
Chai-Youn KimKorea University | KU · Department of Psychology
Chai-Youn Kim
PhD
About
76
Publications
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Introduction
Chai-Youn Kim currently works at the Department of Psychology, Korea University. Chai-Youn does research in Psychophysics and brain imaging. Current projects include contextual modulation of visual perception, multisensory correspondence, multisensory integration, and neuroaesthetics.
Additional affiliations
March 2018 - present
July 2014 - August 2015
March 2013 - present
Education
August 2001 - May 2006
March 1997 - February 2000
March 1993 - February 1997
Publications
Publications (76)
Motion aftereffects (MAEs), illusory motion experienced in a direction opposed to real motion experienced during prior adaptation, have been used to assess audiovisual interactions. In a previous study from our laboratory, we demonstrated that a congruent direction of auditory motion presented concurrently with visual motion during adaptation stren...
It has been shown that there is a non-random association between shape and color. However, the results of previous studies on the shape-color correspondence did not converge. To address the issue, we focused on shape complexity among a number of shape properties, particularly in terms of 3D shape, and parametrically manipulated the shape complexity...
Grapheme-color synesthetes experience graphemes as having a consistent color (e.g., “N is turquoise”). Synesthetes’ specific associations (which letter is which color) are often influenced by linguistic properties such as phonetic similarity, color terms (“Y is yellow”), and semantic associations (“D is for dog and dogs are brown”). However, most s...
Familiarity and novelty are fundamental yet competing factors influencing aesthetic preference. However, whether people prefer familiar paintings or novel paintings has not been clear. Using both behavioral and eye-tracking measures, the present study aimed to investigate whether the effect of familiarity-novelty on aesthetic preference is independ...
Grapheme-color synesthetes experience graphemes as having a consistent color (e.g., “N is turquoise”). Synesthetes’ specific associations (which letter is which color) are influenced by linguistic properties (letter frequency, phonetic similarity, etc.), and plausibly reveal the characteristics of underlying letter representations. Despite their cl...
Cross-modal correspondence is the tendency to systematically map stimulus features across sensory modalities. The current study explored cross-modal correspondence between speech sound and shape (Experiment 1), and whether such association can influence shape representation (Experiment 2). For the purpose of closely examining the role of the two fa...
Sensory information registered in one modality can influence perception associated with sensory information registered in another modality. The current work focuses on one particularly salient form of such multisensory interaction: audio-visual motion perception. Previous studies have shown that watching visual motion and listening to auditory moti...
Food involvement is one of the personality traits that influences the food cognition and behavior of consumers. Given the irrelevance of previous food involvement scales such as measuring lifestyle diligence and a food culture, this study aimed to develop the food involvement inventory (FII) designed specifically for foods and current consumers. Th...
Accumulating evidence has demonstrated the existence of non-arbitrary correspondence between sensory modalities. For example, studies report non-arbitrary relationship between visual shape and sound: people tend to label a round shape ‘bouba’ and a spiky shape ‘kiki’ (Köhler, 1947; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). Since such relationship is well esta...
Audible sounds naturally associated with specific visual stimuli can potentiate awareness of those stimuli during binocular rivalry (Chen et al., 2011; Lee, M., et al., 2015), implying formation of semantically congruent multisensory associations outside of awareness. Is awareness required for establishment of multisensory congruence between low-le...
Familiarity and novelty are fundamental, competing factors influencing preference (Fantz, 1964; Zajonc,1968). It has been suggested that the effect of familiarity and novelty on preference judgments is modulated by complexity (Berlyne, 1970). Also shown was that the relative influence of familiarity and novelty are distinguishable for preference of...
Grapheme-color synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which viewing a grapheme elicits an additional, automatic, and consistent sensation of color. Color-to-letter associations in synesthesia are interesting in their own right, but also offer an opportunity to examine relationships between visual, acoustic, and semantic aspects of language. Re...
It has recently been reported in the synesthesia literature that graphemes sharing the same phonetic feature tend to induce similar synesthetic colors. In the present study, we investigated whether phonetic properties are associated with colors in a specific manner among the general population, even when other visual and linguistic features of grap...
An important factor affecting preference formation is the context in which that preference decision takes place. The current research examined whether one’s preference formed for a previously presented stimulus influences the processing of a subsequent preference decision, henceforth referred to as the preference sequence effect. Using a novel sequ...
