Judgment Of Orientation Research Articles

Reference repulsion is not a perceptual illusion

Perceptual decisions are often influenced by contextual factors. For instance, when engaged in a visual discrimination task against a reference boundary, subjective reports about the judged stimulus feature are biased away from the boundary – a phenomenon termed reference repulsion. Until recently, this phenomenon has been thought to reflect a perceptual illusion regarding the appearance of the stimulus, but new evidence suggests that it may rather reflect a post-perceptual decision bias. To shed light on this issue, we examined whether and how orientation judgments affect perceptual appearance. In a first experiment, we confirmed that after judging a grating stimulus against a discrimination boundary, the subsequent reproduction response was indeed repelled from the boundary. To investigate the perceptual nature of this bias, in a second experiment we measured the perceived orientation of the grating stimulus more directly, in comparison to a reference stimulus visible at the same time. Although we did observe a small repulsive bias away from the boundary, this bias was explained by random trial-by-trial fluctuations in sensory representations together with classical stimulus adaptation effects and did not reflect a systematic bias due to the discrimination judgment. Overall, the current study indicates that discrimination judgments do not elicit a perceptual illusion and points towards a post-perceptual locus of reference repulsion.

Sitting Disability Due to Impaired Distance Judgment and Disability of Body Orientation : A Case Report

Sitting Disability Due to Impaired Distance Judgment and Disability of Body Orientation : A Case Report

SNARC-like compatibility effects for physical and phenomenal magnitudes: a study on visual illusions.

Both numerical and non-numerical magnitudes elicit similar Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effects, with small magnitudes associated with left hand responses and large magnitudes associated with right hand responses (Dehaene et al., J Exp Psychol Gen 122(3), 371, 1993). In the present study, we investigated whether the phenomenal size of visual illusions elicits the same SNARC-like effect revealed for the physical size of pictorial surfaces. Four experiments were conducted by using the Delboeuf illusion (Experiment 1) and the Kanizsa triangle illusion (Experiments 2, 3 and 4). Experiment 1 suggests the presence of a SNARC-like compatibility effect for the physical size of the inducers, while this effect was not revealed for the phenomenal size of the induced elements, possibly masked by a stronger effect of the inducers. A SNARC-like effect for the phenomenal size of the Kanizsa triangle was revealed when participants directly compared the size of the triangles (Experiment 4). Conversely, when participants performed an indirect task (orientation judgment), the SNARC-like effect was present neither for the illusory nor for the physical displays (Experiments 2 and 3). The effect revealed for the size of illusory triangles was comparable to that of real triangles with physical contours, suggesting that both phenomenal and physical magnitudes similarly elicit SNARC-like effects.

Detecting Temporal Cognition in Text: Comparison of Judgements by Self, Expert and Machine.

Background: There is a growing research focus on temporal cognition, due to its importance in memory and planning, and links with psychological wellbeing. Researchers are increasingly using diary studies, experience sampling and social media data to study temporal thought. However, it remains unclear whether such reports can be accurately interpreted for temporal orientation. In this study, temporal orientation judgements about text reports of thoughts were compared across human coding, automatic text mining, and participant self-report.Methods: 214 participants responded to randomly timed text message prompts, categorically reporting the temporal direction of their thoughts and describing the content of their thoughts, producing a corpus of 2505 brief (1–358, M = 43 characters) descriptions. Two researchers independently, blindly coded temporal orientation of the descriptions. Four approaches to automated coding used tense to establish temporal category for each description. Concordance between temporal orientation assessments by self-report, human coding, and automatic text mining was evaluated.Results: Human coding more closely matched self-reported coding than automated methods. Accuracy for human (79.93% correct) and automated (57.44% correct) coding was diminished when multiple guesses at ambiguous temporal categories (ties) were allowed in coding (reduction to 74.95% correct for human, 49.05% automated).Conclusion: Ambiguous tense poses a challenge for both human and automated coding protocols that attempt to infer temporal orientation from text describing momentary thought. While methods can be applied to minimize bias, this study demonstrates that researchers need to be wary about attributing temporal orientation to text-reported thought processes, and emphasize the importance of eliciting self-reported judgements.

