Lawrence E Marks

The John B. Pierce Laboratory | The Pierce Laboratory · Sensory Information Processing

The past two decades have seen an explosion of research on crossmodal correspondences. Broadly speaking, this term has been used to encompass associations between and among features, dimensions, or attributes across the senses. There has been an increasing interest in this topic amongst researchers from multiple fields (psychology, neuroscience, mu...

This is a collection of paintings compiled by Ninghui Xiong himself, chronicling his creation of painting music project for over two decades. It includes his paintings, research papers, creative tools, process records, and applications. The book consists of three chapters, “Driven by Music”, “Dialogue with Music”, and “Painting, Music and Poetry”....

Musical timbre is often described using terms from non-auditory senses, mainly vision and touch; but it is not clear whether crossmodality in tim-bre semantics reflects multisensory processing or simply linguistic convention. If multisensory processing is involved in timbre perception, the mechanism governing the interaction remains unknown. To inv...

Flavorants such as lemon extract that activate olfactory receptors may also evoke or enhance flavor qualities such as sour and sweet that are typically considered gustatory. Similarly, flavorants such as sucrose and citric acid that activate gustatory receptors may enhance flavors such as citrus that are typically considered olfactory. Here, we ask...

Flavor perception is multisensory. Twelve participants rated, in different sessions, either overall perceived intensity or perceived citrus, sour, and sweet components of mixtures of lemon, citric acid, and sucrose. The sum of the perceived components exceeded overall perceived intensity, contravening the frequent assumption that perceivers can ful...

Judgments of taste intensity often show contextual contrast but not assimilation, even though both effects of stimulus context appear in other sense modalities, such as hearing. Four experiments used a paradigm that shifts the stimulus context within a test session in order to seek evidence of assimilation in judgments of the taste intensity of suc...

Raw data—Experiment 1

Raw data—Experiment 2

Two experiments presented oral mixtures containing different proportions of the gustatory flavorant sucrose and an olfactory flavorant, either citral (Experiment 1) or lemon (Experiment 2). In 4 different sessions of each experiment, subjects identified each mixture as “mostly sugar” or “mostly citrus/lemon” or rated the perceived intensities of th...

Previous research shows that people systematically match tastes with shapes. Here, we assess the extent to which matched taste and shape stimuli share a common semantic space and whether semantically congruent versus incongruent taste/shape associations can influence the speed with which people respond to both shapes and taste words. In Experiment...

Previous research shows that people systematically match tastes with shapes. Here, we assessed the extent to which matching taste and shape stimuli share a common semantic space and whether semantically congruent versus incongruent taste/shape associations can influence the speed with which people respond to both shapes and taste words. In Experime...

Previous research shows that people systematically match tastes with shapes. Here, we assessed the extent to which matching taste and shape stimuli share a common semantic space and whether semantically congruent versus incongruent taste/shape associations can influence the speed with which people respond to both shapes and taste words. In Experime...

A mixture of perceptually congruent gustatory and olfactory flavorants (sucrose and citral) was previously shown to be detected faster than predicted by a model of probability summation that assumes stochastically independent processing of the individual gustatory and olfactory signals. This outcome suggests substantial integration of the signals....

Synesthesia in perception and metaphor in language both provide ways to categorize and comprehend the world. Both operate through mechanisms that capitalize on the creation or discovery of links across disparate domains – notably, sensory experiences in different modalities, with cross-modal correspondences serving as perceptual links in synesthesi...

In an attempt to measure how mode of response might affect psychophysical judgment, 18 subjects were asked to give magnitude estimates of the loudness of 1000-Hz tones at various sound pressure levels in each of two sessions. In one session, the subjects responded by giving their numerical judgments orally to the experimenter; in the other session,...

Experiments using diverse paradigms, including speeded discrimination, indicate that pitch and visually-perceived size interact perceptually, and that higher pitch is congruent with smaller size. While nearly all of these studies used static stimuli, here we examine the interaction of dynamic pitch and dynamic size, using Garner's speeded discrimin...

