Evidence suggested that stimulus-response bindings could occur automatically as a result of the co-occurrence of a stimulus and a response, without requiring additional attentional involvement for features or objects. Considering that stimuli used in previous research often involved high-discriminability features processed automatically, the current study investigated the role of feature types in attention-modulated stimulus-response binding. Using the classic partial repetition cost (PRC) paradigm, the study manipulated the task relevance of features during the binding phase to modulate feature-based attention, with color and Landolt-C gap orientation as experimental features. The study found that when the stimulus feature was color (a high-discriminability feature), no significant difference was observed in the PRC effect during the retrieval phase, regardless of whether attention was directed to the color during the binding phase. When the stimulus feature was the gap orientation of the Landolt-C (a fine-grained feature), the PRC effect appeared during the retrieval phase, regardless of attention to gap orientation during the binding phase. However, the PRC effect was stronger when attention was directed to gap orientation, indicating that feature-based attention during the binding phase enhanced the binding strength between the gap orientation of the Landolt-C and the response. This study suggests that stimulus-response binding occurs automatically, but its binding strength is modulated by attention, with the type of stimulus feature playing a critical role in this process. Stimulus-driven and goal-driven factors jointly influence the strength of stimulus-response binding.

Most humans have only two ears. To know where a sound is in external space, our auditory system must therefore rely on the limited information received by these ears alone. In an adventurous late-night attempt to test blindfolded humans' ability to achieve this feat, we discovered that we mishear the sound of two spoons being hit right in front of us as coming from behind us.

While intuitive for humans, the concept of visual complexity is hard to define and quantify formally. We suggest adopting the multiscale structural complexity (MSSC) measure, an approach that defines structural complexity of an object as the amount of dissimilarities between distinct scales in its hierarchical organization. In this work, we apply MSSC to the case of visual stimuli, using an open dataset of images with subjective complexity scores obtained from human participants (SAVOIAS). We demonstrate that MSSC correlates with subjective complexity on par with other computational complexity measures, while being more intuitive by definition, consistent across categories of images, and easier to compute. We discuss objective and subjective elements inherently present in human perception of complexity and the domains where the two are more likely to diverge. We show how the multiscale nature of MSSC allows further investigation of complexity as it is perceived by humans.

Prior research employing emotional faces as distractors within the emotion-induced blindness paradigm has yielded mixed findings, prompting the present investigation into the impact of distinct types of emotional faces on target perception in this framework. Experiment 1 utilized happy faces, neutral faces, baseline stimuli, and inverted emotional faces as distractors, while Experiment 2 employed angry faces, neutral faces, and inverted emotional faces. Results demonstrated that neither happy faces (Experiment 1) nor angry faces (Experiment 2) significantly impaired target perception. By contrast, inverted emotional faces induced a statistically significant reduction in accuracy of target orientation judgments. These findings demonstrate that emotional distractor faces do not automatically elicit blindness under certain conditions, highlighting the importance of both the saliency and task relevance of the distractor in the occurrence of blindness. This study challenges the hypothesis of automatic attentional capture by emotional faces, comprehensively discusses probable reasons underlying these counterintuitive patterns, such as arousal, physical salience, task relevance, and emphasizes the boundary conditions of emotional distractor faces induce blindness.

Can you tell what's inside a sealed container just by touching it? Prior work in "container haptics" has focused on numbers-how many marbles are rolling around, or how full a bottle is. Here, we explore whether humans can make qualitative judgments-what of thing is inside-without seeing it. Across three studies, participants explored containers filled with dry food items (e.g., flour or granola) using touch, with or without sound. Surprisingly, even with no visual (or auditory cues), participants could often identify, or at least describe, the contents based on texture, size, and density. These findings suggest that your hands are better at guessing container contents than you might think.

