Erotophilia and sexual sensation–seeking are good predictors of engagement with sex robots, according to new research

Simon Dubé’s study examines the personality traits of people who are more willing to experiment with erobotics

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: SIMON DUBÉ: “IT’S EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND WHO THE FIRST USERS OF SEX ROBOTS ARE AND WHERE THE INITIAL DEMAND IS COMING FROM.” view more 

CREDIT: CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

Advances in technology, in particular artificial intelligence (AI), are impacting our everyday lives in ever more ways — including our sex lives. Sex robots — life-size, lifelike machines powered by AI and used for sexual purposes — are one such emerging technological system. While they remain very niche, those who make, use and study them believe the market offers room for growth.

But to see if and how demand for sex robots grows, stakeholders must first understand who is interested in using them and why. In a new study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Simon Dubé examines the personality traits of people who say they are (and are not) willing to engage with these technologies. Dubé is a former Concordia Public Scholar who completed his PhD this summer.

“It’s extremely important to understand who the first users are and where the initial demand is coming from,” he says. “The companies that make them need to know in order to adjust and develop these technologies.”

Building profiles

The results are based on data from almost 500 adults who completed an online survey examining their attitudes toward sex robots. First, the researchers assessed the respondents’ personalities using a validated measure of the Big Five, a standard model that includes the overarching traits openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and extraversion.

“Personality assessments help us predict people’s likely thoughts, emotions and behaviours across all kinds of situations, including those regarding their sexuality — and in this case, their willingness to engage with new erotic technologies such as sex robots,” says Dubé, who will be pursuing his studies as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinsey Institute in Indiana this fall.

Realizing that these categories may be overly broad, Dubé and his colleagues added a model that addressed respondents’ attitudes toward sex and technology. The model also included an important value measuring positive attitudes toward newness and a desire to try new erotic experiences.

They were then able to assess traits relating to erotophilia/phobia — positive or negative attitudes toward sexuality — technophilia/phobia and sexual sensation–seeking.

According to the results, the Big Five were only weakly correlated to willingness to engage with sex robots. Dubé says that was to be expected, given the breadth of each category. But when it came to traits that were more closely related to the specific subject of sex robots, results were much stronger.

“We found that erotophilia and sexual sensation–seeking, as well as an enthusiasm for new, diverse or more intense erotic experiences, were the primary drivers behind people’s willingness to engage with these new technologies,” Dubé notes. “Technophilia and non-sexual sensation–seeking were also correlated, but only weakly.”

Dubé adds that systematically, across multiple studies he consulted and this one, men were more interested in sex robots than women. However, he adds that respondents who identified as gender nonconforming or nonbinary exhibited similar patterns of interest as cis-identifying males. Respondents did not reveal their sexual orientation in this study.

A product oriented toward men, for now

The sex robot market currently caters heavily toward heterosexual men. Female robots — known as gynoids — feature much more prominently in media, advertising and websites, and high-end units can cost up to $15,000 US. Dubé points out that heterosexual women constitute the majority of sex toy consumers and believes there is an opportunity for manufacturers to cater to a female customer base in the future as the technology improves and becomes more affordable.

“Right now, women probably do not feel that the product meets their own preferences or needs, or it is just too expensive for something that does not have to be particularly complex or interesting.”

Read the cited paper: “Sex robots and personality: It is more about sex than robots.”

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JOURNAL

Computers in Human Behavior

DOI

10.1016/j.chb.2022.107403 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Sex robots and personality: It is more about sex than robots

Can a robot's ability to speak affect how much human users trust it?

by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

Epi the humanoid robot used by Krantz and his colleagues, is a humanoid 

robotics platform used for human-robot interaction experiments and cognitive

 modelling. It was developed at Lund University Cognitive Science. 

Credit: Krantz, Balkenius & Johansson.

As robots become increasingly advanced, they are likely to find their way into many real-world settings, including homes, offices, malls, airports, health care facilities, and assisted living spaces. To promote their widespread use and implementation, however, roboticists should ensure that robots are well-perceived and trusted by humans.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding what affects a human user's trust in robots. Their paper, set to appear in the proceedings for the SCRITA workshop at IEEE Ro-man 2022, specifically tried to determine whether a humanoid robot's ability to speak can impact a human user's trust in it.

