Biomedical subjects

Claudiu Simion

Publications and source records attributed to Claudiu Simion.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Early interactions between orienting, visual sampling and decision making in facial preference.

Decision making has been regarded as the last stage before action in the human information processing, certainly subsequent to sensory sampling and perceptual integration. Our latest study showed that orienting contributes to preference decision making, by integrating preferential looking and mere exposure in a positive feedback loop leading to the conscious choice. Here, we introduce a gaze-contingent window method of stimulus presentation into our experimental paradigm, to completely block holistic stimulus processing while preserving piecemeal sampling through the gaze-contingent "peephole". This effectively zooms the visual processing in time domain, allowing us to show that orienting and decision making can interact long before the actual conscious choice. The finding also suggests that this interaction is independent of holistic properties of face stimuli and can be totally memory-driven.

Beauty↗

PubMed2003

Gaze bias both reflects and influences preference.

Emotions operate along the dimension of approach and aversion, and it is reasonable to assume that orienting behavior is intrinsically linked to emotionally involved processes such as preference decisions. Here we describe a gaze 'cascade effect' that was present when human observers were shown pairs of human faces and instructed to decide which face was more attractive. Their gaze was initially distributed evenly between the two stimuli, but then gradually shifted toward the face that they eventually chose. Gaze bias was significantly weaker in a face shape discrimination task. In a second series of experiments, manipulation of gaze duration, but not exposure duration alone, biased observers' preference decisions. We thus conclude that gaze is actively involved in preference formation. The gaze cascade effect was also present when participants compared abstract, unfamiliar shapes for attractiveness, suggesting that orienting and preference for objects in general are intrinsically linked in a positive feedback loop leading to the conscious choice.

Choice Behavior↗