Brighter noise: Sensory enhancement of perceived loudness by concurrent visual stimulation

Two experiments investigated the effect of concurrently presented light on the perceived loudness of a low-level burst of white noise. The results suggest two points. First, white noise presented with light tends to be rated as louder than noise presented alone. Second, the enhancement in loudness judgments is resistant to two experimental manipulations: varying the probability that light accompanies sound and shifting from a rating method to a forced choice comparison. Both manipulations were previously shown to eliminate a complementary noise-induced enhancement in ratings of brightness. Whereas noise-induced enhancement of brightness seems to reflect a late-stage decisional process, such as a response bias, the present results suggest that light-induced enhancement of loudness may reflect an early-stage sensory interaction.     

Electrophysiological correlates of the composite face illusion: Disentangling perceptual and decisional components of holistic face processing in the human brain

When the bottom halves of two faces differ, people’s behavioral judgment of the identical top halves of those faces is impaired: they report that the top halves are different, and/or take more time than usual to provide a response. This behavioral measure is known as the composite face effect (CFE) and has traditionally been taken as evidence that faces are perceived holistically. Recently, however, it has been claimed that this effect is driven almost entirely by decisional, rather than perceptual, factors ( Richler, Gauthier, Wenger, & Palmeri, 2008). To disentangle the contribution of perceptual and decisional brain processes, we aimed to obtain an event-related potential (ERP) measure of the CFE at a stage of face encoding ( Jacques & Rossion, 2009) in the absence of a behavioral CFE effect. Sixteen participants performed a go/no-go task in an oddball paradigm, lifting a finger of their right or left hand when the top half of a face changed identity. This change of identity of the top of the face was associated with an increased ERP signal on occipito-temporal electrode sites at the N170 face-sensitive component (∼160 ms), the later decisional P3b component, and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) starting at ∼350 ms. The N170 effect was observed equally early when only the unattended bottom part of the face changed, indicating that an identity change was perceived across the whole face in this condition. Importantly, there was no behavioral response bias for the bottom change trials, and no evidence of decisional biases from electrophysiological data (no P3b and LRP deflection in no-go trials). These data show that an early CFE can be measured in ERPs in the absence of any decisional response bias, indicating that the CFE reflects primarily the visual perception of the whole face.     

Effect of similarity of surround on target-letter processing

Embedding a target letter in a similar surround slowed its processing in both a distortion-detection task and an identification task. If the target was not merely similar but also identical to the surround, however, it was processed more rapidly. The present results favor a two-factor (bias, discriminability) model similar to that of Estes (1982), who also found that performance varied nonmonotonically with changes in target--surround similarity. As similarity increases, performance steadily declines because of reduced discriminability but when improves when the surround becomes identical to the target because of bias or criterion adjustment induced by the surround. Evidence is presented that the decrease in discriminability reflects feature-specific lateral inhibition (Bjork & Murray, 1977), whereas the bias factor reflects priming at encoding. As predicted by the noisy-operator theory, performance in the distortion-detection task was faster but less accurate when the target matched a letter in long-term memory than when it did not. The latter results were found when the distortion involved a missing feature but not when it involved an added inappropriate feature, which indicates that internal noise more often deleted than added features (Proctor & Rao, 1983).     

Sensory and non-sensory factors and the concept of externality in obese subjects

9 obese and 9 normal subjects performed a psychophysical task in which food- or non-food-related stimuli were briefly flashed tachistoscopically at a speed and intensity near the visual threshold. A signal was presented on one-half the trials and noise only on the other one-half of the trials. Using signal detection theory methodology, separate measures of sensory sensitivity (d') and response bias (beta) were calculated. No differences were noted between obese and normal subjects on measures of sensory sensitivity but significant differences on response bias. Obese subjects had consistently lower response criteria than normal ones. Analysis for subjects categorized by whether they were restrained or unrestrained eaters gave findings identical to those for obese and normal. The importance of using a methodology that separates sensory and non-sensory factors in research on obesity is discussed.     

The effect of psychological stress and expectation on auditory perception: A signal detection analysis

Both psychological stress and predictive signals relating to expected sensory input are believed to influence perception, an influence which, when disrupted, may contribute to the generation of auditory hallucinations. The effect of stress and semantic expectation on auditory perception was therefore examined in healthy participants using an auditory signal detection task requiring the detection of speech from within white noise. Trait anxiety was found to predict the extent to which stress influenced response bias, resulting in more anxious participants adopting a more liberal criterion, and therefore experiencing more false positives, when under stress. While semantic expectation was found to increase sensitivity, its presence also generated a shift in response bias towards reporting a signal, suggesting that the erroneous perception of speech became more likely. These findings provide a potential cognitive mechanism that may explain the impact of stress on hallucination‐proneness, by suggesting that stress has the tendency to alter response bias in highly anxious individuals. These results also provide support for the idea that top‐down processes such as those relating to semantic expectation may contribute to the generation of auditory hallucinations.     

