An official website of the United States government
Perception and action interact in nearly every moment of daily life. Previous studies have demonstrated not only that perceptual input shapes action but also that various factors associated with action—including individual abilities and biomechanical costs—influence perceptual decisions. However, it is unknown how action fluency affects the sensitivity of early-stage visual perception, such as orientation. To address this question, we used a dual-task paradigm: Participants prepared an action (e.g., grasping), while concurrently performing an orientation-change-detection task. We demonstrated that as actions became more fluent (e.g., as grasping errors decreased), perceptual-discrimination performance also improved. Importantly, we found that grasping training prior to discrimination enhanced subsequent perceptual sensitivity, supporting the notion of a reciprocal relation between perception and action.
more »
« less
The Pong Effect as a Robust Visual Illusion: Evidence From Manipulating Instructions
Visual perception is not always veridical but can be influenced by factors such as ease of acting, energetic cost, and even body type of the observer. This notion is called action-specific perception. Several effects of action capability on visual perception have been found, but there is much controversy as to whether these effects are truly perceptual. Because perception cannot be measured directly, resolving the controversy relies on ruling out alternative explanations through systematic testing. We combined one of the most robust action-specific effects (the Pong effect) with one of the primary suggestions for exploring an alternative explanation, namely whether the effect persists across instructions that emphasize different aspects of the task. The Pong effect was robust to the type of instructions. The results provide critical evidence that the Pong effect is truly perceptual, furthering the argument that a person’s ability to act can influence visual perception.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10304292
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Perception
- Volume:
- 49
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 0301-0066
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract Selective attention improves sensory processing of relevant information but can also impact the quality of perception. For example, attention increases visual discrimination performance and at the same time boosts apparent stimulus contrast of attended relative to unattended stimuli. Can attention also lead to perceptual distortions of visual representations? Optimal tuning accounts of attention suggest that processing is biased towards “off-tuned” features to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio in favor of the target, especially when targets and distractors are confusable. Here, we tested whether such tuning gives rise to phenomenological changes of visual features. We instructed participants to select a color among other colors in a visual search display and subsequently asked them to judge the appearance of the target color in a 2-alternative forced choice task. Participants consistently judged the target color to appear more dissimilar from the distractor color in feature space. Critically, the magnitude of these perceptual biases varied systematically with the similarity between target and distractor colors during search, indicating that attentional tuning quickly adapts to current task demands. In control experiments we rule out possible non-attentional explanations such as color contrast or memory effects. Overall, our results demonstrate that selective attention warps the representational geometry of color space, resulting in profound perceptual changes across large swaths of feature space. Broadly, these results indicate that efficient attentional selection can come at a perceptual cost by distorting our sensory experience.more » « less
-
Distance compression, which refers to the underestimation of ego-centric distance to objects, is a common problem in immersive virtual environments. Besides visually compensating the compressed distance, several studies have shown that auditory information can be an alternative solution for this problem. In particular, reverberation time (RT) has been proven to be an effective method to compensate distance compression. To further explore the feasibility of applying audio information to improve distance perception, we investigate whether users’ egocentric distance perception can be calibrated, and whether the calibrated effect can be carried over and even sustain for a longer duration. We conducted a study to understand the perceptual learning and carryover effects by using RT as stimuli for users to perceive distance in IVEs. The results show that the carryover effect exists after calibration, which indicates people can learn to perceive distances by attuning reverberation time, and the accuracy even remains a constant level after 6 months. Our findings could potentially be utilized to improve the distance perception in VR systems as the calibration of auditory distance perception in VR could sustain for several months. This could eventually avoid the burden of frequent training regimens.more » « less
-
The perception of distance is a complex process that often involves sensory information beyond that of just vision. In this work, we investigated if depth perception based on auditory information can be calibrated, a process by which perceptual accuracy of depth judgments can be improved by providing feedback and then performing corrective actions. We further investigated if perceptual learning through carryover effects of calibration occurs in different levels of a virtual environment’s visibility based on different levels of virtual lighting. Users performed an auditory depth judgment task over several trials in which they walked where they perceived an aural sound to be, yielding absolute estimates of perceived distance. This task was performed in three sequential phases: pretest, calibration, posttest. Feedback on the perceptual accuracy of distance estimates was only provided in the calibration phase, allowing to study the calibration of auditory depth perception. We employed a 2 (Visibility of virtual environment) ×3 (Phase) ×5 (Target Distance) multi-factorial design, manipulating the phase and target distance as within-subjects factors, and the visibility of the virtual environment as a between-subjects factor. Our results revealed that users generally tend to underestimate aurally perceived distances in VR similar to the distance compression effects that commonly occur in visual distance perception in VR. We found that auditory depth estimates, obtained using an absolute measure, can be calibrated to become more accurate through feedback and corrective action. In terms of environment visibility, we find that environments visible enough to reveal their extent may contain visual information that users attune to in scaling aurally perceived depth.more » « less
-
Sensory signals from the body’s visceral organs (e.g. the heart) can robustly influence the perception of exteroceptive sensations. This interoceptive-exteroceptive interaction has been argued to underlie self-awareness by situating one’s perceptual awareness of exteroceptive stimuli in the context of one’s internal state, but studies probing cardiac influences on visual awareness have yielded conflicting findings. In this study, we presented separate grating stimuli to each of subjects’ eyes as in a classic binocular rivalry paradigm – measuring the duration for which each stimulus dominates in perception. However, we caused the gratings to “pulse” at specific times relative to subjects’ real-time electrocardiogram, manipulating whether pulses occurred during cardiac systole, when baroreceptors signal to the brain that the heart has contracted, or in diastole when baroreceptors are silent. The influential “Baroreceptor Hypothesis” predicts the effect of baroreceptive input on visual perception should be uniformly suppressive. In contrast, we observed that dominance durations increased for systole-entrained stimuli, inconsistent with the Baroreceptor Hypothesis. Further, we show that this cardiac-dependent rivalry effect is preserved in subjects who are at-chance discriminating between systole-entrained and diastole-presented stimuli in a separate interoceptive awareness task, suggesting that our results are not dependent on conscious access to heartbeat sensations.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0301006620972876
