Cognition and Perception

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https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/6273

Research of Undergraduate Honors Students in the Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt University.

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Effect of Spatial Frequency and Filter Condition on Vividness of Visual Imagery
(Vanderbilt University, 2024-03-27) Wong, Kwan Nok Adrian
Mental imagery has been characterized as the isolation of the feedback process that occurs during normal perception, since stimuli are “perceived” without actual feedforward sensory input. Predictive coding theory has been used to explain, among other phenomena, visual perception and visual imagery, and the theory makes several predictions about the phenomenological experience of visual imagery, which is most often weak and blurry when compared with the crisp and clear experience of visual perception. Specifically, we expected imagery strength to decrease with increasing spatial frequency, and that low-pass filtered stimuli would allow for greater imagery strength than high-pass filtered and non-filtered stimuli. To test these hypotheses, 16 participants completed two experiments using a binocular rivalry paradigm. Participants’ imagery strength was operationalized as the percentage of trials where the imagined stimulus matched the dominant stimulus during rivalry. In Experiment 1, there were no significant differences between the imagery strength of low, medium, and high spatial frequency stimuli. In Experiment 2, imagery strength of low-pass filtered stimuli was not significantly different than that of high-pass filtered and non-filtered stimuli. For both experiments, participants’ overall imagery strength was not correlated with their total score on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire 2 (VVIQ2). Taken together, these results show that spatial frequency and filter condition are stimulus properties that cannot affect strength of visual imagery. The conclusions of this study fail to verify the predictions about the nature of mental images made by the predictive coding theory of brain function.
The Role of Cinematic Visual Context in Supporting Viewers’ Language Processing
(Vanderbilt University, 2022-03-28) Kistler, Dylan
Previous research has demonstrated that basic forms of visual context such as object identification and gaze support language comprehension. However, complex forms of narrative context may structure visual supports for language in ways research has yet to reflect. I investigated how cinematic cues such as edit timing and shot coverages (such as depicting actors in close-ups as opposed to wider views) support language comprehension. Participants were shown scenes that either maintain or disrupt the timing of cuts, shot coverage, and other elements of visual context. Participants were tested for their memory for conversation and theory of mind accuracy, as well as reported their perception of continuity from each scene. The experimental conditions had a significant effect on memory for conversation performance but not on theory of mind inference. Memory performance was significantly decreased in the slideshow and reordered conditions, and perceived continuity was significantly decreased for all three conditions compromising the original scene’s visual context.
The Influence of Sequence Reversal on Event Perception
(Vanderbilt University, 2022-03-28) Ding, Yining
Many theories in event perception suggest that the information about the temporal organization of events plays an important role in facilitating the comprehension of event content. Although a previous study conducted by Hymel et al. (2016) showed that most people were not aware of the presence of misordered events while viewing live-action videos of everyday activities, the current study aimed to use more sensitive measures, such as event memory and event segmentation, to reveal the impact created by sequence reversal on the perception and representation of events. In the experiments reported here, we discovered that viewers did not encode more visual details when the misordered event happened. The presence of reversals impaired viewers’ ability to remember the location of the current event in the general event sequence, but this effect disappeared when viewers engaged in an event segmentation task and detected reversals incidentally. In addition, the existence of event misorderings did not increase the number of event boundaries experienced by the viewers. These results reinforce the idea that viewers do not engage in moment-to-moment examination of event sequence as a default process. We argue that even though there is evidence that the reversal exerts an influence on viewers’ lower-level processing, reversals are rarely brought into conscious awareness and minimally impact viewers’ mental representation of events, especially when there is no task-specific demand to focus on event sequence.
Neurobiological Markers of Rhythm Perception in Children with Specific Language Impairment
(Vanderbilt University, 2019-03-15) Yu, Leyao; Gordon, Reyna
The possible links between music and language continue to intrigue researchers, who are capable of investigating from their similar structures to shared human perception mechanism. In children with typical development (TD), perception to regular musical rhythm was positively correlated to grammar ability, and regular musical rhythm had a potentially positive influence on subsequent spoken grammar task performance. Behavioral studies suggest that children with Specific Language Impairments (SLI) have deficits in rhythm and meter perception along with the impairments in their lexical and grammatical abilities. The study tested the potential differences in the underlying brain mechanisms between the group of TD and the group of SLI and investigated the correlations between beat perception sensitivity from neural oscillations and expressive language measures. Eighteen children with SLI and sixty-six age-matched children with TD listened to regular beats with different placement of accents. Brain oscillations were measured using EEG system. The results suggested that the SLI population was less sensitive in beat perception than TD, and shared neural processing for rhythm and grammar might exist. The findings of neural oscillations were interpreted in the framework of Dynamic Attending Theory. Complementing ongoing studies in the lab, the findings would facilitate future research on the early identification and intervention of SLI.
