School of Psychology

We examined eye movements in a patient, FK, who has action disorganisation syndrome (ADS), as he performed the everyday task of making a cup of tea. We compared his eye movements with those of a person with Alzheimer's disease and with healthy volunteers. Despite showing very disorganised behaviour many aspects of FK's eye movements were relatively normal. However, unlike normal participants FK made no advance glances to objects that were about to be used, and he made increased numbers of fixations to irrelevant objects during the task. There were also differences in the durations of his eye movements during correct actions and during his perseverative and task-addition responses. We discuss the implications for understanding ADS and the cognitive processes required for correctly performing everyday tasks.

We examined eye movements in a patient, FK, who has action disorganisation syndrome (ADS), as he performed the everyday task of making a cup of tea. We compared his eye movements with those of a person with Alzheimer's disease and with healthy volunteers. Despite showing very disorganised behaviour many aspects of FK's eye movements were relatively normal. However, unlike normal participants FK made no advance glances to objects that were about to be used, and he made increased numbers of fixations to irrelevant objects during the task. There were also differences in the durations of his eye movements during correct actions and during his perseverative and task-addition responses. We discuss the implications for understanding ADS and the cognitive processes required for correctly performing everyday tasks.

During performance of natural tasks subjects sometimes Wxate objects that are manipulated several seconds later. Such early looks are known as "look-ahead Wxations" (Pelz and Canosa in Vision Res 41(25-26):3587-3596, 2001). To date, little is known about their function. To investigate the possible role of these Wxations, we measured Wxation patterns in a model-building task. Subjects assembled models in two sequences where reaching and grasping were interrupted in one sequence by an additional action. Results show look-ahead Wxations prior to 20% of the reaching and grasping movements, occurring on average 3 s before the reach. Their frequency was inXuenced by task sequence, suggesting that they are purposeful and have a role in task planning. To see if look-aheads inXuenced the subsequent eye movement during the reach, we measured eye-hand latencies and found they increased by 122 ms following a look-ahead to the target. The initial saccades to the target that accompanied a reach were also more accurate following a lookahead. These results demonstrate that look-aheads inXuence subsequent visuo-motor coordination, and imply that visual information on the temporal and spatial structure of the scene was retained across intervening Wxations and inXuenced subsequent movement programming. Additionally, head movements that accompanied look-aheads were signiWcantly smaller in amplitude (by 10°) than those that accompanied reaches to the same locations, supporting previous evidence that head movements play a role in the control of hand movements. This study provides evidence of the anticipatory use of gaze in acquiring information about objects for future manipulation.

The aim of this study was to determine the pattern of fixations during the performance of a well-learned task in a natural setting (making tea), and to classify the types of monitoring action that the eyes perform. We used a head-mounted eye-movement video camera, which provided a continuous view of the scene ahead, with a dot indicating foveal direction with an accuracy of about 1 deg. A second video camera recorded the subject's activities from across the room. The videos were linked and analysed frame by frame. Foveal direction was always close to the object being manipulated, and very few fixations were irrelevant to the task. The first object-related fixation typically led the first indication of manipulation by 0.56 s, and vision moved to the next object about 0.61 s before manipulation of the previous object was complete. Each object-related act that did not involve a waiting period lasted an average of 3.3 s and involved about 7 fixations. Roughly a third of all fixations on objects could be definitely identified with one of four monitoring functions: locating objects used later in the process, directing the hand or object in the hand to a new location, guiding the approach of one object to another (eg kettle and lid), and checking the state of some variable (eg water level). We conclude that although the actions of tea-making are`automated' and proceed with little conscious involvement, the eyes closely monitor every step of the process. This type of unconscious attention must be a common phenomenon in everyday life.

Anthocyanins are an important part of the human diet and the most commonly consumed plant secondary metabolites. They are potent antioxidants, and in several recent studies the ingestion of anthocyanins has been linked to positive health benefits for humans. Here, we show that when given a choice between two alternative samples of cabbage to ingest, captive born orangutans (n = 6) voluntarily chose the sample that contained greater amounts of anthocyanin. This occurred when they had to decide between samples of red cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. capitata f. rubra) from the same plant (p<0.05), and samples from green cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. capitata) (p<0.01). This indicates that anthocyanin holds a reward value for these hominids. There was no difference in L*a*b* colour between ingested and discarded samples in red cabbage, but when the choice was between two green samples, the animals chose samples that were more green and yellow. There was also no difference in the...

Loss of vision is a severe impairment to the dominant sensory system. It often has a catastrophic effect upon the sufferer, with knock-on effects to their standard of living, their ability to support themselves, and their care-givers lives. Research into visual impairments is multi-faceted, focusing on the causes of these debilitating conditions as well as attempting to alleviate the daily lives of affected individuals. One of the methods is through the usage of sensory substitution device. Our proposed system, Luminophonics, focuses on visual to auditory cross modalities information conversions. A visual to audio sensory substitution device a type of system that obtains a continual stream visual inputs which it converts into corresponding auditory soundscape. Ultimately, this device allows the visually impaired to visualize the surrounding environment by only listening to the generated soundscape. Even though there is a huge potential for this kind of devices, public usage is still...

