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Er G, Sweeny TD. Similarity in motion binds and bends judgments of aspect ratio. Vision Res 2024; 220:108400. [PMID: 38603923 DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2024.108400] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/18/2023] [Revised: 03/11/2024] [Accepted: 03/23/2024] [Indexed: 04/13/2024]
Abstract
It is well known that objects become grouped in perceptual organization when they share some visual feature, like a common direction of motion. Less well known is that grouping can change how people perceive a set of objects. For example, when a pair of shapes consistently share a common region of space, their aspect ratios tend to be perceived as more similar (are attracted toward each other). Conversely, when shapes are assigned to different regions in space their aspect ratios repel from each other. Here we examine whether the visual system produce both attractive and repulsive distortions when the state of grouping between a pair of shapes changes on a moment-to-moment basis. Observers viewed a pair of ellipses that differed in terms of how flat or tall they were and reported the aspect ratio of one ellipse from the pair. Each ellipse was defined by a cloud of coherently-moving dots, and the dots within the two ellipses had either the same or different directions of motion, varying from trial-to-trial. We found that the cued ellipse's aspect ratio was reported to be repelled from the aspect ratio of the uncued ellipse when the shapes had different directions of motion compared to when they had the same direction of motion. These results suggest that the visual system can adaptively alter visual experience based on grouping, in particular, repelling the appearance of objects when they do not appear to go together, and it can do so quickly and flexibly.
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Affiliation(s)
- Görkem Er
- Department of Psychology, University of Denver, United States.
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2
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Gaze perception from head and pupil rotations in 2D and 3D: Typical development and the impact of autism spectrum disorder. PLoS One 2022; 17:e0275281. [PMID: 36301975 PMCID: PMC9612464 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0275281] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/16/2022] [Accepted: 09/13/2022] [Indexed: 11/05/2022] Open
Abstract
The study of gaze perception has largely focused on a single cue (the eyes) in two-dimensional settings. While this literature suggests that 2D gaze perception is shaped by atypical development, as in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), gaze perception is in reality contextually-sensitive, perceived as an emergent feature conveyed by the rotation of the pupils and head. We examined gaze perception in this integrative context, across development, among children and adolescents developing typically or with ASD with both 2D and 3D stimuli. We found that both groups utilized head and pupil rotations to judge gaze on a 2D face. But when evaluating the gaze of a physically-present, 3D robot, the same ASD observers used eye cues less than their typically-developing peers. This demonstrates that emergent gaze perception is a slowly developing process that is surprisingly intact, albeit weakened in ASD, and illustrates how new technology can bridge visual and clinical science.
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3
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Thomas L, von Castell C, Hecht H. How facial masks alter the interaction of gaze direction, head orientation, and emotion recognition. Front Neurosci 2022; 16:937939. [PMID: 36213742 PMCID: PMC9533556 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2022.937939] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/06/2022] [Accepted: 09/01/2022] [Indexed: 11/22/2022] Open
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the way we interact with each other: mandatory mask-wearing obscures facial information that is crucial for emotion recognition. Whereas the influence of wearing a mask on emotion recognition has been repeatedly investigated, little is known about the impact on interaction effects among emotional signals and other social signals. Therefore, the current study sought to explore how gaze direction, head orientation, and emotional expression interact with respect to emotion perception, and how these interactions are altered by wearing a face mask. In two online experiments, we presented face stimuli from the Radboud Faces Database displaying different facial expressions (anger, fear, happiness, neutral, and sadness), gaze directions (−13°, 0°, and 13°), and head orientations (−45°, 0°, and 45°) – either without (Experiment 1) or with mask (Experiment 2). Participants categorized the displayed emotional expressions. Not surprisingly, masks impaired emotion recognition. Surprisingly, without the mask, emotion recognition was unaffected by averted head orientations and only slightly affected by gaze direction. The mask strongly interfered with this ability. The mask increased the influence of head orientation and gaze direction, in particular for the emotions that were poorly recognized with mask. The results suggest that in case of uncertainty due to ambiguity or absence of signals, we seem to unconsciously factor in extraneous information.
