Swanky Slinky Six

Making sense of how we sense.

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The Face-Off: Extraverts versus Introverts

It’s a Friday night. You’re at your local bar and the crowd is buzzing with a cocktail of relief and weekend anticipation. You approach two of your close friends, eager to rant about the unreasonable requirement you failed to turn in and the way your team left you hanging. One of your friends is animatedly speaking with two casual acquaintances like they’ve been friends for ten years, while the other is in a corner quietly sipping a drink. The first friend engages you in dynamic conversation, peppering your attempts at communicating your distress with comments and salacious stories. The other keeps a wide berth and does not interrupt, but their muted response makes you unsure that you are being heard. You say your goodbyes with a wide smile and eyebrows scrunched in pent-up stress. As you walk towards the door, both friends follow you with their eyes. Which of them has an inkling of how you really feel?

Extraversion and introversion are probably two of the most overused psychology terms by the general public. Extraverts are often described as sociable and affectionate, while introverts are depicted as private and reserved. Contrary to common knowledge, extraversion is not something you either have or don’t, but a trait which all of us possess to a certain degree. The terms “extravert” and “introvert” actually represent the extremes of the extraversion spectrum, and most of us don’t fit into either category.

However rare they are, all of us know at least one person who’s always with a battalion of friends in their Facebook pictures, and that one person who is perfectly happy going solo in their pursuits. And since they present a striking contrast to each other, we are fascinated by the fundamental differences between people who possess these divergent characteristics.

What we are especially curious about is the perception of extraverts and introverts of other people’s emotions. We usually gain skill in decoding someone’s expression as we spend more time with them and learn which facial cues mean what. Of course, it may also depend on how clearly the person facially depicts their emotions and moods. Even our own affect could influence how we interpret facial signals. However, relatively stable characteristics like traits may also have an independent effect, as well as an interaction with the other factors mentioned above.

So who wins the perceptual face-off: extraverts or introverts?

Arguments could be presented for both sides. Extraverts, who are more likely to be exposed to people and social interactions, might be more experienced in decoding facial expressions. Furthermore, since they seek to be socially connected, they have more reason to learn how to understand others’ feelings. Conversely introverts, who are less likely to be in the spotlight, have more opportunities to observe the subtleties of communication from the sidelines. Having a smaller social circle may enable them to focus on individual moods, instead of seeing people as a blur of faces.

However, all of this is based on intuition. To get down to the science of it, we designed a perception experiment. With the help of a collaborator outside our team, we produced photos of facial expressions depicting happiness and sadness. To ensure the validity of these stimuli, we followed a checklist of facial cue criteria (Ekman & Friesen, 2003). For the clear condition, we portrayed all the criteria in the checklist, while for the ambiguous condition, we eliminated either the upper or lower face cues. We also added pictures showing fear, anger, and disgust.

We then invited extraverts and introverts, selected through the indigenized personality test Masaklaw na Panukat ng Loob (Del Pilar, Sio, Cagasan, Siy, & Galang, 2014), to participate in our experiment. They were to identify which basic emotion is portrayed in the pictures and to rate the intensity of these emotions. All of the participants rated the photos from both conditions.

We computed for the accuracy of each group in identifying happiness, sadness, clear and ambiguous stimuli. By examining the descriptives (percentages of Es and Is who got some items correct and some not) and using ANOVA (Analysis of Variance, a statistical test used mostly for determining whether differences between groups are statistically significant), we analyzed the differences between the extravert and introvert groups. For the perceived intensity, we gathered data from participants who correctly identified the clear stimuli of happiness and sadness. Using ANOVA, we analyzed the main (individual) and interaction (interconnected with other variables) effects of the independent variables (level of extraversion, emotion).

So what did we find from our study?

Let’s focus first on the effect of extraversion on the accuracy and perceived intensity of emotional facial expressions. No significant main effect was found on either accuracy or perceived intensity. This means that participants were more or less similarly accurate in identifying clear and ambiguous happy and sad facial expressions, and also gave similar intensity ratings to them, regardless of whether they were extraverts or introverts. This result does not support recent findings that extraversion does influence people to process specific emotions in different ways.

An interesting aspect we would like to add in that could contribute some explanation as to why this result came to be is culture. We recognize that much of the past research done on extraversion and emotion perception was done in the Western context, while this study is among the first to be done in the Philippine context. Every culture has its own unique dimensions to it, and one of those in the Philippines is the concept of pakikiramdam, a “heightened awareness and sensitivity” (Enriquez, 1994, p. 76) when interacting with one another that is shown through increased “attention to subtle cues and nonverbal behavior” (Mataragnon, 1987, as cited in Enriquez, 1994). Given that this is a value said to be intrinsic in all Filipinos, there is a possibility that any effect that extraversion may have could have been weakened by this factor.

Moving on to the effect of the type of emotion on emotion perception, we found that although clear happiness seemed to be more accurately identified than clear sadness, the type of emotion portrayed (whether happiness or sadness) did not contribute to any differences in participants’ overall accuracy in identifying these emotions. In the aspect of intensity, however, we found that happiness was consistently rated as more intense than was sadness regardless of whether the facial expression was ambiguous or clear. which was consistent with previous research done that found that among the basic emotions portrayed, happiness garnered the highest intensity ratings while sadness garnered the lowest (Hess, Blairy, & Kleck, 1997). It turns out that when unsure about the emotion portrayed due to any source of ambiguity, especially in the case of happiness, people use the formation of the mouth as the main basis for rating the intensity of the emotions (Kappas, Hess, & Kirouac, 1995).This explains our findings in that quirks of the mouth are more noticeable in happiness but less so in sadness, thus making it easier for people to perceive changes in the intensity of happiness than sadness..

Lastly, the effect of ambiguity was rather odd, to say the least.. Per emotion, we had one clear picture and two ambiguous pictures. As expected, the clear pictures were more accurately identified than the 2nd Ambiguous pictures, but only those ones. The 1st Ambiguous pictures, however, were more accurately identified than the clear pictures. In the end, we chalked it up to our own stimuli being faulty, since we used Western standards of emotion representation in constructing the facial expressions with the model.

What do these mean?

At least for this particular study, it seems that extraversion and the emotion portrayed do not affect how accuracy of the facial expression is detected. So introverts can perceive both emotions just as accurately as extraverts, and vice versa. But when it comes to how intense emotions are portrayed, clear facial expressions are seen as more intense than ambiguous ones.

Planning to conduct a similar study? Here’s a few takeaway points future replications can benefit from:

Use culture-sensitive stimuli based on indigenous research. The basis of the features to express the emotions we wanted to test was from Western literature. While happiness and sadness are basic emotions, the little details that give away the emotion, beyond a smile or a frown, can differ from one culture to another. Watch out for these similarities and differences if you plan to conduct a similar study, or any study involving detection of emotion for that matter!

Use male and female actors. Hess, Blairy, & Kleck (1997) found that female faces are rated as happier while male faces as sadder. The next time stimuli in the form of photographed facial expressions are used, it would also be interesting to see how the accuracy and intensity would be viewed depending on the gender assumed from the face. For this study, there was only one face and it was female so this might also have affected how intense the emotion seemed. You can try to do it with a male face, or both.

Improve stimuli and measure validity. The keyword for every experiment that features such sensitive stimuli and employs the use of a scale is pre-test. Pre-test, pre-test, pre-test. If you plan to do a similar experiment, your pre-test should have enough sample to determine sufficiency of the difference in clarity and intensity of the expressions. It should also take into account cultural nuances. As for the scale, consider creating a continuous scale to determine accuracy and intensity. Participants might be seeing a number of emotions in one photo so make sure you consider that as well!

(Article by Clarysse Alfonso, Valerie Borja, Jem Cabanlong, Via Mendoza, & Jaoie Ocampo)

References

Ekman, Paul, & Friesen, Wallace V. (2003). Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues. ISHK.

Enriquez, V. G. (1994). Kapwa and the struggle for justice, freedom, and dignity. In From colonial to liberation psychology: The Philippine experience (pp. 49–67). Manila: De La Salle University Press.

Del Pilar, G. E. H., Sio, C. P., Cagasan, L. P., Siy, A. C., & Galang, A. J. R. (2014). Masaklaw na Panukat ng Loob [Measurement instrument].

Hess, U., Blairy, S., & Kleck R. E. (1997). The Intensity of Emotional Facial Expressions and Decoding Accuracy. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 21(4), 241–257.

Kappas, A., Hess, U., & Kirouac, G. (1995). Scaling the authenticity of facial expressions:

Perceived genuineness of smiling is dependent on mouth and eyes [Unpublished manuscript].

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Sticks and stones may break my bones

There are different kinds of pain. Stubbing your toe while running into a piece of furniture hurts. Getting stood up hurts. Regina George getting hit by a bus in Mean Girls definitely would have hurt. The death of a loved one would hurt. Different forms and intensities but we call them all “pain” and generally describe how we feel about these situations in similar terms.

Thus for years, scientists have wondered about the neural underpinnings of different kinds of pain and wondered if physical pain and emotional pain activate similar parts of the brain. A lot of research has shown that in terms of the affective component, yes, there is an overlap. The dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC) and anterior insula (AI) are activated during our experience of both physical and emotional pain.

What another research on this relationship has suggested, however, is a more extensive overlap. It’s just a matter of how much pain is induced.

So they compared the a) distress self-report, and b) brain activity of participants exposed to the following conditions:

1) low physical pain: warm, non-painful stimulation vs high physical pain: hot, painful stimulation, on the left forearm; and

2) low emotional pain: a photo of a friend they shared a positive experience with during the break-up vs. high emotional pain: their ex-partner.

The self-distress report showed that the pain perception was similarly low for the low-pain stimuli for both physical (mean=4.46) and emotional (mean=4.23) pain, and high for physical (mean=1.88) and emotional (mean=1.72) high-pain stimuli.

Having established a level of equivalence for both physical and emotional pain levels, the brain was scanned to see which parts were activated during each condition. Findings show that yes, structures involved in pain-related somatosensory processing: the operculo-insular region, composed of the secondary somatosensory cortex (S2) and dorsal posterior insula (dpINS) are also activated during experience of intense emotional pain.

But what does this mean?

This gives us insight as to how emotional pain (in this study, rejection) can translate into physical pain. On the other hand, it also further affirms the idea that somatosensory processing plays a role in our emotional experience as well. Social rejection also seems to be a special form of emotional pain that activates specific sites in the brain.

Further research is needed to see what happens with other forms of emotional pain as stimuli.

