What are you looking at? Acuity for triadic eye gaze

The authors measured observers' ability to determine direction of gaze toward an object in space. In Experiment 1, they determined the difference threshold for determining whether a live "looker" was looking to the left or right of a target point. Acuity for eye direction was quite high (approximately 30 s arc). Viewing the movement of the looker's eyes did not improve acuity. When one of the looker's eyes was occluded, the observers' acuity was disrupted and their point of subjective equality was shifted away from the exposed eye. Experiment 2 was a replication of Experiment 1, but digitized gaze displays were used. The results of Experiment 3 showed that the acuity for direction of gaze depended on the position of the looker's target. Overall, the results indicated that humans are highly sensitive to gaze direction and that information from both eyes is used to determine direction of regard.     

Do you believe in magic? Infants’ social looking during violations of expectations

Young infants tend to look longer at physical events that have unexpected outcomes than those that have expected outcomes, suggesting that they have knowledge of physical principles such as numerosity and occlusion (Baillargeon & Graber, 1987; Wynn, 1992). Although infants are typically tested in the presence of a caregiver, the social component of violations of expectations has received little attention. The present study investigated social looking during presumably expected and unexpected cognitive/perceptual events. Two experiments replicated the results of well-known physical knowledge experiments on addition/subtraction and occlusion in 6- (Experiments 1 and 2) and 9-month-old infants (Experiment 1), in that infants at both ages looked longer at unexpected than at expected events. Furthermore, infants at both ages initiated more looks at their caregivers' faces during unexpected than expected events. These findings are interpreted as suggesting that infants as young as 6 months of age actively seek to embed their experiences of unexpected physical/cognitive events in a social context.     

Are you looking at me? Measuring the cone of gaze

The processing of gaze cues plays an important role in social interactions, and mutual gaze in particular is relevant for natural as well as video-mediated communications. Mutual gaze occurs when an observer looks at or in the direction of the eyes of another person. The authors chose the metaphor of a cone of gaze to characterize this range of gaze directions that constitutes "looking at" another person. In 4 experiments using either a real person or a virtual head, the authors investigated the influences of observer distance, head orientation, visibility of the eyes, and the presence of a 2nd head on the perceived direction and width of the gaze cone. The direction of the gaze cone was largely affected by all experimental manipulations, whereas its angular width remained comparatively stable.     

Are you looking at me? Eye gaze and person perception

Previous research has highlighted the pivotal role played by gaze detection and interpretation in the development of social cognition. Extending work of this kind, the present research investigated the effects of eye gaze on basic aspects of the person–perception process, namely, person construal and the extraction of category–related knowledge from semantic memory. It was anticipated that gaze direction would moderate the efficiency of the mental operations through which these social–cognitive products are generated. Specifically, eye gaze was expected to influence both the speed with which targets could be categorized as men and women and the rate at which associated stereotypic material could be accessed from semantic memory. The results of two experiments supported these predictions: Targets with nondeviated (i.e., direct) eye gaze elicited facilitated categorical responses. The implications of these findings for recent treatments of person perception are considered.     

Interrupting infants’ persisting object representations: an object‐based limit?

Making sense of the visual world requires keeping track of objects as the same persisting individuals over time and occlusion. Here we implement a new paradigm using 10-month-old infants to explore the processes and representations that support this ability in two ways. First, we demonstrate that persisting object representations can be maintained over brief interruptions from additional independent events - just as a memory of a traffic scene may be maintained through a brief glance in the rearview mirror. Second, we demonstrate that this ability is nevertheless subject to an object-based limit: if an interrupting event involves enough objects (carefully controlling for overall salience), then it will impair the maintenance of other persisting object representations even though it is an independent event. These experiments demonstrate how object representations can be studied via their 'interruptibility', and the results are consistent with the idea that infants' persisting object representations are constructed and maintained by capacity-limited mid-level 'object-files'.     

Are you looking my way? Ostracism widens the cone of gaze

Ostracized individuals demonstrate an increased need for belonging. To satisfy this need, they search for signals of inclusion, one of which may be another person’s gaze directed at oneself. We tested if ostracized, compared to included, individuals judge a greater degree of averted gaze as still being direct. This range of gaze angles still viewed as direct has been dubbed “the cone of (direct) gaze”. In the current research, ostracized and included participants viewed friendly-looking face stimuli with direct or slightly averted gaze (0°, 2°, 4°, 6°, and 8° to the left and to the right) and judged whether stimulus persons were looking at them or not. Ostracized individuals demonstrated a wider gaze cone than included individuals.     

