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Sonja Stork 1, Jochen Müsseler 2 and A. H. C. van der Heijden 3Perceptual judgement and saccadic behaviour in a spatial distortion with briefy presented stimuli
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volume 6 issue 6, pages 1-14 |
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Perceptual judgement and saccadic behaviour in a spatial distortion with briefy presented stimuli |
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Sonja Stork 1, Jochen Müsseler 2 and A. H. C. van der Heijden 3 |
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1 Department of Psychology, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany
2 Department of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
3 Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen, Instituut Psychologie, Leiden University, The Netherlands
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When observers are asked to localize the peripheral position of a small probe with respect to the
mid-position of a spatially extended comparison stimulus, they tend to judge the probe as being
more peripheral than the mid-position of the comparison stimulus. This relative mislocalization
seems to emerge from diferences in absolute localization, that is the comparison stimulus is localized more towards the fovea than the probe. The present study compared saccadic behaviour and
relative localization judgements in three experiments and determined the quantitative relationship between both measures. The results showed corresponding efects in localization errors and
saccadic behaviour. Moreover, it was possible to estimate the amount of the relative mislocalization by means of the saccadic amplitude.
Keywords: eye movement, saccade, localization, position, absolute position judgement, relative position judgement, space perception, visual illusion
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Victoria J. Williamson 1, Claire McDonald 1, Diana Deutsch 2, Timothy D. Griffiths 3, and Lauren Stewart 1Faster decline of pitch memory over time in congenital amusia
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volume 6 issue 6, pages 15-22 |
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Faster decline of pitch memory over time in congenital amusia |
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Victoria J. Williamson 1, Claire McDonald 1, Diana Deutsch 2, Timothy D. Griffiths 3, and Lauren Stewart 1 |
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1 Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
2 Department of Psychology, University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA
3 Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
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Congenital amusia (amusia, hereafter) is a developmental disorder that impacts negatively on the perception of music. Psychophysical testing suggests that individuals with amusia have above average thresholds for detection of pitch change and pitch direction discrimination; however, a low-level auditory perceptual problem cannot completely explain the disorder, since discrimination of melodies is also impaired when the constituent intervals are suprathreshold for perception. The aim of the present study was to test pitch memory as a function of (a) time and (b) tonal interference, in order to determine whether pitch traces are inherently weaker in amusic individuals. Memory for the pitch of single tones was compared using two versions of a paradigm developed by Deutsch (1970a). In both tasks, participants compared the pitch of a standard (S) versus a comparison (C) tone. In the time task, the S and C tones were presented, separated in time by 0, 1, 5, 10, and 15 s (blocked presentation). In the interference task, the S and C tones were presented with a fixed time interval (5 s) but with a variable number of irrelevant tones in between: 0, 2, 4, 6, and 8 tones (blocked presentation). In the time task, control performance remained high for all time intervals, but amusics showed a performance decrement over time. In the interference task, controls and amusics showed a similar performance decrement with increasing number of irrelevant tones. Overall, the results suggest that the pitch representations of amusic individuals are less stable and more prone to decay than those of matched non-amusic individuals.
Keywords: congenital amusia, short-term memory, delay, tonal interference
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Janek S. Lobmaier1,2, Jens Bölte3, Fred W. Mast2, and Christian Dobel4Configural and featural processing in humans with congenital prosopagnosia
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volume 6 issue 6, pages 23-34 |
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Configural and featural processing in humans with congenital prosopagnosia |
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Janek S. Lobmaier1,2, Jens Bölte3, Fred W. Mast2, and Christian Dobel4 |
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1 School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Scotland
2 Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Switzerland
3 Department of Psychology, University of Münster, Germany
4 Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Münster, Germany
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Prosopagnosia describes the failure to recognize faces, a deficiency that can be devastating in social interactions. Cases of acquired prosopagnosia have often been described over the last century. In recent years, more and more cases of congenital prosopagnosia (CP) have been reported. In the present study we tried to determine possible cognitive characteristics of this impairment. We used scrambled and blurred images of faces, houses, and sugar bowls to separate featural processing strategies from configural processing strategies. This served to investigate whether congenital prosopagnosia results from process-specific deficiencies, or whether it is a face-specific impairment. Using a delayed matching paradigm, 6 individuals with CP and 6 matched healthy controls indicated whether an intact test stimulus was the same identity as a previously presented scrambled or blurred cue stimulus. Analyses of d? values indicated that congenital prosopagnosia is a face-specific deficit, but that this shortcoming is particularly pronounced for processing configural facial information.
Keywords: face perception, object perception, visual cognition, prosopagnosia
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Yuki Yamada1, Atsunori Ariga2, Kayo Miura1, and Takahiro Kawabe1Erroneous selection of
a non-target item improves
subsequent target identification
in rapid serial visual presentations
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volume 6 issue 6, pages 35-46 |
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Erroneous selection of
a non-target item improves
subsequent target identification
in rapid serial visual presentations |
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Yuki Yamada1, Atsunori Ariga2, Kayo Miura1, and Takahiro Kawabe1 |
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1 Faculty of Human-Environment Studies, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan
2 Department of Psychology, The University of Tokyo, Japan
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The second of two targets (T2) embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVSVP) is often missed even though the first (T1) is correctly reported (attentional blink). The rate of correct T2 identification is quite high, however, when T2 comes immediately after T1 (lag-1 sparing). This study investigated whether and how non-target items induce lag-1 sparing. One T1 and two T2s comprising letters were inserted in distractors comprising symbols in each of two synchronised RSVSVPs. A digit (dummy) was presented with T1 in another stream. Lag-1 sparing occurred even at the location where the dummy was present (Experiment 1). This distractor-induced sparing effect was also obtained even when a Japanese katakana character (Experiment 2) was used as the dummy. The sparing effect was, however, severely weakened when symbols (Experiment 3) and Hebrew letters (Experiment 4) served as the dummy. Our findings suggest a tentative hypothesis that attentional set for item nameability is meta-categorically created and adopted to the dummy only when the dummy is nameable.
Keywords: attentional blink, RSVSVP, category, attentional set, lag-1 sparing
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volume 6 issue 6, pages 47-65 |
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Free will debates: Simple experiments are not so simple |
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1College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, Texas A&M University, Texas
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The notion that free will is an illusion has achieved such wide acceptance among philosophers and neuroscientists that it seems to be acquiring the status of dogma. Nonetheless, research in this area continues, and this review ofers a new analysis of the design limitations and data inter- pretations of free-will experiments. This review presents 12 categories of questionable conclusions that some scholars use to promote the idea that free will is an illusion. The next generation of less ambiguous experiments is proposed.
Keywords: free will, consciousness, libet, compatibilism
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