Source:  Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain by Kross et al. (2010). See http://www.pnas.org/content/108/15/6270.full

Photo: www.wired.com

Article by Jem Cabanlong

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Judging food by its container

The art of food is complex.

Some people may not think much of it, as what goes down is the same no matter what, but there are those who believe that certain preparations are a crucial part of the dining experience. For instance, I have a friend who won't drink wine if it's not in a wine glass. She says it simply doesn't feel right when it's in, for example, a plastic cup or a beer glass. Also, the wine apparently doesn't feel as fancy. Another friend of mine, on the other hand, doesn't like eating packed lunch from a tupperware, favoring his metal lunch kit instead. Metal lunch kit; you know, the one where each container is stacked against the others and held together in place by the handle... Okay, you know what? Let's just refer to it as his metal baunan (that's how he referred to it, anyway). So the thing is, he claims that his lunch tastes better when he eats it from his metal baunan, but it's not because the container somehow gives the food a better taste, like magic. His exact words were "mas ginaganahan akong kumain", or that he's a lot more motivated to eat it. And then there's my own eating-related quirk. Personally, I don't like it when I'm eating dine-in at a food place and the cutlery I've been given is made of plastic. Not only are they small (and, thus, it feels like I'm eating baby portions), it also gives me the impression that what I'm eating is cheap or not that good compared to the same food offered in other restaurants. Additionally, my eating experience becomes all the more unpleasant when the meal is expensive by my standards.

Okay, so what does this mean? Birds of the same picky habits and preferences flock together? Actually, what I've just talked about is an example of sensation transference. Sensation transference occurs when physical attributes of a container, be it plate, cutlery, cups, bottles, etc. are attributed or transferred to the food or drink consumed1. It is when people are consciously aware of the kind of container they are consuming food or drink from, which then produces a certain effect involving their perception of the food or drink, or their experience of eating or drinking.

Remember those articles that showcased creative packaging of certain food and drinks? Did you perhaps developed inclinations to try that product out or to simply see it for yourself just because of the ingenuity, innovativeness, or some other quality of the packaging that moved you or piqued your interest? (You didn't? What a liar.) Because of such effects, a lot of research, especially consumer and food-related research, is actually looking into it. The resulting investigations, specifically regarding the effect of the physical attributes of containers towards perception and consumption experience, had produced varying results, mostly dependent on the kind of foodstuff the attributes were tested against.

For instance, it was found that orange plastic cups with white interiors enhanced people's perception of the chocolate flavor of hot chocolate2. The same study also found  that dark-cream colored cups had the same effect, in addition to enhancing perceived sweetness and aroma of the drink. Elsewhere, Van Doorn, Wuillemin, & Spence3 found that compared to transparent glass mugs, white ceramic mugs enhanced the perceived taste intensity and bitterness of coffee. Both studies suggest that the white background (interior) of the cups may have influenced the perceived brownness of the hot chocolate and coffee, and that influenced people's perception and evaluation of the drinks. Indeed, even when it comes to other food receptacles such as cutlery and plates, it was found that color, when it is in contrast with the color of a particular food or drink, appears to enhance the perceived taste of food.1,4

What about water? Water is a tasteless drink, so what happens when sensation transference occurs regarding this particular beverage? 

In a series of experiments, Aradhna Krishna from the University of Michigan and Maureen Morrin from Rutgers University showed that many people do indeed judge a drink by its container, even flavorless drinks such as water. Specifically, they investigated how the firmness of the cup affected people's evaluations of the drink contained within.5

There were four experiments, all of which basically involved the same mineral water being contained within a flimsy cup and a cup of firmer material. These cups looked the same, differing only in the firmness of the material. The participants then evaluated the quality of the water: (1) when they were touching and holding the cups while blindfolded, (2) when they were not blindfolded but were asked not to touch the cups, (3) when they were able to see and touch them, and (4) when they were simply given written descriptions of the cups.

Krishna and Morrin’s study found out that when water was served in flimsy, plastic cups, people actually perceived the water as being of higher quality based on the written description and from looking at the cups, that is, when they were not able to touch or hold either cup, compared to when they were allowed to hold them. However, when people actually held the cups, they rated the quality of the water in the flimsy cups as having a lower quality than those in the firm cups (note that both cups contain the same kind of water). The most interesting finding, however, was that strong autotelics, that is, people who like to touch things before they buy them, were the least influenced from having physical contact with the cups. In the study's taste test of the same mineral water from both a flimsy and a firm cup, it was actually the low autotelics (those who weren't particularly inclined to touch products) who gave the most negative evaluations of the taste of the water in the flimsy cup.

What does this mean? The researchers believed that strong autotelics, compared to low autotelics, enjoy touching objects and thus are inclined to touch them more, and as a result of which they are more consciously aware of the potential effect the qualities of the container of a product regarding evaluation of the actual product itself. Because of this, high autotelics are more capable of adjusting their judgment regarding such matters. 

Looking at the results more broadly, however, we can see that the feel of the cup really does affect our perception of the drink it holds. This is most relevant to those in the food industry, especially the establishments who sell drinks in disposable containers, such as fastfood restaurants and coffee shops. When the drink is truly great yet the feel of the material isn’t as good, there would be a negative impact on customers’ perception of the beverage’s taste and quality. And that wouldn’t be too good for business, now, would it?

Article by CK Hermosa

1Spence, C., Harrar, V., & Piqueras-Fiszman, B. (2012). Assessing the impact of the tableware and other contextual variables on multisensory flavour perception. Flavour, 1, 7-19. Retrieved from http://www.flavourjournal.com/content/pdf/2044-7248-1-7.pdf

2 Piqueras-Fiszman, B. & Spence, C. (2012). The weight of the container influences expected satiety, perceived density, and subsequent expected fullness. Appetite, 58, 559–562.

3Van Doorn, G. H., Wuillemin, D., & Spence, C. (2014). Does the color of the mug influence the taste of the coffee? Flavour, 3(10). Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2044-7248-3-10

4Harrar, V. & Spence, C. (2013). The taste of cutlery: how the taste of food is affected by the weight, size, shape, and colour of the cutlery used to eat it. Flavour, 2(21). Retrieved from http://www.flavourjournal.com/content/pdf/2044-7248-2-21.pdf

5Krishna A. & Morrin, M. (2008). Does touch affect taste? The perceptual transfer of product container haptic cues.  Journal of Consumer Research, 34, 807–818.

Cup of water [Online image]. Retrieved November 2, 2015 from cleanwateraction.org

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Joining them (’cause I can’t beat ‘em)

            There are several kinds of therapy in existence, and one of these is the Developmental Play Therapy. DPT is basically a relationship-based therapy approach that simulates “first play”, or those very first bits of enjoyable play that we used to have with our primary caretakers (namely parents, other relatives, etc.). The goal of this play is to foster a deeper understanding of themselves and the people around them. 

              Of course, the success of this therapy rests not just on the child’s responsiveness but also on the therapist’s way of handling it. Indeed, according to Brody, Fenderson, and Stephenson (1976) (as quoted by Courtney & Gray, 2014): “It is just as important to help the adults experience and define their own feelings. . . . In fact, many times, the adult cannot understand the child’s feelings until he becomes more aware of his own feelings.”

               In order to get a better look at how mental health practitioners would handle DPT, provided that they have no prior experience of it, Janet Courtney and Susan Gray from Barry University decided to conduct a phenomenological study. Their sample population consisted of 42 female doctor’s/master’s degree holders working in the mental health industry who have all had experience working with children. The study design was elaborate, consisting of a one-day, seven-hour introductory DPT training. The training included six exercises aiming to enhance interpersonal relationships and heightened awareness, both of the self and of other people. Said exercises are as follows:

               The participants were asked to record their experiences and insights after every exercise. It was rather straightforward – the participants would engage in an exercise, write about it, then move on to the next exercise, rinse and repeat. The researchers then analyzed both the participants anecdotes and their own records of the events.

               What was the result of the analysis? Four major themes arose. Firstly, some of the participants discovered that touch was gentle, relaxing, and pleasurable, while others expressed dislike for and discomfort with being touched. One even said, “I didn’t touch my hair because I didn’t want to mess it up.” We can conclude that touch being a pleasant or unpleasant stimulus also depends on individual differences.

                Secondly, touch appeared to bring back memories of early life attachment relationships. There were numerous statements mentioning family figures like their mother, father, and grandmother as sources of care, comfort, and security. However, these fond memories were also interspersed with feelings of sadness and wistfulness, as well as regret over not having experienced such pleasant feelings from certain family figures.

               Thirdly, touch fostered more intimate connections between the self and others. They felt as if the exercises fostered their sense of belongingness, broke down barriers between them, and created a sense of unconditional positive regard. But as always, with gain comes loss. Activating such feelings of connectedness provided such a contrast to lack of connectedness that when they finally had to let go (in the holding hands exercise, specifically), quoting the participants, “It felt like a loss or separation” and “After letting go I felt like something was missing now. After the experience of togetherness, separateness was harder to ignore.” A group of total strangers, suddenly feeling such camaraderie and loss after such a simple exercise? Just imagine how more powerful touch will be if done between people who actually know and care for each other, and also between those who hate each other. (insert cringe here.)

               And lastly, touching evoked feelings and experiences of protection, safety, and trust. Holding hands made them feel like they were keeping someone safe, and in turn felt that they were being protected. Imagining themselves being cradled evoked feelings of unconditional love, warmth, compassion, and relaxation. The “name song” evoked a feeling of safety and security in the group, mostly because everyone else in the circle had to do the same thing. They were literally all in this together.

               But of course, there were still downsides. Some were not as happy with the “name song” and holding hands exercise. Some expressed sentiments like: “I realize that it takes time to build trust when you are crossing a boundary”, “To let someone give to me is not easy”, “It made me nervous and I avoided eye contact with others in the circle”. Again it all boils down to individual differences – not everyone perceives touch and the connections it creates in the same way, and it will inevitably elicit different feelings and experiences for every individual.

               Humans are indeed social beings. If touch in such a simulated situation already creates such potent reactions, how much more affected would they be if it were to happen in a more emotionally charged context? Not to mention the real-life context of these participants: they work in the mental health industry, a field that is most definitely emotionally charged. It is no easy feat to maintain neutral sympathy especially if faced with cases and people that might be emotionally stimulating for the practitioner. In order to contain and conquer your personal demons, you must deal with them first, and only then can you help others fight their demons too.

[P.S.: Visit Ms. Janet Courtney’s blog for more information about Play Therapy!]

