The cost of seeing the meaning: Conceptual processing of distractors triggers localized target suppression

It is often assumed that conceptual information impacts visual experience only after perceptual information has been extracted. However, the present study suggests that conceptual processing can interfere with perceptual processes, as reflected in target perception impairments that are specific to the location of conceptually salient distractors. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings that emotional distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation cause a spontaneous, spatially localized impairment in target perception, further finding that distractors that are merely featurally salient do not. Experiment 2 suggested that conceptually salient distractors that are non-emotional also elicit such spatially localized impairments, which are shorter lived than those following emotional distractors. Experiment 3 suggested that featurally salient distractors that are not conceptually salient engage a different, spatial attention mechanism. Together, these findings suggest that, whereas featurally salient distractors can capture spatial attention, conceptual distractors additionally engage mechanisms that suppress spatiotemporally competing targets.     

Epistemic perceptualism and neo-sentimentalist objections

Epistemic Perceptualists claim that emotions are sources of immediate defeasible justification for evaluative propositions that can (and do) sometimes ground undefeated immediately justified evaluative beliefs. For example, fear can constitute the justificatory ground for a belief that some object or event is dangerous. Despite its attractiveness, the view is apparently vulnerable to several objections. In this paper, I provide a limited defence of Epistemic Perceptualism by responding to a family of objections which all take as a premise a popular and attractive view in value theory – Neo-Sentimentalism – according to which values are analysed in terms of fitting emotions.     

The interaction between social saliency and perceptual saliency

The ability to select visual targets in hierarchical stimuli can be affected by both perceptual saliency and social saliency. However, the functional relations between the effects are not understood. Here we examined whether these two factors interact or combine in an additive way. Participants first learnt to associate geometric shapes with three people (e.g., triangle–self, square–stranger). After learning the associations, participants were presented with compound stimuli (e.g., a global triangle formed by a set of local squares) and had to select a target at the global or local level. In Experiment 1 the task was to identify the person associated with the local or global shape. In Experiment 2 the task was simply to identify the shape. We manipulated perceptual saliency by blurring local elements to form perceptually global salient stimuli or by contrasting the colours of neighbouring local elements (red vs. white) to form perceptually local salient stimuli. In Experiment 1 (person discrimination) there was a strong effect of saliency on local targets (there were faster and more accurate responses to high than to low saliency targets) when social and perceptual saliency occurred at same level. However, both perceptual and social saliency effects were eliminated when the effect of saliency at one level competed with that at the other level. In Experiment 2 (shape discrimination), there were only effects of perceptual saliency. The data indicate that social saliency interacts with perceptual saliency when explicit social categorizations are made, consistent with both factors modulating a common process of visual selection.     

The objects of visuospatial short-term memory: Perceptual organization and change detection

We used a colour change-detection paradigm where participants were required to remember colours of six equally spaced circles. Items were superimposed on a background so as to perceptually group them within (a) an intact ring-shaped object, (b) a physically segmented but perceptually completed ring-shaped object, or (c) a corresponding background segmented into three arc-shaped objects. A nonpredictive cue at the location of one of the circles was followed by the memory items, which in turn were followed by a test display containing a probe indicating the circle to be judged same/different. Reaction times for correct responses revealed a same-object advantage; correct responses were faster to probes on the same object as the cue than to equidistant probes on a segmented object. This same-object advantage was identical for physically and perceptually completed objects, but was only evident in reaction times, and not in accuracy measures. Not only, therefore, is it important to consider object-level perceptual organization of stimulus elements when assessing the influence of a range of factors (e.g., number and complexity of elements) in visuospatial short-term memory, but a more detailed picture of the structure of information in memory may be revealed by measuring speed as well as accuracy.     

Rowing together: Interpersonal coordination dynamics with and without mechanical coupling

Although most research on interpersonal coordination focuses on perceptual forms of interaction, many interpersonal actions also involve interactions of mechanical nature. We examined the effect of mechanical coupling in a rowing task from a coupled oscillator perspective: 16 pairs of rowers rowed on ergometers that were physically connected through slides (mechanical coupling condition) or on separate ergometers (no mechanical coupling condition). They rowed in two patterns (in- and antiphase) and at two movement frequencies (20 and 30 strokes per minute). Seven out of sixteen pairs showed one or more coordinative breakdowns, which only occurred in the antiphase condition. The occurrence of these breakdowns was not affected by mechanical coupling, nor by movement frequency. For the other nine pairs, variability of steady state coordination was substantially lower in the mechanical coupling condition. Together, these results show that the increase in coupling strength through mechanical coupling stabilizes coordination, even more so for antiphase coordination.     

