Humans specifically seek out the eyes of others, rather than just the middle of their faces, according to a new study proposed by an 11-year-old boy that uses characters from video game Dungeons and Dragons.

Cognitive scientist Alan Kingstone, director of the brain and research lab at the University of British Columbia in Canada, first became interested in testing whether people look at each others eyes, or simply the centre of their heads, two years ago. However, some had suggested an answer to the question would be impossible to find because our eyes happen to always be roughly in the centre of our heads.

Taking the problem home to his family, Alan’s then 11-year-old son, Julian Levy – named lead author of the subsequent paper, titled “Monsters are people too”, published in British Royal Society journal Biology Letters – had “a clever idea that only a kid’s brain could have,” Kingstone said.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

photo { Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait in Mirrors, 1932 }

A cute mistake that young children make is to think that they can hide themselves by covering or closing their eyes. Why do they make this error? A research team led by James Russell at the University of Cambridge has used a process of elimination to find out. […]

The revelation that most young children think people can only see each other when their eyes meet raises some interesting question for future research.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Cerebral cortex has a very large number of testosterone receptors, which could be a basis for sex differences in sensory functions. For example, audition has clear sex differences, which are related to serum testosterone levels. Of all major sensory systems only vision has not been examined for sex differences, which is surprising because occipital lobe (primary visual projection area) may have the highest density of testosterone receptors in the cortex. We have examined a basic visual function: spatial and temporal pattern resolution and acuity. […]

Across the entire spatio-temporal domain, males were more sensitive, especially at higher spatial frequencies; similarly males had significantly better acuity at all temporal rates. […]

We suggest that testosterone plays a major role, leading to different connectivities in males and in females. But, for whatever reasons, we find that males have significantly greater sensitivity for fine detail and for rapidly moving stimuli. One interpretation is that this is consistent with sex roles in hunter-gatherer societies.

{ Biology of Sex Differences/NCBI | Continue reading }

We examined the possible sex differences in color appearance of monochromatic lights across the visible spectrum. There is a history of men and women perceiving color differently. However, all of these studies deal with higher cognitive functions which may be culture-biased. We study basic visual functions, such as color appearance, without reference to any objects. […]

There were relatively small but clear and significant, differences between males and females in the hue sensations elicited by almost the entire spectrum. Generally, males required a slightly longer wavelength to experience the same hue as did females.

{ Biology of Sex Differences | PDF }

image { Jaymes Sinclair }

As noted in a previous posting, a number of studies have found that males outperform females on tests of general knowledge. The reasons for this are not yet clear. Women’s poorer test performance could be because they actually have acquired less knowledge than men, or it could be that they are not accessing all the knowledge they have. […]

Sex differences in general knowledge favouring males that were identified in a number of studies have been attributed to differing interests between men and women rather than differences in ability.

Another possibility that has not been explored in the research literature is that stereotype threat could have a detrimental effect on the performance of females in tests. […] For example, women who are reminded of their female identity perform more poorly on maths tests compared to a control group.

{ Eye on Psych | Continue reading }

The way that the visual centers of men and women’s brains works is different, finds new research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Biology of Sex Differences. Men have greater sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving stimuli, but women are better at discriminating between colors.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

The “visions” aren’t always complex or bizarre. Sometimes they can “blend in” to our everyday lives a bit more. One case study was recently published in the Canadian Journal of Ophthalmology described a patient having visual hallucinations of small children popping up in her vision. She didn’t try to speak or interact with them in any way and they never spoke to her. She didn’t recognize them. She knew that they weren’t real and she wasn’t frightened of them but there they were. She saw them. Why?

It turns out she had Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a condition in which visual hallucinations are caused by recent visual field loss… and, in her case, a brain tumor.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

image { Adrian Tomine }

While interviewing the suspect who claims ignorance about an incident, the witness who saw it happen, or the informant who identified the perpetrator, the detective asks a question that will eviscerate the perpetrator’s story. As the suspect prepares to answer, he looks up and to the left, purses his lips, tenses his eyelids, and brings his eyebrows down.

The investigator knows that a suspect displaying shifty eyes and gaze aversion and looking up and to the left when answering uncomfortable questions is exhibiting signs of lying. The suspect is not totally disinterested, but he is reluctant to participate in the interview. Because the suspect’s behavior suggests dishonesty, the detective prepares to drill still deeper in the questioning.

Unfortunately, this investigator likely would be wrong. Twenty-three out of 24 peer-reviewed studies published in scientific journals reporting experiments on eye behavior as an indicator of lying have rejected this hypothesis. No scientific evidence exists to suggest that eye behavior or gaze aversion can gauge truthfulness reliably.

Some people say that gaze aversion is the sure sign of lying, others that fidgety feet or hands are the key indicators. Still others believe that analysis of voice stress or body posture provides benchmarks. Research has tested all of these indicators and found them only weakly associated with deception. […]

Lies can be betrayed in verbal and nonverbal leakage independently. However, the authors have chosen to further examine this area, analyzing the combined contribution of verbal and nonverbal leakage to the prediction of deception or truthfulness.

{ FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin | Continue reading }

In a new study published in the journal Vision Research, researchers at the University of Southern California show that the eyes and attention of men and women meander in distinctly different ways. […]

Men, when focused on the person being interviewed, parked their eyes on the speaker’s mouth. They tended to be most distracted by distinctive movement behind the interview subjects.

By contrast, women shift their focus between the interview subject’s eyes and body. When they were distracted, it was typically by other people entering the video frame.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Henry Wessel }

The theory that liars look up to the right has been proved wrong

A paper published in PLOS ONE has apparently disproved the long-standing theory that direction of eye gaze can indicate lying. The theory which forms part of the bed-rock of the controversial offshoot of psychology called ‘Neuro-linguistic programming’ (NLP) has in fact never actually been experimentally researched until now. The study found absolutely no correlation between eye gaze and lying. Considering that this theory has become such a staple of popular psychology, it really is astounding that this was not discovered sooner.

{ Neurobonkers | Continue reading }

photo { Ewen Spencer }

SPIEGEL: Professor Kahneman, you’ve spent your entire professional life studying the snares in which human thought can become entrapped. For example, in your book, you describe how easy it is to increase a person’s willingness to contribute money to the coffee fund.

Kahneman: You just have to make sure that the right picture is hanging above the cash box. If a pair of eyes is looking back at them from the wall, people will contribute twice as much as they do when the picture shows flowers. People who feel observed behave more morally.

SPIEGEL: And this also works if we don’t even pay attention to the photo on the wall?

Kahneman: All the more if you don’t notice it. The phenomenon is called “priming”: We aren’t aware that we have perceived a certain stimulus, but it can be proved that we still respond to it.

SPIEGEL: People in advertising will like that.

Kahneman: Of course, that’s where priming is in widespread use. An attractive woman in an ad automatically directs your attention to the name of the product. When you encounter it in the shop later on, it will already seem familiar to you. […] When it looks familiar, it looks good. There is a very good evolutionary explanation for that: If I encounter something many times, and it hasn’t eaten me yet, then I’m safe. Familiarity is a safety signal. That’s why we like what we know.

[…]

Psychologists distinguish between a “System 1″ and a “System 2,” which control our actions. System 1 represents what we may call intuition. It tirelessly provides us with quick impressions, intentions and feelings. System 2, on the other hand, represents reason, self-control and intelligence.

SPIEGEL: In other words, our conscious self?

Kahneman: Yes. System 2 is the one who believes that it’s making the decisions. But in reality, most of the time, System 1 is acting on its own, without your being aware of it. It’s System 1 that decides whether you like a person, which thoughts or associations come to mind, and what you feel about something. All of this happens automatically. You can’t help it, and yet you often base your decisions on it.

SPIEGEL: And this System 1 never sleeps?

Kahneman: That’s right. System 1 can never be switched off. You can’t stop it from doing its thing. System 2, on the other hand, is lazy and only becomes active when necessary. Slow, deliberate thinking is hard work. It consumes chemical resources in the brain, and people usually don’t like that. It’s accompanied by physical arousal, increasing heart rate and blood pressure, activated sweat glands and dilated pupils …

SPIEGEL: … which you discovered as a useful tool for your research.

Kahneman: Yes. The pupil normally fluctuates in size, mostly depending on incoming light. But, when you give someone a mental task, it widens and remains surprisingly stable — a strange circumstance that proved to be very useful to us. In fact, the pupils reflect the extent of mental effort in an incredibly precise way. I have never done any work in which the measurement is so precise.

{ Der Spiegel | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon }

This experiment is designed to test the efficiency of the intuition, that is, the capacity to acquire information that does not require conscious control and intentional mental activity of the person. In this experiment your implicit intuition will be observed by measuring your pupil dilation. (…)

This study investigates the prediction accuracy of anticipatory pupil dilation responses in humans prior to the random presentation of alerting or neutral sounds. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that the autonomous nervous system may react prior to the presentation of random stimuli. A total of 80 participants, who were matched according to gender to take into account individual differences, were asked to listen to a random sequence of 10 neutral and 10 alerting sounds. Their pupil dilation was continuously recorded and the diameter of their pupils was used to predict the category of sound, alerting, or neutral. The pupil dilation of both males and females predicted alerting sounds approximately 10% more accurately than would be expected by chance, whereas neutral sounds were predicted at the chance level.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Delaney Allen }

Whenever we are doing something, one of our brain hemispheres is more active than the other one. However, some tasks are only solvable with both sides working together.

PD Dr. Martina Manns and Juliane Römling of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum are investigating, how such specializations and co-operations arise. Based on a pigeon-model, they are proving for the first time in an experimental way, that the ability to combine complex impressions from both hemispheres, depends on environmental factors in the embryonic stage. (…)

First the pigeons have to learn to discriminate the combinations A/B and B/C with one eye, and C/D and D/E with the other one. Afterwards, they can use both eyes to decide between, for example, the colours B/D. However, only birds with embryonic light experience are able to solve this problem.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Imagine the smell of an orange. Have you got it? Are you also picturing the orange, even though I didn’t ask you to? Try fish. Or mown grass. You’ll find it’s difficult to bring a scent to mind without also calling up an image. It’s no coincidence, scientists say: Your brain’s visual processing center is doing double duty in the smell department.

