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Introduction: Data from several areas of public health (e.g., harmful alcohol and tobacco) are consistent with the assertion that children’s exposure to advertising strategies increases intention to consume such products. Most studies have measured self-rated impact of gambling advertising using questionnaires. Given that gambling advertisements come in different forms such as print media/television advertising and contain variable content, it is difficult to understand using subjective measures which aspects of the gambling advertisements increase craving and desire to trigger a gambling session. In the present study, we applied a novel data-driven methodology that directly tracks eye movements to reveal attentional biases towards gambling adverts and promotions by examining differences in young people’s eye gaze behaviour when watching gambling and non-gambling (control) moving adverts. Method: A total of 98 (16–18 years old) children who self-identify as having a low or high craving to gambling watched gambling and non-gambling (control) television adverts, while their eye movements were recorded. Results: The results show that the data-driven method can isolate video clips that best distinguish people on the low-high craving spectrum, reveal the type of each video clip with the largest group differences, and accurately predict young people’s gambling craving on the basis of eye movement patterns. Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate that young people’s craving for gambling can be predicted based on their eye movements to video clips of gambling advertisements and that certain features of gambling advertisements may be more appealing to some group of viewers, particularly those with high craving for gambling.

It is of great significance for safe driving to study drivers' eye movement and driving operation behavior when they encounter other road users violating traffic rules. The underlying reason is that most drivers are unable to process the unexpected visual stimulation, which is more likely to lead to driving accidents, especially in a hybrid situation. In this study, a driving simulator is used to design driving scenarios and study the driving performance of drivers with different driving experiences when other road users violate traffic rules. The experimental results show that some novice drivers ignore the position of their own vehicle when they encounter traffic violations which will lead to the collision with other road users. Moreover, some novice drivers can only perform one of the operations between steering and braking to avoid collision in these emergent situations. They cannot reasonably combine braking and steering to complete emergency driving operations like experienced drivers. Finally, when the driving difficulty increases, experienced drivers spend less time looking and more time scanning their surroundings to ensure that they can cope with the more complex driving environment while novice drivers do the opposite. This study reveals the difference between novices and experienced drivers, which paves a useful reference for the future advanced driving assistance system.

The judgment of female body appearance has been reported to be affected by a range of internal (e.g., viewers’ sexual cognition) and external factors (e.g., viewed clothing type and colour). This eye-tracking study aimed to complement previous research by examining the effect of facial expression on female body perception and associated body-viewing gaze behaviour. We presented female body images of Caucasian avatars in a continuum of common dress sizes posing seven basic facial expressions (neutral, happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust), and asked both male and female participants to rate the perceived body attractiveness and body size. The analysis revealed an evident modulatory role of avatar facial expressions on body attractiveness and body size ratings, but not on the amount of viewing time directed at individual body features. Specifically, happy and angry avatars attracted the highest and lowest body attractiveness ratings, respectively, and fearful and surprised avatars tended to be rated slimmer. Interestingly, the impact of facial expression on female body assessment was not further influenced by viewers’ gender, suggesting a ‘universal’ role of common facial expressions in modifying the perception of female body appearance.

IntroductionTo determine men's body ideals and the factors that influence these choices, this study used a matrix of computer generated (CG) male bodies (based on an analysis of 3D scanned real bodies) which independently varied in fat and muscle content.MethodsTwo hundred and fifty-eight male participants completed a range of psychometric measures to index body concerns and body ideal internalization and then chose the CG body that best reflected their own current body, as well as the body that reflected their personal ideal. A subset of participants was then retested to check that these judgements were stable over time.ResultsWhile judgements of the ideal body seem to be influenced by a shared appearance ideal, the degree to which this ideal was internalized showed significant variability between participants. The effect of this internalization was reflected in the difference between the estimated current body and the ideal.DiscussionHigher internalization led to a preference for higher muscle and lower fat content. This preference was most marked for fat content, although reducing adiposity also made the underlying musculature more salient. Additionally, the ideal body composition was modulated by the composition the participant believed his current body had (i.e., it seemed that a participant's ideal body was anchored by what they believed to be their current body and what change was possible from this starting point).

Dogs are good models for studying behaviour and cognition as they have complex social capabilities. In the current study, we observed how human emotional valences (positive, neutral and negative) affected aspects of dogs’ behaviour. We expected that dogs would exhibit more approaching behaviours in the positive condition and more signs of avoidance in the negative one. We analysed videos of 70 adult pet dogs of various breeds taken from an experiment in which one of two actors expressed an emotion and dogs could freely explore the environment for 30 s. Our results show that dogs exhibit differential behaviour when presented with different emotional valences. Two behaviours arose that might be linked to a reciprocal positive emotional state in dogs: tail raised between 90° and 180° and physical contact during sniffing. These behaviours are associated with an active search for information. In the positive conditions, dogs were more willing to explore the social environment and gather information from the actors.

Kruger and Dunning (1999) described a metacognitive bias in which insight into performance is linked to competence: poorer performers are less aware of their mistakes than better performers. Competence-based insight has been argued to apply generally across task domains, including a recent report investigating social cognition using a variety of face-matching tasks. Problematically, serious statistical and methodological criticisms have been directed against the traditional method of analysis used by researchers in this field. Here, we further illustrate these issues and investigate new sources of insight within unfamiliar face matching. Over two experiments (total N = 1077), where Experiment 2 was a preregistered replication of the key findings from Experiment 1, we found that insight into performance was multi-faceted. Participants demonstrated insight which was not based on competence, in the form of accurate updating of estimated performance. We also found evidence of insight which was based on competence: the difference in confidence on correct versus incorrect trials increased with competence. By providing ways that we can move beyond problematic, traditional approaches, we have begun to reveal a more realistic story regarding the nature of insight into face perception.

