The Thatcher illusion seen by the brain: An event-related brain potentials study

In “Thatcherized” faces, the eyes and mouth regions are turned upside-down. Only when presented upright they are perceived as severely distorted. Common theories explain this effect by the loss of configural information for inverted faces. We investigated neural correlates of Thatcherization using event related potentials (ERPs). Sixteen right-handed participants performed identity classifications on Thatcherized or original familiar faces, presented either for 34 ms or 200 ms at an orientation of either 0°, 90° or 180°. For the occipito-temporal N170, we found (1) strong non-linear effects of orientation and (2) interactions between Thatcherization and orientation: Thatcherization resulted in larger N170 for upright faces, but smaller N170 for inverted faces. The novel finding of N170 effects of Thatcherization in inverted faces suggests differences in the neural encoding of Thatcherized and original inverted faces, even though Thatcherization escapes subjective perception in inverted faces

Design evaluation by combination of repeated evaluation technique and measurement of electrodermal activity

Consumer product design needs design evaluation for obtaining information about consumers’ preferences and liking to optimize market success. Such evaluations are usually conducted in simple single-shot studies where consumers only once have to evaluate, for instance, the attractiveness of a design. However, innovative designs often break common visual habits by combining more or less familiar parts into a new concept (Carbon and Leder in Appl Cogn Psychol 19:587–601, 2005). Thus, when design innovation is realized in a too advanced way, such designs are expected to be rejected by perceivers at first glance due to low familiarity. However, from everyday experience, we know that consumers’ liking of products often is a dynamic process, which cannot be captured by simple single-shot studies. Carbon and Leder (Appl Cogn Psychol 19:587–601, 2005) have proposed the repeated evaluation technique (RET) for measuring such dynamic effects, which we have combined here with the measurement of electrodermal activity (EDA). The EDA data demonstrated that the RET captured dynamic effects, as the EDA showed specific sensitivity for highly innovative material only after the RET had been conducted; a cross-check with the same material analyzing item-specific boredom revealed that participants were much more bored by low innovative material over time than by highly innovative material. Thus RET seems to be a valuable tool for relevant affordances of design evaluation, particularly when innovative designs have to be evaluated.Product Innovation ManagmentIndustrial Design Engineerin

Strabismic amblyopia affects relational but not featural and Gestalt processes of faces

The ability to identify faces is of critical importance for normal social interactions. Previous evidence suggests that early visual deprivation may impair certain aspects of face recognition. The effects of strabismic amblyopia on face processing have not been investigated previously. In this study, a group of individuals with amblyopia were administered two tasks known to selectively measure face detection based on a Gestalt representation of a face (Mooney faces task) and featural and relational processing of faces (Jane faces task). Our data show that - when relying on their amblyopic eye only - strabismic amblyopes perform as well as normally sighted individuals in face detection and recognition on the basis of their single features. However, they are significantly impaired in discriminating among different faces on the basis of the spacing of their single features (i.e., configural processing of relational information). Our findings are the first to demonstrate that strabismic amblyopia may cause specific deficits in face recognition, and add to previous reports characterizing visual perceptual deficits associated in amblyopia as high-level and not only as low-level processin

The Gene Ontology resource: enriching a GOld mine

The Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC) provides the most comprehensive resource currently available for computable knowledge regarding the functions of genes and gene products. Here, we report the advances of the consortium over the past two years. The new GO-CAM annotation framework was notably improved, and we formalized the model with a computational schema to check and validate the rapidly increasing repository of 2838 GO-CAMs. In addition, we describe the impacts of several collaborations to refine GO and report a 10% increase in the number of GO annotations, a 25% increase in annotated gene products, and over 9,400 new scientific articles annotated. As the project matures, we continue our efforts to review older annotations in light of newer findings, and, to maintain consistency with other ontologies. As a result, 20 000 annotations derived from experimental data were reviewed, corresponding to 2.5% of experimental GO annotations. The website (http://geneontology.org) was redesigned for quick access to documentation, downloads and tools. To maintain an accurate resource and support traceability and reproducibility, we have made available a historical archive covering the past 15 years of GO data with a consistent format and file structure for both the ontology and annotations