Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： One grouping principle of visual perception is to integrate spatially separated and partially occluded local parts into whole object representations. For example, in the processing of Kanizsa-type illusory contours (ICs), a subjective shape contour is perceived despite the inducers being isolated. The shape discrimination of the Kanizsa illusory contours depends on feedback signals in the brain. Thus, investigations of the adaptation to Kanizsa illusory contours can help us understand the temporal properties of top-down signals in the visual system. In the present study, four experiments were conducted to explore the adaptation to Kanizsa illusory contours. Participants adapted to +5° and −5° illusory contours in experiments 1a and 1b. In experiments 2a and 2b, in order to eliminate the possibility that the adaptation effect could be explained by the lines on the inducers, the inducer lines (experiment 2a) or the whole shape (experiment 2b) was used as the adapting images. For all of the experiments, illusory contours of varied degrees were used as test images. Subjects were instructed to respond as accurately and quickly as possible to the test images to judge whether they were fat or thin. When adapting to fat illusory contours, the participants tended to perceive the following tests as thin; on the contrary, when adapting to thin contours, they tended to perceive the test images as fat. These results showed significant adaption effect of Kanizsa contours. Further control experiments (2a and 2b) indicated that the adaptation effect was mainly caused by the illusory contour itself, rather than by the lines on the Pac-Man. These results revealed that adaptation effect existed in voluntary construction processes, indicating that the strength of feedback signals from higher-level visual cortex could become weak over time.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Increasing evidence has indicated that emotional information, and particularly threatening visual input, elicits faster behavioral responses than non-threatening stimuli. This superior processing of threatening information is also found under conditions where consciousness is absent. However, recent studies found that faster unconscious detection of emotion-associated stimuli than neutral stimuli may be due to their unmatched physical characteristics, rather than by their emotional content. Thus, it is necessary to test whether emotional stimuli still have the processing advantage over neutral ones in unconscious conditions when low-level visual properties are matched. In order to investigate whether unconsciously prioritized processing still occurs with emotion-associated stimuli which are physically identical, we used the conditioning paradigm to manipulate the affective significance of Gabor patches. Participants performed two challenging visual detection tasks under the breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (b-CFS) paradigm. In experiment 1, differently oriented Gabor patches (45° and 135°) were used as material. During an initial learning phase, one oriented Gabor patch (e.g., 45°) was paired with an alarm sound (CS+), whereas the other was never paired with the alarm sound (CS–). The emotional rating indicated that negative emotion could be elicited by the alarm sound in the participants. The orientation of CS+ Gabor patches was counterbalanced across participants. In the subsequent testing phase, participants were required to discriminate the location of the Gabor patch relative to the central fixation as quickly and accurately as possible. In this phase, Gabor patches were suppressed by dynamic noise using b-CFS. The procedure in experiment 2 was the same with that in experiment 1, except that the color of the Gabor patches was also varied, between red and green. In experiment 1, there was no difference in the accuracy rates between CS+ stimuli and CS– stimuli (99% vs. 99%). Suppression time results showed that CS+ stimuli emerged from suppression faster than CS– ones. In experiment 2, there was no difference in the accuracy rates for different learning condition. For the analysis of suppression time, the “learning effect” was computed to represent difference between experimental conditions and control condition. Integrated learning showed a significant learning effect, while there was no remarkable learning effect in orientation learning or in color learning condition. These findings revealed an unconscious processing advantage for aversive conditioned stimuli. Furthermore, the learning effect was specific to the conditioned stimuli and could not generalize to other similar objects. Taken together, this study provided further evidence for the optimized processing of affectively significant visual stimuli in unconscious conditions.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2022-12-03
Abstract：
Despite the unlimited capacity of sensory registration, visual system can still provide an efficient summary of a cluttered scene, representing the statistical properties of multiple objects rather than forming detailed representations of individual objects. There is growing interest in the behavioral study of statistical summary representations (SSRs), especially in the exploring of their automatic mechanism as well as the domain-general or domain specific ensemble mechanism. However, the neural underpinnings of SSRs have received far less attention. Future work on SSRs may use neuroimaging methods to investigate their neural substrates directly, which is also important for understanding neural computation.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2020-05-20
Abstract： The ground-surface reference frame is important in space perception. The sequential surface integration process (SSIP) hypothesis firstly speculated on its formation process. The core viewpoints and relevant evidences of SSIP hypothesis include three aspects: the representation principle of the ground, the integration conditions and the representation results. Although it has been supported by a large number of studies, the existing supporting evidence of SSIP hypothesis still has insufficient methodology, little attention to psychological mechanism, and some opposing evidence, which makes it unable to completely clarify the representation process of ground reference framework. Future research needs to be combined with technology based on process inspection and explore the formation mechanism of ground reference framework directly, and consider its application in national defense.
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