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Developmental Science Jul 2023Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP...
Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here, adopting the HP framework for faces, we examined the developmental emergence of HP in another domain for which human adults have expertise, namely, visual word processing. Children, adolescents, and adults performed a lexical decision task and we used two established signatures of HP for faces: the advantage in perception of upright over inverted words and nonwords and the reduced sensitivity to increasing parts (word length). Relative to the other groups, children showed less of an advantage for upright versus inverted trials and lexical decision was more affected by increasing word length. Performance on these HP indices was strongly associated with age and with reading proficiency. Also, the emergence of HP for word perception was not simply a result of improved visual perception over the course of development as no group differences were observed on an object decision task. These results reveal the developmental emergence of HP for orthographic input, and reflect a further instance of experience-dependent tuning of visual perception. These results also add to existing findings on the commonalities of mechanisms of word and face recognition. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children showed less of an advantage for upright versus inverted trials compared to adolescents and adults. Relative to the other groups, lexical decision in children was more affected by increasing word length. Performance on holistic processing (HP) indices was strongly associated with age and with reading proficiency. HP emergence for word perception was not due to improved visual perception over development as there were no group differences on an object decision task.
Topics: Adult; Adolescent; Child; Humans; Visual Perception; Facial Recognition; Orientation, Spatial; Reading; Pattern Recognition, Visual
PubMed: 36715650
DOI: 10.1111/desc.13372 -
Progress in Neurobiology May 2023Visual perception is the product of serial hierarchical processing, parallel processing, and remapping on a dynamic network involving several topographically organized... (Review)
Review
Visual perception is the product of serial hierarchical processing, parallel processing, and remapping on a dynamic network involving several topographically organized cortical visual areas. Here, we will focus on the topographical organization of cortical areas and the different kinds of visual maps found in the primate brain. We will interpret our findings in light of a broader representational framework for perception. Based on neurophysiological data, our results do not support the notion that vision can be explained by a strict representational model, where the objective visual world is faithfully represented in our brain. On the contrary, we find strong evidence that vision is an active and constructive process from the very initial stages taking place in the eye and from the very initial stages of our development. A constructive interplay between perceptual and motor systems (e.g., during saccadic eye movements) is actively learnt from early infancy and ultimately provides our fluid stable visual perception of the world.
Topics: Animals; Visual Perception; Saccades; Brain; Primates; Brain Mapping
PubMed: 36828036
DOI: 10.1016/j.pneurobio.2023.102424 -
Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Jul 2017Recent advances in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) have explored abnormal visual processing, yet it is unclear how this relates to treatment. The aim of this study was to... (Review)
Review
OBJECTIVE
Recent advances in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) have explored abnormal visual processing, yet it is unclear how this relates to treatment. The aim of this study was to summarize our current understanding of visual processing in BDD and review associated treatments.
METHOD
The literature was collected through PsycInfo and PubMed. Visual processing articles were included if written in English after 1970, had a specific BDD group compared to healthy controls and were not case studies. Due to the lack of research regarding treatments associated with visual processing, case studies were included.
RESULTS
A number of visual processing abnormalities are present in BDD, including face recognition, emotion identification, aesthetics, object recognition and gestalt processing. Differences to healthy controls include a dominance of detailed local processing over global processing and associated changes in brain activation in visual regions. Perceptual mirror retraining and some forms of self-exposure have demonstrated improved treatment outcomes, but have not been examined in isolation from broader treatments.
CONCLUSION
Despite these abnormalities in perception, particularly concerning face and emotion recognition, few BDD treatments attempt to specifically remediate this. The development of a novel visual training programme which addresses these widespread abnormalities may provide an effective treatment modality.
