without knowing the upcoming stimulus location. Taken together, these studies show that a location-specific cue enhances comparison independently of the horizontal advantage, while a location-nonspecific cue produces a different type of attentional set that does not enhance comparison in horizontal configurations.

Effects of Peripheral Gradient of Color Saturation on the Feeling of Being Dazzled

The feeling of being dazzled that is evoked by images consisting of an achromatic uniform center surrounded by regions with a luminance gradient was investigated. The effects of type of color saturation gradient in the peripheral region on the feeling of being dazzled were examined. Stimulus configuration was also varied. For the stimulus configuration of a disk-annulus, the feeling of being dazzled was lower for an increasing saturation gradient from the center to the periphery than for decreasing and no-saturation gradients when the center and the periphery maximum luminances were the same. This suggests that the presence of a chromaticity difference between the disk and the surrounding annulus strengthens the feeling of being dazzled. Similar results were obtained for the stimulus configuration of a star shape. For the stimulus configuration of a cross shape, quite different results were obtained; the chromaticity discontinuity had little or opposite effect. These results suggest that chromaticity border and stimulus configurations are factors in the feeling of being dazzled that is evoked by images with luminance gradient.

Utterances as tool-mediated specifications of affordances - ecological pragmatics

The established descriptions of information structure assume that the basic cognitive unit is a categorization, and that the basic semantic structure is a predication. Descriptions based on these assumptions, however, cannot provide an adequate analysis of certain types of utterances that form a part of activities. The article presents a solution to this problem based on Wittgenstein’s private language argument and the concept of information in Gibson's theory of affordances. The basic cognitive assumption is that performers of activities attend to variations in the environment, for example visibility, and perceive the states of variations (e.g., 3000 feet). A state is defined as a local, temporary occurrence of a stimulus configuration that specifies an affordance. The basic pragmatic assumption, then, is that performers of activities share the states of variations by means of utterances. This ecological-pragmatic assumption allows for a rethinking of the usefulness of the reference-predicate distinction and bring forward different dimensions of informational analysis of utterances. It is claimed that an informative and accurate analysis of utterances that form a part of activities relies two distinctions: a distinction between a convention based regulation of attention and a convention based specification of an affordance, and a distinction between sharing information and nesting information