Which particular selective pressures guided the evolution of zebra stripes? This question, one of biology's most celebrated conundrums, is also of potential interest to readers of as, on most accounts, stripes' benefits to zebras reflect by their predators, parasites, or conspecifics. Although stripes do not seem to camouflage zebras or warn off predators, various accounts implicate perception, including proposals that stripes disrupt predator perception, aid intra-species recognition, or deter biting flies. Currently, only the last of these enjoys strong empirical support: narrow stripes on zebras' heads, necks, shoulders, limbs, and flanks are known to deter biting flies, and variation in patterns of those stripes is associated with parasite burden, not predators, across species. stripes, however, are different. Typically broad and horizontal, there is some evidence that they vary with hyaena threat rather than parasites, consistent with an role. Here, viewing images of zebras, filtered to simulate lion and spotted-hyaena vision at distance or in motion, human observers typically judged rump stripes to be the most attention-capturing regions of the images. Computational models implicated visual salience in this effect, and pursuit simulations showed that by driving predators' attention to a zebra's rear, rump stripes could minimise the probability of capture.

Visual adaptation to extreme body types is known to produce contrastive adaptation aftereffects on the subsequent perception of human bodies. This approach has been exploited to probe the perceptual mechanisms underlying body perception by measuring the extent to which aftereffects occur when the adapting and test stimuli differ in specific characteristics (). The present study used this approach to investigate the body-part specificity of adaptation to body muscularity. Participants made judgments of the muscularity of torsos and arms both before and after adaptation to muscular torsos (Experiment 1) or muscular arms (Experiment 2). Across experiments, we report a double dissociation in the effects of adaptation. In Experiment 1, adaptation to muscular torsos produced aftereffects for torso judgments, but not arm judgments. In Experiment 2, adaptation to muscular arms produced aftereffects for arm judgments, but not torso judgments. These results demonstrate body-part specificity of the visual mechanisms underlying perception of body muscularity.

Previous research has shown that task-irrelevant auditory/haptic input semantically congruent with a target visual object facilitates visual search, indicating that cross-modal congruency influences goal-directed attentional control. The present study examined whether haptic input involuntarily shifts spatial attention to the congruent visual object even though it was not a search target. Participants identified the arrow direction presented above or below a central gaze fixation point while clasping a specifically shaped item in their hand. Two task-irrelevant pictures with specific shapes preceded the arrow. Results showed a significant interaction between visual and haptic shapes: Participants responded faster when the visual object shared the shape of the item clasped in their hand than when the two shapes differed, indicating that haptic-visual shape congruency modulates spatial attention. Thus, cross-modal congruency can affect involuntary attentional orienting as well as goal-directed attentional control.

Visual Snow (VS) syndrome is a neurological condition characterised by the constant perception of small flicking dots across the visual field. These symptoms are thought to be caused by hyperexcitability in the visual cortex. This study examined the potential link between VS and susceptibility to the face pareidolia (FP) illusion, where faces are perceived in inanimate objects. Using a self-report VS questionnaire and a standard FP sensitivity task, we collected data remotely from 132 individuals with VS and 104 age-matched controls. Results revealed higher FP sensitivity in individuals with VS, amplified in those with co-occurring migraines. Non-parametric analyses confirmed elevated face scores for VS participants, even when migraines were excluded. A rank-order analysis showed consistency in response patterns across groups, ruling out the idea that extraordinary responses to one stimulus drove the group difference. These findings suggest that individuals with VS syndrome have an increased susceptibility to the FP illusion. Future research should investigate whether hyperexcitability in the visual cortex is the cause.

We explored whether providing information that artistic photography depicts individuals on the autism spectrum and their special interests influences viewers' preferences. Our findings demonstrated a positive impact of providing such information on participants' ratings of aesthetic emotions and judgments. The present study suggests that artistic activities showing autistic individuals can serve as positive self-advocacy tools when framed by contextual information.

