Inhibition of return in response to gaze cues: The roles of time course and fixation cue

Recent studies have demonstrated that orienting of attention in response to nonpredictive gaze cues arises rapidly and automatically, in a similar fashion to peripheral sudden onset cueing. However, while peripheral cues consistently elicit inhibition of return (IOR) at about 300 ms following cue onset, very little is known about inhibition effects in response to gaze cues. The present experiments systematically examined the conditions under which IOR arises with such cues. Reliable inhibition effects were obtained. Importantly, IOR emerged only at long cue-target intervals and only when a second cue actively triggered attention away from the cued location. This suggests that compared to sudden onset cueing, gaze cueing results in both prolonged facilitation and a delayed onset of inhibition processes. Thus, although both types of cues elicit very similar orienting effects in terms of their basic behavioural outcomes, there are more subtle differences between gaze and peripheral cues with respect to the maintenance and quality of those cueing effects across time.     

Functional consequences of perceiving facial expressions of emotion without awareness

A substantial body of research has established that even when we are not consciously aware of the faces of others we are nevertheless sensitive to, and impacted by their facial expression. In this paper, we consider this body of research from a new perspective by examining the functions of unconscious perception revealed by these studies. A consideration of the literature from this perspective highlights that existing research methods are limited when it comes to revealing possible functions of unconscious perception. The critical shortcoming is that in all of the methods, the perceived facial expression remains outside of awareness. This is a problem because there are good reasons to believe that one important function of unconsciously perceived negative faces is to attract attention so that they are consciously perceived; such conscious perception, however, is never allowed with existing methodologies. We discuss recent studies of emotional face perception under conditions of visual search that address this issue directly. Further, we suggest that methodologies that do not examine cognitive processes as they occur in more natural settings may result in fundamental misunderstandings of human cognition.     

Ethical issues in biomedical research: Perceptions and practices of postdoctoral research fellows responding to a survey

We surveyed 1005 postdoctoral fellows by questionnaire about ethical matters related to biomedical research and publishing; 33% responded. About 18% of respondents said they had taken a course in research ethics, and about 31% said they had had a course that devoted some time to research ethics. A substantial majority stated willingness to grant other investigators, except competitors, access to their data before publication and to share research materials. Respondents’ opinions about contributions justifying authorship of research papers were mainly consistent but at variance with those of many biomedical journal editors. More than half said they had observed what they considered unethical research practices. To increase the chances of getting a grant funded, 27% said they were willing to select or omit data to improve their results; to make publication of their work more likely or to benefit their career, 15% would select or omit data and 32% would list an undeserving author. Of respondents who thought they had been unfairly denied authorship on a paper, or been listed with or asked to list an undeserving author, 75% said they would be willing to list an undeserving author (P<0.001). Having taken a course dealing with research ethics had no effect on stated willingness to select or omit data or to fabricate data in the future, but was positively associated with willingness to grant undeserved authorship (P<0.04). Although these results do not controvert research demonstrating the effectiveness of ethics courses during professional education, they indicate that the research environment is a powerful component of a trainee’s experience and ethical development. Preliminary results of this work were presented in part as a poster at the forumEthics, Values, and the Promise of Science, presented by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, 25–26 February 1993 in San Francisco, California, USA.     

Does unattended information facilitate change detection?

Changes between alternating visual displays are difficult to detect when the successive presentations of the displays are separated by a brief temporal interval. To assess whether unattended changes attract attention, observers searched for the location of a change involving either a large or a small number of features, in pairs of displays consisting of 4, 7, 10, 13, or 16 letters (Experiment 1) or digits (Experiments 2 and 3). Each display in a pair of displays was presented for 200 ms, and either a blank screen (Experiments 1 and 2) or a screen of equal luminance to the letters and digits (Experiment 3) was presented for 80 ms between the alternating displays. In all experiments, the search function for locating the larger change was shallower than the search function for locating the smaller change. These results indicate that unattended changes play a functional role in guiding focal attention.     

Sex-specific variation in facial masculinity/femininity associated with autistic traits in the general population

Reports linking prenatal testosterone exposure to autistic traits and to a masculinized face structure have motivated research investigating whether autism is associated with facial masculinization. This association has been reported with greater consistency for females than for males, in studies comparing groups with high and low levels of autistic traits. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to examine facial masculinity/femininity in 151 neurotypical adults selected for either low, mid-range, or high levels of autistic traits. In the first experiment, their three-dimensional facial photographs were subjectively rated by 41 raters for masculinity/femininity and were objectively analysed. In the second experiment, we generated 6-face composite images, which were rated by another 36 raters. Across both experiments, findings were consistent for ratings of photographs and composite images. For females, a linear relationship was observed where femininity ratings decreased as a function of higher levels of autistic traits. For males, we found a U-shaped function where males with mid-range levels of traits were rated lowest on masculinity. Objective facial analyses revealed that higher levels of autistic traits were associated with less feminine facial structures in females and less masculine structures in males. These results suggest sex-specific relationships between autistic traits and facial masculinity/femininity.     

Attention, researchers! it is time to take a look at the real world

Theories of attention, too often generated from artificial laboratory experiments, may have limited validity when attention in the natural world is considered. For instance, for more than two decades, conceptualizations of "reflexive" and "volitional" shifts of spatial attention have been grounded in methodologies that do not recognize or utilize the basic fact that people routinely use the eyes of other people as rich and complex attentional cues. This fact was confirmed by our novel discovery that eyes will trigger a reflexive shift of attention even when they are presented centrally and are known to be spatially nonpredictive. This exploration of real-world attention also led to our finding that, contrary to popular wisdom, arrows, like eyes, are capable of producing reflexive shifts of attention—a discovery that brings into question much of the existing attention research. We argue that research needs to be grounded in the real world and not in experimental paradigms. It is time for cognitive psychology to reaffirm the difficult task of studying attention in a manner that has relevance to real-life situations.     

Manipulations of attention enhance self-regulation

Successful goal-directed behavior requires self-regulation to override competing impulses. Emerging evidence suggests that attention may mediate such acts, but little is known about the specific operations through which attention might influence self-regulation. Here we test this often-implicit assumption by manipulating attention mechanisms in two ways: one controlling the inhibition of inappropriate responses; the other controlling the breadth of attention. Participants significantly improved their performance on a self-regulation task after practice on a response inhibition task (Experiment 1) and after the induction of a broad focus of attention in a visual discrimination task (Experiment 2). We propose that such manipulations enhance self-regulation by engaging mechanisms that enhance the salience of goal-related representations and reduce the activation of competing goal-irrelevant neural representations. By more efficiently resolving conflict among the signals vying to drive behavior, pre-engaging attention may also help to conserve resources needed for continued self-regulation.