Stimulus-locked auditory information facilitates real-time visuo-motor sequence learning.

Prior research investigating whether and how multisensory information facilitates skill learning is quite mixed; whereas some research points to congruent information improving learning, other work suggests that people become reliant on the redundant information, such that its removal ultimately detracts from the ability to perform a unisensory task. We examined this question using the Serial Interception Sequence Learning (SISL) task, a visuo-motor paradigm in which participants implicitly learn a sequence embedded in noise. We investigated whether adding auditory information in different ways would enhance real time sequence learning and whether any benefits of multisensory learning would persist with visual-only testing.

Mask wearing affects emotion perception.

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, mask wearing has become ubiquitous in much of the world. We studied the extent to which masks impair emotion recognition and dampen the perceived intensity of facial expressions by naturalistically inducing positive, neutral, and negative emotions in individuals while they were masked and unmasked. Two groups of online participants rated the emotional intensity of each presented image.

Visual cortex responds to sound onset and offset during passive listening.

Sounds enhance our ability to detect, localize, and respond to co-occurring visual targets. Research suggests that sounds improve visual processing by resetting the phase of ongoing oscillations in visual cortex. However, it remains unclear what information is relayed from the auditory system to visual areas and if sounds modulate visual activity even in the absence of visual stimuli (e.

Perspective-taking increases emotionality and empathy but does not reduce harmful biases against American Indians: Converging evidence from the museum and lab.

Given the problematic depictions of Native Americans and the pervasive cultural biases that exist, we sought to understand how contemporary educational practices in museums might encourage viewers to consider the context of their preconceptions rather than passively absorb conventional representations. In this two-part study, we tested whether and how viewers (mis)perceptions and interpretations of Native peoples might be influenced by encouraging empathy-specifically by taking the perspective of a Native individual depicted in a photograph they are visually analyzing. We randomly assigned participants in a lab setting (N = 120) and in a museum setting (N = 75) to one of three conditions (perspective-taking, stereotype-suppression, or control), and examined eye movements, self-reports, and verbal and written responses while participants viewed portrait photographs of American Indians.

Multisensory processing of facial expressions in binocular rivalry.

Binocular rivalry occurs when two percepts, each presented to a single eye, compete for perceptual dominance. Across two experiments, we investigated whether emotional music influenced perceptual dominance of an emotionally congruent face. In the first experiment, participants heard music (happy, threatening, none) while viewing a positive or negative emotional face pitted against a neutral face or emotional faces pitted against each other.

What Is Art Good For? The Socio-Epistemic Value of Art.

Scientists, humanists, and art lovers alike value art not just for its beauty, but also for its social and epistemic importance; that is, for its communicative nature, its capacity to increase one's self-knowledge and encourage personal growth, and its ability to challenge our schemas and preconceptions. However, empirical research tends to discount the importance of such social and epistemic outcomes of art engagement, instead focusing on individuals' preferences, judgments of beauty, pleasure, or other emotional appraisals as the primary outcomes of art appreciation. Here, we argue that a systematic neuroscientific study of art appreciation must move beyond understanding aesthetics alone, and toward investigating the social importance of art appreciation.

Pattern classification of EEG signals reveals perceptual and attentional states.

Pattern classification techniques have been widely used to differentiate neural activity associated with different perceptual, attentional, or other cognitive states, often using fMRI, but more recently with EEG as well. Although these methods have identified EEG patterns (i.e.

In the working memory of the beholder: Art appreciation is enhanced when visual complexity is compatible with working memory.

What shapes art appreciation? Much research has focused on the importance of visual features themselves (e.g., symmetry, natural scene statistics) and of the viewer's experience and expertise with specific artworks.

Auditory rhythms are systemically associated with spatial-frequency and density information in visual scenes.

A variety of perceptual correspondences between auditory and visual features have been reported, but few studies have investigated how rhythm, an auditory feature defined purely by dynamics relevant to speech and music, interacts with visual features. Here, we demonstrate a novel crossmodal association between auditory rhythm and visual clutter. Participants were shown a variety of visual scenes from diverse categories and asked to report the auditory rhythm that perceptually matched each scene by adjusting the rate of amplitude modulation (AM) of a sound.

Laughter exaggerates happy and sad faces depending on visual context.

Laughter is an auditory stimulus that powerfully conveys positive emotion. We investigated how laughter influenced the visual perception of facial expressions. We presented a sound clip of laughter simultaneously with a happy, a neutral, or a sad schematic face.

The role of stereopsis, motion parallax, perspective and angle polarity in perceiving 3-D shape.

We studied how stimulus attributes (angle polarity and perspective) and data-driven signals (motion parallax and binocular disparity) affect recovery of 3-D shape. We used physical stimuli, which consisted of two congruent trapezoids forming a dihedral angle. To study the effects of the stimulus attributes, we used 2 × 2 combinations of convex/concave angles and proper/reverse perspective cues.