Xiaohua Zhuang

Differential effects of alcohol on contrast processing mediated by the magnocellular and parvocellular pathways

This study investigated how acute alcohol intake affects contrast processing mediated by inferred magnocellular (MC) and parvocellular (PC) pathways. Achromatic contrast discrimination thresholds were measured in 16 young healthy participants using a steady-pedestal, pulsed-pedestal or pedestal-Δ-pedestal paradigm designed to favor the inferred MC or the PC pathway. Each participant completed two randomized sessions that included consumption of either 0.8 g/kg alcohol or a placebo beverage, with each session consisting of contrast discrimination measurements at baseline and at 60 min following beverage consumption. The results showed that, compared to placebo, alcohol significantly reduced MC contrast sensitivity and PC contrast gain but had no effect on PC contrast sensitivity for the majority of the participants; and did not alter MC contrast gain consistently across participants. The decrease in contrast gain in the PC pathway can be interpreted as a degradation of the postretinal signal-to-noise ratio, whereas the decrease of sensitivity in the MC pathway likely results from a change of cortical processing.

Acute Alcohol Drinking Promotes Piecemeal Percepts during Binocular Rivalry

Binocular rivalry refers to perceptual alternation when two eyes view different images. One of the potential percepts during binocular rivalry is a spatial mosaic of left- and right-eye images, known as piecemeal percepts, which may result from localized rivalries between small regions in the left- and right-eye images. It is known that alcohol increases inhibitory neurotransmission, which may reduce the number of alternations during binocular rivalry. However, it is unclear whether alcohol affects rivalry dynamics in the same manner for both coherent percepts (i.e., percepts of complete left or right images) and piecemeal percepts. To address this question, the present study measured the dynamics of binocular rivalry before and after 15 moderate-to-heavy social drinkers consumed an intoxicating dose of alcohol versus a placebo beverage. Both simple rivalrous stimuli consisting of gratings with different orientations, and complex stimuli consisting of a face or a house were tested to examine alcohol effects on rivalry as a function of stimulus complexity. Results showed that for both simple and complex stimuli, alcohol affects coherent and piecemeal percepts differently. More specifically, alcohol reduced the number of coherent percepts but not the mean dominance duration of coherent percepts. In contrast, for piecemeal percepts, alcohol increased the mean dominance duration but not the number of piecemeal percepts. These results suggested that alcohol drinking may selectively affect the dynamics of transitional period of binocular rivalry by increasing the duration of piecemeal percepts, leading to a reduction in the number of coherent percepts. The differential effect of alcohol on the dynamics of coherent and piecemeal percepts cannot be accounted for by alcohol’s effect on a common inhibitory mechanism. Other mechanisms, such as increasing neural noise, are needed to explain alcohol’s effect on the dynamics of binocular rivalry.

Flicker adaptation desensitizes the magnocellular but not the parvocellular pathway.

PURPOSE Anatomical and physiological studies show that in primates, visual information is conveyed through two parallel pathways, including the magnocellular (MC-) and parvocellular (PC-) pathways. However, the functional separation between the two pathways remains controversial and challenging. To resolve this, we show a psychophysical approach to desensitize the inferred MC-pathway of human observers independently of the inferred PC-pathway. METHODS The steady-pedestal and pulsed-pedestal paradigms that allow detection and discrimination to be mediated by only the inferred MC- or PC-pathway were used. Three observers (one male, aged 43 years, and two females, aged 33 and 62 years) adapted to either a steadily presented pedestal or a 2- or 10-Hz 50% contrast square-wave modulated luminance flicker. Contrast discrimination thresholds were measured following the flicker adaptation. RESULTS Flicker adaptation reduces contrast detection and discrimination of the MC-pathway but not the PC-pathway, with larger MC losses from 10-Hz (∼ 0.28 log unit loss, P < 0.05 for all observers) than 2-Hz flicker (∼ 0.13 log unit loss, P < 0.05 for one or two observers depending on stimulus size). Further, our results show that the PC-pathway does not mediate the contrast detection threshold at the background luminance following MC-pathway desensitization. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates the feasibility of independently manipulating sensitivity of the MC-pathway in human observers. Our paradigms provide powerful tools to independently investigate the perceptual functions in the MC- and PC-pathways. This could lead to a better understanding of the perceptual functions of these pathways.

The ingenious Mr Hughes: Combining forced, flat, and reverse perspective all in one art piece to pit objects against surfaces.

The artist Patrick Hughes has ingeniously painted rows of stacked Brillo boxes in Forced into Reverse Perspective. The geometry is in reverse perspective, predicting only one type of illusory motion for each planar surface for moving viewers. He “broke” these surfaces into objects by painting the boxes in three types of perspective (planar, forced, and reverse). Our experiments confirmed that he succeeded in eliciting different types of illusory motion, including “differential motion” between boxes for most viewers. In some sense, this illustrates the superiority of secondary (painted) over primary (physical) cues.

