scholarly journals Visual awareness judgments are sensitive to accuracy feedback in stimulus discrimination task

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Siedlecka ◽  
Michał Wereszczyński ◽  
Borysław Paulewicz ◽  
Michał Wierzchoń
Keyword(s):  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Performance Monitoring ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Feedback Condition ◽  
Perceptual Discrimination ◽  
Perceptual Awareness ◽  
Discrimination Accuracy ◽  
Stimulus Discrimination ◽  
Correct Discrimination

AbstractIn this study we tested the hypothesis that perceptual awareness judgments are sensitive to the accuracy feedback about previous behaviour. We used a perceptual discrimination task in which participants reported their stimulus awareness. We created two conditions: No-feedback and Feedback (discrimination accuracy feedback was provided at the end of each trial). The results showed that visual awareness judgments are related to the accuracy of current and previous responses. Participants reported lower stimulus awareness for incorrectly versus correctly discriminated stimuli in both conditions; they also reported lower stimulus awareness in trials preceded by incorrect discrimination responses, compared to trials preceded by correct discrimination. This difference was significantly stronger in the Feedback condition. Moreover, in the Feedback condition we also observed larger post-error slowing for PAS ratings. We discuss the relation between the effects of performance monitoring and visual awareness and interpret the results in the context of current theories of consciousness.

Stimulus Ratio Effects on Speech Discrimination by Children and Adults

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan E. Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Response Pattern ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
Speech Discrimination ◽  
Adult Group ◽  
Discrimination Accuracy ◽  
Formant Frequency ◽  
Response Strategies ◽  
Place Of Articulation ◽  
Adults And Children

This investigation examined the response strategies and discrimination accuracy of adults and children aged 5–10 as the ratio of same to different trials was varied across three conditions of a “change/no-change” discrimination task. The conditions varied as follows: (a) a ratio of one-third same to two-thirds different trials (33% same), (b) an equal ratio of same to different trials (50% same), and (c) a ratio of two-thirds same to one-third different trials (67% same). Stimuli were synthetic consonant-vowel syllables that changed along a place of articulation dimension by formant frequency transition. Results showed that all subjects changed their response strategies depending on the ratio of same-to-different trials. The most lax response pattern was observed for the 50% same condition, and the most conservative pattern was observed for the 67% same condition. Adult response patterns were most conservative across condition. Differences in discrimination accuracy as measured by P(C) were found, with the largest difference in the 5- to 6-year-old group and the smallest change in the adult group. These findings suggest that children’s response strategies, like those of adults, can be manipulated by changing the ratio of same-to-different trials. Furthermore, interpretation of sensitivity measures must be referenced to task variables such as the ratio of same-to-different trials.

scholarly journals Effects of Moderate-to-Vigorous Acute Exercise on Visual Consciousness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Binn Zhang ◽  
Xiaoxu Meng ◽  
Yanglan Yu ◽  
Yaogang Han ◽  
Ying LIU
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Acute Exercise ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Hit Rate ◽  
Level Of Consciousness ◽  
Speed Change ◽  
Visual Consciousness ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Subjective Reports

Abstract Background the effect of acute exercise on cognition covers almost all stages of information processing, but few studies have focused on visual awareness. Subjective reports on the appearance of faint speed-changes in the perception of stimuli were used as an index for visual consciousness. Visual consciousness was assessed after exercise or rest. Aside from subjective index, objective speed-change discrimination was added as an index for the level of consciousness. Results: the results showed that subjective reports on the appearance of faint speed-changes in the perception of stimuli were affected by acute aerobic exercise. The hit rate for speed-change detection was marginally significantly higher after exercise than sedentary condition. Furthermore, the d’ index was higher after exercise. Analysis of the results obtained for the objective discrimination task showed that discrimination speed was boosted only when subjects were aware of the speed-change. Conclusions: these results suggest that acute exercise enhances visual consciousness.

scholarly journals Awareness and Integration: Understanding the Challenges of Inferring Multisensory Integration Outside of Awareness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Daniel Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Attention ◽  
Multisensory Integration ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Visual Masking ◽  
Target Location ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Visual Speech ◽  
Emotional Prosody ◽  
Perceptual Awareness ◽  
Spatial Cueing

