Assessing people with visual impairments’ access to information, awareness and satisfaction with high-tech assistive technology

Assistive technology (AT) devices are designed to help people with visual impairments (PVIs) perform activities that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. Devices specifically designed to assist PVIs by attempting to restore sight or substitute it for another sense have a very low uptake rate. This study, conducted in England, aimed to investigate why this is the case by assessing accessibility to knowledge, awareness, and satisfaction with AT in general and with sensory restoration and substitution devices in particular. From a sample of 25 PVIs, ranging from 21 to 68 years old, results showed that participants knew where to find AT information; however, health care providers were not the main source of this information. Participants reported good awareness of different ATs, and of technologies they would not use, but reported poor awareness of specific sensory substitution and restoration devices. Only three participants reported using AT, each with different devices and varying levels of satisfaction. The results from this study suggest a possible breakdown in communication between health care providers and PVIs, and dissociation between reported AT awareness and reported access to AT information. Moreover, awareness of sensory restoration and substitution devices is poor, which may explain the limited use of such technology

The Role of Sexual and Romantic Attraction in Human Mate Preferences

Sex differences in mate preferences are ubiquitous, having been evidenced across generations and cultures. Their prevalence and persistence have compellingly placed them in the evolutionarily adaptive context of sexual selection. However, the psycho-biological mechanisms contributing to their generation and maintenance remain poorly understood. As such a mechanism, sexual attraction is assumed to guide interest, desire, and the affinity toward specific partner features. However, whether sexual attraction can indeed explain sex differences in partner preferences has not been explicitly tested. To better understand how sex and sexual attraction shape mate preferences in humans we assessed how partner preferences differed across the spectrum of sexual attraction in a sample of 479 individuals that identified as asexual, gray-sexual, demisexual or allosexual. We further tested whether romantic attraction predicted preference profiles better than sexual attraction. Our results show that sexual attraction accounts for highly replicable sex differences in mate preferences for high social status and financial prospects, conscientiousness, and intelligence; however, it does not account for the enhanced preference for physical attractiveness expressed by men, which persists even in individuals with low sexual attraction. Instead, sex differences in physical attractiveness preference are better explained by the degree of romantic attraction. Furthermore, effects of sexual attraction on sex differences in partner preferences were grounded in current rather than previous experiences of sexual attraction. Taken together, the results support the idea that contemporary sex differences in partner preferences are maintained by several psycho-biological mechanisms that evolved in conjunction, including not only sexual but also romantic attraction

Social relevance modulates multisensory integration

When interacting with the environment, humans exhibit robust biases towards information that pertains to themselves: Self-relevant information is processed faster and yields more accurate responses than information linked to others. Recent studies have shown that simple social associations can lead to the instant deployment of this benefit in the processing of abstract stimuli. However, how self-prioritization evolves across the processing hierarchy has been a subject of intense debate. Furthermore, there is little empirical evidence about the functional efficiency of social relevance in natural environments in which information is present across multiple senses. Across three experiments (each n = 40), the present study shows that self-prioritization effects (1) can arise in simple audio-visual numerosity judgements, (2) can be efficiently deployed across the senses by funnelling perception towards self-relevant information in the more reliable sensory modality, and (3) modulates the integration of auditory and visual information into a multisensory representation. Taken together, the present findings suggest that social salience can influence multisensory processing at both perceptual and post-perceptual stages via early attentional modulations of sensory integration and later, task-dependent attentional control

The Power of the Self: Anchoring Information Processing Across Contexts

A stable self-representation has an intrinsically beneficial connotation for information processing: it allows the individual to flexibly adapt to different contexts, while prioritizing information that pertains to the own immediate survival. Indeed, many studies have shown how linking arbitrary information to physical or psychological aspects of the self leads to pervasive effects on our decision-making and even our perception. However, the evidence we have gained so far stems from isolated aspects of the self, and varying measures across studies and different levels of processing make results difficult to compare. The present study demonstrates that associating arbitrary information with the self rapidly leads to faster and more efficient processing of information, with stable performance benefits across different tasks (matching and categorization task) and stimulus domains. Focussing on specific processing levels, the findings firstly provide evidence regarding the involvement of self-relatedness in perception. Here, contrast processing interacted with self-relatedness, but only when complex stimuli were used. Secondly, they show that self-prioritization is flexible to decisional modulations, with processing benefits being adjusted to different social contexts. Thirdly, the present data provides evidence that performance benefits towards newly self-associated, abstract information are equivalent to those resulting from long-term established self-knowledge with personally owned objects. The results highlight mechanistic differences between the prioritization of information linked to the self and information linked to close others. Overall, the present findings suggest that the self acts as a stable anchor in information processing, allowing us to filter information by immediate relevance in order to facilitate optimal behavior

Correctly establishing evidence for cue combination via gains in sensory precision: why the choice of comparator matters

Studying how sensory signals from different sources (sensory cues) are integrated within or across multiple senses allows us to better understand the perceptual computations that lie at the foundation of adaptive behaviour. As such, determining the presence of precision gains – the classic hallmark of cue combination – is important for characterising perceptual systems, their development and functioning in clinical conditions. However, empirically measuring precision gains to distinguish cue combination from alternative perceptual strategies requires careful methodological considerations. Here, we note that the majority of existing studies that tested for cue combination either omitted the important analysis contrast, or used an approach that, unknowingly, strongly inflated false positives. Using simulations, we demonstrate that this approach enhances the chances of finding significant cue combination effects in up to 100% of cases, even when cues are not combined. We establish how this error arises when the wrong cue comparator is chosen and recommend an alternative analysis that is easy to implement but has only been adopted by relatively few studies. By comparing combined-cue perceptual precision with the best single-cue precision, determined for each observer individually rather than at group-level, researchers can enhance the credibility of their reported effects. We also note that testing for deviations from optimal predictions alone is not sufficient to ascertain whether cues are combined. Taken together, to correctly test for perceptual precision gains we advocate for a careful comparator selection and task design to ensure that cue combination is tested with maximum power, while reducing the inflation of false positives