The attentional cost of comparisons: Evidence for a general comparison induced delay.

The current work aimed to uncover the pattern of attention given to external comparison standards when engaged in social judgments. In a series of 5 experiments (N = 463), a Modified Spatial Cueing Task provided evidence for a general Comparison Induced Delay (CID), but found no signs of visuospatial attention (Pilot, Study 1 & 2). However, the CID did not occur if cues did not remain visually available throughout the trials (Study 3 & 4). Heterogeneity in results prompted the use of a single-paper meta-analysis including all secondary studies. A consistent CID effect was found across studies when standards remained visually available (K = 5), but not when they were masked (K = 2). No direct signs of visuospatial attentional bias were found. These results suggest that the attentional cost of engaging with external comparisons is mainly cognitive in nature, although a minor reoccurring visual component could not be excluded.

The Compositionality of Facial Expressions.

The principle of compositionality, an important postulation in language and cognition research, posits that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meaning of its constituting parts and the operation performed on those parts. Here, we provide strong evidence that this principle plays a significant role also in interpreting facial expressions. In three studies in which perceivers interpreted sequences of two emotional facial expression images, we show that the composite meaning of facial expressions results from the meaning of its constituting expressions and an algebraic operation performed on those expressions. Our study offers a systematic account as to how the meaning of facial expressions (single and sequences) are being formed and perceived. In a broader context, our results raise the possibility that the principle of compositionality may apply to human communication modalities beyond spoken language, whereby a minimal number of components are expanded to a much greater number of meanings.

Did you see it? Robust individual differences in the speed with which meaningful visual stimuli break suppression.

Perceptual conscious experiences result from non-conscious processes that precede them. We document a new characteristic of the cognitive system: the speed with which visual meaningful stimuli are prioritized to consciousness over competing noise in visual masking paradigms. In ten experiments (N = 399) we find that an individual's non-conscious visual prioritization speed (NVPS) is ubiquitous across a wide variety of stimuli, and generalizes across visual masks, suppression tasks, and time. We also find that variation in NVPS is unique, in that it cannot be explained by variation in general speed, perceptual decision thresholds, short-term visual memory, or three networks of attention (alerting, orienting and executive). Finally, we find that NVPS is correlated with subjective measures of sensitivity, as they are measured by the Highly Sensitive Person scale. We conclude by discussing the implications of variance in NVPS for understanding individual variance in behavior and the neural substrates of consciousness.

Evidence of Validity for a Newly Developed Digital Cognitive Test Battery.

Clinical practice still relies heavily on traditional paper-and-pencil testing to assess a patient's cognitive functions. Digital technology has the potential to be an efficient and powerful alternative, but for many of the existing digital tests and test batteries the psychometric properties have not been properly established. We validated a newly developed digital test battery consisting of digitized versions of conventional neuropsychological tests. Two confirmatory factor analysis models were specified: a model based on traditional neuropsychological theory and expert consensus and one based on the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) taxonomy. For both models, the outcome measures of the digital tests loaded on the cognitive domains in the same way as established in the neuropsychological literature. Interestingly, no clear distinction could be made between the CHC model and traditional neuropsychological model in terms of model fit. Taken together, these findings provide preliminary evidence for the structural validity of the digital cognitive test battery.

Erratum to: Comment on "Quantifying the informational value of classification images": Miscomputation of infoVal metric was a minor issue and is now corrected.

One of the two miscomputations identified in the infoVal metric, namely the omission of the k constant, turns out not to be a miscomputation, since the constant was already taken into account by default in the mad() function from R (see https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/stats/versions/3.6.2/topics/mad ).

Bidirectional contextual influence between faces and bodies in emotion perception.

Recent evidence shows that body context may alter the categorization of facial expressions. However, less is known about how facial expressions influence the categorization of emotional bodies. We hypothesized that context effects would be displayed bidirectionally, from bodies to faces and from faces to bodies. Participants viewed emotional face-body compounds and were required to categorize emotions of faces (Condition 1), bodies (Condition 2), or full persons (Condition 3). Results showed evidence for bidirectional context effects: faces were influenced by bodies, and bodies were influenced by faces. However, because the specific confusability patterns differ for faces and bodies (e.g., disgust and anger expressions are confusable in the face, but less so in the body) we found unique patterns of contextual influence in each expression channel. Together, the findings suggest that the emotional expressions of faces and bodies contextualize each other bidirectionally and that emotion categorization is sensitive to the perceptual focus determined by task instructions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Gender biases in impressions from faces: Empirical studies and computational models.