Does the spatial-numerical association of response codes effect depend on digits’ relative or absolute magnitude? Evidence from a perceptual orientation judgment task

Many previous studies have demonstrated the SNARC effect—i.e., participants are faster to respond with their left/right hand to small/large numbers. However, there is a debate on whether it is based on working or long-term memory (i.e., relative or absolute magnitude). Here, we examined the flexibility of the spatial-numerical associations using orientation judgment tasks. Participants were asked to judge the orientation of a rotated frame surrounding an Arabic digit under numerical ranges 1–6, 4–9 (Experiment 1), and 1–9 (Experiment 2). The task difficulty was manipulated by rotating stimuli. We observed a significant SNARC effect for range 1–6 and a reversed SNARC effect for 4–9, regardless of the total numerical range presented in the task. Furthermore, the SNARC effect became more salient with increasing task difficulty. Our results suggest that the SNARC effect is based on the absolute magnitude of digits, supporting the long-term memory explanation.

Cognition among individuals along a spectrum of increased risk for Parkinson's disease.

IntroductionSeveral characteristics associated with increased risk for Parkinson’s disease (PD) have been identified, including specific genotypes and various non-motor symptoms. Characterizing non-motor features, such as cognitive abilities, among individuals considered at-risk for PD is essential to improving prediction of future neurodegeneration.MethodsParticipants belonging to the following cohorts of the Parkinson Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) study were included: de novo PD with dopamine transporter binding deficit (n = 423), idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD, n = 39), hyposmia (n = 26) and non-PD mutation carrier (NMC; Leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) G2019S (n = 88) and glucocerebrosidase (GBA) gene (n = 38) mutations)). Inclusion criteria enriched the RBD and hyposmia cohorts, but not the NMC cohort, with individuals with dopamine transporter binding deficit. Baseline neuropsychological performance was compared, and analyses were adjusted for age, sex, education, and depression.ResultsThe RBD cohort performed significantly worse than the hyposmia and NMC cohorts on Symbol Digit Modality Test (mean (SD) 32.4 (9.16) vs. 41.8 (9.98), p = 0.002 and vs. 45.2 (10.9), p<0.001) and Judgment of Line Orientation (11.3 (2.36) vs.12.9 (1.87), p = 0.004 and vs. 12.9 (1.87), p<0.001). The RBD cohort also performed worse than the hyposmia cohort on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (25.5 (4.13) vs. 27.3 (1.71), p = 0.02). Hyposmics did not differ from PD or NMC cohorts on any cognitive test score.ConclusionAmong individuals across a spectrum of risk for PD, cognitive function is worse among those with the characteristic most strongly associated with future risk of PD or dementia with Lewy bodies, namely RBD.

Post-decision biases reveal a self-consistency principle in perceptual inference.

Making a categorical judgment can systematically bias our subsequent perception of the world. We show that these biases are well explained by a self-consistent Bayesian observer whose perceptual inference process is causally conditioned on the preceding choice. We quantitatively validated the model and its key assumptions with a targeted set of three psychophysical experiments, focusing on a task sequence where subjects first had to make a categorical orientation judgment before estimating the actual orientation of a visual stimulus. Subjects exhibited a high degree of consistency between categorical judgment and estimate, which is difficult to reconcile with alternative models in the face of late, memory related noise. The observed bias patterns resemble the well-known changes in subjective preferences associated with cognitive dissonance, which suggests that the brain's inference processes may be governed by a universal self-consistency constraint that avoids entertaining 'dissonant' interpretations of the evidence.

