Why the “Hoax” Paper of Baldwin (2018) Should Be Reinstated

In 2018, a peer-reviewed article was published under the name of Richard Baldwin in which the author presented a critique of fat exclusion and advocated “fat bodybuilding” as a sport. Some months later, it became apparent that the article was intended as a hoax written to raise awareness to, or “expose”, a certain ideology promoted by some academics. As a result, the editors retracted the article. Using the principles of methodological behaviorism, and other hoax or hoax-like articles, I will argue that the thoughts and opinions held by any author are not important to the argument they present. I will also argue that this form of reflexive ethnography is too problematic to serve as a method of enquiry. I will therefore conclude that the Baldwin article should be reinstated

Fear of Holes

Phobias are usually described as irrational and persistent fears of certain objects or situations, and causes of such fears are difficult to identify. We describe an unusual but common phobia (trypophobia), hitherto unreported in the scientific literature, in which sufferers are averse to images of holes. We performed a spectral analysis on a variety of images that induce trypophobia and found that the stimuli had a spectral composition typically associated with uncomfortable visual images, namely, high-contrast energy at midrange spatial frequencies. Critically, we found that a range of potentially dangerous animals also possess this spectral characteristic. We argue that although sufferers are not conscious of the association, the phobia arises in part because the inducing stimuli share basic visual characteristics with dangerous organisms, characteristics that are low level and easily computed, and therefore facilitate a rapid nonconscious response. </jats:p

The Grievance Studies Affair; One Funeral at a Time: A Reply to Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian

In 2018, Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian published four “hoax” articles within a number of disciplines that rely on critical theory (e.g., gender studies, feminism). When revealing the project, the authors argued that they wanted to expose these fields as being primarily motivated by ideology and social justice rather than knowledge generation. Their method tested the hypothesis that editors and reviewers will support papers that advocate “ludicrous” ideas including “fat bodybuilding.” In the pages of this journal, I presented a critique of their procedure, and the authors have provided a commentary on my article. After discussing the issue of whether their project was a hoax or not, I will argue that the crux of the matter is whether the papers were ludicrous/absurd. I will show how the authors made a fundamental error in their method; they failed to assess whether their ideas were indeed ludicrous/absurd

Visual cognition during real social interaction

Laboratory studies of social visual cognition often simulate the critical aspects of joint attention by having participants interact with a computer-generated avatar. Recently, there has been a movement toward examining these processes during authentic social interaction. In this review, we will focus on attention to faces, attentional misdirection, and a phenomenon we have termed social inhibition of return (Social IOR), that have revealed aspects of social cognition that were hitherto unknown. We attribute these discoveries to the use of paradigms that allow for more realistic social interactions to take place. We also point to an area that has begun to attract a considerable amount of interest—that of Theory of Mind (ToM) and automatic perspective taking—and suggest that this too might benefit from adopting a similar approach

Visual perspective taking without visual perspective taking

What happens when an observer takes an agent’s visual perspective of a scene? We conducted a series of experiments designed to measure what proportion of adults take a stimulus-centered rather than agent-centered approach to a visual perspective taking task. Adults were presented with images of an agent looking at a number (69). From the perspective of the viewer, the number appeared upside down. We then asked participants what number the agent saw. An agent-centered approach, i.e., one that takes into account the other’s visual experience, should produce the correct answer '69'. Even an egocentric error (i.e., the participant's own perspective) would provide the same correct response. We were interested in what proportion of participants would give the incorrect answer '96', which is best explained by a stimulus-centered rather than agent-centered strategy, namely 'flipping' each digit one at a time from left to right. Crucially, such a strategy ignores the alternative visual perspective. We found that, on average, 12-21% of participants made this error. We discuss this finding in the context of the key questions around representation, content, and Theory of Mind in visual perspective taking

Trypophobia: Heart rate, heart rate variability and cortical haemodynamic response

Background: Trypophobia is a common condition in which sufferers are averse to images of small holes arranged in clusters. Methods: We used photo-plethysmography to examine cardiovascular correlates and near infrared spectroscopy to examine cortical correlates of the phenomenon in order to validate the Trypophobia Questionnaire and explore the several interlinked explanations of the disorder. Results: Trypophobic images were found to increase heart rate and heart rate variability, but only in individuals with high scores on the Trypophobia Questionnaire. Trypophobic images were also found to elicit larger haemodynamic responses in posterior cortical areas, but again only in individuals with high scores. Limitations: The results are consistent with a contribution from both parasympathetic and sympathetic systems. Conclusion: The data demonstrate the validity of the Trypophobia Questionnaire and show an involvement not only ofthe autonomic system but cortical mechanisms including cortical hyperexcitability

It's Not You, It's Me: A Review of Individual Differences in Visuospatial Perspective Taking.

Visuospatial perspective taking (VSPT) concerns the ability to understand something about the visual relationship between an agent or observation point on the one hand and a target or scene on the other. Despite its importance to a wide variety of other abilities, from communication to navigation, and decades of research, there is as yet no theory of VSPT. Indeed, the heterogeneity of results from different (and sometimes the same) VSPT tasks point to a complex picture suggestive of multiple VSPT strategies, individual differences in performance, and context-specific factors that together have a bearing on both the efficiency and accuracy of outcomes. In this article, we review the evidence in search of patterns in the data. We found a number of predictors of VSPT performance but also a number of gaps in understanding that suggest useful pathways for future research and, possibly, a theory (or theories) of VSPT. Overall, this review makes the case for understanding VSPT by better understanding the perspective taker rather than the target agents or their perception

The role of transients in action observation

A large number of studies have now described the various ways in which the observation of another person’s dynamic movement can influence the speed with which the observer is able to prepare a motor action themselves. The typical results are most often explained with reference to theories that link perception and action. Such theories argue that the cognitive structures associated with each share common representations. Consequently, action preparation and action observation are often said to be functionally equivalent. However, the dominance of these theories in explaining action observation effects has masked the potential contribution from processes associated with the detection of low-level “transients” resulting from observing a body movement, such as motion and sound. In the present review, we describe work undertaken in one particular action observation phenomenon (“social inhibition of return”) and show that the transient account provides the best explanation of the effect. We argue that future work should consider attention capture and orienting as a potential contributing factor to action observation effects more broadly

'Seeing’ proximal representations: Testing attitudes to the relationship between vision and images

Corrections applied by the visual system, like size constancy, provide us with a coherent and stable perspective from ever-changing retinal images. In the present experiment we investigated how willing adults are to examine their own vision as if it were an uncorrected 2D image, much like a photograph. We showed adult participants two lines on a wall, both of which were the same length but one was closer to the participant and hence appeared visually longer. Despite the instruction to base their judgements on appearance specifically, approximately half of the participants judged the lines to appear the same. When they took a photo of the lines and were asked how long they appeared in the image their responses shifted; now the closer line appeared longer. However, when they were asked again about their own view they reverted to their original response. These results suggest that many adults are resistant to imagining their own vision as if it were a flat image. We also place these results within the context of recent views on visual perspective-taking

Perspective-Taking: In Search of a Theory.

Perspective-taking has been one of the central concerns of work on social attention and developmental psychology for the past 60 years. Despite its prominence, there is no formal description of what it means to represent another's viewpoint. The present article argues that such a description is now required in the form of theory-a theory that should address a number of issues that are central to the notion of assuming another's viewpoint. After suggesting that the mental imagery debate provides a good framework for understanding some of the issues and problems surrounding perspective-taking, we set out nine points that we believe any theory of perspective-taking should consider