Category: Perception
Aesthetics, Perception	 May 23, 2019
Even People Without Mathematical Training Experience The "Beauty" Of Maths
Philosophers and mathematicians have long held that maths can be aesthetically pleasing. "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty," wrote Bertrand Russell, while Carl Friedrich Gauss proclaimed that "The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal themselves in all their beauty only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it".
But a study published recently in Cognition suggests that even those whose lives don't revolve around logic and numbers also have an appreciation for mathematical "beauty". People tend to see similarities between mathematical proofs and certain paintings or pieces of music, the study finds, suggesting we all share an intuition for the aesthetics of mathematics.
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Brain, Perception, Time	 May 14, 2019 May 30, 2019
Your Brain Stops Time When You Blink
You spend about 10 per cent of your waking hours with your eyes shut, simply because of blinking. Every few seconds, each time you blink, your retinas are deprived of visual input for a period lasting anywhere between tens to hundreds of milliseconds (500 milliseconds is equivalent to half a second). You don't usually notice this because your brain suppresses the dark spells and stitches together the bursts of visual information seamlessly. But these dips in visual processing in the brain do have an impact: a new study in Psychological Science finds that, in an important way, they cause your sense of the passing of time to stop temporarily.
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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, 2019 April 25, 2019
Researchers Show There Is A Simple Way To Induce Synesthesia In People With Normal Perception
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?
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, 2019 February 7, 2019
First Study Of Its Kind Finds Healthy People Have A Distorted Sense Of Their Body Volume And Length
via Sadibolova et al, 2019
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
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, 2018 November 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.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychcrunch/20181101_PsychCrunchEp14_Mx3.mp3
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:
The multisensory perception of flavour
The supertaster who researches supertasting
Wine tastes like the music you're listening to
Plating for pleasure: Debra Zellner at TEDxMontclair
Do Appetizers Whet or Ruin Your Appetite?
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.
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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.