Posts tagged perception
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Babies can read each other’s moods
Although it may seem difficult for adults to understand what an infant is feeling, a new study from Brigham Young University finds that it’s so easy a baby could do it.
Psychology professor Ross Flom’s study, published in the academic journal Infancy, shows that infants can recognize each other’s emotions by five months of age. This study comes on the heels of other significant research by Flom on infants’ ability to understand the moods of dogs, monkeys and classical music.
“Newborns can’t verbalize to their mom or dad that they are hungry or tired, so the first way they communicate is through affect or emotion,” says Flom. “Thus it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect.”
Infants can match emotion in adults at seven months and familiar adults at six months. In order to test infant’s perception of their peer’s emotions, Flom and his team of researchers tested a baby’s ability to match emotional infant vocalizations with a paired infant facial expression.
“We found that 5 month old infants can match their peer’s positive and negative vocalizations with the appropriate facial expression,” says Flom. “This is the first study to show a matching ability with an infant this young. They are exposed to affect in a peer’s voice and face which is likely more familiar to them because it’s how they themselves convey or communicate positive and negative emotions.”
In the study, infants were seated in front of two monitors. One of the monitors displayed video of a happy, smiling baby while the other monitor displayed video of a second sad, frowning baby. When audio was played of a third happy baby, the infant participating in the study looked longer to the video of the baby with positive facial expressions. The infant also was able to match negative vocalizations with video of the sad frowning baby. The audio recordings were from a third baby and not in sync with the lip movements of the babies in either video.
“These findings add to our understanding of early infant development by reiterating the fact that babies are highly sensitive to and comprehend some level of emotion,” says Flom. “Babies learn more in their first 2 1/2 years of life than they do the rest of their lifespan, making it critical to examine how and what young infants learn and how this helps them learn other things.”
Flom co-authored the study of 40 infants from Utah and Florida with Professor Lorraine Bahrick from Florida International University.
Flom’s next step in studying infant perception is to run the experiments with a twist: test whether babies could do this at even younger ages if instead they were watching and hearing clips of themselves.
And while the talking twin babies in this popular YouTube clip are older, it’s still a lot of fun to watch them babble at each other.
Hong Kong Skyscrapers Appear to Fall in Real-World Illusion
No matter how we jump, roll, sit, or lie down, our brain manages to maintain a visual representation of the world that stays upright relative to the pull of gravity. But a new study of rider experiences on the Hong Kong Peak Tram, a popular tourist attraction, shows that specific features of the environment can dominate our perception of verticality, making skyscrapers appear to fall.
The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The Hong Kong Peak Tram to Victoria Peak is a popular way to survey the Hong Kong skyline and millions of people ride the tram every year.
“On one trip, I noticed that the city’s skyscrapers next to the tram started to appear very tilted, as if they were falling, which anyone with common sense knows is impossible,” says lead researcher Chia-huei Tseng of the University of Hong Kong. “The gasps of the other passengers told me I wasn’t the only one seeing it.”
The illusion was perplexing because, in contrast with most illusions studied in the laboratory, observers have complete access to visual cues from the outside world through the tram’s open windows.
Exploring the illusion under various conditions, Tseng and colleagues found that the perceived, or illusory, tilt was greatest on night-time rides, perhaps a result of the relative absence of visual-orientation cues or a heightened sense of enclosure at night. Enhancing the tilted frame of reference within the tram car — indicated by features like oblique window frames, beams, floor, and lighting fixtures — makes the true vertical of the high rises seem to tilt in the opposite direction.
The illusion was significantly reduced by obscuring the window frame and other reference cues inside the tram car, by using wedges to adjust observers’ position, and by having them stand during the tram ride.
But no single modification was sufficient to eliminate the illusion.
“Our findings demonstrate that signals from all the senses must be consonant with each other to abolish the tilt illusion,” the researchers write. “On the tram, it seems that vision dominates verticality perception over other sensory modalities that also mediate earth gravity, such as the vestibular and tactile systems.”
The robustness of the tram illusion took the researchers by surprise:
“We took the same tram up and down for hundreds of trips, and the illusion did not reduce a bit,” says Tseng. “This suggests that our experiences and our learned knowledge about the world — that buildings should be vertical — are not enough to cancel our brain’s wrong conclusion.”
