If momma ain't happy with the mentoring relationship, ain't nobody happy with the mentoring relationship: Parental satisfaction as a predictor of mentoring match strength and length.

Much evidence exists on whether an individual's perception of a match relationship impacts match strength and length, but relatively less is known about whether parental perceptions of the match (i.e., whether the match is meeting their goals) impacts the length and strength of mentoring relationships. These relationships were examined in a sample of 350 newly formed youth-mentor matches who completed multiple measures of match strength and satisfaction with the match. Parents/guardians were also surveyed about their level of satisfaction with the match. The primary finding of this paper was that parent/guardian dissatisfaction with the match relationships meeting goals was the only significant predictor of a higher likelihood of match closure. Although youth and mentor self-reports of satisfaction with how match time was spent were the strongest predictors of volunteer and youth match strength ratings, parent/guardian satisfaction with the match relationship also remained a strong predictor of match strength. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Distribution of content in recently-viewed scenes whitens perception.

Anisotropies in visual perception have often been presumed to reflect an evolutionary adaptation to an environment with a particular anisotropy. Here, we adapt observers to globally-atypical environments presented in virtual reality to assess the malleability of this well-known perceptual anisotropy. Results showed that the typical bias in orientation perception was in fact altered as a result of recent experience. Application of Bayesian modeling indicates that these global changes of the recently-viewed environment implicate a Bayesian prior matched to the recently experienced environment. These results suggest that biases in orientation perception are fluid and predictable, and that humans adapt to orientation biases in their visual environment "on the fly" to optimize perceptual encoding of content in the recently-viewed visual world.

Structural Content in Paintings II: Artists Commissioned to Reproduce a Specific Image Over-Regularize Orientation Biases in Their Paintings.

Measurements of psychophysical performance show that the visual system is biased in ways that counteract statistical regularities of natural scenes thereby allowing efficient coding. Here we consider the perceptual effects of these encoding biases in a "holistic" way by measuring characteristics of the paintings produced by artists making perceptual matches to a natural scene image; 10 artists were asked to produce an exact copy of a single outdoor landscape scene. The structural content of the paintings produced and the "ground truth" image were compared in the frequency domain. The artists were found to over-regularize the orientation content in the paintings: The anisotropy existing only at the lowest spatial scales in the natural scene image was produced across all spatial scales in these commissioned paintings. These results were compared to those from two other methods of comparing paintings and natural scenes reported previously in a companion paper and all three methodologies indicate very similar over-regularization. We suggest that artists may have a general canonical representation of structural relations of scenes that they apply broadly within their creations.

Structural content in paintings: artists overregularize oriented content of paintings relative to the typical natural scene bias.

Natural scenes tend to be biased in both scale (1/f) and orientation (H > V >> O; horizontal > vertical >> oblique), and the human visual system has similar biases that serve to partially 'undo' (ie whiten) the resultant representation. The present approach to investigating this relationship considers content in works of art-scenes produced for processing by the human visual system. We analyzed the content of images by a method that minimizes errors inherent in some prior analysis methods. In the first experiment museum paintings were considered by comparing the amplitude spectrum of landscape paintings, natural scene photos, portrait paintings, and photos of faces. In the second experiment we obtained photos of paintings at the time they were produced by local artists and compared structural content in matched photos which contained the same scenes that the artists had painted. Results show that artists produce paintings with both the 1/f bias of scale and the horizontal-effect bias of orientation (H > V >> O). More importantly, results from both experiments show that artists overregularize the structure in their works: they impose the natural-scene horizontal effect at all structural scales and in all types of subject matter even though, in the real world, the pattern of anisotropy differs considerably across spatial scale and between faces and natural scenes. It appears that artists unconsciously overregularize the oriented structure in their works to make it conform more uniformly to the 'expected' canonical ideal.

Comparison of event-related potentials elicited by cardinal and oblique orientations with broad-band noise stimuli.

The experiments described here used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural processes of the horizontal effect, in which visual performance is worst for horizontal and best for oblique orientations. EEGs were recorded while human adult subjects performed an orientation identification task with broad-band noise stimuli. The results showed that the difference between cardinal orientations and oblique orientations first occurred at P2 component around 200 ms post-stimulus onset, which is much later than the traditional oblique effect. Additionally, the P3 was much smaller and earlier for oblique orientations than for cardinal orientations. These findings indicated that, compared to the classical oblique effect, the horizontal effect with broad-band noise stimuli might occur at relatively later stages of visual information processing and might involve more complex neural mechanisms.