Encapsulated social perception of emotional expressions

In this paper I argue that the detection of emotional expressions is, in its early stages, informationally encapsulated. I clarify and defend such a view via the appeal to data from social perception on the visual processing of faces, bodies, facial and bodily expressions. Encapsulated social perception might exist alongside processes that are cognitively penetrated, and that have to do with recognition and categorization, and play a central evolutionary function in preparing early and rapid responses to the emotional stimuli

High frequency oscillations as a correlate of visual perception

“NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in International journal of psychophysiology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in International journal of psychophysiology , 79, 1, (2011) DOI 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2010.07.004Peer reviewedPostprin

Collective frames of reference, recognition, and managers' mental models of competition: a test in two industries

This work was supported by ESRC grant no. R000232883.Managers draw upon sources of collective knowledge to cognitively represent strategic issues. It has also be argued that cognition is embedded in social interaction, enabling managers to recognize of others’ cognitions. In two separate industries, this study found that the influences upon managers’ mental models of their competitive environment include industry membership, organizational membership, and management level. The results indicate further that recognition of others’ mental models may be more pronounced than cognitive similarity.School of Managemen

Contextual modulation of primary visual cortex by auditory signals

Early visual cortex receives non-feedforward input from lateral and top-down connections (Muckli & Petro 2013 Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 23, 195–201. (doi:10.1016/j.conb.2013.01.020)), including long-range projections from auditory areas. Early visual cortex can code for high-level auditory information, with neural patterns representing natural sound stimulation (Vetter et al. 2014 Curr. Biol. 24, 1256–1262. (doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.04.020)). We discuss a number of questions arising from these findings. What is the adaptive function of bimodal representations in visual cortex? What type of information projects from auditory to visual cortex? What are the anatomical constraints of auditory information in V1, for example, periphery versus fovea, superficial versus deep cortical layers? Is there a putative neural mechanism we can infer from human neuroimaging data and recent theoretical accounts of cortex? We also present data showing we can read out high-level auditory information from the activation patterns of early visual cortex even when visual cortex receives simple visual stimulation, suggesting independent channels for visual and auditory signals in V1. We speculate which cellular mechanisms allow V1 to be contextually modulated by auditory input to facilitate perception, cognition and behaviour. Beyond cortical feedback that facilitates perception, we argue that there is also feedback serving counterfactual processing during imagery, dreaming and mind wandering, which is not relevant for immediate perception but for behaviour and cognition over a longer time frame. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Auditory and visual scene analysis’

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Applying psychological science to the CCTV review process: a review of cognitive and ergonomic literature

As CCTV cameras are used more and more often to increase security in communities, police are spending a larger proportion of their resources, including time, in processing CCTV images when investigating crimes that have occurred (Levesley & Martin, 2005; Nichols, 2001). As with all tasks, there are ways to approach this task that will facilitate performance and other approaches that will degrade performance, either by increasing errors or by unnecessarily prolonging the process. A clearer understanding of psychological factors influencing the effectiveness of footage review will facilitate future training in best practice with respect to the review of CCTV footage. The goal of this report is to provide such understanding by reviewing research on footage review, research on related tasks that require similar skills, and experimental laboratory research about the cognitive skills underpinning the task. The report is organised to address five challenges to effectiveness of CCTV review: the effects of the degraded nature of CCTV footage, distractions and interrupts, the length of the task, inappropriate mindset, and variability in people’s abilities and experience. Recommendations for optimising CCTV footage review include (1) doing a cognitive task analysis to increase understanding of the ways in which performance might be limited, (2) exploiting technology advances to maximise the perceptual quality of the footage (3) training people to improve the flexibility of their mindset as they perceive and interpret the images seen, (4) monitoring performance either on an ongoing basis, by using psychophysiological measures of alertness, or periodically, by testing screeners’ ability to find evidence in footage developed for such testing, and (5) evaluating the relevance of possible selection tests to screen effective from ineffective screener