Benchmarking the speed-accuracy tradeoff in object recognition by humans and neural networks.

Active object recognition, fundamental to tasks like reading and driving, relies on the ability to make time-sensitive decisions. People exhibit a flexible tradeoff between speed and accuracy, a crucial human skill. However, current computational models struggle to incorporate time.

Empathy strengthens the effect of emotion on beauty.

Past research shows that emotion affects beauty judgments of images and music. Because it is widely supposed that our faculty of empathy facilitates aesthetic experience, we wondered whether individual levels of empathy modulate the effect of emotion on beauty. 164 participants rated the perceived beauty, happiness, and sadness of 12 art images, 12 nature photographs, and 24 songs.

Consensus and contention in beauty judgment.

Variance across participants is at the heart of the centuries-old debate about the universality of beauty. Beauty's belonging to the eye of the beholder implies large interindividual variance, while beauty as a universal object property implies the opposite. To characterize the variance at the center of this debate, we selected two quartets with either high- or low-variance images with high typicality and a given mean beauty.

Human V4 size predicts crowding distance.

Visual recognition is limited by both object size (acuity) and spacing. The spacing limit, called "crowding", is the failure to recognize an object in the presence of other objects. Here, we take advantage of individual differences in crowding behavior to investigate its biological basis.

EasyEyes - A new method for accurate fixation in online vision testing.

Online methods allow testing of larger, more diverse populations, with much less effort than in-lab testing. However, many psychophysical measurements, including visual crowding, require accurate eye fixation, which is classically achieved by testing only experienced observers who have learned to fixate reliably, or by using a gaze tracker to restrict testing to moments when fixation is accurate. Alas, both approaches are impractical online as online observers tend to be inexperienced, and online gaze tracking, using the built-in webcam, has a low precision (±4 deg).