The perception of sexual orientation through speech: Generational change

Previous research has shown that listeners can perceive the sexual orientation of some lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people at a greater than chance levels based on the acoustic-perceptual characteristics of their speech (Munson et al., J. Phonetics [2006], Pierrehumbert et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. [2004]). The cues to these judgments were the pronunciation of specific sounds (i.e., /æ/, /ɛ/, /oʊ/, /u/, /s/), rather than global speech characteristics (like f0 range or formant-frequency scaling). In the years since those studies were conducted, societal attitudes toward LGB people have changed substantially. Moreover, ongoing sound changes have affected the pronunciation of many of the sounds that cued judgments of sexual orientation from speech. The current study examines whether these changes affect the perception of sexual orientation through speech. The perception experiments described in Munson et al. are being redone using two groups of listeners. One group is matched in age to subjects whose data were reported previously (i.e, currently 18-30 years old). The second group that is matched in birth year to the subjects from the earlier study (i.e., currently 33-45 years old). Ongoing analyses compare these new data are compared to those from Munson et al.

Spatial perspective taking mediated by whole-body motor simulation.

Humans can envision the world from other people's viewpoints. To explore the embodied process of such spatial perspective taking, we examined whether action related to a whole-body movement modulates performance on spatial perspective-taking tasks. Results showed that when participants responded by putting their left/right foot or left/right hand forward, actions congruent with a movement's direction (clockwise/counterclockwise) reduced RTs relative to incongruent actions. In contrast, actions irrelevant to a movement (a left/right hand index-finger response) did not affect performance. Furthermore, we demonstrated that this response congruency effect cannot be explained by either spatial stimulus-response compatibility or sensorimotor interference. These results support the involvement of simulated whole-body movement in spatial perspective taking. Moreover, the findings revealed faster foot responses than hand responses during spatial perspective taking, whereas the opposite result was obtained during a simple orientation judgment task without spatial perspective taking. Overall, our findings highlight the important role of motor simulation in spatial perspective taking. (PsycINFO Database Record

Cognitive function in patients on androgen suppression: A prospective, multicentric study

ObjectiveTo assess the effect of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) on cognitive performance (CP) in patients with prostate cancer (PCa) after 6 months of treatment with luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) analogs. Material and methodsProspective, observational, multicentre, open-label study of patients diagnosed with nonmetastatic or asymptomatic metastatic PCa scheduled to receive LHRH analogs for ≥6 months. We assessed four CP domains at baseline and after 6 months of ADT: (1) Working memory: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III (WAIS III) Digit Span Subtest (WAIS III-Digit); (2) Visual memory: ad hoc visual memory test; (3) Visuospatial ability: Judgment of Line Orientation (JLO) and Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects (3D-Rotation); and (4) Nonverbal analytical reasoning: WAIS III Matrix Reasoning Test (WAIS III-MRT). Changes outside the baseline 95% confidence intervals were considered significant. ResultsA total of 308 patients completed the study. Of these, 245 (79.6%) experienced no statistically significant changes on any test and 63 patients (20.4%) experienced significant changes in ≥1 test. Of these, most presented a change in only one test, distributed evenly between improvements (58 patients; 18.8%) and worsening (56 patients; 18.2%). For individual tests, most patients (87.8–91.8%) had no change from baseline; however, the significant changes (improvement vs. deterioration, respectively) were as follows: WAIS III-Digit (6.3% vs. 5.9%); visual memory (5.3% vs. 5.7%); JLO (5.3% vs. 4.5%); 3D-Rotation (4.1% vs. 4.1%); and WAIS III-MRT (4.8% vs. 5.8%). ConclusionsCP in patients with PCa does not appear to be adversely affected by 6 months of LHRH analog administration.

Deciphering the religious orientation of a sacred space: Disparate impressions of worship settings by congregants and external observers

Although existing research has assessed the factors associated with judgments of novel sacred spaces, comparatively little work has investigated how these environmental properties relate to the beliefs, emotions, and satisfaction of the congregants who worship there. In this study, individuals from 23 churches evaluated their worship space, and an online sample provided their impressions of these settings and the type of people they believe worship there. A series of linear mixed-effects models revealed that (a) worship spaces that offer exploration were associated with greater satisfaction, feelings of restoration, and more positive emotions among congregants, particularly for those high in quest orientation, (b) external raters' explicit judgments of a congregation's religious orientation from observations of their worship space were highly inaccurate, but (c) an external rater's similarity to the congregation's actual religious attitudes, even when it was unknown to the perceiver, predicted greater liking of that congregation's worship space.

