Perceptual Advantage Research Articles

Following the White Vulture: Ethno-ornithology along the Flyway of the Egyptian Vulture (Neophron percnopterus).

Vultures constitute globally the most rapidly declining group of birds. Across their wide distribution range, they share common ecological functions and unfavourable conservation status while being associated with varying habitats, lifestyles, cultural standing, and threats. We reveal conceptualisations about the emblematic yet critically endangered Egyptian vulture along its migratory flyway from the Balkans through the Middle East to Africa. Information was gathered through interviews, focus group discussions, and market surveys, with 420 people in 11 participating countries contributing overall. Our results showed that all vultures are recognised primarily for the environmental cleaning services, but the level of awareness differs between countries. Τhe Egyptian vulture has some perceptual advantages based on its white color, migratory nature, and endangered conservation status. This underlines its suitability as a charismatic flagship species that can potentially benefit other vulture species and thus enforce broader vulture conservation initiatives.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10745-022-00340-6.

The Contribution of Shape Features and Demographic Variables to Disembedding Abilities

Humans naturally perceive visual patterns in a global manner and are remarkably capable of extracting object shapes based on properties such as proximity, closure, symmetry, and good continuation. Notwithstanding the role of these properties in perceptual grouping, studies highlighted differences in disembedding performance across individuals, which are summarized by the field dependence dimension. Evidence suggests that age and educational attainment explain part of this variability, whereas the role of sex is still highly debated. Also, which stimulus features primarily influence inter-individual variations in perceptual grouping has still to be fully determined. Building upon these premises, we assessed the role of age, education level, and sex on performance at the Leuven Embedded Figure Test—a proxy of disembedding abilities—in 391 cisgender individuals. We also investigated to what extent shape symmetry, closure, complexity, and continuation relate to task accuracy. Overall, target asymmetry, closure, and good continuation with the embedding context increase task difficulty. Simpler shapes are more difficult to detect than those with more lines, yet context complexity impairs the recognition of complex targets (i.e., those with 6 lines or more) to a greater extent. Concerning demographic data, we confirm that age and educational attainment are significantly associated with disembedding abilities and reveal a perceptual advantage in males. In summary, our study further highlights the role of shape properties in disembedding performance and unveils sex differences not reported so far.

Do L1 tone language speakers enjoy a perceptual advantage in processing English contrastive prosody?*

AbstractThis study compared the ability of English monolinguals and Mandarin–English bilinguals to make use of English contrastive prosody not only in natural speech but also in masked speech, in which the only available information was prosodic. In contrast to earlier studies (Choi et al., 2019; Choi, 2021; Tong et al., 2015) which found that L1 tone language speakers outperformed native speakers in tasks involving the use of pitch to identify stress position in English, we did not find a similar advantage for Mandarin–English bilinguals in the interpretation of English contrastive prosody, even under conditions that enforced reliance on pitch contours. These findings are consistent with other studies suggesting that the integration of prosodic information into discourse is an area of particular difficulty for L2 speakers.

Towards a Native OPERA Hypothesis: Musicianship and English Stress Perception.

Musical experience facilitates speech perception. French musicians, to whom stress is foreign, have been found to perceive English stress more accurately than French non-musicians. This study investigated whether this musical advantage also applies to native listeners. English musicians and non-musicians completed an English stress discrimination task and two control tasks. With age, non-verbal intelligence and short-term memory controlled, the musicians exhibited a perceptual advantage relative to the non-musicians. This perceptual advantage was equally potent to both trochaic and iambic stress patterns. In terms of perceptual strategy, the two groups showed differential use of acoustic cues for iambic but not trochaic stress. Collectively, the results could be taken to suggest that musical experience enhances stress discrimination even among native listeners. Remarkably, this musical advantage is highly consistent and does not particularly favour either stress pattern. For iambic stress, the musical advantage appears to stem from the differential use of acoustic cues by musicians. For trochaic stress, the musical advantage may be rooted in enhanced durational sensitivity.

