Perceptual Properties Research Articles

How do we describe other people from voices and faces?

When seeing someone's face or hearing their voice, perceivers routinely infer information about a person's age, sex and social traits. While many experiments have explored how individual person characteristics are perceived in isolation, less is known about which person characteristics are described spontaneously from voices and faces and how descriptions may differ across modalities. In Experiment 1, participants provided free descriptions for voices and faces. These free descriptions followed similar patterns for voices and faces – and for individual identities: Participants spontaneously referred to a wide range of descriptors. Psychological descriptors, such as character traits, were used most frequently; physical characteristics, such as age and sex, were notable as they were mentioned earlier than other types of descriptors. After finding primarily similarities between modalities when analysing person descriptions across identities, Experiment 2 asked whether free descriptions encode how individual identities differ. For this purpose, the measures derived from the free descriptions were linked to voice/face discrimination judgements that are known to describe differences in perceptual properties between identity pairs. Significant relationships emerged within and across modalities, showing that free descriptions indeed encode differences between identities – information that is shared with discrimination judgements. This suggests that the two tasks tap into similar, high-level person representations. These findings show that free description data can offer valuable insights into person perception and underline that person perception is a multivariate process during which perceivers rapidly and spontaneously infer many different person characteristics to form a holistic impression of a person.

The time course of categorical and perceptual similarity effects in visual search.

During visual search for objects (e.g., an apple), the surrounding distractor objects may share perceptual (tennis ball), categorical (banana), or both (peach) properties with the target. Previous studies showed that the perceptual similarity between target and distractor objects influences visual search. Here, we tested whether categorical target-distractor similarity also influences visual search, and how this influence depends on perceptual similarity. By orthogonally manipulating categorical and perceptual target-distractor similarity, we could investigate how and when the two similarities interactively affect search performance and neural correlates of spatial attention (N2pc) using electroencephalography (EEG). Behavioral results showed that categorical target-distractor similarity interacted with perceptual target-distractor similarity, such that the effect of categorical similarity was strongest when target and distractor objects were perceptually similar. EEG results showed that perceptual similarity influenced the early part of the N2pc (200-250 ms after stimulus onset), while categorical similarity influenced the later part (250-300 ms). Mirroring the behavioral results, categorical similarity interacted with perceptual similarity during this later time window, with categorical effects only observed for perceptually similar target-distractor pairs. Together, these results provide evidence for hierarchical processing in visual search: categorical properties influence spatial attention only when perceptual properties are insufficient to guide attention to the target. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

EXPLORING THE ATTRIBUTES OF OPEN PUBLIC SPACES IN THE DEVELOPING CITIES

Open Public Spaces, according to Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), are vital elements of urban fabrics that animate communities in cities. These significant spaces not only provide the residents with different facilities, but also promote social, economic, environmental and health opportunities. Successful open public spaces meet the needs of people of various social classes, ethnicities, and different backgrounds in general. Despite its importance within the city, the lack of appropriate design and planning strategies in developing cities have resulted in a degradation of the urban environment and subsequently the quality of urban life. The problem needs to be addressed with sensitivity to space as well as the people- its main users. The research, therefore, aims to explore the attributes of successful open public spaces that contributes to enhance the quality of public life from users’ perspective. The research focuses on one case study: Horsh Al-Sanawbar, Beirut, Lebanon, which is perceived as the largest green public space in the heart of Beirut, where it plays a significant role in enhancing the public quality within the city. The paper argues that open public space dimensions consist of several attributes that makes an open public space successful, where these spaces can act as catalysts for enhancing the quality of life within the developing city. To prove this hypothesis, the paper adopts a qualitative approach, first, through desk research for defining the main keyword, and examining data from previous works and articles on the same topic wrote by various architects, urban planners, and theorists. Second a field methodology will be supported by questionnaire survey, walking interviews, and onsite observations regarding the four key attributes of successful open public spaces that are: physical, social, functional, and perceptual attributes. The author finally suggests a series of dimensions found in the design and development of open public spaces, that will contribute to create a design guideline for using the attributes in achieving better open public spaces.

