Rowe Elise, van Boxtel Jeroen J A
Discipline of Psychology, Faculty of Health, University of Canberra, Bruce, ACT, Australia.
Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
iScience. 2025 Jul 29;28(8):113227. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.113227. eCollection 2025 Aug 15.
"Stochastic resonance" (SR) is a phenomenon whereby adding an "optimal" amount of noise can perceptual capabilities. Although this performance enhancement is important, in many tasks we also want to reduce biases, such as the tendency to respond "absent" to an infrequent stimulus. To address this, we designed a perceptual task where we presented six possible letters ("C,""B,""H," "O,""E," and "U") at threshold levels. We induced a response bias by manipulating the frequency of the consonants and vowels at 80% (frequent stimuli) versus 20% (rare stimuli) and induced SR using Gaussian visual luminance noise. We observed SR-based improvements in performance (accuracy and d') across 22 observers at low to intermediate noise levels. Additionally, response biases (i.e., criterion) decreased due to an increase in correctly identified rare stimuli. Our results suggest that low-to-moderate noise can improve performance and reduce response biases, with potential implications for real-world tasks (such as cancer screening) where target (i.e., tumor) occurrence is rare.
“随机共振”（SR）是一种现象，即添加“最佳”量的噪声可以提高感知能力。尽管这种性能提升很重要，但在许多任务中，我们还希望减少偏差，例如对不频繁刺激做出“不存在”反应的倾向。为了解决这个问题，我们设计了一个感知任务，在阈值水平呈现六个可能的字母（“C”、“B”、“H”、“O”、“E”和“U”）。我们通过操纵辅音和元音的频率来诱导反应偏差，80%（频繁刺激）对20%（罕见刺激），并使用高斯视觉亮度噪声诱导随机共振。我们观察到，在低至中等噪声水平下，22名观察者的基于随机共振的性能（准确性和d'）有所提高。此外，由于正确识别的罕见刺激增加，反应偏差（即标准）降低。我们的结果表明，低至中等噪声可以提高性能并减少反应偏差，这对现实世界中的任务（如癌症筛查）具有潜在意义，因为目标（即肿瘤）的出现很少见。
