Consumer Visual and Affective Bias for Soothing Dolls.

Soothing dolls are becoming increasingly popular in a society with a lot of physical and mental stress. Many products are also combined with soothing dolls to stimulate consumers' desire for impulse buying. However, there is no research on the relationship between consumers' purchasing behavior, consumers' preference for soothing dolls, and visual preference. The purpose of this study was to examine the possible factors that affect the emotional and visual preferences of soothing dolls. Two local stores' sales lists were used to extract three different types of dolls. The 2D and 3D versions of these three dolls were used. Subjective emotional preferences were examined by the self-assessment manikin (SAM) scale, with 5-point Likert scales for valence and arousal factors. An eye tracker was used to examine visual preferences, both before and after positive/negative emotion stimulation by the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). There were 37 subjects involved, with an age range of 20-28 years. The experimental results show that the average valence/arousal scores for 2D/3D dolls were (3.80, 3.74) and (2.65, 2.68), respectively. There was no statistical difference, but both 2D and 3D pictures had high valence scores. Eye tracker analysis revealed no gaze difference in visual preference between 2D and 3D dolls. After negative emotional picture stimulation, the observation time of the left-side doll decreased from 2.307 (std 0.905) to 1.947 (std 1.038) seconds, p < 0.001; and that of the right-side picture increased from 1.898 (std 0.907) to 2.252 (std 1.046) seconds, p < 0.001. The average observation time ratio of the eye on the 3D doll was 40.6%, higher than that on the 2D doll (34.3%, p = 0.02). Soothing dolls may be beneficial for emotion relaxation. Soothing dolls always have high valence features according to the SAM evaluation's measurement. Moreover, this study proposes a novel research model using an eye-tracker and the SAM for the SOR framework.

Face processing in the infant brain after pandemic lockdown.

The role of visual experience in the development of face processing has long been debated. We present a new angle on this question through a serendipitous study that cannot easily be repeated. Infants viewed short blocks of faces during fMRI in a repetition suppression task. The same identity was presented multiple times in half of the blocks (repeat condition) and different identities were presented once each in the other half (novel condition). In adults, the fusiform face area (FFA) tends to show greater neural activity for novel versus repeat blocks in such designs, suggesting that it can distinguish same versus different face identities. As part of an ongoing study, we collected data before the COVID-19 pandemic and after an initial local lockdown was lifted. The resulting sample of 12 infants (9-24 months) divided equally into pre- and post-lockdown groups with matching ages and data quantity/quality. The groups had strikingly different FFA responses: pre-lockdown infants showed repetition suppression (novel > repeat), whereas post-lockdown infants showed the opposite (repeat > novel), often referred to as repetition enhancement. These findings provide speculative evidence that altered visual experience during the lockdown, or other correlated environmental changes, may have affected face processing in the infant brain.

Real-Time Gender Recognition for Juvenile and Adult Faces.

Facial gender recognition is a crucial research topic due to its comprehensive use cases, including a demographic gender survey, visitor profile identification, targeted advertisement, access control, security, and surveillance from CCTV. For these real-time applications, the face of a person can be oriented to any angle from the camera axis, and the person can be of any age group, including juveniles. A child's face consists of immature craniofacial feature points in texture and edge compared to an adult face, making it very hard to recognize gender using the child's face. Real-word faces captured in an unconstrained environment make the gender prediction system more complex to identify correctly due to orientation. These factors reduce the accuracy of the existing state-of-the-art models developed so far for real-time facial gender prediction. This paper presents the novelty of facial gender recognition for juveniles, adults, and unconstrained-oriented faces. The progressive calibration network (PCN) detects rotation-invariant faces in the proposed model. Then, a Gabor filter is applied to extract unique edge and texture features from the detected face. The Gabor filter is invariant to illumination and produces texture and edge features with redundant feature coefficients in large dimensions. Gabor has drawbacks such as redundancy and a large dimension resolved by the proposed meanDWT feature optimization method, which optimizes the system's accuracy, the size of the model, and computational timing. The proposed feature engineering model is classified with different classifiers such as Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, SVM with linear, and RBF kernel. Its results are compared with the state-of-the-art techniques; detailed experimental analysis is presented and concluded to support the argument. We also present a review of approaches based on conventional and deep learning methods with their pros and cons for facial gender recognition on different datasets available for facial gender recognition.

The impact of face masks on emotion recognition performance and perception of threat.

