Smart Economy

Children’s complex thinking skills begin forming before they go to school

By William Harms

January 23, 2013

New research at the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that children begin to show signs of higher-level thinking skills as young as age 4 ½. Researchers have previously attributed higher-order thinking development to knowledge acquisition and better schooling, but the new longitudinal study shows that other skills, not always connected with knowledge, play a role in the ability of children to reason analytically.

The findings, reported in January in the journal Psychological Science, show for the first time that children’s executive function has a role in the development of complicated analytical thinking. Executive function includes such complex skills as planning, monitoring, task switching, and controlling attention. High early executive function skills at school entry are related to higher than average reasoning skills in adolescence.

Growing research suggests that executive function may be trainable through pathways, including preschool curriculum, exercise and impulse control training. Parents and teachers may be able to help encourage development of executive function by having youngsters help plan activities, learn to stop, think, and then take action, or engage in pretend play, said lead author of the study, Lindsey Richland, assistant professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago.

Although important to a child’s education, “little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underlying children’s development of the capacity to engage in complex forms of reasoning,” Richland said.

The new research is reported in the paper “Early Executive Function Predicts Reasoning Development” and follows the development of complex reasoning in children from before the time they go to school until they are 15. Richland’s co-author is Margaret Burchinal, senior scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The two studied the acquisition of analogical thinking, one form of complex reasoning. “The ability to see relationships and similarities between disparate phenomena is fundamental to analytical and inductive reasoning, and is closely related to measurements of general fluid intelligence,” said Richland. Developing complex reasoning ability is particularly fundamental to the innovation and adaptive thinking skills necessary for a modern workforce, she pointed out.

Richland and Burchinal studied a database of 1,364 children who were part of the Early Child Care and Youth Development study from birth through age 15. The group was fairly evenly divided between boys and girls and included families from a diverse cross-section of ethnic and income backgrounds.

The current study examined tests children took when they were 4 ½, when they were in first grade, third grade, and when they were 15.  Because the study was longitudinal, the same children were tested at each interval. Among the tests they took were ones to measure analytical reasoning, executive function, vocabulary knowledge, short-term memory and sustained attention.

Children were tested at 4 ½ on their ability to monitor and control their automatic responses to stimuli. In first grade they worked on a test that judged their ability to move objects in a “Tower of Hanoi” game, in which they had to move disks between pegs in a specific order.

In third grade and at 15 years old, they were tested on their ability to understand analogies, asked in third grade for instance to complete the question “dog is to puppy as cat is to__?” As 15-year-olds they were asked to complete written tests of analogies.

The study found a strong relationship between high scores among children who as preschoolers had strong vocabularies and were good at monitoring and controlling their responses (executive function) to later ability on tests of understanding analogies.

“Overall, these results show that knowledge is necessary for using thinking skills, as shown by the importance of early vocabulary, but also inhibitory control and executive function skills are important contributors to children’s analytical reasoning development,” Richland said.

The National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation supported the research.

Tags

Early childhood development, Early Executive Function Predicts Reasoning Development, Lindsey Richland, Psychological science

Job Posting for Instructors/consultants to teach cognitive skills and opportunity recognition in a business /scientific environment

Job Posting for  Instructors/consultants  to teach cognitive skills and opportunity recognition
in a business /scientific environment

Job opening for part time instructors/ consultants to teach critical and creative cognitive skills in a
business and scientific environment, in various cities across  Canada  on a project/contract basis.

Experience in teaching in  the secondary school gifted program, entrepreneurship programs or a background  in cognitive science, complexity science, behavior economics or neuro-economics
desirable.

Send resume and cover  letter to  the Strategic Foresight Group, 116 Galley Ave Toronto,
Ontario M6R 1H1 by Feb 5, 2013

Four decades of business scenarios: what can experience teach?

Four decades of business scenarios: what can experience teach?

Authors: Stephen M. Millett

Article Type: Conceptual paper

Keywords: Future unknowns, Futuring and visioning, Long-term risk,
Research-based scenarios, Scenario learning, Scenario methodology, Scenarios,
Scenarios as hypotheses, Scenarios for desirable futures, Subject experts

Strategy & Leadership, Volume 41, Issue 1

Page Numbers: 29 - 33

Year: 2013

Finding the next leader or For power and status, dominance and skill trump likability

Finding the next Barack Obama or Warren Buffett might be as simple as looking at who attracts the most eyes in a crowd, a new University of British Columbia study finds.

