Room corners and how they influence the memory of visual information arranged on walls.

In formal and informal learning settings corresponding information units are often arranged in the space around the viewer. For example, teachers pin task relevant information on classroom walls, or museum curators arrange exhibits in museum halls. Often learners and visitors are expected to see meaningful relationships between these information units. Theoretically, Gestalt Psychology has been examining the effects of connecting and separating elements in visual information displays, leading to the question of whether these findings also hold in three-dimensional environments. Does the mostly rectangular form of our rooms also either highlight or downplay relations between information dispersed across a room? Three experiments using virtual rooms showed that the matching pairs of pictures were memorized better if both pictures were arranged on the same wall instead of across two adjacent walls: that is, the presence of a room corner between matching pairs decreased memory (Experiments 1-3). Additionally, the findings showed that the participants' orientation of their central field of view during learning influenced the effect of corners on memory. When initially looking around in rooms, participants most often oriented the center of their field of view toward the middle of a wall (Experiments 1 and 2); however, if they were restricted to orienting their field of view toward corners, the corner effect on memory vanished (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that room characteristics influence the exploratory behavior of viewers, thereby also affecting their memories of the presented information.

Same action, different level: Descriptions of perceived or predicted actions depend on preceding temporal gaps in event streams.

Events and activities consist not only of sequences of individual actions, but also they form hierarchies comprising chains of low-level actions grouped together to form higher level activities. Therefore, observers face the task of not only segmenting a continuous event stream into discrete units, but also processing these units on an appropriate level of aggregation. In 3 experiments, we show that for events observed in an incomplete, piecemeal manner, the temporal extension of event gaps influences the level of hierarchy at which an observer processes the presented event (Experiments 1a and 1b) and that the level of hierarchy is also transferred to an anticipated subsequent event (Experiment 2). Participants viewed film clips showing everyday activities with short or long temporal gaps between the successive shots presenting different aspects of the same activity. The participants' levels of processing were captured via the cued recall of their descriptions of what they had seen in the film clip or via the formulations they used when describing what they expected to happen next. Our findings suggest an extended model of event cognition: Viewers aim to represent events continuously and therefore extrapolate in the case of gaps by shifting to higher levels of description. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

A catch-up illusion arising from a distance-dependent perception bias in judging relative movement.

The perception of relative target movement from a dynamic observer is an unexamined psychological three body problem. To test the applicability of explanations for two moving bodies participants repeatedly judged the relative movements of two runners chasing each other in video clips displayed on a stationary screen. The chased person always ran at 3 m/s with an observer camera following or leading at 4.5, 3, 1.5 or 0 m/s. We harmonized the chaser speed in an adaptive staircase to determine the point of subjective equal movement speed between runners and observed (i) an underestimation of chaser speed if the runners moved towards the viewer, and (ii) an overestimation of chaser speed if the runners moved away from the viewer, leading to a catch-up illusion in case of equidistant runners. The bias was independent of the richness of available self-movement cues. Results are inconsistent with computing individual speeds, relying on constant visual angles, expansion rates, occlusions, or relative distances but are consistent with inducing the impression of relative movement through perceptually compressing and enlarging inter-runner distance. This mechanism should be considered when predicting human behavior in complex situations with multiple objects moving in depth such as driving or team sports.

Mind the gap: Temporal discontinuities in observed activity streams influence perceived duration of actions.

In everyday life, when observing activities taking place in our environment, we often shift our attention among several activities and therefore perceive each activity sequence piecemeal with temporal gaps in between. Two studies examined whether the length of these gaps influences the processing of the observed activities. Experiment 1 presented film clips depicting activities that were interrupted by either short or long gaps and asked participants to estimate how long the target action presented at the end of the clip would normally take if it were to take place in reality. Using the same activities, Experiment 2 asked participants to judge the duration of the presentation of this target action-that is, how long the target action was presented. Results showed that following long gaps instead of short gaps, target actions are estimated to take longer in reality (Experiment 1), but the depictions themselves are estimated to be shorter (Experiment 2). Following long gaps, target actions seem to be processed pars pro toto as placeholders for longer segments in the stream of events, but in contrast, the depictions themselves appear to be shorter. Results suggest that long gaps lengthen the perceived duration of an event in our cognitive representation and also seem to influence our perception of the duration of the presentation itself.

