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During the COVID-19 pandemic and the related lockdown, the time people spend face-to-face with others has been regulated by the government, so that people spend less time in face-to-face and more time in online meetings. In public places, people are furthermore required to wear masks, so that their nose and mouth area is occluded. The current study aims to investigate the relation of these changes to emotion recognition from the eyes (measured in the Reading mind in the Eyes test; Baron-Cohen et al., 1997) and to mood.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the German government introduced an obligation for people to wear face masks at areas where several people gather, such as supermarkets, shops and public places. These masks are required to cover mouth and nose. Studies from before the pandemic suggest that the mouth provides relevant cues for emotion recognition. The Reading mind in the Eyes test (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997) measures participants’ emotion recognition by presenting them only with the eye region of different faces. When participants see people with masks, they can only judge their emotions from the eyes. The increase in the time people see others with masks may lead to improvements in identifying emotions from the eyes. As psychological and neuroscientific studies suggest that adolescence is a period of heightened social sensitivity (e.g. Jones et al., 2014; Somerville, 2013) and significant improvements in social skills occur during adolescence (for a review, see e.g. Redcay & Warnell, 2018), this age group may be particularly influenced by the changes due to the new rules of wearing masks. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate whether adolescents’ emotion recognition in the Reading Mind in the Eyes test is better during the lockdown after a period of face mask wearing compared to a sample from before the government introduced the rule of wearing masks and whether the performance in this test depends on the time spent with people wearing masks. We furthermore aimed to investigate whether the time adolescents spend with other people in face-to-face or online situations is related to their mood.

Digital images taken by mobile phones are the most frequent class of images created today. Due to their omnipresence and the many ways they are encountered, they require a specific focus in research. However, to date, there is no systematic compilation of the various factors that may determine our evaluations of such images, and thus no explanation of how users select and identify relatively “better” or “worse” photos. Here, we propose a theoretical taxonomy of factors influencing the aesthetic appeal of mobile phone photographs. Beyond addressing relatively basic/universal image characteristics, perhaps more related to fast (bottom-up) perceptual processing of an image, we also consider factors involved in the slower (top-down) re-appraisal or deepened aesthetic appreciation of an image. We span this taxonomy across specific types of picture genres commonly taken—portraits of other people, selfies, scenes and food. We also discuss the variety of goals, uses, and contextual aspects of users of mobile phone photography. As a working hypothesis, we propose that two main decisions are often made with mobile phone photographs: (1) Users assess images at a first glance—by swiping through a stack of images—focusing on visual aspects that might be decisive to classify them from “low quality” (too dark, out of focus) to “acceptable” to, in rare cases, “an exceptionally beautiful picture.” (2) Users make more deliberate decisions regarding one’s “favorite” picture or the desire to preserve or share a picture with others, which are presumably tied to aspects such as content, framing, but also culture or personality, which have largely been overlooked in empirical research on perception of photographs. In sum, the present review provides an overview of current focal areas and gaps in research and offers a working foundation for upcoming research on the perception of mobile phone photographs as well as future developments in the fields of image recording and sharing technology.

In the current review, we argue that experimental results usually interpreted as evidence for cognitive resource limitations could also reflect functional necessities of human information processing. First, we point out that selective processing of only specific features, objects, or locations at each moment in time allows humans to monitor the success and failure of their own overt actions and covert cognitive procedures. We then proceed to show how certain instances of selectivity are at odds with commonly assumed resource limitations. Next, we discuss examples of seemingly automatic, resource-free processing that challenge the resource view but can be easily understood from the functional perspective of monitoring cognitive procedures. Finally, we suggest that neurophysiological data supporting resource limitations might actually reflect mechanisms of how procedural control is implemented in the brain.