Globally, many millions of animals are used by humans every year and much of this usage causes public concern. A new scale, devised to measure attitudes to animal use in relation to the purpose of use and species, the Animal Purpose Questionnaire (APQ), was completed by in total 483 participants, 415 British nationals and 68 participants from 39 other countries. The APQ was presented in two survey formats, alongside an established Animal Attitudes Scale (AAS). In both surveys, participants also provided demographic details to provide a context to their attitudes to animals. As might be expected, and consistent with the validity of the new scale, overall scores on the AAS and APQ were highly correlated. However, the APQ provided a more differentiated measure of attitudes to animal use across a variety of settings. The results showed that there was overall higher levels of agreement with the use of animals in medical research and basic science, less endorsement for food production and pest control, and the use of animals for other cultural practices was generally disapproved of, irrespective of species. Participants overall disagreed with the use of rabbits, monkeys, badgers, tree shrews (survey 1), chimpanzees, dogs, dolphins and parrots (survey 2), but were neutral about the use of rats, mice, pigs, octopus, chickens, zebrafish (survey 1), carp, chickens, pigs, pigeons, rabbits and rats (survey 2). Interactions between species and purpose were largely driven by the consideration of using diverse species for food production. In general, females and vegetarians expressed less agreement with the use of animals with some differences by purpose of use. Pet keeping consistently predicted reduced willingness to use animals for basic science (only). The APQ provides a new tool to unpack how public attitudes depend on the intersectionality of demographics, species and purpose of use.

During performance of natural tasks subjects sometimes Wxate objects that are manipulated several seconds later. Such early looks are known as "look-ahead Wxations" (Pelz and Canosa in Vision Res 41(25-26):3587-3596, 2001). To date, little is known about their function. To investigate the possible role of these Wxations, we measured Wxation patterns in a model-building task. Subjects assembled models in two sequences where reaching and grasping were interrupted in one sequence by an additional action. Results show look-ahead Wxations prior to 20% of the reaching and grasping movements, occurring on average 3 s before the reach. Their frequency was inXuenced by task sequence, suggesting that they are purposeful and have a role in task planning. To see if look-aheads inXuenced the subsequent eye movement during the reach, we measured eye-hand latencies and found they increased by 122 ms following a look-ahead to the target. The initial saccades to the target that accompanied a reach were also more accurate following a lookahead. These results demonstrate that look-aheads inXuence subsequent visuo-motor coordination, and imply that visual information on the temporal and spatial structure of the scene was retained across intervening Wxations and inXuenced subsequent movement programming. Additionally, head movements that accompanied look-aheads were signiWcantly smaller in amplitude (by 10°) than those that accompanied reaches to the same locations, supporting previous evidence that head movements play a role in the control of hand movements. This study provides evidence of the anticipatory use of gaze in acquiring information about objects for future manipulation.

We examined eye movements in a patient, FK, who has action disorganisation syndrome (ADS), as he performed the everyday task of making a cup of tea. We compared his eye movements with those of a person with Alzheimer's disease and with healthy volunteers. Despite showing very disorganised behaviour many aspects of FK's eye movements were relatively normal. However, unlike normal participants FK made no advance glances to objects that were about to be used, and he made increased numbers of fixations to irrelevant objects during the task. There were also differences in the durations of his eye movements during correct actions and during his perseverative and task-addition responses. We discuss the implications for understanding ADS and the cognitive processes required for correctly performing everyday tasks.

Loss of vision is a severe impairment to the dominant sensory system. It often has a catastrophic effect upon the sufferer, with knock-on effects to their standard of living, their ability to support themselves, and their care-givers lives. Research into visual impairments is multi-faceted, focusing on the causes of these debilitating conditions as well as attempting to alleviate the daily lives of affected individuals. One of the methods is through the usage of sensory substitution device. Our proposed system, Luminophonics, focuses on visual to auditory cross modalities information conversions. A visual to audio sensory substitution device a type of system that obtains a continual stream visual inputs which it converts into corresponding auditory soundscape. Ultimately, this device allows the visually impaired to visualize the surrounding environment by only listening to the generated soundscape. Even though there is a huge potential for this kind of devices, public usage is still minimal (Loomis, 2010). In order to promote the adoption from the visually impaired, the overall performance of these devices need to be improved in terms of soundscape interpretability, information preservation and listening comfort amongst other factors. Luminophonics has developed 3 type of prototypes, which we have used to explore different ideas pertaining to visual to audio sensory substitution. In addition to these, one of the prototypes has been converted to include depth information using time of flight camera. Previously, an automated measurement method is used to evaluate the performance of the 3 prototypes (Tan, 2013). The results of the measurement cover the effectiveness in terms of interpretability and information preservation. The main purpose of the experiment reported herein, was to test the prototypes on human subjects in order to gain greater insight on how they perform in real-life situations.

