Emotional faces influence numerosity estimation without awareness

A standardised set of images for judgements of proportion

In the present work, we present normative data for a set of 39 original clipart-style images that can be used as material in studies involving judgements of proportion. The original images are drawings that depict different day-to-day scenarios (e.g., lighted windows in a building; books on a shelf) and each has seven variants of different proportions (from 20% to 80%) belonging to different categories (discrete vs continuous; social vs non-social; natural vs artificial; stimuli physical dimensions; number of referents). Normative data for these images are presented in an interactive database (available at https://judgment-images-and-norms.shinyapps.io/estimates_interactive/ ), corresponding to the means of proportion estimates (in percentage form), the perceived ease of making such estimates, the perceived level of familiarity and liking for each image, and the relationships between these variables. In the paper, we analyse the data at an individual level, addressing how the latter judgements are related to the proportion estimates, how those estimates are related to objective proportions, and how these relationships are moderated by image category. The analyses presented in this paper aim to aid readers in selecting images that enable them to better address specific influences on proportional estimates or to control for those influences in their studies.

EXPRESS: How negative emotions affect young and older adults' numerosity estimation performance

In this study, we investigated the influence of negative emotions on numerosity estimation and whether this influence changes with aging during adulthood. Young and older adults were asked to estimate and compare the numerosity of collections of elements (cars or dots) with a two-digit number. Collections of elements were preceded by emotionally neutral (e.g., mushrooms) or emotionally negative (e.g., a corpse) pictures. Stimuli were easier (i.e., small-ratio) or harder (i.e., large-ratio) items. Young and older participants obtained similar numerosity estimation performance. Interestingly, participants were less accurate under negative emotions than under neutral emotions when they estimated numerosity of collections of abstract elements (i.e., dots). In contrast, participants improved their performance under negative emotions while estimating collections of non-abstract, daily-life elements (i.e., cars). These findings have important implications for furthering our understanding of the role of negative emotions in numerosity estimation and age-related differences therein.

Gaze direction and face orientation modulate perceptual sensitivity to faces under interocular suppression

Faces convey information essential for social interaction. Their importance has prompted suggestions that some facial features may be processed unconsciously. Although some studies have provided empirical support for this idea, it remains unclear whether these findings were due to perceptual processing or to post-perceptual decisional factors. Evidence for unconscious processing of facial features has predominantly come from the Breaking Continuous Flash Suppression (b-CFS) paradigm, which measures the time it takes different stimuli to overcome interocular suppression. For example, previous studies have found that upright faces are reported faster than inverted faces, and direct-gaze faces are reported faster than averted-gaze faces. However, this procedure suffers from important problems: observers can decide how much information they receive before committing to a report, so their detection responses may be influenced by differences in decision criteria and by stimulus identification. Here, we developed a new procedure that uses predefined exposure durations, enabling independent measurement of perceptual sensitivity and decision criteria. We found higher detection sensitivity to both upright and direct-gaze (compared to inverted and averted-gaze) faces, with no effects on decisional factors. For identification, we found both greater sensitivity and more liberal criteria for upright faces. Our findings demonstrate that face orientation and gaze direction influence perceptual sensitivity, indicating that these facial features may be processed unconsciously.

Person Perception, Meet People Perception: Exploring the Social Vision of Groups

Groups, teams, and collectives-people-are incredibly important to human behavior. People live in families, work in teams, and celebrate and mourn together in groups. Despite the huge variety of human group activity and its fundamental importance to human life, social-psychological research on person perception has overwhelmingly focused on its namesake, the person, rather than expanding to consider people perception. By looking to two unexpected partners, the vision sciences and organization behavior, we find emerging work that presents a path forward, building a foundation for understanding how people perceive other people. And yet this nascent field is missing critical insights that scholars of social vision might offer: specifically, for example, the chance to connect perception to behavior through the mediators of cognition and motivational processes. Here, we review emerging work across the vision and social sciences to extract core principles of people perception: efficiency, capacity, and complexity. We then consider complexity in more detail, focusing on how people perception modifies person-perception processes and enables the perception of group emergent properties as well as group dynamics. Finally, we use these principles to discuss findings and outline areas fruitful for future work. We hope that fellow scholars take up this people-perception call.

