stimuli

Sea lions don’t naturally adapt their calls to external stimuli in the wild, although seals do, which share an evolutionary root with sea lions more than 20 million years up the ancestral tree.

Specifically, are people exercising top-down control or is it more about changing the balance of perception by giving more weight to incoming sensory stimuli?

"The odour stimuli used in this study were only those of known and unknown persons," said one of the study's authors, Hidehiko Uchiyama.

We are all wired to focus on the most salient stimuli in our environment.

This means they couldn’t study how aspects of the waking brain like cognition were impacted by various stimuli.