Search results for "Experimental and Cognitive Psychology"
showing 10 items of 1162 documents
Judging body weight from faces: the height-weight illusion.
2012
Being able to exploit features of the human face to predict health and fitness can serve as an evolutionary advantage. Surface features such as facial symmetry, averageness, and skin colour are known to influence attractiveness. We sought to determine whether observers are able to extract more complex features, namely body weight. If possible, it could be used as a predictor for health and fitness. For instance, facial adiposity could be taken to indicate a cardiovascular challenge or proneness to infections. Observers seem to be able to glean body weight information from frontal views of a face. Is weight estimation robust across different viewing angles? We showed that participants stron…
Male steroid hormones and female preference for male body odor
2006
It has been suggested that human scent works as a signal in mate selection, but the empirical evidence is scarce. Here, we examined whether women’s olfactory preferences for a man’s scent could be correlated with his testosterone, estradiol, or cortisol concentrations, and whether these preferences change along with the menstrual cycle. In line with previous studies, women in their most fertile period gave the highest attractiveness ratings to all men. However, the intensity ratings by women at different menstrual phases did not significantly differ statistically. Interestingly, we found that cortisol concentration in saliva correlated positively with the attractiveness but not with the int…
Internal consistency predicts attractiveness in biological motion walkers
2016
Abstract Why do some people appear attractive to us while others don't? Evolutionary psychology states that sexual attractiveness has evolved to assess the reproductive qualities of a potential mate. Past research in the field has identified a number of traits that can be linked directly to qualities such as immuno-competence, developmental stability, and fertility. The current study is motivated by the hypothesis that attractiveness is determined not just by individual, independent traits, but also by whether their pattern is internally consistent. Exploiting the domain of biological motion, we manipulated internal consistency between anthropometry and kinematics of a moving body. In two e…
Facial attractiveness in men provides clues to semen quality
2003
Abstract Facial attractiveness has been related to health in both men and women. Certain psychological, physiological, and secondary sex characteristics have been used as accurate markers of hormonal and developmental health. The main objective of this study was to investigate the capacity of women to select males of high reproductive quality based on their facial attractiveness. A total of 66 males were included in the study. Each of them provides a semen sample, and frontal and lateral photographs were taken. Semen analysis was made according to standard WHO (1999) guidelines for morphology, motility, and concentration. Moreover, a Sperm Index (SI) was calculated as the principal componen…
Height predicts jealousy differently for men and women
2008
Because male height is associated with attractiveness, dominance, and reproductive success, taller men may be less jealous. And because female height has a curvilinear relationship with health and reproductive success (with average-height females having the advantages), female height may have a curvilinear relationship with jealousy. In Study 1, male height was found to be negatively correlated with self-reported global jealousy, whereas female height was curvilinearly related to jealousy, with average-height women reporting the lowest levels of jealousy. In Study 2, male height was found to be negatively correlated with jealousy in response to socially influential, physically dominant, and…
Auditory distance perception in an acoustic pipe
2008
In a study of auditory distance perception, we investigated the effects of exaggeration the acoustic cue of reverberation where the intensity of sound did not vary noticeably. The set of stimuli was obtained by moving a sound source inside a 10.2-m long pipe having a 0.3-m diameter. Twelve subjects were asked to listen to a speech sound while keeping their head inside the pipe and then to estimate the egocentric distance from the sound source using a magnitude production procedure. The procedure was repeated eighteen times using six different positions of the sound source. Results show that the point at which perceived distance equals physical distance is located approximately 3.5 m away fr…
The impact of a concurrent motor task on auditory and visual temporal discrimination tasks
2016
Previous studies have shown the presence of an interference effect on temporal perception when participants are required to simultaneously execute a nontemporal task. Such interference likely has an attentional source. In the present work, a temporal discrimination task was performed alone or together with a self-paced finger-tapping task used as concurrent, nontemporal task. Temporal durations were presented in either the visual or the auditory modality, and two standard durations (500 and 1, 500 ms) were used. For each experimental condition, the participant’s threshold was estimated and analyzed. The mean Weber fraction was higher in the visual than in the auditory modality, but only for…
Perceiving rhythm where none exists : Event-Related Potential (ERP) correlates of subjective accenting
2008
Previous research suggests that our past experience of rhythmic structure in music results in a tendency for Western listeners to subjectively accent equitonal isochronous sequences. We have shown in an earlier study that the occurrence of a slightly softer tone in the 8th to 11th position of such a sequence evokes a P300 event-related potential (ERP) response of different amplitudes depending on whether the tone occurs in putatively subjectively accented or unaccented sequence positions (Brochard et al., 2003). One current theory of rhythm processing postulates that subjective accenting is the result of predictive modulations of perceptual processes by the attention system. If this is the …
Common variance in amplitude envelope perception tasks and their impact on phoneme duration perception and reading and spelling in Finnish children w…
2009
ABSTRACTOur goal was to investigate auditory and speech perception abilities of children with and without reading disability (RD) and associations between auditory, speech perception, reading, and spelling skills. Participants were 9-year-old, Finnish-speaking children with RD (N = 30) and typically reading children (N = 30). Results showed significant group differences between the groups in phoneme duration discrimination but not in perception of amplitude modulation and rise time. Correlations among rise time discrimination, phoneme duration, and spelling accuracy were found for children with RD. Those children with poor rise time discrimination were also poor in phoneme duration discrimi…
Can animation compensate for temporal processing difficulties in deaf people?
2020
International audience; This article addresses the issue of animation as an aid for temporal processing difficulties in deaf people learning the Highway Code. A decision‐making task involving static or animated road situations was performed by 21 deaf and 24 hearing participants. They were confronted with four types of driving situations (overtaking, negotiating roundabouts, highways, and intersections) and had to decide whether or not to proceed. Participants were presented with two different formats (static vs. animated) and two levels of difficulty (simple vs. complex). Results showed that deaf participants had poorer performances in the static condition than hearing participants. Perfor…