Perceptual Competencies Research Articles

Clinical assessment of the TechArm system on visually impaired and blind children during uni- and multi-sensory perception tasks.

We developed the TechArm system as a novel technological tool intended for visual rehabilitation settings. The system is designed to provide a quantitative assessment of the stage of development of perceptual and functional skills that are normally vision-dependent, and to be integrated in customized training protocols. Indeed, the system can provide uni- and multisensory stimulation, allowing visually impaired people to train their capability of correctly interpreting non-visual cues from the environment. Importantly, the TechArm is suitable to be used by very young children, when the rehabilitative potential is maximal. In the present work, we validated the TechArm system on a pediatric population of low-vision, blind, and sighted children. In particular, four TechArm units were used to deliver uni- (audio or tactile) or multi-sensory stimulation (audio-tactile) on the participant's arm, and subject was asked to evaluate the number of active units. Results showed no significant difference among groups (normal or impaired vision). Overall, we observed the best performance in tactile condition, while auditory accuracy was around chance level. Also, we found that the audio-tactile condition is better than the audio condition alone, suggesting that multisensory stimulation is beneficial when perceptual accuracy and precision are low. Interestingly, we observed that for low-vision children the accuracy in audio condition improved proportionally to the severity of the visual impairment. Our findings confirmed the TechArm system's effectiveness in assessing perceptual competencies in sighted and visually impaired children, and its potential to be used to develop personalized rehabilitation programs for people with visual and sensory impairments.

Above the Action: The Cultural Politics of WatchingDota 2

AbstractThe rise of live-streaming platforms, and the related surge in popularity of esports, remind us that there is a politics of watching play. This article extends intensified scholarly interest in game spectatorship, offering a materialist consideration of the embodied work involved in spectating competitive game play. Most readily associated with the discursive alignments between competitive gaming and/as sport, the active camera mode used by esports competitors and “shoutcasters” facilitates analyzing the highly kinetic action of team-based combat in first-person shooters and multiplayer online battle arenas. Here, we draw from microanalyses of audio-visual recordings taken as individual participants spectated a Dota 2 match. Examining the cognitive and perceptual competencies they draw from, we argue that participants are incorporated into apparatuses of perception associated with militarized optical media. While at a discursive level esports spectators may be watching sports, at a material level they are playing with the logics of drones.

Cognitive Task Analysis for Implicit Knowledge About Visual Representations With Similarity Learning Methods.

Visual representations are prevalent in STEM instruction. To benefit from visuals, students need representational competencies that enable them to see meaningful information. Most research has focused on explicit conceptual representational competencies, but implicit perceptual competencies might also allow students to efficiently see meaningful information in visuals. Most common methods to assess students' representational competencies rely on verbal explanations or assume explicit attention. However, because perceptual competencies are implicit and not necessarily verbally accessible, these methods are ill-equipped to assess them. We address these shortcomings with a method that draws on similarity learning, a machine learning technique that detects visual features that account for participants' responses to triplet comparisons of visuals. In Experiment1, 614 chemistry students judged the similarity of Lewis structures and in Experiment2, 489 students judged the similarity of ball-and-stick models. Our results showed that our method can detect visual features that drive students' perception and suggested that students' conceptual knowledge about molecules informed perceptual competencies through top-down processes. Furthermore, Experiment 2 tested whether we can improve the efficiency of the method with active sampling. Results showed that random sampling yielded higher accuracy than active sampling for small sample sizes. Together, the experiments provide the first method to assess students' perceptual competencies implicitly, without requiring verbalization or assuming explicit visual attention. These findings have implications for the design of instructional interventions that help students acquire perceptual representational competencies.

Observation and action priming in anticipative tasks implying biological movements.

The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of short-term priming in perceptual anticipation tasks involving point-light biological motions. After the production or the observation of a relevant or an irrelevant movement (action vs. observation priming), 11 right-handed volunteers were asked to anticipate, as quickly and accurately as possible, the end point of a pointing movement after the stimulus vanished upon completion of 60% of the total movement. Our results indicate that perceptual accuracy is significantly affected only with relevant observation priming. This suggests that perceptual anticipation tasks' involving point-light biological motions implies specific perceptual competencies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

What do We Know about Neonatal Cognition?

Research on neonatal cognition has developed very recently in comparison with the long history of research on child behavior. The last sixty years of research have provided a great amount of evidence for infants’ numerous cognitive abilities. However, only little of this research concerns newborn infants. What do we know about neonatal cognition? Using a variety of paradigms, researchers became able to probe for what newborns know. Amongst these results, we can distinguish several levels of cognitive abilities. First, at the perceptual or sensory level, newborns are able to process information coming from the social world and the physical objects through all their senses. They are able to discriminate between object shapes and between faces; that is, they are able to detect invariants, remember and recognize them. Second, newborns are able to abstract information, to compare different inputs and to match them across different sensory modalities. We will argue that these two levels can be considered high-level cognitive abilities: they constitute the foundations of human cognition. Furthermore, while some perceptual competencies can stem from the fetal period, many of these perceptual and cognitive abilities cannot be a consequence of the environment surrounding the newborn before birth.

Gender Perception as a Habit of Moral Perception: Implications for Philosophical Methodology and Introductory Curriculum

Gender Perception as a Habit of Moral Perception: Implications for Philosophical Methodology and Introductory Curriculum

Does this computational theory solve the right problem? Marr, Gibson, and the goal of vision.

David Marr's book Vision attempted to formulate athoroughgoing formal theory of perception. Marr borrowed much of the "computational" level from James Gibson: a proper understanding of the goal of vision, the natural constraints, and the available information are prerequisite to describing the processes and mechanisms by which the goal is achieved. Yet, as a research program leading to a computational model of human vision, Marr's program did not succeed. This article asks why, using the perception of 3D shape as a morality tale. Marr presumed that the goal of vision is to recover a general-purpose Euclidean description of the world, which can be deployed for any task or action. On this formulation, vision is underdetermined by information, which in turn necessitates auxiliary assumptions to solve the problem. But Marr's assumptions did not actually reflect natural constraints, and consequently the solutions were not robust. We now know that humans do not in fact recover Euclidean structure--rather, they reliably perceive qualitative shape (hills, dales, courses, ridges), which is specified by the second-order differential structure of images. By recasting the goals of vision in terms of our perceptual competencies, and doing the hard work of analyzing the information available under ecological constraints, we can reformulate the problem so that perception is determined by information and prior knowledge is unnecessary.

The uniquely human capacity to throw evolved from a non-throwing primate: an evolutionary dissociation between action and perception

Humans are uniquely endowed with the ability to engage in accurate, high-momentum throwing. Underlying this ability is a unique morphological adaptation that enables the characteristic rotation of the arm and pelvis. What is unknown is whether the psychological mechanisms that accompany the act of throwing are also uniquely human. Here we explore this problem by asking whether free-ranging rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta), which lack both the morphological and neural structures to throw, nonetheless recognize the functional properties of throwing. Rhesus not only understand that human throwing represents a threat, but that some aspects of a throwing event are more relevant than others; specifically, rhesus are sensitive to the kinematics, direction and speed of the rotating arm, the direction of the thrower's eye gaze and the object thrown. These results suggest that the capacity to throw did not coevolve with psychological mechanisms that accompany throwing; rather, this capacity may have built upon pre-existing perceptual processes. These results are consistent with a growing body of work showing that non-human animals often exhibit perceptual competencies that do not show up in their motor responses, suggesting evolutionary dissociations between the systems of perception that provide understanding of the world and those that mediate action on the world.