Avatars with faces of real people: A construction method for scientific experiments in virtual reality

Experimental psychology research typically employs methods that greatly simplify the real-world conditions within which cognition occurs. This approach has been successful for isolating cognitive processes, but cannot adequately capture how perception operates in complex environments. In turn, real-world environments rarely afford the access and control required for rigorous scientific experimentation. In recent years, technology has advanced to provide a solution to these problems, through the development of affordable high-capability virtual reality (VR) equipment. The application of VR is now increasing rapidly in psychology, but the realism of its avatars, and the extent to which they visually represent real people, is captured poorly in current VR experiments. Here, we demonstrate a user-friendly method for creating photo-realistic avatars of real people and provide a series of studies to demonstrate their psychological characteristics. We show that avatar faces of familiar people are recognised with high accuracy (Study 1), replicate the familiarity advantage typically observed in real-world face matching (Study 2), and show that these avatars produce a similarity-space that corresponds closely with real photographs of the same faces (Study 3). These studies open the way to conducting psychological experiments on visual perception and social cognition with increased realism in VR

Repeated letters increase the ambiguity of strings : Evidence from identification, priming and same-different tasks

Letters are often repeated in words in many languages. The present work explored the mechanisms underlying processing of repeated and unique letters in strings across three experimental paradigms. In a 2AFC perceptual identification task, the insertion but not the deletion of a letter was harder to detect when it was repeated than when it was unique (Exp. 1). In a masked primed same-different task, deletion primes produced the same priming effect regardless of deletion type (repeated, unique; Exp. 2), but insertion primes were more effective when the additional inserted letter created a repetition than when it did not (Exp. 3). In a same-different perceptual identification task, foils created by modifying a repetition, by either repeating the wrong letter or substituting a repeated letter, were harder to reject than foils created by modifying unique letters (Exp. 4). Thus, repetition effects were task-dependent. Since considering representations alone would suggest repetition effects would always occur or never occur, this indicates the importance of modelling task-specific processes. The similarity calculations embedded in the Overlap Model (Gomez et al., 2008) appeared to always predict a repetition effect, but its decision rule for the task of Experiment 1 allowed it to predict the asymmetry between insertions and deletions. In the Letters in Time and Retinotopic Space (LTRS; Adelman, 2011) model, repetition effects arise only from briefly presented stimuli as their perception is incomplete. It was therefore consistent with Experiments 2-4 but required a task-specific response bias to account for the insertion-deletion asymmetry of Experiment 1