Do you see what I see? Infants’ reasoning about others’ incomplete perceptions

Twelve‐month‐olds realize that when an agent cannot see an object, her incomplete perceptions still guide her goal‐directed actions. What would happen if the agent had incomplete perceptions because she could see only one part of the object, for example one side of a screen? In the present research, 16‐month‐olds were first shown an agent who always pointed to a red object, as opposed to a black or a yellow object, suggesting that she preferred red over the other colours. Next, two screens were introduced while the agent was absent. The screens were (1) red or green on both sides; (2) red on the front (infants’ side) but green on the back (the agent’s side) or vice versa; or (3) only coloured red or green on the front. During test, the agent, who could see only the back of the screens, pointed to one of the two screens. The results revealed that while infants expected the agent to continue acting on her colour preference and point to the red rather than the green screen during test, they did so in accord with the agent’s perception of the screens, rather than their own perceptions: they expected the agent to point to the red screen in (1), but to the green‐front screen in (2), and they had no prediction of which screen the agent should point to in (3). The implications of the present findings for early psychological reasoning research are discussed.     

What are ‘Universalizable Interests’?

Many of Habermas's critical commentators agree that Discourse Ethics fails as a theory of the validity of moral norms and only succeeds as a theory of the democratic legitimacy of socio-political norms. The reason they give is that the moral principle (U) is too restrictive to count as a necessary condition of the validity of norms. Other commentators more sympathetic to his project want to abandon principle (U) and remodel Discourse Ethics without it. Still others want to downplay the role of universalizing moral discourse and to make more of Habermas's less demanding, though still somewhat vague, conception of ethical discourse. Against this chorus of critical voices Habermas maintains that his conception of moral discourse and the moral principle (U) are central to Discourse Ethics in general, and to the normative heart of his political theory in particular. The conflict may have arisen in part because the concept of a 'universalizable interest' which is central to Habermas's understanding of moral discourse and of the moral principle (U) remains opaque even after nearly two decades of critical debate. Actually Habermas's concept of interest is pretty obscure too. But the obscurity surrounding the concept of interest is not the source of the confusion. For our present purposes we can simply stipulate that an interest is a reason to want. The notion of reason rests loosely on the notion of a need, and the concepts of need and desire are take left deliberately vague. The source of the current confusion lies in the notion of universalizability that is in play. Once we pay due attention to the conditions of the universalizability of interests contained in Habermas's formulation of the moral principle (U), we can distinguish between a weaker and a stronger version of the principle. I argue that only the weaker version is defensible. But I also want to show that Habermas is tempted into defending the stronger version, and to explain why he does so.     

Who is looking at me? The cone of gaze widens in social phobia

Gaze direction is an important cue that regulates social interactions and facilitates joint attention. Although humans are very accurate in determining gaze directions in general, they have a surprisingly liberal criterion for the presence of mutual gaze. Using an established psychophysical task that required observers to adjust the eyes of a virtual head to the margins of the area of mutual gaze, we examined whether the resulting cone of gaze is altered in people with social phobia. It turned out that during presence of a second virtual person, the gaze cone's width was specifically enlarged in patients with social phobia as compared to healthy controls. The size of this effect was correlated with the severity of social anxiety. As this effect was found for merely virtual lookers, it seems to be a fundamental mechanism rather than a specific effect related to the fear of being observed and evaluated by others.     

What aspects of face processing are impaired in developmental prosopagnosia?

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a severe impairment in identifying faces that is present from early in life and that occurs despite no apparent brain damage and intact visual and intellectual function. Here, we investigated what aspects of face processing are impaired/spared in developmental prosopagnosia by examining a relatively large group of individuals with DP (n = 8) using an extensive battery of well-established tasks. The tasks included measures of sensitivity to global motion and to global form, detection that a stimulus is a face, determination of its sex, holistic face processing, processing of face identity based on features, contour, and the spacing of features, and judgments of attractiveness. The DP cases showed normal sensitivity to global motion and global form and performed normally on our tests of face detection and holistic processing. On the other tasks, many DP cases were impaired but there was no systematic pattern. At least half showed deficits in processing of facial identity based on either the outer contour or spacing of the internal features, and/or on judgments of attractiveness. Three of the eight were impaired in processing facial identify based on the shape of internal features. The results show that DP is a heterogeneous condition and that impairment in recognizing faces cannot be predicted by poor performance on any one measure of face processing.     