For the study, which used eye-tracking technology, participants who observed groups of strangers were able to accurately predict who would emerge as leader of the group in 120 seconds or less.

According to the study – to appear in the forthcoming Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – two sets of behaviours will accurately predict future leadership and catch people's attention. The first is prestige – the appearance of skill and competency. The second is dominance, which includes the ability to impose ideas on others through bullying and intimidation.

"Our findings suggest there are really two ways to top the social ladder and gain leadership – impressing people with your skills or powering your way through old-fashioned dominance," says lead author Joey Cheng, a PhD candidate in UBC's Dept. of Psychology. "By measuring levels of influence and visual attention, we find that people defer to and readily spot the prestigious and dominant leaders."

Surprisingly, the study finds that one's likeability – long considered essential for modern leaders – does not consistently predict the attainment of greater status. While participants preferred leaders with prestige, they were surprisingly likely to choose dominant leaders. They were also more forgiving of dominant behaviour than outside observers, the researchers say.

The findings might explain the ongoing prevalence of aggressive leaders in business and politics, such as Donald Trump or Toronto mayor Rob Ford. According to the researchers, today's dominant behaviour has evolved from resource and power battles from our evolutionary past. Prestige's viability as means of attaining status, has increased with the rise of meritocracy in society.

Backgrounder

The study had two parts. First, 200 participants completed a problem-solving task in small groups while being videotaped. Group members rated participants' dominance, prestige and influence during the task, including their own. Participants who were more dominant or prestigious had a greater influence on the task and were perceived as more influential by group members.

In the second part of the study, 60 additional participants watched a total of 120 seconds of short videos of the initial group interactions while wearing an eye-tracking device. These participants paid significantly greater attention to individuals in the clips who appeared more dominant or prestigious, indicating their higher levels of influence.

 

###

Study co-authors include Jessica Tracy, Alan Kingstone, Joseph Henrich (UBC psychology) and Tom Foulsham (formerly UBC, now University of Essex).

 

Brain cells activated, reactivated in learning and memory

University of California, Davis

December 13, 2012

 

Memories are made of this, the song  says. Now neuroscientists have for the first time shown individual mouse brain cells being switched on during learning and later reactivated during memory
recall. The results are published Dec. 13 in the journal Current Biology.

 

We store episodic memories about events in our lives in a part of a brain called the hippocampus, said Brian Wiltgen, now an assistant professor at the Center for Neuroscience and
Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. (Most of the work was conducted while Wiltgen was working at the University of Virginia.) In animals,
the hippocampus is important for navigation and storing memories about places.

 

"The exciting part is that we
are now in a position to answer a fundamental question about memory,"
Wiltgen said. "It's been assumed for a long time that the hippocampus is
essential for memory because it drives reactivation of neurons (nerve cells) in
the cortex. The reason you can remember an event from your life is because the
hippocampus is able to recreate the pattern of cortical activity that was there
at the time."

 

According to this model, patients
with damage to the hippocampus lose their memories because they can't recreate
the activity in the cortex from when the memory was made. Wiltgen's mouse
experiment makes it possible to test this model for the first time.

 

"We can now do a nice test of
hippocampal function," Wiltgen said.

 

Current thinking is that learning
activates a group of neurons that undergo changes, making new connections with
each other to store the memory. Retrieving the memory reactivates the network.

 

Researchers working with human
subjects, at UC Davis and elsewhere, use imaging techniques such as functional
magnetic resonance imaging to see which areas of the brain are switched on and
off in learning and retrieval. But fMRI cannot pick out an object as small as a
single cell.

 

Wiltgen and University of Virginia
graduate student Kaycie Tayler used a genetically modified mouse that carries a
gene for a modified green fluorescent protein. When nerve cells in the mouse
are activated, they produce a long-lived green fluorescence that persists for
weeks, as well as a short-lived red fluorescence that decays in a few hours.

 

However, the whole system can be
suppressed by dosing the mouse with the antibiotic doxycycline, so Tayler and
Wiltgen could manipulate the point at which they started tagging activated
cells.

 

The mice were put into a new cage
with an unfamiliar odor and given a few minutes to explore. Then they were
given a mild electrical shock through the cage floor. When returned to the cage
a couple of days later, the mice would remember the shock and stay frozen in
one place.

 

When they examined the brains of the
mice, the researchers could see which cells had been activated initially to
form the memory and which were reactivated later to recall it.

