Immediate ambiguity resolution in speech perception based on prior acoustic experience

Speech perception relies on the rapid resolution of uncertainty. Here we explore whether auditory experiences contribute to this process of ambiguity resolution. ~8000 participants were surveyed online for their (i) subjective percept of a speech stimulus with ambiguous formant allocation; (ii) demographic profile and auditory experiences. Both linguistic and non-linguistic auditory experiences significantly predict speech perception. Listeners were more likely to perceive the ambiguous stimulus in accordance with their own name, and were biased towards lower formant allocation as a function of being exposed to lower auditory frequencies in their environment. Overall, our results show that the subjective interpretation of an ambiguous stimulus in the auditory domain is determined by prior acoustic exposure, suggesting the operation of an exposure-dependent mechanism impacting sensitivity that resolves ambiguity in speech perception.

Occasion Setting, Anxiety, and Their Computation in Human Fear Conditioning

Contexts and discrete stimuli often influence the association between a stimulus and outcome. This phenomenon, called occasion setting, is central to the development and modulation of fear. We conducted a human fear conditioning study of Pavlovian occasion setting using traditional methodology and investigated the effects of trait anxiety on fear. We predicted that if occasion setting is based on modulating danger/safety of an ambiguous stimulus, then trait anxiety should be associated with greater fear of ambiguous occasion-setting-based stimuli. We additionally present a novel computational model predicting occasion setting, which calculates occasion setting based on prediction error and quantifying learned stimulus ambiguity. Results show that participants were able to successfully learn which stimuli predicted danger and safety across all stimuli. Additionally, individuals high in trait anxiety generally showed increases in fear in occasion setting conditions. Furthermore, our computational model showed excellent model fit. These results are highly relevant for our understanding and treatment of anxiety disorders.

The songs of my people: appraisal differences of popular music as a function of ideology

Music powerfully engages brain and mind, yet remains largely underutilized as experimental stimulus material. Here, we wondered how ideological differences manifest in terms of musical preferences. To explore this question, we studied a large sample of research participants by exposing them to a representative corpus of musical stimuli while also eliciting their ideological position. Doing so, we found that ideological differences are linked to specific signatures of musical appraisal - there are significant genre-based differences in self-reported listening behavior as well as appraisal differences in how people with different ideological affiliations experience the music when listening to it. This effect is strong: ideology can be used to predict whether an ambiguous stimulus in terms of valence - e.g. country music – is experienced as aversive or enjoyable. As political preferences affect aesthetic judgments, we conclude that ideological positions are more deeply rooted than suggested by a discourse model of political exchange.

B or 13? Unconscious Top-Down Contextual Effects at the Categorical but Not the Lexical Level

Contextual effects require integration of top-down predictions and bottom-up visual information. Given the widely assumed link between integration and consciousness, we asked whether contextual effects require consciousness. In two experiments (total N = 60), an ambiguous stimulus (which could be read as either B or 13) was presented alongside masked numbers (12 and 14) or letters (A and C). Context biased stimulus classification when it was consciously and unconsciously perceived. However, unconsciously perceived contexts evoked smaller effects. This finding was replicated and generalized into another language in a further experiment ( N = 46) using a different set of stimuli, strengthening the claim that symbolic contextual effects can occur without awareness. Moreover, four experiments (total N = 160) suggested that these unconscious effects might be limited to the categorical level (numbers context vs. letters context) and do not extend to the lexical level (words context vs. nonwords context). Taken together, our results suggest that although consciousness may not be necessary for effects that require simple integration or none at all, it is nevertheless required for integration over larger semantic windows.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN CREATIVE REACTIONS TO AN AMBIGUOUS STIMULUS

Art therapy has been used in the Czech Republic since the 1950s, and the only thing that has changed over the course of time has been the target group to which art therapy is applied. Art therapy is currently used in three key areas: psychology, social work, and education, or, more precisely, special education. The purpose of the present study is to demonstrate the specific cultural differences during the use of art therapy procedures in the field of education, specifically during work with creativity. The target group for the research consisted of university students from Poland and the Czech Republic. The students were all presented with the same ambiguous stimulus, to which they were to respond artistically. The individual artistic responses were then classified into specific categories, and cultural differences were subsequently evaluated and described

