Determinants of hand attractiveness--a study involving digitally manipulated stimuli

Although attractiveness of the human hand is of significance in the social and mating context, thus far it has attracted little scientific interest. In this study, young women and men were presented with pairs of digitally manipulated images of opposite-sex hands and asked to indicate the hand perceived to be the more attractive in each pair. The hands within a pair differed from one another by a single feature: shape averageness, femininity, finger length, second-to-fourth-digit ratio, or skin smoothness. All these features, with the exception of the digit ratio, were shown to increase hand attractiveness in each sex in both dorsal and ventral views. Skin smoothness was preferred more strongly in female than in male hands. Women also tended to prefer medium degrees of shape femininity and skin smoothness in male hands compared to both high and low levels. Adaptive and non-adaptive (related to perceptual bias) mechanisms underlying these preferences are discussed.     

Reaction time to temporally-displaced phoneme targets in continuous speech.

In seven experiments, reaction time (RT) was recorded to phoneme targets in sentences. By means of tape splicing or other experimental interventions preceding the target, speech information was or was not discarded, and targets were either temporally displaced "early" or "late" or remained on time." RT to displaced targets was slower than to on-time targets, except when the tape-splicing manipulation in effect presented coarticulatory target information in advance, in which case RT was faster than RT to on-time targets. The latter manipulation also produced faster RT than RT to the same targets in the original sentence, that is, that containing no experimental intervention at all. In three of the experiments, half the targets were contained in stressed syllables, half in unstressed syllables. Stressed and unstressed targets were affected differently, depending upon practice and other factors. Results were interpreted in terms of listener expectancies based on timing redundancy in continuous speech. They indicate an interaction between the effects of segmental and suprasegmental cues during ongoing perception.     

Discrimination of computer-synthesized speech

The effects of learning on the discrimination of computer-synthesized speech was assessed by presenting 100 computer-produced monosyllabic words to 2 groups of 15 adult subjects. One group's errors were corrected while the other group's errors were uncorrected. A comparison of errors on the first 50 vs the second 50 presentations showed significant improvement for corrected group only. It was concluded that the discrimination of computer-synthesized monosyllables can be improved with correction of errors but is still about 14% poorer than the discrimination of human speech.     

Representation of serial order in speech: evidence from the repeated phoneme effect in speech errors

Previous research has shown that slips of the tongue involving the exchange of phonemes (e.g., left hemisphere----left hemisphere) are often characterized by a repeated phoneme next to the exchanging ones (the vowel /epsilon/ in the above example is next to both of the exchanging sounds, /l/ and /h/). Two experiments, which elicited slips of the tongue under controlled conditions, revealed that repeated sounds in a speech plan are contributory causes of phoneme exchanges, anticipations, and perseverations. In addition, it was found that repeated sounds induce the misordering of sounds that are not adjacent to the repeated ones, as well as those that are adjacent to the repeated ones. An analysis of a collection of natural slips also supported the conclusion that repeated sounds cause nonadjacent sounds to slip. The results are seen as inconsistent with serial order theories that propose a linear structure of sounds held together by contextual influences between adjacent phonemes.     

Effects of speaker variability and phoneme location on speech perception

The effects of variation in a speaker's voice and temporal phoneme location were assessed through a series of speeded classification experiments. Listeners monitored speech syllables for target consonants or vowels. The results showed that speaker variability and phoneme-location variability had detrimental effects on classification latencies for target sounds. In addition, an interaction between variables showed that the speaker variability effect was obtained only when temporal phoneme location was fixed across trials. A subadditive decrement in latencies produced by the interaction of the two variables was also obtained, suggesting that perceptual loads may not affect perceptual adjustments to a speaker's voice in the same way that memory loads do.     

Individual differences in conceptual behaviour following manipulated controllability

Expectations of controllability are thought to influence subsequent behaviour, such that perceived non-contingency between behaviour and outcomes can produce a “learned helplessness” reaction by the organism. Since cognitive processes are implicated in this debilitation, the present study examines the influence of manipulated controllability upon the intrinsic individual differences (among females) in a disjunctive conceptual behaviour recovery task. Three-mode factor analysis is used to explore the process variability in a multivariate time-series design. Results indicate that intrinsic task processes are altered by the controllability pretreatment, but the nature of the impact reflects substantial individual differences in reaction.     

