Hong Kong Women Project a Larger Body When Speaking to Attractive Men

In this pilot study we investigated the vocal strategies of Cantonese women when addressing an attractive vs. unattractive male. We recruited 19 young female native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese who completed an attractiveness rating task, followed by a speech production task where they were presented a subset of the same faces. By comparing the rating results and corresponding acoustic data of the facial stimuli, we found that when young Cantonese women spoke to an attractive male, they were less breathy, lower in fundamental frequency, and with denser formants, all of which are considered to project a larger body. Participants who were more satisfied with their own height used these vocal strategies more actively. These results are discussed in terms of the body size projection principle.

Examining the effects of free gaze and dynamic video stimuli on engagement, eye movements, and EEG signal quality in a visual aesthetic rating task

Free gaze and the use of dynamically changing video stimuli are typically avoided in EEG exper- iments to avoid artefacts and confounds related to uncontrolled eye movements. Yet, often it is unclear whether these artificial secondary manipulations might have unwanted effects on the pri- mary measures of interest and for a growing number of research questions removing them would be beneficial: Among those is the investigation of visual aesthetic experiences, which typically involve open-ended exploration of highly variable stimuli. Here we aimed to quantify the effect of fixation task and using still vs. movie stimuli on EEG signal quality and several behavioral and physiological measures of interest during an aesthetic rating task. Participants observed scenes from landscapes and dance performances and rated each stimulus for both aesthetic appeal and their state of boredom while watching it. The scenes were presented either as dynamic video clips or static pictures, and participants observed them either with unconstrained gaze or under attempted fixation We recorded EEG, ECG and eyetracking from 43 participants. An auditory stream of 40Hz amplitude modulated pink noise was played during each trial and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of the auditory steady-state response measured at the scalp was extracted as a proxy measure for overall EEG signal quality. The study including hypotheses and a priori power analysis was preregistered. We found that both behavioral ratings were influenced by the experimental conditions: boredom and aesthetic ratings were positively affected by dynamic video stimuli, indicating that these are experienced as more engaging; both these effects were stronger in dance. As already reported before, landscape stimuli were experienced as more appealing. Fixaton task, on the other hand, had no significant effect on the ratings which is encouraging given how canonically it is applied. Eye movements were significantly affected not only by viewing task, but by stimulus dynamics and content as well: we observed fewer eyeblinks, saccades and microsaccades in video stimuli, and fewer saccades but more microsaccades in dance than in landscape stimuli, with several significant interactions. EEG SNR, to our surprise, was barely affected by fixation task - despite only minimal preprocessing and no trial rejection. We nevertheless believe that the new metric is sensitive to capture noise: it was significantly correlated with the number of eye blinks, and after cleaning the dataset with an ICA based preprocessing pipeline the significant effect of fixation task and the correlation with blink rate vanished. We see these as promising results indicating that at least in the lab more liberal experimental conditions could be achieved without significant loss of signal quality. Specifically the use of dynamic video material bears a lot of potential for future investigations in human neurophysiological studies.

On the Acquisition of Polarity Items: 11- to 12-Year-Olds' Comprehension of German NPIs and PPIs

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children’s language input. In this paper, we report an experimental investigation on children’s comprehension of two NPIs and two PPIs in German. Based on corpus data indicating that the four tested PSIs are present in child-directed speech but rare in young children’s utterances, we conducted an auditory rating task with adults and 11- to 12-year-old children. The results demonstrate that, even at 11–12 years of age, children do not yet show a completely target-like comprehension of the investigated PSIs. While they are adult-like in their responses to one of the tested NPIs, their responses did not demonstrate a categorical distinction between licensed and unlicensed PSI uses for the other tested expressions. The effect was led by a higher acceptance of sentences containing unlicensed PSIs, indicating a lack of awareness for their distributional restrictions. The results of our study pose new questions for the developmental time scale of the acquisition of polarity items.

