Questions tagged [perception]
For questions regarding the organization and identification of transducted sensory information in the brain and its interpretation and consolidation in the mind
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Any work being done on Perception, Action, and/or Cognition in Video games?
Call it a nerd crossover, but I've always been curious about how we play games on a mechanistic level. However, even coming from a rational viewpoint video games seem like a fruitful domain of study, ...
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What are the main theories that account for why some people like X and others not?
For example, how does psychology account for why some people like peanuts and others hate them? This is a serious question, although perhaps naive.
Sure, there can be some physiological explanations ...
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Perception of time as a function of age
For many people time seems to run faster as they get older. That is, for an old person an hour, a day or a year seems to be shorter than for a young person.
Is there any hard data for such phenomenon?...
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Is there psychoactive music?
Listen to this music for X minutes to observe Y result. Is there something like that that has been demonstrated to work for general public?
The only example of an experiment that is similar that ...
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What form might Jungian archetypes take in the brain?
Modern psychology and psychiatry are very well grounded in scientific principles. Both, however, have a history in various analytical philosophies. Jung had the notion of an archetype, a universally ...
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How do we hear our inner voice?
How do we perceive inner speech? Does it follow the same neural pathways as normal acoustic speech? If yes, what is the extent of overlap between the two neural pathways?
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is it possible to think without language?
I'm trying to fathom what it might be like for a person with aphasia and for one with agnosia. For a person with a visual agnosia I wonder this: if two unrecognizable objects are shown to them, and ...
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To what extent do individuals vary in their ability to mentally visualise?
Background:
Yesterday I was shocked when a friend of mine told me that he can see only "completely black darkness" when he closes he eyes.
When I close my eyes, I can see some images or "movies" of ...
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Can stress or training influence the perception of time?
I have had this experience that I fell with my bike on an icy street. During the fall, time seemed to slow down and I had an apparent age-long time window to stretch my hand and safely catch my fall.
...
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Is there any evidence that language is the limit of the world?
Philosopher Wittgenstein says that "the limit of my language means the limit of my world". One theory that supports this statement is that people couldn't see the blue colour until they have the word ...
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What is it called to think without language? Are there studies around it?
I think there are two types of thinking:
with and without language.
For my entire life, in my opinion, I have always thought without language. Some people say it's impossible and that we think with ...
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How does task difficulty schedule affect the rate and efficiency of perceptual learning?
In perceptual learning (line length/orientation discrimination, visual target detection, tone frequency discrimination, etc), when training people or animals to perform a task better, is there an ...
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Why is sensory substitution not that successful?
By successful, I mean made it out to the large world market or being massively funded. After looking online it seems that the most relevant research is the one done by Bach-y-Rita about the seeing ...
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Why does the brain skip over repeated "the" words in sentences?
For example, in this sentence by the the time you are done reading you will have already skipped over the double "the".
I have searched this on the internet a little, but I have found nothing that ...
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Due to Gestalt Psychology, is the face an illusion?
Gestalt Psychology maintains that we perceive a whole from parts, and that we fill in missing gaps. The "whole" we perceive is more than the sum of parts we perceive - it also involves what our minds ...
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Where would a cognitively separated person get their brain signals excited from?
I suppose there's nothing wrong about the idea that a cognitively separated person could cognitively function as anybody else. But brain as I understand it always needs a potential from some sense. If ...
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Does the fusiform face area in patients with Prosopagnosia (face blindness) show lower activity under an fMRI?
I watched last night's episode of 60 minutes (and part 2) about Prosopagnosia (Face Blindness) and found it absolutely fascinating. They mentioned in the segment (Around 5:22 into the second part of ...
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Is the theory of Information Metabolism a reasonable scientific theory?
Background
I have been checking out various personality typing assessments lately when I came across a Personality typing system known as Socionics which aims at explaining relationships between ...
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Is there evidence for a unique isolated internal representation of loved ones?
Some time ago, I've read that the most significant people in a person's life have their own internal representation/model of within the person's mind. For example:
An internal representation of a ...
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Quantifying the Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect states that people unexperienced in a certain field or subject generally perceive themselves as having greater aptitude than in reality they do. Dunning and Kruger were able ...
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Can humans keep track of two unrelated rhythms?
Let's do an experiment. With your left hand start tapping out a regular (evenly-spaced) beat - say, 2 beats per second. With your right hand attempt to tap our a different regular beat, but tap at a ...
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Can time be perceived differently depending on a user's feeling?
You often hear that time passes more quickly when you're having fun. And the opposite is also "true" in common belief, that when you're bored time is very slow. But we know that time is almost linear ...
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How does the brain project pain on to a particular part of the body?
How does our brain translate periheral sensations due to injuries into pain perceptions? As an in silico analogy - if a stimulus is applied to a sensor it can be transmitted to a microprocessor. The ...
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Binary classification as a cognitive strategy?
Is there any research investigating whether the human cognitive system has a tendency to reduce complex systems or spectra of data in terms of binary contrast?
There are many common-sense dual ...
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Is Golden Ratio's association with perceived beauty a myth?
Many people advocate using the Golden Ratio in design (e.g. logo design).
Is the Golden Ratio's purported aesthetic appeal supported by scientific evidence?