"The idea for the paper came about after we found some unexpected results in a previous experiment," Amandus Krantz, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "We were investigating how faulty gaze behavior may impact trust in a humanoid social robot. The results showed a significant difference in trust before and after interaction with the robot across all conditions, but no decrease in trust from the faulty behavior. The only component that was unchanged between the conditions was a short speech from the robot."

Previous literature in robotics suggests that humans' trust in humanoid robots can depend on how intelligent they perceive them to be. Based on the findings they gathered in their previous study, Krantz and his colleagues thus started to reflect on the possibility that a robot's ability to speak, which could be perceived as intelligence, influences how much a human user trusts the robot.

"We theorized that perhaps the speech component was increasing the perceived intelligence of the robot, enough that the resulting trust change masked the trust change from the faulty behavior," Krantz said.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers re-ran the same experiment they carried out in their previous work, but in which the robot did not speak. They found that when the robot did not speak, users tended to trust it less and notice its faulty behavior. This suggests that the robot's ability to speak could in fact increase the participants' trust in it.

"Each of our study participants was shown a video of a humanoid robot displaying either faulty or non-faulty behavior and either speaking or being mute," Krantz explained. "When speaking, the robot would give some facts about one of a series of objects that were presented to it. After seeing this video, the participants were given a range of questionnaires designed to estimate their trust in the robot, along with their perceptions about the robots' intelligence, likability, and animacy (how alive the robot seems)."

The researchers conducted their experiments online, engaging 227 participants. When they analyzed the participants' responses, they found that overall, the non-faulty robots were the most trusted. Interestingly, however, when a faulty robot could talk, participants reported trusting it almost as much as non-faulty robots.

"As far as we know, this is the first study that has investigated how the ability to speak impacts trust," Krantz said. "There are some similar studies, but they tend to investigate the effect of the contents of the speech (usually apologizing for an error), rather than possessing the ability to speak. As for practical implications, the results indicate that implementing some form of human-like speech component may be beneficial for manufacturers of consumer robots (such as robotic vacuum cleaners) who are looking to reduce disuse of their robots following an error in operation."

The recent work by this team of researchers offers valuable and interesting insight about how a robot's ability to speak can affect how humans perceive it and relate to it. In the future, their findings could encourage robotics companies and developers to place a greater emphasis on a robot's speech, as a means to increase potential users' trust in it.

"The experiments outlined in the paper were carried out online, which is known to potentially cause slightly different results from physical human-robot interaction experiments, so we are planning a follow-up study where participants interact with the robot in a real-world setting," Krantz said. "We are also planning a range of studies that investigates how trust is affected by other aspects of a humanoid robot, such as gaze or pupil dilation/constriction."Study explores how a robot's inner speech affects a human user's trust

More information: Amandus Krantz, Christian Balkenius, Birger Johansson, Using speech to reduce loss of trust in humanoid social robots. arXiv:2208.13688v1 [cs.RO], arxiv.org/abs/2208.13688

© 2022 Science X Network

How silent environmentalists could help protect biodiversity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

 

IMAGE: NEW RESEARCH HAS IDENTIFIED AN IMPORTANT GROUP OF AUSTRALIANS WITH A SURPRISINGLY STRONG CONNECTION TO NATURE. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

New research has identified an important group of Australians with a surprisingly strong connection to nature.

A University of Queensland-led study surveyed 2,000 people across Australia, finding that a quarter of participants had a human-centric relationship with nature, but also a strong desire to protect the environment.

PhD candidate Nicola Sockhill said the results show pro-environmental behaviour is not just limited to outspoken environmentalists or the strongly ecologically-minded within the community.

“We found that large groups of people from either side of the political spectrum want to protect the environment and in fact they already do so at high levels,” Ms Sockhill said.

“We all know about the stereotypical left-leaning ecologically-centric person, who protests vocally about climate change, eats a vegan diet and values nature for its intrinsic worth.

“But we also found a very different group of people, often from rural areas and typically a more right-leaning voter base.