Fandom Biases Retrospective Judgments Not Perception.

Attitudes and motivations have been shown to affect the processing of visual input, indicating that observers may see a given situation each literally in a different way. Yet, in real-life, processing information in an unbiased manner is considered to be of high adaptive value. Attitudinal and motivational effects were found for attention, characterization, categorization, and memory. On the other hand, for dynamic real-life events, visual processing has been found to be highly synchronous among viewers. Thus, while in a seminal study fandom as a particularly strong case of attitudes did bias judgments of a sports event, it left the question open whether attitudes do bias prior processing stages. Here, we investigated influences of fandom during the live TV broadcasting of the 2013 UEFA-Champions-League Final regarding attention, event segmentation, immediate and delayed cued recall, as well as affect, memory confidence, and retrospective judgments. Even though we replicated biased retrospective judgments, we found that eye-movements, event segmentation, and cued recall were largely similar across both groups of fans. Our findings demonstrate that, while highly involving sports events are interpreted in a fan dependent way, at initial stages they are processed in an unbiased manner.

Recognizing dynamic scenes: influence of processing orientation.

From face recognition studies, it is known that instructions are able to change processing orientation of stimuli, leading to an impairment of recognition performance. The present study examined instructional influences on the visual recognition of dynamic scenes. A global processing orientation without any instruction was assumed to lead to highest recognition performance, whereas instructions focusing participants' attention on certain characteristics of the event should lead to a local processing orientation with an impairment of visual recognition performance as a direct consequence. Since the pattern of results provided evidence for this hypothesis, theoretical contributions were discussed.

Canonical views of dynamic scenes.

The visual recognition of dynamic scenes was examined. The authors hypothesized that the notion of canonical views, which has received strong empirical support for static objects, also holds for dynamic scenes. In Experiment 1, viewpoints orthogonal to the main axis of movement in the scene were preferred over other viewpoints, whereas viewpoints in line with the main axis were least preferred. Experiment 2 provided no empirical evidence for a recognition advantage of canonical viewpoints when presented during the initial learning phase, but Experiment 3 showed a cognitive advantage for canonical viewpoints if they were presented as test stimuli during the recognition test. Overall, the findings suggest that on a phenomenological level, viewers are consciously aware of such viewpoints, and, on a cognitive level, viewers benefit from canonical viewpoints in terms of recognition accuracy.

Changing viewpoints during dynamic events.

The connection of various viewpoints of a visual dynamic scene can be realised in different ways. We examined if various presentation modes influence scene recognition and cognitive representation type. In the learning phase, participants saw clips of basketball scenes from (a) a single, unvaried viewpoint, or with a change of viewpoint during the scene, whereby the connection was realised (b) by an abrupt cut, or (c) by a continuous camera move. In the test phase, participants had to recognise video stills presenting basketball scenes from the same or differing viewpoints. As expected, cuts led to lower recognition accuracy than a fixed unvaried viewpoint, whereas this was not the case for moves. However, the kind of connection between two viewpoints had no influence on the viewpoint dependence of the cognitive representation. Additionally, it was found that the amount of viewpoint deviation seemed to influence the overall conservativeness of participants' reactions.

Viewpoint dependency in the recognition of dynamic scenes.

In 3 experiments, the question of viewpoint dependency in mental representations of dynamic scenes was addressed. Participants viewed film clips of soccer episodes from 1 or 2 viewpoints; they were then required to discriminate between video stills of the original episode and distractors. Recognition performance was measured in terms of accuracy and speed. The degree of viewpoint deviation between the initial presentation and the test stimuli was varied, as was both the point of time presented by the video stills and participants' soccer expertise. Findings suggest that viewers develop a viewpoint-dependent mental representation similar to the spatial characteristics of the original episode presentation, even if the presentation was spatially inhomogeneous.