Previous findings indicate that negative arousal enhances bottom-up attention biases favouring perceptual salient stimuli over less salient stimuli. The current study tests whether those effects were driven by emotional arousal or by negative valence by comparing how well participants could identify visually presented letters after hearing either a negative arousing, positive arousing or neutra...

Why: Real-time machine perception benefits greatly from heuristics for quickly filtering out irrelevant stimuli and thus focusing computational effort where it is most likely to pay off. The robots built by the Humanoid Robotics Group all use one form or another of such heuristics for visual perception, such as biases towards skin-colored regions, moving objects, and bright stimuli [2]. More re...

In 1969, Berlin and Kay proposed that there exist crosscultural universals in the form of basic color terms. To test this hypothesis, the World Color Survey (WCS) collected color naming data from 110 non-industrial societies, identifying regularities in the structure of languages with different numbers of terms. This leaves us with the question of where these universals come from. We use a simp...

Many studies have demonstrated that prism adaptation can reduce several symptoms of visual neglect: a disorder in which patients fail to respond to information in contralesional space. The dominant framework to explain these effects proposes that prisms influence higher order visuospatial processes by acting on brain circuits that control spatial attention and perception. However, studies that ...

The visual system is able to extract an enormous amount of socially relevant information from the face, including social categories, personality traits, and emotion. While facial features may be directly tied to certain perceptions, emerging research suggests that top-down social cognitive factors (e.g., stereotypes, social-conceptual knowledge, prejudice) considerably influence and shape the p...

Marital status can both reflect and affect individual preferences. We explore the impact of marriage on corporate CEOs, and find that firms run by single CEOs exhibit higher stock return volatility, pursue more aggressive investment policies, and do not respond to changes in idiosyncratic risk. These effects are weaker for older CEOs. Our findings continue to hold when we use variation in divor...

The popular press and scholarly studies have noted a number of trends in corporate governance. This paper addresses, from a theoretical perspective, whether these trends are linked. And, if so, how? The paper finds that a trend toward greater board diligence will lead, sometimes through subtle or indirect mechanisms, to trends toward more external candidates becoming ceo, shorter tenures for ce...

People show biases or distortions in their geographical judgments, such as mistakenly judging Rome to be south of Chicago (the Chicago-Rome illusion). These errors may derive from either perceptual heuristics or categorical organization. However, previous work on geographic knowledge has generally examined people's judgments of real-world locations for which learning history is unknown. This ar...

The responses of sensory cortical neurons are shaped by experience. As a result perceptual biases evolve, selectively facilitating the detection and identification of sensory events that are relevant for adaptive behaviour. Here we examine the involvement of human visual cortex in the formation of learned perceptual biases. We use classical aversive conditioning to associate one out of a series...

Making decisions under uncertainty, from perceptual judgments to reward-guided choices, requires combining multiple pieces of decision-relevant information — a cognitive process modeled as statistical inference. In such conditions, human and animal decisions exhibit a large suboptimal variability whose origin and structure remains poorly understood. This variability is usually hypothesized as n...