“These people valued nature mostly for the benefits it gives to us, such as growing crops.

“The findings revealed that both groups show equally strong levels of support for pro-biodiversity policies. 

“This result challenges the stereotype that right-leaning voters and those with human-centric values care less about taking steps to protect the environment and its biodiversity.

“Understanding this could mark a shift in the way conservation messaging is delivered moving forward.”

Ms Sockhill said existing conservation messaging strategies typically target the ecocentric subgroup of the population, assuming they are more likely to respond to pro-environmental campaigns.

“Where messaging does target the human-centric group, it may be created with the assumption that they aren’t connected to nature, or that they don’t already perform pro-environmental behaviours.

“We have clearly shown that both of these assumptions are wrong and could lead to the disenfranchisement of an important constituency.

“The number of people who could be encouraged to increase their level of pro-environmental behaviour is much bigger than previously realised.”

UQ’s Professor Richard Fuller said this opens the door for future conservation messaging to embrace a wider and more politically diverse audience.

“This work has profound implications for how political parties approach environmental issues, and it also means conservationists need to be much more open-minded about who supports the cause,” Professor Fuller said.

“Partisan battle lines are outdated, and there are committed environmentalists right across the political divide.

“Biodiversity is rapidly disappearing, so the stakes couldn’t be higher.”

This research is published in People and Nature. 

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JOURNAL

People and Nature

DOI

10.1002/pan3.10400 

Talk with your hands? You might think with them too!

Demonstration of embodied cognition mechanisms in the brain could have implications for artificial intelligence

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OSAKA METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: WHEN ASKED ABOUT WHICH WORD REPRESENTED THE LARGER OBJECT, PARTICIPANTS ANSWERED FASTER WHEN THEIR HANDS WERE FREE (LEFT) THAN WHEN HANDS WERE RESTRAINED (RIGHT). RESTRAINING HANDS ALSO LOWERED BRAIN ACTIVITY WHEN PROCESSING WORDS FOR HAND MANIPULABLE OBJECTS IN LEFT BRAIN AREAS ASSOCIATED WITH TOOLS. view more 

CREDIT: MAKIOKA, OSAKA METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

How do we understand words? Scientists don’t fully understand what happens when a word pops into your brain. A research group led by Professor Shogo Makioka at the Graduate School of Sustainable System Sciences, Osaka Metropolitan University, wanted to test the idea of embodied cognition. Embodied cognition proposes that people understand the words for objects through how they interact with them, so the researchers devised a test to observe semantic processing of words when the ways that the participants could interact with objects were limited.

Words are expressed in relation to other words; a “cup,” for example, can be a “container, made of glass, used for drinking.” However, you can only use a cup if you understand that to drink from a cup of water, you hold it in your hand and bring it to your mouth, or that if you drop the cup, it will smash on the floor. Without understanding this, it would be difficult to create a robot that can handle a real cup. In artificial intelligence research, these issues are known as symbol grounding problems, which map symbols onto the real world.

How do humans achieve symbol grounding? Cognitive psychology and cognitive science propose the concept of embodied cognition, where objects are given meaning through interactions with the body and the environment.

To test embodied cognition, the researchers conducted experiments to see how the participants’ brains responded to words that describe objects that can be manipulated by hand, when the participants’ hands could move freely compared to when they were restrained.

"It was very difficult to establish a method for measuring and analyzing brain activity. The first author, Ms. Sae Onishi, worked persistently to come up with a task, in a way that we were able to measure brain activity with sufficient accuracy," Professor Makioka explained.

In the experiment, two words such as “cup” and “broom” were presented to participants on a screen. They were asked to compare the relative sizes of the objects those words represented and to verbally answer which object was larger—in this case, “broom.” Comparisons were made between the words, describing two types of objects, hand-manipulable objects, such as “cup” or “broom” and nonmanipulable objects, such as “building” or “lamppost,” to observe how each type was processed.

During the tests, the participants placed their hands on a desk, where they were either free or restrained by a transparent acrylic plate. When the two words were presented on the screen, to answer which one represented a larger object, the participants needed to think of both objects and compare their sizes, forcing them to process each word’s meaning.

