Infants prefer the musical meter of their own culture: A cross-cultural comparison.

Infants prefer native structures such as familiar faces and languages. Music is a universal human activity containing structures that vary cross-culturally. For example, Western music has temporally regular metric structures, whereas music of the Balkans (e.g., Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey) can have both regular and irregular structures. We presented 4- to 8-month-old American and Turkish infants with contrasting melodies to determine whether cultural background would influence their preferences for musical meter. In Experiment 1, American infants preferred Western over Balkan meter, whereas Turkish infants, who were familiar with both Western and Balkan meters, exhibited no preference. Experiments 2 and 3 presented infants with either a Western or Balkan meter paired with an arbitrary rhythm with complex ratios not common to any musical culture. Both Turkish and American infants preferred Western and Balkan meter to an arbitrary meter. Infants’ musical preferences appear to be driven by culture-specific experience and a culture-general preference for simplicity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual and cognitive load interact to control the spatial focus of attention.

Caparos and Linnell (2009, 2010) used a variable-separation flanker paradigm to show that (a) when cognitive load is low, increasing perceptual load causes spatial attention to focus and (b) when perceptual load is high, decreasing cognitive load causes spatial attention to focus. Here, we tested whether the effects of perceptual and cognitive load on spatial focus remain when, respectively, cognitive load is high and perceptual load is low. We found that decreasing cognitive load only causes spatial attention to focus when perceptual load is high and the stimulus encourages this. Moreover, and contrary to the widely held assumption that perceptual load focuses attention automatically (Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004), perceptual load exerts its focusing effect only with the engagement of cognitive resources when cognitive load is low. In sum, perceptual and cognitive mechanisms exert interacting effects and operate in concert to focus spatial attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Playing chess unconsciously.

Expertise in a certain stimulus domain enhances perceptual capabilities. In the present article, the authors investigate whether expertise improves perceptual processing to an extent that allows complex visual stimuli to bias behavior unconsciously. Expert chess players judged whether a target chess configuration entailed a checking configuration. These displays were preceded by masked prime configurations that either represented a checking or a nonchecking configuration. Chess experts, but not novice chess players, revealed a subliminal response priming effect, that is, faster responding when prime and target displays were congruent (both checking or both nonchecking) rather than incongruent. Priming generalized to displays that were not used as targets, ruling out simple repetition priming effects. Thus, chess experts were able to judge unconsciously presented chess configurations as checking or nonchecking. A 2nd experiment demonstrated that experts' priming does not occur for simpler but uncommon chess configurations. The authors conclude that long-term practice prompts the acquisition of visual memories of chess configurations with integrated form-location conjunctions. These perceptual chunks enable complex visual processing outside of conscious awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Viewpoint and the recognition of people from their movements.

Observers can recognize other people from their movements. What is interesting is that observers are best able to recognize their own movements. Enhanced visual sensitivity to self-generated movement may reflect the contribution of motor planning processes to the visual analysis of human action. An alternative view is that enhanced visual sensitivity to self-motion results from extensive experience seeing one's own limbs move. To investigate this alternative explanation, participants viewed point-light actors from first-person egocentric and third-person allocentric viewpoints. Although observers routinely see their own actions from the first-person view, participants were unable to identify egocentric views of their own actions. Conversely, with little real-world experience seeing themselves from third-person views, participants readily identified their own actions from allocentric views. When viewing allocentric displays, participants accurately identified both front and rear views of their own actions. Because people have little experience observing themselves from behind or from third-person views, these findings suggest that visual learning cannot account for enhanced visual sensitivity to self-generated action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parallel and serial grouping of image elements in visual perception.

The visual system groups image elements that belong to an object and segregates them from other objects and the background. Important cues for this grouping process are the Gestalt criteria, and most theories propose that these are applied in parallel across the visual scene. Here, we find that Gestalt grouping can indeed occur in parallel in some situations, but we demonstrate that there are also situations where Gestalt grouping becomes serial. We observe substantial time delays when image elements have to be grouped indirectly through a chain of local groupings. We call this chaining process incremental grouping and demonstrate that it can occur for only a single object at a time. We suggest that incremental grouping requires the gradual spread of object-based attention so that eventually all the object's parts become grouped explicitly by an attentional labeling process. Our findings inspire a new incremental grouping theory that relates the parallel, local grouping process to feedforward processing and the serial, incremental grouping process to recurrent processing in the visual cortex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integration of acoustical information in the perception of impacted sound sources: The role of information accuracy and exploitability.