The measure constant in the psychophysical power equation can have at least 12 distinct referents. These depend upon standardized (SI) units of measurement of the physical stimulus, psychophysical method, group and individual differences in judgment, modality- or quality-specific differences, special sensory/perceptual characteristics, characterist...

In synesthesia, experiences in one domain evoke additional experiences in another, as when musical notes or letters of the alphabet evoke colors. Both the domains and their pairings are diverse. Indeed, Day's (2013) recently tabulated 60 types of synesthesia, each referring to a different combination of inducing and induced domains. The domains con...

Two experiments, using different ranges and numbers of stimuli, examined how linguistic labels affect the identification of flavor mixtures containing different proportions of sucrose (gustatory flavorant) and citral (olfactory flavorant). Both experiments asked subjects to identify each stimulus as having either "mostly sugar" or "mostly citrus."...

Garner’s speeded discrimination paradigm is a central tool in studying crossmodal interaction, revealing automatic perceptual correspondences between dimensions in different modalities. To date, however, the paradigm has been used solely with static, unchanging stimuli, limiting its ecological validity. Here, we use Garner’s paradigm to examine int...

Odorants and flavorants typically contain many components. It is generally easier to detect multicomponent stimuli than to detect a single component, through either neural integration or probability summation (PS) (or both). PS assumes that the sensory effects of 2 (or more) stimulus components (e.g., gustatory and olfactory components of a flavora...

Stimulus context affects judgments of intensity of both gustatory and olfactory flavors, and the contextual effects are modality-specific. Does context also exert separate effects on the gustatory and olfactory components of flavor mixtures? To answer this question, in each of 4 experiments, subjects rated the perceived intensity of 16 mixtures con...

Like many scientific terms, the meaning of reward has not stayed fixed since the time of Thorndike either. Indeed, for several decades, under the umbrella of a behaviorist movement that eschewed the use of subjectivist and mentalist terms, the term reward, with its hedonistic connotations of pleasure, gave way to reinforcement. Reinforcement clearl...

Puzzling in its diversity and resistant to simple theoretical accounts, synesthesia has been a subject of scrutiny and investigation for more than a century. Over 30 years ago, the present author treated synesthesia as a perceptual, cross-modal phenomenon, in which a stimulus presented in one modality produces an additional sensation in another, an...

It is a matter of everyday experience that sounds vary in their perceived strength, from the barely perceptible whisper coming from across the room to the overwhelming roar of a jet engine coming from the end of an airport runway. Loudness is a salient feature of auditory experience, closely associated with measures of acoustical level (energy, pow...

The acoustic environment is typically in a constant flux. Not only do sounds often change over time in their intensity and spectral composition, but they also commonly impinge on our ears in the company of other sounds. The dynamic ensemble of acoustic energies constitutes a Heraclitean context for the perception of auditory intensity, or loudness....

It is easier to detect mixtures of gustatory and olfactory flavorants than to detect either component alone. But does the detection of mixtures exceed the level predicted by probability summation, assuming independent detection of each component? To answer this question, we measured simple response times (RTs) to detect brief pulses of one of 3 fla...

Exposing one ear to a series of brief 80 dB sound pressure level (SPL) inducing tones reduces the tendency to lateralize subsequent target tones to that ear and shifts the point of subjective equality (PSE) toward the unexposed ear. Furthermore, targets with average SPLs of 60 and 80 dB at the two ears showed similar changes in PSE. These results s...

Coding of the complex tastes of ionic stimuli in humans was studied by combining taste confusion matrix (TCM) methodology and treatment with chlorhexidine gluconate. The TCM evaluates discrimination of multiple stimuli simultaneously. Chlorhexidine, a bis-biguanide antiseptic, reversibly inhibits salty taste and tastes of a subset of bitter stimuli...

Absolute pitch (AP) is a rare skill, historically defined as the ability to name notes. Until now, methodologic limitations made it impossible to directly test the extent to which the development of AP depends on musical training. Using a new paradigm, we tested children with minimal musical experience. Although most children performed poorly, two...

Briefly presenting an inducing tone of 70-80 dB can substantially reduce the loudness of a subsequent test tone at or near the inducer's frequency, a phenomenon called Induced Loudness Reduction (ILR). The study of ILR emerged from earlier observations on differential contextual effects in loudness judgment: Tones of a given SPL and frequency were...

