The intentionality bias in schizotypy: a social matter.

INTRODUCTION: We aimed to investigate the association between schizotypy and intentionality bias, the tendency to interpret ambiguous actions as being intentional, for social and non-social actions separately. This bias contributes to interpersonal difficulties, and has been associated with psychotic symptoms, such as delusions. However, results have been inconsistent for an association between putative psychosis proneness, schizotypy, and intentionality bias. Further, the multidimensional nature of schizotypy has not been considered. Agreeableness was measured to examine the specificity of the relationship, and inhibition to examine its potential role as a mediator. METHODS: Two online studies are reported (n = 280 and n = 163) in which participants made intentionality judgements about ambiguous actions described in sentences. They also completed questionnaire measures of schizotypy and agreeableness, and inhibitory efficiency (a sentence completion task). RESULTS: Schizotypy was associated with perceiving ambiguous actions as intentional, particularly in social contexts, after controlling for agreeableness. The association with social intentionality was stronger for schizotypy subscales capturing paranoia and unusual beliefs. Inhibitory efficiency as not a significant predictor of intentionality bias. CONCLUSION: These finding suggest intentionality biases for social and non-social events are distinguishable. In relation to schizotypy, social situations appear to generate perceptions of intentionality. Intentionality bias represents a phenotypic cognitive risk for psychosis which should be further investigated.

The other-race effect in face learning: Using naturalistic images to investigate face ethnicity effects in a learning paradigm.

The other-race effect in face identification has been reported in many situations and by many different ethnicities, yet it remains poorly understood. One reason for this lack of clarity may be a limitation in the methodologies that have been used to test it. Experiments typically use an old-new recognition task to demonstrate the existence of the other-race effect, but such tasks are susceptible to different social and perceptual influences, particularly in terms of the extent to which all faces are equally individuated at study. In this paper we report an experiment in which we used a face learning methodology to measure the other-race effect. We obtained naturalistic photographs of Chinese and Caucasian individuals, which allowed us to test the ability of participants to generalize their learning to new ecologically valid exemplars of a face identity. We show a strong own-race advantage in face learning, such that participants required many fewer trials to learn names of own-race individuals than those of other-race individuals and were better able to identify learned own-race individuals in novel naturalistic stimuli. Since our methodology requires individuation of all faces, and generalization over large image changes, our finding of an other-race effect can be attributed to a specific deficit in the sensitivity of perceptual and memory processes to other-race faces.

Holistic processing of face configurations and components.

Although many researchers agree that faces are processed holistically, we know relatively little about what information holistic processing captures from a face. Most studies that assess the nature of holistic processing do so with changes to the face affecting many different aspects of face information (e.g., different identities). Does holistic processing affect every aspect of a face? We used the composite task, a common means of examining the strength of holistic processing, with participants making same-different judgments about configuration changes or component changes to 1 portion of a face. Configuration changes involved changes in spatial position of the eyes, whereas component changes involved lightening or darkening the eyebrows. Composites were either aligned or misaligned, and were presented either upright or inverted. Both configuration judgments and component judgments showed evidence of holistic processing, and in both cases it was strongest for upright face composites. These results suggest that holistic processing captures a broad range of information about the face, including both configuration-based and component-based information. (PsycINFO Database Record

Change magnitude does not guide attention in an object change detection task.

Investigations of change detection consistently reveal an effect of change magnitude: changes involving more object parts are detected more easily than those involving fewer parts. Whether large changes improve detection by providing stronger preattentive signals to the change location is subject to debate. We report a cued object change detection experiment that tested this hypothesis while controlling for stimulus familiarity, semantic knowledge, and change type (addition versus deletion). We found strong magnitude effects regardless of whether trials were validly or invalidly cued. The size of the cueing effects, which were exhibited for all the change magnitudes examined, did not decrease with the number of parts changing. These findings provide little support for a preattentive guidance hypothesis and instead support the thesis that change detection requires attention.

The face inversion effect following pitch and yaw rotations: investigating the boundaries of holistic processing.

