How perceptive...
A Tiger and a President: Imperceptible Celebrity Facial Cues Influence Trust and Preference
Robin Tanner & Ahreum Maeng
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Neuroscientific research suggests that the brain has evolved specific capabilities enabling automatic social judgments of others to be made based on facial properties alone. However, little research in marketing has considered the consequences of how facial imagery is automatically processed. We explore automatic perceptions of familiarity by using morphing software to digitally combine unfamiliar faces with those of Tiger Woods and George Bush. Despite a complete lack of conscious recognition, trustworthiness ratings of the composite faces are clearly influenced by the celebrities in question. This appears to be due to implicit recognition being sufficient for individuals to automatically access their own summary valence judgments of either Woods or Bush. Alternative explanations based on a perceptual-fluency account, or implicit recognition sufficient to perceive specific trait ratings, are ruled out. These findings suggest that the marketing practice of digitally manipulating the attractiveness of facial imagery risks overlooking the important influence of familiarity.
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Get Me Out of This Slump! Visual Illusions Improve Sports Performance
Jessica Witt, Sally Linkenauger & Dennis Proffitt
Psychological Science, forthcoming
"One of the reasons we (the authors) enjoy going to live college basketball games is to watch the antics of the student section. We love watching the students' creativity in trying to pump up the home team and distract the visiting team, especially during free throws. Such escapades made us question whether manipulating what athletes see can influence their subsequent performance...Participants putted more successfully to the perceptually bigger hole...A likely explanation for this effect is that an increase in the apparent size of the target increased participants' confidence in their abilities, which in turn improved performance (Woodman & Hardy, 2003)."
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Strength and physical fitness predict the perception of looming sounds
John Neuhoff, Katherine Long & Rebecca Worthington
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Listeners consistently perceive approaching sounds to be closer than they actually are and perceptually underestimate the time to arrival of looming sound sources. In a natural environment, this underestimation results in more time than expected to evade or engage the source and affords a "margin of safety" that may provide a selective advantage. However, a key component in the proposed evolutionary origins of the perceptual bias is the appropriate timing of anticipatory motor behaviors. Here we show that listeners with poorer physical fitness respond sooner to looming sounds and with a larger margin of safety than listeners with better physical fitness. The anticipatory perceptual bias for looming sounds is negatively correlated with physical strength and positively correlated with recovery heart rate (a measure of aerobic fitness). The results suggest that the auditory perception of looming sounds may be modulated by the response capacity of the motor system.
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Pavlína Lenochová et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2012
Abstract:
Cross-culturally, fragrances are used to modulate body odor, but the psychology of fragrance choice has been largely overlooked. The prevalent view is that fragrances mask an individual's body odor and improve its pleasantness. In two experiments, we found positive effects of perfume on body odor perception. Importantly, however, this was modulated by significant interactions with individual odor donors. Fragrances thus appear to interact with body odor, creating an individually-specific odor mixture. In a third experiment, the odor mixture of an individual's body odor and their preferred perfume was perceived as more pleasant than a blend of the same body odor with a randomly-allocated perfume, even when there was no difference in pleasantness between the perfumes. This indicates that fragrance use extends beyond simple masking effects and that people choose perfumes that interact well with their own odor. Our results provide an explanation for the highly individual nature of perfume choice.
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Windows to the soul: Children and adults see the eyes as the location of the self
Christina Starmans & Paul Bloom
Cognition, May 2012, Pages 313-318
Abstract:
Where are we? In three experiments, we explore preschoolers' and adults' intuitions about the location of the self using a novel method that asks when an object is closet to a person. Children and adults judge objects near a person's eyes to be closer to her than objects near other parts of her body. This holds even when considering an alien character whose eyes are located on its chest. Objects located near the eyes but out of sight are also judged to be close, suggesting that participants are not using what a person can see as a proxy for what is close to her. These findings suggest that children and adults intuitively think of the self as occupying a precise location within the body, at or near the eyes.
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Overperceiving Disease Cues: The Basic Cognition of the Behavioral Immune System
Saul Miller & Jon Maner
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The behavioral immune system is designed to promote the detection and avoidance of potential sources of disease. Whereas previous studies of the behavioral immune system have provided insight into the types of heuristic cues used to identify disease carriers, the present research provides an understanding of the basic psychological processes involved in the detection of those cues. Across 4 studies, feeling vulnerable to disease, whether that feeling stemmed from dispositional tendencies or situational primes, facilitated a disease overperception bias - a tendency to overperceive people in the environment displaying heuristic disease cues. This disease overperception bias was observed in the outcomes of 2 cognitive processes: categorization and memory. When concerned about disease, participants set a lenient threshold for categorizing targets as displaying heuristic disease cues (e.g., obesity, old age). Additionally, concerns about disease led participants to set a lenient threshold for reporting on a recognition task that they had previously seen individuals displaying those disease cues. The present research provides insight into the basic cognitive mechanisms underlying the operation of the behavioral immune system.
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Estrogenic involvement in social learning, social recognition and pathogen avoidance
Elena Choleris et al.
Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Sociality comes with specific cognitive skills that allow the proper processing of information about others (social recognition), as well as of information originating from others (social learning). Because sociality and social interactions can also facilitate the spread of infection among individuals the ability to recognize and avoid pathogen threat is also essential. We review here various studies primarily from the rodent literature supporting estrogenic involvement in the regulation of social recognition, social learning (socially acquired food preferences and mate choice copying) and the recognition and avoidance of infected and potentially infected individuals. We consider both genomic and rapid estrogenic effects involving estrogen receptors α and β, and G-protein coupled estrogen receptor 1, along with their interactions with neuropeptide systems in the processing of social stimuli and the regulation and expression of these various socially relevant behaviors.