 

About 40 percent of the cells in the
hippocampus that were tagged during initial memory formation were reactivated,
Wiltgen said. There was also reactivation of cells in parts of the brain cortex
associated with place learning and in the amygdala, which is important for
emotional memory.

 

There was no evidence of
reactivation when the mice were tested in a new environment that they did not
remember, Wiltgen said.

 

The researchers also looked at
whether reactivation changed as memories got older. Over several weeks,
reactivation in the cortex and parts of the hippocampus remained stable, but it
decreased in other brain regions like the amygdala.

 

In future work, Wiltgen's team plans
to examine the role of the hippocampus and other brain regions in forming memories
and explore new ways to activate or block memories.

 

Other authors of the paper are
Kazumasa Tanaka at the University of Virginia
and Leon Reijmers at Tufts University School of Medicine.

The work was supported by the
McKnight Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Nakajima
Foundation.

 

About UC Davis

 

For more than 100 years, UC Davis
has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform
the world.

Located close to the state capital,
UC Davis has more than 33,000 students, more than 2,500 faculty and more than
21,000 staff, an annual research budget of nearly $750 million, a comprehensive
health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers
interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four
colleges -- Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences,
Engineering, and Letters and Science. It also houses six professional schools
-- Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty
Irene Moore School of Nursing.

 

Media contact(s):

* Brian Wiltgen, Center for
Neuroscience, (530) 754-9137, bjwiltgen@ucdavis.edu

* Andy Fell, UC Davis News Service,
(530) 752-4533, ahfell@ucdavis.edu

 

View this story on the Web at

<http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=10437>

Need to move soon? Don't trust your emotions

Consumers are more likely to make emotional instead of objective assessments when the outcomes are closer to the present time than when they are further away in the future, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

"The proximity of a decision's outcome increases consumer reliance on feelings when making decisions. Feelings are relied upon more when the outcome is closer in time because these feelings appear to be more informative in such situations," write authors Hannah H. Chang (Singapore Management University) and Michel Tuan Pham (Columbia University).

From which snack to buy to which apartment to rent, we base many of our decisions on either feelings or objective assessment. The option that appeals more to our feelings is often not the one that "makes more sense." When do consumers rely more on their feelings than objective assessments? And how does the proximity of the decision outcome influence consumer decision-making? For example, when looking for an apartment to rent, some consumers may decide which apartment to rent only a week before moving in, while others may decide several months in advance.

In one study, college students were asked to imagine that they were about to graduate, had found a well-paying job, and were looking for an apartment to rent after graduation. They were then given a choice between an apartment that appeals more to their feelings (a smaller, prettier apartment with better views) and an option that is objectively better (a bigger, more conveniently located apartment). Compared to college juniors and those who imagined graduating a year later, college seniors and those who imagined graduating and moving into an apartment next month were more likely to choose the former option.

"Companies should consider the time between consumer decision-making and consumption. When consumers will be deciding immediately prior to consumption (choosing an entrée at a restaurant or a mobile phone plan), companies should focus on messages that appeal to consumers' feelings. When they will be deciding well in advance (choosing a retirement plan or booking flights), companies should focus less on emotional appeals and instead emphasize messages that appeal to objective assessments," the authors conclude.

 

###

Hannah H. Chang and Michel Tuan Pham. "Affect as a Decision-Making System of the Present." Journal of Consumer Research: June 2013. For more information, contact Hannah H. Chang (hannahchang@smu.edu.sg) or visit http://ejcr.org/.

 

Brain study shows why some people are more in tune with what they want

Brain study shows why some people are more in tune with what
they want

 

December 9, 2012 in Neuroscience

 

Wellcome Trust researchers have discovered how the brain
assesses confidence in its decisions. The findings explain why some people have
better insight into their choices than others.

 

 