Old schooled: You never stop learning like a child
The adult brain is far more malleable that we thought, and so learning can be child’s play if you know how.
Some 36-year-olds choose to collect vintage wine, vinyl records or sports memorabilia. For Richard Simcott, it is languages. His itch to learn has led him to study more than 30 foreign tongues – and he’s not ready to give up.
During our conversation in a London restaurant, he reels off sentences in Spanish, Turkish and Icelandic as easily as I can name the pizza and pasta on our menu. He has learned Dutch on the streets of Rotterdam, Czech in Prague and Polish during a house share with some architects. At home, he talks to his wife in fluent Macedonian.
What’s remarkable about Simcott isn’t just the number and diversity of languages he has mastered. It’s his age. Long before grey hairs appear and waistlines expand, the mind’s cogs are meant to seize up, making it difficult to pick up any new skill, be it a language, the flute, or archery. Even if Simcott had primed his mind for new languages while at school, he should have faced a steep decline in his abilities as the years went by – yet he still devours unfamiliar grammars and strange vocabularies to a high level. “My linguistic landscape is always changing,” he says. “If you’re school-aged, or middle-aged – I don’t think there’s a big difference.”
A decade ago, few neuroscientists would have agreed that adults can rival the learning talents of children. But we needn’t be so defeatist. The mature brain, it turns out, is more supple than anyone thought. “The idea that there’s a critical period for learning in childhood is overrated,” says Gary Marcus, a psychologist at New York University. What’s more, we now understand the best techniques to accelerate knowledge and skill acquisition in adults, so can perhaps unveil a few tricks of the trade of super-learners like Simcott. Whatever you want to learn, it’s never too late to charge those grey cells.
The idea that the mind fossilises as it ages is culturally entrenched. The phrase “an old dog will learn no tricks" is recorded in an 18th century book of proverbs and is probably hundreds of years older.
When researchers finally began to investigate the adult brain’s malleability in the 1960s, their results appeared to agree with the saying. Most insights came indirectly from studies of perception, which suggested that an individual’s visual abilities were capped at a young age. For example, restricting young animals’ vision for a few weeks after birth means they will never manage to see normally. The same is true for people born with cataracts or a lazy eye – repair too late, and the brain fails to use the eye properly for life. “For a very long time, it seemed that those constraints were set in stone after that critical period,” says Daphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, New York.
These are extreme circumstances, of course, but the evidence suggested that the same neural fossilisation would stifle other kinds of learning. Many of the studies looked at language development – particularly in families of immigrants. While the children picked up new tongues with ease, their parents were still stuttering broken sentences. But if there is a critical period for foreign language learning, everyone should be affected equally; Simcott’s ability to master a host of languages should be as impossible as a dog playing the piano.
Bearing this in mind, Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto, Canada, recently turned to the US census records, which detailed the linguistic skills of more than 2 million Hispanic and Chinese immigrants. A “critical period” for learning a second language in infancy should have created a sharp difference between those who had moved country in early childhood and those who were uprooted in adolescence. In reality? “There was absolutely no discontinuity,” Bialystok says. Instead, she saw a very gradual decline with age among immigrants – which could reflect differences in environment as much as the adults’ rusty brain circuits. “People talk more slowly and clearly to children in short, simple sentences,” she says. “And the child’s entire social and educational network is organised around that language.”
Yet while Bialystok’s study suggested that adult brains are more pliable than had once been imagined, there was still the suspicion that children might have the edge in certain skills. Adult learners sometimes find it harder to learn to sing in tune, hit a home run or mimic an accent convincingly. At first glance, the problem might seem to lie in adults’ perception and motor skills. Learning involving these abilities differs from the acquisition of factual knowledge, because it needs us to rewire the eyes, ears and muscles.
It’s something that Marcus can identify with. At the age of 38, he devoted himself to learning the guitar, an experience he detailed in his book Guitar Zero. “My family’s initial response was laughter – but they soon saw I was making progress,” he says. Still, during his research, he attended a musical summer camp for 8 to 15-year-olds. He says he was quicker to catch on to the structure of songs, but his younger bandmates had better coordination and sense of pitch.
