The effect of personal grooming on self-perceived body image.

OBJECTIVE: Grooming behaviours, including the application of fragranced products, are thought to reflect a means of managing social impressions and self-image. Although application of deodorants has previously been shown to make individuals appear more confident to others, few studies have specifically examined the psychological effects of such rituals on the wearer. Here, we investigated how grooming behaviours affect self-perceived body image, a central component of an individual's self-image. METHODS: In two separate experiments, using a psychophysical forced choice task, male and female participants with a normal Body Mass Index (BMI) indicated whether projected life-size images of their own body were bigger or smaller than their actual size. In the experimental condition, participants applied a fragranced deodorant before performing the task, whereas in the control condition, no product was applied. Our dependent measures were the point of subjective equality (PSE), the size at which participants report their body is subjectively equal to their actual body size, and the difference limen (DL), the amount of change in body size distortion necessary for it to be reliably detected. These measurements provide an index of attitudinal and perceptual components of body image, respectively. RESULTS: Both male and female participants who, at baseline, overestimated their body size, made significantly more accurate judgments about their body size, as measured by the PSE, following application of a fragranced deodorant or antiperspirant than they did in the control condition. This effect was seen in the absence of differences in perceptual sensitivity to changes in body size (DL) across groups and conditions. People who underestimated their body size did not show this effect. Of note, both male and female overestimators had a significantly larger BMI than underestimators. CONCLUSION: These results demonstrate that the attitudinal component of body image is malleable and can be influenced by everyday grooming routines, suggesting such behaviours have psychological benefits for both genders, beyond their basic hygiene function. However, there are individual differences in people's susceptibility to these effects, perhaps reflecting variability in self-esteem.

Does Parkinson's disease affect judgement about another person's action?

The observer's motor system has been shown to be involved in observing the actions of another person. Recent findings suggest that people with Parkinson's disease do not show the same motor facilitatory effects when observing the actions of another person. We studied whether Parkinson's patients were able to make unspeeded judgements about another person's action. Participants were asked to watch video clips of an actor lifting a box containing different weights (100, 200, 300 or 400 g) and to guess the weight that was being lifted on a 9-point scale. We compared the performance of 16 patients with PD with 16 healthy age-matched controls. Both groups were able to do the task, showing a significant relationship between the real weight and the guessed weight, albeit with a tendency to overestimate the lowest weight and underestimate the heaviest weight. The PD patients, however, showed a reduced slope value. These results show that despite their own motor deficits, PD patients are still able to judge the weight being lifted by another person, albeit with a slight reduction in accuracy. Further research will be required to determine whether PD patients use a motor simulation or a visual compensatory strategy to achieve this.

Inhibition of return for objects and locations in static displays.

When orienting attention, inhibition mechanisms prevent the return of attention to previously examined stimuli. This inhibition of the return of attention (IOR) has been shown to be associated additively with location- and object-based representations. That is, when static objects are attended, IOR is associated with both the object and the location cued, and hence IOR is larger than when only spatial location is attended. Recently McAuliffe, Pratt, and O'Donnell (2001) failed to observe such additive effects except under a narrow set of conditions (at short cue-target intervals and using mixed blocks in which object- and pure location-based effects were probed in the same display). The present study shows that additive IOR effects are observed under conditions that violate all of these boundary conditions. The results also show that IOR is modulated by internal structural properties of objects. These findings are cosistent with the hypothesis that IOR operates over functionally independent object- and location-based frames of reference.

Inhibitory mechanisms in autism spectrum disorders: typical selective inhibition of location versus facilitated perceptual processing.

BACKGROUND: This study examined the inhibitory control mechanisms of selective attention in autism spectrum disorders. Two issues were engaged: First, we extend previous findings of normal inhibition of distractor identity in autism by examining whether inhibition of spatial location is also spared. The second issue concerns the selectivity of inhibition. In non-clinical participants inhibition is selectively directed to the properties of the distractor that compete for the control of action; we examined whether individuals with autism also show normal selectivity of inhibition. METHOD: A negative priming task was used to examine selective spatial inhibition in participants with autism relative to matched non-clinical controls. RESULTS: We discovered that inhibition of distractor spatial location is within normal limits in autism, as is the ability to selectively direct inhibition to task-relevant stimulus features. In addition, we unexpectedly found that the irrelevant perceptual feature of colour produced a facilitation effect in autism, which has not been observed previously in typical controls. CONCLUSIONS: Evidence of colour facilitation implicates more fluent, but presumably less adaptive, perceptual processes in autism.