Background Although researchers have begun to consider metacognitive insight during face matching, little is known about the underlying mechanism. Here, I investigated whether objective ability, as well as self-assessed ability, were able to predict metacognitive performance, that is, the ability to differentiate correct and incorrect responses in terms of confidence. In addition, I considered whether a training intervention resulted in improvements to both face matching performance and metacognitive insight. Methods In this experiment (N = 220), participants completed a face matching task, with either a diagnostic feature training course or a control course presented at the halfway point. In addition, a second face matching task, as well as a self-report questionnaire regarding ability, were completed to provide measures of objective and self-assessed ability respectively. Results Higher self-assessed ability with faces, as well as higher objective ability with face matching, predicted better metacognitive performance, i.e., greater confidence in correct, in comparison with incorrect, responses. This pattern of results was evident both when objective ability was measured through performance on the same task used to measure metacognitive insight and when a different task was used. Finally, the training intervention failed to produce improvements in face matching performance and showed no evidence of altering metacognitive ability. Discussion The current work begins to address the mechanism underlying individual differences in metacognitive insight during face matching. Although support was provided for a competence-based account, where better face matchers showed greater performance on the task and were more successful in monitoring their performance, further work might focus on decoupling task performance and competence in order to more conclusively explain why some people are more insightful than others.

Face mask is now a common feature in our social environment. Although face covering reduces our ability to recognize other's face identity and facial expressions, little is known about its impact on the formation of first impressions from faces. In two online experiments, we presented unfamiliar faces displaying neutral expressions with and without face masks, and participants rated the perceived approachableness, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and dominance from each face on a 9-point scale. Their anxiety levels were measured by the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and Social Interaction Anxiety Scale. In comparison with mask-off condition, wearing face masks (mask-on) significantly increased the perceived approachableness and trustworthiness ratings, but showed little impact on increasing attractiveness or decreasing dominance ratings. Furthermore, both trait and state anxiety scores were negatively correlated with approachableness and trustworthiness ratings in both mask-off and mask-on conditions. Social anxiety scores, on the other hand, were negatively correlated with approachableness but not with trustworthiness ratings. It seems that the presence of a face mask can alter our first impressions of strangers. Although the ratings for approachableness, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and dominance were positively correlated, they appeared to be distinct constructs that were differentially influenced by face coverings and participants’ anxiety types and levels.

People routinely wear face masks during the pandemic, but little is known about their impact on body perception. In this online study, we presented female body images of Caucasian avatars in common dress sizes displaying happy, angry, and neutral facial expressions with and without face masks, and asked women to rate the perceived body attractiveness and body size. In comparison with mask-off condition, mask-on decreased body attractiveness ratings for happy avatars but did not affect ratings for neutral avatars irrespective of avatar dress sizes. For avatars displaying angry expressions, mask-on increased body attractiveness ratings for slimmer avatars but did not affect ratings for larger avatars. On the other hand, body size estimation was not systematically affected by face masks and facial expressions. It appears that face masks mainly show an expression-dependent influence on body attractiveness judgement, possibly through suppressing the perceived facial expressions.

We used attractiveness judgements as a proxy to visualize the ideal female and male body for male and female participants and investigated how individual differences in the internalization of cultural ideals influence these representations. In the first of two studies, male and female participants judged the attractiveness of 242 male and female computer-generated bodies which varied independently in muscle and adipose. This allowed us to map changes in attractiveness across the complete body composition space, revealing single peaks for the attractiveness of both men and women. In the second study, we asked our participants to choose the most attractive male and female bodies in a method of adjustment task in which they could independently vary muscle and adipose to create the most attractive body. We asked whether individual differences in internalization of cultural ideals, drive for muscularity, eating disorder symptomatology and depressive symptoms could systematically shift the location of peak attractiveness in body composition space. We found a clear preference by both genders for a male body with high muscle and low adipose, and a toned, low adipose female body. The degree of internalization of cultural ideals predicted large individual differences in the composition of the most attractive bodies.

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) hold a unique position in human society, particularly in their role as social companions; as such, it is important to understand their emotional lives. There has been growing interest in studying behavioural biases in dogs as indirect markers (reflecting lateralized brain activity) of their emotional states. In this paper, we not only review the previous literature on emotion-related behavioural lateralization in dogs, but also propose and apply the concept of evidential weight to previous research. This allows us to examine different hypotheses about emotion-related brain asymmetries (i.e., Right-Hemisphere-, Valence-, Approach-Withdrawal-Hypothesis) on the basis of a “likelihood-ist” concept of evidence. We argue that previous studies have not been able to discriminate well between competing hypotheses and tended to focus on confirmation bias than critically assess different hypotheses; as such there is a strong case for more systematic investigation to pull these theories apart. We present the areas for future research and explain their importance for understanding the emotional lives of dogs.

In advanced industrial applications, computational visual attention models (CVAMs) could predict visual attention very similarly to actual human attention allocation. This has been used as a very important component of technology in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Given that the biological inspiration of the driving-related CVAMs could be obtained from skilled drivers in complex driving conditions, in which the driver’s attention is constantly directed at various salient and informative visual stimuli by alternating the eye fixations via saccades to drive safely, this paper proposes a saccade recommendation strategy to enhance the driving safety under urban road environment, particularly when the driver’s vision is often impaired by the visual crowding. The altered and directed saccades are collected and optimized by extracting four innate features from human dynamic vision. A neural network is designed to classify preferable saccades to reduce perceptual blindness due to visual crowding under urban scenes. A state-of- the-art CVAM is firstly adopted to localize the predicted eye fixation locations (EFLs) in driving video clips. Besides, human subjects’ gaze at the recommended EFLs is measured via an eye-tracker. The time delays between the predicted EFLs and drivers’ EFLs are analyzed under different driving conditions, followed by the time delays between the predicted EFLs and the driver’s hand control. The visually safe margin is then measured by mediating the driving speed and the total delay. Experimental results demonstrate that the recommended saccades can effectively reduce the amount of perceptual blindness, which is known to be of help to further improve road driving safety.