Individuals possessing absolute pitch (AP) are able to identify a given musical tone or to reproduce it without reference to another tone. The present study sought to learn whether this exceptional auditory ability impacts visual perception under stimulus conditions that provoke visual competition in the form of binocular rivalry. Nineteen adult pa...
Normalized dominance/suppression durations.
Mean values of normalized dominance and suppression durations plotted for each group based on three-group categorization. Asterisks indicate statistically significant difference between a pair of AV conditions (* p < .05).
(TIF)
Predominance.
Predominance values plotted for each group based on three-group categorization. Asterisks indicate statistically significant difference between a pair of AV conditions (* p < .05).
(TIF)
Individuals with grapheme-color synesthesia experience idiosyncratic colors when viewing achromatic letters or digits. Despite large individual differences in grapheme-color association, synesthetes tend to associate graphemes sharing a perceptual feature with similar synesthetic colors. Sound has been suggested as one such feature. In the present...
Early visual experience sculpts neural mechanisms that regulate the balance of influence exerted by the two eyes on cortical mechanisms underlying binocular vision [1, 2], and experience's impact on this neural balancing act continues into adulthood [3-5]. One recently described, compelling example of adult neural plasticity is the effect of patchi...
Women tend to respond to emotional stimuli differently from men. This study aimed at investigating whether neural responses to perceptually “invisible” emotional stimuli differ between men and women by exploiting event-related potential (ERP). Forty healthy participants (21 women) were recruited for the main experiment. A control experiment was con...
Severe emotional disturbances such as anxiety and depression have been closely related to aberrant attentional processing of emotional stimuli. However, this has been little studied in schizophrenia, which is also characterized by marked emotional impairments such as heightened negative affect and anhedonia. In the current study, we investigated te...
Psychophysiological and functional neuroimaging studies have frequently and consistently shown that emotional information can be processed outside of the conscious awareness. Non-conscious processing comprises automatic, uncontrolled, and fast processing that occurs without subjective awareness. However, how such non-conscious emotional processing...
Individuals with absolute pitch (AP) are able to identify or reproduce a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone (Deutsch, 2013). They tend to utilize AP when matching visually presented musical scores with auditorily presented melodies, showing poor performance in recognizing a shifted tone in a transposed melody (Miyazaki and R...
People are adept at recognizing biological motion portrayed by a handful of dots (Johansson, 1973). Visual processing of biological motion is influenced by accompanying information from different sensory modalities (Arrighi et al., 2009; Saygin et al., 2008; Thomas & Shiffrar, 2010) or neighboring biological motion (Ikeda et al., 2013; Thornton et...
It has been suggested that graphemes of similar sound tend to be associated with analogous synesthetic colors in grapheme-color synesthesia (Asano & Yokosawa, 2011; 2012; Shin & Kim, 2014). A work in our group also showed that graphemes sharing phonetic rules - i.e., the place and the manner of articulation - tend to induce similar synesthetic colo...
Significance
When left and right eyes disagree about what is being viewed, the brain resolves the disagreement by compromise: Visual awareness alternates between the two eyes’ views over time. Called “binocular rivalry,” these alternations in awareness are widely thought to reveal the usually implicit inferential nature of visual processing. In thi...
Background: A work in our group showed that the neural machinery ordinarily engaged during perception of real visual motion is activated when people view paintings explicitly designed to convey a sense of visual motion (Kim& Blake, 2007). The involvement of the motion sensitive area MT+, however, was specific to people who have prior experience wit...
Artists such as Duchamp and Balla tried to portray moving objects on static canvases by superimposing snapshots of moving objects. Previously, our group showed the influence of prior experience on brain responses within a motion-sensitive area MT+ to abstract paintings with or without implied motion (Kim and Blake, 2007 Spatial Vision 20 545–560)....
We will present recent studies exploiting various paradigmatic phenomena for manipulating conscious visual awareness, which includes bistable perception, crowding, and continuous flash suppression. The symposium will further explore factors influencing our becoming consciously aware of visual stimuli; attention, imagery, emotion, and learning will...