Prior entry for feature-based attention: Are objects of the attended color perceived earlier?

Attention has been thought to play a major role in selection of input for further process [4]. It is also hypothsized that attention can accelerate sensory processing, thereby causing attended objects to be perceived earlier than unattended objects [30]. This prior-entry effect of attention has been investigated for more than a century [2, 28] and many studies about this hypothesis emerged recently [10, 19, 23, 24, 27, 31, 38, 40]. Temporal order judgment (TOJ) task [21, 23, 34, 35, 38, 39, 5] and simultaneity judgment (SJ) task [21, 39, 40] are the two typical paradigms to study the prior-entry effect. Using these paradigms, many researchers have reported the existence of prior-entry effects across different modalities[27, 28, 40, 1, 33], and within the same modality: visual [12, 23, 34-36], auditory [11] or somatosensory [38, 39].

Alcohol intoxication impairs mesopic rod and cone temporal processing in social drinkers

BACKGROUND Alcohol-related driving accidents and fatalities occur most frequently at nighttime and at dawn, that is, a mesopic lighting condition in which visual processing depends on both rod and cone photoreceptors. The temporal functions of the rod and cone pathways are critical for driving in this lighting condition. However, how alcohol influences the temporal functions in the rod and cone pathways at mesopic light levels is inconclusive. To address this, this study investigated whether an acute intoxicating dose of alcohol impairs rod- and/or cone-mediated critical fusion frequency (CFF; the lowest frequency of which an intermittent or flickering light stimulus is perceived as steady). METHODS In Experiment I, we measured the CFFs for 3 types of visual stimuli (rod stimulus alone, cone stimulus alone, and the mixture of both stimuli types), under 3 illuminant light levels (dim illuminance: 2 Td; low illuminance: 20 Td; and medium illuminance: 80 Td) in moderate-heavy social drinkers before and after they consumed an intoxicating dose of alcohol (0.8 g/kg) compared with a placebo beverage. In Experiment II, we examined whether the illuminance level (dark vs. light) of the visual area surrounding the test stimuli alters alcohols effect on the temporal processing of rods and cones. RESULTS The results showed that compared with placebo, alcohol significantly reduced CFFs of all stimulus types at all illuminance levels. Furthermore, alcohol intoxication produced a larger impairment on rod-pathway-mediated CFFs under light versus dark surround. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that alcohol intake slows down rod and cone-pathway-mediated temporal processing. Further research may elucidate whether this effect may play a role in alcohol-related injury and accidents, which often occur under low-light conditions.

Contrast magnitude and polarity effects on color filling-in along cardinal color axes

Color filling-in is the phenomenon in which the color of a visual area is perceived as the color that is only presented in an adjacent area. In a stimulus with multiple edges, color filling-in can occur along any edge and in both centripetal and centrifugal directions when maintaining steady fixation. The current study aimed to investigate the role of chromatic contrast magnitude and polarity along the two chromaticity cardinal axes and the interaction of the axes in the color filling-in process. In Experiment 1, the color filling-in process was examined using stimuli with three different regions and two edges. The three regions had chromaticities that varied only in one of the chromaticity axes. In Experiment 2, the regions along both edges differed in chromaticity along both axes. The results showed that the contrast magnitudes and polarity relationship of the two edges worked together to determine the filled-in direction and time course of the filled-in percepts. Further, the results pointed to a common mechanism mediating the color filling-in process along the two cardinal axes, and the two axes did not act independently in this process.

Cone contrast magnitude and spatial arrangement affect color filling-in modes

1. Hamburger, K., Prior, H., Sarris, V., & Spillmann, L. (2006). Filling-in with colour: different modes of surface completion. Vision Research, 46(6-7), 1129-1138. 2. Komatsu, H. (2006). The neural mechanisms of perceptual filling-in. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7(3), 220-231. 3. von der Heydt, R., Friedman, S. H., & Zhou, H. (2003) Searching for the neural mechanism of color filling-in. In L. Pessoa & P. de Weerd (Eds.), Filling-in: From perceptual completion to cortical reorganization (pp. 106-127). Oxford: University Press.

“Exorcist Illusion”: Twisting Necks in the Hollow-Face and Hollow-Torso Illusions

We combine a convex facial mask with a concave torso—or vice versa—thus creating a single rigid object with a transition area at the neck, where convexity changes to concavity. This combination creates stunning illusions when the rigid object is set to motion. The two simplest effects are (1) when the object is rotated about its axis, the head appears to twist with respect to the torso, as in “The Exorcist” film (2) when it is rotated around an axis parallel to the shoulders, the head appears to hinge around the torso. More complex illusory effects result from more complex motions. The involvement of higher-level perceptual processes may account for the illusory effects.