Some animals are more equal than others: Validation of a new scale to measure how attitudes to animals depend on species and human purpose of use

© 2020 Bradley et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Globally, many millions of animals are used by humans every year and much of this usage causes public concern. A new scale, devised to measure attitudes to animal use in relation to the purpose of use and species, the Animal Purpose Questionnaire (APQ), was completed by in total 483 participants, 415 British nationals and 68 participants from 39 other countries. The APQ was presented in two survey formats, alongside an established Animal Attitudes Scale (AAS). In both surveys, participants also provided demographic details to provide a context to their attitudes to animals. As might be expected, and consistent with the validity of the new scale, overall scores on the AAS and APQ were highly correlated. However, the APQ provided a more differentiated measure of attitudes to animal use across a variety of settings. The results showed that there was overall higher levels of agreement with the use of animals in medical research and basic science, less endorsement for food production and pest control, and the use of animals for other cultural practices was generally disapproved of, irrespective of species. Participants overall disagreed with the use of rabbits, monkeys, badgers, tree shrews (survey 1), chimpanzees, dogs, dolphins and parrots (survey 2), but were neutral about the use of rats, mice, pigs, octopus, chickens, zebrafish (survey 1), carp, chickens, pigs, pigeons, rabbits and rats (survey 2). Interactions between species and purpose were largely driven by the consideration of using diverse species for food production. In general, females and vegetarians expressed less agreement with the use of animals with some differences by purpose of use. Pet keeping consistently predicted reduced willingness to use animals for basic science (only). The APQ provides a new tool to unpack how public attitudes depend on the intersectionality of demographics, species and purpose of use

Eye movements and visual search in everyday tasks

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN057351 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Anticipatory Eye Movements in Congkak

Congkak is a traditional Malaysian board game involving two players taking turns to pick up marbles from a series of holes on the board. We used this game as a model to explore the role of anticipatory eye movements during natural actions (in this case serially picking up/putting marbles) as novices learnt the game. Prior work on eye and hand movements in natural behaviour shows that much of the demand on the visual system is computed at the moment it is needed and doesn't depend on information acquired from previous fixations. Vision is driven by the task demands. However, anticipatory fixations to upcoming targets of manipulation have recently been shown to confer spatial accuracy and influence the eye-hand latency. We find that experience with the game also influences the deployment of these anticipatory “look-ahead” fixations, and that their influence on eye-hand latency varies with experience. Results suggest that as our experience in Congkak grows, so does our knowledge of the space relationships necessary for task success

Measuring the performance of visual to auditory information conversion.

BACKGROUND: Visual to auditory conversion systems have been in existence for several decades. Besides being among the front runners in providing visual capabilities to blind users, the auditory cues generated from image sonification systems are still easier to learn and adapt to compared to other similar techniques. Other advantages include low cost, easy customizability, and universality. However, every system developed so far has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. In order to improve these systems further, we propose an automated and quantitative method to measure the performance of such systems. With these quantitative measurements, it is possible to gauge the relative strengths and weaknesses of different systems and rank the systems accordingly. METHODOLOGY: Performance is measured by both the interpretability and also the information preservation of visual to auditory conversions. Interpretability is measured by computing the correlation of inter image distance (IID) and inter sound distance (ISD) whereas the information preservation is computed by applying Information Theory to measure the entropy of both visual and corresponding auditory signals. These measurements provide a basis and some insights on how the systems work. CONCLUSIONS: With an automated interpretability measure as a standard, more image sonification systems can be developed, compared, and then improved. Even though the measure does not test systems as thoroughly as carefully designed psychological experiments, a quantitative measurement like the one proposed here can compare systems to a certain degree without incurring much cost. Underlying this research is the hope that a major breakthrough in image sonification systems will allow blind users to cost effectively regain enough visual functions to allow them to lead secure and productive lives

No evidence of other-race effect for Chinese faces in Malaysian non-Chinese population

The other-race effect (ORE) reflects poor recognition of faces of a different race to one's own. According to the expertise-individuation hypothesis, this phenomenon is a consequence of limited experience with other-race faces. Thus, similar experience with own and other-race faces should abolish the ORE. This study explores the ORE in a multi-racial country (i.e., Malaysia) by comparing Malaysian observers' face recognition for faces of a predominant racial group in Malaysia (i.e., Chinese) with faces from an uncommon group (i.e., Caucasian). Malaysian Chinese, Malays, and Malaysian Indians completed the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) and the CFMT-Chinese. Compared with the normative scores, Malaysian observers showed poor performance in the CFMT-Caucasian. Interestingly, Malays and Malaysian Indians observers' performance was identical to that of Malaysian Chinese in the CFMT-Chinese and to the normative scores of the test. These results demonstrate the relevance of experience in shaping the ORE.</p

Correlation of Prototype 3.

<p>Scatter plot that shows correlation between Inter Image Distance and Inter Sound Distance for Prototype 3.</p

Average Information Lost During Conversion.

<p>Average Information Lost During Conversion.</p

Pearson Correlation of IID & ISD.

<p>Pearson Correlation of IID & ISD.</p