Perception articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Different languages rely on different vocal sounds to convey meaning. Here the authors show that language-general coding of pitch occurs in the non-primary auditory cortex for both tonal (Mandarin Chinese) and non-tonal (English) languages, with some language specificity on the population level.

    • Yuanning Li
    • , Claire Tang
    •  & Edward F. Chang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The study reports that implicitly learned, statistically defined chunks of abstract visual shapes elicit similar object-based perceptual effects as images of true objects with visual boundaries do. This result links the emergence of object representations to implicit statistical learning mechanisms.

    • Gábor Lengyel
    • , Márton Nagy
    •  & József Fiser

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The transition from resting to perceiving one’s milieu requires a fundamental reorganization of brain activity. Here, the authors show how a fundamental reshaping of brain state dynamics supports perceptual engagement in naturalistic stimuli.

    • Johan N. van der Meer
    • , Michael Breakspear
    •  & Luca Cocchi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The human brain is specialised for face processing, yet sometimes objects are perceived as illusory faces. Here, the authors show that illusory faces are initially represented similarly to real faces, but the representation quickly transforms into one equivalent to ordinary objects.

    • Susan G. Wardle
    • , Jessica Taubert
    •  & Chris I. Baker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    What sensory information is available for decision making? Here, using multi-alternative decisions, the authors show that a substantial amount of information from sensory representations is lost during the transformation to a decision-level representation.

    • Jiwon Yeon
    •  & Dobromir Rahnev

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Eyewitness errors contribute to wrongful convictions. Here, the authors present a lineup procedure that reveals the structure of eyewitness memory, reduces decision bias, and measures performance of individual witnesses.

    • Sergei Gepshtein
    • , Yurong Wang
    •  & Thomas D. Albright

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Our brain derives a sense of direction from visual inputs. Here, the authors combine 7T-fMRI with predictive modeling of virtual navigation to show that the strength, width and topology of directional coding in the human brain reflect ongoing memory-guided behavior.

    • Matthias Nau
    • , Tobias Navarro Schröder
    •  & Christian F. Doeller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How is action perception organized in the brain? Here, the authors report evidence for five networks tuned to actions’ social content and the scale of their effect on the world and propose that sociality and interaction envelope are organizing dimensions of visual action representation.

    • Leyla Tarhan
    •  & Talia Konkle

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sensory hypersensitivity is common in autism spectrum disorders. Using functional MRI, psychophysics, and computational modeling, Schallmo et al. show that differences in visual motion perception in ASD are accompanied by weaker neural suppression in visual cortex.

    • Michael-Paul Schallmo
    • , Tamar Kolodny
    •  & Scott O. Murray

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Saccadic suppression is frequently attributed to active suppressive signals derived from eye movement commands. Here, the authors show that visual-only mechanisms starting in the retina can account for perceptual saccadic suppression properties without the need for motor-based suppression commands.

    • Saad Idrees
    • , Matthias P. Baumann
    •  & Ziad M. Hafed

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Feelings of confidence reflect the likelihood that decisions are correct. Here the authors show that confidence taps partially dissociable evidence from that used for perceptual decisions, and that, rather than passively monitoring, confidence controls the depth of sensory information processing.

    • Tarryn Balsdon
    • , Valentin Wyart
    •  & Pascal Mamassian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors use a combination of perceptual decision making in rats and computational modeling to explore the interplay of priors and sensory cues. They find that rats can learn to either alternate or repeat their actions based on reward likelihood and the influence of bias on their actions disappears after making an error.

    • Ainhoa Hermoso-Mendizabal
    • , Alexandre Hyafil
    •  & Jaime de la Rocha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    That attention is a rhythmic process has received abundant evidence. Here, the authors reveal the natural sampling rate of auditory and visual periodic temporal attention. Both are antagonistically modulated by overt motor activity, a result generalised in a dynamical model of coupled oscillators.

    • Arnaud Zalta
    • , Spase Petkoski
    •  & Benjamin Morillon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuronal populations in the temporal cortex fire show increased activity in response to face stimuli. Here, the authors show using human intracranial recordings that face perception involves anatomically discrete but temporally distributed response profiles in the human ventral temporal cortex.

    • Jessica Schrouff
    • , Omri Raccah
    •  & Josef Parvizi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The fusiform face area and parahippocampal place area respond to face and scene stimuli respectively. Here, the authors show using fMRI that these brain areas are also preferentially activated by eye movements associated with looking at faces and scenes even when no images are shown.

    • Lihui Wang
    • , Florian Baumgartner
    •  & Stefan Pollmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural mechanisms for concurrently attending to multiple features in the visual stimuli are not well understood. Here, the authors show that the neural representations for two overlapping stimulus features alternate with each other at a ~4 Hz rhythm that was also observed in fluctuations in the task performance.

    • Ce Mo
    • , Junshi Lu
    •  & Fang Fang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In congenitally blind people, tactile stimuli can activate the occipital (visual) cortex. Here, the authors show using magnetoencephalography (MEG) that occipital activation can occur within 35 ms following tactile stimulation, suggesting the existence of a fast thalamocortical pathway for touch in congenitally blind humans.

    • Franziska Müller
    • , Guiomar Niso
    •  & Ron Kupers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In order to perceive moving or changing objects, sensory information must be integrated over time. Here, using a visual sequential metacontrast paradigm, the authors show that integration occurs only when subsequent stimuli are presented within a discrete window of time after the initial stimulus.

    • Leila Drissi-Daoudi
    • , Adrien Doerig
    •  & Michael H. Herzog

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual objects from similar semantic categories present activity patterns that cluster together in higher visual areas. The authors show that conscious access differs between semantic categories and is driven by category-related visual features commonly associated with processing in higher level visual areas.

