Despite decades of research, there is still uncertainty about how people make simple decisions about perceptual stimuli. Most theories assume that perceptual decisions are based on decision variables, which are internal variables that encode task-relevant information. However, decision variables are usually considered to be theoretical constructs that cannot be measured directly, and this often...

While subjective reports provide a direct measure of perception, their validity is not self-evident. Here, the authors tested three possible biasing effects on perceptual reports in the auditory streaming paradigm: errors due to imperfect understanding of the instructions, voluntary perceptual biasing, and susceptibility to implicit expectations. (1) Analysis of the responses to catch trials se...

In this article, we investigate how accurately the squared error captures perceptual errors introduced by Fourier phase spectrum changes. We measure the perceptual error using the Auditory Image Model by Patterson et al.. The squared error is found to represent the perceptual error well for low squared errors but it saturates. Thus, a further increase in squared error does on average not lead t...

Perceptual organization is difficult to study because it lies on the border between our experience of the world and unconscious perceptual processing. Even the term “perceptual organization” is ambiguous: it means both the outcome of perceptual processes—how things look—and the mechanism that produces it—the psychophysical processes that precede awareness. Perceptual organization is difficult t...

Does the magical number four characterize our visual working memory (VWM) capacity for all kinds of objects, or is the capacity of VWM inversely related to the perceptual complexity of those objects? To find out how perceptual complexity affects VWM, we used a change detection task to measure VWM capacity for six types of stimuli of different complexity: colors, letters, polygons, squiggles, cu...

Continually observing an ambiguous figure, we can perceive reversals between different interpretations. How perceptual reversals change when an ambiguous stimulus is presented intermittently? Since no reversal can be consciously perceived during off-periods, we use net Average Reversal Interval (netARI) but not usual average reversal interval to measure the perceptual reversal rate. NetARI is c...

Perceptual audio coders use a varying number of bits to encode subsequent frames according to the perceptual entropy of the audio signal. For transmission over a constant bitrate channel the bitstream must be buffered. The buffer must be large enough to absorb variations in the bitrate, otherwise the quality of the audio will be compromised. We present a new scheme for buffer control of percept...

Perceptual video compression has been increasingly utilized to obtain higher compression gains by removing perceptual redundancies according to the Human Visual System (HVS). Due to non-linear complex mechanisms of the HVS, conventional quality metrics fail to assess the performance of perceptual video compressors. Therefore, subjective assessment is employed as the most reliable method for thi...