Editoriale di uno special issue nella rivista 'Frontiers in Psychology'

D'Ascenzo, Stefania

Palumbo, Rocco

Tommasi, Luca

Frontiers in Psychology

PubMed

Rocco Palumbo

Stefania D'Ascenzo

Luca Tommasi

Frontiers - Publisher Connector

Editorial: High-Level Adaptation and Aftereffects

Harvard University - DASH 

EDITORIAL
published: 17 February 2017
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00217
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1 February 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 217
Edited and reviewed by:
Rufin VanRullen,
Paul Sabatier University, France
*Correspondence:
Rocco Palumbo
roccopalumbo@gmail.com
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Perception Science,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 24 January 2017
Accepted: 06 February 2017
Published: 17 February 2017
Citation:
Palumbo R, D’Ascenzo S and
Tommasi L (2017) Editorial: High-Level
Adaptation and Aftereffects.
Front. Psychol. 8:217.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00217
Editorial: High-Level Adaptation and
Aftereffects
Rocco Palumbo 1, 2*, Stefania D’Ascenzo 3 and Luca Tommasi 2
1 Schepens Eye Research Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, 2 Department of Psychological Science,
Humanities and Territory, “G. d’Annunzio” University, Chieti, Italy, 3 Department of Philosophy and Communication, University
of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Keywords: aftereffects, adaptation, high-level adaptation, visual cognition, perception
Editorial on the Research Topic
High-Level Adaptation and Aftereffects
Adaptation, in sensory and perceptual science, refers to the action of a prolonged exposure of a
receiver (at the cellular level a sensory receptor, at the organismic level an animal endowed with
sensory organs) to an environmental stimulus. While adaptation of sensory receptors is strictly
equivalent to the physiological phenomenon of a reduced electrical response by a receptor following
its sustained stimulation, in this Frontiers Research Topic “adaptation” will be conceived at the
organismic level, in which a wide spectrum of perceptual effects, mostly known as “aftereffects,” has
been observed for more than two thousand years (Aristotle, ca 350 B.C.1). Aftereffects refer to those
changes in the way a stimulus (the test) is perceived following a prolonged exposure to a previous
stimulus (the adaptor). Undoubtly, for a change to be deemed relevant, a comparisonmust bemade
between the perception of the test following the presentation of the adaptor vs. the perception of
the same test presented in isolation.
Aftereffects following adaptation have been reported for all sensory modalities, and for a
growing variety of features in each modality (see Hollins and Favorov, 1994; Schweinberger et al.,
2008), although the most investigated domain is certainly vision. Aftereffects have indeed been
documented for brightness, color, motion, orientation, size, shape and for various combinations
of these visual features (for a review, see Webster, 2015). A general interpretation of aftereffects
following adaptation of low-level vision is related to the phenomenon of neural adaptation, which
is an extension of sensory receptor adaptation, in that it entails the weakening of electrochemical
activity of neural units responsible for processing and communicating the signals corresponding to
low-level visual information beyond the level of sensory receptors, in the visual brain (Barlow and
Hill, 1963). In other words, the sensory and neural adaptation following sustained stimulation may
well provide the basis to explain the change in perceptual appearance that is typical of aftereffects
in many low-level visual adaptation phenomena. The fact that there is a strict contingency between
sensory and neural change and perceptual outcomes has even referred to perceptual adaptation as
the “psychophysicist’s microelectrode” (Frisby, 1979), because the behavioral quantification of its
nature and dynamics is an important behavioral window on the underlying processes of the visual
brain.
Besides the classical aftereffects related to low-level vision, in recent decades perception science
has intriguingly escaladed toward high-level adaptation aftereffects, thus paralleling two crucial
discoveries in the neurosciences: (i) the perceptual brain is organized hierarchically, with low-level
units (and regions) feeding high-level units (and regions) that represent objects (Webster, 2011),
1Aristotle (ca 350 B.C.). Parva Naturalia.
Palumbo et al. Editorial: High-Level Adaptation and Aftereffects
and (ii) among units and regions representing objects, some of
them are specialized to process objects that have a very important
adaptive value for the organism, such as faces (e.g., Webster et al.,
2004), bodies (e.g., Winkler and Rhodes, 2005; Palumbo et al.,
