Nicolas Davidenko

Compensatory Rationalizations and the Resolution of Everyday Undeserved Outcomes

People prefer to perceive the world as just; however, the everyday experience of undeserved events challenges this perception.The authors suggest that one way people rationalize these daily experiences of unfairness is by means of a compensatory bias. People make undeserved events more palatable by endorsing the notion that outcomes naturally balance out in the end—good, yet undeserved, outcomes will balance out bad outcomes, and bad undeserved outcomes will balance out good outcomes.The authors propose that compensatory biases manifest in people’s interpretive processes (Study 1) and memory (Study 2). Furthermore, they provide evidence that people have a natural tendency to anticipate compensatory outcomes in the future, which, ironically, might lead them to perceive a current situation as relatively more fair (Study 3).These studies highlight an understudied means of justifying unfairness and elucidate the justice motive’s power to affect people’s construal of their social world.

Face-likeness and image variability drive responses in human face-selective ventral regions

The human ventral visual stream contains regions that respond selectively to faces over objects. However, it is unknown whether responses in these regions correlate with how face‐like stimuli appear. Here, we use parameterized face silhouettes to manipulate the perceived face‐likeness of stimuli and measure responses in face‐ and object‐selective ventral regions with high‐resolution fMRI. We first use “concentric hyper‐sphere” (CH) sampling to define face silhouettes at different distances from the prototype face. Observers rate the stimuli as progressively more face‐like the closer they are to the prototype face. Paradoxically, responses in both face‐ and object‐selective regions decrease as face‐likeness ratings increase. Because CH sampling produces blocks of stimuli whose variability is negatively correlated with face‐likeness, this effect may be driven by more adaptation during high face‐likeness (low‐variability) blocks than during low face‐likeness (high‐variability) blocks. We tested this hypothesis by measuring responses to matched‐variability (MV) blocks of stimuli with similar face‐likeness ratings as with CH sampling. Critically, under MV sampling, we find a face‐specific effect: responses in face‐selective regions gradually increase with perceived face‐likeness, but responses in object‐selective regions are unchanged. Our studies provide novel evidence that face‐selective responses correlate with the perceived face‐likeness of stimuli, but this effect is revealed only when image variability is controlled across conditions. Finally, our data show that variability is a powerful factor that drives responses across the ventral stream. This indicates that controlling variability across conditions should be a critical tool in future neuroimaging studies of face and object representation. Hum Brain Mapp 33:2334–2349, 2012.

Gender aftereffects in face silhouettes reveal face-specific mechanisms

The present study investigated how object locations learned separately are integrated and represented as a single spatial layout in memory. Two experiments were conducted in which participants learned a room-sized spatial layout that was divided into two sets of five objects. Results suggested that integration across sets was performed efficiently when it was done during initial encoding of the environment but entailed cost in accuracy when it was attempted at the time of memory retrieval. These findings suggest that, once formed, spatial representations in memory generally remain independent and integrating them into a single representation requires additional cognitive processes.

Attending to Race (or Gender) Does Not Increase Race (or Gender) Aftereffects.

Recent research has shown that attention can influence the strength of face aftereffects. For example, attending to changes in facial features increases the strength of identity and figural aftereffects relative to passive viewing (Rhodes et al., 2011). Here, we ask whether attending to a specific social dimension of a face (such as race or gender) influences the strength of face aftereffects along that dimension. Across three experiments, participants completed many single-shot face adaptation trials. In each trial, participants observed a computer-generated adapting face for 5 s while instructed to focus on either the race or gender of that adapting face. Adapting faces were either Asian and female or Caucasian and male. In Experiment 1, all trials included an intermediate question (IQ) following each adaptation period, soliciting a rating of the adapting face on the attended dimension (e.g., race). In Experiment 2, only half of the trials included this IQ, and in Experiment 3 only a quarter of the trials did. In all three experiments, participants were subsequently presented with a race- and gender-neutral face and asked to rate it on either the attended dimension (e.g., race, attention-congruent trials) or the unattended dimension (e.g., gender, attention-incongruent trials) using a seven-point scale. Overall, participants showed significant aftereffects in all conditions, manifesting as (i) higher Asian ratings of the neutral faces following Caucasian vs. Asian adapting faces and (ii) higher female ratings of neutral faces following male vs. female adapting faces. Intriguingly, although reaction times were shorter during attention-congruent vs. attention-incongruent trials, aftereffects were not stronger along attention-congruent than attention-incongruent dimensions. Our results suggest that attending to a facial dimension such as race or gender does not result in increased adaptation to that dimension.