Facial emotion recognition is crucial for social interaction. However, in times of a global pandemic, where wearing a face mask covering mouth and nose is widely encouraged to prevent the spread of disease, successful emotion recognition may be challenging. In the current study, we investigated whether emotion recognition, assessed by a validated emotion recognition task, is impaired for faces wearing a mask compared to uncovered faces, in a sample of 790 participants between 18 and 89 years (condition mask vs. original). In two more samples of 395 and 388 participants between 18 and 70 years, we assessed emotion recognition performance for faces that are occluded by something other than a mask, i.e., a bubble as well as only showing the upper part of the faces (condition half vs. bubble). Additionally, perception of threat for faces with and without occlusion was assessed. We found impaired emotion recognition for faces wearing a mask compared to faces without mask, for all emotions tested (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, neutral). Further, we observed that perception of threat was altered for faces wearing a mask. Upon comparison of the different types of occlusion, we found that, for most emotions and especially for disgust, there seems to be an effect that can be ascribed to the face mask specifically, both for emotion recognition performance and perception of threat. Methodological constraints as well as the importance of wearing a mask despite temporarily compromised social interaction are discussed.

When perception is stronger than physics: Perceptual similarities rather than laws of physics govern the perception of interacting objects.

When several multistable displays are viewed simultaneously, their perception is synchronized, as they tend to be in the same perceptual state. Here, we investigated the possibility that perception may reflect embedded statistical knowledge of physical interaction between objects for specific combinations of displays and layouts. We used a novel display with two ambiguously rotating gears and an ambiguous walker-on-a-ball display. Both stimuli produce a physically congruent perception when an interaction is possible (i.e., gears counterrotate, and the ball rolls under the walker's feet). Next, we gradually manipulated the stimuli to either introduce abrupt changes to the potential physical interaction between objects or keep it constant despite changes in the visual stimulus. We characterized the data using four different models that assumed (1) independence of perception of the stimulus, (2) dependence on the stimulus's properties, (3) dependence on physical configuration alone, and (4) an interaction between stimulus properties and a physical configuration. We observed that for the ambiguous gears, the perception was correlated with the stimulus changes rather than with the possibility of physical interaction. The perception of walker-on-a-ball was independent of the stimulus but depended instead on whether participants responded about a relative motion of two objects (perception was biased towards physically congruent motion) or the absolute motion of the walker alone (perception was independent of the rotation of the ball). None of the two experiments supported the idea of embedded knowledge of physical interaction.

Development of an affective database made of interactive virtual environments.

Despite the great potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to arouse emotions, there are no VR affective databases available as it happens for pictures, videos, and sounds. In this paper, we describe the validation of ten affective interactive Virtual Environments (VEs) designed to be used in Virtual Reality. These environments are related to five emotions. The testing phase included using two different experimental setups to deliver the overall experience. The setup did not include any immersive VR technology, because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but the VEs were designed to run on stereoscopic visual displays. We collected measures related to the participants' emotional experience based on six discrete emotional categories plus neutrality and we included an assessment of the sense of presence related to the different experiences. The results showed how the scenarios can be differentiated according to the emotion aroused. Finally, the comparison between the two experimental setups demonstrated high reliability of the experience and strong adaptability of the scenarios to different contexts of use.

Comparable performance on a spatial memory task in data collected in the lab and online.

Online data collection offers a wide range of benefits including access to larger and more diverse populations, together with a reduction in the experiment cycle. Here we compare performance in a spatial memory task, in which participants had to estimate object locations following viewpoint shifts, using data from a controlled lab-based setting and from an unsupervised online sample. We found that the data collected in a conventional laboratory setting and those collected online produced very similar results, although the online data was more variable with standard errors being about 10% larger than those of the data collected in the lab. Overall, our findings suggest that spatial memory studies using static images can be successfully carried out online with unsupervised samples. However, given the higher variability of the online data, it is recommended that the online sample size is increased to achieve similar standard errors to those obtained in the lab. For the current study and data processing procedures, this would require an online sample 25% larger than the lab sample.

The attributes of the images representing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus affect people's perception of the virus.