Counteracting French Fake News on Climate Change Using Language Models

The unprecedented scale of disinformation on the Internet for more than a decade represents a serious challenge for democratic societies. When this process is focused on a well-established subject such as climate change, it can subvert measures and policies that various governmental bodies have taken to mitigate the phenomenon. It is therefore essential to effectively identify and counteract fake news on climate change. To do this, our main contribution represents a novel dataset with more than 2300 articles written in French, gathered using web scraping from all types of media dealing with climate change. Manual labeling was performed by two annotators with three classes: “fake”, “biased”, and “true”. Machine Learning models ranging from bag-of-words representations used by an SVM to Transformer-based architectures built on top of CamemBERT were built to automatically classify the articles. Our results, with an F1-score of 84.75% using the BERT-based model at the article level coupled with hand-crafted features specifically tailored for this task, represent a strong baseline. At the same time, we highlight perceptual properties as text sequences (i.e., fake, biased, and irrelevant text fragments) at the sentence level, with a macro F1 of 45.01% and a micro F1 of 78.11%. Based on these results, our proposed method facilitates the identification of fake news, and thus contributes to better education of the public.

Transparency and Translucency in Visual Appearance of Light-Permeable Materials

Light-permeable materials are usually characterized by perceptual attributes of transparency, translucency, and opacity. Technical definitions and standards leave room for subjective interpretation on how these different perceptual attributes relate to optical properties and one another, which causes miscommunication in industry and academia alike. A recent work hypothesized that a Gaussian function or a similar bell-shaped curve describes the relationship between translucency on the one hand, and transparency and opacity, on the other hand. Another work proposed a translucency classification system for computer graphics, where transparency, translucency and opacity are modulated by three optical properties: subsurface scattering, subsurface absorption, and surface roughness. In this work, we conducted two psychophysical experiments to scale the magnitude of transparency and translucency of different light-permeable materials to test the hypothesis that a Gaussian function can model the relationship between transparency and translucency, and to assess how well the aforementioned classification system describes the relationship between optical and perceptual properties. We found that the results vary significantly between the shapes. While bell-shaped relationship between transparency and translucency has been observed for spherical objects, this was not generalized to a more complex shape. Furthermore, how optical properties modulate transparency and translucency is also dependent on the object shape. We conclude that these cross-shape differences are rooted in different image cues generated by different object scales and surface geometry.

Perceptual confidence of visual stimulus features is associated with duration perception.

It has been shown that the perceived duration of an object in the subsecond range is closely associated with its nontemporal perceptual properties, the mechanism under which remains unclear. Previous studies have revealed a modulatory effect of early visual feature processing on the apparent duration. Here, we further examined the relationship between perceptual confidence and subjective time by asking participants to simultaneously perform temporal and nontemporal perceptual judgments. The results revealed a significant effect on confidence levels. When participants' confidence in judging the coherent motion direction or relative dot numerosity increases, their perceived duration of the stimulus also appears longer. These results are discussed in the context of perceptual evidence accumulation and evaluation for the decision-making of perceptual properties. They suggest a profound contribution of object processing to the computation of subjective time and provide further insights into the mechanism of event timing.

Cross-modal and cross-language activation in bilinguals reveals lexical competition even when words or signs are unheard or unseen

We exploit the phenomenon of cross-modal, cross-language activation to examine the dynamics of language processing. Previous within-language work showed that seeing a sign coactivates phonologically related signs, just as hearing a spoken word coactivates phonologically related words. In this study, we conducted a series of eye-tracking experiments using the visual world paradigm to investigate the time course of cross-language coactivation in hearing bimodal bilinguals (Spanish-Spanish Sign Language) and unimodal bilinguals (Spanish/Basque). The aim was to gauge whether (and how) seeing a sign could coactivate words and, conversely, how hearing a word could coactivate signs and how such cross-language coactivation patterns differ from within-language coactivation. The results revealed cross-language, cross-modal activation in both directions. Furthermore, comparison with previous findings of within-language lexical coactivation for spoken and signed language showed how the impact of temporal structure changes in different modalities. Spoken word activation follows the temporal structure of that word only when the word itself is heard; for signs, the temporal structure of the sign does not govern the time course of lexical access (location coactivation precedes handshape coactivation)-even when the sign is seen. We provide evidence that, instead, this pattern of activation is motivated by how common in the lexicon the sublexical units of the signs are. These results reveal the interaction between the perceptual properties of the explicit signal and structural linguistic properties. Examining languages across modalities illustrates how this interaction impacts language processing.

Signaling Green: Impact of Green Product Attributes on Consumers Trust and the Mediating Role of Green Marketing.

