Distance Perception Research Articles

Chinese College Students' Stigmatization towards People with Mental Illness: Familiarity, Perceived Dangerousness, Fear, and Social Distance.

Attribution models have been examined in Western countries. However, little is known about the applicability of the attitude-emotion-behavior model within Chinese culture. This study aimed to examine the association between familiarity, perceived dangerousness, fear, and social distance towards persons with mental illness (PMI) in the Chinese context. An online cross-sectional survey was conducted from October to November 2022 in mainland China. A total of 1493 college students completed a questionnaire evaluating familiarity, perception of dangerousness, fear, and social distance regarding PMI. Path analysis was employed to validate the model proposed in this study. Participants expressed moderate to high levels of stigma towards PMI. Familiarity was negatively associated with social distance (p < 0.01). Participants who perceived PMI as dangerous were more prone to exhibit a reaction of fear (p < 0.001), consequently leading to social distance (p < 0.01). However, the mediating effect of perceived dangerousness and fear on the relationship between familiarity and social distance was not significant (p > 0.05). The results of this study provide support for Corrigan's attributional model of stigma in the Chinese context. Contact-based interventions for stigma reduction should emphasize multiple elements of contact, including the quality of contact, rather than familiarity.

High recovery speed optical humidity sensing enabled with GQD for non-contact finger distance detection

Finger distance perception plays a crucial role in enabling humanoid intelligent robotic systems to achieve smooth interaction with humans. Here, a rapidly response optical humidity sensor enabled with graphene quantum dots (GQD) for non-contact finger distance detection was proposed. The GQD was prepared through the functionalization of graphene oxide (GO) with hydrophilic groups. This modification enhances the responsiveness of GO to atmospheric humidity and promotes the deposition of conformal films of functional materials on the surfaces of optical fiber. Utilizing a light-driven coating method, the GQD was deposited onto a tilted fiber Bragg grating (TFBG) to fabricate humidity sensor. When water molecules were absorbed by GQD, the dielectric constant of GQD film was changed, causing an alteration in the intensities of the TFBG’s cladding modes. The proposed sensor shows a sensitivity of 0.032 dB/%RH with the equilibrium response and recovery time of 3.66 s and 0.92 s, respectively. The equilibrium recovery time is the fastest as far as we know. Furthermore, the sensor is capable of precisely identifying the action of a finger, such as approaching, remaining, and departing with a detection range of 0–10 mm.

The influence of affective voice on sound distance perception.

Affective stimuli in our environment indicate reward or threat and thereby relate to approach and avoidance behavior. Previous findings suggest that affective stimuli may bias visual perception, but it remains unclear whether similar biases exist in the auditory domain. Therefore, we asked whether affective auditory voices (angry vs. neutral) influence sound distance perception. Two VR experiments (data collection 2021-2022) were conducted in which auditory stimuli were presented via loudspeakers located at positions unknown to the participants. In the first experiment (N = 44), participants actively placed a visually presented virtual agent or virtual loudspeaker in an empty room at the perceived sound source location. In the second experiment (N = 32), participants were standing in front of several virtual agents or virtual loudspeakers and had to indicate the sound source by directing their gaze toward the perceived sound location. Results in both preregistered experiments consistently showed that participants estimated the location of angry voice stimuli at greater distances than the location of neutral voice stimuli. We discuss that neither emotional nor motivational biases can account for these results. Instead, distance estimates seem to rely on listeners' representations regarding the relationship between vocal affect and acoustic characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual perception of distance in 3D‐augmented reality head‐up displays

