The influence of social and symbolic cues on observers' gaze behaviour

Research has shown that social and symbolic cues presented in isolation and at fixation have strong effects on observers, but it is unclear how cues compare when they are presented away from fixation and embedded in natural scenes. We here compare the effects of two types of social cue (gaze and pointing gestures) and one type of symbolic cue (arrow signs) on eye movements of observers under two viewing conditions (free viewing vs. a memory task). The results suggest that social cues are looked at more quickly, for longer and more frequently than the symbolic arrow cues. An analysis of saccades initiated from the cue suggests that the pointing cue leads to stronger cueing than the gaze and the arrow cue. While the task had only a weak influence on gaze orienting to the cues, stronger cue following was found for free viewing compared to the memory task.     

线索特征和提示对基于事件前瞻记忆的影响

前瞻记忆是一种记住在将来执行某个意向活动的记忆。研究采取2线索类型×2提示被试间设计探究了线索特征和有无提示对基于事件前瞻记忆的影响。结果表明:(1)提示使前瞻记忆的反应速度明显变慢,说明基于事件前瞻记忆的加工过程可能是自动完成的;(2)在具体线索条件下,被试完成进行中任务的速度显著快于概念线索条件下的速度。说明线索类型虽然没有影响到前瞻记忆加工,但是影响到了进行中任务的效率。     

Behavioral and fMRI evidence that cognitive ability modulates the effect of semantic context on speech intelligibility

Text cues facilitate the perception of spoken sentences to which they are semantically related (Zekveld, Rudner, et al., 2011). In this study, semantically related and unrelated cues preceding sentences evoked more activation in middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than nonword cues, regardless of acoustic quality (speech in noise or speech in quiet). Larger verbal working memory (WM) capacity (reading span) was associated with greater intelligibility benefit obtained from related cues, with less speech-related activation in the left superior temporal gyrus and left anterior IFG, and with more activation in right medial frontal cortex for related versus unrelated cues. Better ability to comprehend masked text was associated with greater ability to disregard unrelated cues, and with more activation in left angular gyrus (AG). We conclude that individual differences in cognitive abilities are related to activation in a speech-sensitive network including left MTG, IFG and AG during cued speech perception.     

Visual contribution to human standing balance during support surface tilts

Visual position and velocity cues improve human standing balance, reducing sway responses to external disturbances and sway variability. Previous work suggested that human balancing is based on sensory estimates of external disturbances and their compensation using feedback mechanisms (Disturbance Estimation and Compensation, DEC model). This study investigates the visual effects on sway responses to pseudo-random support surface tilts, assuming that improvements result from lowering the velocity threshold in a tilt estimate and the position threshold in an estimate of the gravity disturbance. Center of mass (COM) sway was measured with four different tilt amplitudes, separating the effect of visual cues across the conditions ‘Eyes closed’ (no visual cues), ‘4 Hz stroboscopic illumination’ (visual position cues), and ‘continuous illumination’ (visual position and velocity cues). In a model based approach, parameters of disturbance estimators were identified. The model reproduced experimental results and showed a specific reduction of the position and velocity threshold when adding visual position and velocity cues, respectively. Sway variability was analyzed to explore a hypothesized relation between estimator thresholds and internal noise. Results suggest that adding the visual cues reduces the contribution of vestibular noise, thereby reducing sway variability and allowing for lower thresholds, which improves the disturbance compensation.     

What am I supposed to be looking at? Controls and measures in inter-modal preferential looking

Intermodal preferential looking (IMPL) is widely used in experimental studies of infant development, especially language development. Control measures vary, and it is not clear how these affect findings. We examined effects of parental awareness of stimuli. Infants (17–19 months) looked at paired pictures, one name-known and one name-unknown, each assigned target status in 50 % of trials. Infants looked longer at a name-known than a name-unknown target, regardless of parents’ awareness. When parents were aware, looking to a name-unknown target increased over a paired name-known non-target. There is evidence that infants’ looking at pictures in this paradigm is not due to direct matching of targets to novel names, but is influenced by additional cues present, in a way that could alter the conclusions of studies of infant word learning and other aspects of infant learning. Implications of these findings are discussed, emphasising replicability and theoretical conclusions drawn from studies using this method.     

