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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 ...
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
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
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
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.....
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
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
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
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 ...
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
Veridicality is a term used in cognitive science; it is the degree to which your internal representation of the world accurately reflects the external world.
Some background
Since the work on Humberto Maturana in color perception, it was considered very important to not always focus on the fact that there is some external stimuli to be cognized by the ...
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
It's essentially shot noise.
In optics, shot noise describes the fluctuations of the number of photons detected (or simply counted in the abstract) due to their occurrence independent of each other. This is therefore another consequence of discretization, in this case of the energy in the electromagnetic field in terms of photons. In the case of photon ...
10
There's literature on temporal expansion with vigilance. Perhaps this might get you started.
Tse, P. U., Intriligator, J., Rivest, J., and Cavanagh, P. (2004). Attention and the subjective expansion of time. Perception & Psychophysics, 66(7):1171–1189.
In this instance they're looking at how odd, unique, or surprising events might increase the amount ...
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I and other colleagues have published a paper on the cognitive impacts of MMORPGs:
Link to full text here
The work also reviews some of the literature regarding the psychology of computer games and a new framework for the understanding of cognition in the digital age.
I hope this helps.
Abstract:
The present paper attempts to empirically study the ...
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Vitouch et. al (2006) observed that "visual tempo significantly influenced
the retrieved music tempo.".
Music is known to potentially affect the perception of visual scenes
(e. g., Vitouch, 2001), as proficiently demonstrated in the movies.
But do films also influence the perception of music? This study
investigates cross-modal influences in ...
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Feeling as though you have seen a face before is perfectly normal. It may reflect actual similarities between the new face and the face you have seen before. There are people who genuinely look like each other, an example being celebrity look-a-likes. It may also reflect a commonly observed cultural/ethnic effect where people of a different ethnicity look ...
10
As you mentioned in your question, Jung was less than perfectly consistent in his definition of archetype throughout his career. This ambiguity reflects the continuing debate about semantic representation in the brain.
His early work stressed the emergence of archetypes as fundamental dichotomies of self experience- whose Enantiodromaic character was the ...
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