Interference between phonemes during phoneme monitoring: evidence for an interactive activation model of speech perception

We explore the recent finding (Newman & Dell, 1978) that the time needed to detect a target phoneme in a phoneme monitoring task is increased when the preceding word contains a phoneme similar to the target. Normal adult native speakers of English monitored auditorily presented sentences and responded as quickly as possible whenever they detected a specified phoneme. We found that preceding word-initial phonemes, despite being processed more quickly, increased the response latency to the following target phoneme more than did preceding word-medial phonemes. There was also an increase in response latency even when the subject could be highly certain that the similar preceding phoneme was not an instance of the target phoneme. We argue that the interference effects are due to fundamental characteristics of perceptual processing and that more time is needed to categorize the target phoneme. We present a computer simulation using an interactive activation model of speech perception to demonstrate the plausibility of our explanation.     

Discrimination of intensity differences on formant-like transitions

Dorman (1974) studied the discrimination of intensity differences on formant transitions in and out of syllable context. He interpreted his results as suggesting that the acoustic features of his stop-consonant/vowel syllable were recoded into a phonetic representation, then stored in an inaccessible form of auditory short-term memory. The Dorman results are replicated with analogous pure-tone and FM-glide conditions. The results of both studies are explained in terms of specified acoustic properties of the signals and thus provide no evidence for a special phonetic recoding.     

Individual differences in typing: pause length

An analysis of pause distribution for 12 subjects on a controlled copying task suggests that pause-based measures used to assess writing processes should reflect individual differences in typing.     

Discrimination of cat-directed speech from human-directed speech in a population of indoor companion cats (Felis catus)

Animal Cognition - In contemporary western cultures, most humans talk to their pet companions. Speech register addressed to companion animals shares common features with speech addressed to young...     

Evidence for a late-occurring effect of phoneme repetition during silent reading

Two reading experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of phoneme repetition during silent reading (also referred to as the visual tongue-twister effect, see McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982; Perfetti & McCutchen, 1982) in conjunction with end-of-clause and end-of-sentence wrap-up effects (Just & Carpenter, 1982; Rayner, Sereno, Morris, Schmauder, & Clifton, 1989). In both experiments, reading time was measured on sentences containing either six or zero words sharing the same initial phoneme. Sentences were presented in a phrase-by-phrase moving window, with each phrase either containing one word that involved a repeated phoneme or a matched word not involving a repeated phoneme. The sixth presentation region either contained or did not contain a comma (Experiment 1) or a period (Experiment 2). The results showed that the effect of phoneme repetition occurred relatively late during sentence processing, only after integration processing related to end-of-clause and end-of-sentence wrap-up occurred.     

Lateral differences in lexical access: word length vs. stimulus length

A. W. Young and A. W. Ellis (1985, Brain and Language, 24, 326-358) have shown that visual length of stimuli is a major determinant of lateral differences in word processing. They suggest that the right hemisphere must first code the words in graphemic form and, therefore, is affected by the word length. They demonstrated that visual length is best defined as the number of letters. The present experiment was conducted with 36 normal subjects to test this definition of the visual length by contrasting the number of letters and the physical length in the visual field. Spaces were inserted in the short words (4-letter) so that they matched the physical length of the long words (7-letter). Our results replicated those of Young and Ellis and confirmed that visual length can be defined by the number of letters. In addition, the imagery value of the words tended to affect this Hemifield x Length effect, a result not obtained by Young and Ellis.     

Neural representation of consciously imperceptible speech sound differences

The concept of subliminal perception has been a subject of interest and controversy for decades. Of interest in the present investigation was whether a neurophysiologic index of stimulus change could be elicited to speech sound contrasts that were consciously indiscriminable. The stimuli were chosen on the basis of each individual subject's discrimination threshold. The speech stimuli (which varied along an F3 onset frequency continuum from /da/ to /ga/) were synthesized so that the acoustical properties of the stimuli could be tightly controlled. Subthreshold and suprathreshold stimuli were chosen on the basis of behavioral ability demonstrated during psychophysical testing. A significant neural representation of stimulus change, reflected by the mismatch negativity response, was obtained in all but 1 subject in response to subthreshold stimuli. Grand average responses differed significantly from responses obtained in a control condition consisting of physiologic responses elicited by physically identical stimuli. Furthermore, responses to suprathreshold stimuli (close to threshold) did not differ significantly from subthreshold responses with respect to latency, amplitude, or area. These results suggest that neural representation of consciously imperceptible stimulus differences occurs and that this representation occurs at a preattentive level.