Quantity perception: The forest and the trees

Park (2021) has described “flawed stimulus design(s)” in our recent studies on area perception. Here, we briefly respond to those critiques. While the rigorous, computational approaches taken by Park (and others) certainly have value, we believe that our approach — one that focuses the perceptual reality of quantity rather than the physical reality — is essential. We emphasize again (as we have many times in our work) that the study of quantity perception benefits from both approaches. To further illustrate our point, we collected additional data and show that some of Park’s arguments, while sensible in principle, further support our view in practice.

Measuring Distortion-Product Otoacoustic Emission With a Single Loudspeaker in the Ear: Stimulus Design and Signal Processing Techniques

The distortion-product otoacoustic emission (DPOAE) is a backward propagating wave generated inside the cochlea during the wave amplification process. The DPOAE signal can be detected rapidly under relatively noisy conditions. In recent years, the earphone industry demonstrated interest in adopting DPOAE as an add-on feature to make their product “intelligent” of inner-ear status. However, a technical challenge remains to be tackled—the loudspeaker in an earphone generates its own cubic distortion at the same frequency as DPOAE. Unfortunately, the intensity of loudspeaker distortion is typically comparable to that of the DPOAE, if not higher. In this research, we propose two strategies, namely compensation and cancellation, to enable DPOAE measurement with a single loudspeaker. The compensation strategy exploits the part of the growth function of the loudspeaker distortion which is almost linear, and thus suppresses the distortion it generates while retaining a larger portion of DPOAE in the residual signal. The cancellation strategy utilizes a one-dimensional Volterra filter to remove the cubic distortion from the loudspeaker. Testing on normal-hearing ears shows that the compensation strategy improved the DPOAE-to-interference ratio by approximately 7 dB, resulting in a cross-correlation of 0.62 between the residual DPOAE level and the true DPOAE level. Meanwhile, the cancellation strategy directly recovered both the magnitude and the phase of DPOAE, reducing the magnitude estimation error from 15.5 dB to 3.9 dB in the mean-square sense. These pilot results suggest that the cancellation strategy may be suitable for further testing with more subjects.

Forward Entrainment: Evidence, Controversies, Constraints, and Mechanisms

We define forward entrainment as that part of the entrainment process that outlasts the entraining stimulus. In this study, we examine conditions under which one may or may not observe forward entrainment. In part 1, we review and evaluate studies that have observed forward entrainment using a variety of psychophysical methods (detection, discrimination and reaction times), different target stimuli (tones, noise, gaps), different entraining sequences (sinusoidal, rectangular or sawtooth waveforms), a variety of physiological measures (MEG, EEG, ECoG, CSD), in different modalities (auditory and visual), across modalities (audiovisual and auditory-motor), and in different species. In part 2, we review those studies that have failed to observe forward entrainment, with emphasis on evaluating the methodological and stimulus design differences that may clarify the contrasting findings across these two classes of studies. In part 3, we describe those experimental conditions under which we ourselves have failed to observe forward entrainment, and provide new data on use of complex envelope patterns as entraining stimuli, show data on intersubject variability, and provide new findings on psychometric functions that characterize the strength of forward entrainment at different SNRs. In part 4 we theorize on potential mechanisms, describe how neurophysiological and psychophysical studies approach the study of entrainment, and caution against drawing direct causal inferences between the two without compelling evidence beyond correlative measures.

Flawed stimulus design in additive-area heuristic studies

Studying magnitude perception using visual item arrays is notoriously difficult due to the intricate relationship between various dimensions including number, area, density, etc. When item arrays are constructed with a skewed and unbalanced distribution of their dimensional properties, false conclusions are easily made. This kind of flawed stimulus design was identified in a series of recently published studies that argue for an additive-area heuristic whereby people are more sensitive to the sum of the vertical and horizontal element axes in each item than the sum of the mathematical area of each item. By analyzing the dimensional properties of the stimuli used in the original studies (e.g., Yousif & Keil, 2019) using the mathematical framework for constructing stimulus parameters (DeWind et al., 2015) and by re-analyzing the data from another previous work on area judgment (Tomlinson et al., 2020), this paper demonstrates how skewed and unbalanced stimulus sampling leads to false conclusions.

