scholarly journals The Survival Processing Advantage of Face: The Memorization of the (Un)Trustworthy Face Contributes More to Survival Adaptation

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 147470491983972 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunna Hou ◽  
Zhijun Liu

Researchers have found that compared with other existing conditions (e.g., pleasantness), information relevant to survival produced a higher rate of retrieval; this effect is known as the survival processing advantage (SPA). Previous experiments have examined that the advantage of memory can be extended to some different types of visual pictorial material, such as pictures and short video clips, but there were some arguments for whether face stimulus could be seen as a boundary condition of SPA. The current work explores whether there is a mnemonic advantage to different trustworthiness of face for human adaptation. In two experiments, we manipulated the facial trustworthiness (untrustworthy, neutral, and trustworthy), which is believed to provide information regarding survival decisions. Participants were asked to predict their avoidance or approach response tendency, when encountering strangers (represented by three classified faces of trustworthiness) in a survival scenario and the control scenario. The final surprise memory tests revealed that it was better to recognize both the trustworthy faces and untrustworthy faces, when the task was related to survival. Experiment 1 demonstrated the existence of a SPA in the bipolarity of facial untrustworthiness and trustworthiness. In Experiment 2, we replicated the SPA of trustworthy and untrustworthy face recognitions using a matched design, where we found this kind of memory benefits only in recognition tasks but not in source memory tasks. These results extend the generality of SPAs to face domain.

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola de Beer ◽  
Marcella Carragher ◽  
Karin van Nispen ◽  
Katharina Hogrefe ◽  
Jan P. de Ruiter ◽  
...  

Purpose People with aphasia (PWA) face significant challenges in verbally expressing their communicative intentions. Different types of gestures are produced spontaneously by PWA, and a potentially compensatory function of these gestures has been discussed. The current study aimed to investigate how much information PWA communicate through 3 types of gesture and the communicative effectiveness of such gestures. Method Listeners without language impairment rated the information content of short video clips taken from PWA in conversation. Listeners were asked to rate communication within a speech-only condition and a gesture + speech condition. Results The results revealed that the participants' interpretations of the communicative intentions expressed in the clips of PWA were significantly more accurate in the gesture + speech condition for all tested gesture types. Conclusion It was concluded that all 3 gesture types under investigation contributed to the expression of semantic meaning communicated by PWA. Gestures are an important communicative means for PWA and should be regarded as such by their interlocutors. Gestures have been shown to enhance listeners' interpretation of PWA's overall communication.


Pythagoras ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 0 (72) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Linneweber‐Lammerskitten ◽  
Marc Schäfer ◽  
Duncan Samson

This paper describes a collaborative research and development project between the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and Rhodes University in South Africa. The project seeks to establish, disseminate and research the efficacy and use of short video clips designed specifically for the autonomous learning of mathematics. Specific to the South African context is our interest in capitalising on the ubiquity of cellphone technology and the autonomous affordances offered by mobile learning. This paper engages with a number of theoretical and pedagogical issues relating to the design, production and use of these video clips. Although the focus is specific to the contexts of South Africa and Switzerland, the discussion is of broad applicability.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Collavo ◽  
A. Lalayev ◽  
S. Angerer ◽  
M. Kraml ◽  
S. Bachner ◽  
...  

In this project, high school students (aged 16-17) tested various protocols of experiments in nanotechnology and evaluated them whether such experiments could also be performed by middle school students (aged 11-15) or even elementary school students (aged 6-10). Protocols pre-selected and provided by the instructing team consisting of Sciencetainment and the Department of Biosciences, University of Salzburg were applied. Laboratory techniques such as thin-layer chromatography, measuring the contact angle by high-resolution 3D microscopy and analyzing and constructing surface layers represented some of the experiments performed. Moreover, students produced short video clips and images and designed photo-collages out of microscopic and electron microscopic pictures. Hence, the school students acquired a number of soft skills during this special science day. 


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Gimhani Kandana Arachchige ◽  
Wivine Blekic ◽  
Isabelle Simoes Loureiro ◽  
Laurent Lefebvre

Numerous studies have explored the benefit of iconic gestures in speech comprehension. However, only few studies have investigated how visual attention was allocated to these gestures in the context of clear versus degraded speech and the way information is extracted for enhancing comprehension. This study aimed to explore the effect of iconic gestures on comprehension and whether fixating the gesture is required for information extraction. Four types of gestures (i.e., semantically and syntactically incongruent iconic gestures, meaningless configurations, and congruent iconic gestures) were presented in a sentence context in three different listening conditions (i.e., clear, partly degraded or fully degraded speech). Using eye tracking technology, participants’ gaze was recorded, while they watched video clips after which they were invited to answer simple comprehension questions. Results first showed that different types of gestures differently attract attention and that the more speech was degraded, the less participants would pay attention to gestures. Furthermore, semantically incongruent gestures appeared to particularly impair comprehension although not being fixated while congruent gestures appeared to improve comprehension despite also not being fixated. These results suggest that covert attention is sufficient to convey information that will be processed by the listener.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 220-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thalia R. Goldstein ◽  
Aline Filipe

Acting is everywhere: TV, movies, and theater. Yet psychologists know surprisingly little about how acting is processed and understood by viewers. This is despite popular, scholarly, and journalistic obsession both with how actors are able to create characters with fully realized personalities, emotional arcs, physical attributes, and skills, and with whether actors and their characters merge during or after performance. Theoretically, there are several possibilities for how audience members process actors and acting: as literary fiction; as if someone is telling a lie; like essentialist traits and states; or like the personalities and emotions of real people in our every day lives. The authors consider each of these possibilities in turn. They then present 3 studies investigating the amount audiences conflate actors’ and characters’ characteristics ( N = 231) by asking participants directly how much they perceive actors as experiencing the characteristics they portray (Study 1), by showing short video clips of actors and asking participants how much they thought actors were experiencing what they portrayed (Study 2) and by asking participants to judge the overlap in personality characteristics between actors and characters (Study 3). Overall, audience members are conflating actors and their characters. However, how much depends on the characteristic being portrayed and the knowledge of the audience. We propose a theoretical model of when and how audience members think of actors and their characters as blended, and we lay out a research agenda to determine how acting and actors are understood.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. e000375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre Donnelly ◽  
Mark L Everard