Musicianship Influences Language Effect on Musical Pitch Perception

Given its practical implications, the effect of musicianship on language learning has been vastly researched. Interestingly, growing evidence also suggests that language experience can facilitate music perception. However, the precise nature of this facilitation is not fully understood. To address this research gap, I investigated the interactive effect of language and musicianship on musical pitch and rhythmic perception. Cantonese and English listeners, each divided into musician and non-musician groups, completed the Musical Ear Test and the Raven’s 2 Progressive Matrices. Essentially, an interactive effect of language and musicianship was found on musical pitch but not rhythmic perception. Consistent with previous studies, Cantonese language experience appeared to facilitate musical pitch perception. However, this facilitatory effect was only present among the non-musicians. Among the musicians, Cantonese language experience did not offer any perceptual advantage. The above findings reflect that musicianship influences the effect of language on musical pitch perception. Together with the previous findings, the new findings offer two theoretical implications for the OPERA hypothesis—bi-directionality and mechanisms through which language experience and musicianship interact in different domains.

Own-race faces promote integrated audiovisual speech information

The other-race effect indicates a perceptual advantage when processing own-race faces. This effect has been demonstrated in individuals' recognition of facial identity and emotional expressions. However, it remains unclear whether the other-race effect also exists in multisensory domains. We conducted two experiments to provide evidence for the other-race effect in facial speech recognition, using the McGurk effect. Experiment 1 tested this issue among East Asian adults, examining the magnitude of the McGurk effect during stimuli using speakers from two different races (own-race vs. other-race). We found that own-race faces induced a stronger McGurk effect than other-race faces. Experiment 2 indicated that the other-race effect was not simply due to different levels of attention being paid to the mouths of own- and other-race speakers. Our findings demonstrated that own-race faces enhance the weight of visual input during audiovisual speech perception, and they provide evidence of the own-race effect in the audiovisual interaction for speech perception in adults.

Early Capture of Attention by Self-Face: Investigation Using a Temporal Order Judgment Task.

Earlier work on self-face processing has reported a bias in the processing of self-face result in faster response to self-face in comparison to other familiar and unfamiliar faces (termed as self-face advantage or SFA). Even though most studies agree that the SFA occurs due to an attentional bias, there is little agreement regarding the stage at which it occurs. While a large number of studies show self-face influencing processing later at disengagement stage, early event-related potential components show differential activity for the self-face suggesting that SFA occurs early. We address this contradiction using a cueless temporal order judgment task that allows us to investigate early perceptual processing, while bias due to top-down expectation is controlled. A greater shift in point of subjective simultaneity for self-face would indicate a greater processing advantage at early perceptual stage. With help of two experiments, we show an early perceptual advantage for self-face, compared to both a friend’s face and an unfamiliar face (Experiment 1). This advantage is present even when the effect of criterion shift is minimized (Experiment 2). Interestingly, the magnitude of advantage is similar for self-friend and self-unfamiliar pair. The evidence from the two experiments suggests early capture of attention as a likely reason for the SFA, which is present for the self-face but not for other familiar faces.

Cantonese advantage on English stress perception: Constraints and neural underpinnings

A prevailing conception of cross-linguistic transfer is that first language experience poses perceptual interference, or at best null effect, on second language speech perception. Surprisingly, a recent study found that Cantonese listeners outperformed English listeners on English stress perception. The present study further evaluated whether segmental variations would constrain the Cantonese advantage on English stress perception. Cantonese and English listeners were tested with both active and passive oddball paradigms in which ERP responses to English stress deviations were elicited. Behaviorally, the Cantonese listeners exhibited a perceptual advantage relative to the English listeners, but this advantage disappeared upon the introduction of segmental variations. Neurophysiologically, segmental variations diminished the P3b amplitudes of the Cantonese but not the English listeners. Collectively, results suggest that segmental variations constrain the Cantonese advantage on English stress perception.

Visual working memory and sensory processing in autistic children

While atypical sensory processing is one of the more ubiquitous symptoms in autism spectrum disorder, the exact nature of these sensory issues remains unclear, with different studies showing either enhanced or deficient sensory processing. Using a well-established continuous cued-recall task that assesses visual working memory, the current study provides novel evidence reconciling these apparently discrepant findings. Autistic children exhibited perceptual advantages in both likelihood of recall and recall precision relative to their typically-developed peers. When autistic children did make errors, however, they showed a higher probability of erroneously binding a given colour with the incorrect spatial location. These data align with neural-architecture models for feature binding in visual working memory, suggesting that atypical population-level neural noise in the report dimension (colour) and cue dimension (spatial location) may drive both the increase in probability of recall and precision of colour recall as well as the increase in proportion of binding errors when making an error, respectively. These changes are likely to impact core symptomatology associated with autism, as perceptual binding and working memory play significant roles in higher-order tasks, such as communication.

