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Pests such as invasive exotic wasps and rats are a serious threat to Aotearoa New Zealand’s native species, and the country has been working toward the New Zealand government’s target of eliminating rats, possums, and mustelids by 2050. Since current control methods lack the efficiency and scalability to eradicate mammalian predators and pest invertebrates like wasps, gene technologies are being considered and developed as additional methods of control. Social studies to gauge public perceptions on these novel technologies have also been conducted, with a strong emphasis on Indigenous viewpoints and the importance of societal compacts, particularly Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi). Conservation volunteers and environmental specialists are uniquely experienced and positioned to inform decisions on which technologies are developed and how, but 1) what are their views on genetic technologies for pest control and 2) how do they expect gene technology for pest control to be discussed and developed? To help answer these two questions, we conducted a new analysis of a dataset of 8,199 nationwide survey responses, 23 in-depth surveys of wasp control volunteers, and 18 interviews with rat and wasp control volunteers and environmental experts, using Q-methodology. All of the conservation volunteers, scientists, academics, and environmental professionals expect that risks associated with the technology are carefully and fully identified and mitigated against. A majority cautiously supports gene technologies for their potential to more effectively control pests. A significant minority supports gene technologies for pest control under certain conditions, most significantly if Māori as Tiriti partners are also supportive. A smaller minority has doubts and concerns about gene technologies for pest control and raises important considerations for scientists and policy-makers alike. Addressing all of these concerns, supported by Tiriti-based decision-making processes, will facilitate consensus-based discussions and decisions on genetic technology use.

Physical appearance influences our perceptions, judgments, and decision making about others. While the current literature with regard to the perceptions and judgments of nondisabled people’s attractiveness is robust, the research investigating the perceived physical attractiveness and judgments of physically disabled individuals is scarce. Therefore, in the current study, we investigated whether people with physical disabilities are perceived by the opposite sex as more or less attractive relative to nondisabled individuals. Our results, based on over 675 participants, showed a positive effect for women’s attractiveness ratings of men with physical disabilities, but not men’s attractiveness ratings of physically disabled women. Moreover, social desirability bias was positively associated with attractiveness ratings of physically disabled individuals, meaning those with higher tendency to be viewed favorably by others rated physically disabled individuals more attractive. Finally, our results revealed that attractiveness ratings of individuals with physical disabilities are positively associated with extroversion and empathy in both men and women, and positively with agreeableness and negatively with neuroticism in women. In conclusion, our study showed women rate men with physical disabilities as higher on attractiveness than nondisabled men, which is also influenced by their social desirability bias.

In daily life, humans constantly process information from multiple sensory modalities (e.g., visual and auditory). Information across sensory modalities may (or may not) be combined to form the perception of a single event via the process of multisensory integration. Recent research has suggested that performing a spatial crossmodal congruency task jointly with a partner affects multisensory integration. To date, it has not been investigated whether multisensory integration in other crossmodal tasks is also affected by performing a task jointly. To address this point, we investigated whether joint task performance also affects perceptual judgments in a crossmodal motion discrimination task and a temporal order judgment task. In both tasks, pairs of participants were presented with auditory and visual stimuli that might or might not be perceived as belonging to a single event. Each participant in a pair was required to respond to stimuli from one sensory modality only (e.g., visual stimuli only). Participants performed both individual and joint conditions. Replicating earlier multisensory integration effects, we found that participants' perceptual judgments were significantly affected by stimuli in the other modality for both tasks. However, we did not find that performing a task jointly modulated these crossmodal effects. Taking this together with earlier findings, we suggest that joint task performance affects crossmodal results in a manner dependent on how these effects are quantified (i.e., via responses time or accuracy) and the specific task demands (i.e., whether tasks require processing stimuli in terms of location, motion, or timing).

Because of their value as a socially communicative cue, researchers have strived to understand how the gaze of other people influences a variety of cognitive processes. Recent work in social attention suggests that the use of images of people in laboratory studies, as a substitute for real people, may not effectively test socially communicative aspects of eye gaze. As attention affects many other cognitive processes, it is likely that social attention between real individuals could also affect other cognitive processes, such as memory. However, from previous work alone, it is unclear whether, and if so how, socially communicative eye gaze affects memory. The present studies test the assumption that socially communicative aspects of eye gaze may impact memory by manipulating the eye gaze of a live speaker in the context of a traditional recognition paradigm used frequently in the laboratory. A female (Experiment 1) or male (Experiment 2) investigator read words aloud and varied whether eye contact was, or was not, made with a participant. With both female and male investigators, eye contact improved word recognition only for female participants and hindered word recognition in male participants. When a female investigator prolonged their eye contact (Experiment 3) to provide a longer opportunity to both observe and process the investigator’s eye gaze, the results replicated the findings from Experiments 1 and 2. The findings from Experiments 1–3 suggest that females interpret and use the investigator’s eye gaze differently than males. When key aspects from the previous experiments were replicated in a noncommunicative situation (i.e., when a video of a speaker is used instead of a live speaker; Experiment 4), the memory effects observed previously in response to eye gaze were eliminated. Together, these studies suggest that it is the socially communicative aspects of eye gaze from a real person that influence memory. The findings reveal the importance of using social cues that are communicative in nature (e.g., real people) when studying the relationship between social attention and memory.

