Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
iScience
Volume
23
Issue
10
Publisher
Elsevier
School
School of Nursing and Midwifery
RAS ID
32250
Funders
Australian Research Council
Grant Number
ARC Number : DP150101731
Grant Link
http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP150101731
Abstract
Perception is a proactive ‘‘predictive’’ process, in which the brain takes advantage of past experience to make informed guesses about the world to test against sensory data. Here we demonstrate that in the judgment of the gender of faces, beta rhythms play an important role in communicating perceptual experience. Observers classified in forced choice as male or female, a sequence of face stimuli, which were physically constructed to be male or female or androgynous (equal morph). Classification of the androgynous stimuli oscillated rhythmically between male and female, following a complex waveform comprising 13.5 and 17 Hz. Parsing the trials based on the preceding stimulus showed that responses to androgynous stimuli preceded by male stimuli oscillated reliably at 17 Hz, whereas those preceded by female stimuli oscillated at 13.5 Hz. These results suggest that perceptual priors for face perception from recent perceptual memory are communicated through frequency-coded beta rhythms.
DOI
10.1016/j.isci.2020.101573
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
Bell, J., Burr, D. C., Crookes, K., & Morrone, M. C. (2020). Perceptual oscillations in gender classification of faces, contingent on stimulus history. IScience, 23(10), article101573. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2020.101573