Cross-modal facilitation of response time (RT) is said to occur in a selective attention task when the introduction of an irrelevant sound increases the speed at which visual stimuli are detected and identified. To investigate the source of the facilitation in RT, we asked participants to rapidly identify the color of lights in the quiet and when a...

A total of 60 subjects, 20 in each experimental condition, gave 'same-different' judgments to pairs of stimuli differing in radius of curvature. Stimuli were presented intramodally to vision, intramodally to haptic touch, and cross-modally to vision and haptic touch. Results showed that performance, quantified by the measure d', differed among the...

Garner's speeded discrimination paradigm was used to determine whether loudness change and spatiovisual vertical motion interact perceptually. 32 participants (16 musically trained) served in 2 experiments, where auditory stimuli (1000 Hz sinusoids) increasing or decreasing in loudness accompanied visual stimuli (dots on a screen) that simultaneous...

The present study examined the role of vision and haptics in memory for stimulus objects that vary along the dimension of curvature. Experiment 1 measured haptic‐haptic (T‐T) and haptic‐visual (T‐V) discrimination of curvature in a short‐term memory paradigm, using 30‐second retention intervals containing five different interpolated tasks. Results...

Presenting an intense (e.g., 80-dB [SPL]) "transient" (e.g., 50-msec) inducer to the ear reduces the loudness of subsequent signals at or near the frequency of the inducer. In this study, we ask whether similar inducers also affect lateralization. In two experiments, we asked how inducing tones presented to one ear (the exposed ear) affect judgment...

The perception of flavor arises from the combination of inputs from several sensory modalities, especially gustation (taste proper) and olfaction (the primary source of flavor qualities). Both the perception of intensity of suprathreshold flavorants and, notably, the detection of weak flavorants are consistent with a rule of additivity. Thus, the d...

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) is the fear of sensations associated with autonomic arousal. AS has been associated with the development and maintenance of panic disorder. Given that panic patients often rate cardiac symptoms as the most fear-provoking feature of a panic attack, AS individuals may be especially responsive to cardiac stimuli. Consequently,...

Stimulus contexts in which different intensity levels are presented to two sensory–perceptual channels can produce differential effects on perception: Perceived magnitudes are depressed in whichever channel received the stronger stimuli. Context differentially can affect loudness at different sound frequencies or perceived length of lines in differ...

Flavors of foods and beverages taken into the mouth reflect a congeries of multisensory inputs: gustatory, olfactory, and somatosensory. One simple model hypothesizes that chemosensory inputs operate as independent channels whose outputs combine linearly. At suprathreshold levels, the model implies linear additivity of gustatory and olfactory contr...

"Perfect pitch," known in the scientific literature as "absolute pitch" (AP), is a rare phenomenon that has fascinated musicians and scientists alike for over a century. There has been a great deal of conflict in the literature between advocates of the two main theories on the etiology of AP: some believe that AP is learned early in life through in...

In induced loudness reduction (ILR), a strong tone causes the loudness of a subsequently presented weak tone to decrease. The aim of the experiment was to determine the time required for loudness to return to its initial level after ILR. Twenty-four subjects were exposed to 5, 10, 20, or 40 brief bursts of 2500-Hz pure tones at 80-dB SPL (inducers)...

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...

The ability to identify and reproduce sounds of specific frequencies is remarkable and uncommon. The etiology and defining characteristics of this skill, absolute pitch (AP), have been very controversial. One theory suggests that AP requires a specific type of early musical training and that the ability to encode and remember tones depends on these...

Labeled scales are commonly used for across-group comparisons. The labels consist of adjective/adverb intensity descriptors (e.g., "very strong"). The relative distances among descriptors are essentially constant but the absolute perceived intensities they denote vary with the domain to which they are applied (e.g., a "very strong" rose odor is wea...

Two experiments investigated the effect of concurrently presented light on the perceived loudness of a low-level burst of white noise. The results suggest two points. First, white noise presented with light tends to be rated as louder than noise presented alone. Second, the enhancement in loudness judgments is resistant to two experimental manipula...