Detection models: Experimental tests with electrocutaneous stimuli

Contemporary psychophysical procedures were employed to determine the nature of the process for detecting rectangular electrical pulses delivered to the skin. Earlier experiments had shown that the somatosensory system is exceedingly responsive to small changes in the energy of an electrocutaneous stimulus, suggesting that sensory noise may be relatively unimportant in this modality. However, a rating scale study showed that both the high-threshold theory and Luce’s low-threshold theory cannot describe the detection process. The form of the ROC curve is consistent with a signal-detection model that assumes a greater variance for the signal plus noise distribution than for the noise distribution. Additional support for signal detection theory came from an experiment that examined the likelihood of a correct second choke when the first was incorrect in a four-alternative forced-choice paradigm. Therefore, the sensory excitation caused by internal noise can sometimes be greater than the excitation produced by an added stimulus. Electrocutaneous detection differs from auditory or visual in that d’ increases at a greater rate as stimulus intensity changes.     

判断框架对时序知觉位置启动效应的影响

研究采用包含两种判断框架（判断刺激出现的先后次序）的时序判断任务探讨了决策偏向对时序知觉位置启动效应的影响。实验结果表明,时序知觉中存在着位置启动效应,而且在两个靶刺激出现时间间隔不同时,被试在“哪个靶刺激先出现”和“哪个靶刺激后出现”两种判断框架下的正确率存在显著差异,但在两个靶刺激同时出现时并没有出现显著的判断框架效应。因此,本研究推测时序知觉位置启动效应的作用机制不仅包括知觉增强加工过程,而且也与认知决策有关,这为反应偏向理论提供了新的支持证据。     

The processing of spatial frequency and orientation information

Three identification experiments were completed to disambiguate the associations between spatial frequency and orientation information at the sensory, decisional, and response levels. The stimuli were gratings generated by crossing four levels each of spatial frequency and orientation. In Experiment 1, the subjects made a single identification response to the stimuli. In Experiment 2, two identification responses were made, one for the spatial frequency component and the other for the orientation component. In Experiment 3, the subjects identified either the spatial frequency or the orientation component in any block of trials. The data were confusion matrices, and an information-transmission approach was used to investigate the interactions in the system. The results show that although there were sensory associations, there were no interactions at the decisional level. Performance parity was found: there was no significant difference between the single- and double-judgment paradigms in terms of information transmitted. Overall, the results suggest that although spatial frequency and orientation information is coded jointly at the sensory level, subsequent processing is independent, with each dimension drawing upon different attentional resources.     

Cross-modal interaction between vision and hearing: a speed-accuracy analysis

Cross-modal facilitation of response time (RT) is said to occur in a selective attention task when the introduction of an irrelevant sound increases the speed at which visual stimuli are detected and identified. To investigate the source of the facilitation in RT, we asked participants to rapidly identify the color of lights in the quiet and when accompanied by a pulse of noise. The resulting measures of accuracy and RT were used to derive speed-accuracy trade-off functions (SATFs) separately for the noise and the no-noise conditions. The two resulting SATFs have similar slopes and intercepts and, thus, can be treated as overlapping segments of a single function. That speeded identification of color with and without the presence of noise can be described by one SATF suggests, in turn, that cross-modal facilitation of RT represents a change in decision criterion induced by the auditory stimulus. Analogous changes in decision criteria might also underlie other measures of cross-modal interactions, such as auditory enhancement of brightness judgments.     

Cross-modal interaction between vision and hearing: A speed—accuracy analysis

Cross-modal facilitation of response time (RT) is said to occur in a selective attention task when the introduction of an irrelevant sound increases the speed at which visual stimuli are detected and identified. To investigate the source of the facilitation in RT, we asked participants to rapidly identify the color of lights in the quiet and when accompanied by a pulse of noise. The resulting measures of accuracy and RT were used to derive speed-accuracy trade-off functions (SATFs) separately for the noise and the no-noise conditions. The two resulting SATFs have similar slopes and intercepts and, thus, can be treated as overlapping segments of a single function. That speeded identification of color with and without the presence of noise can be described by one SATF suggests, in turn, that cross-modal facilitation of RT represents a change in decision criterion induced by the auditory stimulus. Analogous changes in decision criteria might also underlie other measures of cross-modal interactions, such as auditory enhancement of brightness judgments.     