Yet the available evidence hints that children may not always be inherently better at such tasks. One study by Yang Zhang at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis that focused on the acquisition of foreign accents in adults suggests we may simply be suffering from poor tuition. When the researchers gave them recordings that mimicked the exaggerated baby talk of cooing mothers, the adult learners progressed rapidly.
Nor do adults necessarily fumble over the intricate movements that are crucial for music or sport. When volunteers visiting Virginia Penhune's lab at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, learned to press keys in a certain sequence, at certain times – essentially a boiled-down version of keyboard practice – the adults tended to outshine the younger volunteers.
During a more challenging test of hand-eye coordination, nearly 1000 volunteers of all age groups learned to juggle over a series of six training sessions. As you might expect, the senior citizens aged 60 to 80 began with some hesitation, but they soon caught up with the 30-year-olds and by the end of the trials all the adults were juggling more confidently than the 5 to 10-year-olds.
Old dogs, then, are much more adaptable than folklore would have it – and if we do have deficits, they aren’t insurmountable. The reason that children appear to be better learners may have more to do with their environment, and factors such as physical fitness (see “Faster body, faster mind”).
Indeed, many researchers believe that an adult’s lifestyle may be the biggest obstacle. “A child’s sole occupation is learning to speak and move around,” says Ed Cooke, a cognitive scientist who has won many memory contests. “If an adult had that kind of time to spend on attentive learning, I’d be very disappointed if they didn’t do a good job.”
A glut of free time and a carefree existence are out of reach for most of us, but there are other behaviours that boost children’s learning, and these habits can be easily integrated into even an adult’s schedule. For example, children are continually quizzed on what they know – and for good reason: countless studies have shown that testing doubles long-term recall, outperforming all other memory tactics. Yet most adults attempting to learn new skills will rely more on self-testing which, let’s be honest, happens less often.
That’s why Cooke developed a website, called Memrise, which helps take some of the pain out of testing and, crucially, can integrate learning into the adult day. It is designed to track your learning curve with cunningly timed tests that force you to retrieve the information just as you are about to forget it.
"Memrise engages your brain to the greatest possible extent," says Cooke, who has himself used the site to learn thousands of words of foreign vocabulary. Users can create their own courses – the topics range from art to zoology – and importantly, it is easy to load the site in the few spare minutes of your lunch break or while you are waiting for a train. Cooke also plans to launch a smartphone app.
What about tasks that involve perceptual learning or motor skills – like battling against a lifetime of tone deafness, or perfecting that golf swing? Here too, there are guiding principles that can help you rediscover the seemingly effortless learning of youth.
Adults can hamper progress with their own perfectionism: whereas children throw themselves into tasks, adults often agonise over the mechanics of the movements, trying to conceptualise exactly what is required. This could be one of our biggest downfalls. “Adults think so much more about what they are doing,” says Gabriele Wulf at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Children just copy what they see.”
Wulf’s work over the past decade shows that you should focus on the outcome of your actions rather than the intricacies of the movements. She applies this finding in her own life: as a keen golfer, she has found it is better to think about the swing of the club, for instance, rather than the position of her hands. “I’m always trying to find where best to focus my attention,” she says. Similarly, if you are learning to sing, then you should concentrate on the tone of the voice, rather than on the larynx or the placement of the tongue. Study after study shows that simply shifting your mindset in this way accelerates your learning– perhaps by encouraging the subconscious, automatic movements that mark proficiency.
Misplaced conscientiousness may also lead adults to rely on overly rigid practice regimes that stifle long-term learning. The adult talent for perseverance, it seems, is not always a virtue. Left to their own devices, most people segment their sessions into separate blocks – when learning basketball, for instance, they may work on each shot in turn, perhaps because they feel a desire to master it. The approach may bring rapid improvements at first, but a host of studies have found that the refined technique is soon forgotten.
Instead, you do better to take a carousel approach, quickly rotating through the different skills to be practised without lingering too long on each one. Although the reason is still unclear, it seems that jumping between skills makes your mind work a little harder when applying what you’ve learned, helping you to retain the knowledge in the long term – a finding that has helped people improve in activities ranging from tennis and kayaking to pistol shooting.
