Hot answers tagged perception
17
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 ...
13
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 ...
12
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 ...
11
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 ...
10
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 ...
10
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 & ...
9
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 ...
9
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).
...
9
Short answer: there appears to be a whole range of ability at the task of mental visualization. Based on what I have found on the Web, your own level of ability is fairly unusual. Your friend's level of ability, by contrast, seems to be fairly common. Sources I found on this were fairly sparse, though, and my conclusions should not be relied on too heavily.
...
8
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 ...
8
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) ...
7
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 ...
7
There is a substantial literature on eye tracking.
Skill acquisition example
One study that I am familiar with and is of some relevance is Study 2 in Lee and Anderson (2000, PDF).
Specifically the study used eye tracking tools to examine how visual attention was allocated over time on an air traffic control simulator.
The broad finding, consistent with ...
7
What explains the tendency of people to not count the letter F's in the word "OF"?
One possibility to explain this effect is related to the phenomenon of word skipping. When we read, we do not fixate every word, but skip a certain proportion of words while making educated guesses instead. Whether or not a certain word is skipped seems to depend on its ...
7
The Wikipedia article no longer makes reference to the phenomenon that you quote (to my inspection), so I'm not entirely sure if that assertion was edited out as an inaccuracy on someone's part. I did find some information on visual perception and high frequency flicker that might point to some of the significance of the 60 Hz refresh rate of a monitor.
At ...
7
As Josh Gitlin said, imagining something activates more or less the same parts of the brain as actually experiencing it. Behrmann (2000) is a good introduction to this in the visual domain, though that article is a bit outdated now. There is also a lot of evidence that representations of meanings (semantic memory) involve a distributed network of perceptual ...
7
Cross-race effect in facial processing
As @analystic has noted, there is substantial research documenting what is sometimes called the "cross-race effect":
Cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias
or own-race bias) is the tendency for people of one race to have
difficulty recognizing and processing faces and facial ...
7
Yes. The idea that the fusiform face area (FFA) is domain-selective for faces is the dominant hypothesis, but a competing hypothesis is that the FFA is recruited for fine discrimination in visual stimuli of any type in which we are experts.
In a famous study, Gauthier et al. (1999) taught participants to categorize fictitious Greebles (see image below). ...
6
Not surprisingly, there's a huge load of stuff you need to consider when designing things for users. Here's a good paper written by some perception and vision researchers on the topic that might give you a more detailed introduction that what you have seen so far:
Healey, C.G. & Enns, J.T. (in press). Attention and visual memory in visualization and ...
6
There is a processing fluency theory that explains it quite nicely. In short, according to this theory the symmetrical objects are pleasant as they are easier to process.
See Reber et al (2004) for a detailed description:
We propose that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the perceiver's
processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process ...
6
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 ...
6
I believe 'psychosomatic' describes a way the mind has effects on the your body which might result in somatic symptoms. Often psychosomatic disorders are diagnosed as such when:
no somatic correlate to the experienced symptoms can be found
somatic correlates do not sufficiently explain the experienced symptoms
This often results in patients who visit ...
6
From personal observation, the consensus seems to be that the two streams hypothesis is an oversimplification of the truth, albeit a useful one.
The primary reason that this hypothesis is seen as an oversimplification is because there is a lot of cross-talk between the two streams. For example, Zanon et al. (2010) provides evidence for functional ...
5
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 ...
5
Consider the colour visual system. Take 3 monochromatic (in the physics sense) light sources of wavelength $420 \; nm$, $534 \; nm$, and $564 \; nm$; i.e. the peaks of spectral sensitivity for cones. Your 3 physical parameters are then 3 knobs $b$, $g$, $r$ that control the intensity of each light source as they shine on the same white surface. If you want ...
5
Bredart (2003) discusses your exact hypothesis and reports the results of a couple of studies. I'd recommend having a read of the article.
The authors acknowledge that in contrast to familiar others the experience of our own face typically comes through self-inspection in mirrors.
They summarise some relevant literature:
Troje and Kersten (1999) ...
5
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 ...
5
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 ...
5
In psychophysics, this is known as an absolute threshold. The absolute threshold will depend on a variety of factors such as brightness, size, etc.
It is also important to keep in mind that the time needed to detect a stimulus may be too short to cause some desired effect on the participant (e.g. a manipulation). For example, the time needed to detect a ...
4
Nick Yee in Palo Alto is doing a lot of work with second-life and other virtual worlds looking at mostly social psychological questions. He seems to be making use of the full range of data available in the virtual world as you suggest above.
Google Scholar search: author:yee "second-life"
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