<p>Multisensory integration describes the cognitive processes by which information from various perceptual domains is combined to create coherent percepts. For consciously aware perception, multisensory integration can be inferred when information in one perceptual domain influences subjective experience in another. Yet the relationship between integration and awareness is not well understood. One current question is whether multisensory integration can occur in the absence of perceptual awareness. Because there is subjective experience for unconscious perception, researchers have had to develop novel tasks to infer integration indirectly. For instance, Palmer and Ramsey (2012) presented auditory recordings of spoken syllables alongside videos of faces speaking either the same or different syllables, while masking the videos to prevent visual awareness. The conjunction of matching voices and faces predicted the location of a subsequent Gabor grating (target) on each trial. Participants indicated the location/orientation of the target more accurately when it appeared in the cued location (80% chance), thus the authors inferred that auditory and visual speech events were integrated in the absence of visual awareness. In this thesis, I investigated whether these findings generalise to the integration of auditory and visual expressions of emotion. In Experiment 1, I presented spatially informative cues in which congruent facial and vocal emotional expressions predicted the target location, with and without visual masking. I found no evidence of spatial cueing in either awareness condition. To investigate the lack of spatial cueing, in Experiment 2, I repeated the task with aware participants only, and had half of those participants explicitly report the emotional prosody. A significant spatial-cueing effect was found only when participants reported emotional prosody, suggesting that audiovisual congruence can cue spatial attention during aware perception. It remains unclear whether audiovisual congruence can cue spatial attention without awareness, and whether such effects genuinely imply multisensory integration.</p>

Differences Between Normals and Schizophrenics on Activation-induced Change in Two-flash Fusion Threshold

1969 ◽  
Vol 115 (521) ◽  
pp. 477-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Hieatt ◽  
J. E. Tong
Keyword(s):  
Brain Stem ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Experimental Situation ◽  
Arousal Level ◽  
Perceptual Discrimination ◽  
Sources Of Error ◽  
Perceptual Functioning ◽  
Method Of Constant Stimuli

Research relating brain stem stimulation and cortical selectivity by Lindsley (1957) led Venables (1963) to utilize a score from a perceptual discrimination task (two-flash fusion threshold, T.F.T.) to examine hypotheses relating arousal level to perceptual dysfunction and schizophrenic symptoms. Other work failed to confirm the results (Hume and Claridge, 1965), possibly due to the unsuitable method of determining T.F.T., a method of constant stimuli. The following experiments were based on the proposition that perceptual functioning is related to arousal level, and also attempted to resolve confusions arising from earlier studies by control of possible sources of error in the experimental situation.

Invisible Adaptation: The Effect of Awareness on the Strength of the Motion Aftereffect

Perception ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (8) ◽  
pp. 835-857
Author(s):  
Daphne Roumani ◽  
Konstantinos Moutoussis
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Motion Aftereffect ◽  
Stimulus Strength ◽  
Perceptual Awareness ◽  
Physical Stimulus ◽  
Adaptation Stimulus ◽  
Unconscious Processing ◽  
Total Absence ◽  
Direction Discrimination

The ability to process information despite the lack of perceptual awareness is one of the most fascinating aspects of the visual system. Such unconscious processing is often investigated using adaptation, where any presence of the former can be traced by its footprint on aftereffects following the latter. We have investigated the mechanisms of the motion aftereffect (MAE) using random dot displays of varying motion coherence as well as crowding to modulate both the physical as well as the perceptual strength of the adaptation stimulus. Perceptual strength was quantitatively measured as the performance in a forced-choice direction-discrimination task. A motion-nulling technique was used to quantitatively measure the strength of the MAE. We show that the strength of the dynamic MAE is independently influenced by both the physical stimulus strength as well as the subjective perceptual strength, with the effect of the former being more prominent than that of the latter. We further show that the MAE still persists under conditions of subthreshold perception. Our results suggest that perceptual awareness can influence the strength of visual processing, but the latter is not fully dependent on the former and can still take place at its partial or even total absence.

Effects of stimulation or blockade of central nicotinic-cholinergic receptors on performance of a novel version of the rat stimulus discrimination task

1996 ◽  
Vol 123 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. V. Terry ◽  
J. J. Buccafusco ◽  
S. Zagrodnik ◽  
F. F. Evans-Martin ◽  
W. J. Jackson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Cholinergic Receptors ◽  
Stimulus Discrimination ◽  
Nicotinic Cholinergic Receptors

Effects of Physical Size and Complexity on Tactual Discrimination of Blind Children

1972 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward P. Berla
Keyword(s):  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Discrimination Performance ◽  
Discrimination Accuracy ◽  
Physical Size ◽  
Pair Comparison ◽  
Percent Correct ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Blind Children ◽  
Task Time

The effects of physical size and complexity of metric figures on tactual discrimination performance was investigated with 36 blind children in grades 1 and 2. Metric figures from three levels of complexity (3 × 3, 4 × 4, and 5 × 5) were combined factorially with three physical sizes (1, 2, and 4 inches) in a same-different pair-comparison discrimination task. Increasing levels of physical size and complexity had no effect on discrimination accuracy, but increasing levels of either physical size or complexity significantly increased task time. Overall accuracy of performance was low (62 percent correct discriminations), and it appeared that unsystematic and inappropriate hand and finger motions were responsible for the low level of performance.

