Human migration is an increasingly common phenomenon and migrants are at risk of disadvantageous treatment. We reasoned that migrants may receive differential treatment by locals based on the closeness of their facial features to the host average. Residents of Türkiye, the country with the largest number of refugees currently, served as participants. Because many of these refugees are of Arabic origin, we created target facial stimuli varying along the axis connecting Turkish and Arabic morphological prototypes (excluding skin colour) computed using geometric morphometrics and available databases. Participants made judgements of two universal dimensions of social perception-warmth and competence-on these faces. We predicted that participants judging faces manipulated towards the Turkish average would provide higher warmth and competence ratings compared to judging the same faces manipulated towards the Arabic average. Bayesian statistical tools were employed to estimate parameter values in multilevel models with intercorrelated varying effects. The findings did not support the prediction and revealed raters (as well as target faces) to be an important source of variation in social judgements. In the absence of simple cues (e.g. skin colour, group labels), the effect of facial morphology on social judgements may be much more complex than previously assumed.

• MeSH
• Bayes Theorem MeSH
• Adult MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Judgment * MeSH
• Adolescent MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Face anatomy & histology   MeSH
• Facial Recognition physiology   MeSH
• Social Perception * MeSH
• Stereotyping * MeSH
• Refugees psychology   MeSH
• Check Tag
• Adult MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Adolescent MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Male MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Geographicals
• Turkey MeSH

Artists and laypeople differ in their ability to create drawings. Previous research has shown that artists have improved memory performance during drawing; however, it is unclear whether they have better visual memory after the drawing is finished. In this paper, we focused on the question of differences in visual memory between art students and the general population in two studies. In Study 1, both groups studied a set of images and later drew them in a surprise visual recall test. In Study 2, the drawings from Study 1 were evaluated by a different set of raters based on their drawing quality and similarity to the original image to link drawing evaluations with memory performance for both groups. We found that both groups showed comparable visual recognition memory performance; however, the artist group showed increased recall memory performance. Moreover, they produced drawings that were both better quality and more similar to the original image. Individually, participants whose drawings were rated as better showed higher recognition accuracy. Results from Study 2 also have practical implications for the usage of drawing as a tool for measuring free recall - the majority of the drawings were recognizable, and raters showed a high level of consistency during their evaluation of the drawings. Taken together, we found that artists have better visual recall memory than laypeople.

• MeSH
• Adult MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Mental Recall * physiology   MeSH
• Recognition, Psychology * physiology   MeSH
• Pattern Recognition, Visual * physiology   MeSH
• Students * MeSH
• Art * MeSH
• Check Tag
• Adult MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Male MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH

Existing research indicates that the shape of various facial regions is linked to perceived attractiveness and perceived formidability. Interestingly, little evidence shows that people directly focus on these specific facial regions during judgments of attractiveness and formidability, and there is little support for the notion that the levels of attractiveness and formidability affect raters' visual attention. We employed eye-tracking to examine visual attention (the number of fixations and dwell time) in 40 women and 37 men, while they assessed 45 male faces in life-sized photographs for attractiveness and formidability. The facial photographs were grouped by varying levels of attractiveness and formidability (low, medium, and high). Our results showed that regardless of the characteristics rated, both men and women paid the most visual attention to the eyes, nose, mouth, and forehead regions. We found statistically discernible variation in visual attention in relation to the rater's sex or target's attractiveness levels for other facial features (the chin, cheeks, or ears), but these differences may not be substantial enough to have practical implications. We suggest that the eyes, the nose, and the mouth regions play a central role in the evolution of face perception as regions most salient to the acquisition of informative cues about others. Further, during both attractiveness and formidability judgments, men looked longer at the stimuli than women did, which may hint at increased difficulty of this task for men, possibly because they compare themselves with the stimuli. Additionally, irrespective of sex, raters looked marginally longer at faces with a medium level of formidability than at those with a high formidability level, which may reflect ambiguity of these stimuli and uncertainty regarding assessment. We found no other significantly relationships between the target's attractiveness and formidability levels and the rater's visual attention to whole faces.

