Biomedical subjects

David C Burr

Publications and source records attributed to David C Burr.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Visual clutter causes high-magnitude errors.

Perceptual decisions are often made in cluttered environments, where a target may be confounded with competing "distractor" stimuli. Although many studies and theoretical treatments have highlighted the effect of distractors on performance, it remains unclear how they affect the quality of perceptual decisions. Here we show that perceptual clutter leads not only to an increase in judgment errors, but also to an increase in perceived signal strength and decision confidence on erroneous trials. Observers reported simultaneously the direction and magnitude of the tilt of a target grating presented either alone, or together with vertical distractor stimuli. When presented in isolation, observers perceived isolated targets as only slightly tilted on error trials, and had little confidence in their decision. When the target was embedded in distractors, however, they perceived it to be strongly tilted on error trials, and had high confidence of their (erroneous) decisions. The results are well explained by assuming that the observers' internal representation of stimulus orientation arises from a nonlinear combination of the outputs of independent noise-perturbed front-end detectors. The implication that erroneous perceptual decisions in cluttered environments are made with high confidence has many potential practical consequences, and may be extendable to decision-making in general.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Powerful motion illusion caused by temporal asymmetries in ON and OFF visual pathways.

Successive presentations of Glass patterns (randomly positioned pairs of dots oriented in a coherent pattern) create a strong sense of global motion along the orientation of the pattern, but ambiguous in direction. Here we report that dynamic "anti-Glass" patterns, created by successive pairs of globally structured pairs of opposite polarity, create an even more powerful motion illusion that is unambiguous in direction: the dark dots always move toward the light. The motion can be cancelled and reversed by introducing a real delay in the presentation of the light dots, suggesting that the effective stimulation of the light is about 3 ms faster than the dark dots. The most plausible explanation for this is that human on channels are faster than off channels, as has been shown in the macaque.

Humans↗

PubMed2005

The motion aftereffect of transparent motion: two temporal channels account for perceived direction.

Adaptation to orthogonal transparent patterns drifting at the same speed produces a unidirectional motion aftereffect (MAE) whose direction is opposite the average adaptation direction. If the patterns move at different speeds, MAE direction can be predicted by an inverse vector average, using the observer's motion sensitivity to each individual pattern as vector magnitudes. These weights are well approximated by the duration of each pattern's MAE, as measured with static test patterns. However, previous efforts to use the inverse-vector-average rule with dynamic test patterns have failed. Generally, these studies have used spatially and temporally broadband test stimuli. Here, in order to gain insight into the possible contribution of temporal channels, we filtered our test pattern in the temporal domain to produce five ideal, octave-width pass-bands. MAE durations were measured for single-component stimuli drifting at various adaptation speeds and tested at a range of temporal frequencies. Then, two components with orthogonal directions and different speeds were combined and the direction of the resulting MAE was measured. The key findings are that: (i) for a given adaptation speed, the duration of a single component's MAE is dependent on test temporal frequency; (ii) the direction of MAEs produced by transparent motion (i.e., bivectorial adaptation) also varies strongly as a function test temporal frequency (by up to 90 degrees for some speed pairings); and (iii) the inverse-vector-average rule predicts the direction of the transparent MAE provided the MAE durations used to weight the vector combination were obtained from stimuli matched in adaptation speed and test temporal frequency. These results are discussed in terms of the number and shape of temporal channels in our visual system.

Adaptation, Physiological↗

PubMed2005

Using psilocybin to investigate the relationship between attention, working memory, and the serotonin 1A and 2A receptors.

Increasing evidence suggests a link between attention, working memory, serotonin (5-HT), and prefrontal cortex activity. In an attempt to tease out the relationship between these elements, this study tested the effects of the hallucinogenic mixed 5-HT1A/2A receptor agonist psilocybin alone and after pretreatment with the 5-HT2A antagonist ketanserin. Eight healthy human volunteers were tested on a multiple-object tracking task and spatial working memory task under the four conditions: placebo, psilocybin (215 microg/kg), ketanserin (50 mg), and psilocybin and ketanserin. Psilocybin significantly reduced attentional tracking ability, but had no significant effect on spatial working memory, suggesting a functional dissociation between the two tasks. Pretreatment with ketanserin did not attenuate the effect of psilocybin on attentional performance, suggesting a primary involvement of the 5-HT1A receptor in the observed deficit. Based on physiological and pharmacological data, we speculate that this impaired attentional performance may reflect a reduced ability to suppress or ignore distracting stimuli rather than reduced attentional capacity. The clinical relevance of these results is also discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Psilocybin impairs high-level but not low-level motion perception.

The hallucinogenic serotonin(1A&2A) agonist psilocybin is known for its ability to induce illusions of motion in otherwise stationary objects or textured surfaces. This study investigated the effect of psilocybin on local and global motion processing in nine human volunteers. Using a forced choice direction of motion discrimination task we show that psilocybin selectively impairs coherence sensitivity for random dot patterns, likely mediated by high-level global motion detectors, but not contrast sensitivity for drifting gratings, believed to be mediated by low-level detectors. These results are in line with those observed within schizophrenic populations and are discussed in respect to the proposition that psilocybin may provide a model to investigate clinical psychosis and the pharmacological underpinnings of visual perception in normal populations.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

"Pop-out" of targets modulated in luminance or colour: the effect of intrinsic and extrinsic uncertainty.

Targets defined by attributes such as colour or brightness are said to "pop-out" from a cluttered scene, with little or no dependency on the size of the set to be searched, while search for other attributes can depend strongly on set-size. We measured contrast thresholds for increments and decrements in luminance or colour and show that they increase strongly with set-size (as previously observed for orientation). However, in some conditions, where the potential distractors were not salient visual targets, there was no dependency of set-size at all ("pop-out"). All the data can be modelled by assuming two main sources of uncertainty: the intrinsic uncertainty due to the number of detectors monitored during a specific task and the extrinsic uncertainty introduced by increasing the number of items displayed. The strength of the effect is well explained by a simple signal detection theory "signed-max" model suited for two-tailed tasks [Journal of Vision 2 (8), 559]. The results suggest that "pop-out" is not peculiar to luminance or colour, but may occur in conditions when the intrinsic uncertainty is so high as to saturate the effects of further uncertainty sources.

Attention↗

PubMed2002

Direct evidence that "speedlines" influence motion mechanisms.

Determining the direction of visual motion poses a serious problem for any visual system, given the inherent ambiguities. Geisler (1999) has suggested that motion streaks left in the wake of a moving target provide a rich source of potential information that could aid in resolving direction ambiguities. Here we provide strong experimental evidence that the human visual system does in fact exploit motion streaks in direction discrimination. Masks comprising oriented random noise impeded direction discrimination of moving dots when the masks were oriented parallel to the direction of motion but had very little effect when oriented orthogonal to the direction of motion. The masking effect decreased systematically with increasing bandwidth for the parallel masks and increased with bandwidth for the orthogonal masks. Importantly, these masks had little effect on neither contrast sensitivity for detecting the moving stimuli nor for speed discrimination. Experiments with "Glass patterns" (moiré patterns constructed from random dot pairs) confirmed that misleading pattern information can impede motion detection. The results show that the oriented streaks left by moving stimuli provide fundamental information about the direction of visual motion; removing these streaks or augmenting them with erroneous streaks severely confounds motion direction discrimination.

Contrast Sensitivity↗