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The Other-Race Effect (ORE) is the robust and well-established finding that people are generally poorer at facial recognition of individuals of another race than of their own race. Over the past four decades, much research has focused on the ORE because understanding this phenomenon is expected to elucidate fundamental face processing mechanisms and the influence of experience on such mechanisms. Several recent studies of the ORE in which the eye-movements of participants viewing own- and other-race faces were tracked have, however, reported highly conflicting results regarding the presence or absence of differential patterns of eye-movements to own- versus other-race faces. This discrepancy, of course, leads to conflicting theoretical interpretations of the perceptual basis for the ORE. Here we investigate fixation patterns to own- versus other-race (African and Chinese) faces for Caucasian participants using different analysis methods. While we detect statistically significant, though subtle, differences in fixation pattern using an Area of Interest (AOI) approach, we fail to detect significant differences when applying a spatial density map approach. Though there were no significant differences in the spatial density maps, the qualitative patterns matched the results from the AOI analyses reflecting how, in certain contexts, Area of Interest (AOI) analyses can be more sensitive in detecting the differential fixation patterns than spatial density analyses, due to spatial pooling of data with AOIs. AOI analyses, however, also come with the limitation of requiring a priori specification. These findings provide evidence that the conflicting reports in the prior literature may be at least partially accounted for by the differences in the statistical sensitivity associated with the different analysis methods employed across studies. Overall, our results suggest that detection of differences in eye-movement patterns can be analysis-dependent and rests on the assumptions inherent in the given analysis.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002262.].

Although psychological and computational models of time estimation have postulated the existence of neural representations tuned for specific durations, empirical evidence of this notion has been lacking. Here, using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) adaptation paradigm, we show that the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) (corresponding to the supramarginal gyrus) exhibited reduction in neural activity due to adaptation when a visual stimulus of the same duration was repeatedly presented. Adaptation was strongest when stimuli of identical durations were repeated, and it gradually decreased as the difference between the reference and test durations increased. This tuning property generalized across a broad range of durations, indicating the presence of general time-representation mechanisms in the IPL. Furthermore, adaptation was observed irrespective of the subject's attention to time. Repetition of a nontemporal aspect of the stimulus (i.e., shape) did not produce neural adaptation in the IPL. These results provide neural evidence for duration-tuned representations in the human brain.

Can subjective belief about one's own perceptual competence change one's perception? To address this question, we investigated the influence of self-efficacy on sensory discrimination in two low-level visual tasks: contrast and orientation discrimination. We utilised a pre-post manipulation approach whereby two experimental groups (high and low self-efficacy) and a control group made objective perceptual judgments on the contrast or the orientation of the visual stimuli. High and low self-efficacy were induced by the provision of fake social-comparative performance feedback and fictional research findings. Subsequently, the post-manipulation phase was performed to assess changes in visual discrimination thresholds as a function of the self-efficacy manipulations. The results showed that the high self-efficacy group demonstrated greater improvement in visual discrimination sensitivity compared to both the low self-efficacy and control groups. These findings suggest that subjective beliefs about one's own perceptual competence can affect low-level visual processing.

Perceptual interferences in the estimation of quantities (time, space and numbers) have been interpreted as evidence for a common magnitude system. However, if duration estimation has appears sensitive to spatial and numerical interferences, space and number estimation tend to be resilient to temporal manipulations. These observations question the relative contribution of each quantity in the elaboration of a representation in a common mental metric. Here, we elaborated a task in which perceptual evidence accumulated over time for all tested quantities (space, time and number) in order to match the natural requirement for building a duration percept. For this, we used a bisection task. Experimental trials consisted of dynamic dots of different sizes appearing progressively on the screen. Participants were asked to judge the duration, the cumulative surface or the number of dots in the display while the two non-target dimensions varied independently. In a prospective experiment, participants were informed before the trial which dimension was the target; in a retrospective experiment, participants had to attend to all dimensions and were informed only after a given trial which dimension was the target. Surprisingly, we found that duration was resilient to spatial and numerical interferences whereas space and number estimation were affected by time. Specifically, and counter-intuitively, results revealed that longer durations lead to smaller number and space estimates whether participants knew before (prospectively) or after (retrospectively) a given trial which quantity they had to estimate. Altogether, our results support a magnitude system in which perceptual evidence for time, space and numbers integrate following Bayesian cue-combination rules.

Recently, there has been upsurge of interest in the neural mechanisms of time perception. A central question is whether the representation of time is distributed over brain regions as a function of stimulus modality, task and length of the duration used or whether it is centralized in a single specific and supramodal network. The answers seem to be converging on the former, and many areas not primarily considered as temporal processing areas remain to be investigated in the temporal domain. Here we asked whether the superior temporal gyrus, an auditory modality specific area, is involved in processing of auditory timing. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation was applied over left and right superior temporal gyri while participants performed either a temporal or a frequency discrimination task of single tones. A significant decrease in performance accuracy was observed after stimulation of the right superior temporal gyrus, in addition to an increase in response uncertainty as measured by the Just Noticeable Difference. The results are specific to auditory temporal processing and performance on the frequency task was not affected. Our results further support the idea of distributed temporal processing and speak in favor of the existence of modality specific temporal regions in the human brain.