Female face preference in 4-month-olds: The importance of hairline

At 3–4 months of age, infants respond to gender information in human faces. Specifically, young infants display a visual preference toward female over male faces. In three experiments, using a visual preference task, we investigated the role of hairline information in this bias. In Experiment 1, we presented male and female composite faces with similar hairstyles to 4-month-olds and observed a preference for female faces. In Experiment 2, the faces were presented, but in this instance, without hairline cues, and the preference was eliminated. In Experiment 3, using the same cropping to eliminate hairline cues, but with feminized female faces and masculinized male faces, infants’ preference toward female faces was still not in evidence. The findings show that hairline information is important in young infants’ preferential orientation toward female faces.     

Postural leaning direction challenges the manifestation of tendon vibration responses at the ankle joint

In this study, we examined the interaction between central and peripheral proprioceptive afferent pathways by applying ankle tendon vibration during postural leaning in different directions. Twenty young participants stood for 60s over the midline of two adjacent force platforms in (a) neutral stance distributing Body Weight (BW) equally between the platforms, (b) forward leaning transferring 80% of BW to the front platform and (c) backward leaning transferring 80% of BW to the rear platform. Participants controlled the degree of leaning by receiving on-line visual feedback of BW distribution matched to a target line. Vibration (80 Hz, 1.5–1.8 mm) was applied over the Achilles or tibialis anterior tendon during the middle 20s of standing. This induced a postural shift towards the vibration side and an increase in the variability of the BW distribution that was greater in backward compared to forward leaning. EMG responses to tendon vibration were independent of the leaning direction. Antagonistic activity also increased in response to vibration, the amplitude of this increase however was direction dependent. These results favor the hypothesis about the central co-modulation of the vibration evoked proprioceptive inflow based on postural and visual feedback rather than muscle tension constraints.     

The vision heuristic: Judging music ensembles by sight alone

Team effectiveness and group performance are often defined by standards set by domain experts. Professional musicians consistently report that sound output is the most important standard for evaluating the quality of group performance in the domain of music. However, across six studies, visual information dominated rapid judgments of group performance. Participants (1062 experts and novices) were able to select the actual winners of live ensemble competitions and distinguish top-ranked orchestras from non-ranked orchestras based on 6-s silent video recordings yet were unable to do so from sound recordings or recordings with both video and sound. These findings suggest that judgments of group performance in the domain of music are driven at least in part by visual cues about group dynamics and leadership.     

Metaphorical sense-making: visual-narrative language portraits of South African students

This article reflects on a creative visual-narrative approach to understanding South African students’ lived experiences of languages. Data were collected in two interviews: the first entailing a biographical history and the drawing of a linguistic portrait on a simple body outline and the second a narrative interview utilising the portrait generated in the first as a basis for talking about language and identity. Framing the research process in this creative visual mode shifts the focus of narrative talk, simultaneously grounding it in affective, embodied experience, and enabling a reflexive position from which to analyse the taken-for-granted role of language in the minutiae of everyday life. The theoretical lenses of identity and subjectivity are invigorated through these metaphorical representations, and new creative possibilities are released for analysing the role of language in mediating shifting power dynamics in post-apartheid and postcolonial South African life.     

A first grade student’s exploration of variable and variable notation / Una alumna de primer grado explora las variables y su notación

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a first grade student to illustrate the diversity of her understandings related to variables and variable notation. While prior research has documented secondary school students’ difficulties with variables and variable notation, we identify many productive understandings in this much younger student, leading us to question the prevailing argument that students might have difficulties with variables due mostly to their own limitations. We draw our data from a teaching experiment that explored functional relationships. Individual interviews were carried out with a subset of the students in the experiment prior to, as well as mid-way through and at the end of the experiment. This paper focuses on a set of three interviews with one of the first grade students. We illustrate the shifts that occurred in the student’s understandings about variables and variable notation across as well as within each of the three interviews.     

A dissociation between selective attention and conscious awareness in the representation of temporal order information

Previous electrophysiological studies have shown that attentional selection processes are highly sensitive to the temporal order of task-relevant visual events. When two successively presented colour-defined target stimuli are separated by a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of only 10 ms, the onset latencies of N2pc components to these stimuli (which reflect their attentional selection) precisely match their objective temporal separation. We tested whether such small onset differences are accessible to conscious awareness by instructing participants to report the category (letter or digit) of the first of two target-colour items that were separated by an SOA of 10, 20, or 30 ms. Performance was at chance level for the 10 ms SOA, demonstrating that temporal order information which is available to attentional control processes cannot be utilized for conscious temporal order judgments. These results provide new evidence that selective attention and conscious awareness are functionally separable, and support the hypothesis that attention and awareness operate at different stages of cognitive processing.     

Balancing awareness: Vestibular signals modulate visual consciousness in the absence of awareness

The processing of visual and vestibular information is crucial for perceiving self-motion. Visual cues, such as optic flow, have been shown to induce and alter vestibular percepts, yet the role of vestibular information in shaping visual awareness remains unclear. Here we investigated if vestibular signals influence the access to awareness of invisible visual signals. Using natural vestibular stimulation (passive yaw rotations) on a vestibular self-motion platform, and optic flow masked through continuous flash suppression (CFS) we tested if congruent visual–vestibular information would break interocular suppression more rapidly than incongruent information. We found that when the unseen optic flow was congruent with the vestibular signals perceptual suppression as quantified with the CFS paradigm was broken more rapidly than when it was incongruent. We argue that vestibular signals impact the formation of visual awareness through enhanced access to awareness for congruent multisensory stimulation.     

Examining the relationship between skilled music training and attention

While many aspects of cognition have been investigated in relation to skilled music training, surprisingly little work has examined the connection between music training and attentional abilities. The present study investigated the performance of skilled musicians on cognitively demanding sustained attention tasks, measuring both temporal and visual discrimination over a prolonged duration. Participants with extensive formal music training were found to have superior performance on a temporal discrimination task, but not a visual discrimination task, compared to participants with no music training. In addition, no differences were found between groups in vigilance decrement in either type of task. Although no differences were evident in vigilance per se, the results indicate that performance in an attention-demanding temporal discrimination task was superior in individuals with extensive music training. We speculate that this basic cognitive ability may contribute to advantages that musicians show in other cognitive measures.