Processing of Individual Items during Ensemble Coding of Facial Expressions

There is growing evidence that human observers are able to extract the mean emotion or other type of information from a set of faces. The most intriguing aspect of this phenomenon is that observers often fail to identify or form a representation for individual faces in a face set. However, most of these results were based on judgments under limited processing resource. We examined a wider range of exposure time and observed how the relationship between the extraction of a mean and representation of individual facial expressions would change. The results showed that with an exposure time of 50 ms for the faces, observers were more sensitive to mean representation over individual representation, replicating the typical findings in the literature. With longer exposure time, however, observers were able to extract both individual and mean representation more accurately. Furthermore, diffusion model analysis revealed that the mean representation is also more prone to suffer from the noise accumulated in redundant processing time and leads to a more conservative decision bias, whereas individual representations seem more resistant to this noise. Results suggest that the encoding of emotional information from multiple faces may take two forms: single face processing and crowd face processi

Research on household emergency supplies storage from the theory of planned behavior and intention-behavior gap in the context of COVID-19

IntroductionIn the context of COVID-19 epidemic, household-level emergency supplies are becoming a critical link in the national emergency response mechanism for public health emergencies. The main goal of this study is to analyze the forming process of household emergency supplies storage intention and behavior based on the theory of planned behavior.MethodsA total of 486 valid questionnaires were obtained from China and analyzed using structural equation modeling.ResultsThe study found that subjective norms and perceived behavioral control had a positive impact on residents’ intention to store emergency supplies, while attitudes did not play a significant role. Community institutional trust and community network play significant moderating roles in the transformation from intentions to behaviors.DiscussionThis study explored the influencing factors of residents’ household emergency supplies storage, and introduced community institutional trust and community network as moderating variables to analyze the process of transformation of residents’ household emergency supplies storage intentions to behaviors from the perspective of community situation, and initially constructed a two-stage integration model including intention formation and behavior transformation. By analyzing the forming process of household emergency supplies behavior, this paper revealed the effective paths for the formation of household emergency supplies storage intention, and put forward policy suggestions from the government and community levels

Metacognition of average face perception

Individuals have the ability to extract summary statistics from multiple items presented simultaneously. However, it is unclear yet whether we have insight into the process of ensemble coding. The aim of this study was to investigate metacognition about average face perception. Participants saw a group of four faces presented for 2s or 5s, and then they were asked to judge whether the following test face was present in the previous set (Experiment 1), or whether the test face was the average of the four member faces (Experiment 2). After each response, participants rated their confidence. Replicating previous findings, there was substantial endorsement for the average face derived from the four member faces in Experiment 1, even though it was not present in the set. When judging faces that had been presented in the set, confidence correlated positively with accuracy, providing evidence for metacognitive awareness of previously studied faces. Importantly, participants were more confident for judgments of the unseen average faces as they became less accurate with their responses, resulting in a negative confidence-accuracy relationship. By contrast, when the average face had to be identified explicitly in Experiment 2, performance was above chance level and there was a positive correlation between confidence and accuracy. These results suggest that people have metacognitive awareness about average face perception when averaging is required explicitly, but they lack insight into the averaging process when member identification is required, and insight into the fine face identification is poor

Different Roles of Foveal and Extrafoveal Vision in Ensemble Representation for Facial Expressions

People could extract mean expression of multiple faces pretty precisely.However, the mechanism of how we make such ensemble representation was far from clear. This study aimed to explore how faces in the foveal and extrafoveal vision contribute to the ensemble representation and whether the emotion of faces modulates the contribution. In the experiment, the expressions of foveal and extrafoveal faces were independently manipulated by changing the ratio of happy vs. angry faces. The participants reported whether the overall emotion was positive or negative. The results showed that faces in the foveal vision were given more weight than those in the extrafoveal vision in ensemble emotional representation. In addition, the ensemble perception was more accurate when faces in the extrafoveal vision were positive. These findings have great implications for the emotional design in interactive systems, especially when there are multiple users or multiple avatars presented on the screen.</p

Pen Culture Detection Using Filter Tensor Analysis with Multi-Temporal Landsat Imagery

Aquaculture plays an important role in China’s total fisheries production nowadays, and it leads to a few problems, for example water quality degradation, which has damaging effect on the sustainable development of environment. Among the many forms of aquaculture that deteriorate the water quality, disorderly pen culture is especially severe. Pen culture began very early in Yangchenghu Lake and Taihu Lake in China and part of the pen culture still exists. Thus, it is of great significance to evaluate the distribution and area of the pen culture in the two lakes. However, the traditional method for pen culture detection is based on the factual measurement, which is labor and time consuming. At present, with the development of remote sensing technologies, some target detection algorithms for multi/hyper-spectral data have been used in the pen culture detection, but most of them are intended for the single-temporal remote sensing data. Recently, a target detection algorithm called filter tensor analysis (FTA), which is specially designed for multi-temporal remote sensing data, has been reported and has achieved better detection results compared to the traditional single-temporal methods in many cases. This paper mainly aims to investigate the pen culture in Yangchenghu Lake and Taihu Lake with FTA implemented on the multi-temporal Landsat imagery, by determining the optimal time phases combination of the Landsat data in advance. Furthermore, the suitability and superiority of FTA over Constrained Energy Minimization (CEM) in the process of pen culture detection were tested. It was observed in the experiments on the data of those two lakes that FTA can detect the pen culture much more accurately than CEM with Landsat data of selected bands and of limited number of time phases

Averaging multiple facial expressions through subsampling*

When perceivers view multiple facial expressions shown concurrently, they can quickly and precisely extract the mean emotion from the set. Yet it is not clear how many faces in the set contribute to summary judgments, and how the variance among them influences this process. To address these questions, we used the subset manipulation and varied emotion variance of faces in the sets across three experiments. Sets containing sixteen faces, or a subset of faces randomly selected from the sixteen-face display were presented, and participants judged the average emotion of each face set on a continuous scale. Results showed that when emotion variance was relatively large (Experiments 1 & 2), only two faces in the set contributed to ensemble representations. In Experiment 3 where the emotion variance was smaller, around three to four faces were likely sampled. However, when directly comparing results from Experiments 2 and 3, there was no strong evidence supporting the impact of variance in averaging efficiency. Altogether, these new results suggest that the process of averaging multiple emotional facial expressions can be explained by capacity-limited subsampling. The claim that ensemble representations are capacity unlimited or can overcome the bottlenecks in visual perception might need to be reconsidered