Two experiments with artificial languages

Two experiments are reported where subjects learnt simple artificial languages which contained synonyms: i.e. there were two equally correct verbal responses paired with each “referent” in the language: “referents” were simple visual patterns. In the first experiment (a memory task) subjects performed better with material of low auditory discriminability than with material of high auditory discriminability when they were asked to use one synonym of each pair more often than the other; the reverse was the case when they were asked to use each synonym equally often. In the second experiment (a two-person communication task with a noisy channel) the degree to which pairs of subjects tended to use the same synonym for the same meaning was found to be non-monotonic with the noise level in the communication channel: subjects tended to use the same synonyms for moderately high noise and very low noise more often than they did for very high noise and moderately low noise.

The concept of decision cost (Smith, 1968) is used to explain these results. Decision cost is a complex function both of discriminability and of response bias, and it is proposed that changes in decision cost in response to changes in response bias are responsible for the results observed in these experiments.     

Recalibrating the auditory system: a speed-accuracy analysis of intensity perception

Recalibration in loudness perception refers to an adaptation-like change in relative responsiveness to auditory signals of different sound frequencies. Listening to relatively weak tones at one frequency and stronger tones at another makes the latter appear softer. The authors showed recalibration not only in magnitude estimates of loudness but also in simple response times (RTs) and choice RTs. RTs depend on sound intensity and may serve as surrogates for loudness. Most important, the speeded classification paradigm also provided measures of errors. RTs and errors can serve jointly to distinguish changes in sensitivity from changes in response criterion. The changes in choice RT under different recalibrating conditions were not accompanied by changes in error rates predicted by the speed-accuracy tade-off. These results lend support to the hypothesis that loudness recalibration does not result from shifting decisional criteria but instead reflects a change in the underlying representation of auditory intensity.     

Comparisons of some learning models for response bias in signal detection

The effects of variations in signal probability and varying degrees of correct feedback on response bias were studied in a yes-no auditory signal detection task. The main finding was that the bias towards saying yes was an increasing function of the frequency of signal feedback events, but did not depend on the correctness of the feedback. Several learning models coupled with a simple psychophysical and decision model yielded predictions about overall biases and certain sequential statistics. Only one model, which can be decribed as an “informational” model, gave a good account of both observed overall biases and sequential statistics. This model assumes the observer’s response bias is strengthened for the feedback-reinforced response when the observer’s sensory information is ambiguous or is contradicted by the feedback information.     

Gender Differences in Moral Influences on Adolescents’ Eyewitness Identification

Abstract

In this study, 232 (89 11- to 12-year-olds, 71 13- to 14-year-olds; 72 15- to 16-year-olds) students recruited from grades 6th–11th in an urban public high school participated in a study of eyewitness identification. The focus of this study was on the effects of age, gender and moral orientation on decisional bias and, as a secondary outcome, on accuracy (using signal detection analysis).The primary purpose of this and previous studies in this series is to uncover implicit moral decision-making in decisional bias. In this study the perpetrator, the bystanders and the foil were all females. Prior to completing the eyewitness identification task, participants were given instructions that emphasized either (a) fairness and crime prevention, or (b) neither. These instructions had no discernible effect on accuracy but, as in past studies, younger participants (below the age of 13) had lower decisional criteria, resulting in a higher rate of false alarms/positives. Further, those who judged the transgression as worse had a lower decisional criterion, indicating more false alarms. Females were more accurate than the males in identifying the female perpetrator and scored significantly higher on how bad they would feel if they were the victim than did the males.     

Judging confidence influences decision processing in comparative judgments

Current theories of confidence in human judgment assume that confidence and the decision it is based on are inextricably tied to the same process (decisional locus theories) or that confidence processing begins only once the primary decision has been completed (postdecisional locus theories). In the absence of auxiliary assumptions, however, neither class of theory permits the judgment of confidence to affect primary decision processing. In the present study, we examined the effect of rendering confidence judgments on the properties of the decision process in a sensory discrimination task. An examination of the properties of the time taken to determine confidence (i.e., the time taken to render the judgment of confidence) revealed clear evidence of postdecisional confidence processing. Concomitantly, the requirement of confidence judgments was found to substantially increase decisional response times, suggesting that some confidence processing occurs during the primary decision process. We discuss the implications of these findings for contemporary models of confidence in human judgment.     

