The Implicit Nature of the Anti-Fat Bias

The stigmatization and discrimination of obese persons is pervasive in almost any domain of living. At the explicit level, obese people are associated with a wide range of negative characteristics. Furthermore, research with the implicit association test revealed the implicit nature of the anti-fat bias. Building upon these findings, the present study used event-related brain potential recordings in order to assess key features of implicit processes. Participants viewed a series of schematic portrayals of anorexic, medium, and obese body shapes and tools. In a passive viewing condition, participants were asked to simply look at the stimuli and, in a distraction condition, participants were asked to detect a specific tool. Viewing obese body images, as compared to medium or anorexic body images, elicited a positive potential shift over fronto-central sites and a relative negative potential over occipito-temporal regions in a time window from ∼190 to 250 ms. This evaluative brain response to obese body images was similarly pronounced while participants performed a distraction task. Thus, the findings suggest that the anti-fat bias may occur spontaneously, unintentionally, and independent of explicit processing goals. A troublesome picture is emerging in Western cultures suggesting that obese-ism may appear to be as inevitable as a reflex

Neural Signals of Video Advertisement Liking:Insights into Psychological Processes and their Temporal Dynamics

What drives the liking of video advertisements? The authors analyzed neural signals during ad exposure from three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data sets (113 participants from two countries watching 85 video ads) with automated meta-analytic decoding (Neurosynth). These brain-based measures of psychological processes—including perception and language (information processing), executive function and memory (cognitive functions), and social cognition and emotion (social-affective response)—predicted subsequent self-report ad liking, with emotion and memory being the earliest predictorsafter the first three seconds. Over the span of ad exposure, while the predictiveness of emotion peaked early and fell, that of social cognition had a peak-and-stable pattern, followed by a late peak of predictiveness in perception and executive function.At the aggregate level, neural signals—especially those associated with social-affective response—improved the prediction of out-of-sample ad liking compared with traditional anatomically based neuroimaging analysis and self-report liking. Finally, earlyonset social-affective response predicted population ad liking in a behavioral replication. Overall, this study helps delineate the psychological mechanisms underlying ad processing and ad liking and proposes a novel neuroscience-based approach for generating psychological insights and improving out-of-sample predictions

DESIGNING FOR THE SUBCONSCIOUS: A NEUROIS STUDY OF PRIMING AND IDEA GENERATION IN ELECTRONIC BRAINSTORMING

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Business, 2014There has been extensive research on electronic brainstorming (EBS) over the past two decades, yet little is known about how best to design technology to enhance overall team performance. This dissertation seeks to open a new door in EBS design: designing a system for the individual's subconscious. Before effective design interventions can be developed, the cognitive underpinnings of individual-level EBS interactions must be elucidated. These studies provide insight into the core of this issue by examining the neurophysiological correlates of the ideation process, specifically using electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and skin conductance to examine priming-induced changes in cognition and emotion during an EBS session. Furthermore, it extends prior research on the use of priming to enhance EBS performance, creating new design guidelines for EBS systems that are designed for the user's subconscious. The findings show that achievement priming changes cognition in areas of the brain related to creativity which correspond with increases in idea fluency and creativity. While the implications of this study will be directly applicable to design of EBS technology, future studies can examine the use of priming in other collaboration tools. There may also be implications for the design of other forms of technology. The use of NeuroIS to more fully understand information processing in teams can also enhance the collaboration literature, in that it can illuminate individual cognition limitations in team interactions and enhance our understanding of which aspects of team interactions have the biggest "bang for their buck" from a cognitive standpoint. These findings provide several avenues for future research

Look me in the eyes: A survey of eye and gaze animation for virtual agents and artificial systems

International audienceA person's emotions and state of mind are apparent in their face and eyes. As a Latin proverb states: "The face is the portrait of the mind; the eyes, its informers.". This presents a huge challenge for computer graphics researchers in the generation of artificial entities that aim to replicate the movement and appearance of the human eye, which is so important in human-human interactions. This State of the Art Report provides an overview of the efforts made on tackling this challenging task. As with many topics in Computer Graphics, a cross-disciplinary approach is required to fully understand the workings of the eye in the transmission of information to the user. We discuss the movement of the eyeballs, eyelids, and the head from a physiological perspective and how these movements can be modelled, rendered and animated in computer graphics applications. Further, we present recent research from psychology and sociology that seeks to understand higher level behaviours, such as attention and eye-gaze, during the expression of emotion or during conversation, and how they are synthesised in Computer Graphics and Robotics