Topics: Body Dysmorphic Disorders; Facial Recognition; Humans; Social Perception; Visual Perception
PubMed: 28190269
DOI: 10.1111/acps.12705 -
Consciousness and Cognition Oct 2017Working memory has long been thought to be closely related to consciousness. However, recent empirical studies show that unconscious content may be maintained within... (Review)
Review
Working memory has long been thought to be closely related to consciousness. However, recent empirical studies show that unconscious content may be maintained within working memory and that complex cognitive computations may be performed on-line. This promotes research on the exact relationships between consciousness and working memory. Current evidence for working memory being a conscious as well as an unconscious process is reviewed. Consciousness is shown to be considered a subset of working memory by major current theories of working memory. Evidence for unconscious elements in working memory is shown to come from visual masking and attentional blink paradigms, and from the studies of implicit working memory. It is concluded that more research is needed to explicate the relationship between consciousness and working memory. Future research directions regarding the relationship between consciousness and working memory are discussed.
Topics: Attentional Blink; Consciousness; Humans; Memory, Short-Term; Perceptual Masking; Visual Perception
PubMed: 28756199
DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2017.07.005 -
Learning & Behavior Jun 2024When seeing a visual image, humans prioritize the perception of global features, which is followed by the assessment of the local ones. This global precedence has been... (Review)
Review
When seeing a visual image, humans prioritize the perception of global features, which is followed by the assessment of the local ones. This global precedence has been investigated using hierarchical stimuli that consist of a large, global shape formed by the spatial arrangement of small local shapes. Comparing non-human animals to humans, research on global and local processing has revealed a heterogeneous pattern of results with some species exhibiting a local precedence and others a global one. Many factors have been proposed to influence the global and local processing: internal factors (e.g., age, sex) and external elements or perceptual field variables (e.g., stimulus size, visual angle, eccentricity, sparsity). In this review, studies showing that different non-human species process hierarchical stimuli in the same (global precedence) or reverse (local precedence) direction as humans are first collated. Different ecological, perceptual, and anatomical features that may influence global and local processing are subsequently proposed based on a detailed analysis of these studies. This information is likely to improve our understanding of the mechanisms behind the perceptual organization and visual processing, and could explain the observed differences in hierarchical processing between species.
Topics: Animals; Visual Perception; Humans; Pattern Recognition, Visual
PubMed: 37930619
DOI: 10.3758/s13420-023-00605-0 -
Perceptual and Motor Skills Dec 2015Visual perception comprises established responses to visual stimuli. Conceptual development accompanies the development of visual perception skills. Both visual...
Visual perception comprises established responses to visual stimuli. Conceptual development accompanies the development of visual perception skills. Both visual perception and sufficient conceptual development is vital to a child's academic skills and social participation. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between conceptual development and visual perceptual skills of six-year-old children. 140 children were administered Bracken's (1998) Basic Concept Scale (BBCS-R) and the Frostig Developmental Visual Perception Test. BBCS-R scores were weakly correlated with FDVPT Discrimination of figure-ground, and had moderate and significant correlations with Constancy of the figures, Perception of position in space, Perception of spatial relation, and the Total score on visual perception. Also, a moderate correlation was found between the total scores of the FDVPT and the total score of the BBCS-R.
Topics: Child; Child Development; Concept Formation; Female; Humans; Male; Visual Perception
PubMed: 26595200
DOI: 10.2466/24.10.PMS.121c22x7 -
Annual Review of Vision Science Oct 2016This review discusses several pervasive myths about peripheral vision, as well as what is actually true: Peripheral vision underlies a broad range of visual tasks, in... (Review)
Review
This review discusses several pervasive myths about peripheral vision, as well as what is actually true: Peripheral vision underlies a broad range of visual tasks, in spite of its significant loss of information. New understanding of peripheral vision, including likely mechanisms, has deep implications for our understanding of vision. From peripheral recognition to visual search, from change blindness to getting the gist of a scene, a lossy but relatively fixed peripheral encoding may determine the difficulty of many tasks. This finding suggests that the visual system may be more stable, and less dynamically changing as a function of attention, than previously assumed.
