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I found a little discussion of the issue in Russell (2000), where he summarises some of the views of the scientific literature:
Recent reviews of the empirical literature bearing on the claim of
special aesthetic significance for this ratio in the context of the
perception of simple figures include Green (1995), Hoge (1995), and
contributors to a ...
18
Wikipedia on time perception
The Wikipedia article on "time perception". In particular, the section on long-term time perception cites a couple of articles.
* The articles makes the common point that a unit of time as a proportion of one's life decreases with age. A few empirical studies are also cited.
Ukraintseva (2001)
Ukraintseva (2001) wrote an ...
17
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
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Video Games (C. S. Green, D. Bavelier, 2004) is a good if somewhat dated overview of cognitive research on video game players. They note that ordinary video game users show a number of differentiated and improved mental skills:
Video game play has been shown to dramatically
enhance visuo-motor skills. In particular, video ...
16
One of the main reasons related to the 'Gestalt principles'
Law of Proximity Objects near each other tend to be grouped together.
Law of Similarity Similar items tend to be grouped together.
Law of Closure Objects grouped together are seen as a whole.
Law of Continuity Lines are seen as following the smoothest path.
Law of Common Region Items in similar ...
16
At least for images (I don't know of such a result tested on videos) for a given resolution, there is an optimal display size (assuming constant viewing distance. otherwise, display size should be measured in angles from the viewers point of view). In a paper from 1989, Peter Barten provided a formula to compute this effect [1]. The gist can be seen in the ...
16
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 ...
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
Treisman & Gelade's Feature Integration Theory suggests that we are able to process an entire visual scene in parallel at the level of individual features. For example, in a visual search task, the time required to find a blue circle in a field of red circles is independent of the total number of circles. However, focused attention (typically foveal) is ...
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
I can speak to this question somewhat from a cognitive psychology standpoint. We memory researchers would think of text highlighting like this in terms of distinctiveness. (An article by McDaniel and Bugg (2008) may shed some light.) Simply put, highlighting a word in a different color than the rest of the text draws what we call item-specific processing ...
14
Indicator of genetic fitness argument
There is an evolutionary psychology argument. As with most evolutionary psychology arguments, the strength of the evidence is typically a bit fuzzy.
Symmetry in many aspects of the human body is functional. Such symmetry might be seen as the natural state that arises from a healthy life and a youthful body. In contrast ...
14
To add a small neuroscientific point to excellent @JeromyAnglim answer - there has been an interesting study by Rizzolatti group (guy who 'discovered' mirror neurons) published in PLoS ONE. Di Dio, et al. (2007) looked at the brain responses to Classical and Renaissance sculptures, but they manipulated the proportion of sculptures' features by violating the ...
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.....
13
There are two related reasons, I believe for this:
Relationship and connection. When things are aligned, we see then as connected and related. Nature does give us the guidance for things that are related and connected in other ways, but often by a degree of alignment or similarity. In UX terms, we indicate the relationships between items by positioning and ...
13
Antonio, Nielsen and Doneri (1998) provide one assessment of self-reported prevalence of smell in dreams. To quote the abstract (my bolding):
Although numerous studies have investigated the content of
laboratory and home dream reports, surprisingly little is known
about the prevalence of various sensory modes in dreams. 49 men and
115 women ...
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
Video game training has long been shown to influence perceptual-motor skills, but also visual selective attention,(1) although it might well involve a mix of pre attentive and attentive processing. I have no difficulties imagining there are some key studies on fastest adaptation in children as compared to older people, where effects are probably expressed ...
12
Playing action video games improves performance in subitizing and multiple object tracking, both of which are abilities involving attending to multiple objects at once. Note that it's a causal relationship; people who don't play action video games show improvements in those two abilities after playing for a while.
More generally, playing action video games ...
12
The whole of the research on this topic has some very, very serious methodological flaws, which mean there is currently surprisingly little evidence that video games or expert gamers are somehow 'special'. In particular, there are serious concerns regarding demand characteristics.
Don't just take my word for it, take a look at the extremely comprehensive ...
12
This is not my research field, but I'm also very interested in this topic. As far as I know there has not been much research done but two articles of interest are:
Washburn, D. A. (2003). The games psychologists play (and the data
they provide). Behavior research methods, instruments & computers,
35(2), 185-193. Psychonomic Society Publications.
This ...
12
There is "hard evidence" regarding how timing and the subjective experience of intervals changes as a function of age. McAuley et al. (2006) ran a battery of different timing and time perception tasks on participants of ages ranging from 4 to 95 years. One finding that relates to your question was that children in the range of 4 to 7 years preferred and, ...
12
It is not widely thought that impaired function or destruction of the fusiform is sufficient to produce prosoganosia. It is currently widely held that face processing involves a network of regions in the occipital and temporal lobes (e.g., the occipital face area, posterior superior temporal sulus, anterior superior temporal sulus, anterior collateral sulcus)...
12
The most relevant term would be Ironic Processing.
Ironic processing is the psychological process whereby an individual's deliberate attempts to suppress or avoid certain thoughts (thought suppression) render those thoughts more persistent.
This is a result of a failure of Thought Suppression or more generally Motivated Forgetting. It appears Thought ...
12
I think you are asking about quite a high-level definition of "correlated", and this is obviously going to depend on the particular context or stimulus. That is, knowledge about thunder and lightning allows us to infer that they have a common cause, even though perceptually they can be decoupled (that is, we don't perceive them as occurring together).
...
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 ...
11
There's a general discussion of speed reading methods on Wikipedia, but let's look at some specific articles and see what they say about reading speed and comprehension.
Bell's review of the reading speed and comprehension literature
In Bell's (2001) review of the empirical literature, he makes a number of points, which seem reasonable to me:
A few ...
11
The human eye is an interesting device. One of the most amazing things it does is to adjust for the brightness, and it can do so over 10 orders of magnitude.
From a signal processing perspective it can be explained as follows:
There are a few different ways that this is done, but the most basic way is a high pass filter, with a cutoff of about .25-.3 Hz. ...
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