AbstractA head‐up display (HUD) is conveniently used to provide information on the display without changing the user's gaze. 3D HUDs, capable of projecting three‐dimensional information beyond the 2D HUDs, enable the projection of augmented reality (AR) objects into the real world. Research on the perception of 3D AR HUDs is crucial for their efficient utilization and secure commercialization. In this study, we examined whether a 3D HUD is more comfortable than a 2D HUD in the context of viewing real‐world environments and augmented reality objects together. Additionally, we analyzed participants' perception of distance and fatigue for AR objects at varying distances from the 3D HUD. The study found that using a 3D HUD in an AR environment resulted in less fatigue than using a 2D HUD, as determined by a Mann–Whitney statistical analysis. Participants were able to match the depth of AR objects in a 3D HUD within a range of 3 to 50 m, with similar diopter and parallax angular distance errors, regardless of the distance of the AR object. Visual fatigue increases with increasing distance from the virtual‐image plane and can be modeled as a quadratic function in the domain of diopter and parallax angles.

Directive vs. Commissive Illocutionary Acts?

Governments sometimes release information implicitly, and citizens have to understand their illocutionary acts. The present study examines when and how illocutionary acts encourage citizens to disseminate government information. Based on the Speech Act Theory, Study 1 demonstrates that commissive illocutionary acts make citizens in a low-power distance culture more likely to disseminate information. In contrast, directive illocutionary acts make citizens in a high-power distance culture more likely to disseminate information. Study 2 confirms the underlying mechanism of perceived social exchange relationship by looking at the interaction effects between illocutionary acts and power distance perception in a single cultural setting. By crawling 10,000 government microblogs, Study 3 provides objective evidence for the interaction between illocutionary acts and power distance perception on citizens dissemination behavior of information. Finally, we discuss theoretical implications for government information dissemination, managerial implications, and future research directions.

Supplemental Material for The Influence of Affective Voice on Sound Distance Perception

Supplemental Material for The Influence of Affective Voice on Sound Distance Perception

The influence of travel time on perceived traveled distance varies by spatiotemporal scale

The influence of travel time on perceived traveled distance has often been studied, but the results are inconsistent regarding the relationship between the two magnitudes. We argue that this is due to differences in the lengths of investigated travel distances and hypothesize that the influence of travel time differs for rather short compared to rather long traveled distances. We tested this hypothesis in a virtual environment presented on a desktop as well as through a head-mounted display. Our results show that, for longer distances, more travel time leads to longer perceived distance, while we do not find an influence of travel time on shorter distances. The presentation through an HMD vs. desktop only influenced distance judgments in the short distance condition. These results are in line with the idea that the influence of travel time varies by the length of the traveled distance, and provide insights on the question of how distance perception in path integration studies is affected by travel time, thereby resolving inconsistencies reported in previous studies.

Physical Attractiveness and Social distance Perception in Service Encounters- Evidence from a Developing County

Physical Attractiveness (PA) is an essential factor affecting consumer response (CR) in service encounters (SE). Using an experimental design, the purpose of the study is to demonstrate the physical attractiveness (PA) of a service representative's effects (CR) in the context of consumer satisfaction, service quality perception, and likability of the service representative. The study investigated the complex underlying mechanism between these two variables by analyzing the mediating role of social distance perceptions (SDP), and the moderating role of consumer’s physical attractiveness (CPA) and gender. The context of the study is the Airline Industry of Pakistan. The data of the study was collected through scenario based self-administered questionnaires from in-flight 385 passengers using non-probability sampling (voluntary response sampling) from. Analyzing the results of the study it is predicted that high PA has a positive effect on CR. Hence it is also important to take the consumer’s perspective into consideration, as this perspective gives rise to situations under which the beauty premium notion might not hold. The results of the study revealed that a consumer’s gender and his/her own level of PA is an important determinant of how he/she reacts to the attractiveness of the representative. Results can provide significant insights to Airline companies to strategize the recruitment and deployment of cabin crew members in accordance with the level of the customer’s gender and his/her own (PA).

Ensemble Coding of Crowd with Cross-Category Facial Expressions.