Simultaneous bilinguals who do not speak a tone language show enhancement in pitch sensitivity but not in executive function

Abstract Previous studies have reported perceptual advantages, such as when discriminating non-native linguistic or musical pitch differences, among first-year infants growing up in bilingual over monolingual environments. It is unclear whether such effects should be attributed to bilinguals’ enhanced perceptual sensitivity and/or cognitive abilities, and whether such effects would extend to adulthood. Twenty-four Dutch, 24 Dutch simultaneous bilingual (DSB), and 24 Chinese Mandarin speakers were examined by three sets of tasks assessing their linguistic pitch and music perception, executive function, as well as interactions across these modalities. Results showed degrees of advantages for DSB and Chinese participants’ over their Dutch peers in lexical tone discrimination and pitch-related music tasks. In tasks related to executive function, no difference was observed between DSB and Dutch participants, while Chinese participants’ performances were modulated by cognitive interference of language processing. Findings suggest that listeners’ enhanced sensitivity to linguistic and musical pitch may stem from acoustic (DSB) and experience (Chinese) rather than cognitive factors. Moreover, Dutch participants showed robust correlations between their linguistic and musical pitch perception, followed by limited correlations in DSB, and virtually no correlation among Chinese participants, illustrating how distinct language experiences can lead to specific pitch perception patterns between language and music.

A crowd of emotional voices influences the perception of emotional faces: Using adaptation, stimulus salience, and attention to probe audio-visual interactions for emotional stimuli.

Correctly assessing the emotional state of others is a crucial part of social interaction. While facial expressions provide much information, faces are often not viewed in isolation, but occur with concurrent sounds, usually voices, which also provide information about the emotion being portrayed. Many studies have examined the crossmodal processing of faces and sounds, but results have been mixed, with different paradigms yielding different results. Using a psychophysical adaptation paradigm, we carried out a series of four experiments to determine whether there is a perceptual advantage when faces and voices match in emotion (congruent), versus when they do not match (incongruent). We presented a single face and a crowd of voices, a crowd of faces and a crowd of voices, a single face of reduced salience and a crowd of voices, and tested this last condition with and without attention directed to the emotion in the face. While we observed aftereffects in the hypothesized direction (adaptation to faces conveying positive emotion yielded negative, contrastive, perceptual aftereffects), we only found a congruent advantage (stronger adaptation effects) when faces were attended and of reduced salience, in line with the theory of inverse effectiveness.

Musicians Show Improved Speech Segregation in Competitive, Multi-Talker Cocktail Party Scenarios.

Studies suggest that long-term music experience enhances the brain’s ability to segregate speech from noise. Musicians’ “speech-in-noise (SIN) benefit” is based largely on perception from simple figure-ground tasks rather than competitive, multi-talker scenarios that offer realistic spatial cues for segregation and engage binaural processing. We aimed to investigate whether musicians show perceptual advantages in cocktail party speech segregation in a competitive, multi-talker environment. We used the coordinate response measure (CRM) paradigm to measure speech recognition and localization performance in musicians vs. non-musicians in a simulated 3D cocktail party environment conducted in an anechoic chamber. Speech was delivered through a 16-channel speaker array distributed around the horizontal soundfield surrounding the listener. Participants recalled the color, number, and perceived location of target callsign sentences. We manipulated task difficulty by varying the number of additional maskers presented at other spatial locations in the horizontal soundfield (0–1–2–3–4–6–8 multi-talkers). Musicians obtained faster and better speech recognition amidst up to around eight simultaneous talkers and showed less noise-related decline in performance with increasing interferers than their non-musician peers. Correlations revealed associations between listeners’ years of musical training and CRM recognition and working memory. However, better working memory correlated with better speech streaming. Basic (QuickSIN) but not more complex (speech streaming) SIN processing was still predicted by music training after controlling for working memory. Our findings confirm a relationship between musicianship and naturalistic cocktail party speech streaming but also suggest that cognitive factors at least partially drive musicians’ SIN advantage.

