Using "Bubbles" with babies: a new technique for investigating the informational basis of infant perception

The 'Bubbles' technique (Gosselin, F. & Schyns, P.G. (2001). Bubbles: A technique to reveal the use of information in recognition tasks. Vision Research, 41, 2261-2271) has been widely used to reveal the information adults use to make perceptual categorizations. We present, for the first time, an adapted form of Bubbles, suitable for use with young infants.     

Interpretation mistakes in statistical methods: their importance and some recommendations

Interpretation mistakes in statistical methods: Their importance and some recommendations. Prior research has identified some of the most common misconceptions on how researchers interpret the results of significance tests. In this study, we examine the scope of these misconceptions in a sample of university professors and researchers from Spain on the basis of a short questionnaire. The obtained results provide important information: i) to prevent wrong interpretation from the data, ii) to correct the wrong use of statistical testing, iii) to suggest new ways of examining the data, and iv) to propose some modifications on the editorial criteria to publish scientific work.     

Quality service in supermarkets: a proposal of measurement

This assignment has the aim of going deeply into the study of service quality perception in supermarkets. The research tries to find the criterion used when rating the services received in a supermarket and also to elaborate an instrument to measure the service quality in this context. From the review of the existing bibliography, four theoretical factors and a thirteen items scale have been composed. These four factors are: price, product, service and image and fresh product. In order to check the psychometrical properties of the questionnaire we carried out a computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) with a sample of 300 interviews. The results obtained allow us to show a scale with a factorial structure of 4 dimensions that throws up optimal indexes of reliability and validity. At the same time we conclude that the variable called establishment global rate is an important variable in the perceptive structure of the consumers.     

Women abuse: beliefs and attitudes in university students

Beliefs and attitudes positives toward domestic violence are one of the risks factors for his occurrence. Among his most studied predictors are gender, gender role attitudes or educational level. In this paper, domestic violence beliefs and attitudes are analysed in 1395 university students. "Inventory of Thoughts Distorted on the Woman and the Violence" (Echeburúa and Fernández-Montalvo, 1997) and "Inventory of Social Desirability" by Crowne and Marlowe (Form C, Reynolds, 1982) were administrated. Boys and students without specific formation about this subject show more positive beliefs and attitudes toward domestic violence. Though social desirability introduces some limitations, these results suggest the importance of incorporating matters on this subject in the curriculum of university students in general and, especially, in future professional that will work with these groups.     

Assessing and interpreting personality change and continuity in patients treated for major depression

Structural, mean- and individual-level, differential, and ipsative personality continuity were examined in 599 patients treated for major depression assigned to 1 of 6 forms of a 6-month pharmaco-psychotherapy program. Covariation among traits from the Five Factor model remained invariant across treatment, and patients described themselves as slightly more extraverted, open to experience, agreeable and conscientious, and substantially more emotional stable after treatment. Trait changes were only to a small extent explained by changes in depression severity. There was evidence for differential, individual-level, and ipsative stability, with stable personality profiles in terms of shape and to a lesser extent in terms of scatter and elevation. Traits remain relatively stable, except for emotional stability, despite the depressive state and the psychopharmacological interventions.     

Mental rotation in schizophrenia

Motor imagery provides a direct insight into action representations. The aim of the present study was to investigate the level of impairment of action monitoring in schizophrenia by evaluating the performance of schizophrenic patients on mental rotation tasks. We raised the following questions: (1) Are schizophrenic patients impaired in motor imagery both at the explicit and at the implicit level? (2) Are body parts more difficult for them to mentally rotate than objects? (3) Is there any link between the performance and the hallucinating symptom profile? The schizophrenic patients (n = 13) displayed the same pattern of performance as the control subjects (n = 13). More particularly, schizophrenic patients’ reaction time varied as a function of the angular disparity of the stimuli. On the other hand, they were significantly slower and less accurate. Interestingly, patients suffering from hallucinations made significantly more errors than non-hallucinatory patients. We discussed these latter results in terms of deficit of the forward model. We emphasized the necessity to distinguish different levels of action, more or less impaired in schizophrenia.     

Show me the features! Understanding recognition from the use of visual information

We propose an approach that allows a rigorous understanding of the visual categorization and recognition process without asking direct questions about unobservable memory representations. Our approach builds on the selective use of visual information in recognition and a new method (Bubbles) to depict and measure what this information is. We examine three face–recognition tasks (identity, gender, expressive or not) and establish the componential and holistic information responsible for recognition performance. On the basis of this information, we derive task–specific gradients of probability for the allocation of attention to the different regions of the face.     

Transmitting and decoding facial expressions

This article examines the human face as a transmitter of expression signals and the brain as a decoder of these expression signals. If the face has evolved to optimize transmission of such signals, the basic facial expressions should have minimal overlap in their information. If the brain has evolved to optimize categorization of expressions, it should be efficient with the information available from the transmitter for the task. In this article, we characterize the information underlying the recognition of the six basic facial expression signals and evaluate how efficiently each expression is decoded by the underlying brain structures.     

Applying bubbles to localize features that control pigeons' visual discrimination behavior

The authors trained pigeons to discriminate images of human faces that displayed: (a) a happy or a neutral expression or (b) a man or a woman. After training the pigeons, the authors used a new procedure called Bubbles to pinpoint the features of the faces that were used to make these discriminations. Bubbles revealed that the features used to discriminate happy from neutral faces were different from those used to discriminate male from female faces. Furthermore, the features that pigeons used to make each of these discriminations overlapped those used by human observers in a companion study (F. Gosselin & P.G. Schyns, 2001). These results show that the Bubbles technique can be effectively applied to nonhuman animals to isolate the functional features of complex visual stimuli.     

Updating information in verbal working memory and executive functioning

50 older adults (M age=77.9 yr., SD=7.3; 35 women and 15 men) were tested using the updating working-memory task. They were also given the neuropsychological Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, assumed to evaluate executive functioning and the frontal cortex. A factor analysis with age, education, and verbal ability partialled out was computed on the updating task outcomes and resulted in a two-factor solution, indicating that this task requires two independent processes, interpreted as reflecting a storage component and an updating component. Partial correlations with age, education, and verbal ability partialled out indicated that Wisconsin Card Sorting Test measures were significantly associated with the factor supposed to reflect the updating process. Such results appeared consistent with the model of working memory with a central executive system involved in the updating process and related to the executive-frontal functioning, and a phonological loop system involved in the storage of verbal information and not linked to executive-frontal functions.