Multisensory causal inference is feature-specific, not object-based.

Multisensory integration depends on causal inference about the sensory signals. We tested whether implicit causal-inference judgements pertain to entire objects or focus on task-relevant object features. Participants in our study judged virtual visual, haptic and visual-haptic surfaces with respect to two features-slant and roughness-against an internal standard in a two-alternative forced-choice task.

The time-course of real-world scene perception: Spatial and semantic processing.

Real-world scene perception unfolds remarkably quickly, yet the underlying visual processes are poorly understood. Space-centered theory maintains that a scene's spatial structure (e.g.

Investigating Emotional Body Posture Recognition in Adolescents with Conduct Disorder Using Eye-Tracking Methods.

Adolescents with Conduct Disorder (CD) show deficits in recognizing facial expressions of emotion, but it is not known whether these difficulties extend to other social cues, such as emotional body postures. Moreover, in the absence of eye-tracking data, it is not known whether such deficits, if present, are due to a failure to attend to emotionally informative regions of the body. Male and female adolescents with CD and varying levels of callous-unemotional (CU) traits (n = 45) and age- and sex-matched typically-developing controls (n = 51) categorized static and dynamic emotional body postures.

Category systems for real-world scenes.

Categorization performance is a popular metric of scene recognition and understanding in behavioral and computational research. However, categorical constructs and their labels can be somewhat arbitrary. Derived from exhaustive vocabularies of place names (e.

Shape from shading under inconsistent illumination.

People are able to perceive the 3D shape of illuminated surfaces using image shading cues. Theories about how we accomplish this often assume that the human visual system estimates a single lighting direction and interprets shading cues in accord with that estimate. In natural scenes, however, lighting can be much more complex than this, with multiple nearby light sources.

Do emotional faces capture attention, and does this depend on awareness? Evidence from the visual probe paradigm.

The visual probe (VP) paradigm provides evidence that emotional stimuli attract attention. Such effects have been reported even when stimuli are presented outside of awareness. These findings have shaped the idea that humans possess a processing pathway that detects evolutionarily significant signals independently of awareness.

Disruptive coloration and binocular disparity: breaking camouflage.

Many species employ camouflage to disguise their true shape and avoid detection or recognition. Disruptive coloration is a form of camouflage in which high-contrast patterns obscure internal features or break up an animal's outline. In particular, edge enhancement creates illusory, or 'fake' depth edges within the animal's body.

Naturally glossy: Gloss perception, illumination statistics, and tone mapping.

Recognizing materials and understanding their properties is very useful-perhaps critical-in daily life as we encounter objects and plan our interactions with them. Visually derived estimates of material properties guide where and with what force we grasp an object. However, the estimation of material properties, such as glossiness, is a classic ill-posed problem.

Motion adaptation and attention: A critical review and meta-analysis.

The motion aftereffect (MAE) provides a behavioural probe into the mechanisms underlying motion perception, and has been used to study the effects of attention on motion processing. Visual attention can enhance detection and discrimination of selected visual signals. However, the relationship between attention and motion processing remains contentious: not all studies find that attention increases MAEs.

The effects of attention and adaptation duration on the motion aftereffect.

The motion aftereffect (MAE) is the perception of illusory motion following extended exposure to a moving stimulus. The MAE has been used to probe the role of attention in motion processing. Many studies have reported that MAEs are reduced if attention is diverted from the adaptation stimulus, but others have argued that motion adaptation is independent of attention.

The Southampton-York Natural Scenes (SYNS) dataset: Statistics of surface attitude.

Recovering 3D scenes from 2D images is an under-constrained task; optimal estimation depends upon knowledge of the underlying scene statistics. Here we introduce the Southampton-York Natural Scenes dataset (SYNS: https://syns.soton.

Are visual threats prioritized without awareness? A critical review and meta-analysis involving 3 behavioral paradigms and 2696 observers.

Given capacity limits, only a subset of stimuli give rise to a conscious percept. Neurocognitive models suggest that humans have evolved mechanisms that operate without awareness and prioritize threatening stimuli over neutral stimuli in subsequent perception. In this meta-analysis, we review evidence for this 'standard hypothesis' emanating from 3 widely used, but rather different experimental paradigms that have been used to manipulate awareness.