Ensemble coding allows observers to form an average to represent a set of elements. However, it is unclear whether observers can extract an average from a cross-category set. Previous investigations on this issue using low-level stimuli yielded contradictory results. The current study addressed this issue by presenting high-level stimuli (i.e., a crowd of facial expressions) simultaneously (Experiment 1) or sequentially (Experiment 2), and asked participants to complete a member judgment task. The results showed that participants could extract average information from a group of cross-category facial expressions with a short perceptual distance. These findings demonstrate cross-category ensemble coding of high-level stimuli, contributing to the understanding of ensemble coding and providing inspiration for future research.

Life is so Short, Future is so Long: The Relationship between Life History Strategies and People’s Metaphorical Perspectives on Time

Accruing evidence has attested to the plasticity of people’s metaphorical perspectives on the movement of events in time, which oscillate between the ego-moving perspective and the time-moving perspective contingent on, among others, perception of distance to the future by virtue of individual differences in lifestyle and personality. Building on and extending this avenue of inquiry, the current research investigated the relationship between life history strategy, another time-related construct, and the preferred perspective in the resolution of a temporally ambiguous question. Studies based on self-report (Study 1) and behavioral (Study 2) measures showed consistent results, such that individuals with a fast life history strategy and those who preferred the smaller-sooner reward tended to adopt the ego-moving perspective, whereas individuals with a slow life history strategy and those who preferred the larger-later reward tended to adopt the time-moving perspective. Examination of the priming effect of temporal perspectives on intertemporal decision-making revealed that differential perceptions of temporal distance underlay the strategy-time relationship (Study 3). Taken as a whole, the current findings suggested that individual differences in life history strategy may also influence people’s preferred perspective in the interpretation of ambiguous language related to time.

Division and spreading of attention across color.

Biological systems must allocate limited perceptual resources to relevant elements in their environment. This often requires simultaneous selection of multiple elements from the same feature dimension (e.g. color). To establish the determinants of divided attentional selection of color, we conducted an experiment that used multicolored displays with four overlapping random dot kinematograms that differed only in hue. We manipulated (i) requirement to focus attention to a single color or divide it between two colors; (ii) distances of distractor hues from target hues in a perceptual color space. We conducted a behavioral and an electroencephalographic experiment, in which each color was tagged by a specific flicker frequency and driving its own steady-state visual evoked potential. Behavioral and neural indices of attention showed several major consistencies. Concurrent selection halved the neural signature of target enhancement observed for single targets, consistent with an approximately equal division of limited resources between two hue-selective foci. Distractors interfered with behavioral performance in a context-dependent fashion but their effects were asymmetric, indicating that perceptual distance did not adequately capture attentional distance. These asymmetries point towards an important role of higher-level mechanisms such as categorization and grouping-by-color in determining the efficiency of attentional allocation in complex, multicolored scenes.

Autistic adults exhibit typical sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance.

The visual processing differences seen in autism often impede individuals' visual perception of the social world. In particular, many autistic people exhibit poor face recognition. Here, we sought to determine whether autistic adults also show impaired perception of dyadic social interactions-a class of stimulus thought to engage face-like visual processing. Our focus was the perception of interpersonal distance. Participants completed distance change detection tasks, in which they had to make perceptual decisions about the distance between two actors. On half of the trials, participants judged whether the actors moved closer together; on the other half, whether they moved further apart. In a nonsocial control task, participants made similar judgments about two grandfather clocks. We also assessed participants' face recognition ability using standardized measures. The autistic and nonautistic observers showed similar levels of perceptual sensitivity to changes in interpersonal distance when viewing social interactions. As expected, however, the autistic observers showed clear signs of impaired face recognition. Despite putative similarities between the visual processing of faces and dyadic social interactions, our results suggest that these two facets of social vision may dissociate.

