Perceptual Task Research Articles

Validating Synthetic Data for Perception in Autonomous Airport Navigation Tasks

Autonomous navigation within airport environments presents significant challenges, mostly due to the scarcity of accessible and labeled data for training autonomous systems. This study introduces an innovative approach to assess the performance of vision-based models trained on synthetic datasets, with the goal of determining whether simulated data can train and validate navigation operations in complex airport environments. The methodology includes a comparative analysis employing image processing techniques and object detection algorithms. A comparative analysis of two different datasets was conducted: a synthetic dataset that mirrors real airport scenarios, generated using the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020®video game, and a real-world dataset. The results indicate that models trained on a combination of both real and synthetic images perform much better in terms of adaptability and accuracy compared to those trained only on one type of dataset. This analysis makes a significant contribution to the field of autonomous airport navigation and offers a cost-effective and practical solution to overcome the challenges of dataset acquisition and algorithm validation. It is thus believed that this study lays the groundwork for future advancements in the field.

Exploring the Impact of Decoys on Decision‐Making by Young Children

ABSTRACTThe asymmetric dominance effect (or decoy effect) is a decision‐making phenomenon that occurs when preference for a target alternative shifts with the addition of a similar, yet inferior alternative dubbed the decoy. Despite the considerable number of studies examining the decoy effect with adult humans and animals, there is comparatively less research on context effects within the developmental domain. In this study, we explored the impact of a decoy on choice behavior by young children (3–9 years old) using a preferential choice task as well as a perceptual discrimination task. Introduction of an inferior decoy impacted choice behavior across 2‐alternative (binary) versus 3‐alternative (trinary) sets, such that inclusion of the dominated decoy in expanded sets decreased selection of the superior target alternative. This pattern of results indicates a reversal of the standard attraction effect, also known as the repulsion effect. We discuss these findings in light of the adult and comparative literatures on decoy effects as well as call for additional developmental studies exploring the impact of inferior alternatives in multialternative decision‐making.

What the eyes, confidence, and partner's identity can tell about change of mind.

Perceptual confidence reflects the ability to evaluate the evidence that supports perceptual decisions. It is thought to play a critical role in guiding decision-making. However, only a few empirical studies have actually investigated the function of perceptual confidence. To address this issue, we designed a perceptual task in which participants provided a confidence judgment on the accuracy of their perceptual decision. Then, they viewed the response of a machine or human partner, and they were instructed to decide whether to keep or change their initial response. We observed that confidence predicted participants' changes of mind more than task difficulty and perceptual accuracy. Additionally, interacting with a machine, compared to a human, decreased confidence and increased participants tendency to change their initial decision, suggesting that both confidence and changes of mind are influenced by contextual factors, such as the identity of a partner. Finally, variations in confidence judgments but not change of mind were correlated with pre-response pupil dynamics, indicating that arousal changes are linked to confidence computations. This study contributes to our understanding of the factors influencing confidence and changes of mind and also evaluates the possibility of using pupil dynamics as a proxy of confidence.

Pre-Service English as a Foreign Language Teachers’ Perceptions of Task Based Language Teaching for Higher Education Programs in Mexico: Methodology of a Case Study

Pre-Service English as a Foreign Language Teachers’ Perceptions of Task Based Language Teaching for Higher Education Programs in Mexico: Methodology of a Case Study

Diminished representational momentum for physical states in patients with depressive disorder

The representational momentum for physical state changes refers to the fact that we remember objects as more changed in physical state than they actually were. It has been well documented that depressive disorder is associated with impairment of time perception. Thus, the present work was conducted with the aim to investigate the representational momentum for physical state changes in patients with depressive disorder, firstly. Forty patients with depressive disorder and forty-two healthy controls were administrated with the task of representational momentum for physical state changes and task of time perception. The stimulus comprises 10 videos showing object state changes (e.g., ice melting). During playing, the video would stop and immediately be obscured by mosaics at a specific point. Participants select from three detection images (the exact frame of the video just be masked, the frame after that, and the frame before that) to test representational momentum and estimate the duration of the video in seconds to test time perception. The depressive group showed diminished representational momentum (i.e., lower scores on the task of representational momentum) than normal controls (U = 215.00, Z = −5.83, p < 0.001). In addition, the scores on the task of representational momentum were significantly positively related with the scores on the task of time perception among depressive group (r = 0.446, p = 0.004). The findings indicate that patients with depressive disorder may exhibit diminished representational momentum for physical states, which may be correlated with their impairment of time perception.

