Fixation versus periphery in visual awareness: Differential effects of recent perceptual experience.

Processing differences between foveal and peripheral vision mean that the location of objects in the visual field can strongly influence the way we experience them. The contents of visual awareness are believed to arise from interactions between sensory stimulation and context (e.g.

A Flash in the Pan? Distractor Suppression Cannot Be Inferred from the Early Lateralized Positivity.

Humans excel at avoiding distraction in visual environments, successfully filtering out repeated salient distractors that could otherwise capture attention. A recent theoretical perspective posits a mechanism whereby such distractors can be proactively suppressed, reducing their impact on attentional deployment. Electrophysiological evidence for this view comes from the distractor positivity (PD), a neural component associated with distractor handling.

The consequences of color chromaticity on electrophysiological measures of attentional deployment in visual search.

We investigated to what extent color vividness of visual items influences how humans prioritize information in a search task. For this, color chromaticity was manipulated over two search experiments. While recording the electroencephalogram, participants searched for a shape of certain color among three other shapes, when it emerged from a stream of flickering gray placeholders.

Repetition of critical search features modulates EEG lateralized potentials in visual search.

In visual search, the repetition of target and distractor colors enables both successful search and effective distractor handling. Nevertheless, the specific consequences of trial-to-trial feature repetition in different search contexts are poorly understood. Here, we investigated how feature repetition shapes the electrophysiological and behavioral correlates of target processing and distractor handling, testing theoretically informed predictions with single-trial mixed-effects modeling.

Arousal, interindividual differences and temporal binding a psychophysiological study.

The sense of agency varies as a function of arousal in negative emotional contexts. As yet, it is unknown whether the same is true for positive affect, and how inter-individual characteristics might predict these effects. Temporal binding, an implicit measure of the sense of agency, was measured in 59 participants before and after watching either an emotionally neutral film clip or a positive film clip with high or low arousal.

Emotional arousal pattern (EMAP): A new database for modeling momentary subjective and psychophysiological responding to affective stimuli.

This article describes a new database (named "EMAP") of 145 individuals' reactions to emotion-provoking film clips. It includes electroencephalographic and peripheral physiological data as well as moment-by-moment ratings for emotional arousal in addition to overall and categorical ratings. The resulting variation in continuous ratings reflects inter-individual variability in emotional responding.

Prediction of moment-by-moment heart rate and skin conductance changes in the context of varying emotional arousal.

Autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses such as heart rate (HR) and galvanic skin responses (GSR) have been linked with cerebral activity in the context of emotion. Although much work has focused on the summative effect of emotions on ANS responses, their interaction in a continuously changing context is less clear. Here, we used a multimodal data set of human affective states, which includes electroencephalogram (EEG) and peripheral physiological signals of participants' moment-by-moment reactions to emotional provoking video clips and modeled HR and GSR changes using machine learning techniques, specifically, long short-term memory (LSTM), decision tree (DT), and linear regression (LR).

Global enhancement of target color-not proactive suppression-explains attentional deployment during visual search.

The current study touches on a central debate in the area of attention: how the human brain handles distraction by salient stimuli. The idea of proactive suppression proposes a new fundamental perceptual mechanism to resolve this question, whereby attentional capture by a task-irrelevant salient distractor can be preempted through top-down inhibitory mechanisms. In this study, we replicate empirical effects underlying this claim, but show that they are better explained by an alternative mechanism, global target-feature enhancement.

Body Pitch Together With Translational Body Motion Biases the Subjective Haptic Vertical.

Accurate perception of verticality is critical for postural maintenance and successful physical interaction with the world. Although previous research has examined the independent influences of body orientation and self-motion under well-controlled laboratory conditions, these factors are constantly changing and interacting in the real world. In this study, we examine the subjective haptic vertical in a real-world scenario.

"There Is No (Where a) Like Home": Recognition and Appraisal Responses to Masked Facial of Emotion in Four Different National Cultures.

The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emotions could be expressed via discretely different facial movements in different cultures due to the non-convergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical areas.

Holistic face processing is influenced by non-conscious visual information.

Holistic face processing has been widely implicated in conscious face perception. Yet, little is known about whether holistic face processing occurs when faces are processed unconsciously. The present study used the composite face task and continuous flash suppression (CFS) to inspect whether the processing of target facial information (the top half of a face) is influenced by irrelevant information (the bottom half) that is presented unconsciously.

Prediction errors in surface segmentation are reflected in the visual mismatch negativity, independently of task and surface features.

The visual system quickly registers perceptual regularities in the environment and responds to violations in these patterns. Errors of perceptual prediction are associated with electrocortical modulation, including the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) and P2 event-related potential. One relatively unexplored question is whether these prediction error signals can encode higher-level properties such as surface segmentation, or whether they are limited to lower-level perceptual features.

Other-race faces are given more weight than own-race faces when assessing the composition of crowds.

In two experiments we examined the performance of Asian and Caucasian participants as they were asked to estimate the ethnic composition of arrays of 16 concurrently presented faces. Across trials we systematically varied the physical proportion of Asian and Caucasian faces presented in the arrays using the method of constant stimuli. The task was to explicitly indicate which group was in the majority.

Visual perception and visual mental imagery of emotional faces generate similar expression aftereffects.

What is the relationship between visual perception and visual mental imagery of emotional faces? We investigated this question using a within-emotion perceptual adaptation paradigm in which adaptation to a strong version of an expression was paired with a test face displaying a weak version of the same emotion category. We predicted that within-emotion adaptation to perception and imagery of expressions would generate similar aftereffects, biasing perception of weak emotional test faces toward a more neutral value. Our findings confirmed this prediction.

The other-race effect in face learning: Using naturalistic images to investigate face ethnicity effects in a learning paradigm.

The other-race effect in face identification has been reported in many situations and by many different ethnicities, yet it remains poorly understood. One reason for this lack of clarity may be a limitation in the methodologies that have been used to test it. Experiments typically use an old-new recognition task to demonstrate the existence of the other-race effect, but such tasks are susceptible to different social and perceptual influences, particularly in terms of the extent to which all faces are equally individuated at study.

How Well Do Computer-Generated Faces Tap Face Expertise?

The use of computer-generated (CG) stimuli in face processing research is proliferating due to the ease with which faces can be generated, standardised and manipulated. However there has been surprisingly little research into whether CG faces are processed in the same way as photographs of real faces. The present study assessed how well CG faces tap face identity expertise by investigating whether two indicators of face expertise are reduced for CG faces when compared to face photographs.