Can you McGurk yourself? Self-face and self-voice in audiovisual speech

We are constantly exposed to our own face and voice, and we identify our own faces and voices as familiar. However, the influence of self-identity upon self-speech perception is still uncertain. Speech perception is a synthesis of both auditory and visual inputs; although we hear our own voice when we speak, we rarely see the dynamic movements of our own face. If visual speech and identity are processed independently, no processing advantage would obtain in viewing one’s own highly familiar face. In the present experiment, the relative contributions of facial and vocal inputs to speech perception were evaluated with an audiovisual illusion. Our results indicate that auditory self-speech conveys a processing advantage, whereas visual self-speech does not. The data thereby support a model of visual speech as dynamic movement processed separately from speaker recognition.     

Comment on “Visual layout modulates Fitts’s law: The importance of first and last positions”

Pratt, Adam, and Fischer (2007) investigated the effect of surrounding targets on the time it took to move to an individual target and found that the movement time to a central target was above the Fitts’s law line related to the first and last targets. They explained their results in terms of a “visuomotor hypothesis.” Here, an alternative explanation is given in terms of a previously validated model of the “available target width” that is determined by the size of the target and the width of the finger pad that is being used to hit the target.     

The relationship between color–object associations and color preference: Further investigation of ecological valence theory

Ecological valence theory (EVT; Palmer & Schloss, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107:8877–8882, 2010) proposes that color preferences are due to affective responses to color-associated objects: That is, people generally like colors to the degree that they like the objects associated with those colors. Palmer and Schloss found that the average valence of objects associated with a color, when weighted by how well the objects matched the color (weighted affective valence estimates: WAVE) explained 80% of the variation in preference across colors. Here, we replicated and extended Palmer and Schloss’s investigation to establish whether color–object associations can account for sex differences in color preference and whether the relationship between associated objects and color preference is equally strong for males and females. We found some degree of sex specificity to the WAVEs, but the relationship between WAVE and color preference was significantly stronger for males than for females (74% shared variance for males, 45% for females). Furthermore, analyses identified a significant inverse relationship between the number of objects associated with a color and preference for the color. Participants generally liked colors associated with few objects and disliked colors associated with many objects. For the sample overall and for females alone, this association was not significantly weaker than the association of the WAVE and preference. The success of the WAVE at capturing color preference was partly due to the relationship between the number of associated objects and color preference. The findings identify constraints of EVT in its current form, but they also provide general support for the link between color preference and color–object associations.     

Midlife Sexuality Among Thai Adults: Adjustment to Aging in the Thai Family Context

The objective of the study is to assess views of age related changes in sexual behavior among married Thai adults age 53–57. Results are viewed in the context of life course theory. In-depth interviews were conducted with 44 Thai adults in Bangkok and the four regions of Thailand. Topics covered include changing sexual behavior with age, adjustment to this change, gender differences in behavior, attitudes toward commercial sex and other non-marital sexual partners, and condom use. Most respondents were aware of this change and saw a decrease in sexual activity and desire more often among women compared to men. At the same time, many respondents viewed sexuality as important to a marriage. Some respondents accepted the decrease in sexual activity and focused more on work, family and temple activities. Thai Buddhism was seen as an important resource for people who were dealing with changes due to aging. Other persons turned to other partners including both commercial and non-commercial partners. The influence of the HIV epidemic that began in the 1990s was seen in concerns about disease transmission with extramarital partners and consequent attitudes toward condom use. The acceptability of extramarital partners in the family and community ranged from acceptance to strong disapproval of extramarital relationships.     

Invisible “Others”: Sexual Health Vulnerabilities of Wives of Men who Have Sex with Men

The recent trend in the feminization of the HIV epidemic poses great risk to women, especially to the wives of men who have sex with men (MSM). The objective of the present study was to explore wives’ responses to their husbands’ sexual orientation as well as the factors that influence their sexual health in India. For this research, 15 wives who were aware of their husbands’ sexual orientation and their husbands were interviewed separately using semi-structured in-depth interviews and focus groups. The study explored the social and cultural structures that create gender inequality, which put women married to MSM at sexual health risk. These factors need to be addressed carefully through existing MSM targeted interventions, without breaching the confidentiality of either partner.     

