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Focus on outliers creates flawed snap judgments: Our quick scan of a crowd isn't as reliable as we think, new research suggests -- ScienceDaily
For the study, which appears online in the journal Cognition, researchers recruited 48 observers ages 18-28. Participants were presented with a grid of 12 faces and were given just one second to glance at the grid. Study participants were then asked to estimate the number of men and women in the grid.
Participants accurately assessed homogenous groups -- groups containing all men or all women. But if a group contained fewer women, say, participants overestimated the number of women present.
The researchers also tracked participants' eye movements. They found that participants looked more often at whichever group was in the minority -- men or women.
All of this occurred very quickly -- during a glance of just one second, said co-author and Duke psychologist Scott Huettel.
"We should recognize that our visual system is set up to orient ourselves towards some types of information more than others," Huettel said. "People form an initial impression very quickly, and that impression biases where we look next."
Interestingly, the same tendency to focus on the outlier also extended to scanning other kinds of images.
In a second experiment, study participants were shown a grid of nature photos showing a variety of indoor and outdoor scenes. Participants consistently overestimated whatever type of scene appeared less often.
For instance, if a grid of 12 photos contained two outdoor scenes -- say, a waterfall and a mountain range -- participants reported, on average, that the grid contained three such scenes.
Listeners get an idea of the personality of the speaker through his voice -- ScienceDaily
Ratings of perceived personality were highly consistent among listeners regardless of the language in which voices were evaluated. That is, listeners agree in their judgments of whether a given voice sounds aggressive or confident. This suggests that there must be certain invariant properties of the voice that indicate how trustworthy or competent a person is. This is in line with the idea that we can train ourselves to sound more or less competent, more or less dominant, depending on the context (e.g., job interviews).
After hearing just one word, listeners rapidly create a social voice space, where voices are grouped according to two main dimensions, one emphasizing traits of valence (trustworthiness, warmth) and other emphasizing strength (dominance, aggressiveness). These two personality dimensions are very relevant and respond to evolutionary pressures. Obtaining information about the intent of the others helps individuals to appropriately evaluate whether to approach or to avoid interaction with others.
Your Brain Is Constantly Searching for Problems to Fix - Tonic
Instead of carefully deciding how threatening a face is compared to all other faces, the brain can just store how threatening it is compared to other faces it has seen recently, or compare it to some average of recently seen faces, or the most and least threatening faces it has seen. This kind of comparison could lead directly to the pattern my research group saw in our experiments, because when threatening faces are rare, new faces would be judged relative to mostly harmless faces. In a sea of mild faces, even slightly threatening faces might seem scary.
It turns out that for your brain, relative comparisons often use less energy than absolute measurements.
Time-traveling illusion tricks the brain: How the brain retroactively makes sense of rapid auditory and visual sensory stimulation -- ScienceDaily
The first illusion is called the Illusory Rabbit. To produce the illusion, first a short beep and a quick flash are played nearly simultaneously on a computer, with the flash appearing at the left side of the screen. Next, 58 milliseconds after the first beep, a lone beep is played. Finally, 58 milliseconds after the second beep, a second nearly simultaneous beep-flash pair occurs, but with the flash appearing on the right side of the screen. The beep location is always central and does not move. Though only two flashes are played, most people viewing the illusion perceive three flashes, with an illusory flash coinciding with the second beep and appearing to be located in the center of the screen.
The fact that the illusory flash is perceived in between the left and right flashes is the key evidence that the brain is using postdictive processing.
"When the final beep-flash pair is later presented, the brain assumes that it must have missed the flash associated with the unpaired beep and quite literally makes up the fact that there must have been a second flash that it missed," explains Stiles. "This already implies a postdictive mechanism at work. But even more importantly, the only way that you could perceive the shifted illusory flash would be if the information that comes later in time -- the final beep-flash combination -- is being used to reconstruct the most likely location of the illusory flash as well."
Past experiences shape what we see more than what we are looking at now -- ScienceDaily
Most past vision research, however, has been based on experiments wherein clear images were shown to subjects in perfect lighting, says He. The current study instead analyzed visual perception as subjects looked at black-and-white images degraded until they were difficult to recognize. Nineteen subjects were shown 33 such obscured "Mooney images" -- 17 of animals and 16 humanmade objects -- in a particular order. They viewed each obscured image six times, then a corresponding clear version once to achieve recognition, and then blurred images again six times after. Following the presentation of each blurred image, subjects were asked if they could name the object shown.
As the subjects sought to recognize images, the researchers "took pictures" of their brains every two seconds using functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI). The technology lights up with increased blood flow, which is known to happen as brain cells are turned on during a specific task. The team's 7 Tesla scanner offered a more than three-fold improvement in resolution over past studies using standard 3 Tesla scanners, for extremely precise fMRI-based measurement of vision-related nerve circuit activity patterns.
After seeing the clear version of each image, the study subjects were more than twice as likely to recognize what they were looking at when again shown the obscured version as they were of recognizing it before seeing the clear version. They had been "forced" to use a stored representation of clear images, called priors, to better recognize related, blurred versions, says He.
Newfound 'organ' had been missed by standard method for visualizing anatomy -- ScienceDaily
The researchers say that no one saw these spaces before because of the medical field's dependence on the examination of fixed tissue on microscope slides, believed to offer the most accurate view of biological reality. Scientists prepare tissue this examination by treating it with chemicals, slicing it thinly, and dying it to highlight key features. The "fixing" process makes vivid details of cells and structures, but drains away any fluid. The current research team found that the removal of fluid as slides are made causes the connective protein meshwork surrounding once fluid-filled compartments to pancake, like the floors of a collapsed building.
