An Intersectional Perspective on Age Stereotypes: Bisexual and Gay Men are Stereotyped as Younger than Heterosexual Men Even When Aging.

We analyzed the age stereotypes of heterosexual, gay, and bisexual men and the implications of such stereotypes for the conceptualization of older gay and bisexual men, specifically. In Study 1a ( = 158) and 1b ( = 155), we found that compared to heterosexual men, participants stereotyped gay men more on young- than elderly-stereotypical traits. Participants represented bisexual men not as "somewhere in between" the stereotypes about heterosexual and gay men, but were characterized more by young- than elderly-stereotypical traits.

The temporal dynamics of emotion comparison depends on low-level attentional factors.

Humans are predisposed to attend to emotions conveyed by facial expressions. However, compulsory attraction to emotions gets challenging when multiple emotional stimuli compete for attention, as in the emotion comparison task. In this task, participants are asked to choose which of two simultaneously presented faces displays the most positive (happiest) or negative (angriest) emotion.

Mood regulates the physiological response to whole-body vibration at low intensity.

In the present study we evaluated the relationship between human vibrational comfort and psychophysiological processes. We exposed twenty-one participants to three levels of whole-body vibration at low intensity inside a full-scale mock-up of a ship cabin. Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) activity, mood and well-being state during each level of vibration exposure were measured.

Attentional capture in emotion comparison is orientation independent.

Recent findings on emotion comparison show a typical pattern of motor reactivity rising from attentional capture. When pairs of emotional faces are presented simultaneously, the most intense emotional face is recognized faster (Emotional Semantic Congruency-ESC effect). Furthermore, a global response speed advantage for emotional pairs with positive rather than negative average emotion intensity is observed (i.

Snarcing with a phone: The role of order in spatial-numerical associations is revealed by context and task demands.

Previous literature on the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect examined which factors modulate spatial-numerical associations. Recently, the role of order in the SNARC effect has been debated, and further research is necessary to better understand its contribution. The present study investigated how the order elicited by the context of the stimuli and by task demands interact.

Acoustic comfort depends on the psychological state of the individual.

Recent studies have shown that comfort can be influenced more by psychological processes than from the characteristics of environmental stimulation. This is relevant for different industrial sectors, where comfort is defined only as a function of the intensity of external stimuli. In the present study, we measured physiological and psychological comfort during the exposure to four levels of acoustic noise [from 45 to 55 dB(A)] corresponding to different comfort classes inside a full-scale mock-up of a cruise ship cabin.

Large as being on top of the world and small as hitting the roof: a common magnitude representation for the comparison of emotions and numbers.

Previous work on the direct speed-intensity association (SIA) on comparative judgement tasks involved spatially distributed responses over spatially distributed stimuli with high motivational significance like facial expressions of emotions. This raises the possibility that the inferred stimulus-driven regulation of lateralized motor reactivity described by SIA, which was against the one expected on the basis of a valence-specific lateral bias, was entirely due to attentional capture from motivational significance (beyond numerical cognition). In order to establish the relevance of numerical cognition on the regulation of attentional capture we ran two complementary experiments.

Mid-level Priming by Completion vs. Mosaic Solutions.

We report two experiments on the role of mid-level processes in image segmentation and completion. In the primed matching task of Experiment 1, a cue→prime sequence was presented before the imperative stimulus consisting of target shapes with positive versus negative contour curvature polarity and one versus two axes of mirror symmetry. Priming shapes were included in two composite occlusion displays with the same T-junction information and different geometric features supporting a distinct balance between completion and mosaic solutions.

Emotional Semantic Congruency based on stimulus driven comparative judgements.

A common cognitive process in everyday life consists in the comparative judgements of emotions given a pair of facial expressions and the choice of the most positive/negative among them. Results from three experiments on complete-facial expressions (happy/angry) and mixed-facial expressions (neutral/happy-or-angry) pairs viewed with (Experiment 1 and 3) or without (Experiment 2) foveation and performed in conditions in which valence was either task relevant (Experiment 1 and 2) or task irrelevant (Experiment 3), show that comparative judgements of emotions are stimulus driven. Judgements' speed increased as the target absolute emotion intensity grew larger together with the average emotion of the pair, irrespective of the compatibility between the valence and the side of motor response: a semantic congruency effect in the domain of emotion.