An influence of menopausal symptoms on mental health, emotion perception, and quality of life: a multi-faceted approach.

The menopausal transition brings with it many physical, cognitive, and affective changes in a woman's life, impacting quality of life. Whereas prior work has examined impact on general mental health and cognitive function, research on basic affective processing during menopause remains scarce. Using a median-split procedure, this pre-registered study examined the impact of stronger (N = 46 women) vs. milder (N = 47 women) menopausal symptoms using a behavioural task of subjective emotion perception (embody) and a passive eye tracking viewing task of emotional faces in addition to self-report questionnaires. After 3 months, participants completed the questionnaires again to examine whether objective measures of emotion perception (eye tracking) might predict mental health at follow-up. As anticipated, women with stronger vs. milder menopausal symptoms reported increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, stress, emotion regulation difficulties, and lower quality of life during both time points. While no evidence was found in the behavioural task, eye tracking data indicated blunted emotion perception in women with high menopausal symptoms, while women with low symptoms spent more time looking at happy faces relative to fearful or surprised faces. Although eye tracking or hormonal data did not predict mental health at follow-up, a higher estradiol/FSH ratio indicated a higher quality of life. This study documented an impact of the menopausal transition and strength of menopausal symptoms in particular on objective emotion perception as well as mental health and quality of life in women suffering from stronger vs. milder menopausal symptoms. Clinical implications are discussed.

The contribution of auditory imagery and visual rhythm perception to sensorimotor synchronization with external and imagined rhythm.

Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) refers to the temporal coordination of an external stimulus with movement. Our previous work revealed that while SMS with visual flashing patterns was less consistent than with auditory or tactile patterns, it was still evident in a sample of nonmusicians. Although previous studies have speculated the potential role of auditory imagery, its contribution to visual SMS performance is not well quantified. Utilizing a synchronization-continuation finger-tapping task with a visual stimulus that included implied motion, we aimed to examine how participants' imagery ability, musicality, and rhythm perception affected SMS performance. We quantified participants' SMS consistency in synchronization (with visual cues) and continuation (without visual cues) phases. Participants also performed a perception task assessing their ability to detect temporal perturbations in the visual rhythm and completed musical ability and imagery questionnaires. Our linear regression model for SMS consistency included the trial phase, self-reported auditory imagery control and musicality, and visual rhythm perception as predictors. Significant effects of trial phase and auditory imagery scores on SMS consistency suggested that participants performed SMS more consistently while the guiding visual stimulus was present and that the higher one's self-reported auditory imagery ability, the better their SMS when continuing with unguided rhythm. One's visual rhythm perception accuracy significantly correlated with SMS consistency during the synchronization phase, and there was no correlation between rhythm perception and auditory imagery control. Overall, our results suggested relatively independent contributions of auditory imagery and visual rhythm perception to SMS with visual rhythm. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Dissecting Bayes: Using influence measures to test normative use of probability density information derived from a sample test.

