BACKGROUND Can hearing a word change what one sees? Although visual sensitivity is known to be enhanced by attending to the location of the target, perceptual enhancements of following cues to the identity of an object have been difficult to find. Here, we show that perceptual sensitivity is enhanced by verbal, but not visual cues. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Participants completed an obje...

Recognizing objects in cluttered scenes is vital for successful interactions in our complex environments. Learning is known to play a key role in facilitating performance in a wide range of perceptual skills not only in young but also older adults. However, the neural mechanisms that support our ability to improve visual form recognition with training in older age remain largely unknown. Here, ...

Chapter 2 reports two experiments that examine perceptual learning in humans. In Experiment 1, participants received intermixed exposure to two similar compounds (AX, BX, AX, BX ...) and blocked exposure to a second pair of similar compounds (CY, CY... DY, DY...). Aversions established to AX and CY generalized less to BX than to DY. This confirms that intermixed exposure results in greater perc...

Three experiments studied the perception of speech produced by female twins (5 MZ, 1 DZ) ranging in age from 20 to 67. The experiments were designed to discover whether listeners could detect differences between twins, and to explore listeners’ perceptual representations of talkers. Because identical twins have virtually identical vocal tracts and the twins in this study grew up together in the...

It is now well known that the absence of attention can leave people unaware of both visual and auditory stimuli (e.g., Dalton & Fraenkel, 2012; Mack & Rock, 1998). However, the possibility of similar effects within the tactile domain has received much less research. Here, we introduce a new tactile inattention paradigm and use it to test whether tactile awareness depends on the level of percept...

This study examined the relative contribution of visual, perceptual, and cognitive skills to the development of expertise in soccer. Elite and sub-elite players, ranging in age from 9 to 17 years, were assessed using a multidimensional battery of tests. Four aspects of visual function were measured: static and dynamic visual acuity; stereoscopic depth sensitivity; and peripheral awareness. Perc...

The oral fluency level of an L2 speaker is often used as a measure in assessing language proficiency. The present study reports on four experiments investigating the contributions of three fluency aspects (pauses, speed and repairs) to perceived fluency. In Experiment 1 untrained raters evaluated the oral fluency of L2 Dutch speakers. Using specific acoustic measures of pause, speed and repair ...

This paper presents a full-reference image quality estimator based on color, structure, and visual system characteristics denoted as CSV. In contrast to the majority of existing methods, we quantify perceptual color degradations rather than absolute pixel-wise changes. We use the CIEDE2000 color difference formulation to quantify low-level color degradations and the Earth Mover’s Distance betwe...

Although the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) is a particularly useful way of characterising functional vision, its measurement relies on observers making reliable perceptual reports. Such procedures can be challenging when testing children. Here we describe a system for measuring the CSF using an automated analysis of optokinetic nystagmus (OKN); an involuntary oscillatory eye movement made...

Perceptual performance has been known to change around the time of saccadic eye movement. In the current study, we measured the accuracy and sensitivity of orientation discrimination of bar stimuli presented during fixation and before saccadic eye movements. Human participants compared the orientations of the test and reference bar stimuli with the head erect in a two-interval forced choice tas...