Study on the relationship between electric field perception and distance factor of direct current overhead line

Abstract The main reason for line collision accidents in offline construction is that construction personnel have an insufficient perception of distance. In the range of viewing angles, due to the lack of reference objects, people lack a correct judgment of the actual height of overhead lines. Voltage, as the most direct electrical volume, has always been a key indicator of electrical protection. In this paper, the feasibility of electrostatic induction is verified through the combination of electrostatic field simulation and experiment, and the influencing factors of electrostatic induction are studied. The results show that electrostatic induction is strongly related to the environmental angle, and the inductive voltage increases with the increase of the high voltage side, and the increased amplitude gradually increases. In addition, the induction distance and the shape of the receiving antenna have an impact on the effect of electrostatic induction. However, the induction distance has the greatest influence on the electrostatic induction effect, followed by the length and diameter of the induction conductor. The research of this paper plays a technical guiding role in the distance measurement of transmission lines based on electric fields.

Experiencing an Elongated Limb in Virtual Reality Modifies the Tactile Distance Perception of the Corresponding Real Limb.

In measurement, a reference frame is needed to compare the measured object to something already known. This raises the neuroscientific question of which reference frame is used by humans when exploring the environment. Previous studies suggested that, in touch, the body employed as measuring tool also serves as reference frame. Indeed, an artificial modification of the perceived dimensions of the body changes the tactile perception of external object dimensions. However, it is unknown if such a change in tactile perception would occur when the body schema is modified through the illusion of owning a limb altered in size. Therefore, employing a virtual hand illusion paradigm with an elongated forearm of different lengths, we systematically tested the subjective perception of distance between two points [tactile distance perception (TDP) task] on the corresponding real forearm following the illusion. Thus, the TDP task is used as a proxy to gauge changes in the body schema. Embodiment of the virtual arm was found significantly greater after the synchronous visuotactile stimulation condition compared with the asynchronous one, and the forearm elongation significantly increased the TDP. However, we did not find any link between the visuotactile-induced ownership over the elongated arm and TDP variation, suggesting that vision plays the main role in the modification of the body schema. Additionally, significant effect of elongation found on TDP but not on proprioception suggests that these are affected differently by body schema modifications. These findings confirm the body schema malleability and its role as a reference frame in touch.

A study on the influence of perceived distance on China's inbound Tourism and the interaction of non-economic distance: An analysis of dynamic extended gravity model based on 61 countries' entry data (2004-2018).

In the post-epidemic era, the restart of China's inbound tourism is imminent. However, there are gaps in our current understanding of how distance perception dynamically affects inbound tourism in China. In order to understand the past patterns of inbound tourism in China, we mapped the data of 61 countries of origin from 2004 to 2018 into a dynamic expanding gravity model to understand the effects of cultural distance, institutional distance, geographical distance, and economic distance on inbound tourism in China and revealed the dynamic interaction mechanism of non-economic distance perception on inbound tourism in China. Our research results show that cultural distance has a positive impact on China's inbound tourism, while institutional distance has a negative impact. The significant finding is that the dynamic interaction of the above two kinds of perceived distance can still have a positive impact on China's inbound tourism. Its practical significance is that it can counteract the influence of institutional distance by strengthening the cultural distance. Generally speaking, geographical distance and institutional distance restrict China's inbound tourism flow, while cultural distance, economic distance, and interactive perceptual distance promote China's inbound tourism flow.

The Impact of Orienteering Sports in Universities on the Psychological Cognition of College Students

Orienteering, as an emerging sport, has developed rapidly in China. In addition to the continuous emergence of a large number of orienteering clubs, major universities across the country are also gradually popularizing and offering this course. Through research, it has been found that the mental health status of contemporary college students is not optimistic, especially for some students whose cognitive abilities such as attention, perception, and thinking need to be improved. Orienteering can effectively improve the attention ability of college students, with a significant promoting effect on attention allocation, attention breadth, and attention stability. Orienteering is beneficial for the development of sensory perception ability among college students, with significant improvements and improvements in time perception, distance perception, and height perception.