Such an approach might not be to everyone’s taste – with intricate skills, it might feel like you are making no progress. But even if you do revert to stints of lengthy practice, you can still reap some of the same benefits by occasionally trying out your skills in an unfamiliar situation. In tennis, you might move to a different part of the court for a couple of serves before returning to the regular position; while playing scales on a musical instrument, you might switch hands temporarily. According to work by Arnaud Boutin at the Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors in Dortmund, Germany, venturing out of your comfort zone in this way helps to ensure that you improve your overall performance rather than confining your progress to the single task at hand. “Otherwise, the longer you practise, the harder it becomes to transfer the skills that you’ve learned to new situations,” says Boutin.
If none of that helps you learn like a child, simply adopting the arrogance of youth may do no harm. “As we get older, we lose our confidence, and I’m convinced that has a big impact on performance,” says Wulf. To test the assumption, she recently trained a small group of people to pitch a ball. While half were given no encouragement, she offered the others a sham test, rigged to demonstrate that their abilities were above average. They learned to pitch on target with much greater accuracy than those who didn’t get an ego boost.
Whether your itch to learn will ever match Simcott’s appetite for foreign languages is another matter. “What I do – it’s like an extreme sport. There’s no need to learn that many languages,” he says. He has recently turned to Chinese, and has no plans to stop after that. “I’m like a linguistic butterfly. There’s always another, really far away, that suddenly feels appealing.”
Still, embrace the idea that your mind is as capable as Simcott’s, and the lure of extreme learning might take hold of you too.
-by David Robson, New Scientist
The science of magic: it’s not all hocus pocus
Think of your favourite magic trick. Is it as grandiose as David Copperfield’s Death Saw, or is it as simple as making a coin disappear in front of your very eyes?
These two very different tricks have the same effect; they delight and astound, leaving the audience to ponder (usually unsuccessfully):
How did they do that?
But while magic has entertained us for thousands of years, it also has a long and colourful history of informing areas of scientific research, from cognitive psychology to treatment of paralysis.
How could such a seemingly innocuous form of entertainment affect such diverse areas?
Uncovering magic’s secrets
In 1893, French psychologist Alfred Binet managed to co-opt five of the country’s most prominent magicians to help him understand illusions.
His interest in the development of cinema led him to record and view their performances frame by frame.
He was able to analyse the movement of the magicians as an animated sequence with the hope of understanding how audiences could be deceived by the magic performed right in front of them.
In his 1894 article La Psychologie de la Prestidigitation, Binet concluded that magical illusions were created by so many little optical tricks that:
to perceive them could be quite as difficult as to count with the naked eye the grains of sand on the seashore.
A 2008 article by a group of research psychologists argued that it was time to acknowledge magic’s influence on the cognitive sciences, opening a new field called the “science of magic”.
In 2010, neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde coined the term “neuromagic” in their book Sleights of Mind.
The pair published some of their research findings in Nature, co-authored with not one, but four of the world’s leading magicians.
Like Binet more than a century before, they saw the value of working directly with magicians.
Perceiving blindness
Magic has finally emerged from the box labelled “entertainment” and now shines a light on one of the most perplexing areas of mind studies – perception.
Perception is key in many magic techniques. Audience members will follow a magician’s hand when he or she gestures in a curved line – but not when the line is straight, to give just one example.
Scientific attempts to understand perceptual processes have largely relied on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) – medical imaging techniques that identify brain activity through changes in its blood flow.
Scientists also study eye movements using head-mounted eye trackers to ascertain objects of visual focus.
But much of our visual perception cannot be understood as a direct fit between seeing something and that thing registering in our attention.
Looking but not seeing
Our everyday perception is littered with episodes that psychologists call “inattentional blindness” and “change blindness”.
In other words, something happens in front of us but because our attention is elsewhere, we don’t register having seen it.
Neurologically speaking, when change occurs gradually it is referred to as change blindness, and one of the best examples of this is British psychologist Richard Wiseman’s colour card changing trick.
If the change occurs abruptly, it’s called inattentional blindness.
An experiment by American psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris is by far the most famous illustration of this, and won them the Ig Nobel Prize in 2005.
But while the colour card changing “trick” and Simons and Chabris’ experiment aren’t technically magic tricks, magic provides an arena for observing how our visual perception is often at odds with the objects and events happening before our very eyes.
Misdirection is a standard technique of the magician’s palette and demonstrates the perceptual rift between looking at something and attending to it and it is this rift that fascinates neuroscientists and neuropsychologists.