Impaired distractor inhibition in patients with schizophrenia on a negative priming task.

BACKGROUND: Numerous studies have suggested, via the interpretation of negative priming effects, that subjects with schizophrenia are less able than controls to inhibit irrelevant distracting information. Further issues concerning impairment in inhibitory processes are investigated here. First, recent research has revealed that negative priming (NP) effects can be caused by different processes, distractor inhibition or perceptual review. Therefore, conclusions concerning reduced inhibition in patients with schizophrenia are not possible from previous NP research. Secondly, previous NP studies have required subjects to identify some feature of the target. This is the first study to examine NP that uses a spatial task in patients with schizophrenia. METHOD: Twenty-eight subjects with schizophrenia and 28 age and sex matched non-psychiatric control subjects completed a computerized NP task that eliminated the possible contribution of perceptual review. RESULTS: Subjects with schizophrenia had reduced levels of NP compared to control subjects on this spatial NP task (t = 2.46, P < 0.02). Current age, positive, negative or total PANNS scores did not correlate with negative priming scores, but post hoc analyses revealed that clozapine-treated patients had significantly greater levels of negative priming than patients receiving typical antipsychotic medications. CONCLUSIONS: The present experiment eliminated the contribution of perceptual review to negative priming and demonstrated that when a pure measure of inhibition is taken on a localization task, patients with schizophrenia were less able to inhibit irrelevant distracting stimuli. The fact that NP was reduced in a spatial task suggested a more diffuse reduction in inhibition than previous studies that examined only identification-based responses.

On the strategic modulation of the time course of facilitation and inhibition of return.

In studies of exogenous attentional orienting, response times for targets at previously cued locations are often longer than those for targets at previously uncued locations. This effect is known widely as inhibition of return (IOR). There has been debate as to whether IOR can be observed in discrimination as well as detection tasks. The experiments reported here confirm that IOR can be observed when target discrimination is required and that the cue-target interval at which IOR is observed is often longer in discrimination than in detection tasks. The results also demonstrate that the later emergence of IOR is related to perceptual discrimination rather than to response selection differences between discrimination and detection tasks. More difficult discrimination tasks lengthen the SOA at which IOR emerges. In contrast, increasing task difficulty by adding a distractor to the location opposite the target shortens the SOA at which IOR emerges. Together, the results reveal an adaptive interaction between exogenous and endogenous attentional systems, in which the action of the orienting (exogenous) system is modulated endogenously in accord with task demands.

Vision influences tactile perception at body sites that cannot be viewed directly.

Previous research has demonstrated that vision of a body site, without proprioceptive orienting of eye and head to that site, could affect tactile perception. The body site viewed was the hand, which can be seen directly under normal viewing conditions. The current research asked three further questions: First, can vision similarly affect tactile perception at a body site that cannot normally be viewed directly such as the face or neck? Second, does prior experience of seeing a body site, such as occurs when viewing the face in mirrors, produce larger effects of viewing than body sites rarely seen such as the back of the neck? And third, how quickly can visual information affect tactile target detection? We observe that: detection of tactile targets at these body sites was influenced by whether or not they were viewed, this effect was greater when viewing the more familiar site of the face than that of the neck, and significant effects were observed when the stimulus onset asynchrony between visual display and tactile target was as little as 200 ms.

Does negative priming reflect inhibitory mechanisms? A review and integration of conflicting views.

Negative priming has traditionally been viewed as a reflection of an inhibitory mechanism of attention. However, recent accounts have suggested that negative priming does not reflect inhibitory mechanisms. Rather, slowed reaction times on negative priming trials are either due to retrieval of incompatible response tags or of mismatching perceptual information, or due to extra processes needed to distinguish past from present information. In contrast, it is proposed that there is no firm evidence to discount inhibition models. In fact, although retrieval processes can be implicated in negative priming effects, understanding of these requires consideration of the inhibitory processes involved in selecting information for goal-directed behaviour.

Reaching affects saccade trajectories.

The pre-motor theory suggests that, when attention is oriented to a location, the motor systems that are involved in achieving current behavioural goals are activated. For example, when a task requires accurate reaching, attention to a location activates the motor circuits controlling saccades and manual reaches. These actions involve separate neural systems for the control of eye and hand, but we believe that the selection processes acting on neural population codes within these systems are similar and can affect each other. The attentional effect can be revealed in the subsequent movement. The present study shows that the path the eye takes as it saccades to a target is affected by whether a reach to the target is also produced. This effect is interpreted as the influence of a hand-centred frame used in reaching on the spatial frame of reference required for the saccade.