Globally, many millions of animals are used by humans every year and much of this usage causes public concern. A new scale, devised to measure attitudes to animal use in relation to the purpose of use and species, the Animal Purpose Questionnaire (APQ), was completed by in total 483 participants, 415 British nationals and 68 participants from 39 other countries. The APQ was presented in two survey formats, alongside an established Animal Attitudes Scale (AAS). In both surveys, participants also provided demographic details to provide a context to their attitudes to animals. As might be expected, and consistent with the validity of the new scale, overall scores on the AAS and APQ were highly correlated. However, the APQ provided a more differentiated measure of attitudes to animal use across a variety of settings. The results showed that there was overall higher levels of agreement with the use of animals in medical research and basic science, less endorsement for food production and pest control, and the use of animals for other cultural practices was generally disapproved of, irrespective of species. Participants overall disagreed with the use of rabbits, monkeys, badgers, tree shrews (survey 1), chimpanzees, dogs, dolphins and parrots (survey 2), but were neutral about the use of rats, mice, pigs, octopus, chickens, zebrafish (survey 1), carp, chickens, pigs, pigeons, rabbits and rats (survey 2). Interactions between species and purpose were largely driven by the consideration of using diverse species for food production. In general, females and vegetarians expressed less agreement with the use of animals with some differences by purpose of use. Pet keeping consistently predicted reduced willingness to use animals for basic science (only). The APQ provides a new tool to unpack how public attitudes depend on the intersectionality of demographics, species and purpose of use.

Eye movements are an external manifestation of selective attention and can play an important role in indicating which attributes of a scene carry the most pertinent information. Models that predict gaze distribution often define a local conspicuity value that relies on low-level image features to indicate the perceived salience of an image region. While such bottom-up models have some success in predicting fixation densities in simple 2D images, success with natural scenes requires an understanding of the goals of the observer, including the perceived usefulness of an object in the context of an explicit or implicit task. In the present study, observers viewed natural images while their eye movements were recorded. Eye movement patterns revealed that subjects preferentially fixated objects relevant for potential actions implied by the gist of the scene, rather than selecting targets based purely on image features. A protoobject map is constructed that is based on highly-textured regions of the image that predict the location of potential objects. This map is used as a mask to inhibit the unimportant low-level features and enhance the important features to constrain the regions of potential interest. The resulting importance map correlates well to subject fixations on natural-task images.

Congkak is a traditional Malaysian board game involving two players taking turns to pick up marbles from a series of holes on the board. We used this game as a model to explore the role of anticipatory eye movements during natural actions (in this case serially picking up/putting marbles) as novices learnt the game. Prior work on eye and hand movements in natural behaviour shows that much of the demand on the visual system is computed at the moment it is needed and doesn't depend on information acquired from previous fixations. Vision is driven by the task demands. However, anticipatory fixations to upcoming targets of manipulation have recently been shown to confer spatial accuracy and influence the eye-hand latency. We find that experience with the game also influences the deployment of these anticipatory "look-ahead" fixations, and that their influence on eye-hand latency varies with experience. Results suggest that as our experience in Congkak grows, so does our knowledge of the space relationships necessary for task success.

We are grateful to all staff at the National Zoo of Malaysia (Zoo Negara) for their help on this project. We would particularly like to thank the zookeepers at the ape centre; Sharul, John and Firdaus for their assistance and endless patience. We would also like to acknowledge the skills of Danial Hafeez and Research Assistant Nadia Zulkilfi, in collecting and collating data. Many thanks to the Director, Zoology, Hospital & Veterinarian Services & Giant Panda Conservation Centre, Dr. Mat Naim Bin Haji Ramli. We also appreciate advice on enrichment from Zoo Curator, Doreen Khoo, and Education Officer, Junaidi Bin Omar. This research was possible through grants awarded from the Malaysian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI), grant number 06-02-12-SF0187, and from the Malaysian Ministry of Education, Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) no. F0004.54.02.

This work examines the finite temperature properties of the CPT-even and parity-odd electrodynamics of the standard model extension. We start from the partition function written into the functional integral formalism in Ref. [16]. After specializing the Lorentz-violating tensor Wανρϕ for the nonbirefringent and parity-odd coefficients, the partition function is explicitly carry out, showing that it is a power of the Maxwell's partition function. Also, it is observed that the LIV coefficients induce an anisotropy in the black body angular energy density distribution. The Planck's radiation law retains its usual frequency dependence and the Stefan-Boltzmann law keeps the same form, except for a global proportionality constant.