The Brain's Sensitivity to Real-world Statistical Regularity Does Not Require Full Attention.

Predictive coding accounts of perception state that the brain generates perceptual predictions in the service of processing incoming sensory data. These predictions are hypothesized to be afforded by the brain's ability to internalize useful patterns, that is, statistical regularities, from the environment. We have previously argued that the N300 ERP component serves as an index of the brain's use of representations of (real-world) statistical regularities.

Bypassing input to V1 in visual awareness: A TMS-EROS investigation.

Early visual cortex (V1-V3) is believed to be critical for normal visual awareness by providing the necessary feedforward input. However, it remains unclear whether visual awareness can occur without further involvement of early visual cortex, such as re-entrant feedback. It has been challenging to determine the importance of feedback activity to these areas because of the difficulties in dissociating this activity from the initial feedforward activity.

Virtual Reality Sickness Reduces Attention During Immersive Experiences.

In this paper, we show that Virtual Reality (VR) sickness is associated with a reduction in attention, which was detected with the P3b Event-Related Potential (ERP) component from electroencephalography (EEG) measurements collected in a dual-task paradigm. We hypothesized that sickness symptoms such as nausea, eyestrain, and fatigue would reduce the users' capacity to pay attention to tasks completed in a virtual environment, and that this reduction in attention would be dynamically reflected in a decrease of the P3b amplitude while VR sickness was experienced. In a user study, participants were taken on a tour through a museum in VR along paths with varying amounts of rotation, shown previously to cause different levels of VR sickness.

Typical viewpoints of objects are better detected than atypical ones.

Previous work has claimed that canonical viewpoints of objects are more readily perceived than noncanonical viewpoints. However, all of these studies required participants to identify the object, a late perceptual process at best and arguably a cognitive process (Pylyshyn, 1999). Here, we extend this work to early vision by removing the explicit need to identify the objects.

Augmenting Immersive Telepresence Experience with a Virtual Body.

We propose augmenting immersive telepresence by adding a virtual body, representing the user's own arm motions, as realized through a head-mounted display and a 360-degree camera. Previous research has shown the effectiveness of having a virtual body in simulated environments; however, research on whether seeing one's own virtual arms increases presence or preference for the user in an immersive telepresence setup is limited. We conducted a study where a host introduced a research lab while participants wore a head-mounted display which allowed them to be telepresent at the host's physical location via a 360-degree camera, either with or without a virtual body.

Examining the role of feedback in TMS-induced visual suppression: A cautionary tale.

Visual suppression by single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (sTMS) has been attributed to interruptions of either feedforward or feedback activity in the visual stream. The relative timing of the C1 event related potential (ERP) and of the TMS suppression, taken from separate studies, supports an interruption of feedback. Here we probe the validity of such cross-study comparisons, both by conducting a literature survey and by measuring each time window within participants for the same stimuli.