Attending, ignoring, and repetition: on the relation between negative priming and inhibition of return.

A series of spatial localization experiments is reported that addresses the relation between negative priming and inhibition of return. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that slowed responses to repeated location stimuli can be obscured by repetition priming effects involving stimulus dimensions other than spatial location. The results of Experiments 2, 3A, and 3B demonstrate that these repetition priming effects may occur only when participants are required to respond to the prime display. Together, these results suggest that differences between attended and ignored repetition effects in selective attention studies of spatial localization do not provide a basis for distinguishing between spatial negative priming and inhibition of return.

Impaired distractor inhibition on a selective attention task in unmedicated, depressed subjects.

BACKGROUND: Impaired distractor inhibition may contribute to the selective attention deficits observed in depressed patients, but studies to date have not tested the distractor inhibition theory against the possibility that processes such as transient memory review processes may account for the observed deficits. A negative priming paradigm can dissociate inhibition from such a potentially confounding process called object review. The negative priming task also isolates features of the distractor such as colour and location for independent examination. METHOD: A computerized negative priming task was used in which colour, identification and location features of a stimulus and distractor were systematically manipulated across successive prime and probe trials. Thirty-two unmedicated subjects with DSM-IV diagnoses of non-psychotic unipolar depression were compared with 32 age, sex and IQ matched controls. RESULTS: Depressed subjects had reduced levels of negative priming for conditions where the colour feature of the stimulus was repeated across prime and probe trials but not when identity or location was the repeated feature. When both the colour and location feature were the repeated feature across trials, facilitation in response was apparent. CONCLUSIONS: The pattern of results supports studies that found reduced distractor inhibition in depressed subjects, and suggests that object review is intact in these subjects. Greater impairment in negative priming for colour versus location suggests that subjects may have greater impairment in the visual stream associated with processing colour features.

Inhibition of return in a selective reaching task: an investigation of reference frames.

Most previous studies of inhibition of return (IOR) have examined reaction time (RT) and accuracy. These effects have been observed via saccades to targets or with key-press responses. In this study the authors examined, for the first time, IOR in components of a selective reaching task in which participants directly reached for and depressed target keys. When the interval between cue and target was 600 ms, robust IOR effects were observed in RT to begin the reach, but no effects were observed in the movement components (movement time to complete the reach and the path of the reach). However, when the cue-target interval was short (200 ms), hand paths deviated toward the cue. The results suggest that although RT measures of IOR appear to reveal perceptual rather than action-based processes, action-based representations may be briefly activated by irrelevant cues, which can be observed via analysis of three-dimensional reach path.

Attention accesses multiple reference frames: evidence from visual neglect.

Research with normal participants has demonstrated that mechanisms of selective attention can simultaneously gain access to internal representations of spatial information defined with respect to both location- and object-based frames of reference. The present study demonstrates that patients with unilateral spatial neglect following a right-hemisphere lesion are poorer at detecting information on the contralateral left side in both location- and object-based spatial coordinates simultaneously. Moreover, the extent of the neglect is modulated by the probability of a target's appearing in either reference frame; as the probability of sampling a target in a particular frame of reference increases, so does the severity of neglect in the frame. These findings suggest that attention can be flexibly and strategically assigned to a reference frame depending on the contingencies of the task.

Scene-based and object-centered inhibition of return: evidence for dual orienting mechanisms.

We investigated whether inhibition of return (IOR) could be observed in location-based, scene-based, and object-centered frames of reference. IOR was found to move both with a separate cued object (scene-based) and with a location within a single rotating object (object-centered). Importantly, however, IOR was also associated with the environmental location cued when cuing was of a separate object (scene-based), whereas facilitation of the cued location was found when cuing was of a component within an object. These results suggest that location is of central importance to scene-based representations of separate objects, which appear to be encoded in viewer-centered coordinates, whereas environmental locus is of little relevance when attention orients within a single object. The results also provide further evidence for the coexistence of both excitation and inhibition associated with uninformative exogenous cues.

Priming reveals attentional modulation of human motion sensitivity.