Sound sources are perceived by integrating information from multiple acoustical features. The factors influencing the integration of information are largely unknown. We measured how the perceptual weighting of different features varies with the accuracy of information and with a listener’s ability to exploit it. Participants judged the hardness of two objects whose interaction generates an impact sound: a hammer and a sounding object. In a first discrimination experiment, trained listeners focused on the most accurate information, although with greater difficulty when perceiving the hammer. We inferred a limited exploitability for the most accurate hammer-hardness information. In a second rating experiment, listeners focused on the most accurate information only when estimating sounding-object hardness. In a third rating experiment, we synthesized sounds by independently manipulating source properties that covaried in Experiments 1 and 2: sounding-object hardness and impact properties. Sounding-object hardness perception relied on the most accurate acoustical information, whereas impact-properties influenced more strongly hammer hardness perception. Overall, perceptual weight increased with the accuracy of acoustical information, although information that was not easily exploited was perceptually secondary, even if accurate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Infant sensitivity to trajectory forms.

The authors investigated whether infants are sensitive to visual event trajectory forms, and whether they are sensitive to the underlying dynamics of trajectory forms. The authors habituated 8-month-old infants to a videotaped event run either forward or reversed in time and then switched them to the same event run in the opposite direction. Infants dishabituated when switched to the event with the novel direction in time, indicating sensitivity to the form of the trajectory. Infants exhibited equivalent habituation rates and looking times for forward and reversed events, thus failing to provide evidence that infants are sensitive to the underlying dynamics. In a partial replication of this first experiment, the same pattern of results was found. Both experiments revealed infant sensitivity to the trajectory forms, but not the underlying dynamics of events. The authors discuss implications for methods used in infant event perception studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging, practice, and perceptual tasks: A diffusion model analysis.

Practice effects were examined in a masked letter discrimination task and a masked brightness discrimination task for college-age and 60- to 75-year-old subjects. The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) was fit to the response time and accuracy data and used to extract estimates of components of processing from the data. Relative to young subjects, the older subjects began the experiments with slower and less accurate performance; however, across sessions their accuracy improved because the quality of the information on which their decisions were based improved, and this, along with reduced decision criteria, led to shorter response times. For the brightness, but not the letter, discrimination task, the older subjects' performance matched that of the younger group by the end of 4 sessions, except that their nondecision components of processing were slightly slower. These analyses illustrate how a well-specified model can provide a unified view of multiple aspects of data that are often interpreted separately. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of perceptual load on attention-induced motion blindness: The efficiency of selective inhibition.

Recent visual marking studies have shown that the carry-over of distractor inhibition can impair the ability of singletons to capture attention if the singleton and distractors share features. The current study extends this finding to first-order motion targets and distractors, clearly separated in time by a visual cue (the letter X). Target motion discrimination was significantly impaired, a result attributed to the carry-over of distractor inhibition. Increasing the difficulty of cue detection increased the motion target impairment, as distractor inhibition is thought to increase under demanding (high load) conditions in order to maximize selection efficiency. The apparent conflict with studies reporting reduced distractor inhibition under high load conditions was resolved by distinguishing between the effects of "cognitive" and "perceptual" load. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

感性纵情与理性敛情——从《沉沦》和《迟桂花》看郁达夫前后期的创作风格

《沉沦》与《迟桂花》是郁达夫前后期的两部代表性小说,这两部作品反映出作者不同的写作风格。《沉沦》的价值体现为作者的时代性使命感,大胆探索人的欲望与传统伦理的冲突,而非文学本身;而《迟桂花》更具有经久不衰的文学美感。用比较的方法对这两部作品进行分析,可以对郁达夫两部作品的地位进行价值重估。