• MeSH
• Adult MeSH
• Beauty MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Judgment MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Face * MeSH
• Attention * physiology   MeSH
• Facial Recognition physiology   MeSH
• Eye-Tracking Technology MeSH
• Choice Behavior physiology   MeSH
• Visual Perception physiology   MeSH
• Check Tag
• Adult MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Male MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH

We investigated neural correlates of Emotion Recognition Accuracy (ERA) using the Assessment of Contextualized Emotions (ACE). ACE infuses context by presenting emotion expressions in a naturalistic group setting and distinguishes between accurately perceiving intended emotions (signal), and bias due to perceiving additional, secondary emotions (noise). This social perception process is argued to induce perspective taking in addition to pattern matching in ERA. Thirty participants were presented with an fMRI-compatible adaptation of the ACE consisting of blocks of neutral and emotional faces in single and group-embedded settings. Participants rated the central character's expressions categorically or using scalar scales in consequent fMRI scans. Distinct brain activations were associated with the perception of emotional vs. neutral faces in the four conditions. Moreover, accuracy and bias scores from the original ACE task performed on another day were associated with brain activation during the scalar (vs. categorical) condition for emotional (vs. neutral) faces embedded in group. These findings suggest distinct cognitive mechanisms linked to each type of emotional rating and highlight the importance of considering cognitive bias in the assessment of social emotion perception.

• MeSH
• Adult MeSH
• Emotions * physiology   MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging * MeSH
• Brain Mapping * MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Brain * physiology   diagnostic imaging   MeSH
• Facial Recognition physiology   MeSH
• Social Perception * MeSH
• Photic Stimulation methods   MeSH
• Facial Expression * MeSH
• Bias MeSH
• Check Tag
• Adult MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Male MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH

Nearby flanking objects degrade visual resolution. If the flankers are similar to the acuity target, this influence is called crowding (CW), whereas if the flanking stimuli are simple bars then the phenomenon is known as contour interaction (CI). The aim of this study was to compare the influence of the number and position of flankers on foveal CW and CI to investigate possible differences in mechanism of these two effects. Five normal observers viewed single, foveally presented Sloan letters surrounded by 1, 2 or 4 flankers (either a Sloan letter or one-stroke-width bars), presented at several edge-to-edge separations. Single flankers were presented in the right, left, top or bottom position, 2 flankers were placed equally to the right and left or top and bottom of the central target, and 4 flankers were equally spaced in all four directions. Percent correct letter identification was determined for each type, number, position and separation of flankers and confusion matrices were constructed for separations equal to 20% and 100% letter width. Increasing the number of flankers caused an increase in the magnitude of both phenomena. CW showed a greater magnitude than CI for higher numbers of flankers. Analysis of confusion matrices suggests that in addition to the edge-to-edge interaction that appears to mediate CI, letter substitution and feature pooling contribute significantly to CW when higher numbers of flankers are presented. Foveal CW is more strongly influenced by an increase in the number of flankers than CI, which can be explained by the presence of additional interaction effects.

• MeSH
• Fovea Centralis * MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Crowding MeSH
• Pattern Recognition, Visual MeSH
• Form Perception * MeSH
• Visual Acuity MeSH
• Check Tag
• Humans MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH

Seeing a person's mouth move for [ga] while hearing [ba] often results in the perception of "da." Such audiovisual integration of speech cues, known as the McGurk effect, is stable within but variable across individuals. When the visual or auditory cues are degraded, due to signal distortion or the perceiver's sensory impairment, reliance on cues via the impoverished modality decreases. This study tested whether cue-reliance adjustments due to exposure to reduced cue availability are persistent and transfer to subsequent perception of speech with all cues fully available. A McGurk experiment was administered at the beginning and after a month of mandatory face-mask wearing (enforced in Czechia during the 2020 pandemic). Responses to audio-visually incongruent stimuli were analyzed from 292 persons (ages 16-55), representing a cross-sectional sample, and 41 students (ages 19-27), representing a longitudinal sample. The extent to which the participants relied exclusively on visual cues was affected by testing time in interaction with age. After a month of reduced access to lipreading, reliance on visual cues (present at test) somewhat lowered for younger and increased for older persons. This implies that adults adapt their speech perception faculty to an altered environmental availability of multimodal cues, and that younger adults do so more efficiently. This finding demonstrates that besides sensory impairment or signal noise, which reduce cue availability and thus affect audio-visual cue reliance, having experienced a change in environmental conditions can modulate the perceiver's (otherwise relatively stable) general bias towards different modalities during speech communication.