Source:

Courtney, J. A., & Gray, S. W. (2014). A phenomenological inquiry into practitioner experiences of developmental play therapy: Implications for training in touch. International Journal Of Play Therapy, 23(2), 114-129. doi:10.1037/a0036366

Article by Jaoie Ocampo

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When the Body Talks

I have a wide range of musical interests. I like listening to Broadway, blues, pop-folk, jazz, indie, and sometimes country and EDM. There is a very special place in my heart for instrumentals and film/TV scores as well. Look into my music library, though, and you’ll find that a huge chunk consists of songs from the singer-songwriter genre and many possible variants of rock. I would definitely say these genres are my favorites because, for some reason, they seem to hold the most meaning and emotion (at least, from what I have explored so far).

Emotions are central aspects of what makes us human. The magical factor music has that makes it so valuable to so many people is its ability to actually communicate and invoke emotions in its listeners. In the social realm, emotions make a large impact on our day-to-day relationships, having the capacity to steer our conversations and direct our actions towards the person we interact with. But just as we humans naturally experience and show our own emotions, so are we biologically wired to naturally detect other people’s emotions as well. We usually do this by relying on visual cues, such as the other person’s facial expression and posture, and auditory cues such as the tone and volume of the other person’s voice. Tactile cues, however, seem a little downplayed in our eyes, and more so in research, as compared to the previous two. This, however, is further from the truth.

Hertenstein, Holmes, Keltner, & McCullough (2009) explored the ability of touch to communicate emotion on people who were complete strangers to each other. The participants were paired together. Within each of the 124 pairs, one was dubbed the communicator or the encoder, while the other was dubbed the receiver or the decoder. The encoder was given a series of emotions, and they were instructed to communicate these one at a time to the decoder only by touching the decoder anywhere on their body (that was appropriate!) in any way they felt appropriate. Take note that even throughout the experiment, the decoder did not see or hear the encoder, so the only cues they received were tactile ones. After each trial (or emotion communicated) The decoder was instructed to identify the emotion that they thought the encoder attempted to get across.

Remarkably, results yielded high accuracy rates (ranging from 50% to 70%) in the participants’ identification of 8 emotions, namely, anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy. This implies that touch isn’t simply an indicator of emotion intensity, or a mere supplementary tool for cues communicated by one’s face and voice. Touch alone can actually communicate both positive and negative emotions.

Building up on the comparison of emotion communication through tactile means with emotion communication through auditory and visual means, further analysis would show that when interacting with another person, we can actually get much more information from their touches than from their face or voice. While happiness and love are evident visually and through auditory cues, tactile behaviors turned out to be so specific for many emotions such that it seems easier to pinpoint an emotion beyond its emotional valence through touch alone. The study found that in communicating emotions, different emotions vary in various aspects of their corresponding tactile behaviors, such as the specific movements they make as well as the amount of pressure applied on the other person and the speed and abruptness of the movements. To make the long story short, the complexity of touch allows for it to communicate a greater number of different meanings than we would usually expect.

Also, men and women turned out to use different actions to communicate the different emotions stated above. There were some cases wherein they also employed different actions to same-sex and opposite-sex partners, but the most frequent movements were pretty similar.

All this information basically tells us that in our everyday interactions, whether it be with a stranger or with a loved one, or even somebody we don’t like very much, touch does much more than we think. The fact that it is so complex is so much more of a blessing than a curse, really, because it opens up a wider channel of communication with others.

The love songs probably don’t exaggerate after all. And so, to end this blog post on a sweet note, let me get some help from Ronan Keating.

“You say it best when you say nothing at all.”

(Article by Via Mendoza)

Reference:

[1] Hertenstein, M. J., Holmes, R., McCullough, M., & Keltner, D. (2009). The communication of emotion via touch. Emotion, 9(4), 566-573.

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Leaves a Sad Taste in the Mouth

It’s been said that the gate to destruction is wide and many choose to enter it, but the gate to life is narrow and only few find it. It doesn’t take a religious person to see a blatant demonstration of this passage in real life. The humongous gate of fast food and processed junk is enticingly marvelous, and almost all who enter remain permanently aboard the sugary and fatty party that never stops. Meanwhile, the skinny gate of whole wheat and low fat is a nondescript door whom few enter, and the sanitized room inside retains even fewer occupants.

Road to health heaven or highway to unfit hell?

We all know the cliché—people in general love what’s bad for them. This is probably the right moment to make a confession: I go to buffets every week. I know, I know, call it the insolent overindulgence of youth. But now that I’ve hit my twenties, it’s high time I dusted off my blasé attitude about health, alongside all of us who go through life addicted to what’s killing us slowly.

Now if it were that easy, we’d all be metabolic powerhouses with 20% body fat. Instead, some of us are healthy and some of us are not. There’s a great body of research investigating both genetic and social factors in food consumption that account for individual differences.

However, cognitive factors are also one of the prime areas of concern. Common knowledge says that people reach for fatty, sugary comfort food when they’re in a particularly bad mood because it brings back good memories. But what part does the individual physical factor—that is, sensory perception—play in this dynamic? Perhaps we become less sensitive to sweetness and fattiness, needing more of them to be satisfied; or we become more sensitive to them, and so they have the potential of overcoming our physiological reactions to stress and negative emotions?

Does feeling sad literally “desentisize” you to cheeseburgers?

A team of researchers from US and Germany conducted a study on taste perception as mediated by mood, level of subclinical (non-pathological) depression, and level of subclinical (non-pathological) anxiety. The general Labeled Magnitude Scale (gLMS), a quantitatively and experimentally validated instrument for measuring perceptual thresholds, was used to measure ratings of flavor intensity. Positive, neutral, and negative moods were induced through movie clips and their soundtracks. Using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the participants were divided between the no subclinical depression group and the mild subclinical depression group. Meanwhile, using Spielberger’s STAI-trait and state questionnaire, the participants were also divided between the no subclinical anxiety group and the mild anxiety depression group. Other data like BMI1 and gender2 were implicated in the study.

Prior to the experiment, participants with mild subclinical depression or anxiety indicated greater sensitivity to sweetness and intense bitterness, but not to fat, sourness and umami.

All participants, regardless of depression or anxiety scores, became more sensitive to sourness after being shown the positive and negative movie clips. Sweetness and bitterness sensitivity became amplified only for those with mild subclinical depression, who also became less sensitive to the differences between high fat and low fat samples. However, mild subclinical anxiety did not seem to have any significant effect on post-experiment sensitivity.

Yes, even good vibes can trigger the sweet tooth.

So does how you feel affect how you taste? This study says yes, but only for certain tastes, and sometimes not for the general population. These findings imply that a mild level of trait depression or anxiety increases vulnerability to sugar and fat binges as reward-seeking behaviors contingent to mood swings. It also implies that both negative and positive emotions can affect our eating habits. Furthermore, it provides insight not only on our taste preferences but also on our affective states—if your mood swings come with a sweet tooth and cravings of a deep fried variety, you might be interested in examining your levels of depression or anxiety.

1 Higher BMI was linked with mild subclinical depression scores. 2 No association was found between gender and pre and post-experiment taste sensitivity. Males and females were also well distributed across the subclinical depression and subclinical anxiety groups.

Article by Clarysse Alfonso. Access the full research study here. 

Reference: Platte, P., Herbert, C., Pauli, P., & Breslin, P.A.S. (2013). Oral perceptions of fat and taste stimuli are modulated by affect and mood induction. PLoS ONE 8(6): e65006. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065006.

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If there’s a will, there’s a way

Though humans are primarily visual beings, our dependence on our other senses is still staggeringly high, whether we notice it or not. Take one sense away and see how different the world will start becoming to you. Actually, no - take even just one aspect of a sense away  (not even the whole sense yet!) and see how much it changes your perception of the world. Just ask any person with color deficiency, natural inability to feel pain, lack of depth perception, damaged taste buds, etc.

Of course, lacking one or more senses (or even just an aspect of one or more of those senses) isn’t the end of the world. You’d be surprised at the extent of human resiliency and just how capable humans are of adapting to, well, almost anything. Let us take for example the struggles and triumphs of deaf and hard-of hearing children.

(WARNING: Long post ahead. tl;dr version available at the bottom, just in case!)

Language development, according to Lederberg, A. R., Schick, B., & Spencer, P. E. (2013), is the area most affected by hearing loss. Their journal article entitled Language and literacy development of deaf and hard-of-hearing children: Successes and challenges talks about the different models by which deaf and hard-of hearing children develop their language skills. The scope of this article is limited because it only takes into consideration American deaf and hard-of-hearing children (DHH), but nevertheless gives a good overview of what it is like for DHH children as they learn to communicate.

In the past, researchers have erroneously assumed that deaf people do not have language skills. They failed to recognize that yes, deaf people are in fact capable of developing language - mostly sign language, but language all the same - as long as they are exposed to it. In fact, the neural mechanisms of sign language are rather similar to that of spoken language. Many researchers have already agreed that sign languages are not mere alternatives to communications but actual, true languages all on their own, having similar properties to spoken languages and all. This also helped reinforce the idea that decreased hearing or the inability to acquire spoken language is not a deficiency, but simply an alternative state of being.

Recently, new technologies have been invented to allow the identification of hearing loss as early as the moment of birth, whereas 20 years ago the average age of identification (at least in the United States) was around 24 months old. Why is it important to identify hearing loss as early as possible? First of all, the first two years of life in humans are what you would call critical periods of development. This means that babies two years and below are more sensitive to environmental influences than at any other time in their life. Thus, if hearing loss is not identified at birth, the parents and the people around them might not be able to provide the proper intervention and stimulation soon enough. While DHH children with deaf parents might not have as much of a problem, since their parents are already more likely to use sign language with them anyway, all other DHH children might experience language deprivation. Neonatal identification of hearing loss have resulted in dramatic improvements in the development of either signed or spoken language, and policies for universal neonatal hearing screening (including providing intervention, namely exposure to visual and/or spoken language, within the first 6 months) have been adopted in almost all industrialized countries in the world. Of course not all DHH babies are given intervention before they are 6 months old, but at least the average age of detection and intervention has decreased.

[Newborn Hearing Testing Screening Sample:]

Second, improvements in hearing aid and cochlear implant technology have increased DHH children’s auditory perception and spoken language acquisition. What is the difference between the two?