The purpose of this research is to highlight the relationship between green product attributes and consumer trust that influence consumers’ decision to purchase green products in the context of Pakistan. This study contributes to determining quantitatively how green product attributes such as physical, perceptual, and reflexive attributes influence consumers’ trust to purchase a green product and investigates the mediating role of green marketing. Data was collected from different industrial sectors through a survey questionnaire. We employed Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) using the SMART-PLS software to check the reliability and validity of the constructs, and to test the hypotheses. This study reveals variations in terms of shaping the sustainable consumers’ buying behavior by modifying product attributes and green marketing strategies that are in congruence with the proposed hypotheses of this study. In the end, the findings and interpretations of the results are given which can guide the managers to develop effective green marketing campaigns in reshaping the purchase intentions of consumers toward their green products.

Identifying Terrestrial Landscape Character Types in China

Landscape character assessment (LCA) is a widely used tool that integrates natural, cultural, and perceptual attributes to identify and portray landscape. In this study, we used the LCA method to identify the landscape characteristics of China at the national scale. Furthermore, we applied cultural and landscape structural factors along with spatial transmission to improve the identification system. First, we incorporated all the parameters in the assessment. We selected 15 landscape character factors from four factor types including nature, culture, spatial geographic co-ordinates, and landscape structure. These parameters were analysed using multilevel overlay and spatial connection tools in ArcGis 10.2, which resulted in 2307 landscape description units (LDUs). Second, the spatial structure properties of the LDUs were determined using a semivariogram and the moving window method in ArcGis 10.2 and Fragstats 4.2 software, respectively. Third, for visualisation, we applied the principal component analysis (PCA) using the SPSS software and elbow and k-means clustering methods using MATLAB to determine 110 landscape character types (LCTs) of China’s entire terrestrial landscape. Finally, we determined 1483 landscape character areas through semiautomatic segmentation and manual visual correction using eCognition. Based on the unique characteristics of the entire terrestrial landscape of China, a set of ideas and methods for the overall identification of LCTs was proposed. Our findings can be used to optimise territorial spatial planning and landscape protection and management, and promote multiscale land-use studies in China.

Hemispheric asymmetries in the amygdala: A comparative primer.

The amygdala is a core structure in the neuronal network underlying emotion processing in the vertebrate brain. Its structure and function have been extensively studied in both neuroimaging studies in human volunteers and comparative studies in animal models. Across different studies and research questions regarding the amygdala, one often-encountered finding is that the left and the right amygdala are not equivalent in terms of function and structure. Hemispheric asymmetries in the amygdala have been reported on many different levels, yet a systematic integration of these findings has been missing from the literature. Researchers in both cognitive and clinical neurosciences are often puzzled why they find a specific effect or association for the left but not the right amygdala, or vice versa. In this review article, we provide an integrated overview of existing basic and clinical findings regarding amygdala asymmetries in structure, connections, and functions. Importantly, the literature suggests that functional amygdala lateralization is determined by temporal characteristics, emotional valence, and perceptual properties. Furthermore, we highlight alterations of amygdala asymmetries reported in different patient groups, thereby allowing for a deeper understanding of atypical amygdala asymmetries. Lastly, we aim to provide guidelines and approaches concerning the interpretation of results for researchers investigating amygdala asymmetries.

Electrotactile Perception Properties and Its Applications: A Review.

With the increased demands of human-machine interaction, haptic feedback is becoming increasingly critical. However, the high cost, large size and low efficiency of current haptic systems severely hinder further development. As a portable and efficient technology, cutaneous electrotactile stimulation has shown promising potential for these issues. This paper presents a review on and insight into cutaneous electrotactile perception and its applications. Research results on perceptual properties and evaluation methods have been summarized and discussed to understand the effects of electrotactile stimulation on humans. Electrotactile applications are presented in categories to understand the methods and progress in various fields such as prostheses control, sensory substitution, sensory restoration and sensorimotor restoration. State of the art has demonstrated the superiority of electrotactile feedback, its efficiency and its flexibility. However, the complex factors and the limitations of evaluation methods made it challenging for precise electrotactile control. Groundbreaking innovation in electrotactile theory is expected to overcome challenges such as precise perception control, information capacity increasing, comprehension burden reducing and implementation costs.

Motion Effects: Perceptual Space and Synthesis for Specific Perceptual Properties.

A motion effect, the vestibular stimulus generated by a moving chair, is crucial in improving user experiences in many virtual reality (VR) and entertainment applications. However, the perceptual characteristics of motion effects remain unexplored to a great extent. This paper constructs a perceptual space that accounts for many motion effects based on their perceptual distances and then demonstrates smooth-rough and irregular-regular as its two primary perceptual dimensions. An authoring space is constructed with these two pairs as the axes. We also present methods for synthesizing new motion effects with a specific property in the authoring space. The contributions of this work are with new insights into the perceptual characteristics of motion effects and the first design methods of motion effects achieving desired perceptual properties.

