The role of familiarity in the recognition of static and dynamic objects

Color Image Norms in Mandarin Chinese

The present study comprises two parts, an object picture naming task and rating tasks, and reports naming latencies and norms for 435 color images in Mandarin Chinese. These norms include name agreement (%), H-value, concept agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, age of acquisition (AOA) based on adult ratings, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, word frequency, and word length. We examined correlations between the norms and explored the internal structure among these correlative variables by a factor analysis. Four factors were extracted, which accounted for 74.86% of the total variance. These data were analyzed to identify variables with significant contributions to naming latencies using multiple regression analysis, including norms of name agreement (%), familiarity, word frequency, concept agreement, AOA, and object agreement. These variables explained 54.70% of the total variance of naming latencies. This work presents a new set of photo stimuli and a large set of normalized variables. We expect that this study will provide useful materials for further researches.

Appraising the role of visual threat in speeded detection and classification tasks

This research examines the speeded detection and, separately, classification of photographic images of animals. In the initial experiments each display contained various images of animals and, in the detection task, participants responded whether a display contained only images of birds or also included an oddball target image of a cat or dog. In the classification search task, a target was always present and participants classified this as an image of a cat or a dog. Half of the target images depicted the animal in a non-threatening state and the remaining half images depicted the animal in a threatening state. A complex pattern of effects emerged showing some evidence of more efficient detection of a threatening than non-threatening target. No corresponding pattern emerged in the data for the classification task. Next the tasks were repeated when the stimuli were more carefully matched in terms of general pose and salience of facial features. Now the effects in the detection task were reduced but more consistent than before. Threatening targets were more readily detected than non-threatening targets. In addition, non-threatening targets were more readily classified than threatening targets. The nature of these effects appears to reflect decisional/response mechanisms and not search processes. The performance benefit for the non-threatening images was replicated in a final classification task in which, on each trial, only a single peripheral image was presented. The results demonstrate that a number of different affective and perceptual factors can influence performance in speeded search tasks and these may well be confounded with the variation in threat content of the experimental stimuli. The evidence for the automatic detection of visual threat remains illusive.

Non-rigid, but not rigid, motion interferes with the processing of structural face information in developmental prosopagnosia

There is growing evidence to suggest that facial motion is an important cue for face recognition. However, it is poorly understood whether motion is integrated with facial form information or whether it provides an independent cue to identity. To provide further insight into this issue, we compared the effect of motion on face perception in two developmental prosopagnosics and age-matched controls. Participants first learned faces presented dynamically (video), or in a sequence of static images, in which rigid (viewpoint) or non-rigid (expression) changes occurred. Immediately following learning, participants were required to match a static face image to the learned face. Test face images varied by viewpoint (Experiment 1) or expression (Experiment 2) and were learned or novel face images. We found similar performance across prosopagnosics and controls in matching facial identity across changes in viewpoint when the learned face was shown moving in a rigid manner. However, non-rigid motion interfered with face matching across changes in expression in both individuals with prosopagnosia compared to the performance of control participants. In contrast, non-rigid motion did not differentially affect the matching of facial expressions across changes in identity for either prosopagnosics (Experiment 3). Our results suggest that whilst the processing of rigid motion information of a face may be preserved in developmental prosopagnosia, non-rigid motion can specifically interfere with the representation of structural face information. Taken together, these results suggest that both form and motion cues are important in face perception and that these cues are likely integrated in the representation of facial identity.

Visuo-haptic multisensory object recognition, categorization, and representation

Visual and haptic unisensory object processing show many similarities in terms of categorization, recognition, and representation. In this review, we discuss how these similarities contribute to multisensory object processing. In particular, we show that similar unisensory visual and haptic representations lead to a shared multisensory representation underlying both cross-modal object recognition and view-independence. This shared representation suggests a common neural substrate and we review several candidate brain regions, previously thought to be specialized for aspects of visual processing, that are now known also to be involved in analogous haptic tasks. Finally, we lay out the evidence for a model of multisensory object recognition in which top-down and bottom-up pathways to the object-selective lateral occipital complex are modulated by object familiarity and individual differences in object and spatial imagery.

Stimulus familiarity modulates functional connectivity of the perirhinal cortex and anterior hippocampus during visual discrimination of faces and objects

Recent research suggests that the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is involved in perception as well as in declarative memory. Amnesic patients with focal MTL lesions and semantic dementia patients showed perceptual deficits when discriminating faces and objects. Interestingly, these two patient groups showed different profiles of impairment for familiar and unfamiliar stimuli. For MTL amnesics, the use of familiar relative to unfamiliar stimuli improved discrimination performance. By contrast, patients with semantic dementia—a neurodegenerative condition associated with anterolateral temporal lobe damage—showed no such facilitation from familiar stimuli. Given that the two patient groups had highly overlapping patterns of damage to the perirhinal cortex, hippocampus, and temporal pole, the neuroanatomical substrates underlying their performance discrepancy were unclear. Here, we addressed this question with a multivariate reanalysis of the data presented by Barense et al. (2011), using functional connectivity to examine how stimulus familiarity affected the broader networks with which the perirhinal cortex, hippocampus, and temporal poles interact. In this study, healthy participants were scanned while they performed an odd-one-out perceptual task involving familiar and novel faces or objects. Seed-based analyses revealed that functional connectivity of the right perirhinal cortex and right anterior hippocampus was modulated by the degree of stimulus familiarity. For familiar relative to unfamiliar faces and objects, both right perirhinal cortex and right anterior hippocampus showed enhanced functional correlations with anterior/lateral temporal cortex, temporal pole, and medial/lateral parietal cortex. These findings suggest that in order to benefit from stimulus familiarity, it is necessary to engage not only the perirhinal cortex and hippocampus, but also a network of regions known to represent semantic information.

