Warning: Attending to a mask may be hazardous to your perception

Object substitution is a type of backward masking that occurs when a mask appears during visual search for a target. We tested the hypothesis that object substitution is an overwriting process triggered by attentional selection of the mask. Impeding attentional selection of a mask by embedding it in an array of distractors eliminated object substitution. Similarly, object substitution did not occur when the mask appeared in advance of the target and, therefore, could not capture attention during search for the target. However, masking was reinstated when the mask was revealed from background contours at the moment of target onset and could therefore capture attention during search. These observations demonstrate that attentional selection of the mask is a necessary step in this type of masking and suggest that object substitution is active overwriting of unattended information triggered by selection of other visual information at a nearby location.     

Distance perception from motion parallax and ground contact

Meng and Sedgwick (2001, 2002) found that the perceived distance of an object in a stationary scene was determined by the position at which it contacted the ground in the image, or by nested contact relations among intermediate surfaces. Three experiments investigated whether motion parallax would allow observers to determine the distance of a floating object without intermediate contact relations. The displays consisted of one or more computer-generated textured cylinders inserted into a motion picture or still image of an actual 3-D scene. In the motion displays, both the cylinders and the scene translated horizontally. Judged distance for a single cylinder floating above the ground was determined primarily by the location at which the object contacted the ground in the projected image (“optical contact”), but was altered in the direction indicated by motion parallax. When more than one cylinder was present and observers were asked to judge the distance of the top cylinder, judged distance moved closer to that indicated by motion parallax, almost matching that value with three cylinders. These results indicate that judged distance in a dynamic scene is affected both by optical contact and motion parallax, with motion parallax more effective when multiple objects are present.     

What to expect from your remote eye-tracker when participants are unrestrained

The marketing materials of remote eye-trackers suggest that data quality is invariant to the position and orientation of the participant as long as the eyes of the participant are within the eye-tracker’s headbox, the area where tracking is possible. As such, remote eye-trackers are marketed as allowing the reliable recording of gaze from participant groups that cannot be restrained, such as infants, schoolchildren and patients with muscular or brain disorders. Practical experience and previous research, however, tells us that eye-tracking data quality, e.g. the accuracy of the recorded gaze position and the amount of data loss, deteriorates (compared to well-trained participants in chinrests) when the participant is unrestrained and assumes a non-optimal pose in front of the eye-tracker. How then can researchers working with unrestrained participants choose an eye-tracker? Here we investigated the performance of five popular remote eye-trackers from EyeTribe, SMI, SR Research, and Tobii in a series of tasks where participants took on non-optimal poses. We report that the tested systems varied in the amount of data loss and systematic offsets observed during our tasks. The EyeLink and EyeTribe in particular had large problems. Furthermore, the Tobii eye-trackers reported data for two eyes when only one eye was visible to the eye-tracker. This study provides practical insight into how popular remote eye-trackers perform when recording from unrestrained participants. It furthermore provides a testing method for evaluating whether a tracker is suitable for studying a certain target population, and that manufacturers can use during the development of new eye-trackers.     

Birth order differences in normal personality traits: Perspectives from within and outside the family

The hypotheses of Sulloway (1996) regarding birth order differences in five-factor model personality traits were tested in a sample of 231 college students with the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI; Costa & McCrae, 1992). Data were collected from three sources (self, peer, and parent) to systematically evaluate previous observations that birth order differences are more commonly found when ratings are obtained from family members than from observers outside the family (Ernst & Angst, 1983). Using a between-family design, students were selected only from families with two or three full biological siblings and no half-siblings, step-siblings, or adopted siblings. Firstborn (n = 103) and laterborn (n = 128) students were compared using NEO-FFI ratings by the self, by a same-sex college peer, and by a biological parent. No birth order differences were found for any of the five NEO-FFI scores using any of the three rating sources. Effect sizes (Cohen’s d) were less than .20 for all comparisons. Suggestions for new approaches to the study of birth order differences are considered, including the use of within-family designs and more contextualized personality variables.     

Distance perception as a function of photographic area of view

Distance perception of depicted objects was examined as a function of photographic area of view. Subjects viewed slides of natural outdoor scenes and directly estimated the distances to specified objects. Area of view was manipulated by means of photographing each scene with lenses of five different focal lengths: 135, 80, 48, 28, and 17 mm. Distance perception along the pictorial depth plane was systematically transformed through changing the photographic area of view: the shorter the focal length of the camera lens, the wider the area of view, and the greater the perceived distance. Linear functions for each subject's distance judgments revealed a very high goodness of fit. Both the y-intercepts and the slopes increased as focal length decreased. The increasing y-intercepts suggest that viewers place themselves farther away from the depicted scene as focal length decreases, compensating for the advancing proximal edge. The increasing slopes suggest that distance information throughout the pictorial depth plane appears to change with focal length. The subjects also made direct judgments of foreground truncation, revealing that foreground truncation decreased as focal length decreased, but that this decrease did not account for the considerable expansion in distance perception.     