Commonly thought to be about speed – isn’t the hand quicker than the eye? – misdirection is actually more about leading us to focus only on a particular area.
When a magician throws a ball into the air and it seemingly vanishes, the trick works because the audience is following the magician’s gaze – not his hand.
After really throwing the ball into the air numerous times and then simply performing the same movement in every way but without the ball, most people will see a ball fly into the air and disappear.
The magician has misdirected your gaze into following his and deployed a combination of inattentional and change blindness.
A neurological perspective
What we also learn from this neurologically is that implied movement stimulates brain functioning in much the same way as watching an actual movement.
That your gaze can differ from your attention is something that magicians have long exploited.
So now neurologists are looking to magic to help answer questions such as:
Why don’t we see always something right in front of us?
Why do our eyes more easily follow curved rather than straight gestures across space?
Magic, which has exploited such aspects of the visual for centuries, offers us a framework to explore perception in an intriguing way, and the potential for understanding our perceptual system by investigating how magic exploits its blindness and gaps is enormous.
It has become a sophisticated research method and field helping to create more intuitive human-computer interface designs and advance rehabilitation techniques for people physically impaired by neurological conditions like strokes.
It is even being used to study problems in social responsiveness across the autism spectrum.
All we need to do now is convince more magicians to give up their secrets – but how easy that will be remains to be seen.
Babies develop conscious perception from five months of age
Infants develop the ability to consciously process their environment as early as five months of age, according to a study published in the journal Science.
The team of French and Danish researchers, led by neuroscientist Sid Kouider, discovered a signal in the nervous system of infants that reliably identifies the beginning of visual consciousness, or the ability to see something and recall that you have seen it.
The team set out believing infants had the capacity for conscious reflection, but they had to overcome the barrier that babies could not report their thoughts.
They used electroencephalography (EEG) to record electrical activity in the brains of 80 infants aged five, 12 and 15 months while they were shown pictures of faces and random patterns for a fraction of a second.
When adults are aware of a stimulus, their brains show a two-stage pattern of activity. When they see a moving object, the sensors in the vision centre of the brain activate with a spike of activity.
The signal then moves from the back of the brain to the prefrontal cortex, which deals with higher-level cognition. This is known as the late slow wave.
Conscious awareness begins after the second stage of neural activity reaches a specific threshold.
The new study found this two-stage pattern of brain activity was present in the three groups of infants, though it was weaker and more drawn out in the five-month-olds.
The researchers say neurological markers of visual consciousness may help paediatricians better manage infant pain and anaesthesia.
But they note the research does not provide direct proof of consciousness. “Indeed, it is a genuine philosophical problem whether such a proof can ever be obtained from purely neurophsysiological data,” the paper said.
Professor Louise Newman, Director of the Centre for Developmental Psychiatry & Psychology at Monash University, said the study was novel in its ability to measure the way very young brains register stimuli.
But five months should not be seen as a fixed point at which infants start to process information, she said.
“Although this group has studied five months and up, my suspicion would be that if we had different techniques, young infants – from birth on – would show the capacity of registering these sorts of stimuli.
“Infants are born with quite sophisticated capacities to observe, respond to and interact with the environment, particularly the social environment,” she said.
“Very soon after birth, infants will maintain gaze with their parents or parent: they’ve got quite sophisticated visual tracking capacity from an early age.”
Professor Newman, who has undertaken behavioural studies in two- to four-month olds, said young infant brains were extremely sensitive to their mother’s emotional reaction.
“They learn that ‘if I do this, or if I smile or signal in this way, this is what usually happens’. If you manipulate that so they don’t get that response, they’re very sensitive to that and they show signs that it’s very aversive to them.”
‘Seeing’ the flavor of foods
The eyes sometimes have it, beating out the tongue, nose and brain in the emotional and biochemical balloting that determines the taste and allure of food, a scientist said here today. Speaking at the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society, he described how people sometimes “see” flavors in foods and beverages before actually tasting them.
“There have been important new insights into how people perceive food flavors,” said Terry E. Acree, Ph.D. “Years ago, taste was a table with two legs — taste and odor. Now we are beginning to understand that flavor depends on parts of the brain that involve taste, odor, touch and vision. The sum total of these signals, plus our emotions and past experiences, result in perception of flavors, and determine whether we like or dislike specific foods.”