2013), emotions(e.g., Fox and Barton, 2007), and other complex
environmental and social entities (Clifford and Rhodes, 2005;
Greene and Oliva, 2010).
Studies focusing on high-level adaptation have involved more
and more complex objects of perception, but have also moved
in the direction of testing the boundaries of these time-sensitive
perceptual (and neural) phenomena on many fronts: (i) does
the duration of stimulus exposure influence the ensuing effects
in systematic ways? (ii) are the effects contrastive (the test is
perceived in the direction opposite to the adaptor) or assimilative
(the test is perceived in the same direction as the adaptor)?
(iii) are the effects of adaptation confined to a given modality
or do they extend crossomodaly? (iv) are the effects merely
perceptual, or are they contingent and/or permeable to other
processing levels (attention, learning, imagery, language)? (v)
does the behavioral evidence fit with data obtained from the
neurosciences, and does it provide us with a tenable benchmark
to make predictions on and build models of the brain? We
believe that replying to all of these questions is both important
and far-reaching. It is important because the answers seem
to strongly reaffirm the role of perceptual adaptation in the
cognitive neurosciences broadly conceived, possibly updating its
symbolic status to that of a “psychophysicist’s microelectrode and
scanner,” to move with the current times (Cziraki et al., 2010).
It is also far-reaching because adaptation offers a great window
of opportunity to put diverse aspects into contact. Being a time-
and-order-sensitive phenomenon, adaptation is akin to many
other neural and psychological (even merely methodological)
effects that span acrossmultiple research traditions (sensitization,
peak shift, priming, serial order effects, anchoring, carry-over
effects, etc.), and that still do not have a unifying framework.
The usefulness of adaptation to test aftereffects occurring across
modalities (e.g., Skuk and Schweinberger, 2013) is an added value
to the field of crossmodal perception research. Additionally, even
more promising is the understanding of aftereffects occurring
across perceptual and conceptual categories and the role of other
levels of processing in adaptation (Ghuman et al., 2010; Palumbo
et al., 2015), to the point that adaptation stands as a key tool
not only for the psychophysicist, but for the cognitive scientist
interested in mapping the boundaries between perception and
cognition, and in the interplay among representations and
processes (Leopold et al., 2001; Storrs, 2015).
We hope that some glimpses of all of these opportunities
will be conveyed by this Frontiers Research Topic, which starts
with some papers dealing with face aftereffects, a domain of
adaptation studies that has grown at a fast pace in the last
two decades (see Strobach and Carbon, 2013; Hills, 2013).
The first paper, by Zimmer et al. is focused on the effects
of variation of the temporal factor (adaptation duration) on
the manifestation of facial identity aftereffects and specific
time-sensitive components recorded by means of ERPs. The
authors highlight the role of exposure duration in evoking the
electrophysiological components of face processing, showing that
longer adaptation induces enhanced components and a more
articulated segregation of the stages of category-, image- and
identity-related processing. The paper by Kloth et al. investigates
the potential interplay between sex and gaze direction in a gaze
adaptation paradigm, concluding in favor of the nature of gaze
direction as a natural adaptable category, independent of sex
contingencies, and showing how a thorough manipulation of
stimulus dimensions in the experimental design of an adaptation
paradigm can shed light on the important issue of hierarchy
and functional independence in perceptual processing. In the
paper by Davidenko et al., the role of attention is carefully
examined in an adaptation paradigm that is focused on either
the ethnicity or the sex of faces, showing that attention plays
no role in the direction of aftereffects, though it has an effect
in modulating the speed of response of participants. Finally, the
paper by Ross and Palmeri is an overview of the requirements
(and the pitfalls) of a biologically- and behaviorally-inspired
approach to modeling face processing, that capitalizes on data
from face adaptation phenomena, providing valuable directions
and theoretical discussion for computational modeling in
general.
The following two papers revolve around aftereffects observed
for another important high-level entity, the human body. The
article by Brooks et al. investigates the differential role of
adaptating to one’s own or another person’s body size (along
the dimension of fatness/thinness), on perceived body size
aftereffects, concluding (similarly to Kloth et al.’s paper) that