Facial first impressions are known to influence how we behave towards others. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we often view incomplete faces due to the commonplace wearing of face masks. Previous research has shown that perceptions of attractiveness are often increased due to these coverings, with initial evidence suggesting that this may be caused by viewers using a mental representation of the average face to complete any missing information. Here, we directly address this hypothesis by presenting participants with incomplete faces (either the lower or upper half removed) and asking them to decide how they thought the actual, full face looked. Participants were able to manipulate the missing half of the face onscreen by increasing or decreasing the averageness of its shape. Our results demonstrated that participants did not select the original versions of the faces but instead chose more average versions when manipulating both the lower and upper face. Further, the typicality of the original image influenced responses, with less typical faces (in comparison with more typical ones) being completed using an even more average version of the missing half of the faces. Taken together, these findings provide the first direct evidence that people utilise an average/typical internal representation when inferring information about incomplete faces. This result has theoretical importance in terms of visual perception, as well as real-world relevance in a time where face masks are commonplace due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Face images depicting the same individual can differ substantially from one another. Ecological variation in pose, expression, lighting, and other sources of appearance variability complicates the recognition and matching of unfamiliar faces, but acquired familiarity leads to the ability to cope with these challenges. Among the many ways that face of the same individual can vary, some images are judged to be better likenesses of familiar individuals than others. Simply put, these images look more like the individual under consideration than others. But what does it mean for an image to be a better likeness than another? Does likeness entail typicality, or is it something distinct from this? We examined the relationship between the likeness of face images and the similarity of those images to average images of target individuals using a set of famous faces selected for reciprocal familiarity/unfamiliarity across US and UK participants. We found that though likeness judgments are correlated with similarity-to-prototype judgments made by both familiar and unfamiliar participants, this correlation was smaller than the correlation between similarity judgments made by different participant groups. This implies that while familiarity weakens the relationship between likeness and similarity-to-prototype judgments, it does not change similarity-to-prototype judgments to the same degree.

Most full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) models first compute local quality scores and then pool them into an overall score. In this paper, we develop an innovative pooling strategy based on sample statistics to adaptively make the IQA more consistent with human visual assessment. The innovation of this work is threefold. First, we identify that standard sample statistics and robust sample statistics could provide complementary information about the degree of degradation in distorted images. Second, an effective IQA metric is proposed by adaptively integrating robust sample statistics and standard sample statistics via excess kurtosis. Third, instead of using the statistics directly, we adjust them by taking into account the global change of image gradients to avoid exaggerating the degradation degree. Experiments conducted on five well-known IQA databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed pooling strategy in terms of high prediction accuracy and monotonicity.

Recent advances in software and hardware have allowed eye tracking to move away from static images to more ecologically relevant video streams. The analysis of eye tracking data for such dynamic stimuli, however, is not without challenges. The frame-by-frame coding of regions of interest (ROIs) is labour-intensive and computer vision techniques to automatically code such ROIs are not yet mainstream, restricting the use of such stimuli. Combined with the more general problem of defining relevant ROIs for video frames, methods are needed that facilitate data analysis. Here, we present a first evaluation of an easy-to-implement data-driven method with the potential to address these issues. To test the new method, we examined the differences in eye movements of self-reported politically left- or right-wing leaning participants to video clips of left- and right-wing politicians. The results show that our method can accurately predict group membership on the basis of eye movement patterns, isolate video clips that best distinguish people on the political left–right spectrum, and reveal the section of each video clip with the largest group differences. Our methodology thereby aids the understanding of group differences in gaze behaviour, and the identification of critical stimuli for follow-up studies or for use in saccade diagnosis.

A wealth of studies have shown that humans are remarkably poor at determining whether two face images show the same person or not (face matching). Given the prevalence of photo-ID, and the fact that people employed to check photo-ID are typically unfamiliar with the person pictured, there is a need to improve unfamiliar face matching accuracy. One method of improvement is to have participants complete the task in a pair, which results in subsequent improvements in the low performer (“the pairs training effect”). Here, we sought to replicate the original finding, to test the longevity of the pairs training effect, and to shed light on the potential underlying mechanisms. In two experiments, we replicated the pairs training effect and showed it is maintained after a delay (Experiment 1). We found no differences between high and low performers in confidence (Experiment 1) or response times (Experiment 2), and the content of the pairs’ discussions (Experiment 2) did not explain the results. The pairs training effect in unfamiliar face matching is robust, but the mechanisms underlying the effects remain as yet unexplained.

Virtual Reality (VR) experienced through head-mounted displays often leads to vection, discomfort and sway in the user. This study investigated the effect of motion direction and eccentricity on these three phenomena using optic flow patterns displayed using the Valve Index. Visual motion stimuli were presented in the centre, periphery or far periphery and moved either in depth (back and forth) or laterally (left and right). Overall vection was stronger for motion in depth compared to lateral motion. Additionally, eccentricity primarily affected stimuli moving in depth with stronger vection for more peripherally presented motion patterns compared to more central ones. Motion direction affected the various aspects of VR sickness differently and modulated the effect of eccentricity on VR sickness. For stimuli moving in depth far peripheral presentation caused more discomfort, whereas for lateral motion the central stimuli caused more discomfort. Stimuli moving in depth led to more head movements in the anterior–posterior direction when the entire visual field was stimulated. Observers demonstrated more head movements in the anterior–posterior direction compared to the medio-lateral direction throughout the entire experiment independent of motion direction or eccentricity of the presented moving stimulus. Head movements were elicited on the same plane as the moving stimulus only for stimuli moving in depth covering the entire visual field. A correlation showed a positive relationship between dizziness and vection duration and between general discomfort and sway. Identifying where in the visual field motion presented to an individual causes the least amount of VR sickness without losing vection and presence can guide development for Virtual Reality games, training and treatment programmes.

