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11 pages, 1099 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Prefrontal-Dependent and Gender-Specific Modulation of Guilt Emotion on Human Early Visual Perception

by Mingyang Sun and Lihong Chen

Behav. Sci. 2025, 15(3), 333; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15030333 - 8 Mar 2025

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Negative emotions can shape human visual perception, which is mainly investigated using basic emotions such as fear. Whether guilt emotion, which is a negative moral emotion originating late in our evolutionary ancestry, has similar modulatory effects as basic emotions is largely unexplored. Here, we employed a dot estimation task to induce feelings of guilt and subsequently measured the Ebbinghaus illusion strength. The photos of victims’ faces were projected on the central circle of the Ebbinghaus configuration. The results showed that guilt significantly strengthened the illusion effect relative to control condition, which was observed only for female participants playing with same-gender partners and reversed to the opposite pattern with disruption of left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that guilt can sculpt early visual perception in a gender-specific and prefrontal-dependent manner, thus broaden our understanding of guilt emotion and have implications for relevant neuropsychiatric disorders. Full article

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17 pages, 1612 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Geometrical Visual Illusions Revisited: The Curse of Symmetry, the Cure of Sighting, and Taxing Task Demands

by Klaus Landwehr

Symmetry 2022, 14(12), 2550; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym14122550 - 2 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4335

Abstract

For nine popular geometrical visual-illusion figures, a mathematical analysis is provided along with a characterization of the figures’ psychological effectiveness. Supported by graphical illustrations, for the L and the T, it is shown how mathematical singularities of these figures can be isolated, and the illusions annihilated. For the Poggendorff, the Hering, and the Zöllner figures, building on observations from Kennedy and Portal (1990), sighting the figures from specific vantage points at a shallow angle is proposed as a means to overcome these illusions. For the T, the Oppel–Kundt, the Müller–Lyer, and the Ebbinghaus figures, a new experiment demonstrated that observers were able to find a slant of the stimuli at which the illusory impressions vanished. Task demands on part of the beholders comprise discrimination and identification. The observed independence of response bias and sensitivity in psychometric functions can possibly be explained by the intrusion of identifying responses into discrimination tasks. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Symmetry and Asymmetry: From Evolution to Neuroscience)

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7 pages, 587 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Prospects of Utilizing Geometrical Visual Illusions as Tools for Neuroscience

by Klaus Landwehr

Symmetry 2022, 14(8), 1687; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym14081687 - 15 Aug 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3007

Abstract

Geometrical visual illusions have long been used as tools in neuroscience. Most commonly, researchers have taken illusions as a given and attempted to explain phenomenal impressions in terms of known neural mechanisms. In a psychophysical approach to this topic, it is customary to modify stimuli until conditions for which illusions are enhanced, attenuated, or annihilated have been found. Additionally, the focus is not exclusively on response bias but equally on sensitivity, because observers may fall prey to an illusion but at the same time be able to discriminate between stimuli perfectly. For the T-figure, the length of the undivided line is usually overestimated relative to the length of the divided line, and evidence has accrued that suggests that the illusion may be due to the processing of the figure as a coherent unit (a “T-schema”). Dissecting the T or tilting its lines influenced the amount of illusion, suggesting that interactions between orientation-sensitive and end-inhibited neurons are at work. Examples of cognate research with the Ponzo, Ebbinghaus, and Müller-Lyer illusions are also discussed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Symmetry and Asymmetry: From Evolution to Neuroscience)

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