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The object orientation effect describes shorter perceived distances to the front than to the back of oriented objects. The present work extends previous studies in showing that the object orientation effect occurs not only for egocentric distances between an observer and an object, but also for exocentric distances, that are between two oriented objects. Participants watched animated virtual humans (avatars) which were either facing each other or looking away, and afterward adjusted a bar to estimate the perceived length. In two experiments, participants judged avatars facing each other as closer than avatars facing away from each other. As the judged distance was between two objects and did not involve the observer, results rule out an explanation that observers perceive object fronts as closer to prepare for future interaction with them. The second experiment tested an explanation by predictive coding, this is the extrapolation of the current state of affairs to likely future states here that avatars move forward. We used avatars standing on bridges either connecting them or running orthogonal to the inter-avatar line thus preventing forward movement. This variation of walkability did not influence participants’ judgments. We conclude that if predictive coding was used by participants, they did not consider the whole scene layout for prediction, but concentrated on avatars. Another potential explanation of the effect assumes a general asymmetrical distribution of inter-person distances: people facing each other might typically be closer to each other than when facing away and that this asymmetry is reflected as a bias in perception.

People maintain larger distances to other peoples’ front than to their back. We investigated if humans also judge another person as closer when viewing their front than their back. Participants watched animated virtual characters (avatars) and moved a virtual plane towards their location after the avatar was removed. In Experiment 1, participants judged avatars, which were facing them as closer and made quicker estimates than to avatars looking away. In Experiment 2, avatars were rotated in 30 degree steps around the vertical axis. Observers judged avatars roughly facing them (i.e., looking max. 60 degrees away) as closer than avatars roughly looking away. No particular effect was observed for avatars directly facing and also gazing at the observer. We conclude that body orientation was sufficient to generate the asymmetry. Sensitivity of the orientation effect to gaze and to interpersonal distance would have suggested involvement of social processing, but this was not observed. We discuss social and lower-level processing as potential reasons for the effect.

Establishing verbal memory traces for non-verbal stimuli was reported to facilitate or inhibit memory for the non-verbal stimuli. We show that these effects are also observed in a domain not indicated before – wayfinding. Fifty-three participants followed a guided route in a virtual environment. They were asked to remember half of the intersections by relying on the visual impression only. At the other 50% of the intersections, participants additionally heard a place name, which they were asked to memorize. For testing, participants were teleported to the intersections and were asked to indicate the subsequent direction of the learned route. In Experiment 1, intersections’ names were arbitrary (i.e., not related to the visual impression). Here, participants performed more accurately at unnamed intersections. In Experiment 2, intersections’ names were descriptive and participants’ route memory was more accurate at named intersections. Results have implications for naming places in a city and for wayfinding aids.

Route selection is governed by various strategies which often allow minimizing the required memory capacity. Previous research showed that navigators primarily remember information at route decision points and at route turns, rather than at intersections which required straight walking. However, when actually navigating the route or indicating directional decisions, navigators make fewer errors when they are required to walk straight. This tradeoff between location memory and route decisions accuracy was interpreted as a when in doubt follow your nose strategy which allows navigators to only memorize turns and walk straight by default, thus considerably reducing the number of intersections to memorize. These findings were based on newly learned routes. In the present study we show that such an asymmetry in route memory also prevails for planning routes within highly familiar environments. Participants planned route sequences between locations in their city of residency by pressing arrow keys on a keyboard. They tended to ignore straight walking intersections, but they ignored turns much less so. However, for reported intersections participants were quicker at indicating straight walking than turning. Together with results described in the literature, these findings suggest that a when in doubt follow your nose strategy is applied also within highly familiar spaces and might originate from limited working memory capacity during planning a route.

Humans can recognise emotions expressed through body motion with high accuracy even when the stimuli are impoverished. However, most of the research on body motion has relied on exaggerated displays of emotions. In this paper we present two experiments where we investigated whether emotional body expressions could be recognised when they were recorded during natural narration. Our actors were free to use their entire body, face and voice to express emotions, but our resulting visual stimuli used only the upper body motion trajectories in the form of animated stick figures. Observers were asked to perform an emotion recognition task on short motion sequences using a large and balanced set of emotions (amusement, joy, pride, relief, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, shame and neutral). Even with only upper body motion available, our results show recognition accuracy significantly above chance level and high consistency rates among observers. In our first experiment, that used more classic emotion induction setup, all emotions were well recognised. In the second study that employed narrations, four basic emotion categories (joy, anger, fear and sadness), three non-basic emotion categories (amusement, pride and shame) and the neutral category were recognised above chance. Interestingly, especially in the second experiment, observers showed a bias towards anger when recognising the motion sequences for emotions. We discovered that similarities between motion sequences across the emotions along such properties as mean motion speed, number of peaks in the motion trajectory and mean motion span can explain a large percent of the variation in observers' responses. Overall, our results show that upper body motion is informative for emotion recognition in narrative scenarios.