Aspects of Industrial Design and Their Implications for Society. Case Studies on the Influence of Packaging Design and Placement at the Point of Sale

Manufacturing engineering is responsible for the design, development and improvement of production systems that convert raw materials into finished products. Each product is designed to be sold to numerous potential consumers, so the importance of the stimuli surrounding the product in packaging, and at the point of sale, cannot be underestimated. The environmental, social, and ethical commitments of industrial design (and their implications in manufacturing) are establishing universal principles in a common effort to foster a more harmonious and sustainable society. This work aims to analyse, through eye tracking biometric techniques, the level of saturation of information generated by the concentration of stimuli in packaging and the retail channel, possibly creating a lower level of attention towards the product itself. This research confirms that every product associated with a manufacturing process seeks to respond to a need, so the associated responsibility is significant. This would suggest that designers incorporate knowledge from multiple fields, including marketing strategies, design, research and development, basic knowledge related to production, integration management and communication skills. More than 50% of consumer attention is dedicated to other elements/items that accompany the product, so it is important to consider this in the design phase. The results can be used to improve efficiency in both generating product attention, and stimulus design for the purchasing process.

Captivating color: evidence for optimal stimulus design in a polymorphic prey lure

Araneid spiders use abstract color patterns to attract prey. The chromatic properties of these displays vary extensively, both within and across species, and they are frequently polymorphic. Variation is often expressed in terms of signal hue (color per se), but it is unclear precisely how attractiveness scales with this property. We assessed captures among color-manipulated females of the dimorphic jeweled spider Gasteracantha fornicata in their natural webs. The manipulation magnified the natural variation in stimulus hue independently of chroma (saturation) across a range spanning most of the color spectrum. Catch rate varied across treatments in simple accordance with how greatly stimulus hue deviated from either of the two extant phenotypes. Predictions based upon fly-perceived background contrast were unsupported despite dipterans constituting ~60 % of prey. This study isolates the importance of stimulus hue and supports the premise that extant phenotypes reside in an optimal spectral range for prey attraction.

Global Neural Activities Changes under Human Inhibitory Control Using Translational Scenario

This study presents a new approach to exploring human inhibition in a realistic scenario. In previous inhibition studies, the stimulus design of go/no-go task generally used a simple symbol for the go and stop signals. We can understand the neural activity of inhibition through simple symbol scenario. In the real world, situations of human inhibition are more complex than performing an experiment in the laboratory scale. How to explore the neural activities of inhibition in a realistic environment is more complex. Consequently, we designed a battlefield scenario to investigate the neural activities of inhibition in a more realistic environmental setting. The battlefield scenario provides stronger emotion, motivation and real-world experiences for participants during inhibition. In the battlefield scenario, the signs of fixation, go and stop were replaced by images of a sniper scope, a target and a non-target. The battlefield scenario is a shooting game between the enemy and the soldiers. In battlefield scenario participants played the role of the soldiers for shooting target and to stop shooting when a non-target appeared. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals from twenty participants were acquired and analyzed using independent component analysis (ICA) and dipole source localization method. The results of event-related potential (ERP) showed a significant modulation of the peaks N1, N2 and P3 in the frontal and cingulate cortices under inhibitory control. The partially overlapping ERP N2 and P3 waves were associated with inhibition in the frontal cortex. The ERP N2, N1 and P3 waves in the cingulate cortex are related to sustained attention, motivation, emotion and inhibitory control. In addition, the event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) results shows that the powers of the delta and theta bands increased significantly in the frontal and cingulate cortices under human inhibitory control. The EEG-ERP waves and power spectra in the frontal and cingulate cortices were found more increased than in the parietal, occipital, left and right motor cortices after successful stop. These findings provide new insights to understand the global neural activities changes during human inhibitory control with realistic environmental scenario.