Can People Accurately Estimate the Calories in Food Images? An Optimised Set of Low- and High- Calorie Images from the food-pics database.

Calorie intake plays an important role in maintaining a healthy weight. As such, researchers often use the calorie content of food as a distinction when investigating appetite related brain processes and eating behaviour. This distinction assumes that observers accurately perceive caloric content.

Similar distraction, but differential suppression, for faces and non-face objects: Evidence from behaviour and event-related potentials.

In everyday life we constantly experience distractions. Some distractors might be more distracting than others, for example the human face, which has been shown to be very efficient in attracting attention. Here, we employed the irrelevant-distractor paradigm (Forster & Lavie, 2016) to measure behavioural and neural distraction by completely irrelevant faces or non-faces (cars), while participants performed a letter search task that was more (high-load) or less (low-load) demanding.

Ensemble coding of face identity is present but weaker in congenital prosopagnosia.

Individuals with congenital prosopagnosia (CP) are impaired at identifying individual faces but do not appear to show impairments in extracting the average identity from a group of faces (known as ensemble coding). However, possible deficits in ensemble coding in a previous study (CPs n = 4) may have been masked because CPs relied on pictorial (image) cues rather than identity cues. Here we asked whether a larger sample of CPs (n = 11) would show intact ensemble coding of identity when availability of image cues was minimised.

The average facial expression of a crowd influences impressions of individual expressions.

People can accurately assess the "mood of a crowd" by rapidly extracting the average intensity of all the individual expressions, when the crowd consists of a set of faces comprising different expressions of the same individual. Here, we investigate the processes involved when people judge the expression intensity of individual faces that appear in the context of a more naturalistic crowd of different individuals' faces. We show that judgments of the intensity of happy and angry expressions for individual faces are biased toward the group mean expression intensity, even when the faces are all different individuals.

Ensemble coding of face identity is not independent of the coding of individual identity.

Information about a group of similar objects can be summarized into a compressed code, known as ensemble coding. Ensemble coding of simple stimuli (e.g.

Repetition effects in human ERPs to faces.

In the present paper, we review research conducted over the past 25 years addressing the effects of repeating various kinds of information in faces (e.g., pictorial, spatial configural, identity, semantic) on different components in human event-related brain potentials (ERPs).

Reduced set averaging of face identity in children and adolescents with autism.

Individuals with autism have difficulty abstracting and updating average representations from their diet of faces. These averages function as perceptual norms for coding faces, and poorly calibrated norms may contribute to face recognition difficulties in autism. Another kind of average, known as an ensemble representation, can be abstracted from briefly glimpsed sets of faces.

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.

Viewers extract mean and individual identity from sets of famous faces.

When viewers are shown sets of similar objects (for example circles), they may extract summary information (e.g., average size) while retaining almost no information about the individual items.

Attentional spread in deaf and hearing participants: face and object distractor processing under perceptual load.

The case of human deafness constitutes a unique opportunity to examine possible consequences for perceptual processing due to altered sensory experiences. We tested whether deaf--in contrast to hearing--individuals are more susceptible to visual distraction from peripheral than from central face versus object stimuli. The participants were required to classify the gender of a target male or female symbol presented either alone (low perceptual load) or together with three filler symbols (high perceptual load), while ignoring gender-congruent or -incongruent face versus object distractors presented at central or peripheral positions.

Combined effects of attention and inversion on event-related potentials to human bodies and faces.

We investigated effects of attentional load and inversion on event-related potentials to body or face distractors. Participants performed demanding (high load) or less demanding (low load) unrelated letter-search tasks. Bodies and faces were intact (Experiment 1) or without heads or eyes (Experiment 2).

Face and object encoding under perceptual load: ERP evidence.

According to the perceptual load theory, processing of a task-irrelevant distractor is abolished when attentional resources are fully consumed by task-relevant material. As an exception, however, famous faces have been shown to elicit repetition modulations in event-related potentials - an N250r - despite high load at initial presentation, suggesting preserved face-encoding. Here, we recorded N250r repetition modulations by unfamiliar faces, hands, and houses, and tested face specificity of preserved encoding under high load.

Perceptual load manipulation reveals sensitivity of the face-selective N170 to attention.

It has been controversial whether the face-sensitive N170 is affected by selective attention. We manipulated attention sensu Lavie's perceptual load theory to short (200 ms) presentations of task-irrelevant unfamiliar faces or houses, while participants identified superimposed target letters 'X' versus 'N'. These targets were strings of either six identical (low load) or six different letters (high load).

N250r ERP repetition effects from distractor faces when attending to another face under load: Evidence for a face attention resource.

Recently, evidence for a face-specific attentional resource was suggested, which limits simultaneous processing to only one face. In the present Experiment 1, we manipulated perceptual load using two central item types (CITs: small central buildings or unfamiliar faces). To test whether distractor face processing is effectively prevented by face targets, CITs were superimposed on large famous distractor faces.

Perceiving age and gender in unfamiliar faces: brain potential evidence for implicit and explicit person categorization.

We used repetition priming to investigate implicit and explicit processes of unfamiliar face categorization. During prime and test phases, participants categorized unfamiliar faces according to either age or gender. Faces presented at test were either new or primed in a task-congruent (same task during priming and test) or incongruent (different tasks) condition.

N250r and N400 ERP correlates of immediate famous face repetition are independent of perceptual load.

It is a matter of considerable debate whether attention to initial stimulus presentations is required for repetition-related neural modulations to occur. Recently, it has been assumed that faces are particularly hard to ignore, and can capture attention in a reflexive manner. In line with this idea, electrophysiological evidence for long-term repetition effects of unattended famous faces has been reported.

Event-related potential correlates of repetition priming for ignored faces.

An attentional capacity limit was recently suggested for faces, such that only one face can be processed at a time. We measured interference and repetition priming caused by irrelevant distractor faces. Participants initially performed male/female judgments for central faces or symbols flanked by distractor faces.