Use of face masks is one of the measures adopted by the general community to stop the transmission of disease during this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This wide use of face masks has indeed been shown ...to disrupt day-to-day face recognition. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have predisposed impairment in face recognition and are expected to be more vulnerable to this disruption in face recognition. Here, we recruited typically developing adult participants and those with ASD, and we measured their non-verbal intelligence, autism spectrum quotient, empathy quotient, and recognition performances of faces with and without a face mask covering the lower halves of the face. When faces were initially learned unobstructed, we showed that participants had a general reduced face recognition performance for masked faces. In contrast, when masked faces were first learned, typically developing adults benefit with an overall advantage in recognizing both masked and unmasked faces; while adults with ASD recognized unmasked faces with a significantly more reduced level of performance than masked faces—this face recognition discrepancy is predicted by a higher level of autistic traits. This paper also discusses how autistic traits influence processing of faces with and without face masks.
We examined whether two purportedly facespecific effects, holistic processing and the left-side bias, can also be observed in expert-level processing of Chinese characters, which are logographic and ...share many properties with faces. Non-Chinese readers (novices) perceived these characters more holistically than Chinese readers (experts). Chinese readers had a better awareness of the components of characters, which were not clearly separable to novices. This finding suggests that holistic processing is not a marker of general visual expertise; rather, holistic processing depends on the features of the stimuli and the tasks typically performed on them. In contrast, results for the left-side bias were similar to those obtained in studies of face perception. Chinese readers exhibited a left-side bias in the perception of mirror-symmetric characters, whereas novices did not; this effect was also reflected in eye fixations. Thus, the left-side bias may be a marker of visual expertise.
Background
Theories propose that interpretation biases and attentional biases might account for the maintenance of chronic pain symptoms, but the interactions between these two forms of biases in the ...context of chronic pain are understudied.
Methods
To fill this gap, 63 participants (40 females) with and without chronic pain completed an interpretation bias task that measures participants’ interpretation styles in ambiguous scenarios and a novel eye‐tracking task where participants freely viewed neutral faces that were given ambiguous pain/health‐related labels (i.e. ‘doctor’, ‘patient’ and ‘healthy people’). Eye movements were analysed with the Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) approach, a machine‐learning data‐driven method that clusters people's eye movements into different strategy subgroups.
Results
Adults with chronic pain endorsed more negative interpretations for scenarios related to immediate bodily injury and long‐term illness than healthy controls, but they did not differ significantly in terms of their eye movements on ambiguous faces. Across groups, people who interpreted illness‐related scenarios in a more negative way also focused more on the nose region and less on the eye region when looking at patients’ and healthy people's faces and, to a lesser extent, doctors’ faces. This association between interpretive and attentional processing was particularly apparent in participants with chronic pain.
Conclusions
In summary, the present study provided evidence for the interplay between multiple forms of cognitive biases. Future studies should investigate whether this interaction might influence subsequent functioning in people with chronic pain.
Background/Aim
Traumatic dental injuries (TDIs) in the primary dentition may result in tooth discolouration and fractures. The aim of this child‐centred study was to explore the differences between ...preschool children's eye movement patterns and visual attention to typical outcomes following TDIs to primary teeth.
Materials and Methods
An eye‐tracker recorded 155 healthy preschool children's eye movements when they viewed clinical images of healthy teeth, tooth fractures and discolourations. The visual search pattern was analysed using the eye movement analysis with the Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) approach and preference for the various regions of interest (ROIs).
Results
Two different eye movement patterns (distributed and selective) were identified (p < .05). Children with the distributed pattern shifted their fixations between the presented images, while those with the selective pattern remained focused on the same image they first saw.
Conclusions
Preschool children noticed teeth. However, most of them did not have an attentional bias, implying that they did not interpret these TDI outcomes negatively. Only a few children avoided looking at images with TDIs indicating a potential negative impact. The EMHMM approach is appropriate for assessing inter‐individual differences in children's visual attention to TDI outcomes.
Previous research on cross-culture comparisons found that Western cultures tend to value independence and the self is construed as an autonomous individual, while Eastern cultures value ...interdependence and self-identity is perceived as embedded among friends and family members (Markus and Kitayama, 1991). The present experiment explored these cultural differences in the context of a paradigm developed by Sui et al. (2012), which found a bias toward the processing of self-relevant information using perceptual matching tasks. In this task, each neutral shape (i.e., triangle, circle, square) is associated with a person (i.e., self, friend, stranger), and faster and more accurate responses were found to formerly neutral stimuli tagged to the self compared to stimuli tagged to non-self. With this paradigm, the current study examined cross-cultural differences in the self-bias effect between participants from Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Results demonstrated a reliable self-bias effect across groups consistent with previous studies. Importantly, a variation was identified in a larger self-bias toward stranger-associated stimuli in the United Kingdom participants than the Hong Kong participants. This suggested the cultural modulation of the self-bias effect in perceptual matching.
