How visual confidence on global motion is affected by local motion ambiguity and type of motion noise, and its correlation with autistic trait tendency?

Perceptual confidence has been found to correlate with task performance in general, and is believed to be independent of stimulus features. However, certain stimulus feature could induce a subjective sense of uncertainty, which could potentially influence confidence judgments beyond task performance. The present studies aimed at assessing the effects of the ambiguity of local motion signals on perceptual confidence on a global-motion task. Participants first discriminated the global motion directions of two multiple-aperture, global-motion patterns, one generated using multiple Gabor elements and the other using multiple Plaid elements. They then performed a two-interval, forced-choice confidence task by choosing which of the two perceptual responses they were more confident in being correct. In Experiment 1, when perceptual performance was controlled by varying coherence, we found that participants chose plaids more often than Gabors, even with perceptual performance matched between the two patterns. In Experiment 2, when perceptual performance was controlled by varying luminance contrast of noisy pixels in every motion frame, such “plaid preference” in confidence bias was significantly weakened. Besides, there has been numerous studies on visual perception of autistic individuals. But not many of them has looked into the relationship between their metacognition and perceptual judgement. This study aimed at assessing the relationship between the autistic trait tendency and metacognitive process about one’s perceptual performance. Our results show that, at the same level of objective task performance, subject perceptual confidence depends on both the ambiguity of local motion signals and the type of noise. Our results also shows that there is an association between the subject perceptual confidence and the autistic trait tendency

Comprehensive Creativity When We Need It, review of The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, edited by James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg

Reviews the book, The Cambridge handbook of creativity edited by James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg (see record 2010-21837-000). The title suggests that The Cambridge handbook of creativity is an encyclopedic collection of all the major chunks of knowledge connected to creative behavior. Although it does not disappoint in that regard, the contributing authors do a superb job of capturing the coherence and the theoretical and thematic developments of their respective areas. Overall the reviewer would recommend The Cambridge handbook of creativity to serious researchers in creativity and anyone who wants to be seriously creative. Psychologists and educators are advised to keep a copy close by. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved

Imaginative Vividness

How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the “vivacity” or “vividness” of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use “vividness” and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not take much reflection to see that these terms are ill understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable

Street Art and Space

Various forms of street art, such as murals, anamorphic painting or urban interventions, become an important component of urban space. The paper examines examples of selected works of urban art in the context of space and its reception. These unexpected “events” entertain and educate. They become, on the one hand, a tourist attraction, and on the other hand, a major voice in the debate on the public nature of visual urban sphere. Although ephemeral and inconspicuous, usually reluctantly accepted by architects and urban planners, they successfully urge viewers to reflect on space and its existing functions

The Rationality of Perception : Replies to Lord, Railton, and Pautz

My replies to Errol Lord, Adam Pautz, and Peter Railton's commentaries on The Rationality of Perception (2017)

The Richness of Inner Experience: Relating Styles of Daydreaming to Creative Processes.

Psychologists have long hypothesized that daydreaming (i.e., engaging in stimulus-independent, task-unrelated thoughts and images) may facilitate creativity, but evidence for this hypothesis has been mixed. We propose that, to fully understand the relationship between daydreaming and creativity, it is essential to distinguish between different creative processes as well as between alternative styles of daydreaming. A prominent distinction in creativity research is that between analytic problem solving, which involves incremental and largely conscious processes, and insight, which is characterized by the spontaneity with which an idea springs to mind. In this aspect, insight resembles daydreaming. Indeed, recent evidence has linked daydreaming to creative performance. But like creativity, daydreaming is a multifaceted concept. Daydreams vary in style and content, a fact that is receiving little attention in contemporary research. Not all kinds of daydreaming are likely to have the same effects on creativity. We discuss different factors prevalent in people's daydreaming, such as mood, attentional focus, and intentionality, and consider how these factors may be related to creative processes. We further discuss implications for ways to enhance creativity through deliberate daydreaming practice

"Consciousness". Selected Bibliography 1970 - 2001

This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience (Metzinger 1995a, b). From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001

Learning Robust Object Recognition Using Composed Scenes from Generative Models

Recurrent feedback connections in the mammalian visual system have been hypothesized to play a role in synthesizing input in the theoretical framework of analysis by synthesis. The comparison of internally synthesized representation with that of the input provides a validation mechanism during perceptual inference and learning. Inspired by these ideas, we proposed that the synthesis machinery can compose new, unobserved images by imagination to train the network itself so as to increase the robustness of the system in novel scenarios. As a proof of concept, we investigated whether images composed by imagination could help an object recognition system to deal with occlusion, which is challenging for the current state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks. We fine-tuned a network on images containing objects in various occlusion scenarios, that are imagined or self-generated through a deep generator network. Trained on imagined occluded scenarios under the object persistence constraint, our network discovered more subtle and localized image features that were neglected by the original network for object classification, obtaining better separability of different object classes in the feature space. This leads to significant improvement of object recognition under occlusion for our network relative to the original network trained only on un-occluded images. In addition to providing practical benefits in object recognition under occlusion, this work demonstrates the use of self-generated composition of visual scenes through the synthesis loop, combined with the object persistence constraint, can provide opportunities for neural networks to discover new relevant patterns in the data, and become more flexible in dealing with novel situations.Comment: Accepted by 14th Conference on Computer and Robot Visio