1. Hearing aid - amplifies sound so that they may be detected by damaged ears; cannot make up for a damaged cochlea and is only helpful for minor hearing loss

2. Cochlear implants - surgically-implanted devices that convert auditory information into electronic signals that are delivered directly to the auditory nerve. More useful for people with severe hearing loss.

However, time and intervention is needed for DHH people with cochlear implants to be able to properly use the information provided by the CI. The earlier the age of implantation, the better the outcome will be, but it still cannot replicate perfectly the hearing of non-DHH children. In fact, children with certain abnormalities in the cochlea or auditory nerve, as well as children with multiple disabilities, won’t benefit from the CI. But some is better than none, right?

Moreover, mere improvements in technology cannot singlehandedly affect DHH language development. Their language learning environment also has a big effect. About 5% of DHH children have deaf parents who sign, and they are typically surrounded other people who also sign. As expected, being exposed to this kind of environment enabled them to learn sign language almost as effortlessly and at more or less the same right as non-DHH children. On the other hand, about 95% of DHH children have hearing parents who need to defer to other sources in order to provide their children access to visual and/or spoken language. This puts them at a disadvantage.

So far there are three models of language learning environments for DHH children, namely Sign Language, Simultaneous Communication, and Spoken Language.

The Sign Language model focuses on development within the the context of a deaf community wherein everyone uses sign language. Their advantage is the natural and almost effortless nature of their sign language knowledge, so DHH children are highly likely to acquire it through participation in ubiquitous and naturally-occurring social activities.

The Simultaneous Communication model, also called as Sign Supported Speech, focuses on incorporating more elements of spoken language into sign languages. Sign systems already bank on the semantic and syntactic structures of spoken language, but there are still a few differences. The merging is done by combining signs from natural sign languages with newly-created signs to represent grammatical morphemes of spoken language. (For example, using the same sign for the word run in “She runs fast” and “My car runs well”.) These modified sign systems can (at least theoretically) be used simultaneously with speech, hence the term Simultaneous Communication or SimCom for short. DHH with functional/technology-aided hearing can make use of both spoken and sign language while those without functional hearing mostly use sign language, only this time following the structure of spoken language. This can be challenging however because signs take longer to form than words, and it is difficult to produce stress and intonation simultaneously in both spoken and sign language.

Lastly, the Spoken Language model focuses on molding the linguistic behaviors and literacy of DHH children to become as similar to hearing children as possible. Thus, they are exposed exclusively to spoken language. Obviously this cannot work for those with severe hearing loss and those who cannot be helped by HAs and CIs due to special/additional conditions, so it is only feasible for those with mild hearing loss. In most countries, a majority of DHH children end up being taught sign language only after failing to acquire spoken language, which was taught to them first. This method is less recommended because firstly, waiting this long almost surely robs the child of being exposed to the “right” language and secondly, it assumes that exposure to sign in any form will hinder the development of spoken language, despite lack of supporting evidence.

In a nutshell, the effectivity of the method you choose all depends on the degree of hearing loss and of the language environment. The Sign Language Model works, but it is biased. it works better for DHH children with deaf parents (DoDP) because DoDPs learn sign quite easily and naturally, given the environment advantage, while DoHPs experience language delay due to decreased and usually late exposure to sign-fluent models.

As for the Simultaneous Communication model, there are two main challenges: firstly, the grammatical structure of spoken languages cannot be accurately represented by sign. Secondly, DHH children usually have hearing parents and thus do not have optimal signing support. Suffice it to say, however, that SimCom has been very helpful in improving syntax and vocabulary, both spoken and signed.

Lastly, spoken language is the least viable and needs considerably more work than the other models. It can work but it is biased towards with DHH with functional hearing, almost excluding those with severe hearing loss and who cannot be helped by hearing aids and cochlear implants. It is however the closest that one can get to being like a person with regular hearing, so it still worth a try if feasible.

tl;dr: Hearing loss can make things quite difficult for a person. However, it is possible to maneuver around it either through learning sign language (as early as possible, hopefully), adapting sign language to make it more similar to the structure of spoken language, or making as much use of hearing aids and/or cochlear implants as possible and using those to make hearing more functional, thus enabling one to make use of spoken language still. The effectivity of the method you choose all depends on the degree of hearing loss and of the language environment.

Bottomline is, humans are ridiculously adaptable - let it not be said that we back down easily from challenges.

Does this make you feel like appreciating your sense of hearing more now? :>

P.S.: Dumping these here just in case you want to learn common signs, or learn more about the life of DHH people.

Listening is Exhausting! | HearingLikeMe

Post by Jaoie Ocampo

References: 

Implants vs Hearing Aids. (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/pages/coch.aspx

Lederberg, A. R., Schick, B., & Spencer, P. E. (2013). Language and literacy development of deaf and hard-of-hearing children: Successes and challenges. Developmental Psychology, 49(1), 15-30. doi:10.1037/a0029558

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Music vs Noise

Musical expertise provides you an advantage beyond being more talented than the average person. It can actually help with learning.

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Children With Learning Disabilities

Some like Snowling (1981, 2001) attribute it to impairment in their phonological processing--the ability to store, manipulate, and use speech sounds. Others (Merzenich et al., 1996; Tallal, 1980; Tallal, Stark, & Mellits, 1985) say it’s sensory processing, especially the ability to process fast temporal events. Ultimately, there is consensus that for a heterogeneous disorder, individual-specific solutions are necessary (Katzir, 2009; Murphy & Pollatsek, 1994).

Deficit in noise-exclusion i.e., the ability to exclude noise during sensory or cognitive processing (Sperling, Lu, Manis, & Seidenberg, 2005) also seems to be a common problem among children with difficulties in learning.

What role does music play in all this?

Music experience = neuroplasticity to musical sounds = increased sensitivity to musical sounds. This is not surprising, and in fact is backed up by a LOT of studies (Fujioka, Trainor, Ross, Kakigi, & Pantev, 2005; Koelsch, Schroger, & Tervaniemi, 1999; Musacchia, Sams, Skoe, & Kraus, 2007; Pantev et al., 1998; Pantev, Roberts, Schulz, Engelien, & Ross, 2001; Tervaniemi, Rytkonen, Schroger, Ilmoniemi, & Naatanen, 2001).

What’s surprising is the link between musical experience and processing of speech stimuli (Musacchia et al., 2007; Schon, Magne, & Besson, 2004; Wong, Skoe, Russo, Dees, & Kraus, 2007). In particular, it improves the following:

verbal working memory (Chan, Ho, & Cheung, 1998; Forgeard, Winner, Norton, & Schlaug, 2008)

processing of prosody and linguistic features in speech (Bidelman, Gandour, & Krishnan, in press; Chandrasekaran, Krishnan, & Gandour, 2009; Wong et al., 2007), phonological skills (Forgeard, Schlaug, et al., 2008)

processing emotion in speech (Strait, Kraus, Skoe,& Ashley, 2009)

working memory (Parbery-Clark, Skoe, Lam, et al., 2009)

auditory attention (Strait, Kraus, Parbery-Clark, & Ashley, 2010)

auditory stream segregation (Beauvois & Meddis, 1997).

Music & Language

These domains share many features, the most direct being that both exploit changes in pitch patterns to convey information. For music, pitch contours and intervals communicate melodies and tone centers. Pitch patterns in speech convey prosodic information e.g. information about the speaker’s intention, emotion, etc. Musicians show enhanced processing of prosodic and linguistic pitch.

Music & Memory

Musicians recalled more words compared to nonmusicians in a list learning task (Chan et al., 1998). Children who received instrumental music training also showed enhanced vocabulary (Forgeard,Winner, et al., 2008). Musical discrimination skills significantly predicted phonological and reading skills (Forgeard, Schlaug, et al., 2008).

Noise-Exclusion

Musicians, as a consequence of training that requires consistent practice, online manipulation, and monitoring of their instrument, are experts in extracting relevant signals from the complex soundscape.

To escape the temptation of sleeping or distraction of many other things within one’s home, a growing habit of students, especially those in college is to study in coffee shops. Inevitably, in such places, background noise would exist. This is where noise exclusion comes in. And for ~musical experts~ it comes easier. The differences in spectral representation between musicians and nonmusicians are large, suggesting that musical experience protects against the debilitating effects of background noise (Parbery-Clark, Skoe, et al., 2009).

So investing time and effort to learn at least one instrument can benefit you not only in terms of being a tad more impressive talent-wise but also practically: help with language discrimination, memory, and noise-exclusion. Music is key.

Post by Jem Cabanlong

Article: Chandrasekaran, B., & Kraus, N. (2010). Music, noise-exclusion, and learning. Retrieved from http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bharath_Chandrasekaran/publication/249978402_Music_Noise-Exclusion_and_Learning/links/53f9fbe00cf27c365ceae10b.pdf.

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GG? GG.

Today's blog is something short and sweet, and it's going to be about a relatively simple topic: music.

Music is magic; well, the closest thing there is to it, anyway. Besides influencing our mood, it has been found that music can have a variety of effects such as enhancing physical performance1, lessening the feeling of pain2, repairing brain damage3, and even treating Parkinson's and other movement-related physiological problems4. And, it can also affect our ability to perceive time5,6 .

The mechanisms through which the aforementioned effects occur are more or less the same: by distracting your brain (well, except the lattermost one − curing Parkinson's involves something more than just the distraction capabilities of music). Listening to music occupies our mind considerably enough that you'll be less likely to notice things around you in detail, and that includes fatigue, pain, and the passage of time. There's only so much that our brain can focus on and bring to our attention so when there's currently something on our mind, due to our brain's limited capacity we are less likely to think about how many minutes we've been waiting in a line, or how long we've been nursing a headache.

We'll look at the effect of music on time perception a little bit more than the others. The theory is that as your mind switches back and forth between perception of the music and concentration on the challenging tasks, it forms separate "events," or distinct memories. When your brain thinks about what you've been doing for the past hour, you'll remember more of these events and recall that the hour was quite long. To demonstrate and better visualize this particular effect, let's look at how it affects the gaming experience.

Games can be pretty immersive, right? I'm sure everyone has experienced trying a game and a few minutes later (or so it seems), we take a look at the time and see that we've actually been going at a game for a few hours. Remember how music affects time perception by distracting our brain? The same applies to our engagement with games. When we play, our thoughts, attention, and goals are all focused on the game, and this leaves little room to notice the other details around us. So what happens to our time perception when we engage in immersive play and are exposed to music at the same time? Two studies, one by Sanders and Cairns (2010) and another by Cassidy and MacDonald (2010), investigated such interplay.

