Privileged detection of conspecifics: Evidence from inversion effects during continuous flash suppression

The rapid visual detection of other people in our environment is an important first step in social cognition. Here we provide evidence for selective sensitivity of the human visual system to upright depictions of conspecifics. In a series of seven experiments, we assessed the impact of stimulus inversion on the detection of person silhouettes, headless bodies, faces and other objects from a wide range of animate and inanimate control categories. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS), a variant of binocular rivalry, to render stimuli invisible at the beginning of each trial and measured the time upright and inverted stimuli needed to overcome such interocular suppression. Inversion strongly interfered with access to awareness for human faces, headless human bodies, person silhouettes, and even highly variable body postures, while suppression durations for control objects were not (inanimate objects) or only mildly (animal faces and bodies) affected by inversion. Furthermore, inversion effects were eliminated when the normal body configuration was distorted. The absence of strong inversion effects in a binocular control condition not involving interocular suppression suggests that non-conscious mechanisms mediated the effect of inversion on body and face detection during CFS. These results indicate that perceptual mechanisms that govern access to visual awareness are highly sensitive to the presence of conspecifics.     

Failure mechanism in porous materials under compression: crackling noise in mesoporous SiO2

The failure mechanism of porous materials under uniaxial stress has been investigated experimentally. Microporous SiO₂, Vycor, has been subjected to slowly increasing compressive uniaxial stress with stress rates between 0.2 and 12.2?kPa/s. With increasing stress the strain changes stepwise with acoustic emission correlated with each volume collapse. The acoustic emission followed the characteristics of ‘crackling noise’ with a power law distribution over an exceptionally large interval of 6 decades at the slowest stress rate. The power law exponent is ?1.39. Possible applications in mining industry and others are discussed.     

The demise of short-term memory revisited: empirical and computational investigations of recency effects

In the single-store model of memory, the enhanced recall for the last items in a free-recall task (i.e., the recency effect) is understood to reflect a general property of memory rather than a separate short-term store. This interpretation is supported by the finding of a long-term recency effect under conditions that eliminate the contribution from the short-term store. In this article, evidence is reviewed showing that recency effects in the short and long terms have different properties, and it is suggested that 2 memory components are needed to account for the recency effects: an episodic contextual system with changing context and an activation-based short-term memory buffer that drives the encoding of item-context associations. A neurocomputational model based on these 2 components is shown to account for previously observed dissociations and to make novel predictions, which are confirmed in a set of experiments.     

On Understanding Worship in School. Part One: on schooling and education

As worship in school is currently a topic of public debate, it may be useful to re‐examine one of the influential books on the subject,School Worship, an Obituary, by Professor J.M. Hull, published in 1975. I shall argue that it was mistaken in important respects. His case for the abolition of worship in schools was made on essentially philosophical grounds. He sought not just to make the weak point that it is increasingly difficult to overcome many of the practical obstacles, but to make the stronger claim that the practice is conceptually incoherent. This is what makes his position a philosophical one and, as such, subject to philosophical scrutiny. One of the factors that appears to influence Hull's position is his conception of philosophy. Despite his careful analysis of the concepts of education and worship, at a critical point his account seems to rely on a form of philosophical evidential‐ism. In opposition to Hull, I take the view that this is a mistake. A more consistent, philosophical approach of conceptual clarification would have shown that there are various forms of education and that, in at least one case, it not only makes sense to worship as a part of the educational process, but that worship is of its essence as its motivation, substance and goal. The implication of this conclusion is that politicians are not intellectually confused in insisting on a form of education in which worship has an integral role. Whether it is practicable, socially desirable and politically reasonable in an increasingly secular and religiously plural society is quite another matter. Given the current state of society, one might conclude that the government should take a more pluralistic approach through its legislation. The government is there to serve a variety of communities and interests. One might reasonably argue that if the state‐school system is genuinely to serve this plural society there should be more scope for incorporating into the education system a diversity of practice. There might then be different schools with distinctive concepts of education, consistent with the needs and aspirations of the diverse communities and interests. In this part of the article I shall look particularly at the way in which schooling might accommodate a variety of activities and raise the question as to why worship might not be one of them. Hull's answer seems to hinge on the definition of worship and on the definition of education. The former I shall examine in Part Two, but here I shall seek to identify and examine that feature of education that Hull claims would exclude worship in school.     