{ Inkfish | Continue reading }

Scientists are attempting to clarify the path that leads to consciousness by following a single, bite-sized piece of information — the redness of an apple, for instance — as it moves into a person’s inner mind.

Recent research into the visual system suggests that a sight simply passing through the requisite vision channels in the brain isn’t enough for an experience to form. Studies that delicately divorce awareness from the related, but distinct, process of attention call into question the role of one of the key stops on the vision pipeline in creating conscious experience.

Other experiments that create the sensation of touch or hearing through sight alone hint at the way in which different kinds of inputs come together. So far, scientists haven’t followed enough individual paths to get a full picture. But they are hot on the trail, finding clues to how the brain builds conscious experience.

One of the best-understood systems in the brain is the complex network of nerve cells and structures that allow a person to see. Imprints on cells in the eye’s retina get shuttled to the thalamus, to the back of the brain and then up the ranks to increasingly specialized cells where color, motion, location and identity of objects are discerned.

After decades of research, today’s map of the vision system looks like a bowl of spaghetti thrown on the floor, with long, elegant lines connected by knotty tangles. But there’s an underlying method in this ocular madness: Information appears to flow in a prescribed direction.

After planting a vision in a person’s retina, scientists can then watch how one image moves through the brain. By asking viewers when they become aware of the vision, researchers may pinpoint where along the pipeline it pops into consciousness.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

{ 1 | 2 }

As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from the screen at the room beyond, your eyes are making tiny movements, called saccades, and brief pauses, called fixations. Scientists are discovering that eye movement patterns — where we look, and for how long — reveals important information about how we read, how we learn and even what kind of people we are.

Researchers are able to identify these patterns thanks to the development of eye-tracking technology: video cameras that record every minuscule movement of the eyes. Such equipment, originally developed to study the changes in vision experienced by astronauts in zero-gravity conditions, allows scientists to capture and analyze that always-elusive entity, attention. The way we move our eyes, it turns out, is a reliable indicator of what seizes our interest and of what distracts us. (…)

Eye movements are so closely tied to the way we think and act that they can even reveal information about our personalities. In a study published this month in the journal Cognition, researcher Evan Risko and his coauthors asked experimental subjects to complete a questionnaire gauging their levels of curiosity, defined as a desire for new knowledge and new experiences. The scientists then used eye-tracking equipment to record the eye movements of participants as they viewed a series of scenes. People who tested as highly curious, Risko reported, looked at many more elements of the pictures, restlessly moving their eyes around the scenes. “Who a person is,” he concluded, “relates to how they move their eyes.”

{ Time | Continue reading }

images { 1. Robert Longo | 2. Floris M. Neusüss }

Tearing is not a benign secretory correlate of sadness or other emotional state, but a potent visual cue that adds meaning to human facial expression, the tear effect. Although tearing (lacrimation) provides ocular lubrication and is a response to irritation in many animals, emotional tearing may be unique to humans and does not develop until several months after birth.

This study provides the first experimental demonstration that tears are a visual signal of sadness by contrasting the perceived sadness of human facial images with tears against copies of those images that had the tears digitally removed. Tear removal produced faces rated as less sad. Anecdotal findings suggest further that tear-removal often produced faces of uncertain emotional valence, perhaps awe, concern, or puzzlement, not just less sad. Tearing signaled sadness and resolved ambiguity.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | PDF }

{ 1 | 2 }

In every pirate movie there’s always at least one crew member who wears an eye patch, usually due to some hideous disfigurement. (…)

Actually, it looks like the only reason pirates wore eye patches was to keep one eye adjusted to darkness while boarding another ship. That’s right: If this theory is correct, they only wore the patch before and during a raid. (…)

It takes the human eye several minutes to adjust to darkness — however, this way, pirates could simply swap the eye patch and immediately be prepared to fight in the lower decks without constantly running into walls, which is something you’d probably want to avoid if you’re carrying a cutlass.

{ Cracked | Continue reading }

A sociological content analysis of advertising catalogues with the eye-tracking method

Is it possible to look at something without actually noticing it? Is it possible to see something in the picture that is not really there? The answers to these philosophical questions can be obtained by comparing the results of eye-tracking tests combined with interviews based on sociological theories. (…)

The respondents, in line with our expectations, turned out to be familiar with the catalogue investigated. All of them provided the correct name of the company. When asked to describe in their own words the situations presented, the respondents would stress the fact that they show “the ideal” world. (…)

While most attention should be given to watching the advertisements, we constitute our dreams of a perfect life, environment and the items that furnish it.

{ Qualitative Sociology Review | Continue reading | PDF }

follow-up to { UC Berkeley scientists developed a “decoder” that can reconstruct our visual experiences }