In Sanders and Cairns' study,  they looked at how music increased immersion in video games and, consequently, distorted the players' perception of time. They did so by adding different kinds of music on a maze game. Congruent to previous studies before theirs, the addition of music did somewhat increase immersion. However, they found that the likability of the music determined the likelihood of immersion occurring, as well as affected the degree in which time perception was distorted. Interestingly, Cassidy and MacDonald's findings seem parallel to that of Sanders and Cairns'. In their study, they looked at how music affected people's time perception and performance in a driving game and saw that being exposed to music selected by the participants themselves resulted in a more immersive experience and an overestimation of elapsed time. In contrast, listening to music that someone else had picked resulted in the poorest performance and experience. The researchers concluded that personal meaning and associations regarding music are likely to be important factors that influence engagement with games, or whichever activity people choose to take on.

So what’s the lesson to be learned here? It seems that no matter the type of game, the possibility of immersion is there. The effect of music on time perception appears to be separate from the immersive capacities of a game, though it does augment the gaming experience. Music can also either increase or diminish distortion in time perception depending on how much the music is liked by the listener. 

So, that game with the killer soundtrack? You might be getting tricked into liking it because it’s making your gaming experience great (even when the actual gameplay stinks). Better watch out for that!

Article by CK Hermosa

1Karageorghis, C. & Priest, D-L. (2008). Music in sport and exercise : An update on research and application. The Sport Journal, 11(3). Retrieved from http://thesportjournal.org/article/music-sport-and-exercise-update-research-and-application/

2Bhatt, R., Williams, DW. P., Thayer, J. F., & Koenig, J. (2015).  The dark side of the moon: Music may reduce pain but white noise may increase it! Music and Medicine, 7(1), 53-54. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Julian_Koenig/publication/258256087_The_Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_Music_may_Reduce_Pain_but_White_Noise_may_Increase_it%21/links/54d10d6e0cf28959aa7a5de9.pdf

3Soto, D., Funes, M. J., Guzman-Garcia, A., Warbrick, T., Rothstein, P., & Humphrey, G. W. (2009). Pleasant music overcomes the loss of awareness in patients with visual neglect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(12). Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/03/20/0811681106

4Shulman, M. (2008, July 17). Music as medicine for the brain. U.S. News. Retrieved from http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/brain-and-behavior/articles/2008/07/17/music-as-medicine-for-the-brain?PageNr=1

5Sanders, T. & Cairns, P. (2010). Time perception, immersion, and music in videogames. Proceedings of the 24th BCS Interaction Specialist Group Conference, 160-167. Retrieved from https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~pcairns/papers/Sanders_HCI2010.pdf

6Cassidy, G. G. & MacDonald, R. A. R. (2010). The effects of music on time perception and performance of a driving game. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51(6), 455-464. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9450.2010.00830.x

Mario Jumping on a Note Block [Online image]. Retrieved October 19, 2015 from https://mediafluency.journalism.wisc.edu/music/music-and-video-games/

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Eargasmic

There’s good music, and there’s music that makes you feel like you’re listening to God’s playlist. We’ve all had these moments, where we’re listening to a song and a slow wave of shivers, chills, or goosebumps passes over us.

You can call them frissons. Like a sexual orgasm, a frisson is an intense physiological response, but instead of it being about what feels good, it’s about what sounds good.

I recently got into this Korean boy band called BTS, and a song of theirs that never fails to give me chills is “I NEED U”. I can tell you what I like about the song: I’m a fan of rap (they have three rappers, and with distinct voices), especially when it’s in contrast with a beautiful instrumental. Their vocal line is talented, and they have two members who can hit high falsetto notes like it’s nobody’s business. And it’s catchy.

But I can say the same about plenty of their other songs. They have the same rappers, the same vocalists, and great instrumentals. So what’s so special about “I NEED U”? And what exactly causes these chills?

Why We Feel Frissons

The higher the intensity of a frisson, the higher the activity in the following areas of the brain:

paralimbic areas (long-term memory, emotion, reward)

motor areas (movement, conditioned response)

areas associated with the autonomic nervous system (involuntary and fight-or-flight responses)

When activated together, these regions are probably why we experience strong emotional and physiological responses to good music.

What Makes Music “Good Enough” to Elicit Frissons

A lot of studies show that frisson is often caused by sudden dynamic leaps in music. Mostly, it’s when the music goes from soft to loud, or sometimes from loud to extremely soft. This can explain why EDM is such a pleasure, what with its intense buildups immediately followed by dramatic drops. (I think that, in general, we love highly contrasting stimuli, whether they’re visual, auditory, etc.)

Another catalyst to frisson can be the anticipation of the leap. There’s a certain area in one of the brain’s reward systems, the caudate, that activates and transmits dopamine in those moments leading to the peak of the song. FYI, dopamine is one of those feel-good neurotransmitters, hence its role in reward and motivation. The second area involved in this process is the nucleus accumbens, which is involved during the release right after the climax.

From 3:34, the bridge starts building up to the expected peak... and then it stops (3:59). You’re given five seconds of silence before the music resumes at a soft, low point and then again goes into a crescendo to finally, finally hit the climactic, final chorus (4:31). That’s when I get the chills.

Somewhere between 3:34 and 4:31, the caudate is more active than usual, especially as it gets closer to the chorus. From 4:31 onwards, it’s the nucleus accumbens’ turn to be flushed with dopamine.

That’s why “I NEED U” is so great. It’s basically a case of delayed gratification, made even more compelling by the unexpected five-second silence. The dopamine rush throughout the process serves as a reward and encouragement to listen and come back to it, because it’s such a goddamn pleasure. And since it’s human to seek pleasure, I’ll keep craving and playing this stupid song until I get sick of it.

Article by Val Borja

Reference

Harrison, L. & Loui, P. (2014). Thrills, chills, frissons, and skin orgasms: Toward an integrative model of transcendent psychophysiological experiences in music. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00790

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Who Said That?

This phenomenon of hearing voices goes way back. Historically, accounts of foreign “voices” have been explained by people in various ways, one of the most prominent being thoughts of God communicating with them. As a result of the advancement of scientific research, we now heavily link it to psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis.

I would chalk it up to ignorance, however, for one to say that all incidents of auditory verbal hallucination or hearing voices should be attributed to mental illness. Psychologically healthy people experience it too. Interestingly, this happens quite a lot in the creative writing world; there are many fiction writers that claim to actually hear their characters talk. I’ve never experienced it though, but I suspect it is a fascinating thing; just how one would report to have heard something that nobody has actually said would make for an interesting (albeit a little creepy) life experience.

Fortunately, researchers have attempted to find the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. One way of looking at it is through the sensory aspect. According to this view, random firing in certain areas in the brain that were triggered by nothing in particular causes a false impression that the words or sounds we just heard came from something or someone around us (Allen et al, 2008, as cited in Moritz & Larøi, 2008). While this seems to be a relatively simple explanation, exploration into the things actually said by these voices revealed that much of them seem to be tailor-made for each person, involving personal experiences or invoking emotional reactions in the people who hear it. The observation that the content of auditory verbal hallucinations aren’t random and are usually disturbing conjured up an implication that, maybe, sensory input (or misinput?) isn’t all that is involved here. This probably involves the things that people think as well.

Have you ever been surprised with something that came into your mind because of how alien or “not-you” it sounded? Development of this additional angle of auditory verbal hallucinations brings in the occurrences of strange thoughts, more appropriately called intrusions. If we hear voices that no one around us owns, could we simply be projecting our thoughts that we see to be wildly inaccurate with ourselves onto something or someone outside us? Possibly.

Moritz and Larøi (2008) aimed to figure out how auditory verbal hallucinations work by describing the qualities of the “voices” being heard and seeing how they compare and contrast with intrusions and everyday thought. Do they have sounds and properties that resemble actual voices? Are they simply thoughts that we can’t seem to recognize as our own? Or is it something else entirely? Let’s hear them out. (No pun intended)

Schizophrenia patients, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder patients, and psychologically healthy individuals took part in this study. They answered a questionnaire regarding a number of things: 1) sound or acoustic properties of their everyday thoughts, 2) acoustic properties of intrusive thoughts as well as how real they perceived these thoughts to be, and 3) their experience/s of voice-hearing as well as the perceived qualities of these “voices” as compared to real voices.

What did Moritz and Larøi find?

First, they confirmed that although auditory hallucinations are fundamental symptoms of psychosis, as 82% of the participants with schizophrenia have reported hearing voices, they cannot be automatically attributed to mental illness as a 15% of the mentally healthy participants reported hearing voices as well.

Second, hallucinated voices were often not found to be as loud as actual external voices and only one third of the participants are unable to distinguish hallucinated voices as external voices. That is, most people can tell that the “voices” they hear aren’t actually real; thus, when they say they hear voices, it may not be an actual voice they perceive, but rather a self-generated thought or intrusion that they do not perceive to be their own. They reported these intrusions to have perceptual qualities of their own and some even agreed that they are audible to some extent, but they weren’t able to identify any acoustic properties that differentiate hallucinated voices and intrusive thoughts. 

So, “who said that?” 

Most likely, we did, in the form of auditory hallucinations. There may just be individual differences in terms of their awareness of this. Moritz and Larøi‘s findings can shed some light on the reason individuals with psychosis are more likely to experience auditory hallucinations than are individuals without. Auditory verbal hallucinations, as suggested by this research study, may actually well be products of our cognition. Whether a person interprets disturbing or strange thoughts as coming from his environment or from his own mind depends, to some extent, on his ability to process and control them. The fact that this ability is significantly weaker in people with schizophrenia contributes to their increased tendency to misattribute these thoughts to sources external to themselves and thus cause them to perceive voices.

From this study we find a manifestation of the ability our minds to actually create the illusion of sound, which is pretty cool if you think about it. In the meantime, I think we can all pick up something from this study that can help us understand people who go through this, whether irregularly or regularly. 

Article by Via Mendoza 

References:

1  Moritz, S., & Larøi, F. (2008). Differences and similarities in the sensory and cognitive signatures of voice-hearing, intrusions and thoughts. Schizophrenia research, 102(1), 96-107.

2 Comic strip from http://sinfest.net/comikaze/comics/2013-08-28.gif 

3 Picture from http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/image/5117230-3x2-340x227.jpg

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He Says, She Says

When it comes to scientifically investigating the complexities of implicit sexism, it is often a challenge for researchers to hit the right note. The impressions and biases people have of men and women have ubiquitous and insidious effects on many aspects of modern society. It is a particularly heated issue in the business and labor arena, piquing the interest of both the academe and the industry.

