Perceiving speech from inverted faces

We examined whether the orientation of the face influences speech perception in face-to-face communication. Participants identified auditory syllables, visible syllables, and bimodal syllables presented in an expanded factorial design. The syllables were /ba/, /va/, /δa/, or /da/. The auditory syllables were taken from natural speech whereas the visible syllables were produced by computer animation of a realistic talking face. The animated face was presented either as viewed in normal upright orientation or inverted orientation (180° frontal rotation). The central intent of the study was to determine if an inverted view of the face would change the nature of processing bimodal speech or simply influence the information available in visible speech. The results with both the upright and inverted face views were adequately described by the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP). The observed differences in the FLMP’s parameter values corresponding to the visual information indicate that inverting the view of the face influences the amount of visible information but does not change the nature of the information processing in bimodal speech perception     

Phonological context in speech perception

Speech perception can be viewed in terms of the listener’s integration of two sources of information: the acoustic features transduced by the auditory receptor system and the context of the linguistic message. The present research asked how these sources were evaluated and integrated in the identification of synthetic speech. A speech continuum between the glide-vowel syllables /ri/ and /li/ was generated by varying the onset frequency of the third formant. Each sound along the continuum was placed in a consonant-cluster vowel syllable after an initial consonant /p/, /t/, /s/, and /v/. In English, both /r/ and /l/ are phonologically admissible following /p/ but are not admissible following /v/. Only /l/ is admissible following /s/ and only /r/ is admissible following /t/. A third experiment used synthetic consonant-cluster vowel syllables in which the first consonant varied between /b/ and /d and the second consonant varied between /l/ and /r/. Identification of synthetic speech varying in both acoustic featural information and phonological context allowed quantitative tests of various models of how these two sources of information are evaluated and integrated in speech perception.     

The perception of rotated shapes: A process analysis of shape constancy

Ss made objective shape judgments of circular objects rotated in depth to provide a process analysis of shape constancy. The significant finding was that task difficulty, as reflected by proportion errors and correct reaction times; increased with increases in rotation from the frontal-parallel plane. This effect was located at the perceptual encoding stage of the shape judgment process. It was demonstrated that, in contrast to true shape information, the time to interpret slant and two-dimensional projected shape information was not critically dependent on degree of rotation. These results and a number of other additional observations demonstrate that the invariance hypothesis does not provide a sufficient account of shape constancy. Although projected shape and’ slant judgments can be made easily, perception of true shape involves encoding a figure-ground relationship by a process that does not rely exclusively on the discrete values of projected shape and slant.     

The role of the decision system in sensory and memory experiments using confidence judgments

This paper uses an artificial “sensory task” (a dice game) to investigate whether it is possible to distinguish between two-state and multistate sensory processes by examining confidence ratings of a group of unpracticed Os. The results indicate that Os use a decision rule that is deterministic so that both operating characteristics and a posteriori probability functions reflect the number of states used by the decision system. Thus, it would seem to be possible to use confidence ratings of Os to evaluate theoretical issues.     

Are you talking to the future me? The moderator role of future self‐relevance on the effects of aging salience in retirement savings

Increasing the salience of aging has been shown to be a promising strategy to promote young adults' interest in saving for retirement. However, the processes responsible for this effect are still largely unknown. We hypothesize that increased savings choices will only occur when participants are also engaged in self‐relevant thoughts about their own future. Participants were exposed to a fictitious website advertising financial products. Study 1 (n = 78; M_age = 20.87) primed age salience and future self‐relevance orthogonally and showed that priming aging only caused increases in retirement investment decisions when self‐relevance was also high. Study 2 (n = 91; M_age = 23.40) tested whether the effects of age priming were due specifically to age or to a broader focus on the future. The study confirmed that investment decision effects are specific to exposure to the aging prime and not merely priming the future. The effects were also specific to investment in retirement funds and not just depositing money in a checking account. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications for the psychology of aging and retirement planning.     

Brexit or Bremain? A person and social analysis of voting decisions in the EU referendum

The period following UK's European Union referendum in 2016 foreshadows significant social and political change in the UK. The current research draws on social psychological theories to empirically examine the drivers of voting decisions during the referendum. We report the results of a prospective study using structural equation modelling with data (N = 244) collected just before, and self‐reported voting behaviour immediately following (N = 197), the European Union referendum. We employ a person and social approach to examine the additive roles of worldview, conservatism, social identity, and intergroup threat as predictors of voting intentions and behaviour. Results showed that person factors (worldview and conservatism) predicted voting intentions through social factors (European identity and realistic threat) and that intentions predicted behaviour. The results highlight the importance of addressing threat‐based intergroup rhetoric and the potential of common in‐group identity to mitigate psychological threat.