Anchoring has little effect when forming first impressions of facial attractiveness.

First impressions based on facial appearance affect our behaviour towards others. Since the same face will appear different across images, over time, and so on, our impressions may not be equally weighted across exposures but are instead disproportionately influenced by earlier or later instances. Here, we followed up on previous work which identified an anchoring effect, whereby higher attractiveness ratings were given to a person after viewing naturally varying images of their face presented in descending (high-to-low), rather than ascending (low-to-high), order of attractiveness of these images.

From Pictures to the People in Them: Averaging Within-Person Variability Leads to Face Familiarization.

Familiar faces can be confidently recognized despite sometimes radical changes in their appearance. Exposure to within-person variability-differences in facial characteristics over successive encounters-contributes to face familiarization. Research also suggests that viewers create mental averages of the different views of faces they encounter while learning them.

Within-person variability contributes to more durable learning of faces.

Exposure to the natural, unsystematic within-person variability present across different encounters with a face (e.g., differences in emotion, makeup, and hairstyle) increases the likelihood the face will be recognized despite changes in appearance.

Can change detection succeed when change localization fails?

Statistical summary representations (SSRs) are thought to be computed by the visual system to provide a rapid summary of the properties of sets of similar objects. Recently, it has been suggested that a change in the statistical properties of a set can be identified even when changes to the individual items comprising the set cannot. Haberman and Whitney (2011) showed that subjects were correctly able to report which of 2 consecutively presented sets of faces was, on average, happier, even when participants were unable to localize any of the items contributing to this change.

The single lineup paradigm: A new way to manipulate target presence in eyewitness identification experiments.

The suspect in eyewitness lineups may be guilty or innocent. These possibilities are traditionally simulated in eyewitness identification studies using a dual-lineup paradigm: All witnesses observe the same perpetrator and then receive one of two lineups. In this paradigm, the suspect's guilt is manipulated by including the perpetrator in one lineup and an innocent suspect in the other.

Attention capture without awareness in a non-spatial selection task.

Distractors presented prior to a critical target in a rapid sequence of visually-presented items induce a lag-dependent deficit in target identification, particularly when the distractor shares a task-relevant feature of the target. Presumably, such capture of central attention is important for bringing a target into awareness. The results of the present investigation suggest that greater capture of attention by a distractor is not accompanied by greater awareness of it.

Online attention modification for social anxiety disorder: replication of a randomized controlled trial.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) models posit vigilance for external social threat cues and exacerbated self-focused attention as key in disorder development and maintenance. Evidence indicates a modified dot-probe protocol may reduce symptoms of SAD; however, the efficacy when compared to a standard protocol and long-term maintenance of treatment gains remains unclear. Furthermore, the efficacy of such protocols on SAD-related constructs remains relatively unknown.

Incidental statistical summary representation over time.

Information taken in by the human visual system allows individuals to form statistical representations of sets of items. One's knowledge of natural categories includes statistical information, such as average size of category members and the upper and lower boundaries of the set. Previous research suggests that when subjects attend to a particular dimension of a set of items presented over an extended duration, they quickly learn about the central tendency of the set.

A randomized controlled trial of attention modification for social anxiety disorder.

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) models implicate social threat cue vigilance (i.e., attentional biases) in symptom development and maintenance.

Flexible cue combination in the guidance of attention in visual search.

Hodsoll and Humphreys (2001) have assessed the relative contributions of stimulus-driven and user-driven knowledge on linearly- and nonlinearly separable searches. However, the target feature used to determine linear separability in their task (i.e.

Suspect filler similarity in eyewitness lineups: a literature review and a novel methodology.

Eyewitness lineups typically contain a suspect (guilty or innocent) and fillers (known innocents). The degree to which fillers should resemble the suspect is a complex issue that has yet to be resolved. Previously, researchers have voiced concern that eyewitnesses would be unable to identify their target from a lineup containing highly similar fillers; however, our literature review suggests highly similar fillers have only rarely been shown to have this effect.

Intentionally forgetting other-race faces: costs and benefits?

Eyewitnesses to events with multiple actors might be aware that during a subsequent investigation some actors will need to be remembered and others can be forgotten. Research on the directed-forgetting procedure suggests that when some information is cued to be forgotten, retention of other information is enhanced. In three experiments, directed-forgetting conditions were compared with control conditions to assess potential costs and benefits of forgetting other-race faces.

Size averaging of irrelevant stimuli cannot be prevented.

Research suggests that subjects can compute the mean size of two sets of interspersed objects concurrently, but that doing so incurs a cost of dividing attention across the two sets. Alternatively, costs may arise from failing to exclude irrelevant items from the calculation of mean size. Here, we examined whether attention can be selectively deployed to prevent the inclusion of items from an irrelevant, concurrently displayed set in the computation of the relevant set's mean size.

Size and emotion averaging: costs of dividing attention after all.