Determinants of Electoral Support for Anti-Gay Marriage Constitutional Amendments: An Examination of Ballot Issues in California and Florida

Between 1998 and 2006, twenty-seven states amended their constitutions to prohibit same sex marriage. The 2008 elections again saw three states with ballot measures aimed at banning gay marriage. This study examines the determinants of support for those measures in California and Florida, and includes a similar measure placed on the primary election ballot in California in 2000. Support is measured as the county-wide vote in favor of each gay marriage ban. A number of hypotheses are explored that examine the urban/rural nature of each county, as well as the political and demographic characteristics of county residents. It is suggested that states may be best viewed as relatively independent groupings of diverse subcultures, rather than as homogenous populations with a single political culture. The findings reported here indicate that a host of demographic, political and religious differences within each state influence residents’ votes on gay marriage bans.     

Online Responsibility: Bad Samaritanism and the Influence of Internet Mediation

In 2008 a young man committed suicide while his webcam was running. 1,500 people apparently watched as the young man lay dying: when people finally made an effort to call the police, it was too late. This closely resembles the case of Kitty Genovese in 1964, where 39 neighbours supposedly watched an attacker assault and did not call until it was too late. This paper examines the role of internet mediation in cases where people may or may not have been good Samaritans and what their responsibilities were. The method is an intuitive one: intuitions on the various potentially morally relevant differences when it comes to responsibility between offline and online situations are examined. The number of onlookers, their physical nearness and their anonymity have no moral relevance when it comes to holding them responsible. Their perceived reality of the situation and ability to act do have an effect on whether we can hold people responsible, but this doesn’t seem to be unique to internet mediation. However the way in which those factors are intrinsically connected to internet mediation does seem to have a diminishing effect on responsibility in online situations.     

Infant word segmentation and childhood vocabulary development: a longitudinal analysis

Infants begin to segment novel words from speech by 7.5 months, demonstrating an ability to track, encode and retrieve words in the context of larger units. Although it is presumed that word recognition at this stage is a prerequisite to constructing a vocabulary, the continuity between these stages of development has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The goal of the present study is to investigate whether infant word segmentation skills are indeed related to later lexical development. Two word segmentation tasks, varying in complexity, were administered in infancy and related to childhood outcome measures. Outcome measures consisted of age‐normed productive vocabulary percentiles and a measure of cognitive development. Results demonstrated a strong degree of association between infant word segmentation abilities at 7 months and productive vocabulary size at 24 months. In addition, outcome groups, as defined by median vocabulary size and growth trajectories at 24 months, showed distinct word segmentation abilities as infants. These findings provide the first prospective evidence supporting the predictive validity of infant word segmentation tasks and suggest that they are indeed associated with mature word knowledge. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxzLi5oLZQ8 .     

Temperament and Happiness in Children in India

The relation between temperament and happiness was assessed in a sample of 441 children aged 7–14 years drawn from a population in Northern India. Parents assessed their children’s happiness and rated their children’s temperament using the Emotionality, Activity, and Sociability Temperament Survey (EAS). Children self-reported their own happiness using a single-item measure, the Oxford Happiness Scale Short Form, and the Subjective Happiness Scale. Parents’ temperament ratings conformed to the four factor structure proposed by Buss and Plomin (Temperament: early developing personality traits. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, 1984): Emotionality, Activity, Sociability, and Shyness. Temperament accounted for between 4 and 11% of the variance in children’s happiness depending on the measures. Children who were more social and active, and less shy, were happier. This result parallels the well-established relation between happiness and personality in adults and is similar to recent research on happiness and temperament in children; temperament traits akin to extraversion were positively associated with happiness. However, despite that neuroticism and its temperament counterpart are strongly and consistently linked to happiness in adults, the relation between happiness and the temperament trait associated with neuroticism (i.e., Emotionality) was weak. This suggests that the relations between temperament and happiness in children may not completely generalize across cultures.