Behavioral studies have shown that children are sensitive to the numerical attributes of stimuli from a very young age [10].
The neural apparatus mediating the processing of affective attributes of stimuli (i.e. perceived emotionality) has been extensively studied in humans, although the modulating effect of the perceived intensity has hardly been examined.
Together, these and other related studies in other visual qualia [30], [50] suggest that early, non-linear interaction between opponent channels evolved not to encode the physical attributes of stimuli per se, but to encode the statistical relationship between stimuli and their past empirical sources, manifesting itself in this case as colour brightness.
These claims of hyper-specificity of priming to sensory and perceptual attributes of stimuli arose from research on repetition priming with words showing substantial effects due to study-test manipulations of font size and type [11] [15], display orientation [11], [16], presentation modality [10], [17], [18], or presentation voice [19] [21].
More importantly, it is still uncertain how various attributes of stimuli interact and how they affect the overall affective process [ 34, 101].
It has been proposed that such processes may enable elaboration upon the conceptual attributes of stimuli when the to-be-recollected details are conceptual in nature (Dobbins and Wagner, 2005).
Early visual electrophysiological responses are known to be extremely sensitive to the physical attributes of the stimulus [40].
Experiment 4 was designed to determine if newborn and juvenile guppies retain the ability to discriminate quantities after being prevented from using non-numerical attributes of the stimulus.
Alternatively, three attributes of the stimulus may have combined to produce the result: its virtual nature, its low realism, and its short duration.
Facilitation for intra-dimensional shifts has been interpreted as the ability to attend to the specific attributes of a stimulus and to use this information for learning novel discriminations.