Attention within auditory word perception: insights from the phonemic restoration illusion

Phonemic restoration is a powerful auditory illusion that arises when a phoneme is removed from a word and replaced with noise, resulting in a percept that sounds like the intact word with a spurious bit of noise. It is hypothesized that the configurational properties of the word impair attention to the individual phonemes and thereby induce perceptual restoration of the missing phoneme. If so, this impairment might be unlearned if listeners can process individual phonemes within a word selectively. Subjects received training with the potentially restorable stimuli (972 trials with feedback); in addition, the presence or absence of an attentional cue, contained in a visual prime preceding each trial, was varied between groups of subjects. Cuing the identity and location of the critical phoneme of each test word allowed subjects to attend to the critical phoneme, thereby inhibiting the illusion, but only when the prime also identified the test word itself. When the prime provided only the identity or location of the critical phoneme, or only the identity of the word, subjects performed identically to those subjects for whom the prime contained no information at all about the test word. Furthermore, training did not produce any generalized learning about the types of stimuli used. A limited interactive model of auditory word perception is discussed in which attention operates through the lexical level.     

Reading your own lips: Common-coding theory and visual speech perception

Common-coding theory posits that (1) perceiving an action activates the same representations of motor plans that are activated by actually performing that action, and (2) because of individual differences in the ways that actions are performed, observing recordings of one’s own previous behavior activates motor plans to an even greater degree than does observing someone else’s behavior. We hypothesized that if observing oneself activates motor plans to a greater degree than does observing others, and if these activated plans contribute to perception, then people should be able to lipread silent video clips of their own previous utterances more accurately than they can lipread video clips of other talkers. As predicted, two groups of participants were able to lipread video clips of themselves, recorded more than two weeks earlier, significantly more accurately than video clips of others. These results suggest that visual input activates speech motor activity that links to word representations in the mental lexicon.     

Changing perception of average person's risk does not suffice to change perception of comparative risk

The direct method of assessing "unrealistic optimism" employs a question of the form, "Compared with the average person, what is the chance that event X will occur to you?" It has been proposed that when individuals construct their responses to this question (direct-estimates) they focus much more strongly on estimates of their own risk (self-estimates) than on estimates of the average person's risk (other-estimates). A challenge to this proposal comes from findings that interventions that alter other-estimates also change direct-estimates. Employing a novel intervention technique, we tested the possibility that such interventions may indirectly also change self-estimates and that this is what accounts for their effect on direct-estimates. Study 1 (n = 58) showed that an intervention which was designed to (and did) affect other-estimates also affected self-estimates, while Study 2 (n = 101) showed that it affected direct-estimates. Study 3 (n = 79) confirmed that we could modify the intervention so as to maintain the effect on other-estimates, but eliminate that on self-estimates. Study 4 (n = 112) demonstrated that when this was done, there was no longer any effect on direct-estimates. The findings are consistent with the proposal that direct-estimates are constructed largely just out of self-estimates. Implications for heath education programs are discussed.     

Connect within to connect outside: effect of salespeople's political skill on relationship performance

Scholars have recently explored the effects of salespeople's intraorganizational relationships on salespeople's job-related outcomes. Grounded in social influence theory, we explore the effects of salespeople's intraorganizational skills on salesperson relationship performance. We empirically tested the proposed relationships using the data from a non-Western sales force working with an organization in an emerging economy. The results indicate that salespeople's political skill positively contributes to salespeople's identification with the organization and to creative performance, while strikingly, we also find that salesperson task adaptivity weakens these effects. Moreover, salespeople's identification and creative performance are positively related to customer satisfaction. These findings demonstrate that salespeople's intraorganizational relationships play a key role in enhancing customer satisfaction. In light of these results, we explore implications for marketers and academics and conclude by suggesting directions for further research.     

How extending your middle finger affects your perception of others: Learned movements influence concept accessibility

Body movements both express and influence how people feel and think. Conceptualizations of this bidirectional influence assume that movement-concept associations can be innate or learned, although evidence for learned associations remained ambiguous. Providing a conservative test of learned movement-concept associations, two studies investigate the influence of culture-specific body movements, which involve an arbitrary relationship between movements and associated concepts. Paralleling the influence of hostility primes, extending the middle finger influenced the interpretation of ambiguously aggressive behaviors as hostile, but did not influence unrelated trait judgments (Study 1). Paralleling the effects of global evaluative primes, upward extension of the thumb resulted in more positive evaluations of the same target along all trait dimensions and higher liking of the target (Study 2).