Topic
Perception research, explained
18 open-access perception studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Are people with schizophrenia less fooled by visual context?
People with schizophrenia were less fooled by surrounding context when judging contrast and size, but were affected normally when judging brightness and tilt, so the context deficit is not across the board.
- Can brain stimulation at alpha rhythm blur how we see time?
Stimulating the right visual motion area at an alpha rhythm made people slightly more likely to merge two quick flashes into one, but only in the opposite visual field and only once individual alpha speed was accounted for.
- Do people prone to hallucinations expect to see faces in noise?
Healthy people who reported more hallucination-like experiences were more inclined to 'see' faces in visual noise and became aware of faces looking straight at them faster, fitting the idea that psychosis involves overly strong expectations for socially meaningful signals.
- Do people with schizophrenia see past visual 'surround' masking?
People with schizophrenia were generally worse at spotting faint gratings, but a same-orientation surround hurt them much less than it hurt controls, pointing to weaker inhibition in early visual cortex.
- Is a blind mind's eye also a deaf mind's ear?
People who lack visual mental imagery are highly likely to also lack auditory mental imagery, a state termed anauralia.
- How is aphantasia measured, and is it always the same?
People who think they have aphantasia might actually have face recognition issues, and those with true aphantasia have diverse sensory deficits.
- How do we tell our own voice apart from others?
We recognize our own voice better than others' voices when low-frequency pitch and speech details are removed, leaving only the highest vocal frequencies.
- Does learning to sit help babies see which shape is in front?
Babies of the same age who could already sit on their own treated a symmetrical shape as the object in front, while babies who could not yet sit showed no such preference.
- Is there a general skill for telling if two images match?
People who are good at judging whether two faces match also tend to be good at matching fingerprints, bullet casings and even novel prints, suggesting a general 'matching' ability.
- Does being able to move a hand help you recognise hands?
People born with one hand judged pictured hands less accurately and more slowly on awkward postures than amputees, and amputees who could move their phantom hand better made faster judgements, suggesting that motor control, not just visual experience, feeds into how we see bodies.
- How Hunger Changes What We See
Being hungry makes us look at food pictures longer when our eyes are presented with competing images, but it does not help those food pictures break into our awareness faster when they are hidden.
- Do we recognise 'animal' before 'bird' before 'duck'?
Coarse, blurry image information was enough to tell animals from cars quickly, but telling birds apart from other animals, and ducks from pigeons, needed fine detail and took longer.
- Do we use how wet something looks to spot germs?
People judged how wet dough was very accurately from its shiny highlights, and they found it most disgusting and risky when it was moderately wet rather than dry or very runny.
- Does touch feedback make grasping in virtual reality more natural?
When people 'grasped' virtual objects with no touch feedback, the precision of their hand opening got worse for bigger objects the way perception does, but when a real object of the same size was there to touch, this size-dependent imprecision disappeared, as it does for normal grasping.
- Why does a flickering light seem to last longer?
A flickering disk seemed to last longer than a steady one of the same duration, and people also became worse at judging its duration, consistent with the visual system using longer time windows to analyse flicker.
- Do we misjudge how far we have turned our bodies?
When turned on a chair with eyes closed, people consistently felt they had rotated further than they really had, and adding sound landmarks did not correct this.
- Do we learn to see ambiguous shapes a certain way, or just remember?
People quickly locked into seeing an ambiguous spinning cube one way at each screen location whether or not they were 'trained', suggesting that these lasting biases come from short-term perceptual memory rather than classic associative learning.
- Do kids who judge 'straight up' better do better at school?
Children who were more accurate at lining a rod up with true vertical despite a tilted frame scored higher on national school tests, especially maths, even after accounting for family background, sex, fitness and activity.