Brain activity was measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which has the advantage of taking measurements without imposing further physical constraints. The measurements focused on the interparietal sulcus and the inferior parietal lobule (supramarginal gyrus and angular gyrus) of the left brain, which are responsible for semantic processing related to tools. The speed of the verbal response was measured to determine how quickly the participant answered after the words appeared on the screen.

The results showed that the activity of the left brain in response to hand-manipulable objects was significantly reduced by hand restraints. Verbal responses were also affected by hand constraints. These results indicate that constraining hand movement affects the processing of object-meaning, which supports the idea of embodied cognition. These results suggest that the idea of embodied cognition could also be effective for artificial intelligence to learn the meaning of objects. The paper was published in Scientific Reports.

###

About OMU

Osaka Metropolitan University is a new public university established by a merger between Osaka City University and Osaka Prefecture University in April 2022. For more science news, see https://www.upc-osaka.ac.jp/new-univ/en-research/, and follow @OsakaMetUniv_en, or search #OMUScience.

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-022-17702-1 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Hand constraint reduces brain activity and affects the speed of verbal responses on semantic tasks

IT'S CTHULHU

Scientists reveal the true identity of a Chinese octopus

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENSOFT PUBLISHERS

 

IMAGE: A LIVE INDIVIDUAL OF CALLISTOCTOPUS XIAOHONGXU view more 

CREDIT: ZHENG ET AL.

As they were collecting cephalopod samples in Dongshan island in China’s Fujian Province, a team of researchers came across an interesting finding: a new-to-science species of octopus.

Actually, locals and fishermen have long been familiar with the species - but they kept mistaking it for a juvenile form of the common long-arm octopus (‘Octopus’ minor), whose trade is widespread throughout the country.

Only when a team of scientists from the Ocean University of China collected a batch of specimens misidentified by locals from Dongshan Seafood Market Pier as ‘O’. minor to study them, did it become apparent that this was in fact a separate, new species. That’s how it got its own name, Callistoctopus xiaohongxu, and a scientific description published in the open-access journal ZooKeys.

The scientific name xiaohongxu is a phonetic translation of the local Chinese name of this species in Zhangzhou, where it was collected. It is a reference to its smooth skin and reddish-brown colour, which are among its most distinctive features. At less than 40 g in its adult stage, C. xiaohongxu is considered a small to moderate-sized octopus.

The researchers also note that this is the first new species of the genus Callistoctopus to be found in the China Seas.

More than 130 different cephalopod species are recorded in Chinese waters. Тhe southeast waters of China, due to the influence of strong warm currents, provide ideal environmental conditions to generate abundant marine biodiversity, and the finding of C. xiaohongxu further confirms the high diversity of species in the southeast China sea, the researchers said.

 

Research article:

Zheng X, Xu C, Li J (2022) Morphological description and mitochondrial DNA-based phylogenetic placement of a new species of Callistoctopus Taki, 1964 (Cephalopoda, Octopodidae) from the southeast waters of China. ZooKeys 1121: 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1121.86264

A live individual of Callistoctopus xiaohongxu

CREDIT

Zheng et al.

CAPTION

A net-like web structure on Callistoctopus xiaohongxu

CREDIT

Zheng et al.

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JOURNAL

ZooKeys

DOI

10.3897/zookeys.1121.86264 

ARTICLE TITLE

Morphological description and mitochondrial DNA-based phylogenetic placement of a new species of Callistoctopus Taki, 1964 (Cephalopoda, Octopodidae) from the southeast waters of China

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Sep-2022

Scientists say the best way to soothe a crying infant is by carrying them on a 5-minute walk

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CELL PRESS

 

IMAGE: IDENTIFYING WHICH ACTION SOOTHES CRYING INFANTS THE BEST view more 

CREDIT: CURRENT BIOLOGY/OHMURA ET AL.

Most parents have experienced frustration when their infants cry excessively and refuse to sleep. Scientists have found that the best strategy to calm them down is by holding and walking with them for five minutes. This evidence-based soothing strategy is presented in a paper published September 13 in the journal Current Biology.