body size is a visual feature that can produce adaptation effects
per se, independently in this case, of any contingency with self
vs. other identity of the observed body. In the second paper,
Stephen et al., propose a novel methodological paradigm useful
to assess body size aftereffects (again, along the dimension of
fatness/thinness), factoring in the role of explicit vs. implicit
attentional set, and concluding (similarly to Davidenko et al.’s
paper) that attention does not play a major role in visual
adaptation to body size.
Two further papers delve more into aspects concerning
adaptation to emotional features. In the paper by Wincenciak
et al., which could also be listed alongside the two previous
papers, the authors make use of adaptation to human bodies,
although they do so to assess whether the emotional information
conveyed by whole-body actions is contingent upon the identity
of the actors performing those actions. They demonstrate that
identity appears to act as a determinant in the modulation
of emotional action aftereffects, albeit in a graceful fashion,
with stronger and longer-lasting aftereffects in the case of same
identities, as compared to the case of different identities, which
evoke aftereffects in a weaker and short-lived fashion. The paper
by Palumbo et al. moves far from the domain of strictly biological
entities, in the attempt to evaluate the effect of adaptation
to the overall emotional valence of complex images. Carefully
excluding faces from the set of images employed, the authors
show that aftereffects can be evoked following adaptation to
complex scenes, but have an assimilative rather than a contrastive
nature, suggesting that visually perceived emotional valence is
grounded on brain mechanisms eluding the phenomenon of
neural adaptation.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 2 February 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 217
Palumbo et al. Editorial: High-Level Adaptation and Aftereffects
The final two papers in the Research Topic are also based on
less common adaptation paradigms, and demonstrate both the
extent of the field and the many potential bridges to other fields.
Miyoshi et al., provide evidence that a long adaptation to pictures
reduces the strength of priming across disparate domains (images
and words), suggesting the action of conceptual factors in
mediating the effects, and the major role of exposure duration
in explaining experience-driven phenomena such as priming and
adaptation. Finally, the paper by Michel offers a brief review
of the literature on prism adaptation, a century-old method
consisting in visually shifting the entire visual field by wearing
prismatic lenses. Although the effects of prism adaptation are
primarily sensorimotor (thus constituting a valuable tool for
rehabilitation of neglect patients) a growing body of research
has investigated cognitive aftereffects following this treatment,
and the paper offers important insights on the continuity (or
better the discontinuity) between perception, action and higher
cognitive processes, and on the ties between adaptation and
plasticity.
To conclude, the papers in this Research Topic offer a wide
cross-section of the research being carried out in the field
of high-level adaptation, a complex territory that has now a
well-established body, but also branches to other territories,
demonstrating a great potential for further developments.
Aftereffects, once a phenomenon confined to perception science,
have indeed stood the test of time as a tool for studying
perception, but have also assumed a wider relevance, as
they now allow us to better understand the relationships
between perception and other levels of representation (action,
imagery, cognition, emotion, language), to behaviorally gauge the
workings of the brain, and to build more robust computational
models.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
All authors listed, have made substantial, direct and
intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for
publication.
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Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2017 Palumbo, D’Ascenzo and Tommasi. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License
(CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted,
provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original
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No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these
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Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 3 February 2017 | Volume 8 | Article 217


D'ASCENZO, STEFANIA

Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna

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Editorial: High-Level Adaptation and Aftereffects

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