Salient People Research Articles

Mobile Eye Tracking Captures Changes in Attention Over Time During a Naturalistic Threat Paradigm in Behaviorally Inhibited Children.

Attentional biases to and away from threat are considered hallmarks of temperamental Behavioral Inhibition (BI), which is a documented risk factor for social anxiety disorder. However, most research on affective attentional biases has traditionally been constrained to computer screens, where stimuli often lack ecological validity. Moreover, prior research predominantly focuses on momentary presentations of stimuli, rather than examining how attention may change over the course of prolonged exposure to salient people and objects. Here, in a sample of children oversampled for BI, we used mobile eye-tracking to examine attention to an experimenter wearing a "scary" or novel gorilla mask, as well as attention to the experimenter after mask removal as a recovery from exposure. Conditional growth curve modeling was used to examine how level of BI related to attentional trajectories over the course of the exposure. We found a main effect of BI in the initial exposure to the mask, with a positive association between level of BI and proportion of gaze allocated to the stranger's masked face over time. Additionally, there was a main effect of BI on proportion of gaze allocated to the stranger's face plus their mask during the recovery period when the mask was removed.

Summarizing Unconstrained Videos Using Salient Montages.

We present a novel method to summarize unconstrained videos using salient montages (i.e., a "melange" of frames in the video as shown in Fig.1, by finding "montageable moments" and identifying the salient people and actions to depict in each montage. Our method aims at addressing the increasing need for generating concise visualizations from the large number of videos being captured from portable devices. Our main contributions are (1) the process of finding salient people and moments to form a montage, and (2) the application of this method to videos taken "in the wild" where the camera moves freely. As such, we demonstrate results on head-mounted cameras, where the camera moves constantly, as well as on videos downloaded from YouTube. In our experiments, we show that our method can reliably detect and track humans under significant action and camera motion. Moreover, the predicted salient people are more accurate than results from state-of-the-art video salieny method [1] . Finally, we demonstrate that a novel "montageability" score can be used to retrieve results with relatively high precision which allows us to present high quality montages to users.We present a novel method to summarize unconstrained videos using salient montages (i.e., a "melange" of frames in the video as shown in Fig.1, by finding "montageable moments" and identifying the salient people and actions to depict in each montage. Our method aims at addressing the increasing need for generating concise visualizations from the large number of videos being captured from portable devices. Our main contributions are (1) the process of finding salient people and moments to form a montage, and (2) the application of this method to videos taken "in the wild" where the camera moves freely. As such, we demonstrate results on head-mounted cameras, where the camera moves constantly, as well as on videos downloaded from YouTube. In our experiments, we show that our method can reliably detect and track humans under significant action and camera motion. Moreover, the predicted salient people are more accurate than results from state-of-the-art video salieny method [1] . Finally, we demonstrate that a novel "montageability" score can be used to retrieve results with relatively high precision which allows us to present high quality montages to users.

Self‐Protective Altruism

AbstractProsocial behavior accentuates the tension between two conflicting human motivations, self‐interest and belongingness. Responding to the needs of others may compromise self‐interest. Acting callously, however, may lead to social disproval. These antagonistic responses are existentially meaningful as belongingness and self‐esteem have been found to regulate death anxiety. In this paper I critically examine three possible hypotheses concerning the tension between egotism and prosociality from a terror management perspective. The first hypothesis, the carpe diem hypothesis, suggests that when death is salient egotistic self‐interest overrides other‐oriented responses. The second hypothesis, the norm salience hypothesis, suggests that when death is salient people will respond according to the momentarily accessible social norm. The third hypothesis, the self‐protective altruism hypothesis, argues that when the prosocial cause reminds people of their fragile, mortal nature people will turn away from helping when death is salient, but when the prosocial cause is benign death salience will increase prosocial responding.

USING STEREO VISION TO SUPPORT THE AUTOMATED ANALYSIS OF SURVEILLANCE VIDEOS

Abstract. Video surveillance systems are no longer a collection of independent cameras, manually controlled by human operators. Instead, smart sensor networks are developed, able to fulfil certain tasks on their own and thus supporting security personnel by automated analyses. One well-known task is the derivation of people’s positions on a given ground plane from monocular video footage. An improved accuracy for the ground position as well as a more detailed representation of single salient people can be expected from a stereoscopic processing of overlapping views. Related work mostly relies on dedicated stereo devices or camera pairs with a small baseline. While this set-up is helpful for the essential step of image matching, the high accuracy potential of a wide baseline and the according good intersection geometry is not utilised. In this paper we present a stereoscopic approach, working on overlapping views of standard pan-tilt-zoom cameras which can easily be generated for arbitrary points of interest by an appropriate reconfiguration of parts of a sensor network. Experiments are conducted on realistic surveillance footage to show the potential of the suggested approach and to investigate the influence of different baselines on the quality of the derived surface model. Promising estimations of people’s position and height are retrieved. Although standard matching approaches show helpful results, future work will incorporate temporal dependencies available from image sequences in order to reduce computational effort and improve the derived level of detail.

