Browsing by Author "Anderson, Nicole"
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Item Effect of orientation-specific adaptation on face perception(2018) Cruikshank, Emily; Anderson, NicoleHuman observers are more sensitive to faces than any other visual stimulus. Recent evidence suggests that the most important information in faces for recognition is contained within horizontally oriented frequency bands of the face image (Dakin & Watt, 2009). This study focused on evaluating if orientation-specific adaptation influences face recognition. If face processing heavily depends upon horizontal information, then selectively adapting those mechanisms should reduce observers’ ability to recognize faces. The first experiment tested participants’ ability to discriminate between faces after adaptation. The results indicated that orientation–specific adaptation did not impact participants’ face discrimination skills. During the first experiment, participants subjectively noticed a distortion effect after adapting to the horizontal and vertical adapting stimuli. Therefore, the second experiment was designed to determine whether adaptation might influence the perceived distortion in participants after horizontal adaptation. There was a significant difference between adaptation conditions in the perceived distortion of faces. These results suggest that low-level orientation adaptation may influence certain aspects of face recognition.Item Perception of handwriting(2020) Taing, Pichornay (Jennel); Anderson, NicoleHandwriting is a very important form of human communication. As a stimulus, handwriting is a complex visual pattern that is individualistic to the writer, much in the same way that faces are complex patterns that contain an identity. Due to the ubiquity of handwriting as a communication tool, we wanted to investigate sensitivity to handwriting using traditional psychophysical techniques. In this experiment, we will investigate whether observers’ sensitivity to gender differences in the authors of the handwriting scales with different manipulations to the stimulus. We will measure sensitivity in 4 conditions: (1) uppercase words in an upright position, (2) lower case words in an upright position, (3) uppercase words in an inverted position, and (4) lower case words in an inverted position. Our first goal is to determine whether participants are sensitive to differences in gender within handwriting. If so, we would also like to investigate if those differences extend to upper and lowercase samples as well as upright and inverted. We expect to see a difference in perception in all 4 conditions. This would then support the idea that the process of word-recognition is similar to the process of other complex visual stimuli such as faces. For future direction, we hope to conduct other form of manipulation to individual letters of handwriting to study the individuality within the handwriting stimuli.