    • Daniel Lindh
    • , Ilja G. Sligte
    •  & Ian Charest

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In familiar environments, humans automatically anticipate the sensory consequences of their motor actions. Here, the authors show how action-based predictions arise from interactions between the hippocampus and visual cortex, and how these interactions strengthen and weaken over time.

    • Nicholas C. Hindy
    • , Emily W. Avery
    •  & Nicholas B. Turk-Browne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The effect of spontaneous variations in prestimulus neural activity on subsequent perception is incompletely understood. Here, using MEG, the authors identify two distinct neural processes that can influence object recognition in different ways.

    • Ella Podvalny
    • , Matthew W. Flounders
    •  & Biyu J. He

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Practice can improve the perception of stimuli used to achieve a task (perceptual learning). Here, the authors show in monkeys that perceptual learning can be produced even for irrelevant stimuli if the stimuli are paired with stimulation of a dopaminergic centre, the ventral tegmental area (VTA).

    • John T. Arsenault
    •  & Wim Vanduffel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is known that attention can modify the brain's representations of sensory stimuli to enhance features of importance. Here, the authors show that flexible readout of cortical representations is also required to explain the behavioral effects of attention.

    • Daniel Birman
    •  & Justin L. Gardner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    What is the function of color vision? Here, the authors show that when retinal mechanisms of color are impaired, memory has a paradoxical impact on color appearance that is selective for faces, providing evidence that color contributes to face encoding and social communication.

    • Maryam Hasantash
    • , Rosa Lafer-Sousa
    •  & Bevil R. Conway

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We can rapidly determine the gender, age and identity of a face, but the exact steps involved are unclear. Here, the authors show using magnetoencephalography (MEG) that gender and age are encoded in the brain before identity, and reveal the role of familiarity in the earliest stages of face processing.

    • Katharina Dobs
    • , Leyla Isik
    •  & Nancy Kanwisher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The pulvinar is involved in vision and attention, but its interactions with other brain regions are little-studied. Here, using fMRI the authors show that the human pulvinar has widespread functional coupling with cortical areas that reflects its intrinsic organization and the topographic layout of cortex.

    • Michael J. Arcaro
    • , Mark A. Pinsk
    •  & Sabine Kastner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How are abstract, imperceptible concepts such as ‘freedom’ represented in the brain? Here, the authors use fMRI in people born blind to compare the neural responses for abstract concepts, concrete concepts like ‘rainbow’ which in blind people lack sensory qualities, and concrete concepts sensorily accessible to the blind.

    • Ella Striem-Amit
    • , Xiaoying Wang
    •  & Alfonso Caramazza

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Our brains predict the likely sensory consequences of actions we take; one theory is that these sensory responses are suppressed, but another theory is that they are sharpened. Here, the authors show using fMRI evidence consistent with the sharpening account for sensory consequences of hand movements.

    • Daniel Yon
    • , Sam J. Gilbert
    •  & Clare Press

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual search requires recognizing an object “invariantly”, despite changes in its appearance. Here, the authors show that humans can efficiently and invariantly search for objects in complex scenes and introduce a biologically-inspired zero-shot model that captures human eye movements during search.

    • Mengmi Zhang
    • , Jiashi Feng
    •  & Gabriel Kreiman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The presence of opposite horizontal motion in the two eyes is a cue for perceiving motion-in-depth, but also leads to suppressed motion sensitivity. Here, the authors address this paradox and show that spatial and interocular integration mechanisms, distinct from the extraction of motion-in-depth, drive suppression.

    • Peter J. Kohler
    • , Wesley J. Meredith
    •  & Anthony M. Norcia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When tracking a moving object, our eyes make smooth pursuit movements; however, tracking an imaginary object produces jerky saccadic eye movements. Here, the authors show that during lucid dreams, the eyes smoothly follow dreamed objects. In this respect, dream imagery is more similar to perception than imagination.

    • Stephen LaBerge
    • , Benjamin Baird
    •  & Philip G. Zimbardo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Saccades have been extensively used to report choices in perceptual decision making studies yet little is known about the influence of covert decision-related processes on saccade metrics. Here, the authors demonstrate that saccade kinematics is a reliable tell about the degree of decision certainty.

    • Joshua A. Seideman
    • , Terrence R. Stanford
    •  & Emilio Salinas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Economists have observed that many people seem unwilling to save for the future. Here, the authors show that earning and saving are subject to a basic asymmetry in attentional choice, such that cues that are associated with saving are perceived as occurring later than cues associated with earning.

    • Kesong Hu
    • , Eve De Rosa
    •  & Adam K. Anderson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neuronal basis of spontaneous changes in conscious experience is unclear. Here, authors report nonselective medial frontal activity starting two seconds before a spontaneous change in visual perception, followed by selective medial temporal lobe activity, one second before the change.

    • Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv
    • , Liad Mudrik
    •  & Itzhak Fried

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perception relies on information integration but it is unclear how the brain decides which information to integrate and which to keep separate. Here, the authors develop and test a biologically inspired model of cue-integration, implicating a key role for GABAergic proscription in robust perception.

    • Reuben Rideaux
    •  & Andrew E. Welchman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anticipation helps to prioritise the processing of task-relevant sensory targets over irrelevant distractors. Here the authors analyse visual EEG responses and show that anticipation may do so by enhancing the neural representation of the target and by delaying the interference caused by distractors that follow closely in time.

    • Freek van Ede
    • , Sammi R. Chekroud
    •  & Anna C. Nobre

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