scholarly journals Qualitative speed-accuracy tradeoff effects that cannot be explained by the diffusion model under the selective influence assumption

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farshad Rafiei ◽  
Dobromir Rahnev
Keyword(s):  
Diffusion Model ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Drift Rate ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Perceptual Discrimination ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Speed Accuracy ◽  
Selective Influence ◽  
Accuracy Tradeoff ◽  
Rt Distributions

It is often thought that the diffusion model explains all effects related to the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) but this has previously been examined with only a few SAT conditions or only a few subjects. Here we collected data from 20 subjects who performed a perceptual discrimination task with five different difficulty levels and five different SAT conditions (5,000 trials/subject). We found that the five SAT conditions produced robustly U-shaped curves for (i) the difference between error and correct response times (RTs), (ii) the ratio of the standard deviation and mean of the RT distributions, and (iii) the skewness of the RT distributions. Critically, the diffusion model where only drift rate varies with contrast and only boundary varies with SAT could not account for any of the three U-shaped curves. Further, allowing all parameters to vary across conditions revealed that both the SAT and difficulty manipulations resulted in substantial modulations in every model parameter, while still providing imperfect fits to the data. These findings demonstrate that the diffusion model cannot fully explain the effects of SAT and establishes three robust but challenging effects that models of SAT should account for.

scholarly journals Effects of expected task difficulty on metacognitive confidence and multitasking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine Tamara Sherman ◽  
Anil Seth
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Secondary Task ◽  
Task Difficulty ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Prior Probability ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Perceptual Discrimination ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Decision Confidence

In daily life, repeated experiences with a task (e.g. driving) will generally result in the development of a belief about one’s ability (“I am a good driver”). Here we ask how such beliefs, termed self-efficacy, interact with metacognitive confidence judgements. Across three pre-registered experiments, participants performed a perceptual discrimination task and reported their decision confidence. We induced contextual beliefs about performance (our operationalisation of self-efficacy) by manipulating the prior probability of an easy or hard trial occurring in each block. In Experiment 1 easy and hard trials generated the same levels of performance (a “subjective difficulty” manipulation), whereas in Experiments 2 and 3 performance differed across difficulty conditions (an “objective difficulty” manipulation). Results showed that context (self-efficacy) and difficulty interacted multiplicatively, consistent with the notion that confidence judgements combine decision evidence with a prior (contextual) belief on being correct. This occurred despite context having no corresponding effect on performance. We reasoned that performing tasks in easy contexts may reduce cognitive “load”, and tested this, in Experiment 3, by instructing participants to perform two tasks concurrently. Consistent with a reduction in load, the effects of context transferred from influencing confidence on our primary task to improving performance on the secondary task. Taken together, these studies reveal that contextual beliefs about performance facilitate multitasking, potentially by reducing the load of tasks believed to be easy, and they extend psychophysical investigations of perceptual decision-making by incorporating ‘higher-order’ beliefs about difficulty context, corresponding to intuitive notions of self-efficacy.

scholarly journals Disentangling Perceptual Awareness from Non-conscious Processing in Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moshe Shay Ben-Haim ◽  
Olga Dal Monte ◽  
Nicholas A. Fagan ◽  
Yarrow Dunham ◽  
Ran Hassin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Macaca Mulatta ◽  
Rhesus Monkeys ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Empirical Approach ◽  
Perceptual Awareness ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Double Dissociation ◽  
Modes Of Processing ◽  
Conscious Processing ◽  
High Level

Scholars have long debated whether animals, which display impressive intelligent behaviors, are consciously aware or not. Yet, because many complex human behaviors and high-level functions can be performed without conscious awareness, it was long considered impossible to untangle whether animals are aware, or just conditionally or non-consciously behaving. Here, we developed a novel empirical approach to address this question. We harnessed a well-established crossover double dissociation between non-conscious and conscious processing, in which people perform in completely opposite ways when they are aware of stimuli versus when they are not. To date, no one has explored if similar performance dissociations exist in a non-human species. In a series of seven experiments, we first established these signatures in humans using both known and newly developed non-verbal double dissociation tasks, and then identified similar signatures in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). These results provide robust evidence for two distinct modes of processing in non-human primates. This empirical approach makes it feasible to disentangle conscious visual awareness from non-conscious processing in non-human species; hence, it can be used to strip away ambiguity when exploring the processes governing intelligent behavior across the animal kingdom. Taken together, these results strongly support the existence of both non-conscious processing as well as functional human-like visual awareness in non-human animals.

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