Continuous flash suppression: Known and unknowns

Studies utilizing continuous flash suppression (CFS) provide valuable information regarding conscious and nonconscious perception. There are, however, crucial unanswered questions regarding the mechanisms of suppression and the level of visual processing in the absence of consciousness with CFS. Research suggests that the answers to these questions depend on the experimental configuration and how we assess consciousness in these studies. The aim of this review is to evaluate the impact of different experimental configurations and the assessment of consciousness on the results of the previous CFS studies. We review studies that evaluated the influence of different experimental configuration on the depth of suppression with CFS and discuss how different assessments of consciousness may impact the results of CFS studies. Finally, we review behavioral and brain recording studies of CFS. In conclusion, previous studies provide evidence for survival of low-level visual information and complete impairment of high-level visual information under the influence of CFS. That is, studies suggest that nonconscious perception of lower-level visual information happens with CFS, but there is no evidence for nonconscious high-level recognition with CFS.

Novel procedure for generating continuous flash suppression: Seurat meets Mondrian

Continuous flash suppression (CFS) entails presentation of a stationary target to one eye and an animated sequence of arrays of geometric figures, the mask, to the other eye. The prototypical CFS sequence comprises different sized rectangles of various colors, dubbed Mondrians. Presented as a rapid, changing sequence to one eye, Mondrians or other similarly constructed textured arrays can abolish awareness of the target viewed by the other eye for many seconds at a time, producing target suppression durations much longer than those associated with conventional binocular rivalry. We have devised an animation technique that replaces meaningless Mondrian figures with recognizable visual objects and scenes as inducers of CFS, allowing explicit manipulation of the visual semantic content of those masks. By converting each image of these CFS sequences into successively presented objects or scenes each comprised of many small, circular patches of color, we create pointillist CFS sequences closely matched in terms of their spatio-temporal power spectra. Randomly rearranging the positions of the pointillist patches scrambles the images so they are no longer recognizable. CFS sequences comprising a stream of different objects produces more robust interocular suppression than do sequences comprising a stream of different scenes, even when the two categories of CFS are matched in root mean square contrast and spatial frequency content. Factors promoting these differences in CFS potency could range from low-level, image-based features to high-level factors including attention and recognizability. At the same time, object- and scene-based CFS sequences, when themselves suppressed from awareness, do not differ in their durations of suppression, implying that semantic content of those images comprising CFS sequences are not registered during suppression. The pointillist technique itself offers a potentially useful means for examining the impact of high-level image meaning on aspects of visual perception other than interocular suppression.

Number, time, and space are not singularly represented: Evidence against a common magnitude system beyond early childhood

Our ability to represent temporal, spatial, and numerical information is critical for understanding the world around us. Given the prominence of quantitative representations in the natural world, numerous cognitive, neurobiological, and developmental models have been proposed as a means of describing how we track quantity. One prominent theory posits that time, space, and number are represented by a common magnitude system, or a common neural locus (i.e., Bonn & Cantlon in Cognitive Neuropsychology, 29(1/2), 149-173, 2012; Cantlon, Platt, & Brannon in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(2), 83-91, 2009; Meck & Church in Animal Behavior Processes, 9(3), 320, 1983; Walsh in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(11), 483-488, 2003). Despite numerous similarities in representations of time, space, and number, an increasing body of literature reveals striking dissociations in how each quantity is processed, particularly later in development. These findings have led many researchers to consider the possibility that separate systems may be responsible for processing each quantity. This review will analyze evidence in favor of a common magnitude system, particularly in infancy, which will be tempered by counter evidence, the majority of which comes from experiments with children and adult participants. After reviewing the current data, we argue that although the common magnitude system may account for quantity representations in infancy, the data do not provide support for this system throughout the life span. We also identify future directions for the field and discuss the likelihood of the developmental divergence model of quantity representation, like that of Newcombe (Ecological Psychology, 2, 147-157, 2014), as a more plausible account of quantity development.