Trustworthiness and dominance impressions summarize trait judgments from faces. Judgments on these key traits are negatively correlated to each other in impressions of female faces, implying less differentiated impressions of female faces. Here we test whether this is true across many trait judgments and whether less differentiated impressions of female faces originate in different facial information used for male and female impressions or different evaluation of the same information. Using multidimensional rating datasets and data-driven modeling, we show that (a) impressions of women are less differentiated and more valence-laden than impressions of men and find that (b) these impressions are based on similar visual information across face genders. Female face impressions were more highly intercorrelated and were better explained by valence (Study 1). These intercorrelations were higher when raters more strongly endorsed gender stereotypes. Despite the gender difference, male and female impression models-derived from separate trustworthiness and dominance ratings of male and female faces-were similar to each other (Study 2). Further, both male and female models could manipulate impressions of faces of both genders (Study 3). The results highlight the high-level, evaluative effect of face gender in impression formation-women are judged negatively to the extent their looks do not conform to expectations, not because people use different facial information across genders but because people evaluate the information differently across genders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Contributions of shape and reflectance information to social judgments from faces.

Face perception is based on both shape and reflectance information. However, we know little about the relative contribution of these kinds of information to social judgments of faces. In Experiment 1, we generated faces using validated computational models of attractiveness, competence, dominance, extroversion, and trustworthiness. Faces were manipulated orthogonally on five levels of shape and reflectance for each model. Both kinds of information had linear and additive effects on participants' social judgments. Shape information was more predictive of dominance, extroversion, and trustworthiness judgments, whereas reflectance information was more predictive of competence judgments. In Experiment 2, to test whether the amount of visual information alters the relative contribution of shape and reflectance information, we presented faces - varied on attractiveness, competence, and dominance - for five different durations (33-500 ms). For all judgments, the linear effect of both shape and reflectance increased as duration increased. Importantly, the relative contribution did not change across durations. These findings show that that the judged dimension is critical for which kind of information is weighted more heavily in judgments and that the relative contribution of shape and reflectance is stable across the amount of visual information available.

Quantifying the informational value of classification images.

Reverse correlation is an influential psychophysical paradigm that uses a participant's responses to randomly varying images to build a classification image (CI), which is commonly interpreted as a visualization of the participant's mental representation. It is unclear, however, how to statistically quantify the amount of signal present in CIs, which limits the interpretability of these images. In this article, we propose a novel metric, infoVal, which assesses informational value relative to a resampled random distribution and can be interpreted like a z score. In the first part, we define the infoVal metric and show, through simulations, that it adheres to typical Type I error rates under various task conditions (internal validity). In the second part, we show that the metric correlates with markers of data quality in empirical reverse-correlation data, such as the subjective recognizability, objective discriminability, and test-retest reliability of the CIs (convergent validity). In the final part, we demonstrate how the infoVal metric can be used to compare the informational value of reverse-correlation datasets, by comparing data acquired online with data acquired in a controlled lab environment. We recommend a new standard of good practice in which researchers assess the infoVal scores of reverse-correlation data in order to ensure that they do not read signal in CIs where no signal is present. The infoVal metric is implemented in the open-source rcicr R package, to facilitate its adoption.

Visualizing mental representations in schizophrenia patients: A reverse correlation approach.

Schizophrenia patients have difficulties recognizing emotional states from faces, in particular those with negative valence, with severe consequences for daily life. What do these patients see in their minds eye, when they think of a face expressing a particular emotion or trait? The content of such mental representations can shed light into the nature of their deficits, but are usually inaccessible. For the first time, we explored the applicability of reverse correlation, which has been successfully used to visualize mental representations in healthy populations, to visualize mental representations in schizophrenia patients. We investigated mental representations of trustworthy faces, a primary dimension of social face evaluation that is highly correlated with valence. Patients (n = 23) and healthy controls (n = 34) classified images of noise-distorted faces as 'trustworthy', 'untrustworthy' or 'neutral'. We visualized their mental representations of these concepts by averaging the noise patterns based on their classifications. These visualizations were then rated on trustworthiness by an independent sample of participants. Patients were able to perform the reverse correlation task, with response times and biases similar to those of healthy controls, and the obtained images vividly reflected the respective constructs of interest. However, there were no significant differences between the ratings of the visualizations of patients and controls. Conclusion: These novel findings provide a proof of principle that the reverse correlation technique can be applied to investigate mental representations in schizophrenia patients.

