Sensitivity to feature displacement in familiar and unfamiliar faces: beyond the internal/external feature distinction

Previous studies of face recognition and of face matching have shown a general improvement for the processing of internal features as a face becomes more familiar to the participant. In this study, we used a psychophysical two-alternative forced-choice paradigm to investigate thresholds for the detection of a displacement of the eyes, nose, mouth, or ears for familiar and unfamiliar faces. No clear division between internal and external features was observed. Rather, for familiar (compared to unfamiliar) faces participants were more sensitive to displacements of internal features such as the eyes or the nose; yet, for our third internal feature-the mouth no such difference was observed. Despite large displacements, many subjects were unable to perform above chance when stimuli involved shifts in the position of the ears. These results are consistent with the proposal that familiarity effects may be mediated by the construction of a robust representation of a face, although the involvement of attention in the encoding of face stimuli cannot be ruled out. Furthermore, these effects are mediated by information from a spatial configuration of features, rather than by purely feature-based information.     

Ensuring PhD Development of Responsible Conduct of Research Behaviors: Who’s Responsible?

The importance of public confidence in scientific findings and trust in scientists cannot be overstated. Thus, it becomes critical for the scientific community to focus on enhancing the strategies used to educate future scientists on ethical research behaviors. What we are lacking is knowledge on how faculty members shape and develop ethical research standards with their students. We are presenting the results of a survey with 3,500 research faculty members. We believe this is the first report on how faculty work with and educate their PhD students on basic research standards. Specifically, we wanted to determine whether individual faculty members, who are advisors or mentors, differ in how they implemented components of responsible conduct of research (RCR) with their PhD students. Mentors were more likely than advisors or supervisors to report working with all of their PhDs, who graduated in the last 5 years, on the 17 recognized critical components of RCR training and research skill development. We also found about half of the faculty members believe RCR is an institutional responsibility versus a faculty responsibility. Less than a quarter have had opportunities to participate in faculty training to be a better mentor, advisor, or research teacher, and about one third of faculty did not or could not remember whether they had guidelines related to their responsibilities to PhD students. We discuss the implications of our findings and focus on ways that PhD research mentoring can be enhanced.     

Training‐induced recovery of low‐level vision followed by mid‐level perceptual improvements in developmental object and face agnosia

Long‐term deprivation of normal visual inputs can cause perceptual impairments at various levels of visual function, from basic visual acuity deficits, through mid‐level deficits such as contour integration and motion coherence, to high‐level face and object agnosia. Yet it is unclear whether training during adulthood, at a post‐developmental stage of the adult visual system, can overcome such developmental impairments. Here, we visually trained LG, a developmental object and face agnosic individual. Prior to training, at the age of 20, LG's basic and mid‐level visual functions such as visual acuity, crowding effects, and contour integration were underdeveloped relative to normal adult vision, corresponding to or poorer than those of 5–6 year olds (Gilaie‐Dotan, Perry, Bonneh, Malach & Bentin, 2009). Intensive visual training, based on lateral interactions, was applied for a period of 9 months. LG's directly trained but also untrained visual functions such as visual acuity, crowding, binocular stereopsis and also mid‐level contour integration improved significantly and reached near‐age‐level performance, with long‐term (over 4 years) persistence. Moreover, mid‐level functions that were tested post‐training were found to be normal in LG. Some possible subtle improvement was observed in LG's higher‐order visual functions such as object recognition and part integration, while LG's face perception skills have not improved thus far. These results suggest that corrective training at a post‐developmental stage, even in the adult visual system, can prove effective, and its enduring effects are the basis for a revival of a developmental cascade that can lead to reduced perceptual impairments.     

Moving to Learn: How Guiding the Hands Can Set the Stage for Learning

Previous work has found that guiding problem‐solvers' movements can have an immediate effect on their ability to solve a problem. Here we explore these processes in a learning paradigm. We ask whether guiding a learner's movements can have a delayed effect on learning, setting the stage for change that comes about only after instruction. Children were taught movements that were either relevant or irrelevant to solving mathematical equivalence problems and were told to produce the movements on a series of problems before they received instruction in mathematical equivalence. Children in the relevant movement condition improved after instruction significantly more than children in the irrelevant movement condition, despite the fact that the children showed no improvement in their understanding of mathematical equivalence on a ratings task or on a paper‐and‐pencil test taken immediately after the movements but before instruction. Movements of the body can thus be used to sow the seeds of conceptual change. But those seeds do not necessarily come to fruition until after the learner has received explicit instruction in the concept, suggesting a “sleeper effect” of gesture on learning.     

Improving Unfamiliar Face Matching by Masking the External Facial Features

Counter‐terrorism and crime prevention often depend on our ability to match images of unfamiliar faces. For example, when issuing passports, staff must establish an applicant's identity by comparing the submitted photograph witht those in the database of current passports to ensure that multiple documents are not issued to the same person under different names. Previous research has shown that this is a difficult and error prone task. We suggest that this ‘passport problem’ may be due to an over‐reliance on the appearance of external facial features that can be unreliable cues to identity. Compatible with this explanation, we demonstrate that in difficult trials involving a change of appearance or attempted fraud involving a similar looking foil, participants are better able to determine whether two images are of the same person when shown only the internal features of the faces rather than whole images. This discovery has significant practical implications and could form the basis of a procedure to improve the detection of identity fraud.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Faith Communities’ Improvements in Readiness to Engage in Addictions Resilience and Recovery Support Programming

Journal of Religion and Health - Spirituality and religion are well-documented components of prevention, treatment and recovery of substance use disorders. Faith communities are in a distinct...     

Using Self‐Regulated Learning Strategies to Develop Students’ Multicultural Counseling Competency

This study examines the effect of self‐regulated learning strategies on students’ multicultural competency development. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 26 students who took a semester‐long multicultural counseling course. Results show statistically significant improvement in students’ multicultural awareness and knowledge and statistical insignificance in multicultural skill development compared to their level of competence before the training. Implications of using this approach to teach multicultural counseling courses and future research are discussed. Este estudio examina el efecto de las estrategias de aprendizaje autorregulado en el desarrollo de la competencia multicultural de los estudiantes. Se recopilaron datos cuantitativos y cualitativos de 26 estudiantes que atendieron un curso de consejería multicultural de un semestre. Los resultados muestran una mejora estadísticamente significativa en la conciencia y conocimentos multiculturales de los estudiantes y una insignificancia estadística en el desarrollo de las habilidades multiculturales comparadas con su nivel de competencia antes de la capacitación. Se discuten las implicaciones de usar este enfoque didáctico en cursos de consejería multicultural y para investigaciones futuras.     

The Role of Gesture in Supporting Mental Representations: The Case of Mental Abacus Arithmetic

People frequently gesture when problem‐solving, particularly on tasks that require spatial transformation. Gesture often facilitates task performance by interacting with internal mental representations, but how this process works is not well understood. We investigated this question by exploring the case of mental abacus (MA), a technique in which users not only imagine moving beads on an abacus to compute sums, but also produce movements in gestures that accompany the calculations. Because the content of MA is transparent and readily manipulated, the task offers a unique window onto how gestures interface with mental representations. We find that the size and number of MA gestures reflect the length and difficulty of math problems. Also, by selectively interfering with aspects of gesture, we find that participants perform significantly worse on MA under motor interference, but that perceptual feedback is not critical for success on the task. We conclude that premotor processes involved in the planning of gestures are critical to mental representation in MA.