Perceptual Space of Algorithms for Three-to-One Dimensional Reduction of Realistic Vibrations.

Haptics researchers often endeavor to deliver realistic vibrotactile feedback through broad-bandwidth actuators; however, these actuators typically generate only single-axis vibrations, not 3D vibrations like those that occur in natural tool-mediated interactions. Several three-to-one (321) dimensional reduction algorithms have thus been developed to combine 3D vibrations into 1D vibrations. Surprisingly, the perceptual quality of 321-converted vibrations has never been comprehensively compared to rendering of the original 3D signals. In this study, we develop a multi-dimensional vibration rendering system using a magnetic levitation haptic interface. We verify the system's ability to generate realistic 3D vibrations recorded in both tapping and dragging interactions with four surfaces. We then conduct a study with 15 participants to measure the perceived dissimilarities between five 321 algorithms (SAZ, SUM, VM, DFT, PCA) and the original recordings. The resulting perceptual space is investigated with multiple regression and Procrustes analysis to unveil the relationship between the physical and perceptual properties of 321-converted vibrations. Surprisingly, we found that participants perceptually discriminated the original 3D vibrations from all tested 1D versions. Overall, our results indicate that spectral, temporal, and directional attributes may all contribute to the perceived similarities of vibration signals.

DevianceNet: Learning to Predict Deviance from a Large-Scale Geo-Tagged Dataset

Understanding how a city’s physical appearance and environmental surroundings impact society traits, such as safety, is an essential issue in social artificial intelligence. To demonstrate the relationship, most existing studies utilize subjective human perceptual attributes, categorization only for a few violent crimes, and images taken from still shot images. These lead to difficulty in identifying location-specific characteristics for urban safety. In this work, to address this problem, we propose a large-scale dataset and a novel method by adopting a concept of “Deviance" which explains behaviors violating social norms, both formally (e.g. crime) and informally (e.g. civil complaints). We first collect a geo-tagged dataset consisting of incident report data for seven metropolitan cities, with corresponding sequential images around incident sites obtained from Google street view. We also design a convolutional neural network that learns spatio-temporal visual attributes of deviant streets. Experimental results show that our framework can reliably recognize real-world deviance in various cities. Furthermore, we analyze which visual attribute is important for deviance identification and severity estimation. We have released our dataset and source codes at our project page: https://deviance-project.github.io/DevianceNet/

Singapore Soundscape Site Selection Survey (S5): Identification of Characteristic Soundscapes of Singapore via Weighted k-Means Clustering

The ecological validity of soundscape studies usually rests on the choice of soundscapes that are representative of the perceptual space under investigation. For example, a soundscape pleasantness study might investigate locations with soundscapes ranging from “pleasant” to “annoying”. The choice of soundscapes is typically researcher led, but a participant-led process can reduce selection bias and improve result reliability. Hence, we propose a robust participant-led method to pinpoint characteristic soundscapes possessing arbitrary perceptual attributes. We validate our method by identifying Singaporean soundscapes spanning the perceptual quadrants generated from the “Pleasantness” and “Eventfulness” axes of the ISO 12913-2 circumplex model of soundscape perception, as perceived by local experts. From memory and experience, 67 participants first selected locations corresponding to each perceptual quadrant in each major planning region of Singapore. We then performed weighted k-means clustering on the selected locations, with weights for each location derived from previous frequencies and durations spent in each location by each participant. Weights hence acted as proxies for participant confidence. In total, 62 locations were thereby identified as suitable locations with characteristic soundscapes for further research utilizing the ISO 12913-2 perceptual quadrants. Audio–visual recordings and acoustic characterization of the soundscapes will be made in a future study.

Hearing chimeras

I argue that chimericity is a property that we typically experience when listening to multi-instrumental music. It is the property of hearing as a unified whole a melody or a harmony that does not belong to any single sound source but instead consists of the assembling of melodic or harmonic fragments coming from different sources. Chimericity is not reducible to the low-level audible properties of pitch and loudness; it is cognized at the perceptual level thanks to the auditory mechanism of primitive grouping. My aim is to show that chimericity is a perceptual property, one that we can genuinely hear. In developing this view, I engage with the debate within the philosophy of sense perception between rich vs thin views of the content of perceptual experience.