Acree said that people actually can see the flavor of foods, and the eyes have such a powerful role that they can trump the tongue and the nose. The popular Sauvignon Blanc white wine, for instance, gets its flavor from scores of natural chemicals, including chemicals with the flavor of banana, passion fruit, bell pepper and boxwood. But when served a glass of Sauvignon Blanc tinted to the deep red of merlot or cabernet, people taste the natural chemicals that give rise to the flavors of those wines.
The sense of smell likewise can trump the taste buds in determining how things taste, said Acree, who is with Cornell University. In a test that people can do at home, psychologists have asked volunteers to smell caramel, strawberry or other sweet foods and then take a sip of plain water; the water will taste sweet. But smell bread, meat, fish or other non-sweet foods, and water will not taste sweet.
While the appearance of foods probably is important, other factors can override it. Acree pointed out that hashes, chilies, stews and cooked sausages have an unpleasant look, like vomit or feces. However, people savor these dishes based on the memory of eating and enjoying them in the past. The human desire for novelty and new experiences also is a factor in the human tendency to ignore what the eyes may be tasting and listening to the tongue and nose, he added.
Acree said understanding the effects of interactions between smell and vision and taste, as well as other odorants, will open the door to developing healthful foods that look and smell more appealing to finicky kids or adults.
(Source: portal.acs.org)
The memories of near death experiences (NDE): more real than reality?
University of Liège researchers have demonstrated that the physiological mechanisms triggered during NDE lead to a more vivid perception not only of imagined events in the history of an individual but also of real events which have taken place in their lives! These surprising results – obtained using an original method which now requires further investigation – are published in PLOS ONE.
Seeing a bright light, going through a tunnel, having the feeling of ending up in another ‘reality’ or leaving one’s own body are very well known features of the complex phenomena known as ‘Near-Death Experiences ‘ (NDE), which people who are close to death can experience in particular. Products of the mind? Psychological defence mechanisms? Hallucinations? These phenomena have been widely documented in the media and have generated numerous beliefs and theories of every kind. From a scientific point of view, these experiences are all the more difficult to understand in that they come into being in chaotic conditions, which make studying them in real time almost impossible. The University of Liège’s researchers have thus tried a different approach.
Working together, researchers at the Coma Science Group (Directed by Steven Laureys) and the University of Liège’s Cognitive Psychology Research (Professor Serge Brédart and Hedwige Dehon), have looked into the memories of NDE with the hypothesis that if the memories of NDE were pure products of the imagination, their phenomenological characteristics (e.g., sensorial, self referential, emotional, etc. details) should be closer to those of imagined memories. Conversely, if the NDE are experienced in a way similar to that of reality, their characteristics would be closer to the memories of real events.
The researchers compared the responses provided by three groups of patients, each of which had survived (in a different manner) a coma, and a group of healthy volunteers. They studied the memories of NDE and the memories of real events and imagined events with the help of a questionnaire which evaluated the phenomenological characteristics of the memories. The results were surprising. From the perspective being studied, not only were the NDEs not similar to the memories of imagined events, but the phenomenological characteristics inherent to the memories of real events (e.g. memories of sensorial details) are even more numerous in the memories of NDE than in the memories of real events.
The brain, in conditions conducive to such phenomena occurring, is prey to chaos. Physiological and pharmacological mechanisms are completely disturbed, exacerbated or, conversely, diminished. Certain studies have put forward a physiological explanation for certain components of NDE, such as Out-of-Body Experiences, which could be explained by dysfunctions of the temporo-parietal lobe. In this context the study published in PLOS ONE suggests that these same mechanisms could also ‘create’ a perception – which would thus be processed by the individual as coming from the exterior – of reality. In a kind of way their brain is lying to them, like in a hallucination. These events being particularly surprising and especially important from an emotional and personal perspective, the conditions are ripe for the memory of this event being extremely detailed, precise and durable.
Numerous studies have looked into the physiological mechanisms of NDE, the production of these phenomena by the brain, but, taken separately, these two theories are incapable of explaining these experiences in their entirety. The study published in PLOS ONE does not claim to offer a unique explanation for NDE, but it contributes to study pathways which take into account psychological phenomena as factors associated with, and not contradictory to, physiological phenomena.