The correct interpretation of an animal’s emotional state is crucial for successful human–animal interaction. When studying dog and cat emotional expressions, a key source of information is the pet owner, given the extensive interactions they have had with their pets. In this online survey we asked 438 owners whether their dogs and/or cats could express 22 different primary and secondary emotions, and to indicate the behavioral cues they relied upon to identify those expressed emotions. Overall, more emotions were reported in dogs compared to cats, both from owners that owned just one species and those that owned both. Although owners reported a comparable set of sources of behavioral cues (e.g., body posture, facial expression, and head posture) for dogs and cats in expressing the same emotion, distinct combinations tended to be associated with specific emotions in both cats and dogs. Furthermore, the number of emotions reported by dog owners was positively correlated with their personal experience with dogs but negatively correlated with their professional experience. The number of emotions reported in cats was higher in cat-only households compared to those that also owned dogs. These results provide a fertile ground for further empirical investigation of the emotional expressions of dogs and cats, aimed at validating specific emotions in these species.

Ironic enjoyment occurs when people enjoy music despite or because of it being evaluated as bad. Although initial qualitative results suggest that this phenomenon fulfills a variety of self-regulatory functions that are also found in enjoyed music, to date no research has experimentally tested how important these functions are in ironically enjoyed music, in comparison to naturally enjoyed music. In two between-subjects experiments, participants ( N = 216 and N = 143) were instructed to think back to a recent occasion in which they listened to a piece of music which they either enjoyed ironically or enjoyed naturally. They then answered questions on the effects this had on them (Studies 1 and 2) and on the subjective qualities of the music (Study 2). The results suggested that ironically enjoyed music had less effect on personal identification and on managing positive or negative moods and was also appreciated less and judged as less novel than naturally enjoyed music. Differences in mood-management functions were associated with lower levels of subjective qualities of ironically enjoyed music, especially appreciation. Novelty was especially related to positive mood enhancement for ironically enjoyed music. Participants mentioned humor as an additional function of ironically enjoyed music listening.

The ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the immediate perception of the current behaviour of another individual. They may include predictions of the significance of the emotional states being expressed. These abilities were previously believed to be exclusive to primates. In this study, we presented adult domestic dogs with a social interaction between two unfamiliar people, which could be positive, negative or neutral. After passively witnessing the actors engaging silently with each other and with the environment, dogs were given the opportunity to approach a food resource that varied in accessibility. We found that the available emotional information was more relevant than the motivation of the actors (i.e. giving something or receiving something) in predicting the dogs’ responses. Thus, dogs were able to access implicit information from the actors’ emotional states and appropriately use the affective information to make context-dependent decisions. The findings demonstrate that a non-human animal can actively acquire information from emotional expressions, infer some form of emotional state and use this functionally to make decisions.

Deciding whether two different face photographs or voice samples are from the same person represent fundamental challenges within applied settings. To date, most research has focussed on average performance in these tests, failing to consider individual differences and within‐person consistency in responses. Here, participants completed the same face (Experiment 1) or voice matching test (Experiment 2) on two separate occasions, allowing comparison of overall accuracy across the two timepoints as well as consistency in trial‐level responses. In both experiments, participants were highly consistent in their performances. In addition, we demonstrated a large association between consistency and accuracy, with the most accurate participants also tending to be the most consistent. This is an important result for applied settings in which organisational groups of super‐matchers are deployed in real‐world contexts. Being able to reliably identify these high performers based upon only a single test informs regarding recruitment for law enforcement agencies worldwide.

Approximately half the population have experienced a lucid dream. Yet, it is not well understood how an individual realises they are dreaming (i.e. lucid insight). A few studies suggest it can be triggered by a nightmare, or by the identification of inconsistencies/dream-like qualities/peculiarities. The present study aimed to produce a detailed typology of lucidity triggers to inform consideration of the nature of associated thought processes. 91 lucid dreamers were identified in an undergraduate sample of 148. Lucid dreamers were asked to describe what it was, if anything, that had made them realise they were dreaming. Thematic analysis of responses extracted evidence of four overarching triggers consistent with previous research: identification of an abnormality, identification of a dream-like quality, an emotionally-arousing dream event, and miscellaneous. It was uniquely identified that ‘abnormalities’ within the dream were those inconsistent with waking knowledge rather than with the accompanying dream content. Novel triggers were identified that were classifiable as subthemes under the previously-identified triggers, and triggers co-occurred in a third of cases. Novel triggers included ‘deja reve’, the feeling that one has dreamt the experience before, as well as ‘self-comfort/denial’ involving an emotionally-driven denial of the reality of a distressing dream. Nightmare-induced lucidity appeared to arise via qualitatively diverse paths: via self-comfort/denial and/or via the identification of abnormalities/dream-like qualities. The nature of the triggers indicates that higher-order cognition can precede, and promote, lucid insight. This sheds light on a key theoretical issue of whether lucid insight is a pre-requisite for the re-emergence of higher-order cognition. Keywords: lucid dreaming, lucidity, nightmares, higher-order cognition, phenomenology.

