scholarly journals Faces and Orientational Metaphors: The Effects of Valenced Faces and Facial Manipulations on Neutral Targets

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sara C. Moshenrose

<p>Previous research has shown that there may be an association between affect (negative vs. positive) and vertical position (up vs. down) of stimuli. The following research aimed to investigate whether individuals show spatial biases, either up or down, when asked to respond to neutral targets after seeing valenced faces. The research also aimed to investigate what impact manipulating automatic facial mimicry responses would have on response times. The research was conducted over three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants responded to neutral targets in either high or low vertical positions on a computer screen that were preceded by happy and sad schematic faces. There were two facial manipulation conditions. One group held a straw between their lips to inhibit smiling and another group held a straw between their teeth to facilitate smiling. A third group performed the response task without a straw (control condition). The procedure of Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1 except the happy and sad schematic faces had additional internal facial features (noses, eyebrows) that varied across trials. For both Experiment 1 and 2, targets preceded by a happy face were responded to significantly faster. In Experiment 3, the procedure was identical to Experiments 1 and 2, except photographic images of happy, neutral, and sad expressions were used. Participants were significantly faster to respond to targets in the high vertical position. Participants were also faster to respond to targets in the control (no straw) condition than the other two straw conditions. In the inhibition smiling condition, participants were faster to respond to targets in the high vertical position than low vertical position after seeing a happy or neutral face. These findings indicate that there may be an association between valenced faces and vertical selective attention that is consistent with orientational metaphors (positive = up), but further research is needed to clarify this.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sara C. Moshenrose

<p>Previous research has shown that there may be an association between affect (negative vs. positive) and vertical position (up vs. down) of stimuli. The following research aimed to investigate whether individuals show spatial biases, either up or down, when asked to respond to neutral targets after seeing valenced faces. The research also aimed to investigate what impact manipulating automatic facial mimicry responses would have on response times. The research was conducted over three experiments. In Experiment 1, participants responded to neutral targets in either high or low vertical positions on a computer screen that were preceded by happy and sad schematic faces. There were two facial manipulation conditions. One group held a straw between their lips to inhibit smiling and another group held a straw between their teeth to facilitate smiling. A third group performed the response task without a straw (control condition). The procedure of Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1 except the happy and sad schematic faces had additional internal facial features (noses, eyebrows) that varied across trials. For both Experiment 1 and 2, targets preceded by a happy face were responded to significantly faster. In Experiment 3, the procedure was identical to Experiments 1 and 2, except photographic images of happy, neutral, and sad expressions were used. Participants were significantly faster to respond to targets in the high vertical position. Participants were also faster to respond to targets in the control (no straw) condition than the other two straw conditions. In the inhibition smiling condition, participants were faster to respond to targets in the high vertical position than low vertical position after seeing a happy or neutral face. These findings indicate that there may be an association between valenced faces and vertical selective attention that is consistent with orientational metaphors (positive = up), but further research is needed to clarify this.</p>


1987 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Lamben

An experiment is reported testing the idea that spatial selective attention operates like the beam of a spotlight. Subjects made speeded orientation judgements to alphanumeric characters that could appear at an upper or lower display location. Letters tended (p = 0.8) to occur at one location, while digits tended to occur at the other. Alphanumeric category was pre-cued (p = 0.8). Response times were faster for cued than uncued items. For cued items subjects were faster at the likely location for a cued item. For uncued items this was reversed, with faster responding at the likely location for an uncued item. Hence, location selectivity reflected location probability for each category regardless of short-term expectancy concerning stimulus category. These data are incompatible with a simple spotlight view of spatial selective attention. Alternative explanations, including a modified two-stage spotlight model, were considered.


2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 209-218
Author(s):  
A. N’gbala ◽  
N. R. Branscombe

When do causal attribution and counterfactual thinking facilitate one another, and when do the two responses overlap? Undergraduates (N = 78) both explained and undid, in each of two orders, events that were described either with their potential causes or not. The time to perform either response was recorded. Overall, mutation response times were shorter when performed after an attribution was made than before, while attribution response times did not vary as a consequence of sequence. Depending on whether the causes of the target events were described in the scenario or not, respondents undid the actor and assigned causality to another antecedent, or pointed to the actor for both responses. These findings suggest that counterfactual mutation is most likely to be facilitated by attribution, and that mutation and attribution responses are most likely to overlap when no information about potential causes of the event is provided.


Author(s):  
Swaroop Dinakar ◽  
Jeffrey Muttart ◽  
Jeffrey Suway ◽  
J.S. Forensics ◽  
Jim Marr ◽  
...  

In an age where all major manufacturers are trying to get a better understanding of when an emergency response should be triggered, it becomes imperative to learn how humans respond to emergency events. If one can understand driver behavior, systems can be designed around the user to either assist drivers where they fail to perform well or completely eliminate them from the accident avoidance maneuver. In this study, 169 crash and near crash events from the SHRP2 dataset were analyzed. The response behavior of drivers was measured in events where the through drivers’ path was intruded upon by another vehicle perpendicular to its path. Overall, drivers responded significantly faster when the other vehicle failed to stop, and at intersection locations.