How do we process pain in others? Investigating behavioral and neural correlates of empathy

Experiencing pain in others is a phenomenon which we encounter regularly in everyday-life. The empathic response to pain and the involved brain regions are quite well investigated. However, it is still unclear whether and when empathic bottom-up and top-down processes influence information processing. Thus, the first research question of this dissertation thesis was how do we experience empathy and what is the time course of the underlying processes from stimulus encoding over categorization to motor execution (Study 1). A further aim was to determine the influence of the target's racial background on the empathy-related processes (Study 2). The second main strand of this work concerned the motivational consequences of empathy, because it is still an open question when empathy results in prosocial behavior. Therefore, the occurrence of empathic concern and personal distress implying an altruistic and an egoistic motivation, respectively, was investigated (Study 3). In order to address these issues, in Study 1, participants were asked to judge the painfulness of pictures displaying body parts in painful or neutral situations or to count the displayed body parts. Meanwhile, EEG and response force were recorded. Study 2 was very similar to Study 1, but the pictures displayed fair- and dark-colored hands and the counting task was replaced by a skin color judgment task. In Study 3, situational empathic concern and personal distress to pictures of persons in physical and psychological pain were measured, while participants were asked to maintain an other-focused perspective. Then, the situational measures were related to other factors like affect and the participant's disposition to experience empathic concern and personal distress. Study 1 and 2 indicated empathic automatic influences on the early encoding stage, later controlled influences on the categorization stage, whereas the effects on the motor processing stage varied. While the results of Study 1 revealed a facilitation of sensorimotor activity after the response, Study 2 indicated a facilitation of sensorimotor activity before the response and an inhibition after the response. The racial background of the target influenced early but not late processing stages. However, the influence on the late categorization stage increased with the individual implicit ingroup preferences. Motor processing stages were not influenced by the racial background. Study 3, on the other hand, indicated that situational factors like the type of the presented pain and the affect of the observer are substantial in evoking empathic concern and personal distress, whereas the influence of dispositional empathic traits is of less importance. All in all, this dissertation thesis gives important insights into the time course of automatic and controlled processes underlying empathic responses, as well as into the occurrence of empathic concern and personal distress

Embodiment and the senses in travelogue filmmaking

This practice-based research presents an analysis of the representation of embodied experience in the travelogue film genre. It reflects upon the embodied and synaesthesic nature of the cinematic experience by tracing a shift in travelogue filmmaking from the ocular realism characteristic of early travelogue films to the emergence and proliferation of subjective approaches. Moreover, it analyses experimental travelogue films and the capacity of non-linear and non-narrative structures to express sensuous, embodied perception. 9 Meditations is the practice component of this thesis. It is an experimental travelogue film. Through its production this research explores the translation of embodied experience as a multi-sensory process into filmmaking practice. In the field of film studies, the travelogue has not been widely discussed outside historical approaches, and it has certainly never been discussed in relation to phenomenology and embodied sensation. This research articulates a new conceptual framework for both the production and theorisation of the travelogue film, as a form that is intrinsically related to performance, subjectivity and embodied perception. Moreover, this research concerns both the production process in filmmaking practice and the cinematic experience as grounded in synaesthesic, embodied perception. This approach brings to the forefront the capacity of audiovisual practice to both encode and produce sensuous knowledge

The Eye in Motion: Mid-Victorian Fiction and Moving-Image Technologies

This thesis reads selected works of fiction by three mid-Victorian writers (Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot) alongside contemporaneous innovations and developments in moving-image technologies, or what have been referred to by historians of film as ‘pre-cinematic devices’. It looks specifically at the moving panorama, diorama, dissolving magic lantern slides, the kaleidoscope, and persistence of vision devices such as the phenakistiscope and zoetrope, and ranges across scientific writing, journalism, letters, and paintings to demonstrate the scope and popularity of visual motion devices. By exploring this history of optical technologies I show how their display, mechanism, and manual operation contributed to a broader cultural and literary interest in the phenomenological experience of animation, decades before the establishment of cinematography as an industry, technology, and viewing practice. Through a close reading of a range of mid-Victorian novels, this thesis identifies and analyses the literary use of language closely associated with moving-image technologies to argue that the Victorian literary imagination reflected upon, drew from, and incorporated reference to visual and technological animation many decades earlier than critics, focusing usually on early twentieth-century cinema and modernist literature, have allowed. It develops current scholarship on Victorian visual culture and optical technologies by a close reading of the language of moving-image devices—found in advertisements, reviews, and descriptions of their physiological operation and spectacle—alongside the choices Victorian authors made to describe precisely how their characters perceived, how they imagined, remembered, and mentally relived particular scenes and images, and how the readers of their texts were encouraged to imaginatively ‘see’ the animated unfolding of the plot and the material dimensionality of its world through a shared understanding of this language of moving images