Following this trend, researchers from Northwestern University, University of Colorado, and Tilburg University in the Netherlands sought to sound out the effects of sex and vocal femininity on how people are perceived.

Is her message being heard or drowned out by the white noise of gender discrimination?

In the first experiment, undergraduate students judged hypothetical applicants based on their resumes, which were written to be stereotypically masculine or stereotypically feminine. For example, a masculine resume would feature a part-time auto salesman who plays basketball, while a feminine resume would feature a part-time flower shop sales assistant who does yoga. Resumes will also be read using voices of varying degrees of vocal femininity.

The question: when written and oral resumes are stereotypically sex-typed, how will people evaluate the applicants’ competence and warmth? The researchers asked the participants to rate the applicants on eight traits. Four of these—assertive, decisive, passive and insecure—are associated with competence, while the other four—supportive, caring, cold and hostile—are associated with warmth.

The results are loud and clear: the sex-typed information in the written resumes had no significant impact on perceived competence and warmth. But hear this—once voices are added into the mix, feminine-sounding applicants, whether male or female, were rated as less competent. Even when the resume contained information directly related to competence, the dominant influence of vocal femininity resonates. Soprano-esque female applicants were also rated as warmer than their deep-voiced counterparts, and the same phenomenon was observed for male applicants. It’s important to note, however, that there was no relationship between trait judgments and sex.

The researchers speculate that the active countering of gender discrimination may have influenced the participants’ responses. Furthermore, they may have different standards of competence and warmth for different genders. Thus, for the second experiment, they devised a way to make the gender stereotyping manipulation less obvious. Participants listened to four recorded accounts of how a target person behaved in previous situations. Then, for the fifth scenario, participants would have to accurately predict how the target person had acted. Some scenarios were related to competence and others to warmth. Target people are defined by their sex, vocal femininity, and how competently (or warmly) they acted in the previous situations.

This time, males were predicted to act more competently than females, while females were not predicted to act any more warmly than males. On a similar note, the more feminine the voice, the less competent the target person was perceived to be. These results hold regardless of what the target people has done in the past scenarios.

Why did the second experiment start singing a different tune? It would seem that when participants didn’t have a clue that sex has anything to do with the experiment, their judgments became significantly influenced by sexist stereotypes. Perhaps the more dangerous implication is that people are not even aware of their prejudices, dancing to beat of discrimination’s drum unless gender equality shouts over it.

These findings on sexual prejudice sound like a broken record, until the researchers mixed things up a little bit. Aside from vocal femininity, they also analyzed the degree of babyishness of the recordings. When the vocal babyishness was controlled, the impact of vocal femininity on perceived competence fades out.

While this tidbit does not exactly sound like music to the social justice community’s ears, it offers new insight regarding the complicated machinations of sexism. The research suggests that the discriminatory attitudes are directed not to femininity per se, but the associated babyishness. Being aware of this, we can tune in to the femininity-babyishness association and explore interventions on this connection.

Article by Clarysse Alfonso. Access the full research article here. Reference: Ko, S. J., Judd, C. M., & Stapel, D. A. (2009). Stereotyping based on voice in the presence of individuating information: Vocal femininity affects perceived competence but not warmth. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(2), 198-211. 

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Let’s Roll

A friend of mine tried ecstasy once. It was free and barely half of a tablet, so she thought what the hell and popped it. She was still nervous though, because she’d heard about people mixing MDMA with other more unsavory, more unsafe substances. Her companions told her to chill the f out or nothing would happen. She didn’t feel anything for quite some time, until later when they were on the freeway and listening to music.

I’m not giving an in-depth description, because I don’t wanna glorify illicit drug use on an academic blog. (She thought it was nice though. Really nice! So nice, in fact, that she wants to do it again.)

I know someone who takes his own supply, and his pill count is in the hundreds, which is unbelievable and makes you wonder how the hell he doesn’t have holes in his brain. He seems to be a functioning member of society, too, so it really makes me wonder whether MDMA use has long-term effects, and how it even works in the first place.

Basically, MDMA floods your brain with serotonin. That’s no good, because now you’ve got to deal with the sudden lack of it. They tested this on animals (oh no) and confirmed it.

The thing about serotonin it’s pretty involved in visual input. Guess where studies have found functional changes in the brain after MDMA use… the occipital lobe.

Today’s study, however, is psychophysical in nature. It’s a recent study, one published in 2013 in Psychopharmacology, an international journal that talks how drugs affect one’s psychology. The title of the article—“Altered visual perception in long-term ecstasy (MDMA) users”—is self-explanatory.

Let’s talk about TAE. It means tilt after-effect, not poop. TAE happens when you stare at a series of lines tilted in one direction for too long, and then when you switch to look at a set of vertical lines, they look like they’re tilting in the opposite direction even though they’re actually straight.

Having a strong TAE means you’re less sensitive to orientation information and thus have a hard time detecting small differences in it.

What causes TAE? Basically, having a broad orientation tuning bandwidth. The wider your bandwidth, the more difficulty you’ll have discerning images with well-oriented lines. There’s this idea that a certain neurotransmitter has a role in sharpening tuning bandwidths. It’s serotonin, obviously!!!

And apparently, ecstasy users show a stronger TAE than non-users. Remember what we said earlier about MDMA and serotonin depletion? With much less serotonin, who else is gonna sharpen the tuning bandwidths of cells? Hence, TAE.

Aside from tuning bandwidths, serotonin might also be involved in long-range connections in the visual cortex.

So, White, Brown, and Edwards (2013) wanted to see if ecstasy affects occipital lobe functioning by studying participants’ orientation tuning bandwidths and the strength of long-range connections in the visual cortex.

What did they find out?

If you take ecstasy, you have a broader tuning bandwidth, and you have a more difficult time telling whether a contour is pointing left or right.

“These results suggest that changes in serotonergic neural functioning due to ecstasy use may disrupt lateral inhibition between orientation-sensitive neurons, producing more activity in neurons firing to orientations further than their preferred orientation, therefore broadening their bandwidths.”

“This suggests that serotonin may be involved in the operation of long-range connections in the visual cortex. Therefore, ecstasy-mediated serotonin depletion could be damaging to these connections.”

I can’t make these any simpler without muddling up the information, but it all comes down to MDMA depleting serotonin, and this depletion leads to these deficits in visual processing.

Can’t be sure yet though whether these orientation and long-range processing deficits result in a functional impairment in the perception of ecstasy users. Because when you think about it, it’s kinda bad. But not really. I mean, come on, that guy I talked about earlier is doing fine. Hopefully we’ll have more studies on long-term MDMA use in the future.

Article by Val Borja

White, C., Brown, J., Edwards, M. (2013). Altered visual perception in long-term ecstasy (MDMA) users. Psychopharmacology, 229(1), 155-165. doi: 10.1007/s00213-013-3094-9

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I Saw It But I Missed

Imagine being able to see a panoramic view of the city and shift your view to any direction… just by turning your head. Imagine walking, as in literally walking, through idyllic tourist spots and destinations as if you were really there. Imagine being able to study and examine the human body's individual systems and components, in real-time and very adequately without the help of an actual physical, human body; no need for any cadaver contact for med students. These are just a few of the amazing applications that can be made possible by Oculus Rift and other virtual reality devices.

Virtual reality (VR) is the kind of concept we can readily have some notion of even without looking at a dictionary. Google Earth and street view, online gaming, flight simulators, and virtual possessions and communities are just some examples involving VR, and it is very likely that it's easy to give additional examples when asked as well because many of us have been exposed to and able to access VR for a very long time. One can even say that VR and the concept of it has long been part of our actual reality and environment, since we interact with it on an arguably regular basis as we turn on the computer and engage in various online activities.

It was Ivan Sutherland who presented the first idea of virtual reality in 1965: "make that (virtual) world in the window look real, sound real, feel real, and respond realistically to the viewer’s actions”.1 Many terms since this proposition has then been used interchangeably with VR, such as artificial world, artificial reality, synthetic experience, and, most prevalently, virtual environment (VE). Likewise, the term VR has been misused in many cases, most especially by the media, where it's simply likened to 3D computer graphics. Indeed, VR does involve three-dimensional environments that's artificial and computer-generated for simulating physical reality. At the same time, however, VR entails real-time engagement and participation from the user in such a way that it becomes an immersive, interactive experience.2 In other words, VR is the experience of being in a simulated world and being able to perceive and interact with the objects therein at the same time.

VR is originally meant to be fully immersive, which means that it's supposed to be an experience that's believable in such a way that we would consider it actual reality. However, our senses prove to be quite hard to trick. Once we detect any inconsistency, even if it's the tiniest detail, our mind alerts us that there's something wrong, that there's a likely chance that the current experience isn't real. The technological advances at the moment offer the promise of a very realistic experience by producing more HD and highly congruent simulated environments, as well as providing multisensory input, which includes complementary audio components, force feedback, and touch interaction. At the present time, however, the most accessible VR primarily involves visual experiences.3

[TL;DR] Egocentric depth perception in virtual reality

One of the most important requirements for a convincing virtual reality system is to accurately convey depth and layout.4 However, it seems that regardless of the virtual reality device one uses, one's judgment of egocentric depth, which pertains to the location and distance of objects relative to oneself, often gets off the mark while in virtual reality. This has been observed in a number of studies, one of which was the research study by J. Adam Jones and coworkers.

J. Adam Jones et al.'s study compared judgments of egocentric depth made in virtual reality with those made the real world and within augmented reality (AR). AR, unlike VR, is an enhanced version of reality.5 It involves a virtual world that enriches rather than replaces the real world. This means that AR rather than create a new or different world, its goal is to add elements to our current, actual environment in order to improve our experience of it. Examples of this technology include the changing maps behind weather reporters and the global positioning system (GPS).

Jones et al.'s study, which was rather straightforward, involved sixteen (16) undergraduate students. They were to judge egocentric distance via visually directed walking while wearing a head mounted display (HMD). Visually directed walking is a technique commonly used to measure judgment of egocentric depth, where the person, after looking at a particular object for a period of time, would attempt to walk to that object's location without the help of their sense of sight. This technique has been used to judge egocentric distances to real-world objects. For Jones et al.'s study, however, this shall take place within virtual reality as well, with actual virtual objects. That's what the HMD is for. HMDs are one of the most common devices that contribute to a person's immersive experience in VR (e.g. Oculus Rift).