Serial dependencies act directly on perception

There is good evidence that biological perceptual systems exploit the temporal continuity in the world: When asked to reproduce or rate sequentially presented stimuli (varying in almost any dimension), subjects typically err toward the previous stimulus, exhibiting so-called "serial dependence." At this stage it is unclear whether the serial dependence results from averaging within the perceptual system, or at later stages. Here we demonstrate that strong serial dependencies occur within both perceptual and decision processes, with very little contribution from the response. Using a technique to isolate pure perceptual effects (Fritsche, Mostert, & de Lange, 2017), we show strong serial dependence in orientation judgements, over the range of orientations where theoretical considerations predict the effects to be maximal. In a second experiment we dissociate responses from stimuli to show that serial dependence occurs only between stimuli, not responses. The results show that serial dependence is important for perception, exploiting temporal redundancies to enhance perceptual efficiency.

Correlated individual differences suggest a common mechanism underlying metacognition in visual perception and visual short-term memory.

Adaptive behaviour depends on the ability to introspect accurately about one's own performance. Whether this metacognitive ability is supported by the same mechanisms across different tasks is unclear. We investigated the relationship between metacognition of visual perception and metacognition of visual short-term memory (VSTM). Experiments 1 and 2 required subjects to estimate the perceived or remembered orientation of a grating stimulus and rate their confidence. We observed strong positive correlations between individual differences in metacognitive accuracy between the two tasks. This relationship was not accounted for by individual differences in task performance or average confidence, and was present across two different metrics of metacognition and in both experiments. A model-based analysis of data from a third experiment showed that a cross-domain correlation only emerged when both tasks shared the same task-relevant stimulus feature. That is, metacognition for perception and VSTM were correlated when both tasks required orientation judgements, but not when the perceptual task was switched to require contrast judgements. In contrast with previous results comparing perception and long-term memory, which have largely provided evidence for domain-specific metacognitive processes, the current findings suggest that metacognition of visual perception and VSTM is supported by a domain-general metacognitive architecture, but only when both domains share the same task-relevant stimulus feature.

Cortical thinning correlates of changes in visuospatial and visuoperceptual performance in Parkinson's disease: A 4-year follow-up

BackgroundGrowing evidence highlights the relevance of posterior cortically-based cognitive deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD) as possible biomarkers of the evolution to dementia. Cross-sectional correlational studies have established a relationship between the degree of atrophy in posterior brain regions and visuospatial and visuoperceptual (VS/VP) impairment. The aim of this study is to address the progressive cortical thinning correlates of VS/VP performance in PD. MethodsForty-four PD patients and 20 matched healthy subjects were included in this study and followed for 4 years. Tests used to assess VS/VP functions included were: Benton's Judgement of Line Orientation (JLOT), Facial Recognition (FRT), and Visual Form Discrimination (VFDT) Tests; Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT); and the Pentagon Copying Test (PCT). Structural magnetic resonance imaging data and FreeSurfer were used to evaluate cortical thinning evolution. ResultsPD patients with normal cognition (PD-NC) and PD patients with mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI) differed significantly in the progression of cortical thinning in posterior regions. In PD-MCI patients, the change in VS/VP functions assessed by PCT, JLOT, FRT, and SMDT correlated with the symmetrized percent change of cortical thinning of occipital, parietal, and temporal regions. In PD-NC patients, we also observed a correlation between changes in FRT and thinning in parieto-occipital regions. ConclusionIn this study, we establish the neuroanatomical substrate of progressive changes in VS/VP performance in PD patients with and without MCI. In agreement with cross-sectional data, VS/VP changes over time are related to cortical thinning in posterior regions.

