Personality and social attention: Trait-driven differences in neural engagement.

Personality significantly influences social behaviour and cognitive processes, yet its role in modulating neural mechanisms during social attention remains underexplored. This study examined the associations between Big Five personality traits and event-related potentials (ERPs) during a joint Flanker task simulating shared attention in a controlled environment. Conscientiousness was consistently associated with increased P3 amplitudes, particularly during inhibitory control tasks, while Neuroticism was related with variations in N2 amplitudes.

Commonality of neuronal coherence for motor skill acquisition and interlimb transfer.

This study explores the neural underpinnings of motor skill learning and its transfer across limbs. In a randomized controlled trial, 48 right-handed individuals underwent training on either simple or complex motor tasks using their left or right hand. After completing 10 blocks of training, we assessed skill acquisition and transfer, with a 64-channel EEG capturing brain activity.

Adaptive focus: Investigating size tuning in visual attention using SSVEP.

This study investigates the size tuning of visual spatial attention using steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) to understand how visual attention efficiently adapts and directs to specific spatial extents. Sixteen participants performed a task involving the rapid serial visual presentation of digits of varying sizes while their brain activity was monitored using electroencephalography. The stimuli flickered at different frequencies, and participants detected target digits at specified sizes.

Modeling the dynamics of contextual cueing effect by reinforcement learning.

Humans use environmental context for facilitating object searches. The benefit of context for visual search requires learning. Modeling the learning process of context for efficient processing is vital to understanding visual function in everyday environments.

The Reality of a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Environment Tested via Lightness Perception.

Head-mounted displays (HMDs) are becoming more and more popular as a device for displaying a virtual reality space, but how real are they? The present study attempted to quantitatively evaluate the degree of reality achieved with HMDs by using a perceptual phenomenon as a measure. Lightness constancy is an ability that is present in human visual perception, in which the perceived reflectance (i.e.

Different Mechanisms for Visual Attention at the Hand-movement Goal and Endogenous Visual Attention.

Visual perception is closely related to body movements and action, and it is known that processing visual stimuli is facilitated at the hand or at the hand-movement goal. Such facilitation suggests that there may be an attentional process associated with the hands or hand movements. To investigate the underlying mechanisms of visual attention at a hand-movement goal, we conducted two experiments to examine whether attention at the hand-movement goal is a process independent from endogenous attention.

Testing the effect of display organization in the collinear search impairment.

Previous studies established that a salient collinear structure impairs local visual search. A display organization hypothesis states that the vertical grouping of elemental bars in the search display may selectively increase the salience of the local target in the background than that in the collinear distractor, leading to the collinear search impairment. Three displays were designed to test this hypothesis.

Visual attention around a hand location localized by proprioceptive information.

Facilitation of visual processing has been reported in the space near the hand. To understand the underlying mechanism of hand proximity attention, we conducted experiments that isolated hand-related effects from top-down attention, proprioceptive information from visual information, the position effect from the influence of action, and the distance effect from the peripersonal effect. The flash-lag effect was used as an index of attentional modulation.

Crispness, the Key for the Palatability of "Kakinotane": A Sensory Study with Onomatopoeic Words.

Crispness is among the most important food textures that contribute significantly to palatability. This study investigated the association between the perceived crispness and palatability of five types of Japanese rice crackers known as "kakinotane." Two experiments were conducted using the temporal dominance of sensations (TDS) and temporal drivers of liking (TDL) methods.

Collinear search impairment is luminance contrast invariant.

Collinear search impairment (CSI) is a phenomenon where a task-irrelevant collinear structure impairs a target search in a visual display. It has been suggested that CSI is monocular, occurs without the participants' access to consciousness and is possibly processed at an early visual site (e.g.

Contribution of the slow motion mechanism to global motion revealed by an MAE technique.

Two different motion mechanisms have been identified with motion aftereffect (MAE). (1) A slow motion mechanism, accessed by a static MAE, is sensitive to high-spatial and low-temporal frequency; (2) a fast motion mechanism, accessed by a flicker MAE, is sensitive to low-spatial and high-temporal frequency. We examined their respective responses to global motion after adapting to a global motion pattern constructed of multiple compound Gabor patches arranged circularly.

Basic color categories in Mandarin Chinese revealed by cluster analysis.

Previous claims of the number of color categories and corresponding basic color terms in modern Mandarin Chinese remain irreconcilable, mainly due to the shortage in objectively evaluating the basicness of color terms with statistical significance. Therefore the present study applied k-means cluster analysis to investigate native Mandarin Chinese speakers' color naming data of 330 color chips similar to those used in World Color Survey. Results confirmed that there are 11 basic color categories among modern Mandarin speakers in Taiwan, one corresponding to each basic color term.