Facial expressions are a core component of the emotional response of social mammals. In contrast to Darwin's original proposition, expressive facial cues of emotion appear to have evolved to be species-specific. Faces trigger an automatic perceptual process, and so, inter-specific emotion perception is potentially a challenge; since observers should not try to “read” heterospecific facial expressions in the same way that they do conspecific ones. Using dynamic spontaneous facial expression stimuli, we report the first inter-species eye-tracking study on fully unrestrained participants and without pre-experiment training to maintain attention to stimuli, to compare how two different species living in the same ecological niche, humans and dogs, perceive each other’s facial expressions of emotion. Humans and dogs showed different gaze distributions when viewing the same facial expressions of either humans or dogs. Humans modulated their gaze depending on the area of interest (AOI) being examined, emotion, and species observed, but dogs modulated their gaze depending on AOI only. We also analysed if the gaze distribution was random across AOIs in both species: in humans, eye movements were not correlated with the diagnostic facial movements occurring in the emotional expression, and in dogs, there was only a partial relationship. This suggests that the scanning of facial expressions is a relatively automatic process. Thus, to read other species’ facial emotions successfully, individuals must overcome these automatic perceptual processes and employ learning strategies to appreciate the inter-species emotional repertoire. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s10071-020-01348-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The study of lithic technology can provide information on human cultural evolution and can inform hypotheses in cognitive archaeology. The aim of this article is to analyze visual behavior associated with the exploration of ancient stone artefacts and how this relates to cognitive and perceptual mechanism in humans. In Experiment 1 we used eye tracking to record patterns of eye fixations while participants viewed images of Lower Paleolithic stone tools, including examples of worked pebbles and handaxes. The results showed that the focus of gaze was directed more towards the upper regions worked pebbles and on the basal areas for handaxes. Knapped surfaces also attracted more fixation than natural cortex for both tool types. Distribution of fixations during actual viewing was different to that predicted by models that calculate visual salience through analysis of image features. Experiment 2 was an online study using the mouse click attention tracking technique and included images of unworked pebbles and “mixed” images combining the outline shape of a handaxe with the unworked texture of a pebble. Overall, the findings suggest that visual exploration is directed towards functional aspects of tools, such as surfaces relevant for striking and grasping. It is concluded that studies of visual attention and exploration can therefore supply useful information to inform understanding of human cognitive evolution and tool use.

The current “deep learning + large-scale data + strong supervised labeling” technology framework of collision avoidance for ground robots and aerial drones is becoming saturated. Its development gradually faces challenges from real open-scene applications, including small data, weak annotation, and cross-scene. Inspired by the neural structure and processes underlying human cognition (e.g., human visual, auditory, and tactile systems) and the knowledge learned from daily driving tasks, such as, a high-level cognitive system is developed for integrating collision sensing and collision avoidance. This bio-inspired cognitive approach takes the advantages of good robustness, high self-adaptability, and low computation consumption in practical driving scenes.

Investigations of face identification have typically focussed on matching faces to photographic IDs. Few researchers have considered the task of searching for a face in a crowd. In Experiment 1, we created the Chokepoint Search Test to simulate real‐time search for a target. Performance on this test was poor (39% accuracy) and showed moderate associations with tests of face matching and memory. In addition, trial‐level confidence predicted accuracy, and for those participants who were previously familiar with one or more targets, higher familiarity was associated with increased accuracy. In Experiment 2, we found improvements in performance on the test when three recent images of the target, but not three social media images, were displayed during searches. Taken together, our results highlight the difficulties inherent in real‐time searching for faces, with important implications for those security personnel who carry out this task on a daily basis.

In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.

Cybersickness is an unpleasant side effect of Virtual Reality and is often detrimental to a user’s experience. It shows a complex relationship to vection (illusory self-motion) as well as postural instability. Three experiments were conducted presenting both expanding and rotating colourful optimised Fraser Wilcox illusions as well as grey-scaled controlled versions of the illusions. Cybersickness and vection were reported and head movements in medio-lateral and anterior-posterior direction were recorded. The experiments found that perceived visual motion (illusory motion) is sufficient to elicit vection in the absence of any stimulated visual motion. The strength of motion perceived in the illusions was related to the experience of cybersickness and vection, with illusions that were perceived as moving more eliciting stronger experiences of both. Surprisingly, rotating illusions were continuously perceived as moving more compared to expanding motion illusions, which could be related to missing stereoscopic motion-in-depth cues. Head movements were unrelated to any stimuli properties, suggesting that the motion signal elicited by the illusions might not have been strong enough to cause postural instability. Finally, dizziness has been identified as the possible link between cybersickness, vection and head movements supporting sensory conflict as well postural instability theories of cybersickness.

When items are presented sequentially, the evaluation of the current item is biased by both the previous item’s value (perceptual bias) and the previous response given (response bias). While these biases have been identified in judgements of facial attractiveness, it is unclear as to whether they produce assimilation and/or contrast effects. Here, two tasks were employed to measure each bias in isolation. By presenting a preceding face without collecting a response, perceptual biases could be investigated, while response biases were considered by requesting a preceding response without presenting a face. Our results demonstrated a perceptual bias in which attractiveness ratings given to the current face shifted away from the baseline attractiveness value of the previous face, while we found no evidence of a response bias due to the previously selected value. These findings highlight the utility in considering sequential biases separately when trying to determine the nature of these effects.

Psychological concerns are frequently indexed by psychometric questionnaires but the mental representations that they seek to quantify are difficult to visualise. We used a set of questionnaires designed to measure men’s concept of their bodies including: the Drive for Muscularity Scale (DMS; McCreary & Sasse, 2000 ), the Perceived Sociocultural Pressures Scale (PSPS; Stice, Nemeroff, & Shaw, 1996 a ), the Body Appreciation Scale (BAS-2; Tylka & Wood-Barcalow, 2015 ), and the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire-3 (SATAQ-3; Thompson, van den Berg, Roehrig, Guarda, & Heinberg, 2004 ). We combined their use with an interactive 3D modelling programme to allow men to create computer-generated representations of their ideal bodies. We used a principal component analysis to extract those shape components of our participants’ CGI ideal bodies that were predicted by the questionnaires and reconstructed the body shapes that these questionnaires were capturing. Moving from the lowest to the highest score on both the DMS and SATAQ corresponded with changes in muscularity, particularly muscle mass and definition. This approach allows us to demonstrate the actual body features that are being captured by a particular questionnaire.