Time and Distance Perception in Highly Dynamic Environments

Abstract Space- and time-based tasks, like flying airplanes, driving cars, or the manual controlled rendezvous and docking of spacecrafts can be very demanding for pilots, drivers, or astronauts, depending on selected trajectories, approaching speeds, or distracting information. One characteristic of highly dynamic environments is that persons have to consider their spatial position in relation to surrounding elements based on passing time, detected speed, and trajectories to avoid collisions with other objects. An inadequate perception of the own position in relation to other objects and passing time can lead to impaired decision-making processes, resulting in errors or collisions. A framework for the explanation of cognitive processes involved in perception, anticipation, and decision-making in dynamic environments is provided by the concept of situation awareness. Based on this framework persons must perceive relevant elements, integrate them in a coherent mental representation and anticipate the development of the current situation in the near future, to plan safe upcoming maneuvers. Thus, for safe maneuvers anticipation processes are playing a major role in decision-making and action selection. In this paper it is proposed that time and distance perceptions are central features of anticipation processes in dynamic situations. It is suggested to combine theories like the attentional-gate model and time-to-contact with the framework of situation awareness to explain anticipation processes in dynamic environments. The major aim is to develop precise cognitive models of persons acting in dynamic situations. Such cognitive models can be the basis for the development and parameterization of assistance systems, supporting anticipation in dynamic environments.

Effect of Emotionalizing Sounds on the Estimation and Evaluation of Displayed Safety Distances

Musicological and traffic psychology research shows that emotions can be changed by certain tone combinations or sound characteristics and that emotions, in turn, influence our driving behavior. Nevertheless, there are no studies on how a dynamic active sound design could influence driving behavior via changing the emotional state of drivers in certain driving situations. Based on a previous study, emotionalizing sounds, characterized by their capacity to evoke specific emotional responses in individuals, were created and used to investigate their effect on the perception of safety distances in an online study. To test this, participants made statements on the safety distance shown in videos of cars following scenarios combined with emotionalizing sounds. The results show a significant difference in the estimated safety distance for videos combined with sounds invoking positive emotions like light-heartedness vs. sounds invoking negative emotions like feeling threatened. The odds of the safety distance being evaluated as too small compared with appropriate were two to three times higher for some threatening sounds vs. the positive sounds. The results further suggest that threatening sounds influenced participants’ wishes to increase the depicted safety distances. The results show that emotionalizing sounds had effects on the participants, though not all were statistically significant.

"They sure aren't from around here": Children's perception of accent distance in L1 and L2 varieties of English.

Children exhibit preferences for familiar accents early in life. However, they frequently have more difficulty distinguishing between first language (L1) accents than second language (L2) accents in categorization tasks. Few studies have addressed children's perception of accent strength, or the relation between accent strength and objective measures of pronunciation distance. To address these gaps, 6- and 12-year-olds and adults ranked talkers' perceived distance from the local accent (i.e., Midland American English). Rankings were compared with objective distance measures. Acoustic and phonetic distance measures were significant predictors of ladder rankings, but there was no evidence that children and adults significantly differed in their sensitivity to accent strength. Levenshtein Distance, a phonetic distance metric, was the strongest predictor of perceptual rankings for both children and adults. As a percept, accent strength has critical implications for social judgments, which determine real world social outcomes for talkers with non-local accents.

A multiplayer VR showdown game for people with visual impairment

ABSTRACT Researchers have developed virtual reality (VR) systems for people with visual impairment using various audio feedback techniques. However, few studies have investigated collaborative VR systems where people with and without visual impairment can participate together. We developed a VR Showdown, similar to a real showdown game, where players with and without visual impairment can play together in a remote virtual environment. We incorporated auditory distance perception using a head-related transfer function based on the spatial position of the Showdown ball in VR. We developed two modes of VR Showdown. One is the player vs. AI agent (PvA) mode, where visually impaired people can play alone. The other is the player vs. player (PvP) mode, in which visually impaired people can play with another player in a network. The user study results showed that people with and without visual impairment enjoyed playing VR Showdown games that were well-matched.