Talker variability facilitates the statistical learning of speech sounds

Natural speech contains many sources of acoustic variability both within and between talkers, which challenges speech recognition in some contexts but may facilitate language understanding in novel listening situations. Despite this ubiquitous variability, most previous studies that have examined the ability to extract sound patterns in speech—known as statistical learning—have used highly controlled, artificial, monotonic streams of syllables. Thus, it is unknown whether variability in speech may help or hinder statistical learning – an important question to resolve if statistical learning does indeed play a role in the segmentation of naturally spoken language, as widely theorized. Here, we assessed whether the use of naturally produced, variable speech sounds produced by multiple talkers benefits or impairs statistical learning, including the ability to generalize patterns to a novel talker. During training, participants listened to approximately 12 minutes of continuous speech made up of repeating trisyllabic words, spoken either by a single talker (single-talker condition) or four talkers speaking for three minutes each (multiple-talker condition). Post-training, all participants completed three assessments of learning: (1) an explicit familiarity rating task, (2) an explicit forced-choice recognition task, and (3) an implicit syllable target detection task. Results indicated that participants in both training conditions showed evidence of statistical learning across all assessments, providing an important demonstration that statistical learning is robust to additional variability in the speech signal. Further, in both the forced-choice recognition task and target detection task, participants in the multiple-talker condition showed evidence of facilitated statistical learning, particularly when listening to a novel talker. In the familiarity rating task, performance was comparable between conditions; however, participants trained with multiple talkers were less likely to conflate word familiarity with talker voice familiarity. Overall, these results suggest that training with multiple talkers can improve aspects of statistical learning across multiple measures of learning.

Love Your Country: EEG Evidence of Actor Preferences of Audiences in Patriotic Movies

Movie watching is one of the common ways to spark love for the country. A good patriotic movie can arouse love and pride, encourage people to stand by their countries, and reinforce a sense of national belonging. To evoke audience emotion and enhance patriotism, the choice of actors is fundamental and is a dilemma for film producers. In this exploratory study, an electroencephalogram (EEG) with a rating task was used to investigate how actor types (i.e., skilled vs. publicity) in patriotic movies modulate the willingness of audiences to watch a film and their emotional responses. Behavioral results showed that audiences are more willing to watch patriotic movies starring skilled actors than to watch patriotic movies starring publicity actors. Furthermore, brain results indicated that smaller P3 and late positive potential (LPP) were elicited in response to skilled actors than to publicity actors in patriotic movies. A larger theta oscillation was also observed with skilled actors than with publicity actors. These findings demonstrate that the willingness of audiences to watch a movie is deeply affected by actor types in patriotic films. Specifically, skilled actors engage audiences emotionally, more so than publicity actors, and increase the popularity of patriotic movies. This study is the first to employ neuroscientific technology to study movie casting, which advances film studies with careful scientific measurements and a possible new direction.La première des vertus est le dévouement à la patrie.Napoléon Bonaparte

Harsh is large: nonlinear vocal phenomena lower voice pitch and exaggerate body size

A lion's roar, a dog's bark, an angry yell in a pub brawl: what do these vocalizations have in common? They all sound harsh due to nonlinear vocal phenomena (NLP)—deviations from regular voice production, hypothesized to lower perceived voice pitch and thereby exaggerate the apparent body size of the vocalizer. To test this yet uncorroborated hypothesis, we synthesized human nonverbal vocalizations, such as roars, groans and screams, with and without NLP (amplitude modulation, subharmonics and chaos). We then measured their effects on nearly 700 listeners' perceptions of three psychoacoustic (pitch, timbre, roughness) and three ecological (body size, formidability, aggression) characteristics. In an explicit rating task, all NLP lowered perceived voice pitch, increased voice darkness and roughness, and caused vocalizers to sound larger, more formidable and more aggressive. Key results were replicated in an implicit associations test, suggesting that the ‘harsh is large’ bias will arise in ecologically relevant confrontational contexts that involve a rapid, and largely implicit, evaluation of the opponent's size. In sum, nonlinearities in human vocalizations can flexibly communicate both formidability and intention to attack, suggesting they are not a mere byproduct of loud vocalizing, but rather an informative acoustic signal well suited for intimidating potential opponents.

