What produces emotions? Why and how do we have emotions? Why do emotional states feel like something? What is the relation between emotion, and reward value, and subjective feelings of pleasure? How does the brain implement decision-making? Are gene-defined rewards and emotions in the interests of the genes, and does rational multistep planning enable us to go beyond selfish genes to long-term plans and social contracts in the interests of the individual? This book seeks explanations of emotion and decision-making by considering these and other questions

Emotion and decision making explained

Speech is inextricably multisensory: both auditory and visual components provide critical information for all aspects of speech processing, including speech segmentation, the visual components of which have been the target of a growing number of studies. In particular, a recent study (Mitchel and Weiss, 2014) established that adults can utilize facial cues (i.e., visual prosody) to identify word boundaries in fluent speech. The current study expanded upon these results, using an eye tracker to identify highly attended facial features of the audiovisual display used in Mitchel and Weiss (2014). Subjects spent the most time watching the eyes and mouth. A significant trend in gaze durations was found with the longest gaze duration on the mouth, followed by the eyes and then the nose. In addition, eye-gaze patterns changed across familiarization as subjects learned the word boundaries, showing decreased attention to the mouth in later blocks while attention on other facial features remained consistent. These findings highlight the importance of the visual component of speech processing and suggest that the mouth may play a critical role in visual speech segmentation.

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Differential Gaze Patterns on Eyes and Mouth During Audiovisual Speech Segmentation

Face in profile view reduces perceived facial expression intensity: an eye-tracking study.

Test-retest reliability of attention bias for food: Robust eye-tracking and reaction time indices

How does image noise affect actual and predicted human gaze allocation in assessing image quality

While viewing faces, humans often demonstrate a natural gaze bias towards the left visual field, that is, the right side of the viewee’s face is often inspected first and for longer periods. Previous studies have suggested that this gaze asymmetry is a part of the gaze pattern associated with face exploration, but its relation with perceptual processing of facial cues is unclear. In this study we recorded participants’ saccadic eye movements while exploring face images under different task instructions (free viewing, judging familiarity and judging facial expression). We observed a consistent left gaze bias in face viewing irrespective of task demands. The probability of the first fixation and the proportion of overall fixations directed at the left hemiface were indistinguishable across different task instructions or across different facial expressions. It seems that the left gaze bias is an automatic reflection of hemispheric lateralisation in face processing, and is not necessarily correlated with the perceptual processing of a specific type of facial information.

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Kathryn Powell

Papers

Consistent left gaze bias in processing different facial cues