Upright faces are thought to be processed holistically. However, the range of views within which holistic processing occurs is unknown. Recent research by McKone (2008) suggests that holistic processing occurs for all yaw-rotated face views (i.e., full-face through to profile). Here we examined whether holistic processing occurs for pitch, as well as yaw, rotated face views. In this face recognition experiment: (i) participants made same/different judgments about two sequentially presented faces (either both upright or both inverted); (ii) the test face was pitch/yaw rotated by between 0° and 75° from the encoding face (always a full-face view). Our logic was as follows: if a particular pitch/yaw-rotated face view is being processed holistically when upright, then this processing should be disrupted by inversion. Consistent with previous research, significant face inversion effects (FIEs) were found for all yaw-rotated views. However, while FIEs were found for pitch rotations up to 45°, none were observed for 75° pitch rotations (rotated either above or below the full face). We conclude that holistic processing does not occur for all views of upright faces (e.g., not for uncommon pitch rotated views), only those that can be matched to a generic global representation of a face.

Face viewpoint effects about three axes: the role of configural and featural processing.

We directly compared recognition for faces following 0 degrees-75 degrees viewpoint rotation about the yaw, pitch, and roll axes. The aim was to determine the extent to which configural and featural information supported face recognition following rotations about each of these axes. Experiment 1 showed that performance on a sequential-matching task was viewpoint-dependent for all three types of rotation. The best face-recognition accuracy and shortest reaction time was found for roll rotations, then for yaw rotations, and finally the worst accuracy and slowest reaction time was found for pitch rotations. Directional differences in recognition were found for pitch rotations, but not for roll or yaw. Experiment 2 provided evidence that, in all three cases, viewpoint-dependent declines in recognition were primarily driven by the loss of configural information. However, it also appeared that significant featural information was lost following yaw and pitch (but not roll) rotations. Together, these findings show that unfamiliar-face recognition is viewpoint-dependent following rotation about each axis (and in each direction), and that performance is based on the availability of configural and, to a lesser extent, featural information.

Things are looking up: differential decline in face recognition following pitch and yaw rotation.

Previous research into the effects of viewpoint change on face recognition has typically dealt with rotations around the head's vertical axis (yaw). Another common, although less studied, source of viewpoint variation in faces is rotation around the head's horizontal pitch axis (pitch). In the current study we used both a sequential matching task and an old/new recognition task to examine the effect of viewpoint change following rotation about both pitch and yaw axes on human face recognition. The results of both tasks showed that recognition performance was better for faces rotated about yaw compared to pitch. Further, recognition performance for faces rotated upwards on the pitch axis was better than for faces rotated downwards. Thus, equivalent angular rotations about pitch and yaw do not produce equivalent viewpoint-dependent declines in recognition performance.

Attention to configural information in change detection for faces.

In recent research the change-detection paradigm has been used along with cueing manipulations to show that more attention is allocated to the upper than lower facial region, and that this attentional allocation is disrupted by inversion. We report two experiments the object of which was to investigate how the type of information changed might be a factor in these findings by explicitly comparing the role of attention in detecting change to information thought to be 'special' to faces (second-order relations) with information that is more useful for basic-level object discrimination (first-order relations). Results suggest that attention is automatically directed to second-order relations in upright faces, but not first-order relations, and that this pattern of attentional allocation is similar across features.

The configural advantage in object change detection persists across depth rotation.

Although traditionally there has been a debate over whether object recognition involves 3-D structural descriptions or 2-D views, most current approaches to object recognition include the representation of object structure in some form. An advantage for the processing of structural or configural information in objects has been recently demonstrated using a change detection task (Keane, Hayward, and Burke, 2003). We report two experiments that extend this finding and show that configural information dominates change detection performance regardless of an object's orientation. Experiment 1 demonstrated the advantage that configural information has over shape and part arrangement information in change detection across four different object rotations in depth. Experiment 2 showed that this advantage occurs for both categorical and coordinate configural changes. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that configural information is a critical feature of object representations and that this information is utilized effectively in object recognition across changes in viewpoint.