Recovering faces from memory: the distracting influence of external facial features

Recognition memory for unfamiliar faces is facilitated when contextual cues (e.g., head pose, background environment, hair and clothing) are consistent between study and test. By contrast, inconsistencies in external features, especially hair, promote errors in unfamiliar face-matching tasks. For the construction of facial composites, as carried out by witnesses and victims of crime, the role of external features (hair, ears, and neck) is less clear, although research does suggest their involvement. Here, over three experiments, we investigate the impact of external features for recovering facial memories using a modern, recognition-based composite system, EvoFIT. Participant-constructors inspected an unfamiliar target face and, one day later, repeatedly selected items from arrays of whole faces, with "breeding," to "evolve" a composite with EvoFIT; further participants (evaluators) named the resulting composites. In Experiment 1, the important internal-features (eyes, brows, nose, and mouth) were constructed more identifiably when the visual presence of external features was decreased by Gaussian blur during construction: higher blur yielded more identifiable internal-features. In Experiment 2, increasing the visible extent of external features (to match the target's) in the presented face-arrays also improved internal-features quality, although less so than when external features were masked throughout construction. Experiment 3 demonstrated that masking external-features promoted substantially more identifiable images than using the previous method of blurring external-features. Overall, the research indicates that external features are a distractive rather than a beneficial cue for face construction; the results also provide a much better method to construct composites, one that should dramatically increase identification of offenders.     

Gambling Sponsorship and Advertising in British Football: A Critical Account

ABSTRACT

Problem gambling is a growing public health issue in the UK. In this paper, we argue that football plays a problematic role in the promotion and normalisation of gambling. Given that sport broadcasts offer gambling (and alcohol) companies a loophole to avoid the post-watershed guidelines, children and young people are also exposed. By marketing gambling in general and to children in particular, football contributes to an increase in the overall ‘amount’ of gambling in society. In turn, this contributes to an increase in the prevalence of problem gambling (including gambling disorder) and all the associated harms. Furthermore, we argue that a significant amount of gambling profits come from problem gamblers. Therefore, football benefits from, and contributes to, the addictive consumption of gamblers.     

Correction to: Anaphoric Strategies Across Language Modalities: A Comparison Between Catalan and Catalan Sign Language (LSC)

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.     

Age-related declines in context maintenance and semantic short-term memory

This study reports age-related declines in context maintenance (Braver et al., 2001) and semantic short-term memory (STM) and evidence for a relation between the two. A group of younger and older adults completed a context maintenance task (AX-CPT), a semantically oriented STM task (conceptual span), a phonologically oriented STM task (digit span), and a meaning integration task (semantic anomaly judgement). In the AX-CPT task, a target response is required to the probe letter “X” but only when it is preceded by the letter “A” (the context). Either three (short interference) or six distractor letters (long interference) were presented between the cue and the probe. Results indicated an age-related deficit in context maintenance. Age-related declines were also observed for conceptual span and semantic anomaly judgement but not for digit span. Context maintenance was correlated with conceptual span and semantic anomaly judgement but not with digit span. These correlations were largely mediated by age differences, which also explained variance that was unique to (and not shared among) context maintenance, conceptual span, and semantic anomaly judgement.     

Young children's responses to media representations of intergroup threat and ethnicity

Two studies are reported in which ethnic majority children's reactions to media representations of ethnic minorities are examined. In Study 1, 20 white Scottish 6‐year‐olds viewed short television stories in which white or ethnic minority children were depicted as hostile to the participants’ in‐group (threat present) or not (threat absent). A strong effect of threat on liking was obtained but no effect of ethnicity of target and no interaction. In Study 2, 4‐ and 6‐year‐old white Scottish children viewed PowerPoint displays in which Scottish people were shown only as white (traditional version) or as ethnically diverse (multicultural version). Intergroup threat was manipulated. Again, a strong effect of threat was obtained. However, when threat was absent, participants exposed to the traditional condition liked the white out‐group more than the multi‐ethnic out‐group, while participants exposed to the multicultural condition liked the multi‐ethnic out‐group more than the white out‐group. The results are interpreted as consistent with the predictions of Social Identity Development Theory.     

Student Agency in Literacy: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

Scholars contend that agency is at the heart of cultivating equitable learning spaces for all learners. While it is intuitive that literacy educators support agency during instruction, there is diverse terminology surrounding the concept of agency in the field. As a result, aligning the construct to instructional practices and developing a conceptual understanding of agency in practice has been challenging. Our research team completed a systematic literature review of agency during literacy instruction. In this article, we describe findings of this review of empirical research on agency in literacy spanning from 1975–2017. Findings highlight the complexities associated with defining agency as well as the need for diverse methodological approaches to examining agency in literacy contexts.