Topics: Attention; Humans; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Visual Acuity; Visual Fields; Visual Perception
PubMed: 28532349
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-vision-082114-035733 -
Perception Mar 2024Aristotle believed that objects fell at a constant velocity. However, Galileo Galilei showed that when an object falls, gravity causes it to accelerate. Regardless,...
Aristotle believed that objects fell at a constant velocity. However, Galileo Galilei showed that when an object falls, gravity causes it to accelerate. Regardless, Aristotle's claim raises the possibility that people's visual perception of falling motion might be biased away from acceleration towards constant velocity. We tested this idea by requiring participants to judge whether a ball moving in a simulated naturalistic setting appeared to accelerate or decelerate as a function of its motion direction and the amount of acceleration/deceleration. We found that the point of subjective constant velocity (PSCV) differed between up and down but not between left and right motion directions. The PSCV difference between up and down indicated that more acceleration was needed for a downward-falling object to appear at constant velocity than for an upward "falling" object. We found no significant differences in sensitivity to acceleration for the different motion directions. Generalized linear mixed modeling determined that participants relied predominantly on acceleration when making these judgments. Our results support the idea that Aristotle's belief may in part be due to a bias that reduces the perceived magnitude of acceleration for falling objects, a bias not revealed in previous studies of the perception of visual motion.
Topics: Humans; Motion Perception; Acceleration; Visual Perception; Gravitation
PubMed: 38304970
DOI: 10.1177/03010066241228681 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Jul 2021Recurrent loops in the visual cortex play a critical role in visual perception, which is likely not mediated by purely feed-forward pathways. However, the development of...
Recurrent loops in the visual cortex play a critical role in visual perception, which is likely not mediated by purely feed-forward pathways. However, the development of recurrent loops is poorly understood. The role of recurrent processing has been studied using visual backward masking, a perceptual phenomenon in which a visual stimulus is rendered invisible by a following mask, possibly because of the disruption of recurrent processing. Anatomical studies have reported that recurrent pathways are immature in early infancy. This raises the possibility that younger infants process visual information mainly in a feed-forward manner, and thus, they might be able to perceive visual stimuli that adults cannot see because of backward masking. Here, we show that infants under 7 mo of age are immune to visual backward masking and that masked stimuli remain visible to younger infants while older infants cannot perceive them. These results suggest that recurrent processing is immature in infants under 7 mo and that they are able to perceive objects even without recurrent processing. Our findings indicate that the algorithm for visual perception drastically changes in the second half of the first year of life.
Topics: Facial Recognition; Female; Form Perception; Humans; Infant; Male; Perceptual Masking; Photic Stimulation; Reproducibility of Results; Visual Perception
PubMed: 34162737
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103040118 -
International Journal of Environmental... Jun 2022Microsaccades are linked with extraretinal mechanisms that significantly alter spatial perception before the onset of eye movements. We sought to investigate whether...
Microsaccades are linked with extraretinal mechanisms that significantly alter spatial perception before the onset of eye movements. We sought to investigate whether microsaccadic activity is modulated by the speed of radial optic flow stimuli. Experiments were performed in the dark on 19 subjects who stood in front of a screen covering 135 × 107° of the visual field. Subjects were instructed to fixate on a central fixation point while optic flow stimuli were presented in full field, in the foveal, and in the peripheral visual field at different dot speeds (8, 11, 14, 17, and 20°/s). Fixation in the dark was used as a control stimulus. For almost all tested speeds, the stimulation of the peripheral retina evoked the highest microsaccade rate. We also found combined effects of optic flow speed and the stimulated retinal region (foveal, peripheral, and full field) for microsaccade latency. These results show that optic flow speed modulates microsaccadic activity when presented in specific retinal portions, suggesting that eye movement generation is strictly dependent on the stimulated retinal regions.
Topics: Fixation, Ocular; Humans; Optic Flow; Photic Stimulation; Retina; Saccades; Visual Perception
PubMed: 35682346
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph19116765