Objective Tests of theories of mate choice often rely on data gathered in White, industrialised samples and this is especially the case for studies of facial attraction. Our understanding of preferences for sexual dimorphism is currently in flux and a number of hypotheses require testing in more diverse participant samples. The current study uses opportunistically gathered facial dimorphism preference data from 271 participants in rural Nicaragua, and 40 from the national capital Managua. We assess pre-registered hypotheses drawn from sexual selection theory, and from more recent approaches which consider the impacts of economic development and cultural ‘modernisation’ on mate preferences. Methods Participants verbally reported demographic data, and indicated preferences for five male and five female pairs of faces manipulated to differ in sexually dimorphic facial structure based on a sample of Salvadoran individuals. Results While urban participants showed a preference for more feminine female faces, this preference was not evident in the rural participants. Neither urban nor rural participants showed any directional preference for masculinised/feminised male faces. Furthermore, there was no support for any other pre-registered hypothesis. Conclusions Our results are consistent with previous studies showing no interest in facial dimorphism in less globally-acculturated, or market integrated, populations. Together, this suggests that while facial dimorphism may be subject to systematically varying preferences amongst some low-fertility, industrialised populations, it is not a feature which is likely to have been important in ancestral populations. We call for further work attempting to replicate well known mate choice phenomena in more diverse samples.

When multiple stimuli are presented simultaneously, they compete for limited attentional resources. This competition can be mediated by emotional valence, with angry faces eliciting faster and more accurate responses than neutral or positive faces in visual search and attentional blink studies. The current study was designed to investigate the consequences of this attentional bias on the accuracy of recognition memory for unfamiliar faces. In order to explore this issue, we used an inverse square root function based on the Sample-size model to characterise the relationship between N (set size) and d’ (a signal detection theory measure) for threatening and non-threatening faces. The results revealed a decrease in recognition accuracy for neutral faces as the number of to-be-remembered (TBR) faces increased. When the target-face had an angry expression, however, d' was significantly greater than neutral faces but only when there are two faces in the display. This advantage appears to be largely independent of saccadic sampling and suggests the benefit occurred during maintenance rather than encoding. Importantly, when one of the distractors had an angry expression, sensitivity to neutral faces reduced dramatically. This suggests that angry faces exhaust the resources available to process neutral faces. Importantly, because set size increases the distribution of resources during encoding (indexed by reduction in fixations duration) and maintenance, the observed interaction between set size and threat superiority effect suggests that decreasing the quality of the perceptual information available by increasing set size, is likely to decrease threat superiority because it reduces the information driving the activation of the amygdala.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. Emotions play an important role in overeating, yet there is little research looking at practical strategies to reduce overeating in response to a negative mood. In three different experimental studies, we tested if exposure to music can reduce food consumption in a negative mood. Female undergraduates (N = 120-121 in each study) completed a measure of emotional eating and reported baseline hunger. Mood ratings were taken at baseline, post-mood induction and post-eating. All participants were given a mood induction (sadness for study 1, stress for studies 2 and 3) and allocated to one of three music conditions (self-chosen in study 3) or a silent (control) condition. Music was selected from three pieces reported by each participant as being listened to regularly when experiencing the negative mood being examined (sadness or stress) in order to provide solace (comforting music), diversion (distracting positive music), or discharge (angry and/or sad music). Participants were provided with several snack foods to consume whilst completing a mock taste test and intake (in grams) was compared between conditions. In study 1 participants in the music for discharge condition consumed less than those in the control condition. Moreover, participants with high levels of self-reported EE ate more crisps in the control than in the distraction condition. In study 2 participants in the solace condition consumed less than those in the control and discharge conditions. In study 3 most participants chose music for diversion; this did not, however, lead to lower consumption, despite a reduction in reported stress. Overall, the results of these studies indicate that listening to certain types of music might reduce emotion-related eating after controlling for hunger using a standardized pre-session snack.

Previous research has shown that exposure to within-person variability facilitates face learning. A different body of work has examined potential benefits of providing multiple images in face matching tasks. Viewers are asked to judge whether a target face matches a single face image (as when checking photo-ID) or multiple face images of the same person. The evidence here is less clear, with some studies finding a small multiple-image benefit, and others finding no advantage. In four experiments, we address this discrepancy in the benefits of multiple images from learning and matching studies. We show that multiple-image arrays only facilitate face matching when arrays precede targets. Unlike simultaneous face matching tasks, sequential matching and learning tasks involve memory and require abstraction of a stable representation of the face from the array, for subsequent comparison with a target. Our results show that benefits from multiple-image arrays occur only when this abstraction is required, and not when array and target images are available at once. These studies reconcile apparent differences between face learning and face matching and provide a theoretical framework for the study of within-person variability in face perception.

Glass patterns (GPs) have been widely employed to investigate the mechanisms underlying processing of global form from locally oriented cues. The current study aimed to psychophysically investigate the level at which global orientation is extracted from translational GPs using the tilt after-effect (TAE) and manipulating the spatiotemporal properties of the adapting pattern. We adapted participants to translational GPs and tested with sinewave gratings. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether orientation-selective units are sensitive to the temporal frequency of the adapting GP. We used static and dynamic translational GPs, with dynamic GPs refreshed at different temporal frequencies. In Experiment 2, we investigated the spatial frequency selectivity of orientation-selective units by manipulating the spatial frequency content of the adapting GPs. The results showed that the TAE peaked at a temporal frequency of ∼30 Hz, suggesting that orientation-selective units responding to translational GPs are sensitive to high temporal frequencies. In addition, TAE from translational GPs peaked at lower spatial frequencies than the dipoles’ spatial constant. These effects are consistent with form-motion integration at low and intermediate levels of visual processing.