SNARC-like compatibility effects for physical and phenomenal magnitudes: a study on visual illusions.

Both numerical and non-numerical magnitudes elicit similar Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effects, with small magnitudes associated with left hand responses and large magnitudes associated with right hand responses (Dehaene et al., J Exp Psychol Gen 122(3), 371, 1993). In the present study, we investigated whether the phenomenal size of visual illusions elicits the same SNARC-like effect revealed for the physical size of pictorial surfaces.

Don't worry, be active: how to facilitate the detection of errors in immersive virtual environments.

The current research aims to study the link between the type of vision experienced in a collaborative immersive virtual environment (active vs. multiple passive), the type of error one looks for during a cooperative multi-user exploration of a design project (affordance vs. perceptual violations), and the type of setting in which multi-user perform (field in Experiment 1 vs.

Investigating the relationship between intergroup physical contact and attitudes towards foreigners: the mediating role of quality of intergroup contact.

Recent research has shown that a brief, casual touch administered by an outgroup member reduces prejudice towards the group to which the toucher belongs. In this study, we take the research on physical contact and prejudice a step further by addressing the relation between individuals' amount of Experienced Intergroup Physical Contact (EIPC), across distinct contexts and involving different body parts, and attitudes towards foreign people. Specifically, we hypothesized that the amount of EIPC would be positively associated with both quantity and quality of intergroup contact, but that only quality would mediate the relationship between the amount of EIPC and outgroup attitudes, quality being more directly linked to the evaluative component of outgroup attitudes.

Understanding the mechanisms behind the sexualized-body inversion hypothesis: The role of asymmetry and attention biases.

A controversial hypothesis, named the Sexualized Body Inversion Hypothesis (SBIH), claims similar visual processing of sexually objectified women (i.e., with a focus on the sexual body parts) and inanimate objects as indicated by an absence of the inversion effect for both type of stimuli.

Age correction in cognitive, linguistic, and motor domains for infants born preterm: an analysis of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, Third Edition developmental patterns.

Aim: To verify whether it is appropriate to use age correction for infants born preterm in all the developmental domains (cognitive, linguistic, and motor) considered by the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, Third Edition (Bayley-III).

Method: Seventy-three infants born preterm (26-35wks) without major neurological sequelae and 67 infants born at term were assessed at 12 months (corrected age for infants born preterm). The performance of the infants born preterm was assessed with two different evaluations: scores based on uncorrected age and scores based on corrected age.

A biphasic effect of cross-modal priming on visual shape recognition.

We used a cross-modal priming paradigm to evoke a biphasic effect in visual short-term memory. Participants were required to match the memorandum (a visual shape, either spiky or curvy) to a delayed probe (a shape belonging to the same category). In two-thirds of trials the sequence of shapes was accompanied by a task-irrelevant sound (either tzk or upo, cross-modally correspondent to spiky and curvy shape categories, respectively).

Automatic female dehumanization across the menstrual cycle.

In this study, we investigate whether hormonal shifts during the menstrual cycle contribute to the dehumanization of other women and men. Female participants with different levels of likelihood of conception (LoC) completed a semantic priming paradigm in a lexical decision task. When the word 'woman' was the prime, animal words were more accessible in high versus low LoC whereas human words were more inhibited in the high versus low LoC.

Faster but Less Careful Prehension in Presence of High, Rather than Low, Social Status Attendees.

Ample evidence attests that social intention, elicited through gestures explicitly signaling a request of communicative intention, affects the patterning of hand movement kinematics. The current study goes beyond the effect of social intention and addresses whether the same action of reaching to grasp an object for placing it in an end target position within or without a monitoring attendee's peripersonal space, can be moulded by pure social factors in general, and by social facilitation in particular. A motion tracking system (Optotrak Certus) was used to record motor acts.