Stronger reactivity to social gaze in virtual reality compared to a classical laboratory environment

People show a robust tendency to gaze at other human beings when viewing images or videos, but were also found to relatively avoid gaze at others in several real-world situations. This discrepancy, along with theoretical considerations, spawned doubts about the appropriateness of classical laboratory-based experimental paradigms in social attention research. Several researchers instead suggested the use of immersive virtual scenarios in eliciting and measuring naturalistic attentional patterns, but the field, struggling with methodological challenges, still needs to establish the advantages of this approach. Here, we show using eye-tracking in a complex social scenario displayed in virtual reality that participants show enhanced attention towards the face of an avatar at near distance and demonstrate an increased reactivity towards her social gaze as compared to participants who viewed the same scene on a computer monitor. The present study suggests that reactive virtual agents observed in immersive virtual reality can elicit natural modes of information processing and can help to conduct ecologically more valid experiments while maintaining high experimental control.     

Self-prioritization and perceptual matching: The effects of temporal construal

Recent research has revealed that self-referential processing enhances perceptual judgments — the so-called self-prioritization effect. The extent and origin of this effect remains unknown, however. Noting the multifaceted nature of the self, here we hypothesized that temporal influences on self-construal (i.e., past/future-self continuity) may serve as an important determinant of stimulus prioritization. Specifically, as representations of the self increase in abstraction as a function of temporal distance (i.e., distance from now), self-prioritization may only emerge when stimuli are associated with the current self. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. Self-relevance only enhanced performance in a standard perceptual-matching task when stimuli (i.e., geometric shapes) were connected with the current self; representations of the self in the future (Expts. 1 & 2) and past (Expt. 3) failed to facilitate decision making. To identify the processes underlying task performance, data were interrogated using a hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) approach. Results of these analyses revealed that self-prioritization was underpinned by a stimulus bias (i.e., rate of information uptake). Collectively, these findings elucidate when and how self-relevance influences decisional processing.     

Differential development of selectivity for faces and bodies in the fusiform gyrus

Viewing faces or bodies activates category‐selective areas of visual cortex, including the fusiform face area (FFA), fusiform body area (FBA), and extrastriate body area (EBA). Here, using fMRI, we investigate the development of these areas, focusing on the right FFA and FBA. Despite the overlap of functionally defined FFA and FBA (54%–75% overlap), we found that these regions developed along different trajectories. With age (7–32 years old), the FFA gradually increased in size and selectivity, and was significantly larger and more face‐selective in adults than children. By contrast, the size and selectivity of the FBA did not correlate with age, and were equivalent in children and adults. Whereas in adults the FFA and FBA were comparable in size, in children the FBA was on average 70% larger than the FFA. These findings suggest that, in children, the fusiform gyrus is predominantly selective for bodies, with commensurate face‐selective responses apparent later in development. Moreover, differences in the development of the FFA and FBA indicate that overlapping functional brain areas, supported by the same anatomical structure, can develop along different trajectories.     

Exploring types of career orientation: A latent class analysis approach

Career literature has been discussing the decline of the traditional career. Despite this debate, systematic information on the prevalence of contemporary career types is lacking. Two studies with large samples of employees aimed to determine types of career orientation, to explore their prevalence, and to validate these types by testing hypotheses relating each of the career orientations to work attitudes and sociodemographical variables. In study 1 (N = 835), we identified four types of career orientation – traditional/promotion, traditional/loyalty, independent, disengaged – applying exploratory latent class analysis. These were confirmed in study 2 (N = 737) with confirmatory latent class analysis. The variables associated with the career orientation types mostly followed the predicted pattern. Almost two thirds reported a traditional career orientation, while one fifth each expressed an independent and a disengaged orientation. This finding shows that people’s career orientation does not reflect the changes that many authors argue have been occurring.