The variability in the own-gender bias (OGB) in face-recognition is thought to be based on experience and the engagement of expert face processing mechanisms for own-gender faces. Experience is also ...associated with personality characteristics such as extraversion and Autism, yet the effects of these variables on the own-gender bias has not been explored. We ran a face recognition study exploring the relationships between own-gender experience, holistic processing (measured using the face-inversion effect, composite face effect, and the parts-and-wholes test), personality characteristics (extraversion and Autism Quotient) and the OGB. Findings did not support a mediational account where experience increases holistic processing and this increases the OGB. Rather, there was a direct relationship between extraversion and Autism Quotient and the OGB. We interpret this as personality characteristics having an effect on the motivation to process own-gender faces more deeply than opposite-gender faces.
The concept of a multidimensional psychological space, in which faces can be represented according to their perceived properties, is fundamental to the modern theorist in face processing. Yet the ...idea was not clearly expressed until 1991. The background that led to the development of face-space is explained, and its continuing influence on theories of face processing is discussed. Research that has explored the properties of the face-space and sought to understand caricature, including facial adaptation paradigms, is reviewed. Face-space as a theoretical framework for understanding the effect of ethnicity and the development of face recognition is evaluated. Finally, two applications of face-space in the forensic setting are discussed. From initially being presented as a model to explain distinctiveness, inversion, and the effect of ethnicity, face-space has become a central pillar in many aspects of face processing. It is currently being developed to help us understand adaptation effects with faces. While being in principle a simple concept, face-space has shaped, and continues to shape, our understanding of face perception.
Social engineering attacks in the form of phishing emails represent one of the biggest risks to cybersecurity. There is a lack of research on how the common elements of phishing emails, such as the ...presence of misspellings and the use of urgency and threatening language, influences how the email is processed and judged by individuals. Eye tracking technology may provide insight into this. In this exploratory study a sample of 22 participants viewed a series of emails with or without indicators associated with phishing emails, whilst their eye movements were recorded using a SMI RED 500 eye-tracker. Participants were also asked to give a numerical rating of how trustworthy they deemed each email to be. Overall, it was found that participants looked more frequently at the indicators associated with phishing than would be expected by chance but spent less overall time viewing these elements than would be expected by chance. The emails that included indicators associated with phishing were rated as less trustworthy on average, with the presence of misspellings or threatening language being associated with the lowest trustworthiness ratings. In addition, it was noted that phishing indicators relating to threatening language or urgency were viewed before misspellings. However, there was no significant interaction between the trustworthiness ratings of the emails and the amount of scanning time for phishing indicators within the emails. These results suggest that there is a complex relationship between the presence of indicators associated with phishing within an email and how trustworthy that email is judged to be. This study also demonstrates that eye tracking technology is a feasible method with which to identify and record how phishing emails are processed visually by individuals, which may contribute toward the design of future mitigation approaches.
•Attentional settings in a task persist to a second unrelated task, affecting search.•Top-down biases within scenes have no impact on the persistence of attentional set.•The effect of a previously ...relevant attentional set on eye movements is brief.
Top-down attentional settings can persist between two unrelated tasks, influencing visual attention and performance. This study investigated whether top-down contextual information in a second task could moderate this “attentional inertia” effect. Forty participants searched through letter strings arranged horizontally, vertically, or randomly and then made a judgement about road, nature, or fractal images. Eye movements were recorded to the picture search and findings showed greater horizontal search in the pictures following horizontal letter strings and narrower horizontal search following vertical letter strings, but only in the first 1000 ms. This shows a brief persistence of attentional settings, consistent with past findings. Crucially, attentional inertia did not vary according to image type. This indicates that top-down contextual biases within a scene have limited impact on the persistence of previously relevant, but now irrelevant, attentional settings.
The own-age bias is one in which people recognize faces of people their own age more accurately than faces of other ages (e.g., Anastasi & Rhodes, 2005, 2006) and appears to be, at least, partially ...based on experience (Harrison & Hole, 2009). Indeed, Hills and Lewis (2011a) have shown that 8-year-old faces are more accurately recognized by 8-year-old children than by 6- or 11-year-old children, suggesting the own-age bias develops rapidly. The present study explores the own-age bias in a developmental study in participants aged 6-10 years. Ninety participants (divided into 3 groups of 30 on the basis of their age at the first time of testing) undertook a standard old/new recognition paradigm in which their recognition accuracy was measured for 8- and 20-year-old faces. Results showed that when the participants were 8 years old, they recognized 8-year-old faces more accurately than when they were 7 or 9 years old. This effect was found to be based on mechanisms that differ from simple developmental improvement. This is the first study to show the development of the own-age bias in face recognition using a longitudinal design. These results show that the face recognition system is updated on the basis of recent experience and/or motivation to process faces, creating recognition biases.
Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is characterised by a severe and relatively selective deficit in face recognition, in the absence of neurological injury. Because public and professional awareness of ...DP is low, many adults and children are not identified for formal testing. This may partly result from the lack of appropriate screening tools that can be used by non-experts in either professional or personal settings. To address this issue, the current study sought to (a) explore when DP can first be detected in oneself and another, and (b) identify a list of the condition's everyday behavioural manifestations. Questionnaires and interviews were administered to large samples of adult DPs, their unaffected significant others, and parents of children with the condition; and data were analysed using inductive content analysis. It was found that DPs have limited insight into their difficulties, with most only achieving realisation in adulthood. Nevertheless, the DPs' reflections on their childhood experiences, together with the parental responses, revealed specific indicators that can potentially be used to spot the condition in early childhood. These everyday hallmark symptoms may aid the detection of individuals who would benefit from objective testing, in oneself (in adults) or another person (for both adults and children).
While the lack of consent is the only determining factor in considering whether a situation is rape or not, there is sufficient evidence that participants conflate wantedness with consent and ...pleasurableness with wantedness. Understanding how people appraise sexual scenarios may form the basis to develop appropriate educational packages. We conducted two large-scale qualitative studies in two UK universities in which participants read vignettes describing sexual encounters that were consensual or not, wanted or unwanted and pleasurable or not pleasurable. Participants provided free-text responses as to whether they perceived the scenarios to be rape or not and why they made these judgments. The second study replicated the results of the first and included a condition where participants imagined themselves as either the subject or initiator of the sexual encounter. The results indicate that a significant portion of our participants held attitudes reflecting rape myths and tended to blame the victim. Participants used distancing language when imagining themselves in the initiator condition. Participants indicated that they felt there were degrees of how much a scenario reflected rape rather than it simply being a dichotomy (rape or not). Such results indicate a lack of understanding of consent and rape and highlight avenues of potential educational materials for schools, universities or jurors.
Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a cognitive condition characterised by a relatively selective deficit in face recognition. Some adults and children with DP experience severe psychosocial ...consequences related to the condition, yet are reluctant to disclose it to others. The remediation of DP is therefore an urgent issue, but has been met with little success. Given that developmental conditions may only benefit from compensatory rather than remedial training, this study aimed to examine (a) the positive and negative effects of DP disclosure, and (b) compensatory techniques that may circumvent recognition failure. Qualitative questionnaires and interviews were carried out with 79 participants: 50 adults with DP, 26 of their non-affected significant others, and three parents of DP children. Findings indicated positive effects of disclosure, yet most adults choose not to do so in the workplace. Effective compensatory strategies include the use of extra-facial information, identity prompts from others, and preparation for planned encounters. However, changes in appearance, infrequent contact, or encounters in unexpected contexts often cause strategy failure. As strategies are effortful and disrupted by heavily controlled appearance (e.g., the wearing of uniform), disclosure of DP may be necessary for the safety, wellbeing and optimal education of children with the condition.
•There are observer race differences when scanning both own- and other-race faces.•White Ps scan eyes and Black Ps scan the nose indicating physiognomic diagnosticity.•Cueing the most diagnostic ...features of other-race faces removes the own-race bias.•This effect was removed with response delayed; affecting the first fixation only.•The own-race bias is partially caused by misallocation of attention.
Own-race faces are recognised more accurately than other-race faces and may even be viewed differently as measured by an eye-tracker (Goldinger, Papesh, & He, 2009). Alternatively, observer race might direct eye-movements (Blais, Jack, Scheepers, Fiset, & Caldara, 2008). Observer differences in eye-movements are likely to be based on experience of the physiognomic characteristics that are differentially discriminating for Black and White faces. Two experiments are reported that employed standard old/new recognition paradigms in which Black and White observers viewed Black and White faces with their eye-movements recorded. Experiment 1 showed that there were observer race differences in terms of the features scanned but observers employed the same strategy across different types of faces. Experiment 2 demonstrated that other-race faces could be recognised more accurately if participants had their first fixation directed to more diagnostic features using fixation crosses. These results are entirely consistent with those presented by Blais et al. (2008) and with the perceptual interpretation that the own-race bias is due to inappropriate attention allocated to the facial features (Hills & Lewis, 2006, 2011).
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