Category: Perception

Cognition, Perception, Sleep and dreaming April 11, 2019

The Ninja Brain: Humans Can Prioritise Meaningful Sounds Even While Asleep

We often think of sleep as a chance to switch off from the outside world, leaving us blissfully ignorant of anything going on around us. But neuroscience research has shown this is a fantasy – we still monitor the environment and respond to particular sounds while we’re sleeping (at least in some stages of sleep) – a fact that will be unsurprising to anyone who has woken up after hearing someone say their name.

Now a study published in Nature Human Behaviour has revealed more about the brain’s surprisingly sophisticated levels of engagement with the outside world during sleep. Not only does the sleeping brain respond to certain words or sounds – it can even select between competing signals, prioritising the one that is more informative.

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Perception April 9, 2019April 25, 2019

Researchers Show There Is A Simple Way To Induce Synesthesia In People With Normal Perception

By Christian Jarrett

For most of us, it is difficult to imagine what it must be like to be a synesthete – that is, someone who experiences a crossing over of their senses, such as seeing sounds as colours, or perceiving shapes as having tastes. However, according to a new study in Consciousness and Cognition, it is actually relatively easy for people with normal perception to have a synesthetic experience (of the sound-to-vision variety). It merely takes a few minutes of visual deprivation, followed by a visual imagery task. The findings are not merely intriguing – and a fun idea for a psychology class experiment – they also have a bearing on the main theories for how synesthesia occurs.

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Brain, Language, Perception, Thought March 28, 2019

How Do Blind People Who’ve Never Seen Colour, Think About Colour?

By Emma Young

Think about the concepts of “red” and “justice” and you’ll notice a key difference. If you’re sighted, you’ll associate “red” most strongly with the sensory experience, which relates to signals from cone cells in your eyes. “Justice”, in contrast, doesn’t have any associated sensory qualities – as an abstract concept, you’ll think about its meaning, which you learnt via language, understanding it to be related to other abstract concepts like “fairness” or “accountability”, perhaps. But what about blind people – how do they think about “red”?

A brain-imaging study of 12 people who had been blind from birth, and 14 sighted people, published recently in Nature Communications, shows that while for sighted people, sensory and abstract concepts like “red” and “justice” are represented in different brain regions, for blind people, they’re represented in the same “abstract concept” region.

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Perception February 7, 2019February 7, 2019

First Study Of Its Kind Finds Healthy People Have A Distorted Sense Of Their Body Volume And Length

Screenshot 2019-02-05 at 16.57.33.png — via Sadibolova et al, 2019

By Christian Jarrett

How accurately or not we are able to judge the size of our own bodies and specific body parts is an important topic in clinical psychology because a distorted body image is thought to play part in eating disorders, body dysmorphia and other related conditions. However, research has until now been limited in always involving one- or two-dimensional judgments, with volunteers asked to estimated the length of various body parts, for instance, or asked to judge which of various 2-dimensional visual depictions of their body is most accurate. In reality, of course, we don’t just have a sense of how our body looks in two dimensions from the outside but also how it feels from the inside, including how much space it occupies.

A new study published in Cortex is the first to examine how accurately people of healthy weight can estimate the volume of their entire body and specific body parts. Renata Sadibolova at Goldsmiths, University of London, and her colleagues write that “these findings … highlight the importance of studying the perceptual distortions ‘at the baseline’, i.e., in healthy population, given their potential to further elucidate the nature of perceptual distortions in clinical conditions.”

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Brain, Perception November 8, 2018

Researchers are finding out why a partial loss of vision can lead to hallucinations

The findings could lead to new treatment approaches for Charles Bonnet syndrome

By Emma Young

The head of a brown lion. Multiple tiny, green, spinning Catherine wheels with red edges. Colourful fragments of artillery soldiers and figures in uniform and action. Unfamiliar faces of well-groomed men… These are just a few of the hallucinations reported by a group of people with macular degeneration (MD), a common cause of vision loss in people aged over 40.

About 40 per cent of people with MD – who lose vision in the centre of their visual field but whose peripheral vision is generally unaffected – develop Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS), reporting hallucinations that vary from simple flashes of light and shapes to faces, animals and even complex scenes.

It has been suggested that CBS might arise as a result of over-responsiveness – “hyper-excitability” – of certain visual regions of the cortex, after they are deprived of normal retinal input. But whether this really is the case – and why some people with reduced vision or blindness develop them, while others don’t – has not been clear. Now new work by a team of psychologists at the University of Queensland, Australia, led by David Painter, and published in Current Biology, offers some answers.

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Eating, Perception, Podcast November 7, 2018November 8, 2018

Episode 14: Psychological Tricks To Make Your Cooking Taste Better

This is Episode 14 of PsychCrunch, the podcast from the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, sponsored by Routledge Psychology. Download here.

Can psychology help your cooking taste better? Our presenter Ginny Smith hears about the importance of food presentation, pairing and sequencing, and how our perception of food is a multi-sensory experience. She and her friends conduct a taste test using “sonic seasonings” that you can also try at home.

Our guests, in order of appearance, are: Professor Debra Zellner at MontClaire State University and Professor Charles Spence at Oxford University.

Background resources for this episode:

Episode credits: Presented and produced by Ginny Smith. Mixing Jeff Knowler. PsychCrunch theme music Catherine Loveday and Jeff Knowler. Art work Tim Grimshaw.

Check out this episode!

Subscribe and download via iTunes.
Subscribe and download via Stitcher.
Subscribe and listen on Spotify.

Past episodes:

Episode one: Dating and Attraction
Episode two: Breaking Bad Habits
Episode three: How to Win an Argument
Episode four: The Psychology of Gift Giving
Episode five: How To Learn a New Language
Episode six: How To Be Sarcastic 😉
Episode seven: Use Psychology To Compete Like an Olympian.
Episode eight: Can We Trust Psychological Studies?
Episode nine: How To Get The Best From Your Team
Episode ten: How To Stop Procrastinating
Episode eleven: How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep
Episode twelve: How to Be Funnier
Episode thirteen: How to Study and Learn More Effectively

PsychCrunch is sponsored by Routledge Psychology.

Routledge interviewed PsychCrunch presenter Christian Jarrett about the aims of the podcast and engaging with the public about psychology research.

Language, Perception November 2, 2018November 1, 2018

Your native language affects what you can and can’t see

By Emma Young

The idea that the language that you speak influences how you think about and experience the world (the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has a long and storied history. A lot of research into the issue has focused on colour perception, and evidence has accumulated that people whose native languages have different colour categories don’t see the world in quite the same way.

Now in a new paper, published in Psychological Science, Martin Maier and Rasha Abdel Rahman at the Humboldt University of Berlin report that by affecting visual processing at an early stage, such linguistic differences can even determine whether someone will see a coloured shape – or they won’t. “Our native language is thus one of the forces that determine what we consciously perceive,” they write.

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Cognition, Perception August 30, 2018September 6, 2018

Beyond the invisible gorilla – inattention can also render us numb and anosmic (without smell)

By Emma Young

It’s well-known that we can miss apparently obvious objects in our visual field if other events are hogging our limited attention. The same has been shown for sounds: in a nod to Daniel Simons’ and Christopher Chabris’ famous gorilla/basketball study that demonstrated “inattentional blindness”, distracted participants in the first “inattentional deafness” study failed to hear a man walking through an auditory scene for 19 seconds saying repeatedly “I am a gorilla”. Now, two new studies separately show that a very similar effect occurs in relation to touch (inattentional numbness) and to smell (inattentional anosmia).

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