Throughout life, we're constantly evaluating our options and
making decisions based on the information we have available. How confident we
are in those decisions has clear consequences. For example, investment bankers
have to be confident that they're making the right choice when deciding where
to put their clients' money. Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging at UCL led by Professor Ray Dolan have pinpointed the specific
areas of the brain that interact to compute both the value of the choices we
have in front of us and our confidence in those choices, giving us the ability
to know what we want. The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) to measure activity in the brains of twenty hungry volunteers while they
made choices between food items that they would later eat. To determine the
subjective value of the snack options, the participants were asked to indicate
how much they would be willing to pay for each snack. Then after making their
choice, they were asked to report how confident they were that they had made
the right decision and selected the best snack. It has previously been shown
that a region at the front of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is
important for working out the value of decision options. The new findings
reveal that the level of activity in this area is also linked to the level of
confidence participants placed on choosing the best option. The study also
shows that the interaction between this area of the brain and an adjacent area
reflects participants' ability to access and report their level of confidence
in their choices. Dr Steve Fleming, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow
now based at New York
University, explains:
"We found that people's confidence varied from decision to decision. While
we knew where to look for signals of value computation, it was very interesting
to also observe neural signals of confidence in the same brain region." Dr
Benedetto De Martino, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL, added:
"Overall, we think our results provide an initial account both of how
people make choices, and also their insight into the decision process."
The findings are published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Journal
reference: Nature Neuroscience Provided by Wellcome Trust 



Read more at: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-brain-people-tune.html#jCp

Feeling Disgust May Enhance Our Ability to Detect Impurities

 

Related Topics: Emotions,
Individual
Differences, Perception,
Psychological
Science, Visual
Perception

Disgust – it’s an emotion we experience when we encounter things that are
dirty, impure, or otherwise contaminated. From an evolutionary standpoint,
experiencing the intense, visceral sense of revulsion that comes with disgust
presumably helps us to avoid contaminants that can make us sick or even kill
us. But new research suggests that disgust not only helps us to avoid
impurities, it may also make us better able to see them.

If something looks dirty and disgusting, we typically assume it’s
contaminated in some way; when something is white, however, we are more likely
to assume that it’s clean and pure. Research has shown that people from many
different cultures hold this association between lightness and purity, which
may explain why we prefer white teeth, white operating rooms, and white
porcelain bathroom fixtures.

“In the psychology of purity, even the slightest deviation from a pure state
(i.e., whiteness) is an unacceptable blemish,” observe psychological scientist
Gary Sherman and his co-authors.

They hypothesized that if feeling disgust motivates people to create or
protect pure environments, it may also lead them to prioritize the light end of
the visual spectrum. For people trying to preserve cleanliness and purity, the
ability to distinguish even slight deviations from a light shade like white may
become particularly important.

Sherman, who is now at Harvard
University’s Kennedy
School of Government, and his co-authors investigated this hypothesis in three
studies, in which they tested participants’ ability to make subtle gray-scale
discriminations in both ends of the light spectrum. Their findings are
published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for
Psychological Science.

In their first study, 123 college students were presented with sets of
rectangles. In each set of four rectangles, one rectangle was either slightly
darker or slightly lighter than the others. The participants were asked to
indicate which of the four rectangles in each set was different from the other
three. After completing the discrimination task, they completed a survey that
measured their overall sensitivity to disgust.

In general, the students were better at identifying the rectangle that stood
out when the rectangles were presented on the dark end of the visual spectrum.
But the researchers observed a significant relationship between participants’
performance on the light end of the spectrum and their levels of trait disgust
– people who showed higher sensitivity to disgust also showed better
performance on the light end of the spectrum relative to the dark end.
Importantly, this effect was specific to disgust, as there was no such
relationship between participants’ levels of trait fear and their
discrimination performance.

These findings were confirmed in a second study, showing that students who
reported greater disgust sensitivity were better at distinguishing a faint
number set against a background of a nearly identical shade presented on the
light end of the visual spectrum relative to the dark end.

Based on these findings, Sherman
and his co-authors wondered whether disgust might actively influence what
people perceive. Based on the idea of perceptual tuning, they hypothesized that
inducing disgust would actually “tune” participants’ visual perception,
enhancing their ability to discriminate among small deviations in lightness.

In the third study, participants were presented with a slide show of
emotional images designed to elicit either disgust (i.e., images of
cockroaches, trash) or fear (i.e., images of a handgun, an angry face). They
then completed another perceptual discrimination task.

Just as in the first two studies, greater trait disgust predicted better
performance on light-end trials relative to performance on dark-end trials. But
the emotional images had different effects depending on the participants’
disgust sensitivity. For participants who were low on trait disgust, viewing
disgusting images seemed to have no effect on their discrimination performance
on either end of the spectrum. For participants who were highly sensitive to
disgust, however, viewing disgusting images significantly enhanced their
performance on light-end trials.

“Research on the experience-altering nature of emotion has typically focused
on nonperceptual experience, such as changes in cognitive appraisals. It is
clear, however, that these influences extend to perception,” the researchers
conclude.

