User:A.McAuliffe/sandbox

Looming

I am going to examine how visual and auditory looming may differ from one another, but also how they work together. There is an abudnant amount of information out there on mental looking and anxiety, but that will not be my focus.

Visual

In the visual field, "looming" refers to the rapid expansion of an object, or the occurrence of an object coming closer to a subject, while "receding" refers to an object increasing in distance from the subject.

When people are presented with two forms of motion, looming and receding, people were quicker at locating a target in a looming visual field opposed to a receding visual field. Although there is discourse on whether motion onset is responsible opposed to motion flow, there may be evidence that looming has an advantage in visual search tasks and attention capture.

Attention capture is when a stimuli is presented that is irrelevant to a task, and the subject focuses on the stimuli. Previous research demonstrates that sudden appearance and a contrast change strongly capture attention. One study had participants view a screen of moving letters. During presentation, there was a mask, and then letters were presented with various types of motions. Looming target stimuli were located significantly faster and more accurate than receding letters. This shows that motion alone doesn't capture attention, but needs to be salient to the subject.

Auditory

Sound acts similar to visual looming as sound often increases as it moves closer to a listener. Localizing sounds is biologically important to both humans and non humans because it can show where potential dangers may be approaching from, as well as where to avert one's visual attention. One study looked at neural imaging and found that activation occurs in the right planum temporale for understanding distance, horizontal, and vertical motion. However, there is significantly more activation for horizontal motion than vertical.

There needs to more research both reviewed and conducted on the differences in horizontal and vertical looming for both auditory and visual looming. Something to look into when further extending the looming wikipedia article.

One study investigated sound localization based on speed and accuracy, using varying acoustic intensity and pitch. Participants would listen to either looming, receding, or stationary. Pitch was increased for looming sounds, and decreased for receding, to give the illusion on sounds either coming towards, or away from the listener. Participants sat in a room while one of the sounds played from one of nine speakers surrounding the room. People were faster and more accurate at localizing looming sounds, showing that people have a "looming bias" and sounds coming towards someone are perceived as more relevant.

Application:

An example of biological salience for looming is when driving. One study had participants hear four different nonlooming auditory sounds (constant intensity, pulsed, ramped, and car horn), three looming sounds (veridical, early, and late) while experiencing a driving simulator. In the driving simulator, participants had to follow that would unpredictably change speeds and stop. Results showed that veridical looming sounds produced faster brake reaction times compared to other non looming sounds. This demonstrates that one may be more careful when they view something potentially harmful directed at them.

Combined senses

One study examines how participants perceiving a stimulus when they are witnessing it through a suppressed visual and experiencing a noticeable auditory stimulus. Participants viewed either an object, a looming object, or a looming object with a looming auditory aid. Results showed that in the absence of a suppressed visual stimulus, a connection between auditory and visual looming can not be achieved

Auditory looming stimuli may not influence visual looming stimuli, but there is evidence that visual systems could affect auditory systems. In another study, participants experienced intense auditory looming stimuli and were told to report what direction the auditory signals were going. There was a visual stimulus present, but participants were told to ignore visual cues. The experiment had trials in which visual cues were moving congruently and incongruently with auditory signals. Results showed that accuracy of auditory looming stimuli was negatively influenced by the presence of an incongruent visual stimulus.

Two experiments were conducted to examine how auditory stimuli influence the details of a visual stimulus. Participants focused on a fixation point where two disks were presented that varied in luminance or size, presented one after the other, and participants had to say how the second disk differed. During this time sound type and intensity varied, but had no significance to the trial. In the second experiment, the shape of the disk was also varied. Results showed that when looming sounds were played, that objects were perceived as brighter and larger than what they actually were. This explains that in-depth sound motion is transferred to in-depth visual processing.

May want to link to another article, or it can be included here on the phenomenon of looming in a clinical sense. Mental illness can show that there is a looming (something coming closer and closer) sense of dread, sorrow, etc. More background information can be found here..

[null Reflections on Strenger's 'Thoughts about the existential foundations of looming vulnerability'.]

Riskind, J. H., Williams, N. L., Gessner, T. L., Chrosniak, L. D., & Cortina, J. M. (2000). The looming maladaptive style: Anxiety, danger, and schematic processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 837.

Riskind, J. H., Moore, R., & Bowley, L. (1995). The looming of spiders: The fearful perceptual distortion of movement and menace. Behaviour research and therapy, 33(2), 171-178.

Change Blindness Editing

I am going to focus on influencing factors of change blindness as a whole and look more in depth at different studies pertaining to each section of factors. Influencing factors has a great foundation for many of these factors but there still need more details. I will focus specifically on attention and substance use. Each section talks about one specific area of change blindness, but doesn't get into broad areas of it.

Change blindness and substance abuse

Alcohol can sometimes improve change blindness. For example, intoxicated participants were quicker at detecting minor changes in large displays of images than sober participants. This could be attributed to more passive viewings of larger images, and the use of alcohol slows down more controlled search processes.

Active viewing involves more saccades than fixations. When viewing an image with a more passive search, more information is processed with each fixation. The alcohol slows down the movement and processing of the brain, therefore causing more fixation points.

Change Blindness and Age

Children from 6-13 years old looked at colored pictures of real world scenes that were manipulated by color, location of objects, or the removal of objects, in the central or peripheral focus of the image. Adults are more accurate when noticing the changes that occur in the picture. Children can accurately detect central changes, but aren't as good at detecting peripheral changes, and their accuracy depends on the type of manipulation.

Younger drivers (average of 22 years old) were compared with older drivers (average of 69 years old). Images were presented on a screen showing various driving situations that included an original image and a modified image, and participants had to identify where a change had occurred in the modified version, if any. Older drivers expressed reduced accuracy, higher reaction times, and more false positive responses compared to younger drivers.

Change Blindness and Attention

Community volunteers had to focus on a screen and accurately identify if there was a change between series of dots after being fixated on a point in the center of the screen. Distraction of attention by visual disruptions and the observers' ability to focus on potential change were found to have an effect on attention with change blindness.

Peer Review - Jack Kennedy

Overall, good job. Your edits were clear and concise, which make the article understandable to a general audience. Good use of sources to add relevant information to the article. The Change Blindness and Attention section was a little brief/vague, and could be helped by perhaps adding another sentence or two related to the topic. The alcohol section was interesting too, and I wonder if there were any other studies out there that test change blindness with different substances. That might be a potential bit of information you could add if there is any relevant information available.