Effects of forward mask duration variability on the temporal dynamics of brief facial expression categorization.

The Japanese and Caucasian Brief Affect Recognition Task (JACBART) has been proposed as a standardized method for measuring people's ability to accurately categorize briefly presented images of facial expressions. However, the factors that impact performance in this task are not entirely understood. The current study sought to explore the role of the forward mask's duration (i.e., fixed vs. variable) in brief affect categorization across expressions of the six basic emotions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and three presentation times (i.e., 17, 67, and 500 ms). Current findings do not demonstrate evidence that a variable duration forward mask negatively impacts brief affect categorization. However, efficiency and necessity thresholds were observed to vary across the expressions of emotion. Further exploration of the temporal dynamics of facial affect categorization will therefore require a consideration of these differences.

The impact of familiarization strategies on the missing-letter effect.

When reading a text and searching for a target letter, readers make more omissions of the target letter if it is embedded in frequent function words than if it is in rare content words. While word frequency effects are consistently found, few studies have examined the impacts of passage familiarity on the missing-letter effect and studies that have present conflicting evidence. The present study examines the effects of passage familiarity, as well as the impacts of passage familiarization strategy promoting surface or deep encoding, on the missing-letter effect. Participants were familiarized with a passage by retyping a text, replacing all common nouns with synonyms, or generating a text on the same topic as that of the original text, and then completed a letter search task on the familiar passage as well as an unfamiliar passage. In Experiment 1, when both familiar and unfamiliar passages use the same words, results revealed fewer omissions for the retyping and synonyms conditions. However, in Experiment 2, when different words are used in both types of texts, no effect of familiarization strategy was observed. Furthermore, the missing-letter effect is maintained in all conditions, adding support to the robustness of the effect regardless of familiarity with the text.

Distinction between fear and surprise: an interpretation-independent test of the perceptual-attentional limitation hypothesis.

The perceptual-attentional limitation hypothesis posits that the confusion between emotional facial expressions of fear and surprise may be due to their visual similarity, with shared muscle movements. In Experiment 1 full face images of fear and surprise varying as a function of distinctiveness (mouth index, brow index, or both indices) were displayed in a gender oddball task. Experiment 2, in a similar task, directed attention toward the eye or mouth region with a blurring technique. The current two studies used response time and event-related potentials (ERP) to test the perceptual-attentional limitation hypothesis. While ERP results for Experiment 1 suggested that individuals may not have perceived a difference between the emotional expressions in any of the conditions, response time results suggested that individuals processed a difference between fear and surprise when a distinctive cue was in the mouth. With directed attention in Experiment 2, ERP results indicated that individuals were capable of detecting a difference in all the conditions. In effect, the current two experiments suggest that participants display difficulty in distinguishing the prototypes of fear and surprise with the eye region, which may be due to a lack of attention to that region, providing support for the attentional limitation hypothesis.

The Confusion of Fear and Surprise: A Developmental Study of the Perceptual-Attentional Limitation Hypothesis Using Eye Movements.

The goal of the present study was to test the Perceptual-Attentional Limitation Hypothesis in children and adults by manipulating the distinctiveness between expressions and recording eye movements. Children 3-5 and 9-11 years old as well as adults were presented pairs of expressions and required to identify a target emotion. Children 3-5 years old were less accurate than those 9-11 years old and adults. All children viewed pictures longer than adults but did not spend more time attending to the relevant cues. For all participants, accuracy for the recognition of fear was lower than for surprise when the distinctive cue was in the brow only. They also took longer and spent more time in both the mouth and brow zones than when a cue was in the mouth or both areas. Adults and children 9-11 years old made more comparisons between the expressions when fear comprised a single distinctive cue in the brow than when the distinctive cue was in the mouth only or when both cues were present. Children 3-5 years old made more comparisons for brow only than both. The results of the present study extend on the Perceptual-Attentional Limitation Hypothesis showing an importance of both decoder and stimuli, and an interaction between decoder and stimuli characteristics.