Bayesian decision theory (BDT) is frequently used to model normative performance in perceptual, motor, and cognitive decision tasks where the possible outcomes of actions are associated with rewards or penalties. The resulting normative models specify how decision makers should encode and combine information about uncertainty and value-step by step-in order to maximize their expected reward. When prior, likelihood, and posterior are probabilities, the Bayesian computation requires only simple arithmetic operations: addition, etc. We focus on visual cognitive tasks where Bayesian computations are carried out not on probabilities but on (1) probability density functions and (2) these probability density functions are derived from samples. We break the BDT model into a series of computations and test human ability to carry out each of these computations in isolation. We test three necessary properties of normative use of pdf information derived from a sample-accuracy, additivity and influence. Influence measures allow us to assess how much weight each point in the sample is assigned in making decisions and allow us to compare normative use (weighting) of samples to actual, point by point. We find that human decision makers violate accuracy and additivity systematically but that the cost of failure in accuracy or additivity would be minor in common decision tasks. However, a comparison of measured influence for each sample point with normative influence measures demonstrates that the individual's use of sample information is markedly different from the predictions of BDT. We will show that the normative BDT model takes into account the geometric symmetries of the pdf while the human decision maker does not. An alternative model basing decisions on a single extreme sample point provided a better account for participants' data than the normative BDT model.

Aging affects auditory contributions to focus perception in Jianghuai Mandarina).

Speakers can place their prosodic prominence on any locations within a sentence, generating focus prosody for listeners to perceive new information. This study aimed to investigate age-related changes in the bottom-up processing of focus perception in Jianghuai Mandarin by clarifying the perceptual cues and the auditory processing abilities involved in the identification of focus locations. Young, middle-aged, and older speakers of Jianghuai Mandarin completed a focus identification task and an auditory perception task. The results showed that increasing age led to a decrease in listeners' accuracy rate in identifying focus locations, with all participants performing the worst when dynamic pitch cues were inaccessible. Auditory processing abilities did not predict focus perception performance in young and middle-aged listeners but accounted significantly for the variance in older adults' performance. These findings suggest that age-related deteriorations in focus perception can be largely attributed to declined auditory processing of perceptual cues. Poor ability to extract frequency modulation cues may be the most important underlying psychoacoustic factor for older adults' difficulties in perceiving focus prosody in Jianghuai Mandarin. The results contribute to our understanding of the bottom-up mechanisms involved in linguistic prosody processing in aging adults, particularly in tonal languages.

PASS: Patch Automatic Skip Scheme for Efficient On-Device Video Perception.

Real-time video perception tasks are often challenging on resource-constrained edge devices due to the issues of accuracy drop and hardware overhead, where saving computations is the key to performance improvement. Existing methods either rely on domain-specific neural chips or priorly searched models, which require specialized optimization according to different task properties. These limitations motivate us to design a general and task-independent methodology, called Patch Automatic Skip Scheme (PASS), which supports diverse video perception settings by decoupling acceleration and tasks. The gist is to capture inter-frame correlations and skip redundant computations at patch level, where the patch is a non-overlapping square block in visual. PASS equips each convolution layer with a learnable gate to selectively determine which patches could be safely skipped without degrading model accuracy. Specifically, we are the first to construct a self-supervisory procedure for gate optimization, which learns to extract contrastive representations from frame sequences. The pre-trained gates can serve as plug-and-play modules to implement patch-skippable neural backbones, and automatically generate proper skip strategy to accelerate different video-based downstream tasks, e.g., outperforming state-of-the-art MobileHumanPose in 3D pose estimation and FairMOT in multiple object tracking, by up to 9.43 × and 12.19 × speedups, respectively, on NVIDIA Jetson Nano devices.

Color discrimination repetition distorts color representations

Perceptual learning is the improvement of perceptual performance after repeated practice on a perceptual task. Studies on perceptual learning in color vision are limited. In this study, we measured the impact of color discrimination repetitions at a specific base color on color perception for entire hues. Participants performed five sessions of color discrimination training (200 or 300 trials per session) over five days, at colors on either the negative or positive direction of the L-M color axis, based on group assignment. We administered three color perception assessments (unique hues, color category boundaries, and color appearance) before and after the sessions to evaluate perceptual changes after training. The results showed declines in color discrimination thresholds after training, as expected. Additionally, the training influenced outcomes across all three assessment types. After the training, the perceived color appearance changed near the trained color along the stimulus hue, and some of the unique hues and the color category boundaries moved significantly toward the trained color. These findings indicate that short-term repetitions of color discrimination training can alter color representations in the visual system, distorting color perception around the trained color.

