Platform

  • Search
  • Seminars
  • Conferences
  • Jobs

Resources

  • Submit Content
  • About Us

© 2025 World Wide

Open knowledge for all • Started with World Wide Neuro • A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization

Analytics consent required

World Wide relies on analytics signals to operate securely and keep research services available. Accept to continue, or leave the site.

Review the Privacy Policy for details about analytics processing.

World Wide
SeminarsConferencesWorkshopsCoursesJobsMapsFeedLibrary
Back to SeminarsBack
SeminarPast EventNeuroscience

Individual differences in visual (mis)perception: a multivariate statistical approach

Aline Cretenoud

Laboratory of Psychophysics, BMI, SV, EPFL

Schedule
Wednesday, December 8, 2021

Showing your local timezone

Schedule

Wednesday, December 8, 2021

1:15 PM Europe/Zurich

Host: NeuroLeman Network

Access Seminar

Event Information

Domain

Neuroscience

Original Event

View source

Host

NeuroLeman Network

Duration

70 minutes

Abstract

Common factors are omnipresent in everyday life, e.g., it is widely held that there is a common factor g for intelligence. In vision, however, there seems to be a multitude of specific factors rather than a strong and unique common factor. In my thesis, I first examined the multidimensionality of the structure underlying visual illusions. To this aim, the susceptibility to various visual illusions was measured. In addition, subjects were tested with variants of the same illusion, which differed in spatial features, luminance, orientation, or contextual conditions. Only weak correlations were observed between the susceptibility to different visual illusions. An individual showing a strong susceptibility to one visual illusion does not necessarily show a strong susceptibility to other visual illusions, suggesting that the structure underlying visual illusions is multifactorial. In contrast, there were strong correlations between the susceptibility to variants of the same illusion. Hence, factors seem to be illusion-specific but not feature-specific. Second, I investigated whether a strong visual factor emerges in healthy elderly and patients with schizophrenia, which may be expected from the general decline in perceptual abilities usually reported in these two populations compared to healthy young adults. Similarly, a strong visual factor may emerge in action video gamers, who often show enhanced perceptual performance compared to non-video gamers. Hence, healthy elderly, patients with schizophrenia, and action video gamers were tested with a battery of visual tasks, such as a contrast detection and orientation discrimination task. As in control groups, between-task correlations were weak in general, which argues against the emergence of a strong common factor for vision in these populations. While similar tasks are usually assumed to rely on similar neural mechanisms, the performances in different visual tasks were only weakly related to each other, i.e., performance does not generalize across visual tasks. These results highlight the relevance of an individual differences approach to unravel the multidimensionality of the visual structure.

Topics

action video gamerscontextual conditionsindividual differencesluminanceorientationschizophreniaspatial featuressusceptibilityvisual illusionsvisual perception

About the Speaker

Aline Cretenoud

Laboratory of Psychophysics, BMI, SV, EPFL

Contact & Resources

Personal Website

www.epfl.ch/schools/sv/bmi/brain-mind-institute/neuroscience-events/

@NeuroLeman

Follow on Twitter/X

twitter.com/NeuroLeman

Related Seminars

Seminar60%

Knight ADRC Seminar

neuro

Jan 20, 2025
Washington University in St. Louis, Neurology
Seminar60%

TBD

neuro

Jan 20, 2025
King's College London
Seminar60%

Guiding Visual Attention in Dynamic Scenes

neuro

Jan 20, 2025
Haifa U
January 2026
Full calendar →