Perceptual averaging is a process by which sets of similar items are represented by summary statistics such as their average size, luminance, or orientation. Researchers have argued that this process is automatic, able to be carried out without interference from concurrent processing. Here, we challenge this conclusion and demonstrate a reliable cost of computing the mean size of circles distinguished by colour (Experiments 1 and 2) and the mean emotionality of faces distinguished by sex (Experiment 3).

Change detection inflates confidence on a subsequent recognition task.

A face viewed under good encoding conditions is more likely to be remembered than a face viewed under poor encoding conditions. In four experiments we investigated how encoding conditions affected confidence in recognising faces from line-ups. Participants performed a change detection task followed by a recognition task and then rated how confident they were in their recognition accuracy.

The whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts: perceptual averaging in the absence of individual item representation.

We tested Ariely's (2001) proposal that the visual system represents the overall statistical properties of sets of objects against alternative accounts of rapid averaging involving sub-sampling strategies. In four experiments, observers could rapidly extract the mean size of a set of circles presented in an RSVP sequence, but could not reliably identify individual members. Experiment 1 contrasted performance on a member identification task with performance on a mean judgment task, and showed that the tasks could be dissociated based on whether the test probe was presented before or after the sequence, suggesting that member identification and mean judgment are subserved by different mechanisms.

The relationship between collisions and pseudoneglect: is it right?

When walking through narrow doorways people collide more frequently on the right side than on the left. This rightward collision bias has been attributed to pseudoneglect. Originally pseudoneglect was defined as leftward errors on a line bisection task; however, the term is used more broadly now to refer to the slight tendency to neglect the right side of space and attend more towards the left.

Rapid averaging? Not so fast!

Previous research suggests that sets of similar items are represented using a rapid averaging mechanism that automatically extracts statistical properties within 50 ms. However, typically in these studies, displays are not masked, so it is possible that the sets are available for longer than this duration. In the present study, using masked displays, we (a) tested a newly proposed strategy for extracting the mean size of a set of circles, and (b) more precisely evaluated the time course of rapid averaging.

A negative compatibility effect in priming of emotional faces.

The negative compatibility effect (NCE) is the surprising result that low-visibility prime arrows facilitate responses to opposite-direction target arrows. Here we compare the priming obtained with simple arrows to the priming of emotions when categorizing human faces, which represents a more naturalistic set of stimuli and for which there are no preexisting response biases. When inverted faces with neutral expressions were presented alongside emotional prime and target faces, only strong positive priming occurred.

The cerebellum mediates conflict resolution.

Regions within the frontal and parietal cortex have been implicated as important neural correlates for cognitive control during conflict resolution. Despite the extensive reciprocal connectivity between the cerebellum and these putatively critical cortical areas, a role for the cerebellum in conflict resolution has never been identified. We used a task-switching paradigm that separates processes related to task-set switching and the management of response conflict independent of motor processing.

Visual similarity in masking and priming: The critical role of task relevance.

Cognitive scientists use rapid image sequences to study both the emergence of conscious perception (visual masking) and the unconscious processes involved in response preparation (masked priming). The present study asked two questions: (1) Does image similarity influence masking and priming in the same way? (2) Are similarity effects in both tasks governed by the extent of feature overlap in the images or only by task-relevant features? Participants in Experiment 1 classified human faces using a single dimension even though the faces varied in three dimensions (emotion, race, sex). Abstract geometric shapes and colors were tested in the same way in Experiment 2.

The rapid extraction of numeric meaning.

Several kinds of statistical properties can be rapidly extracted from visual displays (e.g., luminance and roughness, Olive, A.

Symbolic distance affects two processing loci in the number comparison task.

A dual-task procedure was used to investigate the attentional requirements of number processing. The results show that (1) numeric information in Task 2 can be retrieved in parallel with capacity-demanding processing in Task 1 but (2) comparing two quantities requires central capacity, which is depleted by switching from one task to another. This finding resolves an apparent discrepancy in the literature, in which digit magnitude information has not been retrieved in parallel with a second task (Logan & Schulkind, 2000), despite repeated demonstrations that this information is retrieved autonomously, even when it is deleterious to performance (Henik & Tzelgov, 1982).

Feature binding and episodic retrieval in blindness for congruent stimuli: evidence from analyses of sequential congruency.

Targets are identified more poorly when presented during a congruent cued response than during an incongruent cued response (blindness effect). The authors investigated sequential trial dependencies in the blindness effect. The results show that the size of the blindness effect depends both on the previous cued response-target congruency relationship and on repetition of events from the preceding trial.

Absence of perceptual processing during reconfiguration of task set.

The authors manipulated stimulus contrast and response-stimulus interval in the alternating runs paradigm to investigate whether early processing could be carried out during a task switch. Subjects alternated between judging the magnitude and the parity of a digit. The results suggested that early processing was not carried out during the task switch (Experiment 1), even in the absence of potentially confounding auditory or visual warning signals (Experiment 2).