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Your question is referring to display polarity. A positive polar display consists of dark letters on a light background, a negative polar display consists of light letters on a dark background. Polarity by itself is independent of text-to-background contrast, as you rightly state.
Generally, positive polarity facilitates performance (e.g. Buchner & ...
16
Perhaps you're referring to Naomi Eisenberger's work on the neural basis of social pain. Her seminal paper found that the neural correlates of distress from social rejection overlapped with those of physical pain, i.e., dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula.
She's recently published a literature review on social pain in the brain (...
15
The ability to enumerate objects without counting is known as subitizing.
Most studies suggest that we can subitize up to about 3 or 4 items (e.g. Starkey & Cooper, 1995). Enumeration of a small number of objects (i.e. subitizing) yields consistent response times regardless of the quantity of objects. Enumeration of larger quantities (i.e. counting) ...
15
I think the answer is a qualified yes, humans can think without language. Ultimately though it depends on what you mean by "think."
There is a remarkably large number of deaf people who are not exposed either to a signed or spoken language even in developed countries. These people often invent their own gesture systems, referred to as home sign systems. ...
14
Preface
This is a very interesting question, that is also somewhat related to my area of research. I know of several related results (which I might add later in an edit), and I thought that with a few minutes of scholar search I'll find a paper dealing with this question exactly. I was surprised to find no such papers. So I decided to conduct an experiment.....
14
My hypothesis: The world accidentally stumbled upon the first (to my knowledge) bi-stable color illusion
Here is an example of bistable illusion:
This bistable illusion involves the perception of motion. Is the dancer spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? The deal is that the image is actually ambiguous. But you can't possible perceive both clockwise or ...
13
I basically agree with @Nick Stauner, but I want to add another important aspect, namely the gradient of photoreceptor densities in the human retina: In the fovea there is a sharp peak in cone density compared to more eccentric regions, as described in Curcio et al. (1990) and see the following graph obtained from Web Vision:
The cones have a different ...
12
As Ben Brocka mentioned, what you're describing is Habituation, which Wikipedia defines as:
Habituation is a decrease in an elicited behavior resulting from the repeated presentation of an eliciting stimulus (a simple form of learning.
More specifically, it's technically called Neural adaptation. To quote Wikipedia again:
Neural adaptation or sensory ...
12
No, inner speech does not follow the same neural pathway as speech coming in from outside.
Rather, inner speech uses the same neural mechanism as outer speech - that is, speech going out. The neural mechanisms of inner speech can be studied using recently developed technologies such as fMRI imaging of subjects instructed to or prevented from engaging in ...
11
From Hubbard & Ramachandran (2005):
[...] the estimated prevalence of synesthesia has varied dramatically, between as many as 1 in 20 (Galton, 1883) and as few as 1 in 25,000 (Cytowic, 1989). The most widely cited study to date suggests that synesthesia occurs in at least 1 in 2000 people (Baron-Cohen et al., 1996), although this is now generally ...
11
Here is a study that creates and manipulates the "song stuck in your head" phenomenon. In particular, it is a myth that only "bad" songs are stuck in your head. These songs can be categorized as intrusive thoughts. Also the obvious finding was that recently heard music was more likely to be stuck in your head.
The authors comes up with a term called the "...
11
Basically, the retina contains two different kinds of receptors: rods and cones. Cones are concentrated in the fovea and activate ganglion cells more discretely than rods. Rods are more interconnected by horizontal cells (if I'm not mistaken...), so multiple rods can often activate the same ganglion cell, whereas each cone is more likely to have its own ...
11
Short answer
Yes, there is a difference between hearing and understanding sound.
Background
Acoustic information is processed in different neural centers along the auditory pathway. The auditory system runs from the peripheral end organ in the inner ear (the cochlea) to the cortex. Along the way various processing steps are carried out. For ...
11
The source I have quoted below gives an example of the following stenographic image:-
Is this perception a particular trick that my eye performs or is it processing the visual data in an alternative way?
Stereograms can be viewed as three-dimensional images by providing two
side-by-side views of a three-dimensional scene, rendered from
slightly ...
