Published in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 30, Issue 4, April 2018, 603-619 Abstract “The feeling of control is a fundamental aspect of human experience and accompanies our voluntary actions all the time. However, how the sense of control interacts with wider perception, cognition, and behavior remains poorly understood. This study focused on how controlling an external object influences the allocation of attention. Experiment 1 examined attention to an object that is under a different level of control from the others. Participants searched for a target among multiple distractors on screen. All the distractors were partially under the participant’s control (50%… Read More
You said you would! The predictability of other’s behavior from their intentions determines predictive biases in action perception
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Volume 44, Issue 2, 320-335 Abstract “The perception of an action is shifted farther along the observed trajectory if the observer has prior knowledge of the actor’s intention. This intention-action prediction effect is explained by predictive perception models, wherein sensory input is interpreted in light of expectancies. This study altered the precision of the prediction by varying the predictability of the action from the intention, to increase/decrease the predictive perceptual bias. Participants heard an actor state an intention (“I’ll take it”/“I’ll leave it”) before the actor reached or withdrew from an… Read More
Beyond opponent coding of facial identity: Evidence for an additional channel tuned to the average face
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Volume 44, Issue 2, 243-260 Abstract “Face identity can be represented in a multidimensional space centered on the average. It has been argued that the average acts as a perceptual norm, with the norm coded implicitly by balanced activation in pairs of channels that respond to opposite extremes of face dimensions (two-channel model). In Experiment 1 we used face identity aftereffects to distinguish this model from a narrow-band multichannel model with no norm. We show that as adaptors become more extreme, aftereffects initially increase sharply and then plateau. Crucially there is… Read More
Unconscious conflict adaptation without feature-repetitions and response time carry-over
Published in: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Volume 44, Issue 2, 169-175 Abstract “Leading theories of cognition linked executive control to consciousness or awareness. Evidence from masked priming experiments questioned this link, but without addressing possible confounds. Responding to a target after a masked prime, participants are slower if prime and target present conflicting (incongruent) than nonconflicting (congruent) information. Crucially, congruence in the previous trial modulates this congruence effect, presenting a congruence-sequence effect. This has been interpreted as conflict adaptation by executive control processes, but alternative explanations through trial-to-trial feature-repetitions and response-time (RT) carry-over are possible. Here, we… Read More
Facial age cues and emotional expression interact asymmetrically: age cues moderate emotion categorisation
Published in: Cognition and Emotion, Volume 32, Issue 2, 350-362 Abstract “Facial attributes such as race, sex, and age can interact with emotional expressions; however, only a couple of studies have investigated the nature of the interaction between facial age cues and emotional expressions and these have produced inconsistent results. Additionally, these studies have not addressed the mechanism/s driving the influence of facial age cues on emotional expression or vice versa. In the current study, participants categorised young and older adult faces expressing happiness and anger (Experiment 1) or sadness (Experiment 2) by their age and their emotional expression. Age cues… Read More
The Perceptual Basis of Vast Space
Published in: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Volume 24, Issue 6, December 2017, 1870-1878 Abstract ““Vast” is a word often applied to environmental terrain that is perceived to have large spatial extent. This judgment is made even at viewing distances where traditional metric depth cues are not useful. This paper explores the perceptual basis of vast experience, including reliability and visual precursors. Experiment 1 demonstrated strong agreement in ratings of the spatial extent of two-dimensional (2D) scene images by participants in two countries under very different viewing conditions. Image categories labeled “vast” often exemplified scene attributes of ruggedness and openness (Oliva & Torralba, 2001). Experiment 2 quantitatively… Read More
Aging enhances cognitive biases to friends but not the self
Published in: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Volume 24, Issue 6, December 2017, 2021-2030 Abstract “We measured changes in self and friend biases in perceptual matching in young and older participants. Participants learned associations between neutral geometric shapes and three personal labels (You, Friend, or Stranger), representing themselves, their named best friend, and a stranger not corresponding to anyone they knew. They then responded whether the shapes and labels matched or mismatched. In addition, participants reported the perceived personal distance between themselves, their best friend, and a stranger. Relative to young participants, older adults showed an increased bias toward matching their friends over strangers,… Read More