Women in engineering, science and technology in sub-Saharan Africa: cultural attitudes, challenges, and gaps affecting clinical engineering and medical devices maintenance practices

Abstract Purpose From previous studies, we had observed that the number of biomedical engineers and technicians (BMETs) skilled in the maintenance of medical devices (MDs) were limited in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and that a likely parallelism existed between BME maintenance-related tasks and house chores mainly carried out by women in daily life. Our objective in carrying out this study was to understand underlying local cultural and social factors and domestic traditions interfering with the inclusion of women in the field of clinical and biomedical engineering (BME), and to identify existing gaps in opportunities for women in Engineering, Science and Technology (EST) in this region. Methods We carried out an online survey involving 51 respondents (70.6% women, 29.4% men), to investigate gender-biased and cultural perceptions of maintenance-related tasks among engineers/technologists/technicians in BME and other allied professions in SSA​. The survey was refined through focus groups and pilot tests to assess its validity, and then shared among specific associations of women in engineering and other bodies in EST, as well as some hospital communities and institutions. Results The survey brought to light evidence of prejudices against women in the society and workplace and showed that the adoption of our parallelism hypothesis has potential for increasing medical device maintenance practices in SSA hospitals. Conclusions There is an apparent need to further study the possible effects of this sociological model through leveraging local culture and domestic traditions in ways that could ultimately increase the leadership and numbers of women BMETs in SSA.

Distance mis-estimations can be reduced with specific shadow locations

Shadows in physical space are copious, yet the impact of specific shadow placement and their abundance is yet to be determined in virtual environments. This experiment aimed to identify whether a target’s shadow was used as a distance indicator in the presence of binocular distance cues. Six lighting conditions were created and presented in virtual reality for participants to perform a perceptual matching task. The task was repeated in a cluttered and sparse environment, where the number of cast shadows (and their placement) varied. Performance in this task was measured by the directional bias of distance estimates and variability of responses. No significant difference was found between the sparse and cluttered environments, however due to the large amount of variance, one explanation is that some participants utilised the clutter objects as anchors to aid them, while others found them distracting. Under-setting of distances was found in all conditions and environments, as predicted. Having an ambient light source produced the most variable and inaccurate estimates of distance, whereas lighting positioned above the target reduced the mis-estimation of distances perceived.

Perception of unfamiliar caregivers during sickness – Using the new Caregiver Perception Task (CgPT) during experimental endotoxemia

Social withdrawal is a well-established part of sickness behavior, but in some contexts sick animals might gain from keeping close instead of keeping away. For instance, sick individuals are more willing to be near known individuals who can provide care and safety (close others) compared to when healthy. Yet, interactions with some strangers might also be beneficial (i.e., healthcare professionals), but it is not known how sickness interplay with social behavior towards such individuals. Here, we assessed if sickness affects perception of caregivers, and developed a new task, the Caregiver Perception Task (CgPT). Twenty-six participants performed the CgPT, once after an injection of lipopolysaccharide (LPS, 0.8 ng/kg body weight, n = 24), and once after an injection of saline (n = 25), one hour and forty-five minutes post-injection. During the task, participants watched short video clips of three types of caregivers: a healthcare professional taking care of a sick individual, a healthcare professional not taking care of a sick individual, and a non-healthcare professional taking care of their sick adult child or partner. After each video clip, the likability, trustworthiness, professionalism, and willingness to interact with and receive care from the caregiver were rated on visual analogue scales. Results showed that participants injected with saline rated healthcare professionals who did not take care of a sick individual less positively on all aspects compared to healthcare professionals who took care of a sick individual. Moreover, compared to saline, LPS increased the participants’ willingness to receive care from healthcare professionals and non-healthcare professionals providing care, but not from healthcare professionals not providing care. Thus, our results indicate that sick individuals may approach unknown individuals with potential to provide care and support.