Charitable Giving: How Framing Amount Raised Influences Donations
(Vanderbilt University, 2019-04-24) Liberman, Andrea; Trueblood, Jennifer
When attempting to solicit donations, fundraisers must consider how their campaign is portrayed. The goal gradient effect suggests that people tend to accelerate towards a goal the closer they get to achieving that goal. Additionally, people often care about not only the absolute distance from a goal, but also the percentage of the goal that is completed. This study analyzes the interaction between the size of the campaign goal, the nearness to completion of the goal, and whether the amount already raised is represented as a percent or in absolute dollars. This paper includes two separate surveys: the first survey asked 68 college students to distribute $1,000 between four fundraisers, which included 2 each of small/large goal sizes, each of which was characterized as either near or far from the goal. The description of the amount raised (either as a percent or in absolute dollars) was varied between-subjects. An analysis of variance showed the only significant result to be a main effect of size, with smaller campaigns receiving more donations. The second survey was similar, but used a forced-choice method, with 62 college students being required to pick only 1 fundraiser to which they would donate $250. Again, only the main effect of size was significant. However, responses to an open-ended question in survey 2 indicate that future research in this area is necessary to better understand the interaction between the goal gradient effect and fundraising.
Role of Auditory Feedback in Mandarin Tone Production in Native and Non-Native Speakers
(Vanderbilt University, 2018-04-23) Chen, Yiran
The current study examines the role of auditory feedback in Mandarin tone production among native and non-native speakers of Chinese through two production tasks where participants are asked to read and pronounce pseudo-words that share characteristics with Mandarin words. Every participant was tested in both tasks, with and without auditory feedback. In the Tonal Pseudo-word Task, participants are asked to read nonsensical Mandarin words with consonants and vowels shared in English. In the Lexical Pseudo-word Task, participants read nonsensical pseudo-mandarin words without tonal markings and were asked not to worry about the tones. The tones produced were masked by a low-band filter as using Praat and judged independently by native Chinese speakers for accuracy. The quality of the consonants and vowels that are unique to Mandarin were evaluated by experts’ judgment. The design of the study was based in part on earlier studies of the role of auditory feedback in singing tunes from memory (Erdemir and Rieser, 2016; Beck, Rieser, and Erdemir, 2017), which showed that expert musicians depended less on accurate tone production than did non-musicians. The goal of the present study is to find out if native Mandarin speakers rely less on auditory feedback than college students who are studying Mandarin. Results showed that non-native speakers are significantly more affected than native speakers and that non-native speakers find the tonal task more challenging than the unfamiliar phoneme task. The original hypothesis that native speaker of a tonal language, comparable to expert singer, has better motor representation of tone production so that they are resilient to the deprivation of auditory feedback.
Spatial Hearing in Elderly Individuals with a Range of Age-Related Hearing Loss
(Vanderbilt University, 2018) Schultz, Krystina; Ashmead, Daniel
The spatial hearing abilities of individuals with hearing loss, especially those who are elderly, have been investigated mostly in the context of localizing a single, stationary sound source in a quiet setting. Real world environments require listeners to make decisions when there are multiple sounds, often while the sound sources or the listener are in motion. This study focused on the spatial hearing abilities of older adults (60+) with a range of hearing losses, including hearing aid users and those without hearing aids. Two traditional "simple" measurements of spatial hearing abilities, minimum audible angle and minimum audible movement angle, were assessed, as well as "complex" tests of motion acceleration/deceleration discrimination and perception of directional alignment to a linear motion path. For all four spatial hearing tasks, there were no group differences between participants who had diagnosed hearing losses and used hearing aids and participants who did not use hearing aids. Subsequent analyses focused on associations between the tasks, as well as associations with age, degree of hearing loss, and self-rated quality of hearing in everyday life. The results suggest that simpler tasks, of the minimum audible angle variety, are dissociated from more complex tasks that require subtle judgments about motion trajectories. In addition to the elderly participants, a small group of participants in their early 20's was tested, to provide benchmarks of performance by those without hearing loss or other age-related problems.
The Temporal Features of Emotional Capture of Attention: Determining the Time Course of the Emotional Attentional Blink
(Vanderbilt University, 2014-04) Anderson, Megan; Zald, David H.
Within a variety of stimuli, we selectively attend to the most emotionally relevant, often at a cost to the processing of the other stimuli. The emotional attentional blink (EAB) is an effect in which emotional distractor images capture attention for several hundred milliseconds so that individuals cannot detect subsequent target images. In this study, we hoped to pinpoint the time course of the emotional capture of attention by creating a multi-target design based on Most and colleagues’ (2005) original EAB study. In Experiment 1, letters were presented on images following the distractor, and participants were asked to report which letter they first recalled seeing. We found that emotional distractor images, including erotic and gory conditions, induced greater deficits than non-emotional distractor images. In Experiment 2, participants reported not only the first letter they saw, but also the last number (presented before the distractor image) they saw. The task in Experiment 2 suggests an EAB that lasts between 200-400 ms. However, the use of two processing streams (the letters and images) suggests that modality serves an important role in the mechanisms of the EAB.

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