Background
Few studies examining the effect of pain‐related threat on eye movements have incorporated a measure of interpretation bias. However, theories suggest that interpretation biases also play ...an important role in the anticipation of harm in situations where pain could be imminent. The current study investigates the association between interpretation biases and pain‐related threat expectancies and their associations with eye movements to pain‐related imagery.
Methods
Healthy adults’ (N = 91) fear of pain, emotional functioning and interpretation biases were assessed prior to a threat manipulation where they were given either threatening or reassuring information about an upcoming cold pressor task. Participants were then asked to freely view scene images that were either pain‐related or neutral.
Results
We used a data‐driven machine learning method to analyse eye movements. We identified an explorative (i.e. greater dispersal of eye fixations) and a focused eye movement pattern subgroup (i.e. mainly focusing on foreground information) for scene viewing in the sample. Participants with more negative interpretation biases expected that the cold pressor task would be more harmful, and those with higher levels of anticipated harm used a more explorative strategy when viewing injury scene images. Subsequent analysis confirmed an indirect effect of interpretation biases on eye movements through expected bodily harm. No difference in eye movements was found between participants given threatening and reassuring information.
Conclusions
Interpretation biases may play a prominent role in threat‐related attentional processing. By adopting a novel eye movement analysis approach, our results revealed interesting associations among interpretations, threat expectancies and eye movements.
Significance
Negative interpretation biases may be associated with greater threat expectancies for an upcoming experimental pain task. Anticipation of bodily harm may induce a stimulus non‐specific hypervigilant style of scanning of pain‐related scenes.
Greater eyes-focused eye movement pattern during face recognition is associated with better performance in adults but not in children. We test the hypothesis that higher eye movement consistency ...across trials, instead of a greater eyes-focused pattern, predicts better performance in children since it reflects capacity in developing visual routines. We first simulated visual routine development through combining deep neural network and hidden Markov model that jointly learn perceptual representations and eye movement strategies for face recognition. The model accounted for the advantage of eyes-focused pattern in adults, and predicted that in children (partially trained models) consistency but not pattern of eye movements predicted recognition performance. This result was then verified with data from typically developing children. In addition, lower eye movement consistency in children was associated with autism diagnosis, particularly autistic traits in social skills. Thus, children's face recognition involves visual routine development through social exposure, indexed by eye movement consistency.
Visual attention is a significant gateway to a child’s mind, and looking is one of the first behaviors young children develop. Untreated caries and the resulting poor dental aesthetics can have ...adverse emotional and social impacts on children’s oral health-related quality of life due to its detrimental effects on self-esteem and self-concept. Therefore, we explored preschool children’s eye movement patterns and visual attention to images with and without dental caries via eye movement analysis using hidden Markov models (EMHMM). We calibrated a convenience sample of 157 preschool children to the eye-tracker (Tobii Nano Pro) to ensure standardization. Consequently, each participant viewed the same standardized pictures with and without dental caries while an eye-tracking device tracked their eye movements. Subsequently, based on the sequence of viewed regions of interest (ROIs), a transition matrix was developed where the participants’ previously viewed ROI informed their subsequently considered ROI. Hence, an individual’s HMM was estimated from their eye movement data using a variational Bayesian approach to determine the optimal number of ROIs automatically. Consequently, this data-driven approach generated the visual task participants' most representative eye movement patterns. Preschool children exhibited two different eye movement patterns, distributed (78%) and selective (21%), which was statistically significant. Children switched between images with more similar probabilities in the distributed pattern while children remained looking at the same ROI than switching to the other ROI in the selective pattern. Nevertheless, all children exhibited an equal starting fixation on the right or left image and noticed teeth. The study findings reveal that most preschool children did not have an attentional bias to images with and without dental caries. Furthermore, only a few children selectively fixated on images with dental caries. Therefore, selective eye-movement patterns may strongly predict preschool children’s sustained visual attention to dental caries. Nevertheless, future studies are essential to fully understand the developmental origins of differences in visual attention to common oral health presentations in children. Finally, EMHMM is appropriate for assessing inter-individual differences in children’s visual attention.
In Chinese orthography, the most common character structure consists of a semantic radical on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); the minority, opposite arrangement also ...exists (PS characters). Recent studies showed that SP character processing is more left hemisphere (LH) lateralized than PS character processing. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether this is due to phonetic radical position or character type frequency. Through computational modeling with artificial lexicons, in which we implement a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception but do not assume phonological processing being LH lateralized, we show that the difference in character type frequency alone is sufficient to exhibit the effect that the dominant type has a stronger LH lateralization than the minority type. This effect is due to higher visual similarity among characters in the dominant type than the minority type, demonstrating the modulation of visual similarity of words on hemispheric lateralization.
PDF
