When making decisions under uncertainty, human subjects do not always act as rational decision makers, but often resort to one or more mental “shortcuts”, or heuristics, to arrive at a decision. How do such “top-down” processes affect real-world decisions that must take into account empirical, “bottom-up” sensory evidence? Here we use recognition of camouflaged objects by expert viewers as an exemplar case to demonstrate that the effect of heuristics can be so strong as to override the empirical evidence in favor of heuristic information, even though the latter is random. We provided the viewers a random number that we told them was the estimate of a drone reconnaissance system of the probability that the visual image they were about to see contained a camouflaged target. We then showed them the image. We found that the subjects’ own estimates of the probability of the target in the image reflected the random information they were provided, and ignored the actual evidence in the image. However, when the heuristic information was not provided, the same subjects were highly successful in finding the target in the same set of images, indicating that the effect was solely attributable to the availability of heuristic information. Two additional experiments confirmed that this effect was not idiosyncratic to camouflage images, visual search task, or the subjects’ prior training or expertise. Together, these results demonstrate a novel aspect of the interaction between heuristics and sensory information during real-world decision making, where the former can be strong enough to veto the latter. This ‘heuristic vetoing’ is distinct from the vetoing of sensory information that occurs in certain visual illusions.
Intrauterine inflammation during pregnancy can cause prenatal brain injury, and is associated with preterm birth. Gardnerella vaginalis (GV) is a gram variable rod associated with bacterial vaginosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, bacteremia, and preterm birth. Bacterial vaginosis samples demonstrate up-regulation of Toll-like Receptor 2 and 4 mRNA and secretion of IL-1β in cultured trophoblasts. It has not been clearly demonstrated that isolated GV specimens are capable of the characteristic inflammatory downstream effectors in monocytes. We set out to determine if GV causes inflammatory effector recruitment and expression of proinflammatory cytokines in a human monocyte cell line, THP-1. An ASC-YFP overexpression system was used for immunofluorescent detection of inflammasome components, the Annexin-V apoptosis assay was used for viability, and cytokine levels were quantified by ELISA. Immunofluorescent detection showed co-localization of both NLRP3 and NLRC4 with ASC-YFP in GV-treated and LPS/ATP-treated cells. GV-treated cells exhibited a statistically significant IL-1β, IL-18, and TNFα response over untreated cells, however, IL-18 was significantly increased compared to LPS/ATP treatment. GV-treated cells remained viable through 24 h which demonstrates that GV causes significant cytokine elevation in THP-1 cells, without significant cell death. These results suggest that GV infection may lead to significant sequelae by production of proinflammatory cytokines.
When searching a visual image that contains multiple target objects of interest, human subjects often show a satisfaction of search (SOS) effect, whereby if the subjects find one target, they are less likely to find additional targets in the image. Reducing SOS or, equivalently, subsequent search miss (SSM), is of great significance in many real-world situations where it is of paramount importance to find all targets in a given image, not just one. However, studies have shown that even highly trained and experienced subjects, such as expert radiologists, are subject to SOS. Here, using the detection of camouflaged objects (or camouflage-breaking) as an illustrative case, we demonstrate that when naïve subjects are trained to detect camouflaged objects more effectively, it has the side effect of reducing subjects’ SOS. We tested subjects in the SOS task before and after they were trained in camouflage-breaking. During SOS testing, subjects viewed naturalistic scenes that contained zero, one, or two targets, depending on the image. As expected, before camouflage-training, subjects showed a strong SOS effect, whereby if they had found a target with relatively high visual saliency in a given image, they were less likely to have also found a lower-saliency target when one existed in the image. Subjects were then trained in the camouflage-breaking task to criterion using non-SOS images, i.e., camouflage images that contained zero or one target. Surprisingly, the trained subjects no longer showed significant levels of SOS. This reduction was specific to the particular background texture in which the subjects received camouflage training; subjects continued to show significant SOS when tested using a different background texture in which they did not receive camouflage training. A separate experiment showed that the reduction in SOS was not attributable to non-specific exposure or practice effects. Together, our results demonstrate that perceptual expertise can, in principle, reduce SOS, even when the perceptual training does not specifically target SOS reduction.
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