The purpose of the current study was to determine whether previous reports of higher sensitivity to the McGurk effect in females than males are influenced by Listener-Speaker sex concordance. Since the degree of motor engagement in speech perception is influenced by the perceived distance between speaker and listener, we sought to determine whether individuals are more likely to perceive the McGurk effect if they are the same sex as the speaker. Behavioral data was collected from 200 participants (100 female) as they identified syllables (audio "ba" paired with visual "ga") spoken by male and female speakers. When controlling for Age and Speaker sex, females experienced the McGurk effect at a higher rate than males, suggesting that previous reports of increased McGurk perception in females exist independent of speaker-related factors. Age and Speaker sex were non-significant, as was the interaction between Speaker sex and Listener sex. However, significant age-related interactions were observed. The Age by Listener sex interaction is proposed to arise from the higher incidence of hearing loss in males, leading to a greater reliance on visual cues with advancing age. A significant interaction between Age and Speaker sex is proposed to arise from greater attentional allocation to male speakers, possibly resulting from societal influences.

When items are judged in a sequence, evaluation of the current item is biased by the one preceding it. These sequential effects have been found for judgements of facial attractiveness, where studies have often shown an assimilation effect - ratings of the current face are pulled towards the attractiveness of the preceding face. However, the focus has been on the average bias across participants in general, with little consideration of individual differences. Here, we investigated an important first question - are individual differences in how sequential effects bias our judgements stable? Establishing this stability is crucial before considering potential associations between these individual differences in bias and other observer-level traits. To this end, we asked participants to provide attractiveness ratings for two different sequences of faces. In Experiment 1, one sequence comprised neutral, passport-style photos, while the other showed more unconstrained, naturalistic images. In Experiment 2, both sequences were composed of images taken from the same (constrained) photoset. Our results were identical for both experiments, with participants in general showing assimilation in their attractiveness judgements. However, for a given individual, we found no evidence that the strength of this bias was stable across the two sequences that they rated. These findings may be the result of within-person inconsistencies in perceiving facial attractiveness more broadly, and should serve to motivate further investigation of individual differences as applied to the domain of sequential effects.

Spatially aligned faces presented in a continuous stream in the periphery appear distorted and grotesque. This flashed face distortion effect ("FFDE") was first reported over 10 years ago, yet little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Here we investigate whether the FFDE persists across visual field locations when there is a change in position. Face streams were presented at one location for several seconds and then either remained at the same location, or were shifted to a new location, either across visual half-fields (Experiment 1) or within the same visual half-field (Experiment 2). We assessed the perceived illusion magnitudes continuously throughout each trial using a joystick as a response device and found that the illusion decreased significantly when the location changed. In the third experiment we added a control condition that did not elicit an illusion and found that the decrease in reported distortions for location-shift trials was of the same magnitude as this baseline condition. Together, our results suggest that the FFDE may be bound to retinotopic locations, at least when location changes are relatively large.

Although synaesthesia has been linked to increased creativity and engagement with the arts, most of the evidence has come from visual arts rather than music. Here we show for the first time that synaesthesia is far more prevalent in musicians than non-musicians (an odds ratio of about 4). We show that this result holds true for all three different kinds of synaesthesia that we considered (grapheme-colour, sequence-space, sound-colour) including for types of synaesthesia unrelated to music. That is, it is not simply the case that the ability to 'see' music drives the higher prevalence, although this may have a role. Instead, we speculate that the cognitive profile of synaesthetes is conducive to musicality. We provide an estimate of the prevalence of sound-colour synaesthesia in non-musicians of between 0.3% and 1.3%, depending on the threshold applied, with comparable figures for musicians of 1.3% to 7.3%.

Seeing the position and motion of one's hand helps guide the hand to objects that one wants to interact with. If the latest available visual information guides the hand at each moment, slightly delaying access to such information should impede performance. We show that increasing the average delay by a few milliseconds, by briefly hiding the hand, does indeed increase the time it takes to reach a target.