Bistable perception has been considered as a useful means to study visual awareness since it induces spontaneous fluctuation in awareness despite constant physical stimulation. Whether visual awareness during bistable perception is modulated by emotional valence associated with one of the two visual interpretations has been of great interest. This...
The present study investigates the neural mechanisms underlying consumer perception of products with visual designs that are accompanied by additional, implied sensory experiences. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) results showed that those brain areas involved in the actual perception of the relevant sensory stimuli were also involved i...
People with color-graphemic synesthesia experience vivid colors when viewing achromatic alphanumeric characters. We tested two such individuals on tasks for which color is ordinarily important. Binocular Rivalry: Spatially distributed objects of the same color tend to dominate simultaneously during binocular rivalry. In synesthetic observers WO and...
Background. Individuals get better with practice on a variety of perceptual and cognitive tasks, and this learning is thought to reflect plasticity in underlying neural mechanisms. Is perceptual learning of biological motion reflected in the neural activity of the brain areas underlying perception of these displays, namely STSp and FFA? We trained...
Background: When observers view ambiguous figures for prolonged period of time, they experience perceptual alternations between two possible visual interpretations (Leopold & Logothetis, 2003). Dubbed bistable perception, this phenomenon has been considered as a useful means to study visual awareness since it induces spontaneous fluctuation in awar...
Early 20th century artists including Duchamp and Balla tried to portray moving objects on a static canvas by superimposing objects in successive portrayals of an action. We investigated whether implied motion in those paintings is associated with activation of motion-sensitive area MT+. In Experiment 1, we found that observers rated these kinds of...
Background: Individuals with color-graphemic synesthesia experience colors when viewing achromatic alphanumeric characters, and accompanying synesthesia is activation of color-responsive brain areas. Whether real and synesthetic colors arise from activation of the same population of neurons remains unknown, however, so we used rapid, event-related...
Williams syndrome is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder with a distinctive phenotype, including cognitive-linguistic features, nonsocial anxiety, and a strong attraction to music. we preformed functional MRI studies examining brain responses to musical and other types of stimuli in young adults with Williams syndrome and typically developing con...
During binocular rivalry local image features distributed over space and between the eyes achieve simultaneous dominance at times; the resulting global figure implicates interocular grouping. Anecdotal evidence suggests that color tends to influence the incidence of global dominance, and in this study we have assessed the strength of this influence...
When dissimilar monocular images are presented separately to each of a person's eyes, these images compete for visual dominance, with dominance of one image or the other alternating over time. While this phenomenon, called binocular rivalry, transpires, local image features distributed over space and between the eyes can become visually dominant at...
Early 20th century artists including Duchamp and Balla tried to portray moving objects on a static canvas by superimposing objects in successive portrayals of an action. We investigated whether implied motion in those paintings is associated with activation of motion-sensitive area MT+. In Experiment 1, we found that observers rated these kinds of...
People with color-graphemic synesthesia experience vivid, reliable color upon viewing achromatic alphanumeric characters. Recent evidence indicates that synesthetic color experiences are as perceptually real as actual colors are for non-synesthetic observers. To investigate possible interactions between real and synesthetic colors, we tested two ad...
What are the neural correlates of conscious visual awareness? Tackling this question requires contrasting neural correlates of stimulus processing culminating in visual awareness with neural correlates of stimulus processing unaccompanied by awareness. To produce these two neural states, one must be able to erase an otherwise visible stimulus from...
Individuals improve with practice on a variety of perceptual tasks, presumably reflecting plasticity in underlying neural mechanisms. We trained observers to discriminate biological motion from scrambled (nonbiological) motion and examined whether the resulting improvement in perceptual performance was accompanied by changes in activation within th...
Owing to its bizarre nature and its implications for understanding how brains work, synesthesia has recently received a lot of attention in the popular press and motivated a great deal of research and discussion among scientists. The questions generated by these two communities are intriguing: Does the synesthetic phenomenon require awareness and a...
Strabismus and anisometropia early in life frequently causes monocular amblyopia. Activation of the visual cortex is compared between the two types of amblyopia to elucidate differences in the pathogenetic mechanism of the disease.
Using an EPI gradient echo sequence in 1.5T MRI, calcarine activation by monocular viewing of checkerboard patterns wi...
Thesis (Ph. D. in Psychology)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2006. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 145-158).