No abstract

No abstract

People automatically redirect their visual attention by following others' gaze orientation, a phenomenon called "gaze following." This is an evolutionarily generated socio-cognitive process that provides people with information about their environments. Often, however, people in crowds can have rather different gaze orientations. This study investigated how gaze following occurs in situations with many conflicting gazes. In two experiments, we modified the gaze cueing paradigm to use a crowd rather than a single individual. Specifically, participants were presented with a group of human avatars with differing gaze orientations, and the target appeared randomly on the left or right side of a display. We found that (a) when a marked difference existed in the number of avatars with divergent gaze orientations, participants automatically followed the majority's gaze orientation, and (b) the strongest gaze cue effect occurred when all gazes shared the same orientation, with the response superiority of the majority's oriented location monotonically diminishing with the number of gazes with divergent orientations. These findings suggested that the majority rule plays a role in gaze following behavior when individuals are confronted with conflicting multigaze scenes, and that an increasing subgroup size appears to enlarge the strength of the gaze cueing effect.

There is growing recognition that caring for a patient with schizophrenia often results in high levels of perceived burden and poorer overall mental health for caregivers. A quantitative cross-sectional design and standardized instruments were used to collect data from 355 primary caregivers of adults in outpatient care with schizophrenia in China. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the association between caregiver burden and mental health among primary caregivers and whether this association is influenced by personality, coping style, and family functioning, based on a diathesis-stress perspective. Goodness-of-fit indices (χ /df = 1.406, GFI = 0.919, CFI = 0.957, etc.) confirmed that the modified model fit the data well. In line with the diathesis-stress model, and with this study's hypotheses, we found that caregiver burden was significantly related to mental health outcomes directly. The final model showed that personality traits, coping style, and family function influenced the relationship between caregiver burden and mental health. The neuroticism personality traits have a direct effect on caregiver burden and family functioning in this sample. Coping style had a direct effect on the caregiver burden, and family functioning had a direct effect on the caregiver burden. Our final model about primary caregivers can be applied clinically to predict mental health outcomes from caregiver burden.

Understanding the process by which consumers evaluate the designs of experience goods is critical for firms designing and delivering experience products. As the implicit process involved in this evaluation, and given the possible social desirability bias inherent to traditional methods of product design evaluation in certain conditions, neuroscientific methods are preferred to gain insight into the neural basis of consumers’ evaluation of experience good designs. We here used event-related potentials (ERPs) and a revised go/no-go paradigm to investigate consumers’ neural responses to experience good designs. Personalized product designs and neutral landscape pictures were randomly presented to 20 student participants; they were asked to view these product designs without making any decisions. The paired t-test and repeated-measures analysis of correlation showed that the P200 and late positive potential (LPP) elicited by the most-preferred experience good designs were significantly higher than that elicited by least-preferred designs, and the two ERP components were positively correlated with the personalized rating scores. Thus, P200 and LPP might be the early and late indices of consumers’ evaluation of experience good designs, respectively, and may facilitate an understanding of the temporal course of this evaluation. Furthermore, these two ERP components can be used to identify consumers’ preferences toward experience good designs. In addition, given the use of personalized experimental stimuli, these findings may help to explain why customized products are preferred by consumers.

Visual working memory is highly sensitive to global configurations in addition to the features of each object. When objects move, their configuration varies correspondingly. In this study, we explored the geometric rules governing the maintenance of a dynamic configuration in visual working memory. Our investigation is guided by Klein's Erlangen program, a hierarchy of geometric stability that includes affine, projective, and topological invariants. In a change-detection task, memory displays were categorized by which geometric invariance was violated by the objects' motions. The results showed that (a) there was no decrement in memory performance until the projective invariance was violated, (b) more dramatic changes (such as a topological change) did not further enlarge the decrement, and (c) objects causing the violation of projective invariance were better encoded into memory. These results collectively demonstrate that projective invariance is the only geometric property determining the maintenance of a dynamic configuration in visual working memory.

The nature of the building blocks of information in visual working memory (VWM) is a fundamental issue that has not been well resolved. Most researchers take objects as the building blocks, although this perspective has received criticism. The objects could be physically separated ones (strict object hypothesis) or hierarchical objects created from separated individuals (broad object hypothesis). Meanwhile, a newly proposed Boolean map theory for visual attention suggests that Boolean maps may be the building blocks of VWM (Boolean map hypothesis); this perspective could explain many critical findings of VWM. However, no previous study has examined these hypotheses. We explored this issue by focusing on a critical point on which they make distinct predictions. We asked participants to remember two distinct objects (2-object), three distinct objects (3-object), or three objects with repeated information (mixed-3-object, e.g., one red bar and two green bars, green bars could be represented as one hierarchical object) and adopted contralateral delay activity (CDA) to tap into the maintenance phase of VWM. The mixed-3-object condition could generate two Boolean maps, three objects, or three objects most of the time (hierarchical objects are created in certain trials, retaining two objects). Simple orientations (Experiment 1) and colors (Experiments 2 and 3) were used as stimuli. Although the CDA of the mixed-3-object condition was slightly lower than that of the 3-object condition, no significant difference was revealed between them. Both conditions displayed significantly higher CDAs than the 2-object condition. These findings support the broad object hypothesis. We further suggest that Boolean maps might be the unit for retrieval/comparison in VWM.

No abstract