The same study also looked into any effects of motion parallax on such depth judgments. Motion parallax is a depth cue resulting from our movement or motion, in which nearby objects look as if they all glide rapidly past us while distant objects give the impression that they move a lot slower in comparison.6 This means that as we move, we are capable of judging depth and distance of objects by looking at those objects' apparent relative motion. To see the effect of this particular depth cue, the undergraduate students in the study were to perform the visually directed walking task twice, with one time simulating motion parallax.

Thus, imagine a person wearing something similar to an Oculus Rift. Under the virtual reality viewing condition, he or she looks at a particular object in virtual reality, then after a while walks towards it without looking. At the same time, he or she would either hold their heads steady or sway back and forth (simulating still parallax and motion parallax respectively). The simulation of which motion cue occurs at random order for each undergraduate student. The same goes for the other viewing conditions, namely the augmented reality viewing condition, the real-world+HMD viewing condition, and the real-world-only viewing condition. The same tasks are performed by the undergraduate students in those conditions. However, under the condition of augmented reality, instead of a virtual image within virtual reality, the undergraduate student would be looking at a virtual image within a real-world environment (in this case, a hallway corridor). In the real-world+HMD condition, the undergraduate students would perform the visually directed walking task while still wearing the HMD, looking at a real-world object within the specified real-world environment. Likewise, the same is set to occur in the real-world-only condition, except that the undergraduate students would not be wearing the HMD at all.

What did the researchers find out in this (awesome) experiment? Consistent to previous studies is trend of underestimation of egocentric depth under VR. In fact, it had the greatest rate of underestimation relative to the other environments. In stark contrast, however, there was a lack of underestimation in AR compared to VR. Thus, it appears that when viewing virtual objects against actual, real-world environments, individuals are able to make accurate egocentric depth judgments. Another interesting finding of this study is the effect of motion parallax on the viewed environments. Contrary to the expectation that motion parallax improves depth perception, it had an apparent weak effect on virtual reality, augmented reality, and real-world-only environments, while a surprisingly detrimental effect on depth perception within the real-world+HMD environment.

What does these findings imply? Well, it seems that the dream that virtual reality would be able to become the perfect illusion, fully immersive and able to provide a very realistic experience, is still really out of our reach. If our perception and the cues relevant to its processes are incongruent with our experience of the real world, how can virtual reality fully capture and simulate actual reality? Considering that it's the visual system that had been the subject of the earliest research in virtual reality, and that it currently comprises the most amount of research in virtual reality literature, would a perfect virtual reality in terms of the visual system be realized in our generation if there are still discrepancies in the visual perceptual processes in such environments even at the present time? I certainly hope that it still can; from Jones et al.'s research we can see that HMDs still have a long way to go, but with the rate of technological advancements and the increasing interest and investment of corporate giants such as Facebook and Samsung regarding virtual reality, it may just be possible.

Article by CK Hermosa

1 Mazuryk, T. & Gervautz, M. (1996). Virtual reality: History, applications, technology and future. Retrieved from https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/1996/mazuryk-1996-VRH/TR-186-2-96-06Paper.pdf

2 Mazuryk et al. (1996) (as n.1 above)

3Stankovic, S. (2011). Virtual reality [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://www.cs.tut.fi/kurssit/SGN-5406/lectures/VR1-introduction.pdf

4 Jones, J. A., Swan II, J. E., Singh, G., Kolstad, E., Ellis, S. R. (2008). The effects of virtual reality, augmented reality, and motion parallax on egocentric depth perception. In APGV '08: Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (pp.9-14). New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved from http://adamjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2008_Jones-etal_AR-Depth-Perception_APGV.pdf.

5 Samani, K. (2015, August 5). What augmented reality is − and isn't. ReadWrite. Retrieved from http://readwrite.com/2015/08/04/augmented-reality-virtual-reality-defined

6 Goldstein, E. (2013). Sensation and Perception (9th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Oculus Rift Launch [Online image]. Retrieved September 28, 2015 from http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Travel/Pix/pictures/2014/10/31/1414776590735/OCULUS-RIFT-LAUNCH-014.jpg

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Seek and you shall find

Imagine yourself entering your living room with the intention of using your laptop while lounging on the sofa. To achieve that, you need to find the laptop first, so you quickly scan the room to find it. After retrieving it, you realize that you are hungry and thirsty and that you could use some food and refreshments while watching. You then leave the laptop on the sofa, head into the kitchen, make a beeline for the refrigerator, and scan its contents for the carton of milk and half-dozen box of donuts that you bought earlier. After retrieving said food and beverage, you return to the living room and sit down to boot up the laptop while eating. You then open your email and search through it for anything important; go through Facebook and quickly scan the notifications for anything interesting; go through some other website that you frequent and search for content that interests you.

Point is, scanning the environment for things is something that we do very often, and probably mostly unconsciously. However, have you ever thought about how quickly you are able to scan the environment? Do you think you get faster at scanning the environment and looking for something as you get more and more experience with looking for it? Interestingly enough, psychologists Melissa Võ and Jeremy Wolfe from the Visual Attention Lab in Harvard Medical School conducted a study about the effect of practice and exposure on one’s search speed, and they found mixed results: yes, prior experience with searching for a particular object helps one get better at searching for it again in the future, but no, mere exposure to and latent memory of a place does not make people better at scanning a scene for a particular object. Let’s hear them out.

The results of several studies (as reviewed by Võ and Wolfe) have established that contextual cueing, or repeated exposure to certain items related to a subsequent task, helps reduce the amount of time that one spends searching, and even guides eye movements toward the targets. A certain study also found that exposing participants to a scene for 20 seconds helps them remember both the specific positions of objects and the overall spatial layout of the scene. Some studies have also demonstrated that fixating on particular objects, whether accidentally or intentionally, can help that object stay in one’s visual long-term memory for hours or even for days. This prolonged stay in one’s memory consequently aids object recognition and scene change detection.

However, some studies have also also found that repeated exposure to and searching through a specific scene and did not improve one’s efficiency in searching. One study asked participants to search for a letter among a set of letters and had them search through the same set for different letters every time. Oddly enough, the speed with which they searched did not improve even after hundreds of trials with the same set. This was replicated in another study that had the same premise, except this time it involved sets of realistic objects embedded in scenes rather than a set of letters. After repeated exposure to the same scenes over and over again, there is no doubt that the participants have already memorized them. It’s just that the memories they have of these search sets were not being used while actually searching. As Võ and Wolfe (2012) said, “given a choice between using memory and doing the visual search over again, observers seemed to choose repeated visual search”, because searching through the scene over and over again was somehow deemed as more efficient than retrieving their memory of the scene’s layout and contents.

There seems to be an explanation for this odd phenomenon. The researchers have also found that these failures occur most often when the “effective set size”, or the actual number of objects that one can potentially be asked to search, is large and fixed. For example, if there are a total of about 30 items in a scene and all 30 items are part of the search pool, then the participant instinctively scans (or at least tries to) all 30 objects until they spot the target. However, if you only really need to search for 10 out of 30 objects and you are well aware of that, then searching will become more efficient because you will only really scan through those 10 task-relevant objects. Of course, if you didn’t know, then your search speed will not improve because you will still take every object into account every time. 

Note however that this principle does not apply as simply to real-life scenes. Scenes on a picture are controlled because the objects in it will not change (unless you manipulate the picture on purpose), but scenes in real life are dynamic and can change at any time. It is more difficult to determine the effective set size because that is no longer specifically determined here. However, increased knowledge of a scene also helps you narrow down the plausible locations of an object; you know where you usually keep your laptop in the living room, so you know immediately where to look. You know where your new food stash is kept in the refrigerator so you find it in no time. In other words, the effective set size decreases as your knowledge of the scene increases, and you become more efficient at looking for things because you take less and less unnecessary objects into account.

Screenshots from Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate

Screenshot from Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove

Up to this point we have only been looking at the studies that Võ and Wolfe have reviewed. Now let’s talk about what they actually did. Their study consisted of 5 experiments that involve having them search through the same scene multiple times. All this is hinged on two premises: first, that learning more about the scene might reduce the effective set size and thus speed up the search, and second, that information about other items might be gained while searching for a present target, which may be used to aid subsequent search for said other items. The experiments ran as follows:

> Experiment 1: Participants had to search 10 scenes for 15 different objects per scene, making that a total of 150 object searches all in all. This is the first “block”. Once they’re done, the task resets and they start searching again from the same first scene, thus beginning the second “block”. After this they start all over again for a third and last “block”.

Result: Similar to aforementioned research studies, they found weak improvements in searching speed despite the scenes being repeated per block, but improvements were present all the same.

> Experiment 2: Participants were made to look for 15 different letters that were superimposed on future target objects, forcing them to look at the future targets before actually looking for them. The same search task in Experiment 1 came after.

Result: “Previewing” the future targets through the letters had no speeding up effects on the object search task.

> Experiment 3: Participants had to look at room scenes for 30 seconds and then determine whether the occupant of that scene was male or female. The same search tasks in Experiment 1 and 2 came after.

Result: The participants were no faster at finding things than those in Experiment 1.

> Experiment 4: Participants were instructed to memorize every object in a scene for a memory test that will be given after.

Result: The participants were still no faster at finding things than those in Experiment 1.

> Experiment 5: Participants were made to search for 15 objects in the same scene with a target word presented in the middle of the scene for 750ms. However, half of the scenes included a visual cue (a red rectangular frame surrounding the target object) that indicated where the target object is.

Result: Active uncued search produced shorter reaction times than cued search.

Example of a scene  (Figure 1; Võ and Wolfe, 2012)

Gaze distributions of all observers during their initial search for a jam jar in Block 1 across Experiments 1–4. Note that despite different ways of previewing each scene in Experiments 2–4, gaze distributions are almost identical to initial searches in Experiment 1, where the scene was encountered for the first time. (Figure 13; Võ and Wolfe, 2012)

Gaze distributions of all observers searching for a jam jar in Experiment 1. Search space substantially decreased from Block 1 over Block 2 to Block 3 (left to right). (Figure 14; Võ and Wolfe, 2012) 

  The whole study basically confirmed that mere memory of an object does not mean that you will be faster at searching for it; search through an unchanging scene indeed seems to depend more on manual visual search than on retrieving memory about an object’s whereabouts. Also, having searched for an object before helps guide the participant to the target object in subsequent searches, so there is more premium on prior experience than on incidental knowledge.

