Initial Salience Research Articles

Under the sun: adaptation effects to changes in facial complexion

BackgroundMany Western people enjoy sunshine, and through the sun’s stimulated increase in melanin, the skin tone or skin complexion will darken (and lighten again during winter). Although the initial salience of such a new look is remarkable – especially in the face – we seem to adapt to this new look relatively quickly. Research on face adaptation in general repeatedly showed that the inspection of manipulated versions of faces (so-called adaptor faces) leads to a change of the perception of subsequently presented faces. The present study investigates face adaptation to very natural changes in faces such as changes in complexion.MethodsDuring the adaptation phase in the present study, participants saw faces with either strongly increased or decreased complexion. After a pause of 5 min, participants had to identify the veridical (non-manipulated) face out of two faces (a face slightly manipulated in complexion combined with the non-manipulated face) during a test phase.ResultsResults show strong adaptation effects to decreased complexion intensities.DiscussionIt seems that we are updating our facial representations in memory quite quickly (i.e., optimizing our processing through adaptation) and seem to sustain those new representations over a certain timespan (at least 5 min). Our results demonstrate that changes in complexion draw our attention for deeper analysis (at least with decreased complexion). However, it loses its informative quality quickly via fast and relatively sustainable adaptation.

What the Heck Is Salience? How Predictive Language Processing Contributes to Sociolinguistic Perception.

Some sociolinguistic variables are prone to hypercorrection, stigmatization and style shifting, while other variables are not. The status of the former type—sometimes called stereotypes and markers (Labov, 1972)—has been attributed to the increased meta-linguistic awareness language users seem to have of these variables. This awareness in turn is attributed to the salience of these variables, such that greater salience is assumed to cause greater meta-linguistic awareness (e.g., Trudgill, 1986). Salience has similarly been invoked when aiming to explain implicit social inferences about, or attitudes toward, speakers who exhibit certain variables in their speech (Babel, 2016; Drager and Kirtley, 2016; Squires, 2016). However, salience is a hard to define concept (for review, see Auer et al., 1998; Kerswill and Williams, 2002) and, partly as a consequence, “notoriously difficult to quantify” (Hickey, 2000). For a concept that plays such a central and ubiquitous role in sociolinguistic explanations, this is arguably a dangerous state of affairs. This motivates the present commentary. We believe that advances in computational psycholinguistics offer definitions of sociolinguistic salience that are more concrete, both empirically and formally grounded, and quantifiable (and thus falsifiable). We propose that it is important to distinguish between the initial salience a listener experiences when first encountering a novel variant (e.g., because of exposure to a previously unfamiliar dialect, sociolect, or idiolect—henceforth lects; Schirmunski, 1930; Preston, 1996), and salience at later stages. Salience after the initial encounter is the cumulative product of an individual's experience related to the lectal variant, including direct experience, as well as discourse about the variant (e.g., explicit stereotyping or enregisterment, Agha, 2003). Here we focus on the causes for initial salience, which we think can be defined in a principled and quantifiable way. Specifically, we propose that salience in the first moments when a novel lect is encountered cannot be understood without reference to prior expectations based on listeners' past language experience and the ensuing expectation violation that a listener experiences relative to those prior expectations—an idea explored in more depth by Racz (2012, 2013). Here we contribute to these efforts. We draw on basic concepts from probability and information theory to define initial salience as a function of (top-down) prior expectations. This has several advantages. First, the proposed definition of salience is quantifiable (see also Racz, 2013). Second, computational psycholinguistics has linked the very same quantities to language processing and learning. Recognizing this link offers the opportunity to ground sociolinguistic salience in human information processing—both empirically and theoretically—offering a parsimonious account of initial salience. After we have outlined our proposal, we briefly turn to an apparent puzzle that was raised during the workshop leading to this special issue: several presenters pointed out that salience sometimes seems to be inversely related to the frequency of a variant and other times positively related. This puzzle readily dissolves once the view proposed here is taken into account.

Emotion blocks the path to learning under stereotype threat

Gender-based stereotypes undermine females' performance on challenging math tests, but how do they influence their ability to learn from the errors they make? Females under stereotype threat or non-threat were presented with accuracy feedback after each problem on a GRE-like math test, followed by an optional interactive tutorial that provided step-wise problem-solving instruction. Event-related potentials tracked the initial detection of the negative feedback following errors [feedback related negativity (FRN), P3a], as well as any subsequent sustained attention/arousal to that information [late positive potential (LPP)]. Learning was defined as success in applying tutorial information to correction of initial test errors on a surprise retest 24-h later. Under non-threat conditions, emotional responses to negative feedback did not curtail exploration of the tutor, and the amount of tutor exploration predicted learning success. In the stereotype threat condition, however, greater initial salience of the failure (FRN) predicted less exploration of the tutor, and sustained attention to the negative feedback (LPP) predicted poor learning from what was explored. Thus, under stereotype threat, emotional responses to negative feedback predicted both disengagement from learning and interference with learning attempts. We discuss the importance of emotion regulation in successful rebound from failure for stigmatized groups in stereotype-salient environments.

Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Training: Selection Effects and Long-Term Changes in Perceptions of Mental Illness and Community Preparedness

Survey data were used to assess how training affects changes in officers’ perceptions of persons with mental illness as well as perceptions of police and the mental health system's preparedness in addressing their needs. Officers’ confidence in their ability to handle calls involving people with mental illness in crisis increased most over time. Exploratory analysis indicated that this increase was positively associated with the pretraining degree to which people with mental illness in crisis present a problem for the police department. This increase was positively associated with the perception that the police department's overall effectiveness in meeting the needs of people with mental illness in crisis and negatively associated with the degree to which mental illness was believed to be caused by parental upbringing. These findings suggest that initial salience of the problem for the police department posed by those with mental illness is critical to CIT officer eventual “success.”

The construal of salience in atemporal complement clauses in English

In Cognitive Grammar, expressions differ in meaning depending on not only the entities they designate but also the construals employed to structure their conceived scenes. The syntax of an expression is a reflection of its conceptual organisation, and represents the specific construal of the scene it describes. In atemporal (non-finite) complementation, causative constructions involving two participants in object position can appear in two syntactic forms: bare infinitive as in She made them go or to-infinitive as in She forced them to go. The construal which brings about the syntactic difference between the two complement clauses pertains to salience. When the speaker wants to give the complement clause initial salience, he opts for the bare infinitive. By contrast, when the speaker wants to give the complement clause subject initial salience, he chooses the to-infinitive. In each case, the meaning of the construction is determined by the particular way the speaker structures its scene, whereas its distribution is governed by the semantic compatibility between its internal parts.

Fractal timing of verbal transforms.

The paper deals with the timing pattern of perceptual change elicited by multiple repetitions of a syllable (the verbal-transformation effect). We show that the distribution of the dwell time, the time spent perceiving a given phonemic form before switching to another form, obeys a power law with an exponent valued between 1 and 2. This result is robust, occurring for meaningless syllables and for English words of different initial phonemic salience. Experiment 2 demonstrates that subjects are aware of the temporal dynamics of perceptual change. On the basis of these results, it is argued that within this paradigm the notion of a mean dwell time is ill defined and there is apparently no characteristic time scale for perceptual change.

Rapid change in lexical development in comprehension and production.

Twenty-four infants were given word comprehension tests at 2-month intervals from 14 to 22 months. For each word, the child observed 2 slides and was prompted to look at 1 named by the experimenter. Visual fixation following the prompt was compared with fixation during a preprompt baseline to calculate a word comprehension score reflecting increase of attention to the referent independent of initial salience. The month-to-month change in comprehension scores revealed a spurt or surge for some but not all children, with the largest number of spurts occurring in the 20-22 month interval. For a subset of children (n=18), parents maintained diaries of spojen words. For a statistically significant number of children, the presence of a comprehension spurt was associated with the presence of a production spurt

Recognition of Facial Expressions by Seven-Month-Old Infants

3 experiments examined 7-month-old infants' ability to discriminate the facial expressions of happy vs. fear. Experiment 1 revealed that infants demonstrated discrimination of happy vs. fear expressions when posed by a single model but that this discrimination was affected by the order of stimulus presentation. In experiment 2 infants were shown 2 models posing the happing and fearful expressions and did not demonstrate generalization of the discrimination of happy versus fear across these models. The third and main experiment varied the test procedure. Here, infants demonstrated reliable generalized discrimination of the 2 expressions across different models. As in experiment 1, however, these results were constrained by the order in which the stimuli were presented. These consistent order effects were not due to the initial salience of the 2 expressions but, instead, appeared to reflect differential rates of habituation to happy vs. fear expressions.

Salience of Initial Ratings and Attitude Change in the "Forbidden Toy" Paradigm

The effects of level of initial attitude salience and severity of threat on attitude change were assessed utilizing the forbidden toy paradigm. Second and third grade children were warned to refrain from playing with a preferred toy, using either a mild or severe threat. Initial attitude salience was varied by having a second experimenter either show the subjects their initial rating during the temptation period or not. A significant interaction between threat and salience was obtained when derogation scores were analysed. With mild threat, increased salience led to increased derogation of the forbidden toy. With severe threat, increased salience had no effect on derogation.