Years of Blindness Lead to "Visualize" Space Through Time.

Spatial representation has been widely studied in early blindness, whereas research about late blindness is still limited. We recently demonstrated that the early (50–90 ms) event-related potential (ERP) response observed in sighted people during a spatial bisection task, is altered in early blind people and is influenced by the amount of time spent without vision in late blind individuals. Specifically, in late blind people a shorter period of blindness is associated with strong contralateral activation in occipital cortex and good performance during the spatial task–similar to that of sighted people. In contrast, non-lateralized occipital activation and lower performance characterize late blind individuals who have experienced a longer period of blindness–similar to that of early blind people. However, the same early occipital response activated in sighted individuals by spatial cues has been found to be activated by temporal cues in early blind individuals. Here, we investigate whether a similar temporal attraction can explain the neural and behavioral changes observed after many years of blindness in late blind people. An EEG recording was taken during a spatial bisection task where coherent and conflicting spatio-temporal information was presented. In participants with long blindness duration, the early recruitment of both visual and auditory areas is sensitive to temporal instead of spatial coordinates. These findings highlight some limits of neuroplasticity. Perceptual advantages from cross-sensory calibration during development seem to be subsequently lost following years of visual deprivation. This result has important implications for clinical outcomes following late blindness, highlighting the importance of timing in intervention and rehabilitation programs that activate compensatory strategies soon after sensory loss.

Perceptual Advantage of Animal Facial Attractiveness: Evidence From b-CFS and Binocular Rivalry.

Research has shown that attractive human faces enjoy an advantage in both conscious and preconscious processing. Here we examined whether this preference for attractiveness is exclusive to human faces by measuring participants’ sensitivity to the attractiveness of cat and tiger faces. Experiment 1 measured the time taken to break continuous flash suppression (b-CFS), whereas Experiment 2 measured the dominant time in binocular rivalry (BR). The results showed that attractive cat faces were detected more quickly (Experiment 1) and dominated for longer time in visual awareness (Experiment 2). However, no effect of attractiveness was found for tiger faces in Experiment 1, while attractive tiger faces also dominated for longer time in visual awareness in Experiment 2. The results provide first evidence that the preference for attractive animal faces can be shown involuntarily or without apparent conscious control. The findings suggest that human preference for facial attractiveness may contain an aesthetic element rather than being a purely adaptive means for mate choice.

Gravity prior in human behaviour: a perceptual or semantic phenomenon?

Humans show a gravitational advantage in perception: we are more precise at judging the speed of downwards-moving than upwards-moving objects, indicating that gravitational acceleration is an internalised prior. However, it is unclear whether this gravity prior is based on purely perceptual cues or whether it can incorporate semantic knowledge. Previous research has used only objects which are known to comply with gravity, possibly confounding semantic and perceptual cues. Here we have addressed this question by asking participants to judge the speed of objects that typically move coherently with gravity (ball) or against it (rocket). Our results showed a perceptual advantage for falling stimuli, irrespective of object identity, suggesting the gravity prior is based on perceptual cues.

Binocular Encoding in the Damselfly Pre-motor Target Tracking System.

Akin to all damselflies, Calopteryx (family Calopterygidae), commonly known as jewel wings or demoiselles, possess dichoptic (separated) eyes with overlapping visual fields of view. In contrast, many dragonfly species possess holoptic (dorsally fused) eyes with limited binocular overlap. We have here compared the neuronal correlates of target tracking between damselfly and dragonfly sister lineages and linked these changes in visual overlap to pre-motor neural adaptations. Although dragonflies attack prey dorsally, we show that demoiselles attack prey frontally. We identify demoiselle target-selective descending neurons (TSDNs) with matching frontal visual receptive fields, anatomically and functionally homologous to the dorsally positioned dragonfly TSDNs. By manipulating visual input using eyepatches and prisms, we show that moving target information at the pre-motor level depends on binocular summation in demoiselles. Consequently, demoiselles encode directional information in a binocularly fused frame of reference such that information of a target moving toward the midline in the left eye is fused with information of the target moving away from the midline in the right eye. This contrasts with dragonfly TSDNs, where receptive fields possess a sharp midline boundary, confining responses to a single visual hemifield in a sagittal frame of reference (i.e., relative to the midline). Our results indicate that, although TSDNs are conserved across Odonata, their neural inputs, and thus the upstream organization of the target tracking system, differ significantly and match divergence in eye design and predatory strategies. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

A Developmental Study of the Self-Prioritization Effect in Children Between 6 and 10Years of Age.