10
Short answer: there appears to be a whole range of ability at the task of mental visualization. Based on what I have found on the Web, your own level of ability is fairly unusual. Your friend's level of ability, by contrast, seems to be fairly common. Sources I found on this were fairly sparse, though, and my conclusions should not be relied on too heavily.
...
10
Yes, there are benefits, but I don't think it requires long-term switches. Studies have used this as a manipulation to try and increase self control and have found that it decrease aggression. Based on this, once one has mastered using the non-dominant hand, it seems like the benefit of continuing to use that hand might be over (as it no longer requires ...
10
The images you've linked are composites, and so probably don't contain the characteristics by which raters were able to judge IQ accurately. The original article (Kleisner, Chvátalová, & Flegr, 2014) is freely available and appears to answer your question in its abstract:
Faces that are perceived as highly intelligent are rather prolonged with a ...
10
A study by Rainer et al. (2011) has shown that words are skipped and apparently filled in mentally quite often (in the order of 8 to 30% of times).
Two important factors that increased skipping rates were the length of the word and the predictability of the word due to contextual constraints. Both cases apply on the word 'the', because it is short and ...
9
Cross-race effect in facial processing
As @analystic has noted, there is substantial research documenting what is sometimes called the "cross-race effect":
Cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias
or own-race bias) is the tendency for people of one race to have
difficulty recognizing and processing faces and facial ...
9
Yes. The idea that the fusiform face area (FFA) is domain-selective for faces is the dominant hypothesis, but a competing hypothesis is that the FFA is recruited for fine discrimination in visual stimuli of any type in which we are experts.
In a famous study, Gauthier et al. (1999) taught participants to categorize fictitious Greebles (see image below). ...
9
Association areas are exactly what you are looking for, actually.
For example, the ventral intraparietal (VIP) cortex, located in the inferior parietal lobe (along the right border of the yellow area in the image below), just on the border of the occipital lobe, integrates somatosensory (tactile) and visual information.
Image via Wikipedia
For an ...
9
There is no true frame rate of the eyes, but there are limitations. The brain uses blurring to simulate continuity. Films are shot at 24 frames per second; if you go too much lower than that, the film will seem choppy. This is because the motion blurring process is too fast and it finishes "blurring" before the frame changes, so you just see choppy frames....
9
First I have to say that the wavelengths of light are on a totally different order of magnitude than sound. So the parallel drawn in your question "do light waves, for example one with the same wave length as a mid-C and another with a mid-F wave, look nicely together?" may seem logical, but is on closer inspection not easily maintained. Instead, one way to ...
9
Bach-y-Rita's Tactile Vision Substitution System (TVSS) project was initiated in 1963 and he has since been regarded as the founding father of sensory substitution. The concept of sensory substitution refers to the process of obtaining information about the world from a functional sensory system (e.g. touch) that would normally be obtained from a lost ...
9
Part of the difficulty in studying time perception is that memory is known to be biased by numerous factors including arousal and salience. So while people commonly report time slowing down during specific events, it is difficult to differentiate the effects of retroactive memory bias in encoding and recall from actual increased resolution in the perception ...
9
The Lateral Preference Inventory
Coren (1993) developed an inventory for lateral preference (The Lateral Preference Inventory). Several items concerned ear preference.
I found the choice of items to be quite interesting. See below for the items concerned with ear preference.
Based on a large adult normative sample, a total score was created for the four ...
8
I believe 'psychosomatic' describes a way the mind has effects on the your body which might result in somatic symptoms. Often psychosomatic disorders are diagnosed as such when:
no somatic correlate to the experienced symptoms can be found
somatic correlates do not sufficiently explain the experienced symptoms
This often results in patients who visit ...
8
If that same effect is happening with the "99% fat free" labeling, consumers would over-perceive the amount of fat
I think you are misunderstanding the desired effect here. I don't see how "99% fat free" would lead to the impression that a product contains a lot of fat. My read is, "This is 99% fat free! That's really good!" as opposed to "1% fat" which ...
8
Much of the answer will depend on how you define multisensory. Are you most interested in areas of the brain where multiple primary sensory streams converge together to form secondary representations, or are you interested in areas of the brain that simply have access to that kind of information?
I will throw in for consideration one of my favorite ...
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