Together, the three studies provide evidence for an interactive relationship
between disgust sensitivity and perceptual sensitivity that may ultimately help
us detect and avoid the germs, toxins, and other contaminants around us.

This research was co-authored by Gerald Clore of the University of Virginia
and Jonathan Haidt, who is now at the New York University Stern School of
Business.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

###

For more information about this study, please contact: Gary D. Sherman at gary_sherman@hks.harvard.edu.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the
highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article
"The Faintest Speck of Dirt: Disgust Enhances the Detection of
Impurity" and access to other Psychological Science research
findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.

Related Topics: Emotions,
Individual
Differences, Perception,
Psychological
Science, Visual
Perception

 

For Immediate Release

Contact: Anna
Mikulak

Association for Psychological Science

202.293.9300

amikulak@psychologicalscience.org

 

Why older adults become fraud victims more often: Brain shows diminished response to untrustworthiness

Why older adults become fraud victims more often: Brain shows diminished response to untrustworthiness December 3, 2012 in Neuroscience

 

Why are older people especially vulnerable to becoming victims of fraud? A new UCLA study indicates that an important clue may lie in a particular region of the brain that influences the ability to discern who is honest and who is trying to deceive us.

 

Older people, more than younger adults, may fail to interpret an untrustworthy face as potentially dishonest, the study shows. The reason for this, the UCLA life scientists found, seems to be that a brain region called the anterior insula, which is linked to disgust and is important for discerning
untrustworthy faces, is less active in older adults. "The consequences of misplaced trust for older adults are severe," said Shelley E. Taylor, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and senior author of the new research, which appears Dec. 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "A recent study estimates that adults over age 60 lost at least $2.9 billion in 2010 to financial exploitation, ranging from home repair scams to complex financial swindles. This figure represents a 12 percent increase from 2008. "Older adults seem to be particularly vulnerable to interpersonal solicitations, and their reduced sensitivity to cues related to trust may partially underlie this vulnerability." Taylor and her colleagues report the results of two new studies in PNAS. In the first, 119 older adults between the ages of 55 and 84 (mean age 68) and 24 younger adults (mean age 23) looked at 30 photographs of faces and rated them on how trustworthy and approachable they seemed. The faces were intentionally selected to look trustworthy, neutral or untrustworthy. The younger and older adults reacted very similarly to the trustworthy faces and to the neutral faces.
However, when viewing the untrustworthy faces, the younger adults reacted strongly, while the older adults did not. The older adults saw these faces as more trustworthy and more approachable than the younger adults did.

 