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Hessels RS, Benjamins JS, van Doorn AJ, Koenderink JJ, Hooge ITC. Perception of the Potential for Interaction in Social Scenes. Iperception 2021; 12:20416695211040237. [PMID: 34589197 PMCID: PMC8474344 DOI: 10.1177/20416695211040237] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/09/2021] [Accepted: 07/30/2021] [Indexed: 11/15/2022] Open
Abstract
In urban environments, humans often encounter other people that may engage one in interaction. How do humans perceive such invitations to interact at a glance? We briefly presented participants with pictures of actors carrying out one of 11 behaviors (e.g., waving or looking at a phone) at four camera-actor distances. Participants were asked to describe what they might do in such a situation, how they decided, and what stood out most in the photograph. In addition, participants rated how likely they deemed interaction to take place. Participants formulated clear responses about how they might act. We show convincingly that what participants would do depended on the depicted behavior, but not the camera-actor distance. The likeliness to interact ratings depended both on the depicted behavior and the camera-actor distance. We conclude that humans perceive the "gist" of photographs and that various aspects of the actor, action, and context depicted in photographs are subjectively available at a glance. Our conclusions are discussed in the context of scene perception, social robotics, and intercultural differences.
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Affiliation(s)
- Roy S. Hessels
- Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
| | - Jeroen S. Benjamins
- Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
| | - Andrea J. van Doorn
- Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
| | - Jan J. Koenderink
- Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
| | - Ignace T. C. Hooge
- Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
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Qiu S, Mei G. Spontaneous recovery of adaptation aftereffects of natural facial categories. Vision Res 2021; 188:202-210. [PMID: 34365177 DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2021.07.015] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/01/2021] [Revised: 07/07/2021] [Accepted: 07/23/2021] [Indexed: 10/20/2022]
Abstract
Adaptation to a natural face attribute such as a happy face can bias the perception of a subsequent face in this dimension such as a neutral face. Such face adaptation aftereffects have been widely found in many natural facial categories. However, how temporally tuned mechanisms could control the temporal dynamics of natural face adaptation aftereffects remains unknown. To address the question, we used a deadaptation paradigm to examine whether the spontaneous recovery of natural facial aftereffects would emerge in four natural facial categories including variable categories (emotional expressions in Experiment 1 and eye gaze in Experiment 2) and invariable categories (facial gender in Experiment 3 and facial identity in Experiment 4). In the deadaptation paradigm, participants adapted to a face with an extreme attribute (such as a 100% angry face in Experiment 1) for a relatively long duration, and then deadapted to a face with an opposite extreme attribute (such as a 100% happy face in Experiment 1) for a relatively short duration. The time courses of face adaptation aftereffects were measured using a top-up manner. Deadaptation only masked the effects of initial longer-lasting adaptation, and the spontaneous recovery of adaptation aftereffects was observed at the post-test stage for all four natural facial categories. These results likely indicate that the temporal dynamics of adaptation aftereffects of natural facial categories may be controlled by multiple temporally tuned mechanisms.
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Affiliation(s)
- Shiming Qiu
- School of Psychology, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang, PR China
| | - Gaoxing Mei
- School of Psychology, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang, PR China.
