A Preliminary Study of the Relation of Visual Attention to Stimulus Complexity and Functional Vision in Individuals With Cortical Visual Impairment: Implications for Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Purpose Individuals with cortical visual impairment (CVI) can have difficulties with visual processing due to physical damage or atypical structures of visual pathways or visual processing centers in the brain. Many individuals with CVI have concomitant disabilities, including significant communication support needs; these individuals can benefit from augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Because much AAC involves a visual channel, implementation of AAC must consider the unique visual processing skills and challenges in CVI. However, little is known empirically about how to best design AAC for individuals with CVI. This study examined processing of visual stimuli in four young adolescents with CVI. Method This study used a within-subjects experimental design that sought to provide an in-depth description of the visual engagement of individuals with CVI when viewing stimuli of various levels of complexity, either with or without a social cue. Results Participants engaged most with the simplest stimuli (relative to the size of those stimuli) and engaged more when a social cue was provided during the task. The level of engagement with more complex stimuli was related to participants' score on the CVI Range, a clinical assessment tool that characterizes level of visual functioning. Conclusions Implications for AAC include considerations for the internal complexity of AAC symbols and the complexity of the arrays created for individuals with CVI. Clinicians working with children with CVI who use AAC should consider the unique features of their visual processing.

Building trust in eCommerce - an experimental study of social-cue design dimensions

Integrating diverse social media cues such as photos, video streaming, and social networking has become a common marketing strategy to boost consumer trust in an online setting. In this paper, we study the influence of social-cue design dimensions such as a facial photo, a video stream, and social networking site on trust through an experiment. Our results show that online retailers can enhance consumer trust and stimulate a clear purchase intention by embedding social media cues into a web interface.

Head turning is an effective cue for gaze following

In referential communication, gaze is often interpreted as a social cue that facilitates comprehension and enables word learning. Here we investigated the degree to which head turning facilitates gaze following. We presented participants with static pictures of a man looking at a target object in a first and third block of trials, while they saw short videos of the same man turning towards the target in the second block. In Experiment 1, newly sighted individuals (recently treated for congenital cataracts) benefited from the motion cues, both when comparing their initial performance with static gaze cues to their performance with head turning, and their performance with static cues before and after the videos. In Experiment 2, neurotypical school children (ages 5-10 years) and adults also revealed improved performance with motion cues, although most participants had started to follow the static gaze cues by the end of the first block. Our results confirm that head turning is an effective social cue when interpreting new words, offering new insights for a pathways approach to development.

EEG alpha and theta signatures of socially and non-socially cued working memory in virtual reality

In this preregistered study (https://osf.io/s4rm9) we investigated the behavioural and neurological (EEG; alpha and theta) effects of dynamic non-predictive social and non-social cues on working memory. In a virtual environment realistic human-avatars initiated eye contact before dynamically looking to the left or right side of a table. A moving stick served as a non-social control cue. Kitchen items were presented in the valid cued or invalid un-cued location for encoding. Behavioural findings show a similar influence of the social and non-social cues on working memory performance. Alpha power changes were equivalent for the social and non-social cues during cuing and encoding. However, theta power changes revealed different patterns for the two cues. Theta power increased more strongly for the non-social cue compared to the social cue during initial cuing. Further, while for the non-social cue there was a significantly larger increase in theta power for valid compared to invalid conditions during encoding, this was reversed for the social cue, with a significantly larger increase in theta power in posterior electrodes for the invalid compared to valid conditions. Therefore, while social and non-social attention cues impact working memory performance in a similar fashion, the underlying neural mechanisms appear to differ.

EXPRESS: Standing out from the crowd: Both cue numerosity and social information affect attention in multi-agent contexts

Groups of people offer abundant opportunities for social interactions. We used a two-phase task to investigate how social cue numerosity and social information about an individual affected attentional allocation in such multi-agent settings. The learning phase was a standard gaze-cuing procedure in which a stimulus face could be either uninformative or informative about the upcoming target. The test phase was a group-cuing procedure in which the stimulus faces from the learning phase were presented in groups of three. The target could either be cued by the group minority (i.e., one face) or majority (i.e., two faces) or by uninformative or informative stimulus faces. Results showed an effect of cue numerosity, whereby responses were faster to targets cued by the group majority than the group minority. However, responses to targets cued by informative identities included in the group minority were as fast as responses to targets cued by the group majority. Thus, previously learned social information about an individual was able to offset the general enhancement of cue numerosity, revealing a complex interplay between cue numerosity and social information in guiding attention in multi-agent settings.

Language as a Social Cue

Social groups are a pervasive feature of human life. One factor that is often understudied in the literature on person perception and social categorization is language. Yet, someone's language (and accent) provides a tremendous amount of social information to a listener. Disciplines across the social and behavioral sciences—ranging from linguistics to anthropology to economics—have exposed the social significance of language. Less social psychological research has historically focused on language as a vehicle for social grouping. Yet, new approaches in psychology are reversing this trend. This article first reviews evidence, primarily from psycholinguistics, documenting how speech provides social information. Next it turns to developmental psychology, showing how young humans begin to see others’ language as conveying social group information. It then explores how the tendency to see language as a social cue has vast implications for people's psychological processes (e.g., psychological essentialism and trust) and also for society, including education and the law.

The Influence of Similarity and Mimicry on Decisions to Trust

Research on trust development has generally focused on how similarities between people influence trust allocation. However, similarity in interests and beliefs, which underpins trust development and may be critical to relationship success, is seldom apparent upon initial interaction and thus may not be a primary predictor of initial trust decisions. Here we ask how mimicry, a visible social cue, affects trust decisions alongside similarity. We used a “chat-room” style task to independently manipulate the degree to which participants were similar to a set of avatars and the degree to which those avatars displayed mimicry. We then assessed trust decisions in both financial and social domains. Our results show that together with similarity, mimicry is an important independent predictor of trust decisions. This work has implications for understanding how and when trust is allocated, as well how to facilitate successful interactions.