Although recent fMRI and single unit recording studies have shown that attention modulates neural activity in motion sensitive areas of extrastriate cortex, these approaches cannot reveal qualitative or quantitative effects of attention on perception of motion. To investigate this, we asked observers to select one of two orthogonal directions in a brief, transparent dot display (prime) and then measured their sensitivity to global directional motion in a second uni-directional dot display (probe) presented a short time later. When probe direction matched the attended prime direction, sensitivity was degraded. But, when probe direction matched the ignored prime direction, sensitivity was enhanced, even though both components were of equal physical strength. Sensitivity was unchanged for directions opposite to either previously seen direction. Neither sensory adaptation nor opponent direction mechanisms can account for these data. Rather, processes initiated by visual selection must underlie these dramatic changes in motion sensitivity.

Action-based mechanisms of attention.

Actions, which have effects in the external world, must be spatiotopically represented in the brain. The brain is capable of representing space in many different forms (e.g. retinotopic-, environment-, head- or shoulder-centred), but we maintain that actions are represented in action-centred space, meaning that, at the cellular level, the direction of movement is defined by the activity of cells. In reaching, for example, object location is defined as the direction and distance between the origin of the hand and the target. Most importantly, we argue that more than one task-relevant action can be evoked at any moment in time. Therefore, highly efficient selection processes that accurately link vision and action have had to evolve. Research is reviewed which supports the notion of action-based inhibitory mechanisms that select the target from competing distractors.

Vision influences tactile perception without proprioceptive orienting.

The perception of tactile stimuli is facilitated when subjects look towards the stimulated body site: this facilitation even takes place when visual information is unavailable, as when orienting in the dark. It is not known whether the facilitation is due entirely to such proprioceptive orienting of eye and head, or whether visual information of the body site can also facilitate touch. An experiment is reported which dissociates vision and proprioception, and demonstrates for the first time that vision of a body part, independent of proprioceptive orienting, can indeed effect somatosensation.

Reaching into cluttered visual environments: spatial and temporal influences of distracting objects.

Subjects reached for visual target lights in the presence of distractor lights. Previous studies (e.g., Tipper, Lortie, & Baylis, 1992) have shown that distractors at locations between the starting position of the hand and the target location caused greater interference (as indexed by response time) than distractors beyond the target. This finding has been attributed to the former distractors being in the path of the response to the target, but we provide evidence that they interfere more because of their proximity to the starting position of the hand (a "proximity-to-hand effect"). Also, distractors located in the hemispace ipsilateral to the responding hand caused more interference than contralateral distractors (an "ipsilateral effect"). The proximity-to-hand and ipsilateral effects were found in both reaction and movement time, suggesting that the resolution of the selection problem caused by a distractor could occur before or after movement initiation. Further evidence for this suggestion was provided by individual differences in movement initiation strategies which were predictive of the temporal locus of distractor influence. Errors of touching the distractor location also showed proximity-to-hand and ipsilateral effects. We discuss applications of these findings to real-world situations in which people reach for the wrong object in multiple-object visual displays.

Object-based facilitation and inhibition from visual orienting in the human split-brain.

Object-based attention was examined in 2 split-brain patients. A precued object could move within a visual field or cross the midline to the opposite field. Normal individuals show an inhibition in detecting signals in the cued object whether it moves within or between fields. Both patients showed this effect when the cued object moved within a visual field. When it crossed the midline into the opposite visual field, however, detection was faster in the cued box. These results reveal both facilitatory and inhibitory effects on attention that are object based and may last for several hundred milliseconds. However, the inhibition requires an intact corpus callosum for interhemispheric transfer, whereas the facilitation is transferred subcortically.

Hand deviations away from visual cues: indirect evidence for inhibition.

Previous research has demonstrated that when a stimulus is to be ignored, the path of motion towards a target (saccade or manual reach) deviates away from the to-be-ignored stimulus. Path deviations in saccade and reaching tasks have, however, been observed in very different situations. In the saccade tasks subjects initially attended to a cue, then disengaged attention while saccading to a target. By contrast, in the selective reaching tasks attention was continuously withdrawn from the to-be-ignored stimulus, as this was irrelevant throughout the experiment. In the two experiments reported here, cues similar to those studied in saccade tasks are examined with selective reaching procedures. Experiment 1 shows that when a coloured light-emitting diode cue, upon which subjects engage and then subsequently disengage attention, is close to the responding hand, the hand deviates away from the cue. Experiment 2 confirms this cue avoidance by showing that, compared with central fixation alone, the hand veers away from a central cue. These results confirm that the path deviations observed in saccades can also be obtained in manual reaching movements. Such findings support the notion that eye and hand movements are both affected by inhibitory mechanisms of attention.