Visual one and two dimensional pattern processing

This project is focussed on how the human brain processes visual and grammatical structures. We will apply novel techniques to study the creative process whith fMRI and MEG techniques as well as established "Artificial Grammar Learning" techniques, which are used to assess which grammatical rules can be deduced from auditory and visual input without explicit instruction. We will recruit a wide range of participants, including individuals diagnosed with autism as well as sing-language users to take part in our experiments. The visual perception of individuals diagnosed with autism is particularly interesting since it is known that in these individuals the focus tends to be on local details. T here is an ongoing debate in the literature on whether this is due to a global deficit or to a local bias with intact global processing. Our experiments using simple geometric patterns that vary to what extent they are global or local will try to answer this question. We will also gather creativity data from both groups of children, to determine to what extent the local bias in the visual domain translates into the production of patterns. Deaf signers use visual communication, while hearing people use auditory communication. This may lead to interesting difference sin how artificial grammars are processed in the visual domain, and we intend to test both hearing and deaf individual on which structures can be processed, and to what extent short term memory is affected in both groups. The same artificial grammars will also be tested on adults in an fMRI scanner, so that we cn pnpoint exactly which brain areas are activated when processing sequences of varying grammatical complexity and various long-distance dependencies, a hallmark of human language. Finally, we will scan the brains of participants who are completing a creative task involving geometrical patterns, which we hope will allow us to pinpoint exactly which brain regions are recruited during creative visual activities.

This project was based on the observation that visual geometric patterns are ubiquitous in human societies around the world and guided by the hypothesis that studying visual patterns might thus reveal deep insights about the structure and functioning of the human mind. Because patterns have interesting structural properties, such as combinatoriality, symmetry and other regularities that can be described with mathematical precision, I decided to use them as my main stimuli in the experiments I conducted for this grant. I thus employed and further developed a custom software interface of testing and interacting with patterns in the lab called FlexTiles. I also used the more conventional paradigm of "artificial grammar learning" but applied to abstract visual patterns, rather than auditory or otherwise linguistic patterns. I tested children of various ages (8 months to 8 years) as well as deaf indiviuals who use sign language, whom I compared with hearing individuals and found that they have no appreciable performance disadvantage when processing visual patterns.