Illusory Increases in Font Size Improve Letter Recognition.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lages M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5549815 | biostudies-other | 2017 Aug
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
Publications
Illusory Increases in Font Size Improve Letter Recognition.
Lages Martin M Boyle Stephanie C SC Jenkins Rob R
Psychological science 20170705 8
Visual performance of human observers depends not only on the optics of the eye and early sensory encoding but also on subsequent cortical processing and representations. In two experiments, we demonstrated that motion adaptation can enhance as well as impair visual acuity. Observers who experienced an expanding motion aftereffect exhibited improved letter recognition, whereas observers who experienced a contracting motion aftereffect showed impaired letter recognition. We conclude that illusory ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:The visual system constructs perceptions based on ambiguous information. For motion perception, the correspondence problem arises, i.e., the question of which object went where. We asked at which level of processing correspondence is solved - lower levels based on information that is directly available in the retinal input or higher levels based on information that has been abstracted beyond the input directly available at the retina? We used a Ponzo-like illusion to manipulate the perceived size and separations of elements in an ambiguous apparent motion display. Specifically, we presented Ternus displays - for which the type of motion that is perceived depends on how correspondence is resolved - at apparently different distances from the viewer using pictorial depth cues. We found that the perception of motion depended on the apparent depth of the displays, indicating that correspondence processes utilize information that is produced at higher-level processes.
| S-EPMC7704483 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In visual word recognition tasks, digit primes that are visually similar to letter string targets (e.g., 4/A, 8/B) are known to facilitate letter identification relative to visually dissimilar digits (e.g., 6/A, 7/B); in contrast, with letter primes, visual similarity effects have been elusive. In the present study we show that the visual similarity effect with letter primes can be made to come and go, depending on whether it is necessary to discriminate between visually similar letters. The results support a Bayesian view which regards letter recognition not as a passive activation process driven by the fixed stimulus properties, but as a dynamic evidence accumulation process for a decision that is guided by the task context.
| S-EPMC4577525 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The perception of the size and shape of one's body (body image) is a fundamental aspect of how we experience ourselves. We studied the neural correlates underlying perceived changes in the relative size of body parts by using a perceptual illusion in which participants felt that their waist was shrinking. We scanned the brains of the participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We found that activity in the cortices lining the left postcentral sulcus and the anterior part of the intraparietal sulcus reflected the illusion of waist shrinking, and that this activity was correlated with the reported degree of shrinking. These results suggest that the perceived changes in the size and shape of body parts are mediated by hierarchically higher-order somatosensory areas in the parietal cortex. Based on this finding we suggest that relative size of body parts is computed by the integration of more elementary somatic signals from different body segments.
| S-EPMC1287503 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Social context may influence the perception of sensory cues and the ability to display refined behavioral responses. Previous work suggests that effective responses to environmental cues can be contingent on having a sufficient number of individuals in a group. Thus, the changes in group size may have profound impacts, particularly on the behavior of small social groups. Using zebrafish (Danio rerio), here we examined how changes in group size influence the ability to respond to changes in water flow. We found that fish in relatively larger groups displayed stronger rheotaxis even when comparing pairs of fish with groups of four fish, indicating that a small increase in group size can enhance the responsiveness to environmental change. Individual fish in relatively larger groups also spent less time in the energetically costly leading position compared to individuals in pairs, indicating that even a small increase in group size may provide energetic benefits. We also found that the shoal cohesion was dependent on the size of the group but within a given group size, shoal cohesion did not vary with flow rate. Our study highlights that even a small change in group size could significantly affect the way social fish respond to the changes in water flow, which could be an important attribute that shapes the resilience of social animals in changing environments.
| S-EPMC9269864 | biostudies-literature
Project description:It is known that the perceived size of an afterimage is modulated by the perceived distance between the observer and the depth plane on which the afterimage is projected (Emmert's law). Illusions like Ponzo demonstrate that illusory distance induced by depth cues can also affect the perceived size of an object. In this study, we report that the illusory distance not only modulates the perceived size of object's afterimage during the presence of the depth cues, but the modulation persists after the disappearance of the depth cues. We used an adapted version of the classic Ponzo illusion. Illusory depth perception was induced by linear perspective cues with two tilted lines converging at the upper boundary of the display. Two horizontal bars were placed between the two lines, resulting in a percept of the upper bar to be farther away than the lower bar. Observers were instructed to make judgment about the relative size of the afterimage of the lower and the upper bars after adaptation. When the perspective cues and the bars were static, the illusory effect of the Ponzo afterimage is consistent with that of the traditional size-distance illusion. When the perspective cues were flickering and the bars were static, only the afterimage of the latter was perceived, yet still a considerable amount of the illusory effect was perceived. The results could not be explained by memory of a prejudgment of the bar length during the adaptation phase. The findings suggest that cooccurrences of depth cues and object may link a depth marker for the object, so that the perceived size of the object or its afterimage is modulated by feedback of depth information from higher-level visual cortex even when there is no depth cues directly available on the retinal level.
