Configural and featural processing during face perception: a new stimulus set.

A new stimulus set of 60 male-face stimuli in seven in-depth orientations was developed. The set can be used in research on configural versus featural mechanisms of face processing. Configural, or holistic, changes are produced by changing the global form of the face, whereas featural, or part-based, changes are attained by altering the local form of internal facial features. For each face in the set, there is one other face that differs only by its global form and one other face that differs only by its internal features. In all faces, extrafacial cues have been eliminated or standardized. The stimulus set also contains a color-coded division of each face in areas of interest, which is useful for eye movement research on face scanning strategies. We report a matching experiment with upright and inverted face pairs that demonstrates that the face stimulus set is indeed useful for research on configural and featural face perception. The stimulus set may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's archive (brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental) or from our Web site (http://ppw.kuleuven.be/labexppsy/newSite/resources).

Partial within-animal calibration: a new calibration approach in lead optimisation high-throughput bioanalysis.

The lead optimization phase of drug discovery requires high-throughput analyses for quantification in biological matrices and in plasma in particular. Over the last decade, some technical innovations allowed the pharmaceutical industry to improve the quality of the results. However, there is room for improvement. In this context, a new calibration strategy is proposed in this paper. Experiments were performed on dog plasma samples and it was showed that a within-animal calibration strategy can reduce the bias up to 20% and improve the precision up to 20%. However, a partial within-animal calibration is preferred to the full approach in order to avoid to many sample preparations.