Sweetening the Till: The Use of Candy to Increase Restaurant Tipping

A common practice among servers in restaurants is to give their dining parties an unexpected gift in the form of candy when delivering the check. Two studies were conducted to evaluate the impact of this gesture on the tip percentages received by servers. Study 1 found that customers who received a small piece of chocolate along with the check tipped more than did customers who received no candy. Study 2 found that tips varied with the amount of the candy given to the customers as well as with the manner in which it was offered. It is argued that reciprocity is a stronger explanation for these findings than either impression management or the good mood effect

Psychological Correlates of Male Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences with Adults: A Review of the Nonclinical Literature

Researchers have generally neglected sexual experiences of boys with adults, assumed them to be the same as those of girls, or tried to understand them by referring to clinical research while ignoring nonclinical research. A review of nonclinical research allows a more complete understanding of boys' sexual experiences with adults and the outcomes and correlates of those experiences. Research with nonclinical samples reveals a broad range of reactions, with most reactions being either neutral or positive. Clinical samples reveal a narrower, primarily negative, set of reactions. Comparison of the reactions of boys and girls shows that reactions and outcomes for boys are more likely to be neutral or positive. Moderator variables, including presence of force, perceptions of consent, and relationship to the adult, also relate to outcomes. Incestuous contacts and those involving force or threats are most likely to be negative. Problems in this field of research include broad and vague definitions of “abuse” and conflation of value judgments with harm. Effects of boys' early sexual experiences with older persons in general cannot be accurately inferred from clinical research alone or from girls' experiences.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44100/1/10508_2004_Article_423340.pd

National Samples, Sexual Abuse in Childhood, and Adjustment in Adulthood: A Commentary on Najman, Dunne, Purdie, Boyle, and Coxeter (2005)

Abstract This article comments on the Najman, Dunne, Purdie, Boyle, and Coxeter (2005) study on the relationship between childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and later sexual functioning in an Australian national sample. We note the value of the Najman et al. study, being well conducted and using a generalizable sample, but critique Najman et al.'s interpretation that their study showed "significant impairment" due to the CSA. We computed effect sizes to show that the "effects" were small, and then show using meta-analysis that these small effects were consistent with results in a series of national samples from other countries. We argue that Najman et al.'s causal statement about CSA's "impairment" effect was unwarranted given their lack of causal analysis, the well-established fact in other research that CSA is often confounded with third variables, and the fact that CSA was confounded with a key third variable in Najman et al.'s study. Given the hyperbole that surrounds the issue of CSA, we emphasize the need for researchers to adhere to valid scientific principles in inference and precision when reporting the results of CSA research. keywords Child sexual abuse . Adult sexual functioning . National samples . Effect size . Causal inference B. Rind (

What has been missed for predicting human attention in viewing driving clips?

Recent research progress on the topic of human visual attention allocation in scene perception and its simulation is based mainly on studies with static images. However, natural vision requires us to extract visual information that constantly changes due to egocentric movements or dynamics of the world. It is unclear to what extent spatio-temporal regularity, an inherent regularity in dynamic vision, affects human gaze distribution and saliency computation in visual attention models. In this free-viewing eye-tracking study we manipulated the spatio-temporal regularity of traffic videos by presenting them in normal video sequence, reversed video sequence, normal frame sequence, and randomised frame sequence. The recorded human gaze allocation was then used as the ‘ground truth’ to examine the predictive ability of a number of state-of-the-art visual attention models. The analysis revealed high inter-observer agreement across individual human observers, but all the tested attention models performed significantly worse than humans. The inferior predictability of the models was evident from indistinguishable gaze prediction irrespective of stimuli presentation sequence, and weak central fixation bias. Our findings suggest that a realistic visual attention model for the processing of dynamic scenes should incorporate human visual sensitivity with spatio-temporal regularity and central fixation bias

Insect Brains Use Image Interpolation Mechanisms to Recognise Rotated Objects

Recognising complex three-dimensional objects presents significant challenges to visual systems when these objects are rotated in depth. The image processing requirements for reliable individual recognition under these circumstances are computationally intensive since local features and their spatial relationships may significantly change as an object is rotated in the horizontal plane. Visual experience is known to be important in primate brains learning to recognise rotated objects, but currently it is unknown how animals with comparatively simple brains deal with the problem of reliably recognising objects when seen from different viewpoints. We show that the miniature brain of honeybees initially demonstrate a low tolerance for novel views of complex shapes (e.g. human faces), but can learn to recognise novel views of stimuli by interpolating between or ‘averaging’ views they have experienced. The finding that visual experience is also important for bees has important implications for understanding how three dimensional biologically relevant objects like flowers are recognised in complex environments, and for how machine vision might be taught to solve related visual problems