A new standardized stimulus set for studying need-of-help recognition (NeoHelp)

This article presents the NeoHelp visual stimulus set created to facilitate investigation of need-of-help recognition with clinical and normative populations of different ages, including children. Need-of-help recognition is one aspect of socioemotional development and a necessary precondition for active helping. The NeoHelp consists of picture pairs showing everyday situations: The first item in a pair depicts a child needing help to achieve a goal; the second one shows the child achieving the goal. Pictures of birds in analogue situations are also included. These control stimuli enable implementation of a human-animal categorization task which serves to separate behavioral correlates specific to need-of-help recognition from general differentiation processes. It is a concern in experimental research to ensure that results do not relate to systematic perceptual differences when comparing responses to categories of different content. Therefore, we not only derived the NeoHelp-pictures within a pair from one another by altering as little as possible, but also assessed their perceptual similarity empirically. We show that NeoHelp-picture pairs are very similar regarding low-level perceptual properties across content categories. We obtained data from 60 children in a broad age range (4 to 13 years) for three different paradigms, in order to assess whether the intended categorization and differentiation could be observed reliably in a normative population. Our results demonstrate that children can differentiate the pictures' content regarding both need-of-help category as well as species as intended in spite of the high perceptual similarities. We provide standard response characteristics (hit rates and response times) that are useful for future selection of stimuli and comparison of results across studies. We show that task requirements coherently determine which aspects of the pictures influence response characteristics. Thus, we present NeoHelp, the first open-access standardized visual stimuli set for investigation of need-of-help recognition and invite researchers to use and extend it.

Tactual perception: a review of experimental variables and procedures

This paper reviews the literature on tactual perception. Throughout this review, we will highlight some of the most relevant aspects in the touch literature: type of stimuli; type of participants; type of tactile exploration; and finally, the interaction between touch and other senses. Regarding type of stimuli, we will analyse studies with abstract stimuli such as vibrations, with two- and three-dimensional stimuli, and also concrete stimuli, considering the relation between familiar and unfamiliar stimuli and the haptic perception of faces. Under the "type of participants" topic, we separated studies with blind participants, studies with children and adults, and also performed an overview of sex differences in performance. The type of tactile exploration is explored considering conditions of active and passive touch, the relevance of movement in touch and the relation between haptic exploration and time. Finally, interactions between touch and vision, touch and smell and touch and taste are explored in the last topic. The review ends with an overall conclusion on the state of the art for the tactual perception literature. With this work, we intend to present an organised overview of the main variables in touch experiments, compiling aspects reported in the tactual literature, and attempting to provide both a summary of previous findings, and a guide to the design of future works on tactual perception and memory, through a presentation of implications from previous studies.

The Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS), a new set of 480 normative photos of objects to be used as visual stimuli in cognitive research

There are currently stimuli with published norms available to study several psychological aspects of language and visual cognitions. Norms represent valuable information that can be used as experimental variables or systematically controlled to limit their potential influence on another experimental manipulation. The present work proposes 480 photo stimuli that have been normalized for name, category, familiarity, visual complexity, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, and manipulability. Stimuli are also available in grayscale, blurred, scrambled, and line-drawn version. This set of objects, the Bank Of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS), was created specifically to meet the needs of scientists in cognition, vision and psycholinguistics who work with photo stimuli.

Primate auditory recognition memory performance varies with sound type

Neural correlates of auditory processing, including for species-specific vocalizations that convey biological and ethological significance (e.g., social status, kinship, environment), have been identified in a wide variety of areas including the temporal and frontal cortices. However, few studies elucidate how non-human primates interact with these vocalization signals when they are challenged by tasks requiring auditory discrimination, recognition and/or memory. The present study employs a delayed matching-to-sample task with auditory stimuli to examine auditory memory performance of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), wherein two sounds are determined to be the same or different. Rhesus macaques seem to have relatively poor short-term memory with auditory stimuli, and we examine if particular sound types are more favorable for memory performance. Experiment 1 suggests memory performance with vocalization sound types (particularly monkey), are significantly better than when using non-vocalization sound types, and male monkeys outperform female monkeys overall. Experiment 2, controlling for number of sound exemplars and presentation pairings across types, replicates Experiment 1, demonstrating better performance or decreased response latencies, depending on trial type, to species-specific monkey vocalizations. The findings cannot be explained by acoustic differences between monkey vocalizations and the other sound types, suggesting the biological, and/or ethological meaning of these sounds are more effective for auditory memory.