Even in a non-search related context, I guess this all makes sense. It’s like the relationship between theory and practice - theory (knowledge of the layout of a scene and the objects in it) is useless if it is not put into practice (actually using that knowledge to look for something within the scene), and your practice will not get better if you do not link your experiences back to theory. Merely reviewing texts intensively in preparation for a licensure exam without having actual experience does not ensure enough knowledge for success in your chosen field. You need practice too - practicums, internships, volunteer work, research, mentoring from someone more experienced than you, etc.  in order to learn the ropes. This study also tells us that what helps us more when finding things is conscious attention, not incidental knowledge. It is easy to miss something that you are looking for, but once you find something by looking for it, it gets pretty hard to miss it the second time around.

Now, it’s your turn. What do you think about the above-mentioned research studies? Do you believe that merely looking at something does not help you search for it better in the future, but that actually looking for it will? Did this trigger any insights about your experience with visual search games like Mystery Case Files? Let us know by reblogging this post with your comment below!

Article by Joyce Anne Ocampo

Reference:

Mystery Case Files Dire Grove Macintosh Screenshot. Retrieved from http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/499134-mystery-case-files-dire-grove-macintosh-screenshot-2nd-floor.jpg

Mystery Case Files Madame Fate 1. Retrieved from http://www.terragame.com/downloadable/seek/mystery_case_files_madame_fate/screen_1.jpg

Mystery Case Files Madame Fate 3. Retrieved from http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/69000/69509/mystery-case-files-madame-fate-3.jpg

[Untitled image of a living room]. Retrieved from http://www.iseecubed.com/wp-content/uploads/awesome-living-room-by-masvaley.jpg

[Untitled image of a refrigerator]. Retrieved from http://www.zimmber.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/refrigerator.jpg

Võ, M. L., & Wolfe, J. M. (2012). When does repeated search in scenes involve memory? Looking at versus looking for objects in scenes. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception And Performance, 38(1), 23-41. doi:10.1037/a0024147

[BONUS:

Click here for free online image search games!]

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Perceptual Prowess

With the new UAAP season well underway, the spotlight is back to focusing on student athletes of the eight universities battling it out for the winning titles in different sports. Old and new star players have their own fan-bases and get sponsorship deals that most people would be jealous of. But aside from stellar records and names trending on Twitter, what makes these athletes so special?

The answer lies in their visual perception behavior.

Mann and company were interested in the enhanced perceptual-cognitive skills of sports “experts,” or basically, athletes who played their sports regularly and well. Their study, “Perceptual-Cognitive Expertise in Sport: A Meta-Analysis” (1) published in 2007, looked into the advantages in visual perception of these players.

What Did They Want To Know?

The study assessed the perceptual-cognitive skills of experts of different sports types, as compared to non-experts. Were they more accurate? Faster? How did they process visual information about their target?

If you’re an aspiring athlete, or simply curious about what makes that basketball superstar so good, these questions are probably relevant to your interests as well. But before we answer them--and trust me, the findings are interesting--a quick run through the methods used and existing literature are in order.

How Did They Do It?

This study involved two general steps:

looking for relevant literature

This was basically a long, long process of going through journal articles that were relevant to what the study wanted to know. They used keywords to find these studies and proceeded to do a meta-analysis on them through...

statistical analysis

From the resulting data from different studies, an average effect size was computed for and tested for significance. The “effect size” is the difference between the performance of an expert player and a non-expert, and the “significance” was whether or not this difference was big enough statistically speaking.

What Else Should I Know?

What Mann et al. (2007) (1) found out was that, based on existing literature, it seemed that “the perceptual strategies and corresponding decision-making processes of experts and non-experts is task dependent. (Williams, Davids, Burwitz, & Williams, 1993; Williams et al., 1994; Williams & Davids, 1995)” Thus, the visual perceptual behaviors may vary across different sports.

At this point, it is important to differentiate the sports types that would later be considered in the results of the study. And no, this wasn’t basketball versus volleyball versus football, etc. Their study dealt with more broad types:

Interceptive sport - “any sport that requires coordination between a participant’s body, parts of the body or a held implement, and an object in the environment.” [Davids, Savelsbergh, Bennett, & Van der Kamp, 2002, as cited in (1)] Examples of these are tennis and badminton.

Strategic sport - “a sport that involves multiple teammates, often resulting in tactical formations during offensive and defensive series, and emphasizing the importance of allocating attention to both the projectile involved and the diverse array of participants.” (1) Soccer and basketball are examples of this sport.

Other sports “included such characteristics as being closed, self-paced, and aiming at a target.” (1) These include golf, billiards, etc.

If you want to be the next superstar, you should start working on these...

388 effect sizes were calculated to see how experts differed from non-experts across the following measures. These were further compared among the different sports types.

Response Accuracy - “the participant’s frequency of producing appropriate responses according to objective standards and in accord with environmental constraints and task demands.” (1)

number of effect sizes: 214

mean effect size: 0.31, significant

Experts, on average, were 31% more accurate than non-experts. There was no significant difference among different sport types, with interceptive sports experts being 32% more accurate, strategic ones 28% more accurate, and experts of other sports having 37% more accuracy.

Response Time - “an objective measure of the elapsed time between stimulus onset and the overt production of a response.” (1)

number of effect sizes: 62

mean effect size: 0.35, significant

Experts, on average, were 35% quicker. Expert interceptive and strategic sports players responded 37% faster than non-experts while experts in other sports were only 15% faster.

Number of Fixations - “provides an index of the search characteristics representative of the most pertinent cues extracted from the environment to facilitate the decision-making process.” (1)

number of effect sizes: 58

mean effect size: 0.26, significant

Experts, on average, executed 26% fewer fixations. Strategic sports experts, compared to non-experts, executed 49% fewer fixations. Interceptive sports experts only had 10% fewer fixations, and experts in other sports executed 35% fewer fixations.

Fixation Duration - “The longer the eye remains fixated on a given target, the more information is thought to be extracted from the display (albeit not necessarily from the locus of fixation), permitting detailed information processing.” (1)

number of effect sizes: 49

mean effect size: 0.23, significant

Experts, on average, had fixation durations that lasted 23% longer than non-experts’. For experts in interceptive sports, they lasted 14% longer, for strategic sports 23%, and for other sports, 32%.

Quiet Eye - “a period of time when task-relevant environmental cues are processed and motor plans are coordinated for the successful completion of an upcoming task; represents the elapsed time between the last visual fixation on a target and the initiation of the motor response.” [Vickers, 1996, as cited in (1)]

number of effect sizes: 5

mean effect size: 0.62, significant

Experts, on average, had quiet eye durations that lasted 62% longer. The very small effect size meant an inability to compare further among different sports types.

So?

SO all those three-pointers, touchdowns, and goals aren’t only products of endurance training and sheer strength, but also of what we might call their perceptual prowess. Practice, practice, and more practice may not make perfect but it definitely makes for perceptual-cognitive expertise, and an interesting article.

(Article by Jem Cabanlong)

Source:

(1) Mann, D.T.Y., Williams, A.M., Ward, P. & Janelle, C.M. (2007). Perceptual-Cognitive Expertise in Sport: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Sport Exercise Psychology, 29, 457-4

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Tasting the Rainbow

Let’s say I were to give you all this candy to choose from and I would allow you to take only three pieces. 

Now that would get you thinking carefully about which ones to pick. Of course, this means thinking about the flavors you would and would not like to be tasting...but I didn’t tell you how each of the candies was flavored (or if they were flavored differently at all).

That’s alright, you say, because you already have an idea as to what those flavors could be just by looking at them.

We don’t usually notice how much our judgments about food depend on what they look like. Master chefs are especially fond of the saying, “We eat with our eyes first.” To a great extent, I would agree. Yes, at the end of the day, taste is most of what matters (because it’s all going to end up in our stomachs anyway), but--and let’s face it--if we see some gray, sloppy mess on our plates, our appetites would most probably decrease as compared to if we see a structured combination of vibrant colors (in which case I’m sure we would all be practically drooling at this point.) Even if they were both created to have the same flavor.

Spence, Levitan, Shankar, and Zampini, four chemosensory perception researchers, compiled more than a handful of information on the relationship between color and flavor conjured up by a long line of experiments, and they found that results on this relationship have been either very consistent or a little blurry, depending on which aspect of flavor you look at it. Let’s look at the two main aspects the researchers focused on:

When it comes to flavor intensity, there have been studies that found color to have an influence on the level of flavor something was sensed to possess, that is, the level of flavor people are able to detect. In one experiment, participants were asked to detect a variety of tastes (salty, sweet, sour, and bitter) in aqueous solutions that had different colors. Results showed that the participants’ detection of sweetness was closely related to the colors associated with the ripening of fruits. When the concentration of the color  green increased in sweet solutions, participants were better able to detect sweetness, whereas when the concentration of the color yellow increased, participants were less able to detect it. Also, when the concentration of the color red decreased in bitter solutions, participants were less able to detect the bitterness. No color was found to influence their detection of saltiness, however, most likely due to the fact that salty foods are known to come in many different colors.

A much clearer relationship was found between color and flavor identity. Color turns out to make it easier for people to identify flavors of foods, particularly among sweet foods. Various experiments that involved participants having to identify flavors of various colored and fruit-flavored drinks all led to results that agree: they were significantly more able to correctly pinpoint the drinks’ flavors when the color “matched” the flavor (e.g., red for a strawberry-flavored drink) than when the color didn’t match the flavor or when the drink was colorless. This result was found even when participants were made fully aware of the possibility that the drinks’ colors won’t match their flavors. What’s more is that when participants answered incorrectly, their answers were oftentimes the flavors that would usually correspond to the drink’s color (e.g., identifying a green cherry-flavored drink as lime-flavored.) 

What do these findings tell us? For one, the interplay of our different sensory modalities can greatly affect the way we experience the things around us. It is no surprise, then, that food packaging, lighting and restaurant ambience, dish plating, and all other little things down to the amount of ‘crunch’ food makes in the mouth are important. It is no wonder that chefs and food manufacturers around the world place so much effort in creating products that effectively stimulate all our senses as opposed to simply focusing on their taste, even though that is ultimately what we all purchase food for. We see that it is possible for one sense to override another, where altering a stimulus for one sensory modality can surely change how we perceive it through another. Moreover, we see the impact of sensory integration, combining seemingly frivolous bits of information that we acquire through our different senses, on creating the richness of human experience.

Article by Via Mendoza

Source:

Spence, C., Levitan, C. A., Shankar, M. U., & Zampini, M. (2010). Does food color influence taste and flavor perception in humans?. Chemosensory Perception, 3(1), 68-84.