Empowering Film Sound Practice: Countering visual hegemony and industrial ideology with reference to the short-film ‘Fade’

This thesis examines the possible marginalisation of sound practices in contemporary mainstream film and television, the fundamental reason for which amounts to a dominant, delineating visual culture (a visual hegemony) that is proliferated within filmmaking practice via ideological and technological means. Evidence for the discussion consists of historical and anecdotal accounts. The discussion is framed by broader concepts of ideology and industrial structures by philosophers: Antonio Gramsci, Dick Hebdige, Louis Althusser and Theodore Adorno. The central contention is that due to the belief that sound is ‘passive’ and a ‘secular’ sphere of film production; it is frequently underrepresented and provided as a ‘sweetener’ to make the visual elements more tangible. The term secular here refers to sounds often segregated and subordinate position in comparison to metaphorical ‘deification’ of visual practices. My assertion is that this ideology, reinforced by industrial constraints, can belittle the expressive power that sound offers. The practical work builds from this a philosophy that empowers the soundtrack in production and reception, by exploiting the subjective, emotive and sensorial nature of sound to create an aesthetic that demands further engagement from the receiver. This is achieved by engendering experimentation and discourse between picture and sound edits. Ultimately this is framed by a guerrilla filmmaking process of film production and a subsequent exploitation of the freedoms of workflow during postproduction that working as an auteur affords

Images and literary imagery

This thesis attempts to show that the present ambiguity in the use of the term "image" causes serious confusion of thought, both in Literary Criticism and in Psychological research concerned with Literature. Part I. is an investigation of the causes of this ambiguity. It consists of an historical survey of the use of the term in English Rhetoric, Criticism and Psychology, prefaced by a consideration of the concept "image" in Greek and Latin writers. The claim is made, that the confusion does not become serious till the Nineteenth Century, when the use of image as meaning figure of speech first became general. Part II. is an account of experiments investigating the use of sensory images in figures of speech by subjects who were not imageless thinkers. Experiment I A tested the subjects' use of spontaneous analogy by means of coloured shapes drawn or verbally described after an interval for forgetting. In I B the material consisted of black shapes with inappropriate titles compelling the subject to accept or refuse the analogy therein suggested. An analogy was developed in different ways through various stages: overt comparison and consequent oscillation of attention; "unter-schiebung" involving partial unification of the images representing the objects compared; identification or coalescence of images implying unification of attention. Experiments II A and B investigated the subjects' use of images in the apprehension of figures of speech in Literature by means of introspective records. Such an apprehension demanded Imaginal activity (similar to that noted in Experiments I A and B) which attempts to eliminate the necessity for oscillation of attention. Some subjects found satisfaction in unifying the images involved, others by eliminating one element in the analogy. The adequate apprehension of the figure of speech demanded an organisation or configuration of images, modified, consciously or sub-consciously according to a definite end.<p

Hong Kong Experience: Johnnie To's Cinema and the Phenomenology of the Senses

...By examining the cinema of Hong Kong’s commercial crime film director Johnnie To, this dissertation explains how film aesthetics offers a profound understanding of the geopolitical status of the city. In particular, this study concerns, in To’s aesthetic practice, the shift from the modern man’s ocular-phono-logocentric perception to a postmodern type of film viewing experience, which is not only ocular-phonic, but also corporeal. Using To’s post-1997 cinema as a frame of reference, this study observes that in order for Hong Kong’s film audience to comprehend the city, besides using only what the camera or the characters see or hear, they have begun to use what the characters appear to feel with their skin and internal organs. These transitions from sight and sound to haptic perceptions are signs of the skin and inner body taking over as the dominant layers of onscreen perception and cultural memory in post-1997 Hong Kong. This study brings to awareness a historical shift around 1997 in Hong Kong’s crime films from the ocular-phonic perceptual tradition to a corporeal aesthetic, what I call the “haptic turn” of the cinema. This suggests a sensory-visceral-affective film viewing experience that symptomatically informs some unsolvable dilemmas under Hong Kong’s “One Country, Two Systems” geopolitical framework