Recognizing social interactions, e.g. two people shaking hands, is important for obtaining information about other people and the surrounding social environment. Despite the visual complexity of social interactions, humans have often little difficulties to visually recognize social interactions. What is the visual representation of social interactions and the bodily visual cues that promote this remarkable human ability? Viewpoint dependent representations are considered to be at the heart of the visual recognition of many visual stimuli including objects (Bülthoff & Edelman, 1992), and biological motion patterns (Verfaillie, 1993). Here we addressed the question whether complex social actions acted out between pairs of people, e.g. hugging, are also represented in a similar manner. To this end, we created 3-D models from motion captured actions acted out by two people, e.g. hugging. These 3-D models allowed to present the same action from different viewpoints. Participants task was to discriminate a target action from distractor actions using a one-interval-forced-choice (1IFC) task. We measured participants' recognition performance in terms of reaction times (RT) and d-prime (d'). For each tested action we found one view that lead to superior recognition performance compared to other views. This finding demonstrates view-dependent effects of visual recognition, which are in line with the idea of a view dependent representations of social interactions. Subsequently, we examined the degree to which velocities of joints are able to predict the recognition performance of social interactions in order to determine candidate visual cues underlying the recognition of social interactions. We found that the velocities of the right arm, lower left leg, and both feet correlated with recognition performance.

Introduction: Parents to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) face diverse daily demands that can lead to stress. The aim of this study was to examine to which extent stress in parents to children with ASD can be explained by daily demands before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (after lockdowns; first half of 2022), and whether there are differences between the two time periods in this regard., Methods: Data from parents to children with ASD living in Germany from two independent questionnaire studies (before the pandemic: N  = 168, during the pandemic: N  = 105) were matched for comparability. Simple and multiple linear regression analyses were used to answer the research question., Results: Parental stress as well as all demands examined showed higher levels during the COVID-19 pandemic than before. Significant predictors of parental stress before and during the COVID-19 pandemic were (1) the daily demands to deal with the child's problem behavior, (2) the restriction of one's personal way of life, and (3) the challenge to cooperate with the partner. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the child's problem behavior was particularly relevant. It was also found that the demand to deal with stigmatizing reactions did not explain parental stress during the COVID-19 pandemic whereas before the pandemic it had been a significant predictor., Discussion: Although parental stress and the demands of daily life increased during the pandemic, most of the stress can be explained by the same demands. It is suggested that the increased levels may be due to an increase in the child's ASD symptomatology, which is why it is advisable to install therapeutic and care structures that prepare children with ASD for future crises., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Sartor, Sons, Kunina-Habenicht, Tröster and Kuhn.)

Rugby sevens was included in the 2016 Olympic Games, with South Africa's Blitzboks winning bronze. They also won the 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 World Rugby Sevens Series. Whilst peak performance is paramount at the elite level there is a growing responsibility to address player well-being and off-the-field player needs. This study explored the psychological demands of international rugby sevens and the well-being needs of elite players. Twenty professional players (age range: 21-33 years) participated in semi-structured interviews. Qualitative content analysis yielded five categories of psychological demands: (1) tournament structure, (2) resilience, (3) cope with physicality, (4) perform when fatigued, and (5) perform under pressure. The prevailing team culture included: (1) team cohesion, (2) clear purpose, (3) work ethic, (4) team values, (5) happy environment, (6) relationships with coaching staff, and (7) faith. Various psychological skills [(1) goal-directed behavior, (2) compartmentalization, (3) deal with anxiety, (4) motivation, (5) imagery, and (6) self-confidence] and mental strategies [(1) coping, (2) "back-to-zero," (3) creativity, and (4) cognitive triggers] utilized by the players are discussed. Their general well-being and individual needs were: (1) physical needs, (2) financial concerns/needs, (3) preparation for life after rugby career, (4) support structures, and (5) mental (ill) health. This information could be useful to develop an integrated sport psychological and well-being program aimed at improving performance and facilitating psychological well-being both during and after retirement from elite sport.