Bodily action penetrates affective perception.

Fantoni & Gerbino (2014) showed that subtle postural shifts associated with reaching can have a strong hedonic impact and affect how actors experience facial expressions of emotion. Using a novel Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure (MAMIP), they found consistent congruency effects in participants who performed a facial emotion identification task after a sequence of visually-guided reaches: a face perceived as neutral in a baseline condition appeared slightly happy after comfortable actions and slightly angry after uncomfortable actions. However, skeptics about the penetrability of perception (Zeimbekis & Raftopoulos, 2015) would consider such evidence insufficient to demonstrate that observer's internal states induced by action comfort/discomfort affect perception in a top-down fashion.

Action valence and affective perception.

Respecting all constraints proposed by Firestone & Scholl (F&S), we have shown that perceived facial expressions of emotion depend on the congruency between bodily action (comfort/discomfort) and target emotion (happiness/anger) valence. Our studies challenge any bold claim against penetrability of perception and suggest that perceptual theory can benefit from demonstrations of how - under controlled circumstances - observer's states can mold expressive qualities.

Web party effect: a cocktail party effect in the web environment.

In goal-directed web navigation, labels compete for selection: this process often involves knowledge integration and requires selective attention to manage the dizziness of web layouts. Here we ask whether the competition for selection depends on all web navigation options or only on those options that are more likely to be useful for information seeking, and provide evidence in favor of the latter alternative. Participants in our experiment navigated a representative set of real websites of variable complexity, in order to reach an information goal located two clicks away from the starting home page.

Body actions change the appearance of facial expressions.

Perception, cognition, and emotion do not operate along segregated pathways; rather, their adaptive interaction is supported by various sources of evidence. For instance, the aesthetic appraisal of powerful mood inducers like music can bias the facial expression of emotions towards mood congruency. In four experiments we showed similar mood-congruency effects elicited by the comfort/discomfort of body actions.

Misperception of rigidity from actively generated optic flow.

It is conventionally assumed that the goal of the visual system is to derive a perceptual representation that is a veridical reconstruction of the external world: a reconstruction that leads to optimal accuracy and precision of metric estimates, given sensory information. For example, 3-D structure is thought to be veridically recovered from optic flow signals in combination with egocentric motion information and assumptions of the stationarity and rigidity of the external world. This theory predicts veridical perceptual judgments under conditions that mimic natural viewing, while ascribing nonoptimality under laboratory conditions to unreliable or insufficient sensory information--for example, the lack of natural and measurable observer motion.

Visuomotor adaptation changes stereoscopic depth perception and tactile discrimination.

Perceptual judgments of relative depth from binocular disparity are systematically distorted in humans, despite in principle having access to reliable 3D information. Interestingly, these distortions vanish at a natural grasping distance, as if perceived stereo depth is contingent on a specific reference distance for depth-disparity scaling that corresponds to the length of our arm. Here we show that the brain's representation of the arm indeed powerfully modulates depth perception, and that this internal calibration can be quickly updated.

"Connectability" matters too: completion theories need to be complete.

Kogo and Wagemans provide an intriguing way of assigning a polarity value to closed edges in fragmented images (solving the border ownership problem), but their model lacks generality and disregards connectability as a relevant aspect of visual completion. The lack of generality depends on considering concave disk sectors (pacmen) as the main inducers of illusory contours. Connectability is crucial for defining the occurrence, the salience and the shape of completed contours.

Perceived surface slant is systematically biased in the actively-generated optic flow.

Humans make systematic errors in the 3D interpretation of the optic flow in both passive and active vision. These systematic distortions can be predicted by a biologically-inspired model which disregards self-motion information resulting from head movements (Caudek, Fantoni, & Domini 2011). Here, we tested two predictions of this model: (1) A plane that is stationary in an earth-fixed reference frame will be perceived as changing its slant if the movement of the observer's head causes a variation of the optic flow; (2) a surface that rotates in an earth-fixed reference frame will be perceived to be stationary, if the surface rotation is appropriately yoked to the head movement so as to generate a variation of the surface slant but not of the optic flow.