Stereotypes and prejudice affect the recognition of emotional body postures.

Most research on emotion recognition focuses on facial expressions. However, people communicate emotional information through bodily cues as well. Prior research on facial expressions has demonstrated that emotion recognition is modulated by top-down processes. Here, we tested whether this top-down modulation generalizes to the recognition of emotions from body postures. We report three studies demonstrating that stereotypes and prejudice about men and women may affect how fast people classify various emotional body postures. Our results suggest that gender cues activate gender associations, which affect the recognition of emotions from body postures in a top-down fashion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

White Look-Alikes: Mainstream Culture Adoption Makes Immigrants "Look" Phenotypically White.

White Americans generally equate "being American" with "being White." In six studies, we demonstrate that White Americans perceive immigrants who adopt American mainstream culture as racially White and, reciprocally, perceive White-looking immigrants as assimilating more. In Studies 1 and 2, participants visually represented immigrants who adopted U.S. culture by acculturating to mainstream American culture or by holding a common or dual identity as more phenotypically White and less stereotypic in appearance. In Studies 3 and 4, these processes explained why participants were less likely to racially profile immigrants but also regarded them as less qualified for integration support. In Study 5, participants perceived light skin to fit to high U.S. culture adoption and dark skin to low U.S. culture adoption. Finally, in Study 6, light-skinned immigrants were seen as less threatening because they were perceived as assimilating more. Immigrants' acculturation orientation and appearance interact and shape how they are evaluated.

For Your Local Eyes Only: Culture-Specific Face Typicality Influences Perceptions of Trustworthiness.

Recent findings show that typical faces are judged as more trustworthy than atypical faces. However, it is not clear whether employment of typicality cues in trustworthiness judgment happens across cultures and if these cues are culture specific. In two studies, conducted in Japan and Israel, participants judged trustworthiness and attractiveness of faces. In Study 1, faces varied along a cross-cultural dimension ranging from a Japanese to an Israeli typical face. Own-culture typical faces were perceived as more trustworthy than other-culture typical faces, suggesting that people in both cultures employ typicality cues when judging trustworthiness, but that the cues, indicative of typicality, are culture dependent. Because perceivers may be less familiar with other-culture typicality cues, Study 2 tested the extent to which they rely on available facial information other than typicality, when judging other-culture faces. In Study 2, Japanese and Israeli faces varied from either Japanese or Israeli attractive to unattractive with the respective typical face at the midpoint. For own-culture faces, trustworthiness judgments peaked around own-culture typical face. However, when judging other-culture faces, both cultures also employed attractiveness cues, but this effect was more apparent for Japanese participants. Our findings highlight the importance of culture when considering the effect of typicality on trustworthiness judgments.

The Relationship Between Mental Representations of Welfare Recipients and Attitudes Toward Welfare.

Scholars have argued that opposition to welfare is, in part, driven by stereotypes of African Americans. This argument assumes that when individuals think about welfare, they spontaneously think about Black recipients. We investigated people's mental representations of welfare recipients. In Studies 1 and 2, we used a perceptual task to visually estimate participants' mental representations of welfare recipients. Compared with the average non-welfare-recipient image, the average welfare-recipient image was perceived (by a separate sample) as more African American and more representative of stereotypes associated with welfare recipients and African Americans. In Study 3, participants were asked to determine whether they supported giving welfare benefits to the people pictured in the average welfare-recipient and non-welfare-recipient images generated in Study 2. Participants were less supportive of giving welfare benefits to the person shown in the welfare-recipient image than to the person shown in the non-welfare-recipient image. The results suggest that mental images of welfare recipients may bias attitudes toward welfare policies.

Do we spontaneously form stable trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance?