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6
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Ho PK, Newell FN. Turning Heads: The Effects of Face View and Eye Gaze Direction on the Perceived Attractiveness of Expressive Faces. Perception 2020; 49:330-356. [PMID: 32063133 DOI: 10.1177/0301006620905216] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/16/2022]
Abstract
We investigated whether the perceived attractiveness of expressive faces was influenced by head turn and eye gaze towards or away from the observer. In all experiments, happy faces were consistently rated as more attractive than angry faces. A head turn towards the observer, whereby a full-face view was shown, was associated with relatively higher attractiveness ratings when gaze direction was aligned with face view (Experiment 1). However, preference for full-face views of happy faces was not affected by gaze shifts towards or away from the observer (Experiment 2a). In Experiment 3, the relative duration of each face view (front-facing or averted at 15°) during a head turn away or towards the observer was manipulated. There was benefit on attractiveness ratings for happy faces shown for a longer duration from the front view, regardless of the direction of head turn. Our findings support previous studies indicating a preference for positive expressions on attractiveness judgements, which is further enhanced by the front views of faces, whether presented during a head turn or shown statically. In sum, our findings imply a complex interaction between cues of social attention, indicated by the view of the face shown, and reward on attractiveness judgements of unfamiliar faces.
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Affiliation(s)
- Pik Ki Ho
- School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; Institute of Anatomy I, University Hospital Jena, Germany
| | - Fiona N Newell
- School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
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Mihalache D, Feng H, Askari F, Sokol-Hessner P, Moody EJ, Mahoor MH, Sweeny TD. Perceiving gaze from head and eye rotations: An integrative challenge for children and adults. Dev Sci 2019; 23:e12886. [PMID: 31271685 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12886] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/02/2018] [Revised: 06/13/2019] [Accepted: 06/20/2019] [Indexed: 12/01/2022]
Abstract
Gaze is an emergent visual feature. A person's gaze direction is perceived not just based on the rotation of their eyes, but also their head. At least among adults, this integrative process appears to be flexible such that one feature can be weighted more heavily than the other depending on the circumstances. Yet it is unclear how this weighting might vary across individuals or across development. When children engage emergent gaze, do they prioritize cues from the head and eyes similarly to adults? Is the perception of gaze among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) emergent, or is it reliant on a single feature? Sixty adults (M = 29.86 years-of-age), thirty-seven typically developing children and adolescents (M = 9.3 years-of-age; range = 7-15), and eighteen children with ASD (M = 9.72 years-of-age; range = 7-15) viewed faces with leftward, rightward, or direct head rotations in conjunction with leftward or rightward pupil rotations, and then indicated whether the face was looking leftward or rightward. All individuals, across development and ASD status, used head rotation to infer gaze direction, albeit with some individual differences. However, the use of pupil rotation was heavily dependent on age. Finally, children with ASD used pupil rotation significantly less than typically developing (TD) children when inferring gaze direction, even after accounting for age. Our approach provides a novel framework for understanding individual and group differences in gaze as it is actually perceived-as an emergent feature. Furthermore, this study begins to address an important gap in ASD literature, taking the first look at emergent gaze perception in this population.
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Affiliation(s)
- Diana Mihalache
- Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado
| | - Huanghao Feng
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado
| | - Farzaneh Askari
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado
| | | | - Eric J Moody
- Wyoming Institute for Disabilities, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming
| | - Mohammad H Mahoor
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado
| | - Timothy D Sweeny
- Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado
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Bart E, Hegdé J. Deep Synthesis of Realistic Medical Images: A Novel Tool in Clinical Research and Training. Front Neuroinform 2018; 12:82. [PMID: 30515089 PMCID: PMC6255819 DOI: 10.3389/fninf.2018.00082] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/30/2018] [Accepted: 10/22/2018] [Indexed: 11/15/2022] Open
Abstract
Making clinical decisions based on medical images is fundamentally an exercise in statistical decision-making. This is because in this case, the decision-maker must distinguish between image features that are clinically diagnostic (i.e., signal) from a large amount of non-diagnostic features. (i.e., noise). To perform this task, the decision-maker must have learned the underlying statistical distributions of the signal and noise to begin with. The same is true for machine learning algorithms that perform a given diagnostic task. In order to train and test human experts or expert machine systems in any diagnostic or analytical task, it is advisable to use large sets of images, so as to capture the underlying statistical distributions adequately. Large numbers of images are also useful in clinical and scientific research about the underlying diagnostic process, which remains poorly understood. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to obtain medical images of given specific descriptions in sufficiently large numbers. This represents a significant barrier to progress in the arenas of clinical care, education, and research. Here we describe a novel methodology that helps overcome this barrier. This method leverages the burgeoning technologies of deep learning (DL) and deep synthesis (DS) to synthesize medical images de novo. We provide a proof-of-principle of this approach using mammograms as an illustrative case. During the initial, prerequisite DL phase of the study, we trained a publicly available deep learning neural network (DNN), using open-sourced, radiologically vetted mammograms as labeled examples. During the subsequent DS phase of the study, the fully trained DNN was made to synthesize, de novo, images that capture the image statistics of a given input image. The resulting images indicated that our DNN was able to faithfully capture the image statistics of visually diverse sets of mammograms. We also briefly outline rigorous psychophysical testing methods to measure the extent to which synthesized mammography were sufficiently alike their original counterparts to human experts. These tests reveal that mammography experts fail to distinguish synthesized mammograms from their original counterparts at a statistically significant level, suggesting that the synthesized images were sufficiently realistic. Taken together, these results demonstrate that deep synthesis has the potential to be impactful in all fields in which medical images play a key role, most notably in radiology and pathology.