The relationship between neuropsychological tests of visuospatial function and lobar cortical thickness

ABSTRACTIntroduction: Tests of visuospatial function are often administered in comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations. These tests are generally considered assays of parietal lobe function; however, the neural correlates of these tests, using modern imaging techniques, are not well understood. In the current study we investigated the relationship between three commonly used tests of visuospatial function and lobar cortical thickness in each hemisphere.Method: Data from 374 patients who underwent a neuropsychological evaluation and MRI scans in an outpatient dementia clinic were included in the analysis. We examined the relationships between cortical thickness, as assessed with Freesurfer, and performance on three tests: Judgment of Line Orientation (JoLO), Block Design (BD) from the Fourth edition of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-Revised Copy Trial (BVMT–R-C) in patients who showed overall average performance on these tasks. Using a series of multiple regression models, we assessed which lobe’s overall cortical thickness best predicted test performance.Results: Among the individual lobes, JoLO performance was best predicted by cortical thickness in the right temporal lobe. BD performance was best predicted by cortical thickness in the right parietal lobe, and BVMT–R-C performance was best predicted by cortical thickness in the left parietal lobe.Conclusions: Performance on constructional tests of visuospatial function appears to correspond best with underlying cortical thickness of the parietal lobes, while performance on visuospatial judgment tests appears to correspond best to temporal lobe thickness. Future research using voxel-wise and connectivity techniques and including more diverse samples will help further understanding of the regions and networks involved in visuospatial tests.

Función cognitiva en pacientes tratados con supresión androgénica: estudio prospectivo y multicéntrico

ObjectiveTo assess the effect of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) on cognitive performance (CP) in patients with prostate cancer (PCa) after 6 months of treatment with luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) analogues. Material and methodsProspective, observational, multicentre, open-label study of patients diagnosed with nonmetastatic or asymptomatic metastatic PCa scheduled to receive LHRH analogues for≥6 months. We assessed four CP domains at baseline and after 6 months of ADT: 1) Working memory: Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III (WAIS III) Digit Span Subtest (WAIS III-Digit); 2) Visual memory: ad hoc visual memory test; 3) Visuospatial ability: Judgement of Line Orientation (JLO) and Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects (3D-Rotation); and 4) Nonverbal analytical reasoning: WAIS III Matrix Reasoning Test (WAIS III-MRT). Changes outside the baseline 95% confidence intervals were considered significant. ResultsA total of 308 patients completed the study. Of these, 245 (79.6%) experienced no statistically significant changes on any test and 63 patients (20.4%) experienced significant changes in ≥1 test. Of these, most presented a change in only one test, distributed evenly between improvements (58 patients; 18.8%) and worsening (56 patients; 18.2%). For individual tests, most patients (87.8% to 91.8%) had no change from baseline; however, the significant changes (improvement vs. deterioration, respectively) were as follows: WAIS III-Digit (6.3% vs. 5.9%); visual memory (5.3% vs. 5.7%); JLO (5.3% vs. 4.5%); 3D-Rotation (4.1% vs. 4.1%); and WAIS III-MRT (4.8% vs. 5.8%). ConclusionsCP in patients with PCa does not appear to be adversely affected by 6 months of LHRH analogue administration.

Confidence in masked orientation judgments is informed by both evidence and visibility.

How do human observers determine their degree of belief that they are correct in a decision about a visual stimulus-that is, their confidence? According to prominent theories of confidence, the quality of stimulation should be positively related to confidence in correct decisions, and negatively to confidence in incorrect decisions. However, in a backward-masked orientation task with a varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), we observed that confidence in incorrect decisions also increased with stimulus quality. Model fitting to our decision and confidence data revealed that the best explanation for the present data was the new weighted evidence-and-visibility model, according to which confidence is determined by evidence about the orientation as well as by the general visibility of the stimulus. Signal detection models, postdecisional accumulation models, two-channel models, and decision-time-based models were all unable to explain the pattern of confidence as a function of SOA and decision correctness. We suggest that the metacognitive system combines several cues related to the correctness of a decision about a visual stimulus in order to calculate decision confidence.