Development of an image-based measurement instrument for gloss characterization

Gloss is one of the main attributes to describe the appearance of surfaces and objects, as it contributes to the general quality perception. Gloss is a multidimensional quantity of which ‘specular gloss’ is the most commonly applied attribute. Specular gloss meters are standardized and widely used in industry. However, their readings correlate only partially to the general visual gloss impression, which also comprises distinctness-of-the-reflected-image (DOI), haze, contrast and surface-uniformity attributes. This study presents a more profound image-based gloss meter (iGM) which incorporates a CMOS camera detector. This concept is not new, but limited research has been conducted on the inclusion of various image processing evaluations for gloss attributes. The designed iGM is compatible to 60° specular gloss meter standards. The CMOS detector captures the reflected source image, which is processed to measure four perceptual attributes of surface gloss. The obtained results validate the 60° specular gloss evaluation and indicate a promising capability in characterizing DOI, haze, and contrast. Contrast is an important attribute that is not available yet in industrial gloss meters. It is measured using a diffuse aspecular light source. Generally, this iGM maintains the hardware principles of specular gloss meters, while evolving toward a representative gloss perception meter.

A multidimensional assessment of construction machinery noises based on perceptual attributes and psychoacoustic parameters

Traditional decibel-based measures in predicting annoyance from construction activities are limited to reflect high acoustic variability of construction machinery noises. Hence, a multidimensional approach based on perceptual attributes and psychoacoustic parameters is proposed. In-situ audio-visual recordings of 16 construction machinery in operation were evaluated subjectively on both perceived annoyance and a 12-item semantic differential perceptual attribute scale. The 16 machinery noises formed three clusters based on four perceptual components (Incisiveness, Strength, Intermittency, and Periodicity) derived via principal component analysis of the perceptual attributes. Notably, individual perceptual components strongly correlate with mean values of psychoacoustic parameters (loudness, sharpness, roughness, and fluctuation strength) over time, which we use to develop an annoyance model for construction noise. Both loudness and fluctuation strength were critical parameters to discriminate between clusters. The model can be used to automatically categorize construction noises by cluster and manage it based on known cluster characteristics.

A wrinkle in and of time: Contraction of felt duration with a single perceptual switch

The way we represent and perceive time has crucial implications for studying temporality in conscious experience. Contrasting positions posit that temporal information is separately abstracted out like any other perceptual property through specialized mechanisms or that time is represented through the temporality of experiences themselves. To add to this debate, we investigate alterations in felt time in conditions where only conscious visual experience is altered through perceptual switches while a bistable figure remains physically unchanged. We predicted that if perceived time is a function of temporally evolving conscious content, then a break in it (here via a perceptual switch) would also lead to a break in felt time. In three experiments, we showed participants a Necker cube that was manipulated to induce a perceptual switch (experiments 1(a) and 1(b)) or left to switch on its own (experiment 2). We asked participants to report both perceptual switches and felt durations (experiments 1(a) and 2) or only estimate time (experiment 1(b)). Over these three experiments, we find evidence of contraction of felt time in trials with a perceptual switch, consistent with the idea that perceived time is a function of temporally evolving conscious experience. Additionally, we present a phenomenological demonstration to support our empirical data. Overall, the study provides evidence for temporal mirroring and isomorphism in visual experience, arguing for a link between the timing of experience and time perception.

How head posture affects perceived cooperativeness: A cross-cultural perspective

Previous research has tested whether culture moderates the relationship between head tilt and perceptions of a cooperation-relevant construct. In this paper, we replicated the effects of head posture on perceived traits and compared Chinese and American participants to explore whether difference in cultural background (collectivist and individualist) affects perceptual attribution. Specifically, we investigated how head posture (level, up or down) affects perceptions of cooperativeness. In Experiment 1, Chinese and American participants rated Asian and Caucasian faces in three postures for perceived cooperativeness on a seven-point Likert scale. In Experiment 2, participants ranked the cooperativeness of the three postures of the same faces. In Experiment 3, participants scrolled through face images and manually manipulated vertical head angle to maximise apparent cooperativeness. We found that for both Chinese and American participants a neutral head level posture was perceived as more cooperative than head up and down postures. The optimal head posture for maximised apparent cooperativeness was close to level but with a slight downward rotation. While there was cross-cultural consistency in perceptions, Chinese participants exhibited greater sensitivity to postural cues in their judgments of cooperation compared to American participants. Our results suggest a profound effect of posture on the perception of cooperativeness that is common across cultures and that there are additional subtle cross-cultural differences in the cues to cooperativeness.