Navigating virtual mazes: The benefits of audiovisual landmarks

It has been shown that multisensory presentation can improve perception, attention, and object memory compared with unisensory presentation. Consequently, we expect that multisensory presentation of landmarks can improve spatial memory and navigation. In this study we tested the effect of visual, auditory and combined landmark presentations in...

Counting visual and tactile events: The effect of attention on multisensory integration

Irrelevant events in one sensory modality can influence the number of events that are perceived in another modality. Previously, the underlying process of sensory integration was studied in conditions in which participants knew a priori which sensory modality was relevant and which was not. Consequently, (bottom-up) sensory interference and (top...

Multisensory temporal numerosity judgment

In temporal numerosity judgment, observers systematically underestimate the number of pulses. The strongest underestimations occur when stimuli are presented with a short interstimulus interval (ISI) and are stronger for vision than for audition and touch. We investigated if multisensory presentation leads to a reduction of underestimation....

Human factors issues of tactice displays for military environments

The overall goal of this chapter is to give the reader insights into the human factors issues related to the use of tactile displays. Torso-mounted displays, which are particularly suited for direction and orientation cues, are emphasized. First, perceptual issues relevant to tactile stimulation are discussed. These include issues regarding...

Audiovisual events capture attention: Evidence from temporal order judgments

Is an irrelevant audiovisual event able to guide attention automatically? In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked to make a temporal order judgment (TOJ) about which of two dots (left or right) appeared first. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to make a simultaneity judgment (SJ) instead. Such tasks have been shown to be affected...

Portable real-time color night vision

We developed a simple and fast lookup-table based method to derive and apply natural daylight colors to multi-band night-time images. The method deploys an optimal color transformation derived from a set of samples taken from a daytime color reference image. The colors in the resulting colorized multiband night-time images closely resemble the...

Method for applying daytime colors to nighttime imagery in realtime

We present a fast and efficient method to derive and apply natural colors to nighttime imagery from multiband sensors. The color mapping is derived from the combination of a multiband image and a corresponding natural color reference image. The mapping optimizes the match between the multiband image and the reference image, and yields a...

Towards cognitive image fusion

The increasing availability and deployment of imaging sensors operating in multiple spectral bands has led to a large research effort in image fusion, resulting in a plethora of pixel-level image fusion algorithms. However, the cognitive aspects of multisensor image fusion have not received much attention in the development of these methods. In...

Tactile displays for navigation and orientation: Perception and behaviour

Perceiving and understanding information of, for example, a visual navigation display may be difficult for people with a visual challenge or in situations where the user's visual sense and cognitive resources are heavily loaded. Developing information presentation schemes that reduce the threat of overloading eyes and mind becomes increasingly...

Recalibration of auditory phoneme perception by lipread and lexical information

In a natural environment, many events have perceptual consequences in more than one modality. For example, when we hear someone speaking, there is not only auditory information about what is said, but also visual information about where the sound comes from, and phonetic information that can be lipread. It is known that our perceptual system...

Detection of dim point targets in cluttered maritime backgrounds through multisensor image fusion

Multispectral IR imaging techniques are frequently deployed in maritime operations, for instance to detect floating mines or to find small dinghies and swimmers during search and rescue operations. However, maritime backgrounds usually contain a large amount of clutter that severely hampers the detection of dim point targets. Here we present a...