Disgust, creatureliness and the accessibility of death‐related thoughts

AbstractFrom an existential terror management theory perspective, disgusting stimuli are threatening to human beings because they make salient people's vulnerability to death. Two studies were designed to assess this proposition by measuring implicit death‐related ideation after individuals were presented with stimuli that either were or were not disgusting, under conditions in which the similarities of humans to other animals or the uniquely human aspects of people were made salient. In Study 1, in which rather extreme disgust‐eliciting pictures were used, disgusting stimuli led to higher death‐thought accessibility than neutral pictures regardless of whether or not participants had previously been primed with similarities between humans and other animals. In Study 2, in which milder verbal disgust‐eliciting stimuli were used, disgusting stimuli led to heightened death‐thought accessibility only when human‐animal similarities were first primed. Implications for the regulation and humanization of the human body and its functions are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Causal chunking: memory and inference in ongoing interaction.

We propose that people simplify their perceptions of their interactions by organizing them into discrete casual chunks. Once formed, these chunks presumably influence the extent to which people are aware of their influence on others, as well as their impressions of others. We anticipated that people would form self-causal chunks (e.g., my action causes my partner's action) when they possessed an offensive set and other-causal chunks when they possessed a defensive set. We also expected that a self-causal chunking strategy would make salient people's influence on their partners and thereby discourage them from concluding that their partner's behaviors reflected underlying dispositions. In contrast, we anticipated that an other-causal chunking strategy would obscure people's influence on their partners, thereby encouraging them to infer that their partners' behaviors reflected underlying dispositions. We tested these hypotheses by inducing participants to develop either a defensive or an offensive set prior to interacting with another person in a simulated arms race. After the interactions, we assessed the manner in which participants chunked their interactions, as well as their impressions of partners. The results supported our predictions. The implications of these findings for understanding conflict and misunderstanding in interpersonal relations are discussed.

Causal chunking: Memory and inference in ongoing interaction.

We propose that people simplify their perceptions of their interactions by organizing them into discrete causal chunks. Once formed, these chunks presumably influence the extent to which people are aware of their influence on others, as well as their impressions of others. We anticipated that people would form self-causal chunks (e.g., my action causes my partner's action) when they possessed an offensive set and other-causal chunks when they possessed a defensive set. We also expected that a self-causal chunking strategy would make salient people's influence on their partners and thereby discourage them from concluding that their partners' behaviors reflected underlying dispositions. In contrast, we anticipated that an other-causal chunking strategy would obscure people's influence on their partners, thereby encouraging them to infer that their partners' behaviors reflected underlying dispositions. We tested these hypotheses by inducing participants to develop either a defensive or an offensive set prior to interacting with another person in a simulated arms race. After the interactions, we assessed the manner in which participants chunked their interactions, as well as their impressions of partners. The results supported our predictions. The implications of these findings for understanding conflict and misunderstanding in interpersonal relations are discussed.

Impact of salient vocal qualities on causal attribution for a speaker's behavior.

Considerable research has demonstrated an illusory causation effect in which visually salient people are perceived as more causal of events in a social interaction than their nonsalient counterparts. The present studies extended this work to the realm of auditory salience. Two determinants of auditory salience were manipulated—the intensity of a speaker's voice and the sex of a speaker's voice. As predicted, subjects attended more to a 75-dB (A) than to a 70-dB voice on a binaural listening test, and subjects attributed more causality to an actor in a two-person conversation when his voice was 75 dB in intensity than when it was 70 dB. Contrary to expectation, subjects did not attend more to the voice whose sex matched their own on the binaural listening test. Rather, all subjects listened more to the actor with the male voice. Consistent with this tendency for the male voice to be more salient, subjects attributed more causality to an actor when the voice was-male than when it had been electronically converted to a female voice of the same intensity and intonation. Vocal salience also influenced subjects' impressions of the actors, but it had no impact on recall of the actors' verbalizations. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.