Burcu A. Urgen

• PhD in UCSD Cognitive Science
• Professor (Assistant) at Bilkent University

This study investigates recognition memory in healthy older individuals, emphasizing the impact of expected (familiar) and unexpected (novel) semantically complex visual stimulus on recognition performance. A digital recognition task was created using monochromatic illustrations representing either expected (e.g., a person cooking in a kitchen) or...

Visual perception of biological motion (BM) is essential in comprehending our environment. Despite the well-established contribution of cross-modal priming to our understanding of BM perception, the influence of expectations in audiovisual settings remains unexplored. The present study investigates the impact of congruent and incongruent auditory c...

Introduction Chemosensory food signals are carried by the vagus nerve (VN) from the gut to the brain and these signals contribute to communicating fullness and caloric value of the consumed food in regulatory and reward‐related contexts. Here, we aimed to explore whether neural responses to flavor can be modulated through noninvasive VN stimulation...

Biological motion perception (BMP) is fundamental for interpreting and predicting human actions, playing a crucial role in social cognition. While traditionally viewed as a bottom-up process, recent evidence suggests that top-down mechanisms, particularly expectations, influence BMP. This fMRI study investigates how prior expectations shape BMP by...

We present the HR-ACT (Human-Robot Action) Database, a comprehensive collection of 80 standardized videos featuring matched communicative and noncommunicative actions performed by both a humanoid robot (Pepper) and a human actor. We describe the creation of 40 action exemplars per agent, with actions executed in a similar manner, timing, and number...

This study takes an interdisciplinary approach to investigate interior space perception—environments where people spend much of their daily lives—by examining behavior and brain activity. Integrating psychology, neuroscience, and architecture, it explores three key components of aesthetic experience—familiarity, excitement, and fascination—within v...

The present study aims to examine the role of social robots in enriching older adults’ environments and helping them cope with the problems that decrease their well-being and life quality. To understand how social robots can be integrated into older adults’ lives, we investigated both older adults’ and caretakers’ attitudes toward social robots. Fo...

The study of scene perception is crucial to the understanding of how one interprets and interacts with their environment, and how the environment impacts various cognitive functions. The literature so far has mainly focused on the impact of low-level and categorical properties of scenes and how they are represented in the scene-selective regions in...

The study aims to investigate participants’ aesthetic experience in response to environments with curvilinear boundaries that are presented in two different virtual environments (VEs), namely immersive (IVE) and desktop-based virtual environments (DTVE). To this end, 60 participants were presented with 360° 32 VE visualizations that had either hori...

Our attentional resources are allocated to the various aspects of the environment based on the context, and predictive coding has been used as a model to explain the interaction between sensory-based information and top-down expectations in visual attention (Spratling, 2008; Rauss et al., 2011). On the other hand, the saliency of the environmental...

In the present study, we introduce an image database created with a simple digital line-drawing tool to represent the expected and unexpected action-place relationships. This database consists of 70 drawings. We validated the dataset with 207 participants. They evaluated the actions, places, and the probability of an action taking place in the resp...

Goal-directed actions are characterized by two main features: the content (i.e., the action goal) and the form, called vitality forms (VF) (i.e., how actions are executed). It is well established that both the action content and the capacity to understand the content of another’s action are mediated by a network formed by a set of parietal and fron...

Perceiving others' actions is essential for survival and social interaction. Cognitive neuroscience research has identified a network of brain regions crucial to visual action perception, known as the Action Observation Network (AON), comprising the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTS), posterior parietal cortex, and premotor cortex. Recent re...

49 This study investigates how an agent's name (masculine, feminine, neutral, technical, no-50 name) and type (human, robot) can impact evaluations of autonomy, which is characterized 51 both by explicit and implicit measurements. Explicit measurements include questions 52 regarding agency, anthropomorphism, competency, and (gender) identity attrib...

Agent perception is essential for social interaction, allowing individuals to interpret and respond to the actions of others within dynamic environments. In this study, we examined how prior knowledge and motion cues are integrated to influence the temporal dynamics of perceiving agents. In order to make realistic but ambiguous stimuli in motion an...

Visual perception of biological motion plays a crucial role in comprehending our environment. Despite the well-established contribution of multisensory integration to our understanding of biological motion perception, whether expectations affect our biological motion perception in audiovisual settings remains unexplored. The present study investiga...

