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Stress, Perceptual Distortions, and Human Performance
Published in Darrell L. Ross, Gary M. Vilke, Guidelines for Investigating Officer-Involved Shootings, Arrest-Related Deaths, and Deaths in Custody, 2018
Darrell L. Ross, Randall L. Murphy
Selective attention (or misperception) explains how a person may miss observing something that is in his or her direct line of vision, or not hearing something because the brain has focused the vision directly on the immediate stressor that requires attention. Peripheral vision then may be narrowed by as much as 70 percent (Breedlove, 1995, 2013; Easterbrook, 1959). This response is also referred to as inattentional blindness or visual noise, which is an unconscious rejection of competing visual input. It can occur across all of the senses but primarily affects vision (Honig & Lewinski, 2008; Williams, Allen, & Stein, 1999). Accordingly, this phenomenon occurs from an overload of visual sensory input or from focusing primarily on the task at hand. If a weapon is involved or an object is perceived to be a weapon, a “weapon focus” phenomenon may be created, which aligns with the tunnel vision effect. This can explain why a person may misperceive a situation and actually be blind to seeing the obvious. Perceptual narrowing suggests that as the level of demand increases, there will be a corresponding decrease in the visual area as the number of visual cues is reduced (Godnig, 2001).
The Neurobiologic Embedding of Childhood Socioeconomic Status
Published in L. Syd M Johnson, Karen S. Rommelfanger, The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics, 2017
In one example of developmental plasticity, for native language acquisition to occur, children must be exposed to the sounds of their native language very early in life. Such experience essentially narrows the perceptual window through which language is processed, leading to expertise. At six months of age, infants throughout the world can discriminate the sounds of most of the world’s languages (e.g., an infant being brought up in an English-speaking home can discriminate the sounds not only of English but also of Mandarin; Ruben, 1997). In contrast, by twelve months of age, infants are able to discriminate the sounds only from their native language (Ruben, 1997), an effect called perceptual narrowing. Importantly, this sensitive period for phonemic awareness in children is not the ‘whole story’ for language acquisition. All through early childhood, until puberty, developmental plasticity allows children to be better language learners than adolescents or adults (Dettman et al., 2016; Johnson and Newport, 1989). Thus, there is little doubt that childhood experiences play a central role in some aspects of brain development, and generally the brain is understood to develop in an experience-expectant manner. However, unlike our understanding of the development of vision and language, it is less well understood what kinds of experiences are important in the development of higher-order cognitive and emotional abilities. Likely these abilities also rely on experience to develop, but when is the sensitive period of development for these abilities? How long does it last? And does it have properties similar to those observed in the sensory cortices? The answers to these questions are, to date, less well understood. Higher-order cognitive function relies on areas of the brain termed the association cortices, where multiple domains of sensory perception and motor output come together to support our most complex skills: our ability to understand and solve cognitive problems, control our impulses, and regulate our emotions.
From Freud to Android: Constructing a Scale of Uncanny Feelings
Published in Journal of Personality Assessment, 2023
Rachele Benjamin, Steven J. Heine
Different routes to uncanniness may also implicate different functional systems, and different developmental trajectories. A recent study finds that children are sensitive to human-like avatar faces at 12 months of age, just as they become more expert at perceiving human faces (Lewkowicz & Ghazanfar, 2012). Perceptual narrowing is key to perceiving uncanny faces, but it is unclear how and when other sensitivities to uncanniness emerge, like perceiving machines with minds as eerie (see Gray & Wegner, 2012). It remains a question for future research to determine when people become sensitive to uncanny concepts, like robots with experience, or uncanny situations, like life-disrupting world events. Culture, and beliefs about human uniqueness might also affect sensitivity to the uncanny.
Atypical neural oscillations in response to speech in infants and children with speech and language impairments: a systematic review
Published in Hearing, Balance and Communication, 2022
Caroline Nallet, Judit Gervain
Preterm infants miss the prosodic prenatal experience and are exposed prematurely to the full-band speech signal. The chronological sequence of experiences is thus disrupted. This reduced prosodic prenatal experience could perturb the tuning of the slow oscillations and consequently the whole hierarchy of oscillations. This atypical oscillatory activity could then have consequences for further language development. Indeed, it has been shown that children who were born preterm are at higher risk for language impairments [49,50], often leading to educational delays [51]. Moreover, several studies have investigated more specifically the speech perception abilities in infants and children born preterm and found impaired word stress sensitivity and frequency change detection [52–55]. Some studies show preserved phoneme change detection [54]. However, the study of Jansson-Verkasalo and colleagues [56] suggests that the developmental trajectory of phoneme perception may nevertheless be atypical in preterm infants. Perceptual narrowing, i.e. the developmental phenomenon whereby, during the first year of life, infants lose the ability to discriminate non-native phonemic contrast while they become fine-tuned to the phonemic repertoire of their native(s) language(s), has been found to be delayed. The results suggest that preterm infants show an atypical trajectory as they continue to show the ability to discriminate non-native phonemes even when their control peers no longer do, and this was correlated with poorer language abilities at 2 years of age.