BACKGROUND: The recent COVID-19 pandemic has seen an explosion of coronavirus-related information. In many cases, this information was supported by images representing the SARS-CoV-2. AIM: To evaluate how attributes of images representing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that were used in the initial phase of the coronavirus crisis in 2020 influenced the public's perceptions. METHODS: We have carried out an in-depth survey using 46 coronavirus images, asking individuals how beautiful, scientific, realistic, infectious, scary and didactic they appeared to be. RESULTS: We collected 91,908 responses, obtaining 15,315 associations for each category. While the reference image of SARS-CoV-2 used in the media is a three-dimensional, colour, illustration, we found that illustrations of the coronavirus were perceived as beautiful but not very realistic, scientific or didactic. By contrast, black and white coronavirus images are thought to be the opposite. The beauty of coronavirus images was negatively correlated with the perception of scientific realism and didactic value. CONCLUSION: Given these effects and the consequences on the individual's perception, it is important to evaluate the influence that different images of SARS-CoV-2 may have on the population.

Sharpening of peripersonal space during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our social world has been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the direct impact of the pandemic on physical health, the social distancing measures implemented worldwide to slow down disease transmission have dramatically impacted social interactions1,2. These measures, including orders to stay at home and to maintain a social distance of at least 2 meters, have been essential to limit the spread of the disease, but they have had severe costs for humans as social animals2. Right before and right after the adoption of the most stringent measures in Switzerland in Spring 2020, we were conducting a series of experiments to measure the representation of the so-called peripersonal space - the space immediately surrounding our body, where we normally interact with objects and other individuals3. We found that the introduction of social distancing measures led to a reduction in the extent of the peripersonal space and enhanced its segregation between individuals, as if the presence of others in close space would activate an implicit form of freezing response.

Comparing the influence of stimulus size and contrast on the perception of moving gratings and random dot patterns-A registered report protocol.

Modern accounts of visual motion processing in the primate brain emphasize a hierarchy of different regions within the dorsal visual pathway, especially primary visual cortex (V1) and the middle temporal area (MT). However, recent studies have called the idea of a processing pipeline with fixed contributions to motion perception from each area into doubt. Instead, the role that each area plays appears to depend on properties of the stimulus as well as perceptual history. We propose to test this hypothesis in human subjects by comparing motion perception of two commonly used stimulus types: drifting sinusoidal gratings (DSGs) and random dot patterns (RDPs). To avoid potential biases in our approach we are pre-registering our study. We will compare the effects of size and contrast levels on the perception of the direction of motion for DSGs and RDPs. In addition, based on intriguing results in a pilot study, we will also explore the effects of a post-stimulus mask. Our approach will offer valuable insights into how motion is processed by the visual system and guide further behavioral and neurophysiological research.

"There's something inside": Children's intuitions about animate agents.

From infancy, humans have the ability to distinguish animate agents from inert objects, and preschoolers map biological and mechanical insides to their appropriate kinds. However, less is known about how identifying something as an animate agent shapes specific inferences about its internal properties. Here, we test whether preschool children (N = 92; North American population) have specifically biological expectations about animate agents, or if they have more general expectations that animate agents should have an internal source of motion. We presented preschoolers with videos of two puppets: a "self-propelled" fur-covered puppet, and a fur-covered puppet that is seen to be moved by a human actor. In addition, we presented preschoolers with images of a familiar artifact (motorcycle) and familiar animal (sheep). For each item, we asked them to choose what they thought was inside each of these entities: nothing, biological insides, or mechanical insides. Preschoolers were less likely to say that a self-propelled fur-covered object was empty, compared to a fur-covered object that was moved by a human actor, which converges with past work with infants. However, preschoolers showed no specifically biological expectations about these objects, despite being able to accurately match biological insides to familiar animals and mechanical insides to familiar artifacts on the follow-up measure. These results suggest that preschoolers do not have specifically biological expectations about animate agents as a category, but rather general expectations that such agents should not be empty inside.

Olfactory Training and Visual Stimulation Assisted by a Web Application for Patients With Persistent Olfactory Dysfunction After SARS-CoV-2 Infection: Observational Study.