IntroductionChronic cough in childhood is common and causes much parental anxiety. Eliciting a diagnosis can be difficult as it is a non-specific symptom indicating airways inflammation and this may be due to a variety of aetiologies. A key part of assessment is obtaining an accurate cough history. It has previously been shown that parental reporting of ‘wheeze’ is frequently inaccurate. This study aimed to determine whether parental reporting of the quality of a child’s cough is likely to be accurate.MethodsParents of 48 ‘new’ patients presenting to a respiratory clinic with chronic cough were asked to describe the nature of their child’s cough. They were then shown video clips of different types of cough using age-appropriate examples, and their initial report was compared with the types of cough chosen from the video.ResultsIn a quarter of cases, the parents chose a video clip of a ‘dry’ or ‘wet’ cough having given the opposite description. In a further 20% parents chose examples of both ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ coughs despite having used only one descriptor.DiscussionWhile the characteristics of a child’s cough carry important information that may be helpful in reaching a diagnosis, clinicians should interpret parental reporting of the nature of a child’s cough with some caution in that one person’s ‘dry’ cough may very well be another person’s ‘wet’ cough.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nobuhiro Kamiya

This study investigated how learners’ ages affect their interpretation of the nonverbal behaviors (NVBs) of teachers and other students in distinguishing between questions and statements in the second language (L2) classroom. After watching 48 short video clips without sound in which three L2 teachers asked a question or made a statement with or without gesture, 36 elementary school pupils and 30 university students judged whether they thought the teachers asked a question or made a statement along with their reasons. The findings show that, regardless of learners’ ages, L2 teacher’s gestures were found to help learners better identify questions. Furthermore, the six major types of NVBs used for judgments most frequently were identical across the two age groups regardless of the accuracy of their judgments. Nevertheless, incorrect judgments were made as often and sometimes even more often than correct judgments by applying the same assumptions. The effect of age was evidenced in that the university students were able to use a larger number of NVBs for correct judgments, and better distinguish questions and statements without linguistic information than the elementary school pupils. The data suggest that it is the learners’ (L2) classroom experience that seems to be playing the major role in yielding this difference. The study indicates that adult L2 learners are better able than children to incorporate and interpret NVBs of teachers as well as other students quantitatively and qualitatively.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilmar Brohmer ◽  
Katja Corcoran ◽  
Gayannee Kedia ◽  
Lisa V. Eckerstorfer ◽  
Andreas Fauler ◽  
...  

Helping often occurs in a broader social context. Every day, people observe others who require help, but also others who provide help. Research on goal contagion (Aarts, Gollwitzer & Hassin, 2004) suggests that observing other people’s goal-directed behavior (like helping) activates the same goal in the observer. Thus, merely observing a prosocial act could inspire people to act on the same goal. This effect should be even stronger, the more the observer’s disposition makes him or her value the goal. In the case of prosocial goals, we looked at the observer’s Social Value Orientation (SVO; van Lange et al., 1999) as a moderator of the process. In three studies (N = 126, N = 162 and N = 371), we tested the hypothesis that prosocial observations (vs. control) will trigger more subsequent prosocial behavior the more the observer is prosocially oriented. In line with the original research, we used texts as stimulus material in Study 1 and short video clips in Study 2 and 3. In Study 1 and 2, SVO was measured directly before the manipulation was induced and in Study 3 even a week prior to the actual experiment. Additionally, we included a second control condition video clip in Study 3, which did not depict human beings. Despite thoroughly developed stimulus material and methods, we found no support for an effect of the interaction, nor of the prosocial observation, but some support of SVO in Study 1 and 2. A mini meta-analysis revealed an effect equivalent to zero for goal contagion and a small, but robust SVO effect across studies. One implication for the theory of goal contagion is that prosocial goals might not be as contagious as other goals addressed in the literature. However, because SVO might not have been an optimal trait, other moderators for prosocial dispositions should be tested.


Author(s):  
Gareth J Price ◽  
June Chalmers ◽  
Clare Goodfellow

For the past few years, we have been experimenting with an e-learning approach to our introductory laboratory classes for first year students. Our overall objective was to maximise students’ useful time in the laboratory. We considered that time spent with students gathered around a desk watching a demonstration is not an efficient use of staff or students’ time.It is well recognised that students’ performance in the laboratory can be enhanced if they are familiar with the background of the experiments which will be conducted, hence the use of ‘pre-labs’. We have been delivering our ‘pre-labs’ electronically by requiring students to work through a package before coming to the laboratory. As well as covering the theory and background to the experiment, short video clips have been included so that students will also have seen the experiment being performed. They should at least recognise the apparatus! The package concludes with a short assessment quiz which must be completed.The packages were mounted on the University network using WebCT and meant that students could undertake the exercises at a time (and place) of their choosing rather than being confined to set laboratory hours.This communication will describe the packages and our experiences as well as an initial evaluation of our approach. Although largely anecdotal, staff felt that they spent less time on more mundane aspects of laboratory work and more time discussing chemistry.Students also felt that they were better prepared for the experiments before they came to the laboratory. Some of the pitfalls and technical problems that had to be overcome willalso be described.


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