The Development of Audio-Visual Integration for Temporal Judgements.

Adults combine information from different sensory modalities to estimate object properties such as size or location. This process is optimal in that (i) sensory information is weighted according to relative reliability: more reliable estimates have more influence on the combined estimate and (ii) the combined estimate is more reliable than the component uni-modal estimates. Previous studies suggest that optimal sensory integration does not emerge until around 10 years of age.

Does comorbid anxiety counteract emotion recognition deficits in conduct disorder?

Background: Previous research has reported altered emotion recognition in both conduct disorder (CD) and anxiety disorders (ADs) - but these effects appear to be of different kinds. Adolescents with CD often show a generalised pattern of deficits, while those with ADs show hypersensitivity to specific negative emotions. Although these conditions often cooccur, little is known regarding emotion recognition performance in comorbid CD+ADs.

Touch influences perceived gloss.

Identifying an object's material properties supports recognition and action planning: we grasp objects according to how heavy, hard or slippery we expect them to be. Visual cues to material qualities such as gloss have recently received attention, but how they interact with haptic (touch) information has been largely overlooked. Here, we show that touch modulates gloss perception: objects that feel slippery are perceived as glossier (more shiny).

Fearful faces have a sensory advantage in the competition for awareness.

Only a subset of visual signals give rise to a conscious percept. Threat signals, such as fearful faces, are particularly salient to human vision. Research suggests that fearful faces are evaluated without awareness and preferentially promoted to conscious perception.

Autonomic arousal and attentional orienting to visual threat are predicted by awareness.

The rapid detection and evaluation of threat is of fundamental importance for survival. Theories suggest that this evolutionary pressure has driven functional adaptations in a specialized visual pathway that evaluates threat independently of conscious awareness. This is supported by evidence that threat-relevant stimuli rendered invisible by backward masking can induce physiological fear responses and modulate spatial attention.

Effects of specular highlights on perceived surface convexity.

Shading is known to produce vivid perceptions of depth. However, the influence of specular highlights on perceived shape is unclear: some studies have shown that highlights improve quantitative shape perception while others have shown no effect. Here we ask how specular highlights combine with Lambertian shading cues to determine perceived surface curvature, and to what degree this is based upon a coherent model of the scene geometry.

Faces and awareness: low-level, not emotional factors determine perceptual dominance.

Threat-relevant stimuli such as fear faces are prioritized by the human visual system. Recent research suggests that this prioritization begins during unconscious processing: A specialized (possibly subcortical) pathway evaluates the threat relevance of visual input, resulting in preferential access to awareness for threat stimuli. Our data challenge this claim.

Learning different light prior distributions for different contexts.

The pattern of shading across an image can provide a rich sense of object shape. Our ability to use shading information is remarkable given the infinite possible combinations of illumination, shape and reflectance that could have produced any given image. Illumination can change dramatically across environments (e.

Highlights, disparity, and perceived gloss with convex and concave surfaces.

Glossy and matte objects can be differentiated using specular highlights: bright patches in the retinal image produced when light rays are reflected regularly from smooth surfaces. However, bright patches also occur on matte objects, due to local illumination or reflectance changes. Binocular vision provides information that could distinguish specular highlights from other luminance discontinuities; unlike surface markings, specular highlights lie not at the surface depth, but "float" in front of concave surfaces and behind convex ones.

Efficient visual recalibration from either visual or haptic feedback: the importance of being wrong.

The human visual system adapts to the changing statistics of its environment. For example, the light-from-above prior, an assumption that aids the interpretation of ambiguous shading information, can be modified by haptic (touch) feedback. Here we investigate the mechanisms that drive this adaptive learning.

High-level face adaptation without awareness.

When a visual stimulus is suppressed from awareness, processing of the suppressed image is necessarily reduced. Although adaptation to simple image properties such as orientation still occurs, adaptation to high-level properties such as face identity is eliminated. Here we show that emotional facial expression continues to be processed even under complete suppression, as indexed by substantial facial expression aftereffects.