Previous research has shown that the typical or memory color of an object is perceived in images of that object, even when the image is achromatic. We performed an experiment to investigate whether the implied color in greyscale images could influence the perceived color of subsequent, simple stimuli. We used a standard top-up adaptation technique along with a roving-pedestal, two-alternative spatial forced-choice method for measuring perceptual bias without contamination from any response or decision biases. Adaptors were achromatic images of natural objects that are normally seen with diagnostic color. We found that, in some circumstances, greyscale adapting images had a biasing effect, shifting the achromatic point toward the implied color, in comparison with phase-scrambled images. We interpret this effect as evidence of adaptation in chromatic signaling mechanisms that receive top-down input from knowledge of object color. This implied color adaptation effect was particularly strong from images of bananas, which are popular stimuli in memory color experiments. We also consider the effect in a color constancy context, in which the implied color is used by the visual system to estimate an illuminant, but find our results inconsistent with this explanation. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.3758/s13414-019-01716-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We investigated the effect of wearing glasses and sunglasses on the perception of social traits from faces and on face matching. Participants rated images of people wearing no glasses, glasses and sunglasses on three social traits (trustworthiness, competence and attractiveness). Wearing sunglasses reduced ratings of trustworthiness. Participants also performed a matching task (telling whether two images show the same person or not) with pairs of images both wearing no glasses, glasses or sunglasses, and all combinations of eyewear. Incongruent eyewear conditions (e.g., one image wearing glasses and the other wearing sunglasses, etc.) reduced performance. Further analysis comparing performance on congruent and incongruent eyewear trials showed that our effects were driven by match trial performance, where differences in eyewear decreased accuracy. For same-eyewear-condition pairs, performance was poorer for pairs of images both wearing sunglasses than no glasses. Our results extend and update previous research on the effect of eyewear on face perception.

Emotional memory may be modulated by BDNF Val66Met and 5-HTTLPR polymorphisms. However, the influence of these genetic variants on the overnight retention of emotional memories has not been investigated in humans. Thirty-six healthy female students were selected to participate in this study based on 5-HTTLPR genotype status (L’/L’, L’/S’, S’/S’). Participants were also genotyped for BDNF Val66Met (Val/Val, Met carriers). We measured recognition performance for positive, neutral and negative images before and after overnight sleep. We found a significant interaction between BDNF Val66Met genotype group and image valence on post-sleep recognition performance. This interaction was driven by greater memory for negative and positive images, relative to neutral images, in Met carriers. We also found that longer Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep duration predicted greater post-sleep recognition performance for negative images in Met carriers, but not in Val homozygotes. We observed no influence of 5-HTTLPR polymorphisms on post- sleep recognition performance for positive, neutral or negative images. Our findings support a modulatory role for BDNF Val66Met in overnight emotional memory retention in females. We discuss the implications of this finding for understanding the influence of BDNF Val66Met on depression vulnerability.

Research has indicated that Caucasian women gaze more often at waist–hip and chest regions than other local body areas when assessing female body attractiveness and body size, and this stereotypical gaze distribution is further modulated by their own body satisfaction and body composition. However, little is known whether the model race and viewing perspective could affect women’s body-viewing gaze behaviour and body perception. Here, we presented female body images of Caucasian, Asian and African avatars in a continuum of common dress sizes in full frontal, mid-profile and rear view, and asked young Caucasian women to rate the perceived body attractiveness and body size. Their body-viewing gaze distributions were then correlated with their behavioural responses, their own body composition and body satisfaction. Our analysis revealed a clear in-group favouritism, in which Caucasian women tended to rate Caucasian avatars more attractive and slimmer than Asian and African avatars. Their body-viewing gaze patterns, on the other hand, were not affected by avatar race but were modulated by viewing perspectives. The frontal-view body (especially upper-body and waist–hip regions) attracted the highest proportion of viewing time, followed by the mid-profile view and then the rear-view body. Furthermore, our participants’ own body composition and satisfaction level did not affect their judgement of other women’s body attractiveness and body size, but could influence their gaze allocation at local body features. It seems that both body perception and body-viewing gaze behaviour are subject to group and individual biases.