The effect of endogenous attention on the detectability of weak flavorants was examined in an absolute detection (two-alternative forced-choice) task. Attention to sucrose improved the detectability of sucrose, a gustation-based flavorant, both when the alternative was water and when it was vanillin. But attention to vanillin did not improve the de...

The psychological doctrines of empiricism, associationism, and hedonism served as intellectual sources for the development of utilitarianism in the 18th century and psychophysics in the 19th. Utilitarianism, first articulated by Bentham in 1781, makes four implicit but nevertheless important psychophysical assumptions: (1) that utilities, which ref...

We describe a new, open flow device for presenting taste stimuli to human subjects under controlled conditions of timing. The device delivers each stimulus as a mist to the participant's tongue through one of 16 nozzles attached to a linear slide. Software controls the position of the slide, the duration of the stimulus, and the duration of the pre...

Resumo: As doutrinas psicológicas do Empirismo, Associacionismo e Hedonismo serviram de fontes intelectuais para o desenvolvimento do Utilitarismo no século XVIII e da psicofísica no século XIX. O Utilitarismo, articulado primeiramente por Bentham em 1781, apresenta quatro pressupostos psicofísicos implícitos, embora importantes: 1) que utilidade,...

Three experiments examined auditory-visual interactions using two sensory discrimination paradigms. Experiments 1 and 2 used a one-interval confidence-rating procedure and found modest effects of concurrent visual stimulation on auditory pitch and loudness discrimination, but little effect of auditory stimulation on visual brightness discrimination...

Loudness recalibration, the effect of a relatively loud 2500-Hz recalibrating tone on the loudness of a relatively soft 2500-Hz target tone, was measured as a function of the interstimulus interval (ISI) between them. The loudness of the target tone, assessed by a 500-Hz comparison tone, declined when the ISI equaled or exceeded about 200 ms and le...

Recalibration in loudness perception refers to an adaptation-like change in relative responsiveness to auditory signals of different sound frequencies. Listening to relatively weak tones at one frequency and stronger tones at another makes the latter appear softer. The authors showed recalibration not only in magnitude estimates of loudness but als...

The ability to identify and reproduce sounds of specific frequencies, typically called ``perfect pitch,'' is remarkable and uncommon. Whether this skill is learned early in life or inherited has been a matter of great controversy. Further, a substantial literature suggests that ``perfect pitch'' may be heterogeneous. Previously, we proposed a model...

The nervous system is capable of fully processing only a small fraction of the information typically impinging on the sense organs at any moment. Attention provides an important mechanism for selecting some information to be processed extensively, albeit often limiting the processing of other information. Two main questions are: Can attention be di...

Stein, London, Wilkinson, and Price (1996) reported the presence of cross-modal enhancement of perceived visual intensity: Participants tended to rate weak lights as brighter when accompanied by a concurrent pulse of white noise than when presented alone. In the present study, two methods were used to determine whether the enhancement reflects an e...

After a decade of research on synesthesia, largely in collaboration with Simon Baron-Cohen and other colleagues, John Harrison has given us this introductory work. Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing (see record 2001-01283-000 ) blends a review of current neurophysiological evidence and speculation regarding the mechanisms underlying synesthesia with...

Psychophysical scaling refers to the process of quantifying psychological events, especially sensations and perceptions. Scaling requires both a set of empirical operations and a theoretical framework to derive the quantitative values or representations. The chapter treats scaling as it is accomplished through discrimination, partition, and magnitu...

In visual search, when a subset of distractors is previewed 1 s before the target and the remaining distractors, search speed is independent of the number of previewed items. This is visual marking. What allows old items to be marked? Four experiments show that marking is disrupted if the onset of the new items is accompanied by synchronous changes...

Austen Clark is a philosopher with long-standing interest in the nature of sensory experience, and in this thoughtful and stimulating book (see record 2000-02349-000 ), directed primarily at philosophers rather than psychologists, he takes most seriously the data and theories of sensory and perceptual psychology. Indeed, scientific data and theory...