Seeing overweight adults as babies: Physical cues and implications for stigmatization

Human babies not only are reliable triggers of tender feelings and protective tendencies, they also happen to be exceptionally fat compared to the newborns of most other species. These two facts are used to formulate a hypothesis predicting that overweight males, due to their great physical resemblance to babies, not only are perceived as cute, but also are associated with negatively evaluated traits (e.g., immaturity, lack of willpower) that are saliently inconsistent with traits required for adults. In this study, a great many physical features of adult males varying widely in weight were measured and correlated with subjective judgements. Providing preliminary support for the hypothesis, it was found that the features that were correlated with objective and perceived fatness (e.g., circularity of body parts, relatively large head, short and thick neck) also correlated with perceived babyishness. Perceived fatness and babyishness had curvilinear influences on the positive and prosocial appraisal of cuteness, but were primarily negatively related to perceived willpower and beauty. Results are used to formulate an alternative evolutionary perspective on social responses to overweight and obese individuals, emphasizing the uniquely human adaptive value of fatness and the misfiring of the underlying response mechanism under modern conditions of living.     

Discounting mechanism underlies extinction illusion

Humans can perceive a coherent visual scene despite a low spatial resolution in peripheral vision. How does the visual system determine whether an object exists in the periphery? We addressed this question by focusing on the extinction illusion in which a disk becomes subjectively invisible when presented at the intersection of grids. We hypothesized that the disk would go unnoticed when the stimuli with and without the disk produced the same strength of visual signals. The visual system would miss the disk by confounding the target signals with the intersection signals that should be discounted. Computational analysis revealed that the energy ratio between the stimuli with and without the disk decreased with stimulus eccentricity and such energy ratio could successfully explain the observer’s d’ to detect the disk. These results indicate that the discounting mechanism relying on stimulus energy determines the awareness toward a peripheral object.     

Attention AND mentalizing? Reframing a debate on social orienting of attention

ABSTRACT

People spontaneously attend where others are looking. Recently, it has been debated whether such orienting behaviour is supported by domain-general attentional processes, that involve reading the cues’ directional properties, or by processes that involve attributing mental states to agents. In this Opinion, we summarize key evidence for each position and argue that instead of favouring one or the other view, the available data point to an integrated framework in which the attribution of mental states and the operation of domain-general attentional processes both contribute to social orienting. In addition to providing a novel perspective, this view opens several fruitful future research avenues aimed at understanding how the two processes act together to influence cognitions and behaviour.     

Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness

The sound of the voice has several acoustic features that influence the perception of how cooperative the speaker is. It remains unknown, however, whether these acoustic features are associated with actual cooperative behaviour. This issue is crucial to disentangle whether inferences of traits from voices are based on stereotypes, or facilitate the detection of cooperative partners. The latter is likely due to the pleiotropic effect that testosterone has on both cooperative behaviours and acoustic features. In the present study, we quantified the cooperativeness of native French-speaking men in a one-shot public good game. We also measured mean fundamental frequency, pitch variations, roughness, and breathiness from spontaneous speech recordings of the same men and collected saliva samples to measure their testosterone levels. Our results showed that men with lower-pitched voices and greater pitch variations were more cooperative. However, testosterone did not influence cooperative behaviours or acoustic features. Our finding provides the first evidence of the acoustic correlates of cooperative behaviour. When considered in combination with the literature on the detection of cooperativeness from faces, the results imply that assessment of cooperative behaviour would be improved by simultaneous consideration of visual and auditory cues.     

Attentional engagement during syllable discrimination: The role of salient prosodic cues in 6- to 8-month-old infants

Prosodic cues drive speech segmentation and guide syllable discrimination. However, less is known about the attentional mechanisms underlying an infant's ability to benefit from prosodic cues. This study investigated how 6- to 8-month-old Italian infants allocate their attention to strong vs. weak syllables after familiarization with four repeats of a single CV sequence with alternating strong and weak syllables (different syllables on each trial). In the discrimination test-phase, either the strong or the weak syllable was replaced by a pure tone matching the suprasegmental characteristics of the segmental syllable, i.e., duration, loudness and pitch, whereas the familiarized stimulus was presented as a control. By using an eye-tracker, attention deployment (fixation times) and cognitive resource allocation (pupil dilation) were measured under conditions of high and low saliency that corresponded to the strong and weak syllabic changes, respectively. Italian learning infants were found to look longer and also to show, through pupil dilation, more attention to changes in strong syllable replacement rather than weak syllable replacement, compared to the control condition. These data offer insights into the strategies used by infants to deploy their attention towards segmental units guided by salient prosodic cues, like the stress pattern of syllables, during speech segmentation.