Persistent illusory apparent motion in sequences of uncorrelated random dots

We report a novel phenomenon in which long sequences of random dot arrays refreshing at 2.5 Hz lead to persistent illusory percepts of coherent apparent motion. We term this effect illusory apparent motion (IAM). To quantify this illusion, we devised a persistence task in which observers are primed with a particular motion pattern and must indicate when the motion pattern ends. In Experiment 1 (N = 119), we induced translational apparent motion patterns and show that both drifting motion (e.g., up-up-up-up) and rebounding motion (e.g., up-down-up-down) persists throughout many frames of uncorrelated random dots, although rebounding motion tends to persist for longer (a rebounding bias). In Experiment 2 (N = 60), we induced rotational IAM on an annulus-shaped display, and show that the topology of the display (whether the annulus is complete or has a gap) determines whether or not the rebounding bias is present. Based on our findings, we argue that IAM provides a powerful tool to study the mechanisms, constraints, and individual differences in the perception of illusory motion.

Environmental Inversion Effects in Face Perception.

Visual processing is highly sensitive to stimulus orientation; for example, face perception is drastically worse when faces are oriented inverted vs. upright. However, stimulus orientation must be established in relation to a particular reference frame, and in most studies, several reference frames are conflated. Which reference frame(s) matter in the perception of faces? Here we describe a simple, novel method for dissociating effects of egocentric and environmental orientation on face processing. Participants performed one of two face-processing tasks (expression classification and recognition memory) as they lay horizontally, which served to disassociate the egocentric and environmental frames. We found large effects of egocentric orientation on performance and smaller but reliable effects of environmental orientation. In a follow-up control experiment, we ruled out the possibility that the latter could be explained by compensatory ocular counterroll. We argue that environmental orientation influences face processing, which is revealed when egocentric orientation is fixed.

Physical and perceptual accuracy of upright and inverted face drawings

ABSTRACT This study considers the conception that drawing or copying a face that is vertically inverted will improve the accuracy of the drawing by preventing holistic interference. We used a novel parameterized face space both for generating face stimuli and for measuring the physical accuracy of drawings. One group of participants (the artists) were asked to draw 16 parameterized faces (eight upright and eight inverted). We computed two physical measures of accuracy by comparing the face-space representation of each drawing to the original face. A second and third group of participants (the raters) compared the similarity between each original face and each pair of drawings of that face (one upright and one inverted per artist). For the second group, all faces were presented upright; for the third group, all faces were presented inverted. Our results showed that upright drawings were more accurate than inverted drawings, both in terms of the physical face-space measure and in terms of the perceptual judgments for both orientations. Our data suggest that holistic processing may aid rather than hinder face drawing accuracy.

Dissociating Higher and Lower Order Visual Motion Systems by Priming Illusory Apparent Motion

Motion processing is thought of as a hierarchical system composed of higher and lower order components. Past research has shown that these components can be dissociated using motion priming paradigms in which the lower order system produces negative priming while the higher order system produces positive priming. By manipulating various stimulus parameters, researchers have probed these two systems using bistable test stimuli that permit only two motion interpretations. Here we employ maximally ambiguous test stimuli composed of randomly refreshing pixels in a task that allows observers to report more than just two types of motion percepts. We show that even with such stimuli, motion priming can constrain the unstructured random pixel patterns into coherent percepts of positive or negative apparent motion. Moreover, we find that the higher order system is uniquely susceptible to cognitive influences, as evidenced by a significant suppression of positive priming in the presence of alternative response options.

A strong bias to fixate the upper eye in tilted faces

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Primed and unprimed rebounding illusory apparent motion

Although sequences of uncorrelated random dots can yield a wide range of illusorily coherent motion percepts (including translation, rotation, contraction, expansion, shear, and rebounding motion), past priming studies have relied on two-alternative forced choice tasks that only measure unidirectional (positive or negative) priming effects. In Experiment 1 we showed that when participants are primed with unidirectional motion and given an additional option to report bidirectional (rebounding) motion, they do so frequently, suggesting that unidirectional motion can “default” to a rebounding percept. Furthermore, rebounding percepts are more prevalent during trials with long frame durations, suggesting a role for attention in forming and maintaining these illusory percepts. In Experiment 2 we compared rebounding percepts that followed unidirectional, drifting primes with rebounding percepts that followed bidirectional, rebounding primes, and found that these two types of illusory rebounding motion percepts differ systematically in their temporal structures. We argue that rebounding percepts following drifting primes can be understood as a breakdown of positive priming into an underlying oscillatory state, whereas rebounding percepts following rebounding primes may be understood either as (1) the initialization of the same oscillatory process, or (2) the entrainment of a two-step motion pattern by a higher-order mechanism.