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Affiliation(s)
- Evgeniy Bart
- Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, United States
| | - Jay Hegdé
- Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, James and Jean Culver Vision Discovery Institute, The Graduate School, Augusta University, Augusta, GA, United States.,Department of Ophthalmology, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University, Augusta, GA, United States
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Palmer CJ, Caruana N, Clifford CWG, Seymour KJ. Perceptual integration of head and eye cues to gaze direction in schizophrenia. ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE 2018; 5:180885. [PMID: 30662721 PMCID: PMC6304143 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.180885] [Citation(s) in RCA: 14] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/07/2018] [Accepted: 10/30/2018] [Indexed: 06/09/2023]
Abstract
The perceptual mechanisms that underlie social experience in schizophrenia are increasingly becoming a target of empirical research. In the context of low-level vision, there is evidence for a reduction in the integration of sensory features in schizophrenia (e.g. increased thresholds for contour detection and motion coherence). In the context of higher-level vision, comparable differences in the integration of sensory features of the face could in theory impair the recognition of important social cues. Here we examine how the sense of where other people are looking relies upon the integration of eye-region cues and head-region cues. Adults with schizophrenia viewed face images designed to elicit the 'Wollaston illusion', a perceptual phenomenon in which the perceived gaze direction associated with a given pair of eyes is modulated by the surrounding sensory context. We performed computational modelling of these psychophysical data to quantify individual differences in the use of facial cues to gaze direction. We find that adults with schizophrenia exhibit a robust perceptual effect whereby their sense of other people's direction of gaze is strongly biased by sensory cues relating to head orientation in addition to eye region information. These results indicate that the visual integration of facial cues to gaze direction in schizophrenia is intact, helping to constrain theories of reduced integrative processing in higher-level and lower-level vision. In addition, robust gaze processing was evident in the tested participants despite reduced performance on a theory of mind task designed to assess higher-level social cognition.
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Affiliation(s)
- Colin J. Palmer
- School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia
| | - Nathan Caruana
- Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales 2109, Australia
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders, Sydney, Australia
| | | | - Kiley J. Seymour
- School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia
- Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales 2109, Australia
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders, Sydney, Australia
- School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales 2150, Australia
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Palmer CJ, Clifford CW. Adaptation to other people’s eye gaze reflects habituation of high-level perceptual representations. Cognition 2018; 180:82-90. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.07.005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/22/2018] [Revised: 07/03/2018] [Accepted: 07/06/2018] [Indexed: 11/24/2022]
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Palmer CJ, Clifford CW. The visual system encodes others’ direction of gaze in a first-person frame of reference. Cognition 2017; 168:256-266. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.07.007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/02/2017] [Revised: 07/14/2017] [Accepted: 07/14/2017] [Indexed: 10/19/2022]
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