How does attention contribute to perceptual experience? Within cognitive science, attention is known to contribute to the organization of sensory features into perceptual objects, or ‘‘object-based organization.’’ The current paper tackles a different type of organization and thus suggests a different role for attention in conscious perception. Within every perceptual experience we find that mo...

In this paper, we propose the Perceptual Shape Decomposition (PSD) to detect fingers for a Kinect-based hand gesture recognition system. The PSD is formulated as a discrete optimization problem by removing all negative minima with minimum cost. Experiments show that our PSD is perceptually relevant and robust against distortion and hand variations, and thus improves the recognition system perfo...

Scaling laws characterize diverse complex systems in a broad range of fields, including physics, biology, finance, and social science. The human language is another example of a complex system of words organization. Studies on written texts have shown that scaling laws characterize the occurrence frequency of words, words rank, and the growth of distinct words with increasing text length. Howev...

In this paper we present an approach to modeling emergent syllable systems using simulated evolution of a “vocabulary” of “words.” The model is aimed at testing the general hypothesis that language-universal sound patterns emerge from selection pressures exerted on the system by the perceptual and articulatory constraints of language users. The model is able to distinguish between hypotheses ab...

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to provide precise temporal information about the modulation of masked repetition priming effects × word frequency during the course of target word recognition. Contrary to the pattern seen with behavioral response times in prior research, we predicted that high-frequency words should generate larger and earlier peaking repetition priming e...

Two competitive sensations which are produced by a previously described bistable stroboscopic movement display were studied in a series of five experiments. In Experiment 1 each of the movement sensations was selectively adapted, a finding which supports the hypothesis that a different visual process underlies each of the two sensations. In Experiments 2-5 the relative dominance of the two sens...

The earliest thinking about lightness assumed that perceptual experience correlates with local stimulation. Wallach’s (1948) celebrated disk/annulus experiments showed that lightness depends on relative luminance, not absolute luminance, but his ratio theory recognized perceptual structure in only a minimal way. Work following the cognitive revolution showed that lightness depends on (1) depth ...

1.1. The problem According to the functionalist view of perception and cognition (Brunswik 1955), perceptual information processing serves to support the organism in reaching its fundamental goals: avoiding dangers and gaining access to resources. Both dangers and resources are provided by objects in our environment. Thus a large part of perceptual processing can be understood as answering the ...

It is widely assumed that the grouping of the visual field first described by the Gestalt psychologists and the related phenomenon of texture segregation occur very early in the processing of visual information and involve preattentive processes. All the recent evidence supporting this assumption comes from visual search experiments in which the subject is actively looking for a target and atte...