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The Perception of a Face Is No More Than the Sum of Its Parts
Jason Gold, Patrick Mundy & Bosco Tjan
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
When you see a person's face, how do you go about combining his or her facial features to make a decision about who that person is? Most current theories of face perception assert that the ability to recognize a human face is not simply the result of an independent analysis of individual features, but instead involves a holistic coding of the relationships among features. This coding is thought to enhance people's ability to recognize a face beyond what would be expected if each feature were shown in isolation. In the study reported here, we explicitly tested this idea by comparing human performance on facial-feature integration with that of an optimal Bayesian integrator. Contrary to the predictions of most current notions of face perception, our findings showed that human observers integrate facial features in a manner that is no better than would be predicted by their ability to use each individual feature when shown in isolation. That is, a face is perceived no better than the sum of its individual parts.
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Alex Jones, Robin Kramer & Robert Ward
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
To what extent does information in a person's face predict their likely behavior? There is increasing evidence for association between relatively neutral, static facial appearance and personality traits. By using composite images rendered from three dimensional (3D) scans of women scoring high and low on health and personality dimensions, we aimed to examine the separate contributions of facial shape, skin texture and viewing angle to the detection of these traits, while controlling for crucial posture variables. After controlling for such cues, participants were able to identify Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Physical Health. For personality traits, we found a reliable laterality bias, in that the right side of the face afforded higher accuracy than the left. The separate contributions of shape and texture cues varied with the traits being judged. Our findings are consistent with signaling theories suggesting multiple channels to convey multiple messages.
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Your Unconscious Knows Your Name
Roland Pfister et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2012
Abstract:
One's own name constitutes a unique part of conscious awareness - but does this also hold true for unconscious processing? The present study shows that the own name has the power to bias a person's actions unconsciously even in conditions that render any other name ineffective. Participants judged whether a letter string on the screen was a name or a non-word while this target stimulus was preceded by a masked prime stimulus. Crucially, the participant's own name was among these prime stimuli and facilitated reactions to following name targets whereas the name of another, yoked participant did not. Signal detection results confirmed that participants were not aware of any of the prime stimuli, including their own name. These results extend traditional findings on "breakthrough" phenomena of personally relevant stimuli to the domain of unconscious processing. Thus, the brain seems to possess adroit mechanisms to identify and process such stimuli even in the absence of conscious awareness.
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The Angry Spotlight: Trait Anger and Selective Visual Attention to Rewards
Brett Ford et al.
European Journal of Personality, March/April 2012, Pages 90-98
Abstract:
This investigation examined links between trait anger and selective attention to threats and rewards. Existing research has focused mainly on trait anxiety and is equally consistent with several competing theoretical accounts of trait emotion and visual attention. Both valence-based and motivation-based accounts predict that trait anxiety would be associated with biased attention toward threats. In contrast, a valence-based account predicts that trait anger would be associated with biased attention toward threats, whereas a motivation-based account predicts that it would be associated with biased attention toward rewards. To test these predictions, we measured trait anxiety, trait anger and selective attention to threats and rewards. Consistent with a motivation-based account, we found that trait anger was associated with selective attention toward rewarding but not threatening information, whereas trait anxiety was associated with selective attention toward threatening but not rewarding information.
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Oxytocin increases amygdala reactivity to threatening scenes in females
Alexander Lischke et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) is well known for its profound effects on social behavior, which appear to be mediated by an OT-dependent modulation of amygdala activity in the context of social stimuli. In humans, OT decreases amygdala reactivity to threatening faces in males, but enhances amygdala reactivity to similar faces in females, suggesting sex-specific differences in OT-dependent threat-processing. To further explore whether OT generally enhances amygdala-dependent threat-processing in females, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a randomized within-subject crossover design to measure amygdala activity in response to threatening and non-threatening scenes in 14 females following intranasal administration of OT or placebo. Participants' eye movements were recorded to investigate whether an OT-dependent modulation of amygdala activity is accompanied by enhanced exploration of salient scene features. Although OT had no effect on participants' gazing behavior, it increased amygdala reactivity to scenes depicting social and non-social threat. In females, OT may, thus, enhance the detection of threatening stimuli in the environment, potentially by interacting with gonadal steroids, such as progesterone and estrogen.
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T. Klucken et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Fear learning is a crucial process in the pathogeneses of psychiatric disorders, which highlights the need to identify specific factors contributing to interindividual variation. We hypothesized variation in the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) and stressful life events (SLEs) to be associated with neural correlates of fear conditioning in a sample of healthy male adults (N=47). Subjects were exposed to a differential fear conditioning paradigm after being preselected regarding 5-HTTLPR genotype and SLEs. Individual differences in brain activity as measured by fMRI, skin conductance responses and preference ratings were assessed. We report significant variation in neural correlates of fear conditioning as a function of 5-HTTLPR genotype. Specifically, the conditioned stimulus (CS+) elicited elevated activity within the fear-network (amygdala, insula, thalamus, occipital cortex) in subjects carrying two copies of the 5-HTTLPR S' allele. Moreover, our results revealed preliminary evidence for significant gene-by-environment interaction, such as homozygous carriers of the 5-HTTLPR S' allele with a history of SLEs demonstrated elevated reactivity to the CS+ in the occipital cortex and the insula. Our findings contribute to the current debate on 5-HTTLPR × SLEs interaction by investigating crucial alterations on an intermediate phenotype level which may convey elevated vulnerability for the development of psychopathology.