Perceptual and decisional contributions to audiovisual interactions in the perception of apparent motion: a signal detection study

Motion information available to different sensory modalities can interact at both perceptual and post-perceptual (i.e., decisional) stages of processing. However, to date, researchers have only been able to demonstrate the influence of one of these components at any given time, hence the relationship between them remains uncertain. We addressed the interplay between the perceptual and post-perceptual components of information processing by assessing their influence on performance within the same experimental paradigm. We used signal detection theory to discriminate changes in perceptual sensitivity (d') from shifts in response criterion (c) in performance on a detection (Experiment 1) and a classification (Experiment 2) task regarding the direction of auditory apparent motion streams presented in noise. In the critical conditions, a visual motion distractor moving either leftward or rightward was presented together with the auditory motion. The results demonstrated a significant decrease in sensitivity to the direction of the auditory targets in the crossmodal conditions as compared to the unimodal baseline conditions that was independent of the relative direction of the visual distractor. In addition, we also observed significant shifts in response criterion, which were dependent on the relative direction of the distractor apparent motion. These results support the view that the perceptual and decisional components involved in audiovisual interactions in motion processing can coexist but are largely independent of one another.     

The nature of phoneme representation in spoken word recognition

Four experiments used the psychological refractory period logic to examine whether integration of multiple sources of phonemic information has a decisional locus. All experiments made use of a dual-task paradigm in which participants made forced-choice color categorization (Task 1) and phoneme categorization (Task 2) decisions at varying stimulus onset asynchronies. In Experiment 1, Task 2 difficulty was manipulated using words containing matching or mismatching coarticulatory cues to the final consonant. The results showed that difficulty and onset asynchrony combined in an underadditive way, suggesting that the phonemic mismatch was resolved prior to a central decisional bottleneck. Similar results were found in Experiment 2 using nonwords. In Experiment 3, the manipulation of task difficulty involved lexical status, which once again revealed an underadditive pattern of response times. Finally, Experiment 4 compared this prebottleneck variable with a decisional variable: response key bias. The latter showed an additive pattern of responses. The experiments show that resolution of phonemic ambiguity can take advantage of cognitive slack time at short asynchronies, indicating that phonemic integration takes place at a relatively early stage of spoken word recognition.     

The Effect of Social Disclosure on the Intensity of Affect Provoked by Autobiographical Memories

Affect associated with negative autobiographical memories fades faster over time than affect associated with positive autobiographical memories (the fading affect bias). Data described in the present article suggest that this bias is observed when people use their own words to describe both the emotions that they originally felt in response to events in their lives and the emotions that they feel when they recall those events. The data also suggest that the fading affect bias is not a consequence of distortion in memory for the emotions experienced at event occurrence, but instead reflects current affective responses to memories for those events. Moreover, this bias has a social component. Frequently disclosed memories evince a stronger fading affect bias than less frequently disclosed memories. Memories disclosed to many types of people evince a stronger fading affect bias than memories disclosed to few types of people. Finally, the relation between social disclosure and fading affect appears to be causal: the results of an experiment demonstrate that social disclosure decreases the fading of pleasant affect and increases the fading of unpleasant affect associated with autobiographical memories.     

Sun protective behaviour,optimism bias,and the transtheoretical model of behaviour change

This study investigated the relationship between sun protective behaviours and three psychological variables influencing health behaviour: decisional balance, optimism bias, and the transtheoretical model of behaviour change. Two hundred participants completed the ‘Readiness to Alter Sun Protective Behaviour’ questionnaire, and a short questionnaire investigating optimism bias, decisional balance, attitudes, and experiences of sun protection and skin cancer. Participants were evenly distributed between the precontemplation, contemplation, and action stages. Participants in the action stage were significantly more likely to endorse the perceived advantages associated with sun protective behaviour than participants in the precontemplation and contemplation stages. They also reported sunbathing significantly less—and being more concerned about contracting skin cancer—than participants in the earlier stages. Decisional balance and optimism bias scores varied systematically across the stages of change; however, decisional balance was the only significant psychological predictor of sun protective behaviours. Optimism bias was greatest in the precontemplation stage, whereas the action stage was characterised by more positive attitudes to sun protection. This suggests that knowledge of the real risks of skin cancer might be a precursor to behaviour change, but only a change in attitudes results in a move to the action stage and measurable behaviour change.     

Independence and separability of volume and mass in the size-weight illusion

Numerous size-weight illusion models were classified in the present article according to general recognition theory (Ashby & Townsend, 1986), wherein the illusion results from a lack of perceptual separability, perceptual independence, decisional separability, or a combination of the three. These options were tested in two experiments in which a feature-complete factorial design and multidimensional signal detection analysis were used (Kadlec & Townsend, 1992a, 1992b). With haptic touch alone, the illusion was associated with a lack of perceptual and decisional separability. When the participant viewed the stimulus in his or her hand, the illusion was associated only with a lack of decisional separability. Visual input appeared to improve the discrimination of mass, leaving only the response bias due to expectation.