İnsan olmayan primatlarla yapılan nörofizyolojik çalışmalar, algısal karar vermeyi iki aşamalı bir süreçle karakterize etmektedir: 1) duyusal kanıt birikimi (accumulation of sensory evidence), 2) yanıt seçimine yol açan karar sınırı (decision bound). Bu çalışmalar yaygın olarak rastgele nokta hareketi uyaranlarını kullanmış ve hareket uyaranlarının...

Biological motion perception plays a crucial role in understanding the actions of other animals, facilitating effective social interactions. While foundation of biological motion perception is rooted in bottom-up processes, as evidenced by point-light display studies, real-world complexities necessitate the involvement of top-down processes, such a...

Son 20 yıl içinde yapay zekâ alanındaki gelişmeler, insanlarla etkileşimde bulunan ve bu etkileşimlerden öğrenen sosyal robotları insanların sosyal yaşamına dahil etmiştir. Günümüzde, çocuklara matematik ya da dil öğreten, otizmli bireylerin tedavi ve rehabilitasyonunda kullanılan ya da banka ve restoranlarda müşteriyi yönlendiren sosyal robotlar m...

The study of scene perception is crucial to the understanding of how one interprets and interacts with their environment, and how the environment impacts various cognitive functions. The literature so far has mainly focused on the impact of low-level and categorical properties of scenes and how they are represented in the scene-selective regions in...

İnsanlar dahil olmak üzere tüm hayvanların sahip olduğu temel bir beceri, çevredeki diğer canlıların hareket ve eylemlerini algılama ve tanıma yeteneğidir. Günümüze kadar yapılan nörofizyolojik ve nörogörüntüleme çalışmaları, çevremizdeki diğer canlıların eylemlerini algılamak için önemli ve gerekli olan beyin bölgelerini büyük ölçüde tanımlamıştır...

Biological motion perception plays a critical role in various decisions in daily life for humans. Failure to decide accordingly in such a perceptual task could have life-threatening consequences. Neurophysiological studies on non-human primates and computational modeling studies suggest two processes that mediate perceptual decision-making. One of...

Biological motion perception plays a critical role in various decisions in daily life for humans. Failure to decide accordingly in such a perceptual task could have life-threatening consequences. Neurophysiological studies on non-human primates and computational modeling studies suggest two processes that mediate perceptual decision-making. One of...

Perceptual load theory argues that attention is a limited resource and stimuli cannot be processed if there is insufficient perceptual capacity available. Although attention is known to modulate biological motion processing, whether this modulation differs among different perceptual loads remains unknown. To answer this question, three experiments...

Perception of others' actions is crucial for survival, interaction, and communication. Despite decades of cognitive neuroscience research dedicated to understanding the perception of actions, we are still far away from developing a neurally inspired computer vision system that approaches human action perception. A major challenge is that actions in...

People are exposed to indoor lighting almost 90% of their lives. The frequency of light is perceived by the human eye as color. Correlated color temperature (CCT) in light, expressed in Kelvin (K). As the wavelength (nm) increases, the colors form a scale extending from cool to warm colors. According to Lavie's load model of attention (2005), atten...

Users' personality traits can provide different clues about them in the Internet environment. Some areas where these clues can be used are law enforcement, advertising agencies, recruitment processes, and e-commerce applications. In this study, it is aimed to create a dataset and a prediction model for predicting the personality traits of Internet...

Recent work in cognitive science suggests that our expectations affect visual perception. With the rise of artificial agents in human life in the last few decades, one important question is whether our expectations about non-human agents such as humanoid robots affect how we perceive them. In the present study, we addressed this question in an audi...

Considering its importance for survival and social significance, biological motion (BM) perception is assumed to occur automatically. Indeed, Thornton and Vuong (2004) showed that task-irrelevant BM in the periphery interfered with task performance at the fovea. However, the neural underpinnings of this bottom-up processing of BM lacks thorough exa...

The recent shift towards incorporating implicit measurements into the mind perception studies in social robotics has come along with its promises and challenges. The implicit tasks can go beyond the limited scope of the explicit tasks and increase the robustness of empirical investigations in human-robot interaction (HRI). How-ever, designing valid...

