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Does Optic Flow Provide Information About Actions?, Hannah Masoner May 2022

Does Optic Flow Provide Information About Actions?, Hannah Masoner

Dissertations

Optic flow, the pattern of light generated in the visual field by motion of objects and the observer’s body, serves as information that underwrites perception of events, actions and affordances. This visual pattern informs the observer about their own actions in relation to their surroundings, as well as those of others. This study explored the limits of action detection for others as well as the role of optic flow. First-person videos were created using camera recordings of the actor’s perspective as they performed various movements (jumping jacks, jumping, squatting, sitting, etc.). In three experiments participants attempted to detect the action …


Scope Of Attention Variation As A Function Of Anxiety And Depression, Kathleen O'Donnell Jun 2020

Scope Of Attention Variation As A Function Of Anxiety And Depression, Kathleen O'Donnell

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

As a social species, correct emotional perception is so vital, that the human brain has evolved a mechanism to control attentional choices by exerting a narrowed field of perception during danger, called the scope of attention (SoA). The SoA determines what information will be focused on or ignored by blocking the perception of non-relevant items and increasing selective focus on danger; even if danger is merely a sad-face. The emotional items blocked from perception cannot be remembered because they were never perceived. But, attention-control to emotional stimuli also varies with mood, as seen in mood-disorders. A mood-disorder’s effect upon the …


Mechanisms Of Value-Biased Prioritization In Fast Sensorimotor Decision Making, Kivilcim Afacan-Seref Jan 2020

Mechanisms Of Value-Biased Prioritization In Fast Sensorimotor Decision Making, Kivilcim Afacan-Seref

Dissertations and Theses

In dynamic environments, split-second sensorimotor decisions must be prioritized according to potential payoffs to maximize overall rewards. The impact of relative value on deliberative perceptual judgments has been examined extensively, but relatively little is known about value-biasing mechanisms in the common situation where physical evidence is strong but the time to act is severely limited. This research examines the behavioral and electrophysiological indices of how value biases split-second perceptual decisions and the possible mechanisms underlying the process. In prominent decision models, a noisy but statistically stationary representation of sensory evidence is integrated over time to an action-triggering bound, and value-biases …


Correspondence Between Haptic And Visual Perception Of Stand-On-Ability: Do Hills Look As Steep As They Feel?, Jonathan Kenealy Doyon Dec 2016

Correspondence Between Haptic And Visual Perception Of Stand-On-Ability: Do Hills Look As Steep As They Feel?, Jonathan Kenealy Doyon

Master's Theses

Vision and haptics play a central role in perceiving environmental layout to guide action. Hajnal, Wagman, Doyon, and Clark (2016) demonstrated that visual perception of stand-on-ability is accurate compared to action capabilities, whereas haptic perception of stand-on-ability reliably underestimates action capabilities. This finding contradicts Gibson’s (1979) theory of equivalence in perceptual systems, which suggests that perception should be equivalent regardless of modality. Previous comparisons of visual and haptic perception tested the modalities in isolation. The current experiment directly compares visual to haptic perception of stand-on-ability by using one perceptual system to estimate the other. Observers viewed a surface set to …


Change Detection In Rhesus Monkeys And Humans, Deepna T. Devkar, Deepna T. Devkar Dec 2014

Change Detection In Rhesus Monkeys And Humans, Deepna T. Devkar, Deepna T. Devkar

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Visual working memory (VWM) is the temporary retention of visual information and a key component of cognitive processing. The classical paradigm for studying VWM and its encoding limitations has been change detection. Early work focused on how many items could be stored in VWM, leading to the popular theory that humans could remember no more than 4±1 items. More recently, proposals have suggested that VWM is a noisy, continuous resource distributed across virtually all items in the visual field, resulting in diminished memory quality rather than limited quantity. This debate about the nature of VWM has predominantly been studied with …