Ordnance Survey (OS) remote sensing surveyors have extensive experience with aerial views of scenes and objects. Building on our previous work with this group, we investigated whether their expertise influenced performance on a same/different object recognition task involving houses. In an online study, these stimuli were shown from both familiar ground-level viewpoints and from what is for most people, unfamiliar aerial viewpoints. OS experts and novices compared achromatic, disparity-free images with aerial perspectives rotated around the clock against canonical ground-views; we measured response times (RTs) and sensitivities (). In two 'grounding' tasks using rotated letters, we found conventional outcomes for both groups, validating the online approach. Experiment 1 (non-matching letters) yielded ceiling-level performance with no signs of mental rotation, consistent with a feature-based recognition strategy. In Experiment 2 (mirror reversed letters), both groups showed orientation-dependent performance, but experts exhibited a speed-accuracy trade-off, responding more cautiously than novices. In the main house task (Experiment 3), we found (a) the same speed-accuracy trade-off observed in Experiment 2, (b) substantially longer RTs overall, and (c) no evidence for mental rotation in either group, mirroring Experiment 1. Contrary to our earlier findings on aerial depth perception, expertise in remote sensing did not yield a distinctive recognition strategy for the experiments here. However, experts displayed more diligent tactics in Experiments 2 and 3. We suggest that all participants in Experiment 3 engaged in cognitively challenging feature comparisons across viewpoints, presumably supported by volumetric or surface-connected prototypes of houses as the basis for feature comparisons.

Looming sounds are known to influence visual processing in various ways. Prior work suggests that performance on an orientation sensitivity task may be improved if visual presentation is preceded by looming audio, but not by non-looming audio. However, our recent work revealed that looming and non-looming alert sounds have a similar impact on performance in contrast sensitivity tasks. In the current study, we aim to reconcile these findings by comparing the effects of looming and non-looming sounds on contrast and orientation discrimination tasks within participants. Participants viewed tilted sinusoidal gratings and made judgments about their orientation (left/right). The gratings for the contrast discrimination task had low contrast and high deviation from vertical (±45°), whereas for the orientation discrimination task, they had a low deviation (less than ±2° from vertical) and full contrast. Immediately before visual stimulus presentation, there could be no sound, stationary sound, or looming sound. Sensitivity was measured as ' and compared across tasks and sound types. Our results indicate that neither task benefited more from looming sounds over stationary sounds, yielding no evidence for a looming bias in this domain. However, we found a differential effect between tasks, indicating that contrast discrimination was improved more by alert sounds than orientation discrimination, likely reflecting perceptual differences in the task types. Factors that may influence the effectiveness of looming sounds are discussed.

Faces are rapidly and automatically assessed on multiple social dimensions, including trustworthiness. The high inter-rater agreement on this social judgment suggests a systematic association between facial appearance and perceived trustworthiness. The facial information used by observers during explicit trustworthiness judgments has been studied before. However, it remains unknown whether the same perceptual strategies are used during decisions that involve trusting another individual, without necessitating an explicit trustworthiness judgment. To explore this, 53 participants completed the Trust Game, an economic decision task, while facial information was randomly sampled using the Bubbles method. Our results show that economic decisions based on facial cues rely on similar visual information as that used during explicit trustworthiness judgments. We then manipulated facial features identified as diagnostic for trust to test their influence on perceived trustworthiness (Experiment 2) and on trust-related behaviors (Experiment 3). Across all experiments, subtle, targeted changes to facial features systematically shifted both impressions and monetary trust decisions. These findings demonstrate that the same perceptual strategies underlie explicit judgments and trust behaviors, highlighting the applied relevance of even minimal alterations in facial appearance. These findings should be replicated with real faces from diverse demographic backgrounds to confirm their generalizability.

As ChatGPT continues to impress with its ability to generate human-like text, its capabilities in emotion recognition remain an open question. Unlike previous research comparing ChatGPT and humans on tasks with objective answers, we explored an affective domain where no correct answer exists: emotional ratings of images, a task requiring visual-perceptual analysis of complex input to recover an affective judgment. Using the MATTER database, rated on valence and arousal dimensions, I prompted ChatGPT-4 to do the same. The results revealed that ChatGPT rated images as less positive and less arousing than humans on average, particularly for images categorized as 'mirthful,' 'fearful,' and 'disgusting.' These findings suggest that while ChatGPT is able to process affective information, its responses reflect an analytical rather than experiential framework, differing from human interpretations.