Displacement detection is suppressed by the post-saccadic stimulus.

To establish a perceptually stable world despite the large retinal shifts caused by saccadic eye movements, the visual system reduces its sensitivity to the displacement of visual stimuli during saccades (e.g. saccadic suppression of displacement, SSD).

A motion-in-depth model based on inter-ocular velocity to estimate direction in depth.

Perception of motion in depth is one of the most important visual functions for living in the three-dimensional world. Two binocular cues have been investigated for motion in depth: inter-ocular velocity difference (IOVD) and changing disparity (CD). IOVD provides direction information directly by comparing velocity signals from the two retinas.

Effects of content and viewing distance on the preferred size of moving images.

While visual size preferences regarding still objects have been investigated and linked to the "canonical size" effect-where preferred on-screen size was significantly related to objects' real-world size-the visual size preferences related to moving images of natural scenes has not been researched. In this study, we measured the preferred size of moving images of natural scenes and short duration and investigated the effect of viewing distance on size preferences. Our results showed that the preferred size varied strongly depending on content, and we found moving images' canonical size effect.

Extracting the orientation of rotating objects without object identification: Object orientation induction.

When a rotating object (inducer) is briefly replaced by a static face image (test stimulus), the orientation of the face appears to shift in the rotation direction of the inducer (object orientation induction, OOI). The OOI effect suggests that there is a process to continuously analyze and update the orientation of an object in motion. We investigated the perception of object orientation in motion, examining potential factors that contribute to OOI.

Spatial representations of the viewer's surroundings.

Spatial representation surrounding a viewer including outside the visual field is crucial for moving around the three-dimensional world. To obtain such spatial representations, we predict that there is a learning process that integrates visual inputs from different viewpoints covering all the 360° visual angles. We report here the learning effect of the spatial layouts on six displays arranged to surround the viewer, showing shortening of visual search time on surrounding layouts that are repeatedly used (contextual cueing effect).

Estimation of physiological sources of nonlinearity in blood oxygenation level-dependent contrast signals.

Blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast appears through a variation in the transverse relaxation rate of magnetic resonance signals induced by neurovascular coupling and is known to have nonlinear characteristics along echo time (TE) due to the intra-vasculature. However, the physiological causes of this nonlinearity are unclear. We attempted to estimate the physiological information related to the nonlinearity of BOLD signals by using a two-compartment model.

The modern Japanese color lexicon.

Despite numerous prior studies, important questions about the Japanese color lexicon persist, particularly about the number of Japanese basic color terms and their deployment across color space. Here, 57 native Japanese speakers provided monolexemic terms for 320 chromatic and 10 achromatic Munsell color samples. Through k-means cluster analysis we revealed 16 statistically distinct Japanese chromatic categories.

Contrast dependence of saccadic blanking and landmark effects.

Two phenomena have been reported to affect the perceived displacement of a visual target during saccadic eye movements: the blanking effect and landmark effect. In the blanking effect, temporarily blanking the target after a saccade improves displacement judgments. In the landmark effect, illusory target displacement occurs when a continuously presented landmark is displaced during a saccade, and the target is temporarily blanked after the saccade without displacement.

Visual attention spreads broadly but selects information locally.

Visual attention spreads over a range around the focus as the spotlight metaphor describes. Spatial spread of attentional enhancement and local selection/inhibition are crucial factors determining the profile of the spatial attention. Enhancement and ignorance/suppression are opposite effects of attention, and appeared to be mutually exclusive.

Saliency-based gaze prediction based on head direction.

Despite decades of attempts to create a model for predicting gaze locations by using saliency maps, a highly accurate gaze prediction model for general conditions has yet to be devised. In this study, we propose a gaze prediction method based on head direction that can improve the accuracy of any model. We used a probability distribution of eye position based on head direction (static eye-head coordination) and added this information to a model of saliency-based visual attention.

Attentional facilitation of detection of flicker on moving objects.

We investigated the influence of attention and motion on the sensitivity of flicker detection for a target among distractors. Experiment 1 showed that when the target and distractors were moving, detection performance plummeted compared to when they were not moving, suggesting that the most sensitive detectors were local, temporal frequency-tuned receptive fields. With the stimuli in motion, a qualitatively different strategy was required and this led to much reduced performance.

Smooth pursuit eye movements and motion perception share motion signals in slow and fast motion mechanisms.

Pursuit eye movements correlate with perceived motion in both velocity and direction, even without retinal motion. Cortical cells in the monkey medial temporal region generate signals for initiating pursuit eye movements and respond to retinal motion for perception. However, recent studies suggest multiple motion processes, fast and slow, even for low-level motion.