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Sensitivity to chromatic and luminance contrast and its neuronal substrates
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Barry B LeeHuman sensitivity to changes in luminance or chromaticity differ as a function of temporal or spatial frequency. Luminance sensitivity is band-pass in shape, while chromatic sensitivity curves are low-pass, along both L–M cone opponent (red–green) and S-cone opponent (blue–yellow) axes, where L, M, and S refer to the long-wavelength middle-wavelength and short-wavelength sensitive cones. Temporal sensitivity curves are supported by the magnocellular pathway for luminance, the parvocellular pathway for L–M m...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - October 1, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Color illusion as a spatial binding problem
We present a different framework for illusions: in non-illusory conditions, healthy brains construct a single, consistent representation from the physiological processes that encode the world; illusions, in contrast, are conditions where the brain constructs conflicting representations of the world. We contend that the conditions for illusions often arise for color vision because of the multifaceted aspects of color in relation to space, and that many color illusions arise from the juxtaposition and selective recombination (i.e. the binding) of these aspects of color/spatial information. We discuss three spatial aspects of...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - September 26, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Editorial Board
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): (Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences)
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - September 22, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

How to study the neural mechanisms of multiple tasks
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Guangyu Robert Yang, Michael W Cole, Kanaka RajanMost biological and artificial neural systems are capable of completing multiple tasks. However, the neural mechanism by which multiple tasks are accomplished within the same system is largely unclear. We start by discussing how different tasks can be related, and methods to generate large sets of inter-related tasks to study how neural networks and animals perform multiple tasks. We then argue that there are mechanisms that emphasize either specialization or flexibility. We wil...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - September 9, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

The response to colour in the human visual cortex: the fMRI approach
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Kathy T MullenfMRI has been an important tool for understanding the functional organization of the human visual cortex for colour vision. Here I focus on three distinct approaches used in fMRI, each addressing a different question. Univariate measurements of BOLD amplitude responses have localized the areas of the human visual cortex with high colour responses. fMRI adaptation has the potential to define the selectivity (tuning) of the neural responses in these areas to colour in relation to achromatic responses or within the...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - September 8, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Central mechanisms of perceptual filling-in
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Frédéric Devinck, Kenneth KnoblauchHuman observers generally perceive a stable and coherent visual scene despite the fact that sensory information is ambiguous and often incomplete. Perceptual filling-in provides an interesting example of how the visual system realizes perceptual inferences from incomplete information. Vision scientists have a long history studying filling-in phenomena in the context of surface color filling-in. While significant progress has been achieved with behavioral experiments, little is known about ...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - September 8, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Tetrachromacy: the mysterious case of extra-ordinary color vision
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Gabriele Jordan, John MollonRecent years have witnessed a growing public interest in human tetrachromacy – the possibility that a subpopulation of women enjoy an extra dimension of color vision. Yet, by contrast, rigorous studies of this unusual phenotype are sparse. The aim here is to offer the reader a guide to the facts and myths regarding this potential ‘superpower’ and to address the core methodological issues that need to be considered when investigating it. (Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences)
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - September 5, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Recent progress in understanding the origins of color universals in language
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Delwin T Lindsey, Angela M BrownAlthough color lexicons vary greatly in the number of color terms they contain, there are also striking regularities in how people around the world name colors. In spite of 50 years of research since Berlin and Kay’s seminal monograph, there is still no clear understanding of the processes that underlie these regularities. We review current advances in four prominent directions of research into this question. First, we examine the classical view that universal perceptual landmarks – related...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - September 4, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Tasks for aligning human and machine planning
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Bas van Opheusden, Wei Ji MaResearch on artificial intelligence and research on human intelligence rely on similar conceptual foundations and have long inspired each other [1,2•]. However, achieving concrete synergy has been difficult, with one obstacle being a lack of alignment of the tasks used in both fields. Artificial intelligence research has traditionally focused on tasks that are challenging to solve, often using human performance as a benchmark to surpass [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. By contrast, cognitive science and psycholog...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - August 30, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

What is optimal in optimal inference?
Publication date: October 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 29Author(s): Gaia Tavoni, Vijay Balasubramanian, Joshua I GoldInferring hidden structure from noisy observations is a problem addressed by Bayesian statistical learning, which aims to identify optimal models of the process that generated the observations given assumptions that constrain the space of potential solutions. Animals and machines face similar “model-selection” problems to infer latent properties and predict future states of the world. Here we review recent attempts to explain how intelligent agents address these challenges a...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - August 23, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Camouflage in a dynamic world
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Innes C Cuthill, Samuel R Matchette, Nicholas E Scott-SamuelWe review how animals conceal themselves in the face of the need to move, and how this is modulated by the dynamic components and rapidly varying illumination of natural backgrounds. We do so in a framework of minimising the viewer’s signal-to-noise ratio. Motion can match that of the observer such that there is no relative motion cue, or mimic that of background objects (e.g. swaying leaves). For group-living animals, matched motion and colouration constitute a sp...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - August 18, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Long-term adaptation to color
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Katherine EM Tregillus, Stephen A EngelWhen the environment changes, the visual system adjusts to maintain accurate color perception. Such adaptations happen at different time scales, and long-term effects are of particular interest because they may engage mechanisms of long-lasting neural plasticity. Long-term adaptation to changes in the color of the environment produce strong and long-lasting changes in color perception, with the general effect of neutralizing the dominant color. Large individual differences and details of...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - August 18, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Editorial overview: Artificial intelligence
Publication date: Available online 13 August 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral SciencesAuthor(s): Matthew M Botvinick, Samuel J Gershman (Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences)
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - August 14, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

What is the ‘spectral diet’ of humans?
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Forrest S Webler, Manuel Spitschan, Russell G Foster, Marilyne Andersen, Stuart N PeirsonOur visual perception of the world — seeing form and colour or navigating the environment — depends on the interaction of light and matter in the environment. Light also has a more fundamental role in regulating rhythms in physiology and behaviour, as well as in the acute secretion of hormones such as melatonin and changes in alertness, where light exposure at short-time, medium-time and long-time scales has different effects on these...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - August 14, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Learning to see stuff
Publication date: December 2019Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 30Author(s): Roland W Fleming, Katherine R StorrsMaterials with complex appearances, like textiles and foodstuffs, pose challenges for conventional theories of vision. But recent advances in unsupervised deep learning provide a framework for explaining how we learn to see them. We suggest that perception does not involve estimating physical quantities like reflectance or lighting. Instead, representations emerge from learning to encode and predict the visual input as efficiently and accurately as possible. Neural networks can be trained t...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - August 13, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research