Socially Communicative Eye Contact and Gender Affect Memory.

Because of their value as a socially communicative cue, researchers have strived to understand how the gaze of other people influences a variety of cognitive processes. Recent work in social attention suggests that the use of images of people in laboratory studies, as a substitute for real people, may not effectively test socially communicative aspects of eye gaze. As attention affects many other cognitive processes, it is likely that social attention between real individuals could also affect other cognitive processes, such as memory.

Eye Contact Is a Two-Way Street: Arousal Is Elicited by the Sending and Receiving of Eye Gaze Information.

Research shows that arousal is significantly enhanced while participants make eye contact with a live person compared to viewing a picture of direct or averted gaze. Recent research has pointed toward the potential for social interaction as a possible driving force behind the arousal enhancement. That is, eye gaze is not only a signal perceived but also a signal sent out in order to communicate with others.

Eye contact affects attention more than arousal as revealed by prospective time estimation.

Eye contact can both increase arousal and engage attention. Because these two changes impact time estimation differently, we were able to use a prospective time estimation task to assess the relative changes in arousal and attention during eye contact. Pairs of participants made a 1-minute prospective time estimate while sitting side-by-side and performing three different gaze trials: looking at the wall away from their partner (baseline/away trials), looking at their partner's profile (profile trials), or making eye contact with their partner (eye contact trials).

The duality of gaze: eyes extract and signal social information during sustained cooperative and competitive dyadic gaze.

In contrast to non-human primate eyes, which have a dark sclera surrounding a dark iris, human eyes have a white sclera that surrounds a dark iris. This high contrast morphology allows humans to determine quickly and easily where others are looking and infer what they are attending to. In recent years an enormous body of work has used photos and schematic images of faces to study these aspects of social attention, e.

Do you see what I hear? Vantage point preference and visual dominance in a time-space synaesthete.

Time-space synaesthetes "see" time units organized in a spatial form. While the structure might be invariant for most synaesthetes, the perspective by which some view their calendar is somewhat flexible. One well-studied synaesthete L adopts different viewpoints for months seen vs.

The frustrating effects of just missing the jackpot: slot machine near-misses trigger large skin conductance responses, but no post-reinforcement pauses.

Near-misses in slot machines resemble jackpot wins but fall just short. Previous research has demonstrated that near-misses are behaviorally reinforcing despite the absence of monetary reward. We assessed the hedonic properties of near-misses by measuring the time between outcome delivery and the initiation of the next spin-the post-reinforcement pause (PRP) and skin conductance responses (SCRs) for losses, near-misses, and a range of wins (5, 15, 25, 50 or 250 credits) while participants (N = 122) played a slot machine simulator.

The automaticity of vantage point shifts within a synaesthetes' spatial calendar.

Time-space synaesthetes report that time units (e.g., months, days, hours) occupy idiosyncratic spatial locations.

9 is always on top: assessing the automaticity of synaesthetic number-forms.

For number-form synaesthetes, digits occupy idiosyncratic spatial locations. Atypical to the mental number line that extends horizontally, the synaesthete (L) experiences the numbers 1-10 vertically. We used a spatial cueing task to demonstrate that L's attention could be automatically directed to locations within her number-space - being faster to detect targets appearing in synaesthetically cued locations.

A different outlook on time: visual and auditory month names elicit different mental vantage points for a time-space synaesthete.

Synaesthesia is a fascinating condition whereby individuals report extraordinary experiences when presented with ordinary stimuli. Here we examined an individual (L) who experiences time units (i.e.

The ups and downs (and lefts and rights) of synaesthetic number forms: validation from spatial cueing and SNARC-type tasks.

Typically, numbers are spatially represented using a mental 'number line' running from left to right. Individuals with number-form synaesthesia experience numbers as occupying specific spatial coordinates that are much more complex than a typical number line. Two synaesthetes (L and B) describe experiencing the numbers 1 through 10 running vertically from bottom to top, 10-20 horizontally from left to right, 21-40 from right to left, etc.

Effects of seeing and hearing speech on speech production: a response time study.

Research demonstrates that listening to and viewing speech excites tongue and lip motor areas involved in speech production. This perceptual-motor relationship was investigated behaviourally by presenting video clips of a speaker producing vowel-consonant-vowel syllables in three conditions: visual-only, audio-only, and audiovisual. Participants identified target letters that were flashed over the mouth during the video, either manually or verbally as quickly as possible.

Observation of static gestures influences speech production.

Research investigating 'mirror neurons' has demonstrated the presence of an observation-execution matching system in humans. One hypothesized role for this system might be to aid in action understanding by encoding the underlying intentions of the actor. To investigate this hypothesis, we asked participants to observe photographs of an actor making orofacial gestures (implying verbal or non-verbal acts), and to produce syllables that were compatible or incompatible with the gesture they observed.

Multisensory integration of speech signals: the relationship between space and time.

Integrating audiovisual cues for simple events is affected when sources are separated in space and time. By contrast, audiovisual perception of speech appears resilient when either spatial or temporal disparities exist. We investigated whether speech perception is sensitive to the combination of spatial and temporal inconsistencies.