Changes in performance and bio-mathematical model performance predictions during 45 days of sleep restriction in a simulated space mission.

Lunar habitation and exploration of space beyond low-Earth orbit will require small crews to live in isolation and confinement while maintaining a high level of performance with limited support from mission control. Astronauts only achieve approximately 6 h of sleep per night, but few studies have linked sleep deficiency in space to performance impairment. We studied crewmembers over 45 days during a simulated space mission that included 5 h of sleep opportunity on weekdays and 8 h of sleep on weekends to characterize changes in performance on the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) and subjective fatigue ratings.

Task instructions can accelerate the early preference for social features in naturalistic scenes.

Previous research demonstrated that humans rapidly and reflexively prioritize social features (especially heads and faces) irrespective of their physical saliency when freely viewing naturalistic scenes. In the current study, we investigated whether this preference for social elements already occurs maximally fast during free exploration or whether it is possible to additionally accelerate it by means of top-down instructions. To examine this question, we presented participants with colour photographs of naturalistic scenes containing social features (e.

Investigating overt and covert shifts of attention within social naturalistic scenes.

Eye-tracking studies on social attention have consistently shown that humans prefer to attend to other human beings. Much less is known about whether a similar preference is also evident in covert attentional processes. To enable a direct comparison, this study examined covert and overt attentional guidance within two different experimental setups using complex naturalistic scenes instead of isolated single features.

Orienting towards social features in naturalistic scenes is reflexive.

Saliency-based models of visual attention postulate that, when a scene is freely viewed, attention is predominantly allocated to those elements that stand out in terms of their physical properties. However, eye-tracking studies have shown that saliency models fail to predict gaze behavior accurately when social information is included in an image. Notably, gaze pattern analyses revealed that depictions of human beings are heavily prioritized independent of their low-level physical saliency.

Preferential Processing of Social Features and Their Interplay with Physical Saliency in Complex Naturalistic Scenes.

According to so-called saliency-based attention models, attention during free viewing of visual scenes is particularly allocated to physically salient image regions. In the present study, we assumed that social features in complex naturalistic scenes would be processed preferentially irrespective of their physical saliency. Therefore, we expected worse prediction of gazing behavior by saliency-based attention models when social information is present in the visual field.

Own-race and own-age biases facilitate visual awareness of faces under interocular suppression.

The detection of a face in a visual scene is the first stage in the face processing hierarchy. Although all subsequent, more elaborate face processing depends on the initial detection of a face, surprisingly little is known about the perceptual mechanisms underlying face detection. Recent evidence suggests that relatively hard-wired face detection mechanisms are broadly tuned to all face-like visual patterns as long as they respect the typical spatial configuration of the eyes above the mouth.

The own-age bias in face memory is unrelated to differences in attention--evidence from event-related potentials.

Participants are more accurate at remembering faces from their own relative to a different age group (the own-age bias, or OAB). A recent socio-cognitive account has suggested that differential allocation of attention to old versus young faces underlies this phenomenon. Critically, empirical evidence for a direct relationship between attention to own- versus other-age faces and the OAB in memory is lacking.