The present study aims to investigate how gender stereotypes affect people's gender attribution to social robots. To this end, we examined whether a robot can be assigned a gender depending on a performed action. The study consists of 3 stages. In the first stage, we determined masculine and feminine actions by a survey conducted with 54 participan...

The investigation of the perception of others’ actions and underlying neural mechanisms has been hampered by the lack of a comprehensive stimulus set covering the human behavioral repertoire. To fill this void, we present a video set showing 100 human actions recorded in natural settings, covering the human repertoire except for emotion-driven (e.g...

Biological motion (BM) perception under selective attention is supported by a network of regions including the occipito-temporal, parietal, and premotor cortices. Considering the effortless processing and social importance of BM for humans, it can be assumed to occur automatically. Consistently, Thornton and Vuong (2004) showed that task-irrelevant...

The ability to extract information from the body movements of others is crucial for predicting the behavior of others and survival. Humans can infer the action, emotional state, and gender of others from a set of dots known as point-light biological motion. The present study investigates whether prior knowledge about the action, gender, and emotion...

Object and action perception in cluttered dynamic natural scenes relies on efficient allocation of limited brain resources to prioritize the attended targets over distractors. It has been suggested that during visual search for objects, distributed semantic representation of hundreds of object categories is warped to expand the representation of ta...

Visual perception of architectural spaces and human aesthetic experience in these spaces have recently received considerable interest in cognitive science. However, it has been difficult to construe a common understanding of aesthetic experience for architectural space, since different studies use different scales to measure aesthetic experiences....

Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been gaining increasing interest as a practical mobile functional brain imaging technology for understanding the neural correlates of social cognition and emotional processing in the human prefrontal cortex (PFC). Considering the cognitive complexity of human-robot interactions, the aim of this stud...

There is a need to obtain more information about target audiences in many areas such as law enforcement agencies, institutions, human resources, and advertising agencies. In this context, in addition to the information provided by individuals, their personal characteristics are also important. In particular, the predictability of personality traits...

“Uncanny Valley Hypothesis” suggests that humanoid objects that materialize human beings virtually but not entirely realistically may elicit uncanny feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. While the uncanny valley (UV) has been largely investigated with a focus on the visual aspects of the robot-like designs with young adults, the auditory...

“Uncanny Valley Hypothesis” suggests that humanoid objects that materialize human beings virtually but not entirely realistically may elicit uncanny feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. While the uncanny valley (UV) has been largely investigated with a focus on the visual aspects of the robot-like designs with young adults, the auditory...

Recent work in cognitive science suggests that our expectations affect visual perception. With the rise of artificial agents in human life in the last few decades, one important question is whether our expectations about non-human agents such as humanoid robots affect how we perceive them. In the present study, we addressed this question in an audi...

Object and action perception in cluttered dynamic natural scenes relies on efficient allocation of limited brain resources to prioritize the attended targets over distractors. It has been suggested that during visual search for objects, distributed semantic representation of hundreds of object categories is warped to expand the representation of ta...

Action observation is supported by a network of regions in occipito-temporal, parietal, and premotor cortex in primates. Recent research suggests that the parietal node has regions dedicated to different action classes including manipulation, interpersonal interactions, skin displacement, locomotion, and climbing. The goals of the current study con...

Mind perception is considered to be the ability to attribute mental states to non-human beings. As social robots increasingly become part of our lives, one important question for HRI is to what extent we attribute mental states to these agents and the conditions under which we do so. In the present study, we investigated the effect of appearance an...

Action observation is supported by a network of regions in occipito-temporal, parietal, and premotor cortex in primates. Recent research suggests that the parietal node has regions dedicated to different action classes including manipulation, interpersonal, skin-displacing, locomotion, and climbing. The goals of the current study consist of: 1) ext...

People spend most of their time in buildings and interact intimately with the interior spaces. The impact of interior spaces on human psychology could be measured using the aesthetic and emotional assessments. Therefore, this study proposes a new aesthetic and emotional framework with its psychological dimensions for the built environment. Accordin...

When observing others’ behavior, it is important to perceive not only the identity of the observed actions, but also the number of times they were performed. Given the mounting evidence implicating posterior parietal cortex in action observation, and in particular that of manipulative actions, the aim of this study was to identify the parietal regi...

