Diurnal variation of visual function and the signs and symptoms of dry eye.

Purpose: Subjects with dry eye often complain of disturbances in visual function and worsening of symptoms in the evening. To clinically substantiate these reports of diurnal variations, the present study tested subjects with dry eye on a series of visual function and ocular physiology measures.

Methods: Twenty-one subjects with dry eye were enrolled and underwent ophthalmic examinations, including best spectacle-corrected visual acuity, visual function decay as measured by the interblink interval visual acuity decay test without ocular anesthetic, reading rate test, slit-lamp biomicroscopy, and tear film breakup time.

Social contact and other-race face processing in the human brain.

The present study investigated the influence social factors upon the neural processing of faces of other races using event-related potentials. A multi-tiered approach was used to identify face-specific stages of processing, to test for effects of race-of-face upon processing at these stages and to evaluate the impact of social contact and individuating experience upon these effects. The results showed that race-of-face has significant effects upon face processing, starting from early perceptual stages of structural encoding, and that social factors may play an important role in mediating these effects.

An encoding advantage for own-race versus other-race faces.

Studies have shown that individuals are better able to recognise the faces of people from their own race than the faces of people from other races. Although the so-called own-race effect has been generally regarded as an advantage in recognition memory, differences in the processing of the own-race versus other-race faces might also be found at the earlier stages of perceptual encoding. In this study, the perceptual basis of the own-race effect was investigated by generating a continuum of images by morphing an East Asian parent face with a Caucasian parent face.