Predictive processing of music and language in autism: Evidence from Mandarin and English speakers.

Atypical predictive processing has been associated with autism across multiple domains, based mainly on artificial antecedents and consequents. As structured sequences where expectations derive from implicit learning of combinatorial principles, language and music provide naturalistic stimuli for investigating predictive processing. In this study, we matched melodic and sentence stimuli in cloze probabilities and examined musical and linguistic prediction in Mandarin- (Experiment 1) and English-speaking (Experiment 2) autistic and non-autistic individuals using both production and perception tasks. In the production tasks, participants listened to unfinished melodies/sentences and then produced the final notes/words to complete these items. In the perception tasks, participants provided expectedness ratings of the completed melodies/sentences based on the most frequent notes/words in the norms. While Experiment 1 showed intact musical prediction but atypical linguistic prediction in autism in the Mandarin sample that demonstrated imbalanced musical training experience and receptive vocabulary skills between groups, the group difference disappeared in a more closely matched sample of English speakers in Experiment 2. These findings suggest the importance of taking an individual differences approach when investigating predictive processing in music and language in autism, as the difficulty in prediction in autism may not be due to generalized problems with prediction in any type of complex sequence processing.

Online Assessment of Cross-Linguistic Similarity as a Measure of L2 Perceptual Categorization Accuracy

The effect of cross-linguistic similarity on the development of target-like categories in a second or additional language is widely attested. Research also shows that second-language speakers may access both their native and the second-language lexicons when processing second-language speech. Forty-three Catalan learners of English performed a perceptual assimilation task evaluating the perceived similarity between English and Catalan vowels and also participated in a visual world eye-tracking experiment investigating between-language lexical competition. The focus of the study was the English vowel contrasts /iː/-/ɪ/ and /æ/-/ʌ/. The perceptual task confirmed that English /iː/ and /æ/were perceptually closer to native Catalan categories than English /ɪ/ and /ʌ/. The results of the spoken word recognition task indicated that learners experienced greater competition from native words when the target words contained English /iː/ and /æ/, illustrating a close link between the two types of tasks. However, differences in the magnitude of cross-language lexical competition were found to be only weakly related to learners’ degree of perceived similarity to native categories at an individual level. We conclude that online tasks provide a potentially effective method of assessing cross-linguistic similarity without the concerns inherent to more traditional offline approaches.

Role of the prefrontal cortex in musical and verbal short-term memory: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

Abstract Auditory short-term memory (STM) is a key process in auditory cognition, with evidence for partly distinct networks subtending musical and verbal STM. The delayed matching-to-sample task (DMST) paradigm has been found suitable for comparing musical and verbal STM and for manipulating memory load. In this study, musical and verbal DMSTs were investigated with measures of activity in frontal areas with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS): Experiment 1 compared musical and verbal DMSTs with a low-level perception task (that does not entail encoding, retention, or retrieval of information), to identify frontal regions involved in memory processes. Experiment 2 manipulated memory load for musical and verbal materials to uncover frontal brain regions showing parametric changes in activity with load and their potential differences between musical and verbal materials. A FIR model was used to deconvolute fNIRS signals across successive trials without making assumptions with respect to the shape of the hemodynamic response in a DMST. Results revealed the involvement of the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and inferior frontal gyri (IFG), but not of the superior frontal gyri (SFG) in both experiments, in keeping with previously reported neuroimaging data (including fMRI). Experiment 2 demonstrated a parametric variation of activity with memory load in bilateral IFGs during the maintenance period, with opposite directions for musical and verbal materials. Activity in the IFGs increased with memory load for verbal sound sequences, in keeping with previous results with n-back tasks. The decreased activity with memory load observed with musical sequences is discussed in relation to previous research on auditory STM rehearsal strategies. This study highlights fNIRS as a promising tool for investigating musical and verbal STM not only for typical populations, but also for populations with developmental language disorders associated with functional alterations in auditory STM.