Visual perception as retrospective Bayesian decoding from high- to low-level features

When a stimulus is presented, its encoding is known to progress from low- to high-level features. How these features are decoded to produce perception is less clear, and most models assume that decoding follows the same low- to high-level hierarchy of encoding. There are also theories arguing for global precedence, reversed hierarchy, or bidirectional processing, but they are descriptive without quantitative comparison with human perception. Moreover, observers often inspect different parts of a scene sequentially to form overall perception, suggesting that perceptual decoding requires working memory, yet few models consider how working-memory properties may affect decoding hierarchy. We probed decoding hierarchy by comparing absolute judgments of single orientations and relative/ordinal judgments between two sequentially presented orientations. We found that lower-level, absolute judgments failed to account for higher-level, relative/ordinal judgments. However, when ordinal judgment was used to retrospectively decode memory representations of absolute orientations, striking aspects of absolute judgments, including the correlation and forward/backward aftereffects between two reported orientations in a trial, were explained. We propose that the brain prioritizes decoding of higher-level features because they are more behaviorally relevant, and more invariant and categorical, and thus easier to specify and maintain in noisy working memory, and that more reliable higher-level decoding constrains less reliable lower-level decoding.

Degraded document image binarization using structural symmetry of strokes

This paper presents an effective approach for the local threshold binarization of degraded document images. We utilize the structural symmetric pixels (SSPs) to calculate the local threshold in neighborhood and the voting result of multiple thresholds will determine whether one pixel belongs to the foreground or not. The SSPs are defined as the pixels around strokes whose gradient magnitudes are large enough and orientations are symmetric opposite. The compensated gradient map is used to extract the SSP so as to weaken the influence of document degradations. To extract SSP candidates with large magnitudes and distinguish the faint characters and bleed-through background, we propose an adaptive global threshold selection algorithm. To further extract pixels with opposite orientations, an iterative stroke width estimation algorithm is applied to ensure the proper size of neighborhood used in orientation judgement. At last, we present a multiple threshold vote based framework to deal with some inaccurate detections of SSP. The experimental results on seven public document image binarization datasets show that our method is accurate and robust compared with many traditional and state-of-the-art document binarization approaches based on multiple evaluation measures.

Homocysteine and cognitive function in Parkinson's disease

IntroductionIncreased plasma homocysteine (HC) is a risk factor for dementia in the general population. Levodopa therapy causes increased plasma HC, but it remains unclear whether elevated plasma HC is associated with cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD). MethodsThe study population includes all participants in the Pacific Northwest Udall Center (PANUC) Clinical cohort at the time of the study, consisting of 294 individuals with PD who had a standardized neuropsychological assessment and plasma collection for HC measurement. We tested the hypothesis that elevated plasma HC is inversely related to cognitive function in patients with PD. ResultsAs expected, plasma HC was positively associated with age, disease duration, disease severity, and levodopa usage, while cognitive function was associated with age, education, gender, and APOE genotype, so subsequent analyses controlled for these covariates. When plasma HC was dichotomized as normal (<14 μmol/L) or elevated (≥14 μmol/L), subjects with hyper-homocysteinemia had lower scores on Digit Symbol (p = 0.031), Hopkins Verbal Learning Task (HVLT) Delayed Recall (p = 0.004), and semantic verbal fluency (p = 0.049). When examined as a continuous variable, plasma HC was inversely associated with HVLT Delayed Recall (p = 0.009)) and semantic verbal fluency (p = 0.004), but was not significantly related to Digit symbol, Trail-making test, Judgment of Line Orientation, phonemic verbal fluency, MMSE, or MOCA. When analysis was restricted to non-demented subjects (n = 231), the findings were unchanged. ConclusionsWe conclude that plasma HC is significantly associated with some aspects of cognitive function in PD, and may represent a treatable risk factor for cognitive decline in PD.