• MeSH
• COVID-19 prevention & control   MeSH
• Adult MeSH
• Adaptation, Physiological physiology   MeSH
• Middle Aged MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Masks * MeSH
• Adolescent MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Lipreading * MeSH
• Speech Perception physiology   MeSH
• Cues * MeSH
• Facial Recognition physiology   MeSH
• Age Factors MeSH
• Check Tag
• Adult MeSH
• Middle Aged MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Adolescent MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Male MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH

It has been demonstrated that sociocultural environment has a significant impact on human behavior. This contribution focuses on differences in the perception of attractiveness of European (Czech) faces as rated by Czechs of European origin, Vietnamese persons living in the Czech Republic and Vietnamese who permanently reside in Vietnam. We investigated whether attractiveness judgments and preferences for facial sex-typicality and averageness in Vietnamese who grew up and live in the Czech Republic are closer to the judgements and preferences of Czech Europeans or to those of Vietnamese born and residing in Vietnam. We examined the relative contribution of sexual shape dimorphism and averageness to the perception of facial attractiveness across all three groups of raters. Czech Europeans, Czech Vietnamese, and Asian Vietnamese raters of both sexes rated facial portraits of 100 Czech European participants (50 women and 50 men, standardized, non-manipulated) for attractiveness. Taking Czech European ratings as a standard for Czech facial attractiveness, we showed that Czech Vietnamese assessments of attractiveness were closer to this standard than assessments by the Asian Vietnamese. Among all groups of raters, facial averageness positively correlated with perceived attractiveness, which is consistent with the "average is attractive" hypothesis. A marginal impact of sexual shape dimorphism on attractiveness rating was found only in Czech European male raters: neither Czech Vietnamese nor Asian Vietnamese raters of either sex utilized traits associated with sexual shape dimorphism as a cue of attractiveness. We thus conclude that Vietnamese people permanently living in the Czech Republic converge with Czechs of Czech origin in perceptions of facial attractiveness and that this population adopted some but not all Czech standards of beauty.

• MeSH
• Asian People psychology   MeSH
• White People psychology   MeSH
• Adult MeSH
• Beauty * MeSH
• Cultural Diversity * MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Judgment physiology   MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Face physiology   MeSH
• Sex Characteristics MeSH
• Facial Recognition physiology   MeSH
• Sex Factors MeSH
• Social Environment * MeSH
• Check Tag
• Adult MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Male MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH
• Comparative Study MeSH
• Geographicals
• Czech Republic MeSH
• Vietnam MeSH

Článek shrnuje vybrané poznatky k problematice férovosti kriminalistické rekognice (identifikace očitým svědkem). Stručně se věnuje historii zkoumání této problematiky. Zaměřuje se na důležité aspekty férovosti, jimiž je přítomnost pachatele v rekognici a roli popisu pachatele při vytváření rekognice. Věnuje se experimentálnímu ověření kroků vytváření rekognice a v závěru také způsobům výpočtu férovosti rekognice.

