Lu-Chun Yeh - Research

The role of semantic information in visual cognition

Visual objects in real life carry both perceptual and semantic information, which cannot readily be inferred from simple visual features and is based on prior knowledge. However, semantics is not a unitary concept; it can be separated into category (aka, taxonomy; e.g., dogs and frogs are both animals) and co-occurrence (e.g., candles appear together with cakes). In my research, I investigate how these two types of semantic information influence our visual cognition and interact with perceptual information.

Co-occurrence

Ongoing project: Seen Together, Activating Together: How object co-occurrence statistics shape object representation and visual cognition. (funded by the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships)

The aim of this project is to investigate the impact of object co-occurrence on object representation and visual cognition. The project has four objectives: (1) to identify where and when object co-occurrence statistics are represented in the brain, how they rival other competing organizations, and which mechanisms enable these representations. (2) to investigate how co-occurrence modulates neural competition between objects using fMRI. (3) to examine whether co-occurrence can facilitate conscious perception using the attentional blink paradigm and explore where and when neural representations of co-occurrence predict AB magnitudes. (4) to investigate how and when co-occurrence impacts performance and neural processing in visual search. Overall, this research will provide a comprehensive characterization of how object co-occurrence in the world shapes human vision and open new avenues for explaining visual behaviors in natural environments.

Arthur Heyer (1872 - 1931) Ruhende Bulldogge und weiße Perserkatze

Category

In this series of studies, we investigated how categorical similarity (animate - inanimate) influences visual search and memory search performance and the time course of its influence.

Yeh, L.C., Peelen, M.V. (2022). The time course of categorical and perceptual similarity effects in visual search. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 48:1069-1082
Shang, L., Yeh, L.C., Zhao,Y., Wiegand, I., & Peelen, M.V. (2024). Category-based attention facilitates memory search. eNeuro 11(2)

Similarity and visual search performance

Searching for a banana among apples is much easier than searching for a peach among apples. Our search performance is strongly influenced by the target-distractor(T-D) similarity. However, the T-D similarity can come from different aspects. Are they all influential in search performance?

Still Life with Apples and Bananas (1925) by Charles Demuth. Original from The Detroit Institute of Arts. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel

In this series of studies, we investigated how different types of T-D similarity (perceptual, categorical, neural representational) are related to search performance.

Yeh, L.C., Thorat, S., & Peelen, M.V. (2024). Predicting cued and oddball visual search performance from neural representational similarity. J Neurosci 44: e1107232024
Yeh, L.C., Peelen, M.V. (2022). The time course of categorical and perceptual similarity effects in visual search. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 48:1069-1082
Yeh, L.C., Yeh, Y.Y., & Kuo, B.C. (2019). Spatially specific attention mechanisms are sensitive to competition during visual search. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 31(8), 1248-1259.
Yeh, L.C. (2022). Neural Evidence for the Influence of Target-nontarget Competition on Selective Attention in Visual Search. (Ph.D. thesis)