Evidence for Right-Sided Horses Being More Optimistic than Left-Sided Horses

An individual’s positive or negative perspective when judging an ambiguous stimulus (cognitive bias) can be helpful when assessing animal welfare. Emotionality, as expressed in approach or withdrawal behaviour, is linked to brain asymmetry. The predisposition to process information in the left or right brain hemisphere is displayed in motor laterality. The quality of the information being processed is indicated by the sensory laterality. Consequently, it would be quicker and more repeatable to use motor or sensory laterality to evaluate cognitive bias than to perform the conventional judgment bias test. Therefore, the relationship between cognitive bias and motor or sensory laterality was tested. The horses (n = 17) were trained in a discrimination task involving a box that was placed in either a “positive” or “negative” location. To test for cognitive bias, the box was then placed in the middle, between the trained positive and negative location, in an ambiguous location, and the latency to approach the box was evaluated. Results indicated that horses that were more likely to use the right forelimb when moving off from a standing position were more likely to approach the ambiguous box with a shorter latency (generalized linear mixed model, p < 0.01), and therefore displayed a positive cognitive bias (optimistic).

Bistable Perception Is Biased by Search Items but Not by Search Priming

During visual search, selecting a target facilitates search for similar targets in the future, known as search priming. During bistable perception, in turn, perceiving one interpretation facilitates perception of the same interpretation in the future, a form of sensory memory. Previously, we investigated the relation between these history effects by asking: can visual search influence perception of a subsequent ambiguous display and can perception of an ambiguous display influence subsequent visual search? We found no evidence for such influences, however. Here, we investigated one potential factor that might have prevented such influences from arising: lack of retinal overlap between the ambiguous stimulus and the search array items. In the present work, we therefore interleaved presentations of an ambiguous stimulus with search trials in which the target or distractor occupied the same retinal location as the ambiguous stimulus. Nevertheless, we again found no evidence for influences of visual search on bistable perception, thus demonstrating no close relation between search priming and sensory memory. We did, however, find that visual search items primed perception of a subsequent ambiguous stimulus at the same retinal location, regardless of whether they were a target or a distractor item: a form of perceptual priming. Interestingly, the strengths of search priming and this perceptual priming were correlated on a trial-to-trial basis, suggesting that a common underlying factor influences both.

Does task relevance shape the 'shift to global' in ambiguous motion perception?

Perception can differ even when the stimulus information is the same. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of experience and relevance on visual perception. We examined the influence of perceptual relevance in an auxiliary task on subsequent perception of an ambiguous stimulus. Observers were presented with an ambiguous motion stimulus that could either be perceived as rotating dot-pairs (‘local’) or pulsating geometrical figures (‘global’). Prolonged perception of this stimulus is characterized by a ‘shift to global’, but it remained unclear whether this process is due to relevance of the global percept or mere exposure to the stimulus. During a learning phase over five successive days, participants were divided into conditions determining the relevant percept in an auxiliary task: local, global, or none (active exposure). In a pre- and post- test, individual points of subjective equality between ‘local’ and ‘global’ percepts were measured. Results indicate that there is indeed a ‘shift to global’. Interestingly, auxiliary task relevance does not seem to modify this process.

Controlled and automatic perceptions of a sociolinguistic marker

This paper explores the relation between controlled and automatic perceptions of a sociolinguistic variable that yields no metalinguistic commentary—a marker (Labov, 1972). Two experiments examine links between the backed trap vowel and its social meanings. The first, a matched guise task, measures social evaluations of the feature in a relatively controlled, introspective task. In the second, two measures are used that access different points in online processing and different degrees of listener control: (a) lexical categorization of an ambiguous stimulus, measured by a mouse click, and (b) automatic, early responses to this ambiguous stimulus, measured by eye movements. While listeners perceptually link trap-backing with social information in all three measures, specific social effects differ across the measures. Findings illustrate that the task and time course of a response influence how listeners link a linguistic marker with social information, even when this sociolinguistic knowledge is below the level of conscious awareness.