Are unconscious processes susceptible to attentional influences? In two subliminal priming experiments, we investigated whether task sets differentially modulate the sensitivity of unconscious processing pathways. We developed a novel procedure for masked semantic priming of words (Experiment 1) and masked visuomotor priming of geometrical shapes (Experiment 2). Before presentation of the maske...

Quantification of vocal quality of a speech signal is essential in a number of applications. However, existing measures for this purpose are often characterized by poor sensitivity and specificity to perceptual judgments. These shortcomings may have arisen because (1) these measures are often validated against “noisy” perceptual data and (2) the non-linear and multidimensional relationships bet...

Aiming at the fundamental issue of optimal design of discrete levels of detail (LOD) for the visualization of complicated 3D building fac-ades, this paper presents a new quantitative analytical method of perceptible 3D details based on perceptual metric. First, the perceptual metric is defined as the quantitative indicator of the visual perceptibility of fac-ade details at a given viewing dista...

Adults have little difficulty perceiving objects as complete despite occlusion, but newborn infants perceive moving partly occluded objects solely in terms of visible surfaces. The developmental mechanisms leading to perceptual completion have never been adequately explained. Here, the authors examine the potential contributions of oculomotor behavior and motion sensitivity to perceptual comple...

Numerous psychophysical studies have described perceptual learning as long-lasting improvements in perceptual discrimination and detection capabilities following practice. Where and how long-term plastic changes occur in the brain is central to understanding the neural basis of perceptual learning. Here, neurophysiological research using non-human primates is reviewed to address the neural mech...

Feature extraction is a main step in all perceptual image hashing schemes in which robust features will led to better results in perceptual robustness. Simplicity, discriminative power, computational efficiency and robustness to illumination changes are counted as distinguished properties of Local Binary Pattern features. In this paper, we investigate the use of local binary patterns for percep...

development to adults. When either hormone is low, the dauer state is promoted. Insulin/IGF and TGF-b are expressed by sensory neurons in C. elegans, which couple transcription of both hormones to the environment. By contrast, downstream hormone receptors are broadly expressed, allowing for organism-wide developmental changes. Interestingly, the insulin pathway has also been linked to longevity...

Previous research has shown that typical adults demonstrate a heightened visual sensitivity to potentially threatening biological motion (Chouchourelou, Matsuka, Harber, & Shiffrar, 2006). Namely, typical adults are more sensitive to the presence of an angry point-light walker as compared to the presence of happy, fearful, sad, or neutral walkers. This is known as the anger-superiority effect. ...

A psychoacoustic model of the source spectrum has been proposed in which four spectral slope parameters describe perception of overall voice quality: H1-H2 (the difference in amplitude between the first and second harmonics), H2-H4, H4-2000 Hz (i.e., the harmonic nearest 2000 Hz), and 2000-5000 Hz. The goals of this study are to evaluate perceptual sensitivity in the mid-to-high frequency range...

To shed new light on the long-standing debate about the (in)dependence of sensitivity to weak stimuli and overreactivity to strong stimuli, we examined the relation between these tendencies within the neurobehavioral framework of the Predictive and Reactive Control Systems (PARCS) theory (Tops et al., 2010, 2014). Whereas previous studies only considered overreactivity in terms of the individua...