Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance
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J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform · Aug 2014
The facial width-to-height ratio shares stronger links with judgments of aggression than with judgments of trustworthiness.
Variation in the facial width-to-height ratio (face ratio) is associated with judgments of aggression and of trustworthiness made by observers when viewing men's faces. Although judgments of aggression and of trustworthiness are correlated, they represent distinct constructs. We thus investigated the hypothesis that judgments of aggression share stronger associations with the face ratio than judgments of trustworthiness, and that judgments of aggression mediate the link between the face ratio and trustworthiness. ⋯ The correlations between the face ratio and judgments of aggression were moderate to strong in all 4 studies (rs = .45 to .70). Reaction time was measured in Study 4: Participants judged aggression faster than trustworthiness; thus, temporal precedence also supports the hypothesis that aggression mediates the link between the face ratio and trustworthiness. Sensitivity to the face ratio may therefore be part of a perceptual mechanism specialized to assess aggressiveness rather than trustworthiness in others, likely because of the greater necessity for rapid judgments of aggressive potential than trustworthiness.
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J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform · Aug 2014
Item and category-based attentional control during search for real-world objects: Can you find the pants among the pans?
To compare the speed and efficiency of item-based and category-based attentional control during visual search for real-world objects, we measured N2pc components as electrophysiological markers of attentional target selection. In different blocks, participants searched for 1 or 2 specific target objects or for any object in a target category (items of clothing or kitchen objects). ⋯ In contrast to previous findings for letter/digit search (Nako, Wu, & Eimer, 2014), target N2pc components were delayed by 40 ms during category-guided search relative to single-target search. This suggests that for objects and object categories that are less familiar than alphanumerical stimuli, category-guided target selection operates less efficiently than selection that is based on a physical match with an attentional template. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).