Integration of prior experience and contextual information can help to resolve perceptually ambiguous situations and might support the ability to understand other peoples’ thoughts and intentions, called Theory of Mind. We studied whether the readiness to incorporate contextual information for resolving binocular rivalry is positively associated with Theory-of-Mind-related social cognitive abilities. In children (12 to 13 years) and adults (18 to 25 years), a predictive temporal context reliably modulated the onset of binocular rivalry to a similar degree. In contrast, adult participants scored better on measures of Theory of Mind compared to children. We observed considerable interindividual differences regarding the influence of a predictive context on binocular rivalry, which were associated with differences in sensory eye dominance. The absence of a positive association between predictive effects on perception and Theory of Mind performance suggests that predictive effects on binocular rivalry and higher-level Theory-of-Mind-related abilities stem from different neurocognitive mechanisms. We conclude that the influence of predictive contextual information on basic visual processes is fully developed at an earlier age, whereas social cognitive skills continue to evolve from adolescence to adulthood. Open-Access-Publikationsfonds 2020 peerReviewed

Visual prime stimuli can affect the processing of following target stimuli even if their visibility is reduced due to visual masking. Prime visibility depends on the stimulus parameters of the prime and those of the mask. Here we explored the effects of prime stimuli and modulated their visibility by continuous flash suppression (CFS). CFS reduces the visibility of a stimulus presented to one eye by simultaneously presenting a series of high-contrast masking stimuli to the other eye. We manipulated the strength of CFS effects on perception and examined how action priming effects of the masked stimuli varied under the same conditions. Prime visibility was modulated by the contrast of the primes (Experiments 1 and 2), the contrast of the masks (Experiments 2 and 3), and by the stimulus onset asynchrony between prime and target stimuli (all experiments). Surprisingly, action priming effects were modulated by these experimental variables in a parallel way. In addition, individual differences between participants in prime visibility correlated with individual differences in action priming. Our findings suggest that action priming and prime perception depend in similar ways on prime contrast, mask contrast, stimulus onset asynchrony, and individual dispositions in CFS. These findings distinguish CFS from other perceptual suppression techniques, such as backward masking, that allow reducing prime visibility without parallel effects on action priming. Our results corroborate the view that CFS interferes with visual processing at early stages in the cortical hierarchy with similar effects on later processing for perception and action. Open-Access-Publikationsfonds 2019 peerReviewed

Poster session presented at the European Conference on Visual Perception, August 27-31, 2017, Berlin, Germany.Abstract:Visual awareness of a static stimulus presented to one eyecan be strongly suppressed by continuously flashing high-contrast patterns to the other eye. Here we employed Con-tinuous Flash Suppression (CFS) to examine stimulus pro-cessing in the absence of awareness. Simple arrow stimulipointing left or right were employed as primes which weresuppressed by CFS. Visible arrow stimuli (targets) followed100, 200, or 300 milliseconds after the onset of primes. Par-ticipants performed two tasks, randomly intermixed acrosstrials. In half of trials, participants gave speeded manual left/ right responses to the visible targets. In the other half oftrials, participants discriminated whether primes were point-ing left or right. In Experiment 1, we manipulated primestrength (low vs. high contrast). Response times and ac-curacy were reduced when prime and target were congruentrather than incongruent. This priming effect was larger withhigh-contrast primes than with low-contrast primes, wherethe effect increased with prime-target onset asynchrony.Moreover, priming effects varied considerably across partic-ipants with a strong linear relationship between individualdepth of suppression (indexed by prime discrimination per-formance) and the size of the priming effect. In Experiment2, we individually adjusted the contrast of CFS suppressorsto different prime discrimination thresholds. Thereby, weequalized relative stimulus strength across participants andconfirmed the results of Experiment 1 within participants.We discuss our data with regard to the notion of stimulusstrength in binocular rivalry and outline implications for theuse of CFS in priming experiments.

Valuch, C. (2018, March). Orientation priming during continuous flash suppression. Poster session presented at the 60th Conference of Experimental Psychologists –Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen, University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany.

Poster presented at the Vision Sciences Society 15th Annual Meeting, St Pete Beach, FL, USA, 15.-20.-05.2015.Abstract available in:Valuch, C., Seywerth, R., König, P., & Ansorge, U. (2015). “Why do cuts work?” – Implicit memory biases attention and gaze after cuts in edited movies. Journal of Vision, 15(12), 1237.Link: http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2434353