Expertise in object recognition, as in bird watching or X-ray specialization, is based on extensive perceptual experience and in-depth semantic knowledge. Although it has been shown that rich perceptual experience shapes elementary perception and higher level discrimination and identification, little is known about the influence of in-depth semantic knowledge on object perception and identifica...

To address the plurality of interpretations of the subjective notion of risk, we describe it by means of a risk order and concentrate on the context invariant features of diversification and monotonicity. Our main results are uniquely characterized robust representations of lower semicontinuous risk orders on vector spaces and convex sets. This representation covers most instruments related to ...

Reducing the sodium content in foods is complex because of their multidimensional sensory characteristics and the multifunctionality of sodium chloride. The aim of this study was to elucidate how food composition may influence in-mouth sodium release and saltiness perception. Lipoprotein matrices (LPM) were produced using milk constituents and characterized by means of rheological measurements,...

Contextual effects are ubiquitous in vision and provide a means for detectors with localized receptive fields to encode global properties of a stimulus. Although the nature of the neural connections is complex, the majority of evidence supports the Gestalt idea of collinearity; interactions are greatest when the target and surround orientations are spatially aligned to form a contour. Here we c...

A variety of studies have demonstrated that organizing stimuli into categories can affect the way the stimuli are perceived. We explore the influence of categories on perception through one such phenomenon, the perceptual magnet effect, in which discriminability between vowels is reduced near prototypical vowel sounds. We present a Bayesian model to explain why this reduced discriminability mig...

This paper studies active perception in an urban scenario, focusing on the cooperation between a set of surveillance cameras and mobile robots. The fixed cameras provide a global but incomplete and possibly inaccurate view of the environment, which can be enhanced by a robot’s local sensors. Active perception means that the robot considers the effects of its actions on its sensory capabilities....

Although it is well known that a listener’s linguistic experience influences their perception of non-native speech sounds, many researchers have access to a limited range of listener populations. Building on recent work, we examined if this issue could be addressed by conducting non-native speech perception experiments over the internet. We developed a web-based version of an implicit learning ...

Perception is influenced both by the immediate pattern of sensory inputs and by memories acquired through prior experiences with the world. Throughout much of its illustrious history, however, study of the cellular basis of perception has focused on neuronal structures and events that underlie the detection and discrimination of sensory stimuli. Relatively little attention has been paid to the ...

Sometimes, perception fluctuates spontaneously between two distinct interpretations of a constant sensory input. These bistable perceptual phenomena provide a unique window into the neural mechanisms that create the contents of conscious perception. Models of bistable perception posit that mutual inhibition between stimulus-selective neural populations in visual cortex plays a key role in these...

Failure to selectively attend to a facial feature, in the part-to-whole paradigm, has been taken as evidence of holistic perception in a large body of face perception literature. In this article, we demonstrate that although failure of selective attention is a necessary property of holistic perception, its presence alone is not sufficient to conclude holistic processing has occurred. One must a...