| S-EPMC4938592 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The present study investigates the nature of the spelling-to-sound correspondences taught to enhance phonemic awareness in prereaders. The main assumption in the literature is that learning the alphabetic code through letter-to-phoneme correspondences is the best way to improve phonemic awareness. The alternative syllabic bridge hypothesis, based on the saliency and early availability of syllables, assumes that learning to associate letters to phonological syllables enables phoneme units to be the mirror of the letters and to become accessible, thereby developing phonemic awareness of prereaders. A total of 222 French-speaking prereaders took part in a 4-session learning program based on correspondences either between letters and syllables (letters-to-syllable group) or between letters and phonemes (letter-to-phoneme group), and the fifth last session on coding and decoding. Our results showed a greater increase in phonemic awareness in the letters-to-syllable group than in the letter-to-phoneme group. The present study suggests that teaching prereaders letters-to-syllable correspondences is a key to successful reading.
| S-EPMC7747708 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We occasionally misinterpret ambiguous sensory input or report a stimulus when none is presented. It is unknown whether such errors have a sensory origin and reflect true perceptual illusions, or whether they have a more cognitive origin (e.g., are due to guessing), or both. When participants performed an error-prone and challenging face/house discrimination task, multivariate electroencephalography (EEG) analyses revealed that during decision errors (e.g., mistaking a face for a house), sensory stages of visual information processing initially represent the presented stimulus category. Crucially however, when participants were confident in their erroneous decision, so when the illusion was strongest, this neural representation flipped later in time and reflected the incorrectly reported percept. This flip in neural pattern was absent for decisions that were made with low confidence. This work demonstrates that decision confidence arbitrates between perceptual decision errors, which reflect true illusions of perception, and cognitive decision errors, which do not.
| S-EPMC10013920 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Currently, digital transformation has occurred in most countries in the world to varying degrees, but digitizing business processes are complex in terms of understanding the various aspects of manual documentation. The use of digital devices and intelligent systems is vital in the digital transformation of manual documentation from hardcopy to digital formats. The transformation of handwritten documents into electronic files is one of the principal aspects of digitization and represents a common need shared by today's businesses. Generally, handwriting recognition poses a complex digitization challenge, and Arabic handwriting recognition, specifically, proves inordinately challenging due to the nature of Arabic scripts and the excessive diversity in human handwriting. This study presents an intelligent approach for recognizing handwritten Arabic letters. In this approach, a convolution neural network (CNN) model is proposed to recognize handwritten Arabic letters. The model is regularized using batch normalization and dropout operations. Moreover, the model was tested with and without dropout, resulting in a significant difference in the performance. Hence, the model overfitting has been prevented using dropout regularization. The proposed model was applied to the prominent, publicly-available Arabic handwritten characters (AHCD) dataset with 16,800 letters, and the performance was measured using several evaluation measures. The experimental results show the best fit of the proposed model in terms of higher accuracy results that reached 96.78%; additionally, other evaluation measures compared to popular domain-relevant approaches in the literature.
| S-EPMC9202630 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Spatio-temporal pattern recognition is a fundamental ability of the brain which is required for numerous real-world activities. Recent deep learning approaches have reached outstanding accuracies in such tasks, but their implementation on conventional embedded solutions is still very computationally and energy expensive. Tactile sensing in robotic applications is a representative example where real-time processing and energy efficiency are required. Following a brain-inspired computing approach, we propose a new benchmark for spatio-temporal tactile pattern recognition at the edge through Braille letter reading. We recorded a new Braille letters dataset based on the capacitive tactile sensors of the iCub robot's fingertip. We then investigated the importance of spatial and temporal information as well as the impact of event-based encoding on spike-based computation. Afterward, we trained and compared feedforward and recurrent Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offline using Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) with surrogate gradients, then we deployed them on the Intel Loihi neuromorphic chip for fast and efficient inference. We compared our approach to standard classifiers, in particular to the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deployed on the embedded NVIDIA Jetson GPU, in terms of classification accuracy, power, and energy consumption together with computational delay. Our results show that the LSTM reaches ~97% of accuracy, outperforming the recurrent SNN by ~17% when using continuous frame-based data instead of event-based inputs. However, the recurrent SNN on Loihi with event-based inputs is ~500 times more energy-efficient than the LSTM on Jetson, requiring a total power of only ~30 mW. This work proposes a new benchmark for tactile sensing and highlights the challenges and opportunities of event-based encoding, neuromorphic hardware, and spike-based computing for spatio-temporal pattern recognition at the edge.
| S-EPMC9695069 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Four experiments examined the ability of respondents to identify letters that were displayed on an LED array with flashes lasting little more than a microsecond. The first experiment displayed each letter with a single, simultaneous flash of all the dots forming the letter and established the relation of flash intensity to the probability of letter identification. The second experiment displayed the letters with multiple flashes at different frequencies to determine the probability that the sequence of flashes would be perceived as fused. The third experiment displayed the letters at a frequency that was above the flicker-fusion frequency, varying flash intensity to establish the amount needed to elicit a given probability of letter identification. The fourth experiment displayed each letter twice, once at a frequency where no flicker was perceived and also with steady light emission. The intensity of each flash was fixed and the steady intensity was varied; respondents were asked to judge whether the fused-flicker display and the steady display appeared to be the same brightness. Steady intensity was about double the average flash intensity where the two conditions were perceived as being equal in brightness. This is at odds with Talbot-Plateau law, which predicts that these two values should be equal. The law was formulated relative to a flash lasting half of each period, so it is surprising that it comes this close to being correct where the flash occupies only a millionth of the total period.
| S-EPMC4395448 | biostudies-literature