TY  - JOUR
A1  - Rolfs, Martin
A1  - Dambacher, Michael
A1  - Cavanagh, Patrick
T1  - Visual adaptation of the perception of causality
JF  - Current biology
N2  - We easily recover the causal properties of visual events, enabling us to understand and predict changes in the physical world. We see a tennis racket hitting a ball and sense that it caused the ball to fly over the net; we may also have an eerie but equally compelling experience of causality if the streetlights turn on just as we slam our car's door. Both perceptual [1] and cognitive [2] processes have been proposed to explain these spontaneous inferences, but without decisive evidence one way or the other, the question remains wide open [3-8]. Here, we address this long-standing debate using visual adaptation-a powerful tool to uncover neural populations that specialize in the analysis of specific visual features [9-12]. After prolonged viewing of causal collision events called "launches" [1], subsequently viewed events were judged more often as noncausal. These negative aftereffects of exposure to collisions are spatially localized in retinotopic coordinates, the reference frame shared by the retina and visual cortex. They are not explained by adaptation to other stimulus features and reveal visual routines in retinotopic cortex that detect and adapt to cause and effect in simple collision stimuli.
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.017
SN  - 0960-9822
VL  - 23
IS  - 3
SP  - 250
EP  - 254
PB  - Cell Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Dambacher, Michael
A1  - Slattery, Timothy J.
A1  - Yang, Jinmian
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
A1  - Rayner, Keith
T1  - Evidence for direct control of eye movements during reading
JF  - Journal of experimental psychology : Human perception and performance
N2  - It is well established that fixation durations during reading vary with processing difficulty, but there are different views on how oculomotor control, visual perception, shifts of attention, and lexical (and higher cognitive) processing are coordinated. Evidence for a one-to-one translation of input delay into saccadic latency would provide a much needed constraint for current theoretical proposals. Here, we tested predictions of such a direct-control perspective using the stimulus-onset delay (SOD) paradigm. Words in sentences were initially masked and, on fixation, were individually unmasked with a delay (0-, 33-, 66-, 99-ms SODs). In Experiment 1, SODs were constant for all words in a sentence; in Experiment 2, SODs were manipulated on target words, while nontargets were unmasked without delay. In accordance with predictions of direct control, nonzero SODs entailed equivalent increases in fixation durations in both experiments. Yet, a population of short fixations pointed to rapid saccades as a consequence of low-level information at nonoptimal viewing positions rather than of lexical processing. Implications of these results for theoretical accounts of oculomotor control are discussed.
KW  - stimulus-onset delay
KW  - oculomotor control
KW  - fixation durations
KW  - sentence reading
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031647
SN  - 0096-1523
VL  - 39
IS  - 5
SP  - 1468
EP  - 1484
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  -