Is attention necessary for perceiving gaze direction? It depends on how you look at it: Evidence from the locus-of-slack method

Several researchers have studied how we process and perceive gaze direction. However, it is still unclear at which perceptual stage of gaze processing (encoding or/and categorization), attention is required to judge gaze direction. We report a study in which we manipulated the difficulty of gaze perceptual judgements (easy vs. difficult) and used the locus-of-slack method to test the role of different types of attention (spatial and central) in the encoding and categorization of gaze direction. In Experiment 1 we used the spatial cueing paradigm to investigate if gaze direction judgements can be carried out while spatial attention is diverted. In Experiment 2 we used the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm to determine whether judgement of gaze direction involves central attention processes. The findings demonstrate that gaze judgements require input attention (both for the encoding and categorization stage) but not central attention. The implications of the results are discussed.     

The Gettier Intuition from South America to Asia

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail...     

Age-related quantitative and qualitative changes in decision making ability

The "frontal aging hypothesis" predicts that brain senescence affects predominantly the prefrontal regions. Preliminary evidence has recently been gathered in favour of an age-related change in a typically frontal process, i.e. decision making, using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), but overall findings have been conflicting. Following the traditional scoring method, coupled with a qualitative analysis, in the present study we compared IGT performance of 40 young (mean age: 27.9+/-4.7) and 40 old (mean age: 65.4+/-8.6) healthy adults and of 18 patients affected by frontal lobe dementia of mild severity (mean age: 65.1+/-7.4, mean MMSE score: 24.1+/-3.9). Quantitative findings support the notion that decision making ability declines with age; moreover, it approximates the impairment observed in executive dysfunction due to neurodegeneration. Results of the qualitative analysis did not reach statistical significance for the motivational and learning decision making components considered, but approached significance for the attentional component for elderly versus young normals, suggesting a possible decrease in the ability to maintain sustained attention during complex and prolonged tasks as the putative deficit underlying impaired decision making in normal aging.     

Designing Mobile Systems in Highly Dynamic Scenarios: The WORKPAD Methodology

The design of interactive systems to be used in mobile and pervasive scenarios, such as emergency management, requires novel methodologies which combine user-centred design approaches and software engineering approaches tailored for distributed architectures. In this paper, the methodology adopted in a successful research project is presented together with a case study.

Adolescent Place Attachment, Social Capital, and Perceived Safety: A Comparison of 13 Countries

In adolescence, children become increasingly independent and autonomous, and spend more time in neighborhood settings away from home. During mid-to-late adolescence, youth often become more critical about the place they live. Their attachment to home and even community may decrease as they explore and develop new attachments to other specific places. The aim of this study is to understand how 15-year-old students from 13 countries perceive their local neighborhood area (place attachment, social capital and safety), and how these different community cognitions are interrelated. We hypothesize that their place attachment predicts safety, and that the relationship is mediated in part by social capital. Result show that, despite cross-cultural differences in neighborhood perceptions, the proposed theoretical model fits robustly across all 13 countries.     

Stimulus-driven attentional capture: An empirical comparison of display-size and distance methods

Four experiments examined attentional capture by colour as assessed by two different investigative methods. Subjects performed a visual search task for a vertical-target line embedded among tilted-distractor lines, presented inside 4, 8, or 12 coloured discs. Interestingly, when the colour singleton was task irrelevant, and data were analysed by means of the display-size method combined with the zero-slope criterion, no evidence for attentional capture by colour was found. However, when data were analysed by means of the distance method, which consists of monitoring the spatial relationship between the target and the singleton, results showed that the target was found faster and/or more accurately when it was inside the singleton than when it was in a nonsingleton location. This provided evidence for a stimulus-driven attentional capture. In addition, the application of signal detection methodology showed that attentional capture, as revealed by the distance method, resulted from a perceptual modulation at the singleton location, rather than from a criterion shift. We conclude that, at least with the kind of stimuli used here, the display-size method combined with the zero-slope criterion is less than ideal for investigating how static discontinuities can affect the automatic deployment of visual attention.     

On the axiomatization of finiteK-frames

We find a short way to construct a formula which axiomatizes a given finite frame of the modal logicK, in the sense that for each finite frameA, we construct a formula ωA which holds in those and only those frames in which every formula true inA holds. To obtain this result we find, for each finite model \(\mathfrak{A}\) and each natural numbern, a formula ω \(\mathfrak{A}\) which holds in those and only those models in which every formula true in \(\mathfrak{A}\) , and involving the firstn propositional letters, holds.