EndoSRR: a comprehensive multi-stage approach for endoscopic specular reflection removal.

Specular reflections in endoscopic images not only disturb visual perception but also hamper computer vision algorithm performance. However, the intricate nature and variability of these reflections, coupled with a lack of relevant datasets, pose ongoing challenges for removal. We present EndoSRR, a robust method for eliminating specular reflections in endoscopic images. EndoSRR comprises two stages: reflection detection and reflection region inpainting. In the reflection detection stage, we adapt and fine-tune the segment anything model (SAM) using a weakly labeled dataset, achieving an accurate reflection mask. For reflective region inpainting, we employ LaMa, a fast Fourier convolution-based model trained on a 4.5M-image dataset, enabling effective inpainting of arbitrarily shaped reflection regions. Lastly, we introduce an iterative optimization strategy for dual pre-trained models to refine the results of specular reflection removal, named DPMIO. Utilizing the SCARED-2019 dataset, our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Qualitatively, our method excels in accurately detecting reflective regions, yielding more natural and realistic inpainting results. Quantitatively, our method demonstrates superior performance in both segmentation evaluation metrics (IoU, E-measure, etc.) and image inpainting evaluation metrics (PSNR, SSIM, etc.). The experimental results underscore the significance of proficient endoscopic specular reflection removal for enhancing visual perception and downstream tasks. The methodology and results presented in this study are poised to catalyze advancements in specular reflection removal, thereby augmenting the accuracy and safety of minimally invasive surgery.

Conspiracy beliefs and perceptual inference in times of political uncertainty.

Sociopolitical crises causing uncertainty have accumulated in recent years, providing fertile ground for the emergence of conspiracy ideations. Computational models constitute valuable tools for understanding the mechanisms at play in the formation and rigidification of these unshakeable beliefs. Here, the Circular Inference model was used to capture associations between changes in perceptual inference and the dynamics of conspiracy ideations in times of uncertainty. A bistable perception task and conspiracy belief assessment focused on major sociopolitical events were administered to large populations from three polarized countries. We show that when uncertainty peaks, an overweighting of sensory information is associated with conspiracy ideations. Progressively, this exploration strategy gives way to an exploitation strategy in which increased adherence to conspiracy theories is associated with the amplification of prior information. Overall, the Circular Inference model sheds new light on the possible mechanisms underlying the progressive strengthening of conspiracy theories when individuals face highly uncertain situations.

Assessing Trial-by-Trial Electrophysiological and Behavioral Markers of Attentional Control and Sensory Precision in Psychotic and Mood Disorders.

The current study investigated the extent to which changes in attentional control contribute to performance on a visual perceptual discrimination task, on a trial-by-trial basis in a transdiagnostic clinical sample. Participants with schizophrenia (SZ; N = 58), bipolar disorder (N = 42), major depression disorder (N = 51), and psychiatrically healthy controls (N = 92) completed a visual perception task in which stimuli appeared briefly. The design allowed us to estimate the lapse rate and the precision of perceptual representations of the stimuli. Electroencephalograms (EEG) were recorded to examine pre-stimulus activity in the alpha band (8-13 Hz), overall and in relation to behavior performance on the task. We found that the attention lapse rate was elevated in the SZ group compared with all other groups. We also observed group differences in pre-stimulus alpha activity, with control participants showing the highest levels of pre-stimulus alpha when averaging across trials. However, trial-by-trial analyses showed within-participant fluctuations in pre-stimulus alpha activity significantly predicted the likelihood of making an error, in all groups. Interestingly, our analysis demonstrated that aperiodic contributions to the EEG signal (which affect power estimates across frequency bands) serve as a significant predictor of behavior as well. These results confirm the elevated attention lapse rate that has been observed in SZ, validate pre-stimulus EEG markers of attentional control and their use as a predictor of behavior on a trial-by-trial basis, and suggest that aperiodic contributions to the EEG signal are an important target for further research in this area, in addition to alpha-band activity.