What did you say? Self‐regulatory depletion impairs interpretation of vocal cues

Evidence indicates that people are motivated to interpret environmental cues to belongingness, but doing so can be challenging. Prior evidence shows that the self's regulatory resources are consumed when interpreting complex facial displays; with this study, we examined how the depletion of such resources may impact the ability to interpret vocal tones. Results showed that depletion decreased accuracy in identifying complex (vs. simple) vocal cues, which extends prior work and offers a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between self‐regulatory resources and the ability to effectively interpret one's social environment.     

Who are you looking at? The influence of face gender on visual attention and memory for own- and other-race faces

Previous research suggests that the own-race bias (ORB) in memory for faces is a result of other-race faces receiving less visual attention at encoding. As women typically display an own-gender bias in memory for faces and men do not, we investigated whether face gender and sex of viewer influenced visual attention and memory for own- and other-race faces, and if preferential viewing of own-race faces contributed to the ORB in memory. Participants viewed pairs of female or male own- and other-race faces while their viewing time was recorded. Afterwards, they completed a surprise memory test. We found that (1) other-race males received the initial focus of attention, (2) own-race faces were viewed longer than other-race faces over time, although the difference was larger for female faces, and (3) even though longer viewing time increased the probability of remembering a face, it did not explain the magnified ORB in memory for female faces. Importantly, these findings highlight that face gender moderates attentional responses to and memory for own- and other-race faces.     

Who are you looking at? The influence of face gender on visual attention and memory for own- and other-race faces

Previous research suggests that the own-race bias (ORB) in memory for faces is a result of other-race faces receiving less visual attention at encoding. As women typically display an own-gender bias in memory for faces and men do not, we investigated whether face gender and sex of viewer influenced visual attention and memory for own- and other-race faces, and if preferential viewing of own-race faces contributed to the ORB in memory. Participants viewed pairs of female or male own- and other-race faces while their viewing time was recorded. Afterwards, they completed a surprise memory test. We found that (1) other-race males received the initial focus of attention, (2) own-race faces were viewed longer than other-race faces over time, although the difference was larger for female faces, and (3) even though longer viewing time increased the probability of remembering a face, it did not explain the magnified ORB in memory for female faces. Importantly, these findings highlight that face gender moderates attentional responses to and memory for own- and other-race faces.     

What are we really priming? Cue-based versus category-based processing of facial stimuli.

Results from 5 experiments provide converging evidence that automatic evaluation of faces in sequential priming paradigms reflects affective responses to phenotypic features per se rather than evaluation of the racial categories to which the faces belong. Experiment 1 demonstrates that African American facial primes with racially prototypic physical features facilitate more automatic negative evaluations than do other Black faces that are unambiguously categorizable as African American but have less prototypic features. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 further support the hypothesis that these differences reflect direct affective responses to physical features rather than differential categorization. Experiment 5 shows that automatic responses to facial primes correlate with cue-based but not category-based explicit measures of prejudice. Overall, these results suggest the existence of 2 distinct types of prejudice.     

Aberrant first fixations when looking at inverted faces in various poses: The result of the centre‐of‐gravity effect?

Face recognition is essential in everyday human life, and all faces are encountered in different poses. However, when a face is inverted, difficulties arise for recognition and eye movements may (Barton, Radcliffe, Cherkasova, Edleman, & Intriligator, 2006) or may not be disrupted (Williams & Henderson, 2007). The present study explored the effects of orientation and pose on recognition and eye movements during a standard old/new recognition task in order to resolve whether inversion disrupts eye movements. Eye‐tracking data looked at the first fixations, the number of fixations, and the duration of fixations over a face. A standard inversion effect was observed, but the three‐quarter view advantage was not observed. Eye‐movement data revealed that the eyes were the most sampled feature (in terms of first fixation, number of fixations, and duration of fixation) for all upright faces, however, other features were sampled first for inverted faces. These results are consistent with Barton et al.'s (2006) but not Williams and Henderson's (2007) findings: possible explanations for this are discussed with the caveat that the same images were used from learning to test.     

Report from borderland: an addendum to ‘What works?’

Abstract :  Based on personal experience the following paper briefly argues that forming a supportive relationship prior to analysis is important for certain 'borderline' patients. Should such a relationship not be established analysis may prove destructive, despite the best of intentions. Direct expression of feeling is important here but, it is suggested, has been undervalued in the history of analysis because of fear of spontaneity. This also affects current day writing about analysis.