Changes in women’s facial skin color over the ovulatory cycle are not detectable by the human visual system

Human ovulation is not advertised, as it is in several primate species, by conspicuous sexual swellings. However, there is increasing evidence that the attractiveness of women’s body odor, voice, and facial appearance peak during the fertile phase of their ovulatory cycle. Cycle effects on facial attractiveness may be underpinned by changes in facial skin color, but it is not clear if skin color varies cyclically in humans or if any changes are detectable. To test these questions we photographed women daily for at least one cycle. Changes in facial skin redness and luminance were then quantified by mapping the digital images to human long, medium, and shortwave visual receptors. We find cyclic variation in skin redness, but not luminance. Redness decreases rapidly after menstrual onset, increases in the days before ovulation, and remains high through the luteal phase. However, we also show that this variation is unlikely to be detectable by the human visual system. We conclude that changes in skin color are not responsible for the effects of the ovulatory cycle on women’s attractiveness

Individual Differences in Performance Speed Are Associated With a Positivity/Negativity Bias. An ERP and Behavioral Study

There is a current dispute over the origins, incidence, and development of Positivity Bias, i.e., preferential processing of positive relative to negative information. We addressed this question using a multi-method technique of behavioral, psychometric and event-related potential (ERP) measures in a lexical decision task (LDT). Twenty-four university students (11 female) participated (age range 18–26), but four were omitted owing to data issues. Participants were classified as Positivity Biased (PB) if their LDT responses to positive words were faster than negative words, and vice versa for those classified as Negativity Biased (NB), leading to a group of 11 PB participants and a group of 9 NB participants. Interestingly, the PB group was significantly faster overall than the NB group and had significantly shorter P2 component ERP latencies in the left occipital region. Furthermore, the PB group had significantly higher scores for expressive suppression (ES), together with higher scores for Crystallized Knowledge and for cognitive reappraisal (CR). These results suggest that around 55% of the students had Positivity Bias, and these were more efficient in processing information and had better emotion regulation abilities than those with a Negativity Bias

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Dissociation of sensitivity to spatial frequency in word and face preferential areas of the fusiform gyrus

Different cortical regions within the ventral occipitotemporal junction have been reported to show preferential responses to particular objects. Thus, it is argued that there is evidence for a left-lateralized visual word form area and a right-lateralized fusiform face area, but the unique specialization of these areas remains controversial. Words are characterized by greater power in the high spatial frequency (SF) range, whereas faces comprise a broader range of high and low frequencies. We investigated how these high-order visual association areas respond to simple sine-wave gratings that varied in SF. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrated lateralization of activity that was concordant with the low-level visual property of words and faces; left occipitotemporal cortex is more strongly activated by high than by low SF gratings, whereas the right occipitotemporal cortex responded more to low than high spatial frequencies. Therefore, the SF of a visual stimulus may bias the lateralization of processing irrespective of its higher order properties