It is widely assumed among psychologists that people spontaneously form trustworthiness impressions of newly encountered people from their facial appearance. However, most existing studies directly or indirectly induced an impression formation goal, which means that the existing empirical support for spontaneous facial trustworthiness impressions remains insufficient. In particular, it remains an open question whether trustworthiness from facial appearance is encoded in memory. Using the 'who said what' paradigm, we indirectly measured to what extent people encoded the trustworthiness of observed faces. The results of 4 studies demonstrated a reliable tendency toward trustworthiness encoding. This was shown under conditions of varying context-relevance, and salience of trustworthiness. Moreover, evidence for this tendency was obtained using both (experimentally controlled) artificial and (naturalistic varying) real faces. Taken together, these results suggest that there is a spontaneous tendency to form relatively stable trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance, which is relatively independent of the context. As such, our results further underline how widespread influences of facial trustworthiness may be in our everyday life. (PsycINFO Database Record

Physical Strength as a Cue to Dominance: A Data-Driven Approach.

We investigate both similarities and differences between dominance and strength judgments using a data-driven approach. First, we created statistical face shape models of judgments of both dominance and physical strength. The resulting faces representing dominance and strength were highly similar, and participants were at chance in discriminating faces generated by the two models. Second, although the models are highly correlated, it is possible to create a model that captures their differences. This model generates faces that vary from dominant-yet-physically weak to nondominant-yet-physically strong. Participants were able to identify the difference in strength between the physically strong-yet-nondominant faces and the physically weak-yet-dominant faces. However, this was not the case for identifying dominance. These results suggest that representations of social dominance and physical strength are highly similar, and that strength is used as a cue for dominance more than dominance is used as a cue for strength.

The Development of White-Asian Categorization: Contributions from Skin Color and Other Physiognomic Cues.

We examined the development of racial categorizations of faces spanning the European-East Asian ("White-Asian") categorical continuum in children between the ages of four and nine as well as adults. We employed a stimulus set that independently varied skin color and other aspects of facial physiognomy, allowing the contribution of each to be assessed independently and in interaction with each other. Results demonstrated substantial development across this age range in children's ability to draw on both sorts of cue, with over twice as much variance explained by stimulus variation in adults than children. Nonetheless, children were clearly sensitive to both skin color and other aspects of facial physiognomy, suggesting that understanding of the White-Asian category boundary develops in a somewhat different way than understanding of the White-Black category boundary, in which attention to features other than skin color appear only somewhat later. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for theories of social categorization.

The ABC of stereotypes about groups: Agency/socioeconomic success, conservative-progressive beliefs, and communion.

Previous research argued that stereotypes differ primarily on the 2 dimensions of warmth/communion and competence/agency. We identify an empirical gap in support for this notion. The theoretical model constrains stereotypes a priori to these 2 dimensions; without this constraint, participants might spontaneously employ other relevant dimensions. We fill this gap by complementing the existing theory-driven approaches with a data-driven approach that allows an estimation of the spontaneously employed dimensions of stereotyping. Seven studies (total N = 4,451) show that people organize social groups primarily based on their agency/socioeconomic success (A), and as a second dimension, based on their conservative-progressive beliefs (B). Communion (C) is not found as a dimension by its own, but rather as an emergent quality in the two-dimensional space of A and B, resulting in a 2D ABC model of stereotype content about social groups. (PsycINFO Database Record

Positive Feeling, Negative Meaning: Visualizing the Mental Representations of In-Group and Out-Group Smiles.

Even though smiles are seen as universal facial expressions, research shows that there exist various kinds of smiles (i.e., affiliative smiles, dominant smiles). Accordingly, we suggest that there also exist various mental representations of smiles. Which representation is employed in cognition may depend on social factors, such as the smiling person's group membership: Since in-group members are typically seen as more benevolent than out-group members, in-group smiles should be associated with more benevolent social meaning than those conveyed by out-group members. We visualized in-group and out-group smiles with reverse correlation image classification. These visualizations indicated that mental representations of in-group smiles indeed express more benevolent social meaning than those of out-group smiles. The affective meaning of these visualized smiles was not influenced by group membership. Importantly, the effect occurred even though participants were not instructed to attend to the nature of the smile, pointing to an automatic association between group membership and intention.