Spatial But Not Oculomotor Information Biases Perceptual Memory: Evidence From Face Perception and Cognitive Modeling

Recent research put forward the hypothesis that eye movements are integrated in memory representations and are reactivated when later recalled. However, “looking back to nothing” during recall might be a consequence of spatial memory retrieval. Here, we aimed at distinguishing between the effect of spatial and oculomotor information on perceptual memory. Participants’ task was to judge whether a morph looked rather like the first or second previously presented face. Crucially, faces and morphs were presented in a way that the morph reactivated oculomotor and/or spatial information associated with one of the previously encoded faces. Perceptual face memory was largely influenced by these manipulations. We considered a simple computational model with an excellent match (4.3% error) that expresses these biases as a linear combination of recency, saccade, and location. Surprisingly, saccades did not play a role. The results suggest that spatial and temporal rather than oculomotor information biases perceptual face memory.     

Is positivity a cue or a response option? Warm glow vs evaluative matching in the familiarity for attractive and not-so-attractive faces

Monin (2003) showed that the attractiveness of a face increases its perceived familiarity regardless of prior exposure, and suggested that this beautiful-is-familiar effect was due to the misattribution to familiarity of the positive affect (or “warm glow”) elicited by attractive faces. This research tests the alternative interpretation that an evaluative match between a positive stimulus (an attractive face) and a positive response (“familiar”) accounts for this effect in the absence of any misattribution. In a face recognition task, participants were led to signal their sense of familiarity with previously seen and unseen faces by selecting either a pleasant (affectively congruent) or unpleasant (affectively incongruent) image. Consistent with the warm glow heuristic, higher false alarm rates were obtained for more attractive distracters, and this effect survived (and was, if anything, stronger) when an affectively incongruent response format was used. These findings are discussed in the context of current face memory and perceptual fluency models.     

Race-specific perceptual discrimination improvement following short individuation training with faces

This study explores the effect of individuation training on the acquisition of race-specific expertise. First, we investigated whether practice individuating other-race faces yields improvement in perceptual discrimination for novel faces of that race. Second, we asked whether there was similar improvement for novel faces of a different race for which participants received equal practice, but in an orthogonal task that did not require individuation. Caucasian participants were trained to individuate faces of one race (African American or Hispanic) and to make difficult eye-luminance judgments on faces of the other race. By equating these tasks we are able to rule out raw experience, visual attention, or performance/success-induced positivity as the critical factors that produce race-specific improvements. These results indicate that individuation practice is one mechanism through which cognitive, perceptual, and/or social processes promote growth of the own-race face recognition advantage.     

Contrasting rule-based and similarity-based category learning: The effects of mood and prior knowledge on ambiguous categorization

This study adopts a dual-system view of category learning. The findings suggest that consumers who learn a dominant feature as a verbal rule for a product category will classify a new ambiguous product according to that feature even if it more closely resembles a different product category. The findings also demonstrate that dominant features can bias categorization toward a less prototypical category in the event that the new product breaks the rule. We refer to this phenomenon as criterial inferencing. Lastly, we offer unique empirical evidence to suggest that mood influences category learning and thus attenuates the criterial inferencing bias.     

The role of variation in the perception of accented speech

Phonetic variation has been considered a barrier that listeners must overcome in speech perception, but has been proved beneficial in category learning. In this paper, I show that listeners use within-speaker variation to accommodate gross categorical variation. Within the perceptual learning paradigm, listeners are exposed to p-initial words in English produced by a native speaker of French. Critically, listeners are trained on these words with either invariant or highly-variable VOTs. While a gross boundary shift is made for participants exposed to the variable VOTs, no such shift is observed after exposure to the invariant stimuli. These data suggest that increasing variation improves the mapping of perceptually mismatched stimuli.