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     

Common reasoning about admissibility

We analyze common reasoning about admissibility in the strategic and extensive form of a game. We define a notion of sequential proper admissibility in the extensive form, and show that, in finite extensive games with perfect recall, the strategies that are consistent with common reasoning about sequential proper admissibility in the extensive form are exactly those that are consistent with common reasoning about admissibility in the strategic form representation of the game. Thus in such games the solution given by common reasoning about admissibility does not depend on how the strategic situation is represented. We further explore the links between iterated admissibility and backward and forward induction.     

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.     

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.