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Why is white on black considered higher contrast than black on white?
While researching to answer Why are "Inverted Colors" considered an accessibility feature? I noticed the puzzling claim that "White text on a black background is a higher contrast to the opposite, so ...
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Why do we prefer visually aligned objects?
We all know visual alignment is one of the foundations of design. Everything must be aligned with everything else.
We also know that when things are aligned it is easier to process information.
My ...
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Effect of words highlighting on reading comprehension
I'm interested if there are studies dealing with text understanding and POS (part of speech) coloring, or coloring syntactic/semantic information. The studies should solve the questions like:
Which ...
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Are there benefits to learning to write with your non-dominant hand?
There are some articles on the web that recommend learning to write with your non-dominant hand to get in touch with your inner child or a higher power, increase your creativity and be more open-...
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What stimulus features determine the psychophysical power law exponent?
Following the work of Stanley Stevens, psychophysical functions of stimulus intensity are commonly assumed to follow power laws, as illustrated below:
This appears to be true for a wide variety of ...
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Is it possible to improve reading speed and visual comprehension by doing exercises?
Background
I'm trying to capture detailed information from the images in my visual memory, mainly text. My daily life requires reading many documents on varying topics. I want to increase my reading ...
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What concepts of perception should designers be aware of when designing?
Visual perception is a huge topic, much of which is relevant to the work of a designer. I have identified topics in visual memory, visual cognition and colour perception that are relevant, and I'm ...
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How is the size of a video related to its perceived quality?
Video is often presented at different sizes. On the Internet, many websites provide quite a few size settings. In the store, you can buy TVs of many different sizes. In both cases, it's the same ...
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Has there been any serious research on subliminal messaging?
I certainly don't question the existence of subliminal perception which has been demonstrated many times in priming studies like those of Daniel Schacter and many others, nor do I reject the notion of ...
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How do humans control saccades?
I've gathered the standard rational for a visual system utilizing saccades from perception textbooks: the neural cost of processing an entire scene at a high level of detail would be prohibitive, but ...
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How to temporarily induce low latent inhibition?
As the Wikipedia article says,
High levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine (or its agonists) in the ventral tegmental area of the brain have been shown to decrease latent inhibition. Certain ...
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Is our attention attracted by bright lights?
Bright lights are often used to attract human attention. For example, brightly lit signs, despite often being too bright to look at directly are often used for information and/or advertisement.
Why ...
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Are there any studies that examine the phenomenon of songs stuck in the head?
Frequently I hear people say (and myself included) "darn it, I can't get that song out of my head!".
Are there any studies that examine this phenomenon of songs getting stuck in people's heads?
I.e.,...
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What happens when a person "imagines" how food could taste like just from looking at it?
What processes are triggered by imagining the taste of food (let's assume it's sealed so that its smell doesn't reach the test subject's nose) only by looking at it, based on memories of food with ...
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Does perception have a "frame rate"?
Are the objects of visual perception processes divisible into individual, still frames, like video is? If so:
Are the perceptions from different senses synced to the same frequency?
Are these "stills"...
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Fusiform Face Area (FFA) for within class recognition?
Is there any evidence (papers, studies, etc) that the Fusiform Face Area is used for any other type of recognition besides facial recognition? I remember hearing or reading a long time ago that ...
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aftereffects of auditory adaptation
Adaptation is a very robust feature of sensory processing: when a stimulus is displayed for a prolonged period, or repeatedly, the neural response to it will diminish. This process creates a local ...
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How does the inner ear encode sound intensity?
Different areas of the inner ear (the cochlea) are sensitive to different acoustic frequencies. Hence, the cochlea basically performs a fast Fourier transform on the audio signal. This spectral ...
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Name of cognitive bias that causes experts to overestimate their ability in other areas?
Is there a name for a cognitive bias that causes people who have been successful in one area to be overconfident in their level of knowledge / ability in another unrelated area?
It's related to the ...
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What does the visual feed from the retina look like before it is processed by the visual cortex?
I was recently at the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, where I saw a keynote on visual attention. The speaker (Laurent Itti) showed an animation that blew my mind. It showed a video of fish ...
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Are the physical sensations of an emotion due to neural activity strictly in the brain or also in the body?
Symptoms of anxiety and anger are often described as some sort of energetic sensation in my chest and sometimes face or arms. Are these sensations an 'illusion' from neural activity strictly in the ...
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Has the inverted spectrum thought experiment ever been conducted (and if not, why)?
The inverted spectrum thought experiment posits that you (the subject) wake up one morning to find that your colour spectrum (or some part of it anyway) has inverted. This experiment has important ...
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How do you know if it's psychosomatic or not?
"It's in your head" is often true and often offensive. But as your head can invent any number of psychological and physiological symptoms how can you distinguish whether something is or isn't ...
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Is V1 involved in visual imagery?
It's well known that mental imagery shares the neural substrates of its respective modality, despite dissociable multivariate patterns. For example, visual imagery can be decoded across the ventral ...
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How does appreciation for music change over time for the same person?
I know that there's a concept of acquired taste, where a child may find certain tastes, like peppers and beer unappealing until certain age or frequency of exposure.
Is there something similar to ...
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