The Advantage of Ambiguity? Enhanced Neural Responses to Multi-Stable Percepts Correlate with the Degree of Perceived Instability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Artwork can often pique the interest of the viewer or listener as a result of the ambiguity or instability contained within it. Our engagement with uncertain sensory experiences might have its origins in early cortical responses, in that perceptually unstable stimuli might preclude neural habituation and maintain activity in early sensory areas. To assess this idea, participants engaged with an ambiguous visual stimulus wherein two squares alternated with one another, in terms of simultaneously opposing vertical and horizontal locations relative to fixation (i.e., stroboscopic alternating motion; von Schiller, 1933). At each trial, participants were invited to interpret the movement of the squares in one of five ways: traditional vertical or horizontal motion, novel clockwise or counter-clockwise motion, and, a free-view condition in which participants were encouraged to switch the direction of motion as often as possible. Behavioral reports of perceptual stability showed clockwise and counter-clockwise motion to possess an intermediate level of stability compared to relatively stable vertical and horizontal motion, and, relatively unstable motion perceived during free-view conditions. Early visual evoked components recorded at parietal-occipital sites such as C1, P1, and N1 modulated as a function of visual intention. Both at a group and individual level, increased perceptual instability was related to increased negativity in all three of these early visual neural responses. Engagement with increasingly ambiguous input may partly result from the underlying exaggerated neural response to it. The study underscores the utility of combining neuroelectric recording with the presentation of perceptually multi-stable yet physically identical stimuli, in revealing brain activity associated with the purely internal process of interpreting and appreciating the sensory world that surrounds us.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".