Carryover of scanning behaviour affects upright face recognition differently to inverted face recognition.

Face perception is characterized by a distinct scanpath. While eye movements are considered functional, there has not been direct evidence that disrupting this scanpath affects face recognition performance. The present experiment investigated the influence of an irrelevant letter-search task (with letter strings arranged horizontally, vertically, or randomly) on the subsequent scanning strategies in processing upright and inverted famous faces. Participants’ response time to identify the face and the direction of their eye movements were recorded. The orientation of the letter search influenced saccadic direction when viewing the face images, such that a direct carryover-effect was observed. Following a vertically oriented letter-search task, the recognition of famous faces was slower and less accurate for upright faces, and faster for inverted faces. These results extend the carryover findings of Thompson and Crundall into a novel domain. Crucially they also indicate that upright and inverted faces are better processed by different eye movements, highlighting the importance of scanpaths in face recognition

Exploring the contribution of motivation and experience in the post-pubescent own-gender bias in face recognition

The own-gender bias in face recognition has been hypothesised to be the result of extensive experience with own-gender faces, coupled with a motivation to process own-group faces more deeply than other-group faces. We test the effect of experience and motivation in four experiments employing standard old/new recognition paradigms. In Experiment 1, no own-gender recognition bias was observed following an attractiveness-rating encoding task regardless of school type (single- or mixed-sex). Experiment 2, which used a distinctiveness-rating encoding task, did find a significant own-gender bias for all groups of participants. Experiment 3 on adults found that the own-gender bias was not affected by self-reported contact with the other-gender, but the encoding task did moderate the size of the bias. Experiment 4 revealed that participants with an own-gender sexual orientation showed a stronger own-gender bias. These results indicate that motivational factors influence the own-gender bias whereas no evidence was found for perceptual experience

Detrimental effects of carryover of eye movement behaviour on hazard perception accuracy: Effects of driver experience, difficulty of task, and hazardousness of road.

Novice drivers are more likely to be involved in road accidents than experienced drivers and this relates to their lower performance in hazard perception tasks. Hazard perception performed under dual task conditions is also affected differentially due to driver experience. In this study, we explore the detrimental effect of vertical eye-movement carryover from one task to a second task in drivers of different levels of experience, whilst accounting for road conditions. Participants searched letters presented horizontally, vertically, or in a random array. Following this, they identified a hazard in a driving scene. Carryover of eye movements from the letter search to the driving scene was observed and participants were quicker and more accurate when responding to a hazard following horizontal scanning, compared to following vertical and random scanning. Furthermore, while carryover of eye movements was equivalent for all participants, the negative effect it had on hazard identification accuracy was less prominent in experienced drivers, especially when viewing the most hazardous of images. These results indicate that carryover of eye movements is another potentially distracting effect that can impact on the ability and safety of novice drivers

Effective anisotropy field variation of magnetite nanoparticles with size reduction

75.50.Tt Fine-particle systems; nanocrystalline materials, 75.30.Gw Magnetic anisotropy, 75.60.Ch Domain walls and domain structure, 76.50.+g Ferromagnetic, antiferromagnetic, and ferrimagnetic resonances; spin-wave resonance,