On Direct Social Perception

Direct Social Perception (DSP) is the idea that we can non-inferentially perceive others’ mental states. In this paper, I argue that the standard way of framing DSP leaves the debate at an impasse. I suggest two alternative interpretations of the idea that we see others’ mental states: others’ mental states are represented in the content of our perception, and we have basic perceptual beliefs about others’ mental states. I argue that the latter interpretation of DSP is more promising and examine the kinds of mental states that plausibly could satisfy this version of DSP.     

Understanding intentions from actions: Direct perception,inference, and the roles of mirror and mentalizing systems

This review asks whether observers can obtain information about others’ intentions from observation of their actions; and if so, whether this process is performed using direct perceptual or inferential processes (prominent examples of each being the intention understanding theory of mirror neuron function, and mentalizing accounts of intention understanding, respectively). I propose four conditions that should be fulfilled in order to support a direct perception account, and suggest that only two of these conditions are supported by the existing data. I then propose and review three further sources of evidence which have the potential to inform this debate, concluding that the data do not support the direct perception account. In particular, mirror neurons may be involved in lower-level processes of action perception, but there is no evidence to support their involvement in the type of higher-level intention understanding that is proposed by the direct perception account.     

Stroke me for longer this touch feels too short: The effect of pleasant touch on temporal perception

Negative, painful, somatosensory stimulation lengthens the perceived duration of time. However, to date, no research has explored the influence of positive, pleasant, somatosensory stimulation on temporal perception. Here we asked whether gentle stroking touch influences perceptions of duration. Pleasant (gentle) and mildly unpleasant (rough) tactile stimulation was delivered whilst participants estimated the duration of a neutral visual stimulus. Pleasant touch resulted in shorter estimates of duration than unpleasant touch. There was no difference in duration perception in the unpleasant and control conditions. Taken together with the results of previous research (Ogden, Moore, Redfern, & McGlone, 2015), the results of this study suggest that pleasant and painful somatosensory stimulation have opposing effects on temporal perception, and additionally that pleasant touch can alter aspects of perceptual and attentional processing outside the purely affective domain.     

The estimation of vehicle speed and stopping distance by pedestrians crossing streets in a naturalistic traffic environment

The ability to estimate vehicle speed and stopping distance accurately is important for pedestrians to make safe road crossing decisions. In this study, a field experiment in a naturalistic traffic environment was conducted to measure pedestrians’ estimation of vehicle speed and stopping distance when they are crossing streets. Forty-four participants (18–45 years old) reported their estimation on 1043 vehicles, and the corresponding actual vehicle speed and stopping distance were recorded. In the speed estimation task, pedestrians’ performances change in different actual speed levels and different weather conditions. In sunny conditions, pedestrians tended to underestimate actual vehicle speeds that were higher than 40 km/h but were able to accurately estimate speeds that were lower than 40 km/h. In rainy conditions, pedestrians tended to underestimate actual vehicle speeds that were higher than 45 km/h but were able to accurately estimate speeds ranging from 35 km/h to 45 km/h. In stopping distance estimation task, the accurate estimation interval ranged from 60 km/h to 65 km/h, and pedestrians generally underestimated the stopping distance when vehicles were travelling over 65 km/h. The results show that pedestrians have accurate estimation intervals that vary by weather conditions. When the speed of the oncoming vehicle exceeded the upper bound of the accurate interval, pedestrians were more likely to underestimate the vehicle speed, increasing their risk of incorrectly deciding to cross when it is not safe to do so.     

Hallucination And Imagination

What are hallucinations? A common view in the philosophical literature is that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of perceptual experience. I argue instead that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of sensory imagination. As well as providing a good account of many actual cases of hallucination, the view that hallucination is a kind of imagination represents a promising account of hallucination from the perspective of a disjunctivist theory of perception like naïve realism. This is because it provides a way of giving a positive characterisation of hallucination—rather than characterising hallucinations in negative, relational, terms as mental events that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences.     

Unfamiliar face matching: Pairs out‐perform individuals and provide a route to training

Matching unfamiliar faces is known to be difficult. Here, we ask whether performance can be improved by asking viewers to work in pairs, a manipulation known to increase accuracy for low‐level visual discrimination tasks. Across four experiments we consistently find that face matching accuracy is higher for pairs of viewers than for individuals. This ‘pairs advantage’ is generally driven by adopting the response of the higher scoring partner. However, when the task becomes difficult, both partners' performance is improved by working in a pair. In two experiments, we find evidence that working in a pair can lead to subsequent improvements in individual performance, specifically for viewers whose accuracy is initially low. The pairs' technique therefore offers the opportunity for substantial improvements in face matching performance, along with an added training benefit.     

Effect of temporal constraints on hemispheric asymmetries during spatial frequency processing

Studies on functional hemispheric asymmetries have suggested that the right vs. left hemisphere should be predominantly involved in low vs. high spatial frequency (SF) analysis, respectively. By manipulating exposure duration of filtered natural scene images, we examined whether the temporal characteristics of SF analysis (i.e., the temporal precedence of low on high spatial frequencies) may interfere with hemispheric specialization. Results showed the classical hemispheric specialization pattern for brief exposure duration and a trend to a right hemisphere advantage irrespective of the SF content for longer exposure duration. The present study suggests that the hemispheric specialization pattern for visual information processing should be considered as a dynamic system, wherein the superiority of one hemisphere over the other could change according to the level of temporal constraints: the higher the temporal constraints of the task, the more the hemispheres are specialized in SF processing.     

Three-month-olds' sensitivity to orientation cues in the three-dimensional depth plane

Three-month-olds are sensitive to orientation changes of line drawings when they have a three-dimensional (3-D) interpretation and when the changes are defined by both 3-D depth and two-dimensional (2-D) picture plane cues [Bhatt, R. S., & Bertin, E. (2001). Pictorial cues and three-dimensional information processing in early infancy. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 80, 315-332]. In the current study, we examined whether 3-month-olds are sensitive to pictorial line junction cues that signal orientation changes solely in the 3-D depth plane. The results revealed that infants discriminated a misoriented elongated cube in an array when the stimuli contained both shading and lines (Experiment 2) but not when only lines depicted the elongated cubes (Experiment 1). Testing with comparable 2-D images revealed that, even in the presence of shading information, detection of orientation changes is specific to images that have a 3-D interpretation. Together, the results suggest that 3-month-olds are sensitive to pictorial line junction cues that signal orientation changes in the 3-D depth plane to adults provided that shading information is available and the images have a 3-D interpretation.     

Time flies with music whatever its emotional valence

The present study used a temporal bisection task to investigate whether music affects time estimation differently from a matched auditory neutral stimulus, and whether the emotional valence of the musical stimuli (i.e., sad vs. happy music) modulates this effect. The results showed that, compared to sine wave control music, music presented in a major (happy) or a minor (sad) key shifted the bisection function toward the right, thus increasing the bisection point value (point of subjective equality). This indicates that the duration of a melody is judged shorter than that of a non-melodic control stimulus, thus confirming that “time flies” when we listen to music. Nevertheless, sensitivity to time was similar for all the auditory stimuli. Furthermore, the temporal bisection functions did not differ as a function of musical mode.