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov's valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. in this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov's methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov's original analysis strategy, the valence-dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions, we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence-dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods and correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution., Vienna Science and Technology Fund [WWTF VRG13-007]; ERCEuropean Research Council (ERC)European Commission [647910]; CONICET, ArgentinaConsejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONICET); European Social Fund (Comprehensive Development for Implementing Smart Specialization Strategies at the University of Pecs) [EFOP-3.6.1.-16-2016-00004]; Swiss National Science FoundationSwiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)European Commission [PZ00P1_154911]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)CGIAR; Comunidad de MadridComunidad de Madrid [2016-T1/SOC-1395]; AEI/FEDER UE [PSI2017-85159-P]; National Science Centre, PolandNational Science Centre, Poland [2015/19/D/HS6/00641]; Joep Lange Institute; Slovak Research and Development AgencySlovak Research and Development Agency [APVV-17-0418]; French National Research Agency 'Investissements d'Avenir' programme grantFrench National Research Agency (ANR) [ANR-15-IDEX-02]; Australian Government Research Training Program ScholarshipAustralian GovernmentDepartment of Industry, Innovation and Science; University Grants Commission, New Delhi, IndiaUniversity Grants Commission, India; Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg; Beijing Natural Science FoundationBeijing Natural Science Foundation [5184035]; CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology; National Science Foundation Graduate Research FellowshipNational Science Foundation (NSF) [R010138018], C.L. was supported by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF VRG13-007); L.M.D. was supported by ERC 647910 (KINSHIP); D.I.B. and N.I. received funding from CONICET, Argentina; L.K., F.K. and A. Putz were supported by the European Social Fund (EFOP-3.6.1.-16-2016-00004; `Comprehensive Development for Implementing Smart Specialization Strategies at the University of Pecs'). K.U. and E. Vergauwe were supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (PZ00P1_154911 to E. Vergauwe). T.G. is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). M.A.V. was supported by grants 2016-T1/SOC-1395 (Comunidad de Madrid) and PSI2017-85159-P (AEI/FEDER UE). K.B. was supported by a grant from the National Science Centre, Poland (number 2015/19/D/HS6/00641). J. Bonick and J.W.L. were supported by the Joep Lange Institute. G.B. was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency (APVV-17-0418). H.I.J. and E.S. were supported by a French National Research Agency 'Investissements d'Avenir' programme grant (ANR-15-IDEX-02). T.D.G. was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. The Raipur Group is thankful to: (1) the University Grants Commission, New Delhi, India for the research grants received through its SAP-DRS (Phase-III) scheme sanctioned to the School of Studies in Life Science; and (2) the Center for Translational Chronobiology at the School of Studies in Life Science, PRSU, Raipur, India for providing logistical support. K. Ask was supported by a small grant from the Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg. Y.Q. was supported by grants from the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (5184035) and CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology. N.A.C. was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (R010138018). We acknowledge the following research assistants: J. Muriithi and J. Ngugi (United States International University Africa); E. Adamo, D. Cafaro, V. Ciambrone, F. Dolce and E. Tolomeo (Magna Graecia University of Catanzaro); E. De Stefano (University of Padova); S. A. Escobar Abadia (University of Lincoln); L. E. Grimstad (Norwegian School of Economics (NHH)); L. C. Zamora (Franklin and Marshall College); R. E. Liang and R. C. Lo (Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman); A. Short and L. Allen (Massey University, New Zealand), A. Ates, E. Gunes and S. Can Ozdemir (Bogazici University); I. Pedersen and T. Roos (Abo Akademi University); N. Paetz (Escuela de Comunicacion Monica Herrera); J. Green (University of Gothenburg); M. Krainz (University of Vienna, Austria); and B. Todorova (University of Vienna, Austria). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Existing models of facial first impressions indicate between two and four factors that underpin all social trait judgements. Here, we submitted several large databases of these first impression ratings to unsupervised learning algorithms with the aim of clustering together faces, rather than traits, to examine the ways in which impressions may be grouped together. Experiment 1 revealed two clusters of faces that exist in both a full-dimensional, and two- or three-factor representations, of social impressions, while Experiment 2 indicated that these clusters also emerged in additional datasets. In Experiment 3, using Bayesian modelling approaches, we extracted the impression profile of each cluster and also derived a vector that maximally separated the clusters. The resulting vector related strongly to the valence and approachability components in existing models. In a further test of our model, we showed in Experiment 4 that mere facial appearance, rather than perceptions, is sufficient to separate these clusters, demonstrating probabilistically that facial cues like smiling may drive the perceptual profile that gives rise to the perceptual clusters. Finally, Experiment 5 showed that observer responses to faces in these two clusters mapped closely on to approach-avoidance behaviour, with observers responding rapidly and without instruction to approach faces from one cluster over the other. Taken together, our findings provide compelling evidence, drawing upon both computational and behavioural approaches, that existing models of social impressions are realised practically in terms of basic approach-avoidance mechanisms.

When evaluating items in a sequence, the current judgment is influenced by the previous item and decision. These sequential biases take the form of assimilation (shifting toward the previous item/decision) or contrast (shifting away). Previous research investigating facial attractiveness evaluations provides mixed results while using analytical techniques that fail to address the dependencies in the data or acknowledge that the images represent only a subset of the population. Here, we utilized cross-classified linear mixed-effects modeling across 5 experiments. We found compelling evidence of multicollinearity in our models, which may explain apparent contradictions in the literature. Our results demonstrated that the previous image's rating positively influenced current ratings, and this was also the case for the previous image's baseline value, although only when that image remained onscreen during the current trial. Further, we found no influence of the next face on current judgments when this was visible. In our final experiment, the response bias due to the previous trial remained present even when accounts involving motor effort were addressed. Taken together, these findings provide a clear framework in which to incorporate current and past results regarding the biases apparent in sequential judgments, along with an appropriate method for investigating these biases. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The accurate perception of human crowds is integral to social understanding and interaction. Previous studies have shown that observers are sensitive to several crowd characteristics such as average facial expression, gender, identity, joint attention, and heading direction. In two experiments, we examined ensemble perception of crowd speed using standard point-light walkers (PLW). Participants were asked to estimate the average speed of a crowd consisting of 12 figures moving at different speeds. In Experiment 1, trials of intact PLWs alternated with trials of scrambled PLWs with a viewing duration of 3 seconds. We found that ensemble processing of crowd speed could rely on local motion alone, although a globally intact configuration enhanced performance. In Experiment 2, observers estimated the average speed of intact-PLW crowds that were displayed at reduced viewing durations across five blocks of trials (between 2500 ms and 500 ms). Estimation of fast crowds was precise and accurate regardless of viewing duration, and we estimated that three to four walkers could still be integrated at 500 ms. For slow crowds, we found a systematic deterioration in performance as viewing time reduced, and performance at 500 ms could not be distinguished from a single-walker response strategy. Overall, our results suggest that rapid and accurate ensemble perception of crowd speed is possible, although sensitive to the precise speed range examined.

Perceptions of physical attractiveness vary across cultural groups, particularly for female body size and shape. It has been hypothesized that visual media propagates Western "thin ideals." However, because cross-cultural studies typically consider groups highly differentiated on a number of factors, identifying the causal factors has thus far been impossible. In the present research, we conducted "naturalistic" and controlled experiments to test the influence of media access on female body ideals in a remote region of Nicaragua by sampling from villages with and without regular TV access. We found that greater TV consumption remained a significant predictor of preferences for slimmer, curvier female figures after controlling for a range of other factors in an ethnically balanced sample of 299 individuals (150 female, aged 15-79) across 7 villages. Within-individual analyses in 1 village over 3 years also showed an association between increased TV consumption and preferences for slimmer figures among some participants. Finally, an experimental study in 2 low-media locations demonstrates that exposure to media images of fashion models can directly impact participants' body size ideals. We provide the first converging cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental evidence from field-based research, that media exposure can drive changes in perceptions of female attractiveness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).