Perception ◽  
10.1068/p6916 ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (11) ◽  
pp. 1282-1289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludovica Lorusso ◽  
Gavin Brelstaff ◽  
Linda Brodo ◽  
Andrea Lagorio ◽  
Enrico Grosso

Following other researchers, we investigated the premise that visual judgment of kinship might be modelled as a signal-detection task, strictly related to similar facial features. We measured subjects' response times to face-pair stimuli while they performed visual judgments of kinship, similarity, or dissimilarity, and examined some priming effects involved. Our results show that kinship judgment takes longer on average than either similarity or dissimilarity judgment—which is compatible with existing models, yet might also suggest that kinship judgments are of a more complex character. In our priming study we observed selective suppression/enhancement of the efficacy of dissimilarity judgments whenever they followed similarity and kinship judgments. This finding confounds the notion, inherent in previous models, of resemblance cues signalling for kinship, since similarity and dissimilarity cannot be considered just as opposite concepts, and observed priming effects need to be explicitly modelled, including dissimilarity cues. To model kinship judgments across faces that are perceived as dissimilar, a new framework may be required, perhaps accepting the perspective of a task-driven use of the visual cues, modulated by experience and cultural conditioning.


1971 ◽  
Vol 33 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1335-1342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Gopher ◽  
Daniel Kahneman

A dichotic listening test was constructed which requires S to monitor a relevant message and to ignore a concurrent message presented to the other ear. The test has promising validity for predicting different criteria of proficiency in flying high-performance aircraft. An analysis of the most valid type of errors suggests that a change in an existing orientation is accompanied by a transient instability of selective attention. Most errors in continuous attention are omissions, which indicate a failure of the listening set. Intrusions, which indicate a failure of selectivity, are rare and their frequency is not correlated to flight criteria.


1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shoji Azuma ◽  
Richard P. Meier

ABSTRACTOne of the most striking facts about exchange errors in speech is that open class items are exchanged, but closed class items are not. This article argues that a pattern analogous to that in speech errors also appears in intrasentential code-switching. Intrasentential code-switching is the alternating use of two languages in a sentence by bilinguals. Studies of the spontaneous conversation of bilinguals have supported the claim that open class items may be codeswitched, but closed class items may not. This claim was tested by two sentence repetition experiments, one with Japanese/English bilinguals and the other with Spanish/English bilinguals. The results show that the switching of closed class items caused significantly longer response times and more errors than the switching of open class items.


1950 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 176-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. C. Fraser

An experiment is described to test the relation between angle of display and performance in prolonged visual tasks, using the Clock Test in three positions of display surface, vertical, at an angle of 45 degrees to the horizontal, and horizontal. In every case the line of regard was kept at right-angles to the display surface. The results indicate that significantly fewer stimuli are missed in the vertical position of the display surface than in the other two. The deterioration observed in the second half-hour of the original Clock Test experiments was not found in the present experiment, and two possible reasons for this are discussed briefly.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melina Kunar ◽  
Derrick Watson ◽  
Rhiannon Richards ◽  
Daniel Gunnell

Previous work has shown that talking on a mobile phone leads to an impairment of visual attention. Gunnell et al. (2020) investigated the locus of these dual-task impairments and found that although phone conversations led to cognitive delays in response times, other mechanisms underlying particular selective attention tasks were unaffected. Here we investigated which attentional networks, if any, were impaired by having a phone conversation. We used the Attentional Network Task (ANT) to evaluate performance of the alerting, orienting and executive attentional networks, both in conditions where people were engaged in a conversation and where they were silent. Two experiments showed that there was a robust delay in response across all three networks. However, at the individual network level, holding a conversation did not influence the size of the alerting or orienting effects but it did reduce the size of the conflict effect within the executive network. The findings suggest that holding a conversation can reduce the overall speed of responding and, via its influence on the executive network, can reduce the amount of information that can be processed from the environment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-96
Author(s):  
Michelle P. Kelly ◽  
Phil Reed

Stimulus over-selectivity is said to have occurred when only a limited subset of the total number of stimuli present during discrimination learning controls behavior, thus, restricting learning about the range, breadth, or all features of a stimulus. The current study investigated over-selectivity of 100 typically developing children, aged 3–7 (mean = 65.50 ± 17.31 SD months), using a visual discrimination task. Developmental trends in over-selectivity and their relationship to some cognitive variables (i.e., selective attention, sustained attention, and cognitive flexibility) were the target. Over-selectivity decreased with age, but this effect was mediated by the development of cognitive flexibility. Over-selectivity increased when a distractor task was introduced, which was not mediated by the other cognitive variables under investigation. The current results assist in the establishment of the theoretical underpinnings of over-selectivity by offering evidence of its underlying determinants and relating these to developmental trends.


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