Speaker: Egor Ananyev

Title:  Separate requirements for detection and perceptual stability of motion in interocular suppression

Date: 14 October, 1-2 pm 

Venue: AS4/02-08 (Psychology Department Meeting Room) 

Abstract:

In interocular masking, a stimulus presented to one eye (the mask) is made stronger in order to suppress from awareness the target stimulus presented to the other eye. In the current study, we investigated whether matching the features of the target and the mask would lead to more effective suppression (feature-selective suppression), or not (i.e., non-selective suppression). To control the temporal characteristics of the stimuli, we used a dynamic interocular mask to suppress a moving target, and found that neither matching speed nor pattern of motion led to more effective suppression. Instead, a faster, linearly moving target was detected faster, regardless of the mask, while a relatively slow (about 1˚/s), linear mask was more perceptually stable (i.e., maintained its suppression longer) in a non-selective fashion. While the requirement for target detectability, i.e., salience, is well characterized, relatively little attention is given to the factors that make a mask percept more perceptually stable. We argue that there are separate requirements for detection and perceptual stability.

About the Speaker:

 Egor is a graduate student at NUS Psychology Department working with Dr. Trevor Penney (NUS) and  Dr. Brown Hsieh (Duke-NUS) investigating consciousness and visual information processing using behavioral techniques and eye tracking. Prior to coming to Singapore, Egor worked on investigating vision loss with head- and eye-tracking and virtual environments (with Dr. Eliezer Peli, Schepens Eye Research Institute, Boston, MA), and using artificial neural networks to evaluate neurological damage to visual system (with Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, Harvard University).