Self-biases are well described in adults but remain poorly understood in children. Here, we investigated in 6-10 year-old children (N=132) the self-prioritization effect (SPE), a self-bias which reflects, in adults, the perceptual advantage for stimuli arbitrarily associated with the self as compared to those associated with other persons. We designed a child-friendly adaptation of a paradigm originally introduced in adults by Sui, He, and Humphreys (2012) in order to test whether the SPE also occurs in children and if so, to determine its evolution with age. A robust SPE was obtained from the age of 6, and this effect was similar-sized in our four age groups. These findings are discussed with reference to the development of the self during childhood.

Retinotopy of emotion: Perception of negatively valenced stimuli presented at different spatial locations as revealed by event-related potentials.

Scarce previous data on how the location where an emotional stimulus appears in the visual scene modulates its perception suggest that, for functional reasons, a perceptual advantage may exist, vertically, for stimuli presented at the lower visual field (LoVF) and, horizontally, for stimuli presented at the left visual field (LeVF). However, this issue has been explored through a limited number of spatial locations, usually in a single spatial dimension (e.g., horizontal) and invariant eccentricities. Event‐related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 39 participants perceiving brief neutral (wheels) and emotional stimuli (spiders) presented at 17 different locations, one foveal and 16 at different peripheral coordinates. As a secondary scope, we explored the role of the magnocellular (M) and the parvocellular (P) visual pathways by presenting an isoluminant/heterochromatic (P‐biased) and a heteroluminant/isochromatic version (M‐biased) of each stimulus. Emo > Neu effects were observed in PN1 (120 ms) for stimuli located at fovea, and in PN2 (215 ms) for stimuli located both at fovea and diverse peripheral regions. A factorial approach to these effects further revealed that: (a) emotional stimuli presented in the periphery are efficiently perceived, without evident decrease from para‐ to perifovea; (b) peripheral Emo > Neu effects are reflected 95 ms later than foveal Emo > Neu effects in ERPs; (c) LoVF is more involved than UVF in these effects; (d) our data fail to support the LeVF advantage previously reported, and (e) Emo > Neu effects were significant for both M and P stimuli.

But, how can we make “art?” Artistic production versus realistic copying and perceptual advantages of artists.

But, how can we make “art?” Artistic production versus realistic copying and perceptual advantages of artists.

Studying the Effect of Carrier Type on the Perception of Vocoded Stimuli via Mismatch Negativity.

Vocoder processing has been long used in many studies to examine how acoustic cues affect speech understanding and auditory processing. Early behavioral studies have shown that the type of carrier (i.e., pure-tone or noise) used in vocoding process affected the intelligibility of the perceived speech, and tone-vocoded stimuli had a perceptual advantage over noise-vocoded stimuli. This work further assessed whether the auditory evoked cortical response could objectively measure the perceptual difference between the two types of vocoded stimuli using an oddball-paradigm based event-related potential (ERP) experiment. A vowel stimulus was processed by noise- and tone-vocoding processes, and the processed stimuli were presented to normal-hearing listeners in an ERP experiment. The noise-vocoded and tone-vocoded vowel stimuli served as the deviant stimuli and the non-vocoded vowel stimulus as the standard stimulus. Experimental results showed that tone-vocoded stimulus evoked a significantly larger mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitude and a significantly shorter MMN peak latency than noise-vocoded stimulus did. Results in this work suggested that compared to noise-vocoded stimulus, tone-vocoded stimulus had a larger perceptual difference relative to the reference stimulus, and this effect caused by the usage of different carrier signals could be reflected by the MMN response.