%0 Journal Article %J Journal of Experimental Psychology: General %D 2021 %T Characterizing a snapshot of perceptual experience. %A Cohen, Michael A. %A Ostrand, Caroline %A Frontero, Nicole %A Pham, Phuong-Nghi %X

What can we perceive in a single glance of the visual world? Although this question appears rather simple, answering it has been remarkably difficult and controversial. Traditionally, researchers have tried to infer the nature of perceptual experience by examining how many objects and what types of objects are not fully encoded within a scene (e.g., failing to notice a bowl disappearing/changing). Here, we took a different approach and asked how much we could alter an entire scene before observers noticed those global alterations. Surprisingly, we found that observers could fixate on a scene for hundreds of milliseconds yet routinely fail to notice drastic changes to that scene (e.g., scrambling the periphery so no object can be identified, putting the center of 1 scene on the background of another scene). In addition, we also found that as observers allocate more attention to their periphery, their ability to notice these changes to a scene increases. Together, these results show that although a single snapshot of perceptual experience can be remarkably impoverished, it is also not a fixed constant and is likely to be continuously changing from moment to moment depending on attention. (

%B Journal of Experimental Psychology: General %8 02/2021 %G eng %U http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000864 %! Journal of Experimental Psychology: General %R 10.1037/xge0000864 %0 Journal Article %J Current Biology %D 2021 %T Selective responses to faces, scenes, and bodies in the ventral visual pathway of infants %A Heather L Kosakowski %A Cohen, Michael A. %A Takahashi, Atsushi %A Keil, Boris %A Nancy Kanwisher %A Rebecca Saxe %X

Three of the most robust functional landmarks in the human brain are the selective responses to faces in the fusiform face area (FFA), scenes in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and bodies in the extrastriate body area (EBA). Are the selective responses of these regions present early in development or do they require many years to develop? Prior evidence leaves this question unresolved. We designed a new 32-channel infant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) coil and collected high-quality functional MRI (fMRI) data from infants (2–9 months of age) while they viewed stimuli from four conditions—faces, bodies, objects, and scenes. We find that infants have face-, scene-, and body-selective responses in the location of the adult FFA, PPA, and EBA, respectively, powerfully constraining accounts of cortical development.

%B Current Biology %V 32 %8 11/2021 %G eng %U https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221015086 %& 1-20 %R 10.1016/j.cub.2021.10.064 %0 Journal Article %J NeuroImage %D 2019 %T Representational similarity precedes category selectivity in the developing ventral visual pathway %A Cohen, Michael A. %A Dilks, Daniel D. %A Kami Koldewyn %A Weigelt, Sarah %A Jenelle Feather %A Alexander J. E. Kell %A Keil, Boris %A Fischl, Bruce %A Zöllei, Lilla %A Lawrence Wald %A Rebecca Saxe %A Nancy Kanwisher %B NeuroImage %V 197 %P 565 - 574 %8 Jan-08-2019 %G eng %U https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31077844 %! NeuroImage %R 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.05.010