Psychology Prof. Richard Russell reveals a new sign of aging in perception research
The contrasting nature of facial features is one of the signals that people unconsciously use to decipher how old someone looks, says Psychology Prof. Richard Russell, who has been collaborating with researchers from CE.R.I.E.S. (Epidermal and Sensory Research and Investigation Center), a department of Chanel Research and Technology dedicated to skin related issues and facial appearance.
“Unlike with wrinkles, none of us are consciously aware that we’re using this cue, even though it stares us in the face every day,” said Russell.
The discovery of this cue to facial age perception may partly explain why cosmetics are worn the way they are, and it lends more evidence to the idea that makeup use reflects our biological as well as our cultural heritage, according to Russell.
In one study, Russell and his team measured images of 289 faces ranging in age from 20 to 70 years old, and found that through the aging process, the color of the lips, eyes and eyebrows change, while the skin becomes darker. This results in less contrast between the features and the surrounding skin – leaving older faces to have less contrast than younger faces.
The difference in redness between the lips and the surrounding skin decreases, as does the luminance difference between the eyebrow and the forehead, as the face ages. Although not consciously aware of this sign of aging, the mind uses it as a cue for perceiving how old someone is.
In another study involving more than a hundred subjects in Gettysburg and Paris, the scientists artificially increased these facial contrasts and found that the faces were perceived as younger. When they artificially decreased the facial contrasts, the faces were perceived as older.
The image shows two identical images of the same face, except that the facial contrast has been increased in the left image and decreased in the right image. The face on the left appears younger than the one on the right.
Cosmetics are commonly used to increase aspects of facial contrast, such as the redness of lips. Scientists propose that this can partly explain why makeup is worn the way that it is – shades of lipstick that increase the redness of the lips are making the face appear younger, which is related to healthiness and beauty.
More on Russell’s study is available from PLOS ONE, an open-access publisher that makes the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.
Researchers Show that Suppressing the Brain’s “Filter” Can Improve Performance in Creative Tasks
The brain’s prefrontal cortex is thought to be the seat of cognitive control, working as a kind of filter that keeps irrelevant thoughts, perceptions and memories from interfering with a task at hand.
Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that inhibiting this filter can boost performance for tasks in which unfiltered, creative thoughts present an advantage.
The research was conducted by Sharon Thompson-Schill, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Evangelia Chrysikou, a member of her lab who is now an assistant professor at the University of Kansas. They collaborated with Roy Hamilton and H. Branch Coslett of the Department of Neurology at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and Abhishek Datta and Marom Bikson of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the City College of New York.
Their work was published in the journal Cognitive Neuroscience.
Enhancing Cognition with Video Games: A Multiple Game Training Study
Background
Previous evidence points to a causal link between playing action video games and enhanced cognition and perception. However, benefits of playing other video games are under-investigated. We examined whether playing non-action games also improves cognition. Hence, we compared transfer effects of an action and other non-action types that required different cognitive demands.
Methodology/Principal Findings
We instructed 5 groups of non-gamer participants to play one game each on a mobile device (iPhone/iPod Touch) for one hour a day/five days a week over four weeks (20 hours). Games included action, spatial memory, match-3, hidden- object, and an agent-based life simulation. Participants performed four behavioral tasks before and after video game training to assess for transfer effects. Tasks included an attentional blink task, a spatial memory and visual search dual task, a visual filter memory task to assess for multiple object tracking and cognitive control, as well as a complex verbal span task. Action game playing eliminated attentional blink and improved cognitive control and multiple-object tracking. Match-3, spatial memory and hidden object games improved visual search performance while the latter two also improved spatial working memory. Complex verbal span improved after match-3 and action game training.
Conclusion/Significance
Cognitive improvements were not limited to action game training alone and different games enhanced different aspects of cognition. We conclude that training specific cognitive abilities frequently in a video game improves performance in tasks that share common underlying demands. Overall, these results suggest that many video game-related cognitive improvements may not be due to training of general broad cognitive systems such as executive attentional control, but instead due to frequent utilization of specific cognitive processes during game play. Thus, many video game training related improvements to cognition may be attributed to near-transfer effects.