Shape familiarity modulates preference for curvature in drawings of common-use objects

Drawing is a way to represent common-use objects. The contour of an object is a salient feature that defines its identity. Preference for a contour (curved or angular) may depend on how familiar the resulting shape looks for that given object. In this research, we examined the influence of shape familiarity on preference for curved or sharp-angled drawings of common-use objects. We also examined the possibility that some individual differences modulated this preference. Preference for curvature was assessed with a liking rating task (Experiment 1) and with a two-alternative forced-choice task simulating approach/avoidance responses (Experiment 2). Shape familiarity was assessed with a familiarity selection task where participants selected the most familiar shape between the curved and the angular version for each object, or whether both shapes were equally familiar for the object. We found a consistent preference for curvature in both experiments. This preference increased when the objects with a curved shape were selected as the most familiar ones. We also found preference for curvature when participants selected the shape of objects as equally familiar. However, there was no preference for curvature or preference for angularity when participants selected the sharp-angled shapes as the most familiar ones. In Experiment 2, holistic and affective types of intuition predicted higher preference for curvature. Conversely, participants with higher scores in the unconventionality facet showed less preference for the curved drawings. We conclude that shape familiarity and individual characteristics modulate preference for curvature.

Adaptive memory: Greater memory advantages in bilinguals’ first language

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: In this study, we examined memory performance in a bilingual population, in an effort to compare depth of processing and complexity across first and second languages. Design/methodology/approach: Complexity was investigated with a pleasantness rating task and an elaborative encoding, scenario-based rating task (i.e. rating words for their survival-relevance). Previous research found word recall largely benefited from an ancestral context that primed participants to think deeply about the survival-relevance of a list of concrete, neutral words. Engaging this more elaborative processing may lead to better memory if the human memory system is particularly tuned toward remembering survival-relevant materials. Data and analysis: Participants included 127 Spanish-English bilinguals, randomly-assigned to complete survival-relevance or pleasantness ratings in either Spanish or English. Aggregated language history data self-reported by participants (e.g. language-learning environments, age of acquisition, and so on), suggested an L1 of Spanish and L2 of English. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) compared word recall across these tasks and languages. Findings/conclusions: We hypothesized better recall performance collected from bilingual participants in the survival condition using their first, more often emotional, language. Our results support this hypothesis, with bilinguals replicating the memory advantage for words rated for their survival-relevance in Spanish (their L1), but not in English (their L2). Originality: While this paradigm has largely been studied with monolingual English-speakers, or in some cases, other languages, no study has explored its replicability in a Spanish-English bilingual population’s two languages. Significance/implications: These findings speak to the on-going effort to understand word processing and memory differences—particularly with regards to processing complexity—across bilinguals’ first and second languages.

Testing Causal Explanations of Viewing Time Measures of Sexual Interests

The term viewing time (VT) effect refers to a phenomenon whereby respondents typically take longer to judge the sexual attractiveness of targets from sexually preferred (versus nonpreferred) categories. Although frequently characterized as an unobtrusive measure of respondents’ sexually motivated reactions to the stimulus images themselves, the typical pattern of response times might be sufficiently explained by the task demands of the seemingly less relevant rating task. Utilizing three different VT variants, the present paper reports an experimental investigation (N = 136 heterosexual women and men) that tested hypotheses derived from hot stimulus-based processes versus cold cognitive task-based processes. Specifically, stimulus-based processes would predict VT effects even without a rating task, greater VT effects for sexually more suggestive images, and correlations of VT effects with individual sex drive differences. The task-based processes would not imply such predictions, but instead suggest identical response patterns for abstract non-pictorial stimuli that require the same feature integration. Results unanimously speak to the relevance of task demands but provide no support for stimulus-based processes. Implications of these findings for the causal explanation of VT effects are discussed.

Chinese Aesthetic Mask: Three Forehead and Five Eyes—Holistic Processing and Facial Attractiveness

Human face processing has been attributed to holistic processing. Here, we ask whether humans are sensitive to configural information when perceiving facial attractiveness. By referring to a traditional Chinese aesthetic theory—Three Forehead and Five Eyes—we generated a series of faces that differed in spacing between facial features. We adopted a two-alternative forced-choice task in Experiment 1 and a rating task in Experiment 2 to assess attractiveness. Both tasks showed a consistent result: The faces which fit the Chinese aesthetic theory were chosen or rated as most attractive. This effect of configural information on facial attractiveness was larger for faces with highly attractive features than for faces with low attractive features. These findings provide experimental evidence for the traditional Chinese aesthetic theory. This issue can be further explored from the perspective of culture in the future.