In visual search, when a subset of distractors is previewed 1 s before the target and the remaining distractors, search speed is independent of the number of previewed items. This is visual marking. What allows old items to be marked? Four experiments show that marking is disrupted if the onset of the new items is accompanied by synchronous changes...

In three experiments, we examined the transfer of orientation-contingent context effects between the eyes and across portions of the retina with or without variation in external spatial location. Previous research had shown that vertical lines are judged long, relative to horizontal lines, when the stimulus set comprises relatively long horizontals...

Reports an error in the byline of the article by Y. Jiang et al (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2002[Mar], Vol 28[2], 293-302). Y. Jiang's affiliations should have been listed as "Yale University and John B. Pierce Laboratory" and Lawrence E. Mark's affiliations should have been listed as "John B. Pierce Labora...

Reports an error in the byline of the article by Y. Jiang et al ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , 2002[Mar], Vol 28[2], 293-302). Y. Jiang's affiliations should have been listed as "Yale University and John B. Pierce Laboratory" and Lawrence E. Mark's affiliations should have been listed as "John B. Pierce Labo...

Visual marking makes it possible to ignore old items during search. In a typical study, old items are previewed 1 s before adding an equal number of new items, one of which is the target. Previewing half of the items reduces the search slope relating response time (RT) to overall set size by half. However, this manipulation sometimes only reduces o...

Visual marking makes it possible to ignore old items during search. In a typical study, old items are previewed 1 s before adding an equal number of new items, one of which is the target. Previewing half of the items reduces by half the search slope relating RT to overall set size, the defining feature of marking. However, previewing half of the it...

In visual search tasks, when a subset of distractors is previewed 1 s before the target and the remaining (new) distractors, search speed is independent of the number of previewed items. The process of ignoring old visual items is called visual marking (D. G. Watson & G. W. Humphreys, 1997). This study explores the mechanism that allows the old ite...

Recalibration of loudness comprises a difference in relative responsiveness over sound frequency brought about by contextual differences in prior stimulation. Evidence from studies of both loudness perception and auditory response times, as well as from studies of intensity perception in taste, smell, haptic touch, and vision, supports three genera...

In this review, we distinguish strong and weak forms of synesthesia. Strong synesthesia is characterized by a vivid image in one sensory modality in response to stimulation in another one. Weak synesthesia is characterized by cross-sensory correspondences expressed through language, perceptual similarity, and perceptual interactions during informat...

Seven experiments investigated how stimulus context affects judgements of the magnitude of chemosensory stimuli. In each experiment, subjects gave magnitude estimates of the intensity of several concentrations of two substances, with the contextual set of concentrations varying across experimental conditions. Different experiments used different pa...

The loudness of a moderate level tone is substantially reduced when preceded by a louder tone of the same frequency (loudness recalibration). The reduction in loudness depends on the interstimulus interval (ISI) between the tones. Arieh and Marks (2003) reported that loudness starts to decline only when ISI exceeds about 200 m. One possible explana...

At each moment, we experience a melange of information arriving at several senses, and often we focus on inputs from one modality and 'reject' inputs from another. Does input from a rejected sensory modality modulate one's ability to make decisions about information from a selected one? When the modalities are vision and hearing, the answer is "yes...

Taste stimulus identification was studied in order to more thoroughly examine human taste perception. Ten replicates of an array of 10 taste stimuli--NaCl, KCl, Na glutamate, quinine. HCl, citric acid, sucrose, aspartame, and NaCl-sucrose, acid-sucrose, and quinine-sucrose mixtures--were presented to normal subjects for identification from a list o...

Taste stimulus identification was studied in order to more thoroughly examine human taste perception. Ten replicates of an array of 10 taste stimuli—NaCl, KCl, Na glutamate, quinine.HCl, citric acid, sucrose, aspartame, and NaCl-sucrose, acid-sucrose, and quinine-sucrose mixtures—were presented to normal subjects for identification from a list of c...

The perception of linear extent in haptic touch appears to be anisotropic, in that haptically perceived extents can depend on the spatial orientation and location of the object and, thus, on the direction of exploratory motion. Experiments 1 and 2 quantified how the haptic perception of linear extent depended on the type of motion (radial or tangen...