i-Perception

Scottish Vision Group Meeting.

Pion

The Scottish Vision Group (SVG) Meeting is an annual event. The meeting was held 25-27 March 2011 on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Previous meetings took place in:

2001 The Burn, Glenesk, Brechin, Angus
2002 The Burn, Glenesk, Brechin, Angus
2003 The Burn, Glenesk, Brechin, Angus
2004 The Burn, Glenesk, Brechin, Angus
2005 The Log Cabin Hotel, Kirkmichael, Perthshire
2006 The University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen
2007 Kinloch Hotel, Blackwaterfoot, Isle of Arran
2008 Dundarach Hotel, Pilochry, Perthshire
2009 Western Isles Hotel, Tobermory, Isle of Mull
2010 The Royal Dunkeld Hotel, Dunkeld, Perthshire

The meeting organiser was Martin Lages, and the committee included Paul Hibbard, Martin Lages, Phil MacAleer, David Simmons, and Roger Watt. The meeting was supported by Suzanne Heron and Katarzyna Jaworska. The following are the abstracts of that meeting.

Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision.

Pion

The Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV) is an annual meeting devoted to vision research. The 2011 meeting was held 15–18 July in the exciting city of Hong Kong. The conference aims to facilitate vision research throughout the Asia-Pacific by bringing together scientists from the broad range of disciplines contributing to modern vision science, including visual psychophysics, neuroscience, computational vision, and cognitive psychology. William Hayward was the chair of the organizing committee, which included members from the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Hong Kong Shue Yan University. The following are the abstracts of keynote speakers, talks, and posters from the conference.

12th International Multisensory Research Forum Abstracts.

Pion

The International Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF) is an annual meeting. The 2011 meeting was held 17‒20 October in Fukuoka, Japan. The conference provides a platform for scientists who are interested in how different senses interact with each other and are integrated. Researchers from many different disciplines, including neuroscience, psychophysics, cognitive psychology, computational modeling, developmental research, and engineering, participate. This year, Yôiti Suzuki was the general chair of the organizing committee, which included members from universities and research institutes in Japan. The following are the abstracts of keynote speakers, symposia, talks, and posters from the conference.

Haptic face aftereffect. Kazumichi Matsumiya

Pion

Face aftereffects (FAEs) are generally thought of as being a visual phenomenon. However, recent studies have shown that people can haptically recognize a face. Here, I report a haptic, rather than visual, FAE. By using three-dimensional facemasks, I found that haptic exploration of the facial expression of the facemask causes a subsequently touched neutral facemask to be perceived as having the opposite facial expression. The results thus suggest that FAEs can also occur in haptic perception of faces.

Scintillating lustre induced by radial fins. Kohske Takahashi, Haruaki Fukuda, Katsumi Watanabe, Kazuhiro Ueda

Pion

Radial lines of Ehrenstein patterns induce illusory scintillating lustre in gray disks inserted into the central gaps (scintillating-lustre effect). We report a novel variant of this illusion by replacing the radial lines with white and black radial fins. Both white and gray disks inserted into the central gaps were perceived as scintillating, if the ratio of the black/white fin width were balanced (ie, close to 1.0). Thus, the grayness of the central disk is not a prerequisite for the scintillation. However, the scintillation was drastically reduced when the ratio was imbalanced. Furthermore, the optimal ratio depended on the color of the center disks.

Healthy older observers cannot use biological-motion point-light information efficiently within 4 m of themselves. Isabelle Legault, Nikolaus F Troje, Jocelyn Faubert

Pion

Healthy aging is associated with a number of perceptual changes, but measures of biological-motion perception have yielded conflicting results. Biological motion provides information about a walker, from gender and identity to speed, direction, and distance. In our natural environment, as someone approaches us (closer distances), the walker spans larger areas of our field of view, the extent of which can be underutilized with age. Yet, the effect of age on biological-motion perception in such real-world scenarios remains unknown. We assessed the effect of age on discriminating walking direction in upright and inverted biological-motion patterns, positioned at various distances in virtual space. Findings indicate that discrimination is worse at closer distances, an effect exacerbated by age. Older adults’ performance decreases at distances as far away as 4 m, whereas younger adults maintain their performance as close as 1 m (worse at 0.5 m). This suggests that older observers are limited in their capacity to integrate information over larger areas of the visual field and supports the notion that age-related effects are more apparent when larger neural networks are required to process simultaneous information. This has further implications for social contexts where information from biological motion is critical.