Approach-avoidance behaviors are observed across a broad range of species. For humans, we tend move toward things we like, and away from things we dislike. Previous research tested whether repeatedly shifting visuo-spatial attention toward an object in response to eye gaze cues can increase liking for that object. Here, we tested whether a gaze-liking effect can occur for verbal descriptions of looking behavior without shifts of attention. Also, we tested the gaze specificity hypothesis – that the liking effect is specific to gaze cues – by comparing the effect of different types of cue (pointing gestures and arrow cues). In Experiment 1, participants (N = 205) were split into 5 groups according to the type of cue that was described as directed either toward or away from an object. The results show that (1) attention is not necessary; the liking effect was recorded for verbal descriptions of looking, (2) the effect also occurs for descriptions of pointing and arrows, and (3) the liking effect is enhanced for gaze cues compared to arrows, consistent with the gaze specificity hypothesis. Results from a further experiment suggest that the effect is not due to demand compliance. We conclude that the gaze-liking effect occurs for verbal descriptions of eye gaze. Indeed, because our method bypasses altogether the use of visual cues, objects, and shifts in visual selective attention, our paradigm appears to be more sensitive at tapping into the fundamental approach-avoidance response that mediate the implicit liking effect. As such, it offers new opportunities for research investigations in the future.

There is a growing consensus among researchers that a complete description of human attention and action should include information about how these processes are informed by social context. When we actively engage in co-action with others, there are characteristic changes in action kinematics, reaction time, search behavior, as well as other processes (see Sebanz et al., 2003; Becchio et al., 2010; Wahn et al., 2017). It is now important to identify precisely what is shared between co-actors in these joint action situations. One group recently found that participants seem to withdraw their attention away from a partner and toward themselves when co-engaged in a line bisection judgment task (Szpak et al., 2016). This effect runs counter to the typical finding that attention is drawn toward social items in the environment (Birmingham et al., 2008, 2009; Foulsham et al., 2011). As such, the result suggests that joint action can uniquely lead to the withdrawal of covert attention in a manner detectable by a line bisection task performed on a computer screen. This task could therefore act as a simple and elegant measure of interpersonal effects on attention within particular pairs of participants. For this reason, the present work attempted to replicate and extend the finding that attention, as measured by a line-bisection task, is withdrawn away from nearby co-actors. Overall our study found no evidence of social modulation of covert attention. This suggests that the line bisection task may not be sensitive enough to reliably measure interpersonal attention effects – at least when one looks at overall group performance. However, our data also hint at the possibility that the effect of nearby others on the distribution of attention may be modulated by individual differences.

When humans collaborate, they often distribute task demands in order to reach a higher performance compared to performing the same task alone (i.e., a collective benefit). Here, we tested to what extent receiving information about the actions of a co-actor, performance scores, or receiving both types of information impacts the collective benefit in a collaborative multiple object tracking task. In a between-subject design, pairs of individuals jointly tracked a subset of target objects among several moving distractor objects on a computer screen for a 100 trials. At the end of a trial, pairs received performance scores (Experiment 1), information about their partner's target selections (Experiment 2), or both types of information (Experiment 3). In all experiments, the performance of the pair exceeded the individual performances and the simulated performance of two independent individuals combined. Initially, when receiving both types of information (Experiment 3), pairs achieved the highest performance and divided task demands most efficiently compared to the other two experiments. Over time, performances and the ability to divide task demands for pairs receiving a single type of information converged with those receiving both, suggesting that pairs' coordination strategies become equally effective over time across experiments. However, pairs' performances never reached a theoretical limit of performance in all experiments. For distributing task demands, members of a pair predominantly used a left-right division of labor strategy (i.e., the leftmost targets were tracked by one co-actor while the rightmost targets were tracked by the other co-actor). Overall, findings of the present study suggest that receiving information about actions of a co-actor, performance scores, or receiving both enables pairs to devise effective division of labor strategies in a collaborative visuospatial task. However, when pairs had both types of information available, the formation of division of labor strategies was facilitated, indicating that pairs benefited the most from having both types of information available (i.e., actions about the co-actor and performance scores). Findings are applicable to circumstances in which humans need to perform collaborative visuospatial tasks that are time-critical and/or only allow a very limited exchange of information between co-actors.