The Art of Seeing and Painting

The human urge to represent the three-dimensional world using two-dimensional pictorial representations dates back at least to Paleolithic times. Artists from ancient to modern times have struggled to understand how a few contours or color patches on a flat surface can induce mental representations of a three-dimensional scene. This article summarizes some of the recent breakthroughs in scientifically understanding how the brain sees that shed light on these struggles. These breakthroughs illustrate how various artists have intuitively understand paradoxical properties about how the brain sees, and have used that understanding to create great art. These paradoxical properties arise from how the brain forms the units of conscious visual perception; namely, representations of three-dimensional boundaries and surfaces. Boundaries and surfaces are computed in parallel cortical processing streams that obey computationally complementary properties. These streams interact at multiple levels to overcome their complementary weaknesses and to transform their complementary properties into consistent percepts. The article describes how properties of complementary consistency have guided the creation of many great works of art.National Science Foundation (SBE-0354378); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624

Generators of Architectural Atmosphere

This book was born as the legacy of the “Generators of Architectural Atmosphere” Symposium, an Interfaces event of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), sponsored by the EU’s Horizon 2020 MSCA Program — RESONANCES Project, the Perkins Eastman Studio, and the 2020 Regnier Chair. The event was hosted in the College of Architecture, Planning and Design (APDesign), Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, on April 12, 2022. Recent advances in science are confirming many of the architect’s expert intuitions opening new doors to the perception of space and the meaning of architectural design. This volume collects three essays: “The Atmospheric Equation and the Weight of Architectural Generators” by Elisabetta Canepa; “Sensing the Atmospheric Space Through a Virtual Lens: Scrutinizing Opportunities and Limitations” by Kutay Güler; and “Locating Architectural Atmosphere” by Tiziana Proietti and Sergei Gepshtein. Bob Condia provided a critical introduction entitled “The Applied Science of Generating Atmospheres in Architecture.”https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1048/thumbnail.jp

Modeling Mental Qualities

Conscious experiences are characterized by mental qualities, such as those involved in seeing red, feeling pain, or smelling cinnamon. The standard framework for modeling mental qualities represents them via points in geometrical spaces, where distances between points inversely correspond to degrees of phenomenal similarity. This paper argues that the standard framework is structurally inadequate and develops a new framework that is more powerful and flexible. The core problem for the standard framework is that it cannot capture precision structure: for example, consider the phenomenal contrast between seeing an object as crimson in foveal vision versus merely as red in peripheral vision. The solution I favor is to model mental qualities using regions, rather than points. I explain how this seemingly simple formal innovation not only provides a natural way of modeling precision, but also yields a variety of further theoretical fruits: it enables us to formulate novel hypotheses about the space and structures of mental qualities, formally differentiate two dimensions of phenomenal similarity, generate a quantitative model of the phenomenal sorites, and define a measure of discriminatory grain. A noteworthy consequence is that the structure of the mental qualities of conscious experiences is fundamentally different from the structure of the perceptible qualities of external objects

The perceived present: What is it and what is it there for?

It is proposed that the perceived present is not a moment in time, but an information structure comprising an integrated set of products of perceptual processing. All information in the perceived present carries an informational time marker identifying it as “present”. This marker is exclusive to information in the perceived present. There are other kinds of time markers, such as ordinality (“this stimulus occurred before that one”) and duration (“this stimulus lasted for 50 ms”). These are different from the “present” time marker and may be attached to information regardless of whether it is in the perceived present or not. It is proposed that the perceived present is a very short-term and very high-capacity holding area for perceptual information. The maximum holding time for any given piece of information is ~100 ms: This is affected by the need to balance the value of informational persistence for further processing against the problem of obsolescence of the information. The main function of the perceived present is to facilitate access by other specialized, automatic processes

Hearing triangles: perceptual clarity, opacity, and symmetry of spectrotemporal sound shapes

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.In electroacoustic music, the spectromorphological approach commonly employs analogies to non-sonic phenomena like shapes, gestures, or textures. In acoustical terms, sound shapes can concern simple geometries on the spectrotemporal plane, for instance, a triangle that widens in frequency over time. To test the auditory relevance of such triangular sound shapes, two psychoacoustic experiments assessed if and how these shapes are perceived. Triangular sound-shape stimuli, created through granular synthesis, varied across the factors grain density, frequency and amplitude scales, and widening vs. narrowing orientations. The perceptual investigation focused on three auditory qualities, derived in analogy to the visual description of a triangle: the clarity of the triangular outline, the opacity of the area enclosed by the outline, and the symmetry along the vertical dimension. These morphological qualities seemed to capture distinct perceptual aspects, each linked to different acoustical factors. Clarity of shape was conveyed even for sparse grain densities, while also exhibiting a perceptual bias for widening orientations. Opacity varied as a function of grain texture, whereas symmetry strongly depended on frequency and amplitude scales. The perception of sound shapes could relate to common perceptual cross-modal correspondences and share the same principles of perceptual grouping with vision

