Face Adaptation—Investigating Nonconfigural Saturation Alterations

Recognizing familiar faces requires a comparison of the incoming perceptual information with mental face representations stored in memory. Mounting evidence indicates that these representations adapt quickly to recently perceived facial changes. This becomes apparent in face adaptation studies where exposure to a strongly manipulated face alters the perception of subsequent face stimuli: original, non-manipulated face images then appear to be manipulated, while images similar to the adaptor are perceived as “normal.” The face adaptation paradigm serves as a good tool for investigating the information stored in facial memory. So far, most of the face adaptation studies focused on configural (second-order relationship) face information, mainly neglecting non-configural face information (i.e., that does not affect spatial face relations), such as color, although several (non-adaptation) studies were able to demonstrate the importance of color information in face perception and identification. The present study therefore focuses on adaptation effects on saturation color information and compares the results with previous findings on brightness. The study reveals differences in the effect pattern and robustness, indicating that adaptation effects vary considerably even within the same class of non-configural face information.

Foreign, Security, and Defence Policy

This chapter explores the roots of Irish foreign, security, and defence policy, placing them in the context of a deeply pragmatic approach to public policy. Those roots are defined in terms of nationalism, solidarity, and global justice, which are themselves deep markers within Irish political culture. Ireland’s pragmatic approach is then grounded in a meticulously crafted rhetoric surrounding key foreign policy priorities but an associated reluctance to devote substantial resources towards these foreign policy and defence goals. Together, this gives rise to an assessment that the interests of smaller and less powerful states such as Ireland are best defended within legitimate, strong, and effective multilateral institutions such as the UN—even as the state continues to face adaptation challenges arising from a deepening foreign, security, and defence policy engagement within the EU.

Face Adaptation Effects on Non-Configural Face Information

Inspecting new visual information in a face can affect the perception of subsequently seen faces. In experimental settings for example, previously seen manipulated versions of a face can lead to a clear bias of the participant’s perception of subsequent images: Original images are then perceived as manipulated in the opposite direction of the adaptor while images that are more similar to the adaptor are perceived as normal or natural. These so-called face adaptation effects can be a useful tool to provide information about which facial information is processed and stored in facial memory. Most experiments so far used variants of the second-order relationship configural information (e.g., spatial relations between facial features) when investigating these effects. However, non-configural face information (e.g., color) was mainly neglected when focusing on face adaptation, although this type of information plays an important role in face processing. Therefore, we investigated adaptation effects of non-configural face information by employing brightness alterations. Our results provide clear evidence for brightness adaptation effects (Experiment 1). These effects are face-specific to some extent (Experiments 2 and 3) and robust over time (Experiments 4 and 5). They support the assumption that non-configural face information is not only relevant in face perception but also in face retention. Brightness information seems to be stored in memory and thus is even involved in face recognition.

Adaptation aftereffects reveal how categorization training changes the encoding of face identity

Previous research suggests that learning to categorize faces along a novel dimension changes the perceptual representation of such dimension, increasing its discriminability, its invariance, and the information used to identify faces varying along the dimension. A common interpretation of these results is that categorization training promotes the creation of novel dimensions, rather than simply the enhancement of already-existing representations. Here, we trained a group of participants to categorize faces that varied along two morphing dimensions, one of them relevant to the categorization task and the other irrelevant to the task. An untrained group did not receive such categorization training. In three experiments, we used face adaptation aftereffects to explore how categorization training changes the encoding of face identities at the extremes of the category-relevant dimension, and whether such training produces encoding of the category-relevant dimension as a preferred direction in face space. The pattern of results suggests that categorization training enhances the already-existing norm-based coding of face identity, rather than creating novel category-relevant representations. We formalized this conclusion in a model that explains the most important results in our experiments and serves as a working hypothesis for future work in this area.

NATO's About-Face: Adaptation to Gender Mainstreaming in an Alliance Setting

Scholars in global security studies have only recently focused attention on how and why international security organizations (ISOs) adapt. Since the United Nations Security Council's issuance of Resolution 1325, some ISOs have enacted changes to implement gender mainstreaming. The concept involves incorporating gender-based analyses in policy and planning and increasing women's representation. Drawing on interviews with seventy-one elites and a dataset of ninety-seven NATO gender guidelines, this article introduces an original argument for why NATO adapted to gender mainstreaming. Such adaptation is surprising given the military's historical resistance to gender considerations and that civilian bodies typically enact reforms. Findings indicate that other ISOs were substantially influential in the process and that institutional incentives built into NATO's military bodies drove military officials to implement mainstreaming in practice. Additionally, military elites perceived a link between gender mainstreaming and operational effectiveness, which further consolidated organization-wide adaptation. This study challenges long-held assumptions about militaries’ resistance to gender-related changes. It also offers one of the first empirical assessments of gender mainstreaming in an ISO.

Diagnosis of educational preparation for retirement: expectations and knowledge of Mexican workers

Introduction: Without proper preparation, 1 in 3 workers who are about to retire face adaptation problems while their levels of stress and anxiety increase.Objective: To diagnose the educational preparation needs for retirement by classifying expectations and knowledge of Mexican workers about to retire.Materials y methods: Qualitative descriptive study in which an initial comprehensive evaluation was used. 92 workers over 55 years of age and about to retire were included. Data were collected in a metacognitive format that encourages self-assessment and self-reflection. A thematic analysis was carried out.Results: Six types of knowledge were identified: 1) no knowledge; 2) basic knowledge; 3) indifferent knowledge (workers who knew little about retirement or were not interested in learning about it); 4) knowledge about labor rights; 5) positive knowledge; and 6) negative knowledge. Expectations were classified into five types: a) wanting to know everything, b) wanting to know about income, c) wanting to know about rights and obligations, d) wanting to stay active, and e) wanting to prepare for retirement.Conclusion: The metacognitive tool helped workers who are close to retirement to decipher, reflect and socialize their knowledge and expectations about retirement, and to raise awareness about their upcoming change of lifestyle. Companies should prepare employees who are going to retire through sensitizing conferences, taking care first of the need to know about the procedures and paperwork. Relatives and colleagues should be involved in future interventions, given that retirement has a collective dimension that needs to be addressed.