BACKGROUND: Persistent olfactory dysfunction is a significant complication of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Olfactory training involving aromatic oils has been recommended to improve olfactory recovery, but quantitative data are missing. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to quantify the benefit of olfactory training and visual stimulation assisted by a dedicated web application for patients who experienced olfactory dysfunction for ≥1 month. METHODS: We performed an observational, real-life, data-based study on a cohort of patients who experienced at least 1 month of persistent olfactory dysfunction between January 30 and March 26, 2021. An analysis was performed after a mean olfactory training time of 4 weeks, and at least 500 patients were assessable for primary outcome assessment. Participants exposed themselves twice daily to odors from 4 high-concentration oils and visual stimulation assisted by a dedicated web application. Improvement was defined as a 2-point increase on a 10-point, self-assessed olfactory visual analogue scale. RESULTS: In total, 548 patients were assessable for primary outcome assessment. The mean baseline, self-assessed olfactory score was 1.9 (SD 1.7), and this increased to 4.6 (SD 2.8) after a mean olfactory training time of 27.7 days (SD 17.2). Olfactory training was associated with at least a 2-point increase in 64.2% (352/548) of patients. The rate of patients' olfactory improvement was higher for patients who trained for more than 28 days than that rate for patients who trained for less than 28 days (73.3% vs 59%; P=.002). The time to olfactory improvement was 8 days faster for patients with hyposmia compared to the time to improvement for patients with anosmia (P<.001). This benefit was observed regardless of the duration of the olfactory dysfunction. CONCLUSIONS: Olfactory training and visual stimulation assisted by a dedicated web application was associated with significant improvement in olfaction, especially after 28 days of olfactory training.

COVID-2019 Associated with Acquired Monocular Blindness.

OBJECTIVE: We documented an older female with Coronavirus(CoV) Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and concomitant acquired monocular blindness. We examined this phenomenon in order to understand COVID-19 better. METHODS: We observed an older female with COVID-19 and concomitant acquired monocular blindness. The following indicators were monitored during the course of the disease: ocular examinations, flash visual evoked potential examination, a blood test for COVID-19 IgM antibodies, as well as nasopharyngeal swab and tear sample tests for COVID-19 nucleic acid. RESULTS: The patient's visual acuity for the left eye was NLP and the intraocular pressure was 51 mmHg. Keratic precipitates similar to mutton-fat were spread over the corneal endothelium of the left eye. The funduscopic examination of the patient's left eye revealed severe retinal arterial ischemia, and the color of the retina was off-white. Compared to the right eye, the flash visual evoked potential examination revealed a moderate decrease in P2 wave amplitude for the left eye. A blood test was positive for COVID-19 IgM antibodies, and a nasopharyngeal swab test taken for COVID-19 nucleic acid was positive on May 4, 2020. A sample of the patient's tears was taken, and the nucleic acid test for COVID-19 was still positive two weeks later. CONCLUSIONS: Our study was the first to find that acute viral retinitis could occur in patients with COVID-19 and severe blindness could be associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Therefore, physicians should consider the possibility of coronavirus infection in patients with an abnormal fundus or suddenly vision loss.

The impact of face masks on the recall of spoken sentences.

The effect of face covering masks on listeners' recall of spoken sentences was investigated. Thirty-two German native listeners watched video recordings of a native speaker producing German sentences with and without a face mask, and then completed a cued-recall task. Listeners recalled significantly fewer words when the sentences had been spoken with a face mask. This might suggest that face masks increase processing demands, which in turn leaves fewer resources for encoding speech in memory. The result is also informative for policy-makers during the COVID-19 pandemic, regarding the impact of face masks on oral communication.

Face Tuning in Depression.

The latest COVID-19 pandemic reveals that unexpected changes elevate depression bringing people apart, but also calling for social sharing. Yet the impact of depression on social cognition and functioning is not well understood. Assessment of social cognition is crucial not only for a better understanding of major depressive disorder (MDD), but also for screening, intervention, and remediation. Here by applying a novel experimental tool, a Face-n-Food task comprising a set of images bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style, we assessed the face tuning in patients with MDD and person-by-person matched controls. The key benefit of these images is that single components do not trigger face processing. Contrary to common beliefs, the outcome indicates that individuals with depression express intact face responsiveness. Yet, while in depression face sensitivity is tied with perceptual organization, in typical development, it is knotted with social cognition capabilities. Face tuning in depression, therefore, may rely upon altered behavioral strategies and underwriting brain mechanisms. To exclude a possible camouflaging effect of female social skills, we examined gender impact. Neither in depression nor in typical individuals had females excelled in face tuning. The outcome sheds light on the origins of the face sensitivity and alterations in social functioning in depression and mental well-being at large. Aberrant social functioning in depression is likely to be the result of deeply-rooted maladaptive strategies rather than of poor sensitivity to social signals. This has implications for mental well-being under the current pandemic conditions.