Might the gravity levels found on other planets and on the moon be sufficient to provide an adequate perception of upright for astronauts? Can the amount of gravity required be predicted from the physiological threshold for linear acceleration? The perception of upright is determined not only by gravity but also visual information when available and assumptions about the orientation of the body...

Using neutron diffraction Harroun et al. [(2006) Biochemistry 45, 1227-1233; (2008) Biochemistry 47, 7090-7096] carried out studies that unequivocally demonstrated cholesterol preferentially sequestering in the middle of bilayers (i.e., flat orientation) made of lipids with polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), in contrast to its "usual" position where its hydroxyl group locates near the lipid/wa...

Research has shown that people are able to judge sexual orientation from faces with above-chance accuracy, but little is known about how these judgments are formed. Here, we investigated the importance of well-established face processing mechanisms in such judgments: featural processing (e.g., an eye) and configural processing (e.g., spatial distance between eyes). Participants judged sexual or...

We measured thresholds in a 1-of-10 face identification task in which stimuli were embedded in orientation-filtered Gaussian noise. For upright faces, the threshold elevation produced by the masking noise varied as a function of noise orientation: significantly greater masking was obtained with horizontal noise than with vertical noise. However, the orientation selectivity of masking was signif...

Despite continuous movements of the head, humans maintain a stable representation of the visual world, which seems to remain always upright. The mechanisms behind this stability are largely unknown. To gain some insight on how head tilt affects visual perception, we investigate whether a well-known orientation-dependent visual phenomenon, the oblique effect-superior performance for stimuli at c...

Attention may be biased towards faces but a face advantage may be linked to the upright orientation of a face. Three experiments, employing a flanker and a cuing paradigm, investigated effects of face orientation, perceptual load and allocation of attention. Experiment 1 demonstrated that, irrespective of load, attention is biased towards upright face distractors while inverted face distractors...

PURPOSE To determine the impact of patient positioning and scan orientation on the appearance of air in the nasolacrimal drainage system on computed tomography (CT) imaging, and the repeatability of the observations. METHODS This was a retrospective analysis of CT images for 92 patients. RESULTS Air was found to be present more fully in the upright-position group as compared with the supine...

Inverted faces are more difficult to identify than upright ones. This even applies when pictures of faces are partially hidden in geometrical designs so that it takes some seconds to recognise them. Similar, though not as pronounced, orientation preferences apply to familiar objects. We compared the recognition times and patterns of eye movements for two sets of familiar symmetrical objects. Pi...

We maintain a stable perception of the visual world despite continuous movements of our eyes, head and body. Perception of upright is a key aspect of such orientation constancy. Here we investigated whether changes in upright perception during sustained head tilt were related to simultaneous changes in torsional position of the eyes. We used a subjective visual vertical (SVV) task, modified to ...