This study investigated the link between expertise for a prototype-defined category and the face inversion effect (which refers to the decline in performance in recognising faces that are inverted compared to the recognition of faces in their normal upright orientation; e.g., Yin, 1969). We aimed to demonstrate an analogous effect in chequerboards drawn from a familiar category such that partic...

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is reported to differ significantly from adult-directed speech (ADS) in its acoustic-phonetic properties. In IDS, phonetic features of individual speech sounds tend to be intensified [6, 14, 20]. An example phenomenon documented for IDS in several languages is vowel hyperarticulation [25]. Thus, the formant frequency values (F1, F2) vary in the two target speaking s...

The study presented in this paper investigates auditory-only and auditory-visual (AV) consonant recognition where the talker’s face is obscured by various types of face-concealing garments and headgear. Observers’ consonant identification performance across the various ‘facewear’ conditions was tested both in quiet listening conditions (Experiment 1), and when the speech stimuli were embedd...

During face to face interactions, the emotional state of each participant is greatly affected by the behavior of other participants and how much this behavior conforms with common protocols of interaction in the society. Research in human to human interaction in face to face situations has uncovered many forms of synchrony in the behavior of the interacting partners. This includes factors as bo...

Previous work suggests that Asians allocate more attention to configuration information than Caucasian Americans do. Yet this cultural variation has been found only with stimuli such as natural scenes and objects that require both featureand configuration-based processing. Here, we show that the cultural variation also exists in face perception—a domain that is typically viewed as configural in...

Current ‘embodied simulation’ approaches to emotion perception suggest that individuals classify another person’s emotions in a three-step process: (i) observers automatically mimic a target’s facial expression, (ii) this motor activation generates the corresponding emotion in the observer, and (iii) the observer attributes his or her current emotional state to the target. In this study, we arg...

The purpose of this study is to develop a stimulus set, in which facial and vocal expressions by East Asian and Western speakers are recorded. In the recording session, facial and vocal expressions, in which the six basic emotions were expressed, were recorded from Japanese and Dutch models, using equivalent linguistic phrases and identical recording settings and procedures. After selection, fa...

We investigated how spectral information contributes to the perception of Japanese consonants, using re-synthesised samples that were created by (1) gradually reducing the order of LPC analysis in the residual excited LPC vocoder; and (2) gradually flattening the spectral peak in the frequency domain. The results of native Japanese speakers showed that the information in LPC residuals contribut...