Criminalistic recognition is a very important source of information in the criminal proceedings, but it can be a source of many mistakes. It involves a recognition of the previously perceived object by the identifying person, with the aim of identifying the object. Identifying a person as one of its forms is very interesting from a psychological point of view, and a deeper understanding of the factors that appear throughout the process contributes to the prevention of erroneous procedures. The article deals with one of these effects, the so-called line-up fairness. A fair line-up exposes the suspect to be identified by the ratio: 1 / number of subjects. Unfair lineup increases the possibility of his / her identification, regardless of his / her guilt. The suspect involved in the line-up need not be the perpetrator. The article summarizes the history of this phenomenon, deals with the research of line-up fairness from the psychological point of view, focuses on the key variables of line-up fairness, introduces the procedure of creating a fair lineup and brings information about calculating the line-up fairness. Among the principles that Anglo-Saxon practice regards as key to the line-up fairness there are: the use of a sufficient number of recruits who are similar in physical appearance to the extent that the suspect’s identity is not obvious to the identifying person. While sufficient is meant in England eight, in the US six people. In the Czech Republic, the minimum required is three foils. Fillers should be at least five and no more than eight. Given the diversity of facial and body features in general, it is problematic to specify clearly the degree of similarity and how to build optimally a fair line-up.

• MeSH
• Criminology methods   MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Facial Recognition MeSH
• Recognition, Psychology * classification   MeSH
• Identity Recognition MeSH
• Crime psychology   MeSH
• Check Tag
• Humans MeSH
• Publication type
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH

Complex visual signaling through various combinations of colors and patterns has been well documented in a number of diurnal reptiles. However, there are many nocturnal species with highly sensitive vision, being able to discriminate colors in night conditions, as was shown in geckos. Because of their sensitivity to chromatic signals, including UV (ultraviolet), they may have potential hidden features in their coloration, which may play role in intraspecific communication (e.g. mate choice) or interspecific signals (e.g. antipredatory function). We explored this hypothesis in nocturnal Leopard geckos (Eublepharis macularius), a species using visual signals in both antipredation defense and courtship, having ontogenetic color change accompanied by a shift in behavior. We used UV photography and visual modeling in order to compare various aspects of their coloration (luminance, contrast, color proportions) between sexes, age groups and populations. We found that Leopard geckos have considerable UV reflectance in white patches on their tails (and on the head in juveniles). Though, no prominent differences were detected in their coloration between various groups. We hypothesize that the limitation of UV reflectance to the head and tail, which are both actively displayed during defense, especially in juveniles, might potentially boost the effect of antipredation signaling.

• MeSH
• Lizards physiology   MeSH
• Night Vision physiology   MeSH
• Pattern Recognition, Visual physiology   MeSH
• Sex Factors MeSH
• Photic Stimulation MeSH
• Ultraviolet Rays MeSH
• Age Factors MeSH
• Color Vision physiology   MeSH
• Animals MeSH
• Check Tag
• Male MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Animals MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH

This study investigates the role of the dorsal/sensorimotor striatum in visuomotor integration (i.e., the transformation of internal visual information about letter shapes into motor output) during handwriting. Twenty healthy participants underwent fMRI scanning with tasks consisting of self-paced handwriting of alphabetically ordered single letters and simple dots, with both tasks performed without visual feedback. Functional connectivity (FC) from these two tasks was compared to demonstrate the difference between coordinated activity arising during handwriting and the activity during a simpler motor condition. Our study focused upon the writing-specific cortico-striatal network of preselected regions of interest consisting of the visual word form area (VWFA), anterior intraparietal sulcus/superior parietal lobule, striatum, premotor cortex/Exner's area, and primary and supplementary motor regions. We observed systematically increased task-induced cortico-striatal and cortico-cortical FC. This increased synchronization of neural activity between the VWFA, i.e., the visual cortical area containing information about letter shapes, and the frontoparietal motor regions is mediated by the striatum. These findings suggest the involvement of the striatum in integrating stored letter-shape information with motor planning and execution during handwriting.

• MeSH
• Corpus Striatum diagnostic imaging   physiology   MeSH
• Adult MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Cerebral Cortex diagnostic imaging   physiology   MeSH
• Nerve Net diagnostic imaging   physiology   MeSH
• Motor Activity physiology   MeSH
• Handwriting * MeSH
• Psychomotor Performance physiology   MeSH
• Pattern Recognition, Visual physiology   MeSH
• Check Tag
• Adult MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Young Adult MeSH
• Male MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH