Face processing skills predict faithfulness of portraits drawn by novices

Individuals show astonishing variability in their face recognition abilities, and the causes and consequences of this heterogeneity are unclear. Special expertise with faces, for example in portraitists, is associated with advantages on face processing tasks, especially those involving perceptual abilities. Do face processing skills improve through practice, or does drawing skill reflect pre-existing individual differences? If the latter, then the association between face processing skills and production of faithful portraits should also exist in people without practice in drawing. Two exploratory studies and one follow-up confirmatory study provide support for this hypothesis. Drawing ability of novices was predicted by their performance on face recognition tasks involving perceptual discrimination and visual short-term memory, but not by those that rely more heavily on long-term memory or memory for non-face objects. By examining non-experts, we show that expertise with faces might build upon pre-existing individual differences in face processing skills.     

Undetected changes in visible stimuli influence subsequent decisions

Change blindness-our inability to detect changes in a stimulus-occurs even when the change takes place gradually, without any disruption [Simons, D. J., Franconeri, S. L., & Reimer, R. L. (2000). Change blindness in the absence of a visual disruption. Perception, 29(10), 1143-1154]. Such gradual changes are more difficult to detect than changes that involve a disruption. Using this method, David et al. [David, E., Laloyaux, C., Devue, C., & Cleeremans, A. (in press). Change blindness to gradual changes in facial expressions. Psychologica Belgica] recently showed substantial blindness to changes that involve facial expressions of emotion. In this experiment, we show that people who failed to detect any change in the displays were (1) nevertheless influenced by the changing information in subsequent recognition decisions about which facial expression they had seen, and (2) that their confidence in their decisions was lower after exposure to changing vs. static displays. The findings therefore support the notion that undetected changes that occur in highly salient stimuli may be causally efficacious and influence subsequent behavior. Implications concerning the nature of the representations associated with undetected changes are discussed.     

Verbal memory compensation: application to left and right temporal lobe epileptic patients

This study investigates the compensatory impact of cognitive aids on left and right temporal lobe epileptic patients suffering from verbal memory disorders, who were candidates for surgery. Cognitive aids are defined in the levels-of-processing framework and deal with the depth of encoding, the elaboration of information, and the use of retrieval cues. Results indicate differential compensatory impact for left and right epileptic patients and are discussed according to the HERA model and the compensation framework.     

More questions for mirror neurons

The mirror neuron system is widely held to provide direct access to the motor goals of others. This paper critically investigates this idea, focusing on the so-called ‘intentional worry’. I explore two answers to the intentional worry: first that the worry is premised on too limited an understanding of mirror neuron behaviour (Sections 2 Mirror neurons and the intentional worry, 3 What is the mechanism behind motor chain embeddings?), second that the appeal made to mirror neurons can be refined in such a way as to avoid the worry (Section 4). I argue that the first response requires an account of the mechanism by which small-scale gestures are supposedly mapped to larger chains of actions but that none of the extant accounts of this mechanism are plausible. Section 4 then briefly examines refinements of the mirror neuron-mindreading hypothesis which avoid the intentional worry. I conclude that these refinements may well be plausible but that they undermine many of the claims standardly made for mirror neurons.     

Field dependence in relation to alcohol consumption: a co-twin control study.

20 male, alcohol-discordant twin pairs, aged 45 to 65 yr. were compared for field-dependent cognitive style and general intelligence by means of one-sample t and multivariate Td2-tests. The high alcohol group was more field-dependent (p less than .01) than the low alcohol group, mainly because of poorer scores on the Embedded-figures Test. When general intelligence was controlled for, the amount of embedded-figures variance accounted for by consumption of alcohol dropped considerably.     

The eukolos-dyskolos dimension: locus of control and personal satisfaction

It is first asked how Hofst?tter's (1986) personality dimension dyskolos-eukolos could be validated without directly using self-assessments of subjective well-being. It is argued that internal and external locus-of-control beliefs could be tied to this construct. A study with 264 respondents shows that internal beliefs lead to well-being ratings that are higher in every life aspect than those associated with ratings of external beliefs. The effects are only marginally greater for control beliefs directly related to the different life aspects. It is hypothesized that internal control beliefs and high satisfaction are both generated by experiences of behavior that is both successful and causally self-attributed.     

The impact of environmental experiences on symptoms of anxiety and depression across the life span

Symptoms of anxiety and depression are relatively stable over time. Can this stability be explained by genetic influences, or is it caused by the long-lasting effects of accumulating environmental experiences? To address this question, we analyzed longitudinally assessed symptoms of anxiety and depression in eight samples of monozygotic twins of widely varying ages. These samples were drawn from American and European population-based registries. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we examined individual differences and individual changes in the level of symptoms over time. This method enabled us to decompose the variance into the predictable variance shared by both members of each pair of twins, the differences between individuals within pairs, and the residual variance. We then modeled how these components of individual variation changed over time. Within pairs, the twins' predicted levels of symptoms increasingly diverged from childhood until late adulthood, at which point the divergence ceased. By middle adulthood, environmental experiences contributed substantially to stable and predictable interindividual differences in levels of anxiety and depression.