"Most of the older adults showed this effect," said Taylor, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and director of UCLA's Social Neuroscience Laboratory. "They missed facial cues that are pretty easily distinguished." The second study was conducted at UCLA's Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, where participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans while looking at the faces. This study included 44 participants: 23 older adults between the ages of 55 and 80 (mean age 66) and 21 younger adults (mean age 33). The younger adults showed anterior insula activation both when they were making the ratings of the faces and especially when viewing the untrustworthy faces. In contrast, the older adults displayed very little anterior insula activation during these activities. "We wanted to find out whether there are differences in how the brain reacts to these faces, and the answer is yes, there are," Taylor said. "We found a strong anterior insula response both to the task of rating trustworthiness and also to the untrustworthy faces among the younger adults—but the response is much more muted among the older adults. The older
adults do not have as strong an anterior insula early-warning signal; their brains are not saying 'be wary,' as the brains of the younger adults are.
"In younger adults, the very act of judging whether a person is trustworthy activates the anterior insula," she added. "It's as if they're thinking they need to make this judgment with caution. This gives us a potential brain mechanism for understanding why older and younger adults process facial cues about trust differently. Now we know what the brain sees, and in the older adults, the answer is not very much when it comes to differentiating on the basis of trust." "It's not that younger adults
are better at finance or judging whether an investment is good; they're better at discerning whether a person is potentially trustworthy when cues are communicated visually," she said. Taylor and her colleagues, including lead author Elizabeth Castle, identified that the anterior insula plays the role of telling us "Something's not right here." "Older adults are more vulnerable. It looks like their skills for making good financial decisions may be deteriorating as early as their early-to-mid-50s," said Taylor, a founder of the field of health psychology who was honored in 2010 with the American Psychological Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. The prototypical victim of financial fraud, Taylor
said, is a 55-year-old male who is an experienced investor. "It's people with money, who are comfortable with investing," Taylor said. "Somehow they didn't get the early warning from their brain that said 'Don't invest in that movie, don't buy that land.' The financial losses can be huge." Castle, a UCLA psychology graduate student who analyzed the data for the brain-mapping study, said the scientists found a "robust" anterior insula response in the younger adults and a "minimal" response in the older adults.
 "One of the functions of the anterior insula is to sense bodily feelings and interpret these visceral states for the brain." Castle said.
"This is the response that we see lacking in older adults. "This neural mapping of bodily states forms the basis of 'gut feelings'" she added. "This leads us to think that older adults have a diminished gut
feeling that something is wrong when someone looks untrustworthy." The life scientists did not find significant differences between women and men.
This project is funded by the National Institute on Aging in an effort to understand the reasons for the vulnerability of older adults to financial fraud. 'Just hang up' For Taylor, the topic is personal. Her father and aunt both lost money in financial scams.
"My father was walked to the bank by someone he referred to as 'such a nice man.' The guy was a homeless man. Anybody looking at him should have picked up on the cues that said 'Do not give this man $6,000.' I still don't know how my father could not pick up that this was not a nice young man," Taylor said. Her father was in his mid-70s at the time. Her aunt bought jewels through the mail.
"When I give talks on this work, I wear the 'diamond' earrings that she bought in the mail," Taylor
said. "They are glass." What advice does Taylor offer older adults to avoid becoming victims of financial fraud? "I would tell older adults to just hang up on solicitors. Don't talk to salesmen pushing investments—just say no. Do not go to the free lunch seminars where there are investment pitches. Stay away from these people," she said. "I'm not saying that all of these are fraudulent, but the best thing that you can do if your brain isn't helping you to make these discriminations is not to have to make them. Be very careful what you do with your money. I don't talk to any solicitors on the phone." A pivotal point is when people take money from their 401(k) accounts, including when they take required distributions, starting at age 70-and-a-half.
"That's when older adults tend to be targeted—401(k) conversions, required minimum distributions and inheritances," Taylor said. "These are points when people need to be wary, and many older adults are insufficiently wary."
What does an untrustworthy face look like? "The smile is insincere, the eye contact is off; it's a gestalt," Taylor said. More information: "Neural and behavioral bases of age differences in
perceptions of trust," by Elizabeth Castle et al. PNAS, 2012. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Provided by University of California, Los Angeles 



Read more at: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-older-adults-fraud-victims-brain.html#jCp

Men and women explore the visual world differently

Everyone knows that men and women tend to hold different views on certain things.  However, new research by scientists from the University of Bristol and published in PLoS ONE indicates that this may literally be the case.

Researchers examined where men and women looked while viewing still images from films and pieces of art. They found that while women made fewer eye movements than men, those they did make were longer and to more varied locations. 

These differences were largest when viewing images of people. With photos of heterosexual couples, both men and women preferred looking at the female figure rather than the male one. However, this preference was even stronger for women.

While men were only interested in the faces of the two figures, women's eyes were also drawn to the rest of the bodies - in particular that of the female figure.

Felix Mercer Moss, PhD student in the Department of Computer Science who led the study, said: "The study represents the most compelling evidence yet that, despite occupying the same world, the viewpoints of men and women can, at times, be very different.

"Our findings have important implications for both past and future eye movement research together with future technological applications."

Eye movements are a tool used to collect visual information, which then colours an individual's perception of the world. Equally, when individuals have different interpretations of the world, this in turn affects the information they seek and, consequently, the places they look.

The researchers suggest that men and women look at different things because they interpret the world differently. The pictures preferred by women were the same pictures that produced the most distinct 'looking patterns'. Similarly, the pictures with the largest scope for a difference in interpretation - those with people - also produced the largest differences between where men and women looked.

One perceptual sex difference in particular - women's increased sensitivity to threat - may explain a further finding. People's eyes are drawn to the most informative regions of an image while also being repelled from areas that carry possible threat or danger, for example the sun.  Faces are a paradoxical example of a region that is both highly informative and potentially threatening, particularly if eye contact is made.

While men made direct eye contact with faces in the pictures; especially when primed to look for threat, women averted their gaze downward slightly towards the nose and mouth of these faces. The researchers claim that this may be due to women being more sensitive to the negative consequences of making direct eye contact and will, therefore, shift their gaze downward, towards the centre of the face.

 

###

Paper: Eye Movements to Natural Images as a Function of Sex and Personality by Felix Mercer Moss, Roland Baddeley and Nishan Canagarajah, PLoS ONE, 30 November 2012.