Objectives: Mind perception refers to the ability to attribute mental states to a living or inanimate being (Grey et al., 2007). Previous research has shown that mind perception has two dimensions: Agency and Experience. While Agency is defined to have the ability to perform some behavior (e.g. grasping an object), Experience is defined to have the...

Visual perception of actions is supported by a network of brain regions in the occipito-temporal, parietal, and premotor cortex in the primate brain, known as the Action Observation Network (AON). Although there is a growing body of research that characterizes the functional properties of each node of this network, the communication and direction o...

Visual perception of actions is supported by a network of brain regions in the occipito-temporal, parietal, and premotor cortex in the primate brain, known as the Action Observation Network (AON). Although there is a growing body of research that characterizes the functional properties of each node of this network, the communication and direction o...

Visual processing of actions is supported by a network consisting of occipito-temporal, parietal, and premotor regions in the human brain, known as the Action Observation Network (AON). In the present study, we investigate what aspects of visually perceived actions are represented in this network using fMRI and computational modeling. Human subject...

Visual processing of actions is supported by a network of brain regions in occipito-temporal, parietal, and premotor cortex in the primate brain, known as the Action Observation Network (AON). What remain unclear are the representational properties of each node of this network. In this study, we investigated the representational content of brain ar...

Successfully perceiving and recognizing the actions of others is of utmost importance for the survival of many species. For humans, action perception is considered to support important higher order social skills, such as communication, intention understanding and empathy, some of which may be uniquely human. Over the last two decades, neurophysiolo...

Over the last two decades neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies have identified a network of brain regions in occipito-temporal, parietal, and frontal cortex that are involved in visual processing of actions. What remains unclear are the neural computations and representational properties in each area. In this study, we investigated the repre...

In natural vision, although moving objects are often partially or fully occluded, we are able to maintain coherent representations of them and their locations. The form of an object can influence judgments regarding its motion path, especially for the case of biological motion (Shiffrar and Freyd, 1990). Moreover, these effects can be dependent on...

Understanding others’ actions is essential for functioning in the physical and social world. In the past two decades research has shown that action perception involves the motor system, supporting theories that we understand others’ behavior via embodied motor simulation. Recently, empirical approach to action perception has been facilitated by usi...

The uncanny valley hypothesis suggests that robots that are humanoid in appearance elicit positive and empathetic responses, but that there is a point where the robot design is very close to human, the robot becomes repulsive [1]. A possible mechanism underlying this phenomenon is based on the predictive coding theory of neural computations [2,3]....

Recent work in cognitive and systems neuroscience suggests that the brain is a prediction machine ([Clark, 2013][1]), continually attempting to predict the external causes of sensory information. This idea is formulated in the predictive coding framework, a modern theory of brain function ([Friston

Although neuroimaging studies have advanced our understanding of cortical representations of object characteristics such as animacy, little is known about temporal aspects of associated processes. In the current study, we investigated with millisecond resolution when the brain shows differential processing of biological agents. We used unique stimu...

The perception of others' actions supports important skills such as communication, intention understanding, and empathy. Are mechanisms of action processing in the human brain specifically tuned to process biological agents? Humanoid robots can perform recognizable actions, but can look and move differently from humans, and as such, can be used in...

Successfully perceiving and understanding others’ body movements supports a variety of perceptual and cognitive processes such as recognizing people, understanding events, detecting communicative intent, inferring intentions, feeling compassion and empathy toward others (Blake & Shiffrar, 2007). Despite intense interest from various sub-fields of c...

The perception of others' body movements is subserved by a network of lateral temporal, parietal, and premotor brain areas, here called the action perception system (APS). Using fMRI adaptation, we explored selectivity for biological motion and/or biological form in this network. Participants watched 2 s clips of recognizable actions of a human (bi...

We used fMRI to study the modulation of retinotopic maps in human cortex by top-down and bottom-up attention. We presented point-light biological motion or scrambled control stimuli in a phase-encoded polar angle mapping paradigm. The background of the stimuli was either empty, or contained the opposite stimulus type. Subjects fixated and always ig...

This study analyses the methodology of computational cognitive modeling as one of the ways of conducting research in cognitive science. The aim of the study is to provide an understanding of the place of computational cognitive models in understanding human cognition. Considering the vast number of computational cognitive models which have been jus...