The exact determination of subjective risk and comfort thresholds in car following

In this study the location of vehicle to vehicle distance thresholds for self-reported subjective risk and comfort was researched. Participants were presented with ascending and descending time headway sequences in a driving simulator. This so called method of limits of ascending and descending stimuli (Gouy, Diels, Reed, Stevens, & Burnett, 2012) was refined to efficiently determine individual thresholds for stable time headways with a granularity of 0.1 seconds. Time headway thresholds were researched for 50, 100, and 150 km/h in a city, rural, and highway setting. Furthermore, thresholds for self-driving (level 0 automation: NHTSA, 2013) were compared with thresholds for the experience of subjective risk and comfort in assisted driving, similar to adaptive cruise control (level 1 automation). Results show that preferred individual time headways vary between subjects. Within subjects however, time headway thresholds do not significantly differ for different speeds. Furthermore we found that there was no significant difference between time headways of self-driving and distance-assisted driving. The relevance of these findings for the development of adaptive cruise control systems, autonomous driving and driver behavior modelling is discussed

Content, granularity, and type 2 sensitivity of subjective measures of visual consciousness

According to several major theories in the field of consciousness research, the valid assessment of conscious awareness requires subjective measures, i.e. participants’ reports about their conscious experience. However, there is a considerable amount of uncertainty in the field if and how scientifically valuable data can be obtained from subjective measures. The present work empirically examines how subjective measures of conscious awareness need to be designed and applied to provide maximally useful data for empirical studies of visual consciousness. Specifically, it is investigated what contents subjective measures should require participants to report, at which granularity subjective measures ought to be recorded, and what statistical procedures should be used to quantify the relation between subjective measures and discrimination task performance. Concerning content, subjective measures that referred to the accuracy of a preceding discrimination response and subjective measures referring to participants’ visual experience of the task-relevant stimulus feature were compared during a series of visual psychophysical experiments. Subjective measures about the accuracy of the responses were associated with more liberal psychophysical thresholds: At lower stimulus quality, participants reported that they feel confident that their discrimination response was correct without reporting a visual experience of the stimulus feature. Only at greater stimulus quality, they reported that they had a visual experience of the stimulus feature in addition to being confident. Moreover, subjective measures about confidence in discrimination responses predicted task accuracy more efficiently than measures about visual experience. Finally, subjective measures of experience and task accuracy as content were compared while event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded. The earliest electrophysiological correlates of subjective measures where predictive of the fact if participants reported that they selected the response to the discrimination task based on knowledge instead of guessing, but were not yet predictive whether participants reported a clear experience over and above making the task response based on knowledge. The strongest ERP correlate of visual experience occurred a short period in time before participants responded to the discrimination task. As a consequence, it is argued that conceptual considerations are required which conscious contents are relevant for a specific research question, and subjective measures should be about the relevant contents accordingly. Concerning the granularity of subjective measures, a continuous scale and a scale with four discrete labelled categories were compared as subjective measure of conscious experience of motion. The subjective measures contained more information when participants used the continuous scale instead of the discrete scales. The greater amount of information provided by continuous scales rendered subjective measures more predictive of task accuracy and enhanced internal consistency. Regarding the statistical procedure to quantify the relation between subjective measures and task performance, it was found that logistic regression is a suboptimal method because the relationship between subjective measures and the transformed accuracy was frequently not linear. In contrast, meta-da, a measure of the relationship between subjective reports and task accuracy derived from signal detection theory (SDT), provided the most consistent results across all studies. Overall, it is concluded that subjective measures are suited to provide highly useful data to address non-trivial research questions for the scientific study of consciousness: As prerequisite, the content of a subjective measures should be tailored to the current research question. In addition, the problem of a lacking objective standard can be addressed by using the relation between subjective measures and task performance as a reference frame

Decoding identity from motion: how motor similarities colour our perception of self and others

This is the final version. Available on open access from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this record.For more than 4 decades, it has been shown that humans are particularly sensitive to biological motion and extract socially relevant information from it such as gender, intentions, emotions or a person’s identity. A growing number of findings, however, indicate that identity perception is not always highly accurate, especially due to large inter-individual differences and a fuzzy self-recognition advantage compared to the recognition of others. Here, we investigated the self-other identification performance and sought to relate this performance to the metric properties of perceptual/physical representations of individual motor signatures. We show that identity perception ability varies substantially across individuals and is associated to the perceptual/physical motor similarities between self and other stimuli. Specifically, we found that the perceptual representations of postural signatures are veridical in the sense that closely reflects the physical postural trajectories and those similarities between people’ actions elicit numerous misattributions. While, on average, people can well recognize their self-generated actions, they more frequently attribute to themselves the actions of those acting in a similar way. These findings are consistent with the common coding theory and support that perception and action are tightly linked and may modulate each other by virtue of similarity.European CommissionWellcome TrustEPSR