“Many parents suffer from babies’ nighttime crying,” says corresponding author Kumi Kuroda of the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan. “That’s such a big issue, especially for inexperienced parents, that can lead to parental stress and even to infant maltreatment in a small number of cases,” she says.

Kuroda and her colleagues have been studying the transport response, an innate reaction seen in many altricial mammals—those whose young are immature and unable to care for themselves—such as mice, dogs, monkeys, and humans. They observed that when these animals pick up their infants and start walking, the bodies of their young tend to become docile and their heart rates slow. Kuroda’s team wanted to compare the effects of the transport response, the relaxed reaction while being carried, with other conditions such as motionless maternal holding or rocking and also examine if the effects persist with longer carrying in human infants.

The researchers compared 21 infants’ responses while under four conditions: being held by their walking mothers, held by their sitting mothers, lying in a still crib, or lying in a rocking cot. The team found that when the mother walked while carrying the baby, the crying infants calmed down and their heart rates slowed within 30 seconds. A similar calming effect occurred when the infants were placed in a rocking cot, but not when the mother held the baby while sitting or placed the baby in a still crib.

This suggests that holding a baby alone might be insufficient in soothing crying infants, contradicting the traditional assumption that maternal holding reduces infant distress. At the same time, movement has calming effects, likely activating a baby’s transport response. The effect was more evident when the holding and walking motions continued for five minutes. All crying babies in the study stopped crying, and nearly half of them fell asleep.

But when the mothers tried to put their sleepy babies to bed, more than one-third of the participants became alert again within 20 seconds. The team found that all babies produced physiological responses, including changes in heart rate, that can wake them up the second their bodies detach from their mothers. However, if the infants were asleep for a longer period before being laid down, they were less likely to awaken during the process, the team found.

“Even as a mother of four, I was very surprised to see the result. I thought baby awoke during a laydown is related to how they’re put on the bed, such as their posture, or the gentleness of the movement,” Kuroda says.  “But our experiment did not support these general assumptions.” While the experiment involved only mothers, Kuroda expects the effects are likely to be similar in any caregiver.

Based on their findings, the team proposes a method for soothing and promoting sleep in crying infants. They recommend that parents hold crying infants and walk with them for five minutes, followed by sitting and holding infants for another five to eight minutes before putting them to bed. The protocol, unlike other popular sleep training approaches such as letting infants cry until they fall asleep themselves, aims to provide an immediate solution for infant crying. Whether it can improve infant sleep in the long-term requires further research, Kuroda says.

“For many, we intuitively parent and listen to other people’s advice on parenting without testing the methods with rigorous science. But we need science to understand a baby’s behaviors, because they’re much more complex and diverse than we thought,” Kuroda says.

###

This research was supported by RIKEN Center for Brain Science and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Current Biology, Ohmura et al. “A method to soothe and promote sleep in crying infants utilizing the Transport Response” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01363-X

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.041 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

A method to soothe and promote sleep in crying infants utilizing the Transport Response

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Sep-2022

Walk then sit: A scientific recipe that helps babies stop crying

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RIKEN

 

IMAGE: BASED ON THE 'TRANSPORT RESPONSE' IN WHICH DISTRESSED ANIMALS CALM DOWN WHEN CARRIED, THE BEHAVIORAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL DATA IN THIS STUDY SHOWED THAT WHEN BABIES ARE CRYING A LOT, WALKING FOR ABOUT 5 MINUTES, FOLLOWING BY SITTING FOR ABOUT 8 MINUTES SHOULD HELP CALM THEM DOWN AND PUT THEM TO SLEEP. NOTE, SITTING AND HOLDING A CRYING BABY NEVER CALMED THEM DOWN AND HEART RATES ROSE. PUTTING BABIES TO SLEEP IMMEDIATELY AFTER WALKING OFTEN LED TO HIGHER HEART RATES AND WOKE BABIES UP. view more 

CREDIT: RIKEN

New research published in Current Biology on September 13 demonstrates the importance of carrying crying infants rather than simply holding them. Led by Kumi Kuroda at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan, the study details how crying babies are physiologically affected by being held, carried, and laid down. The data yield a simple but cost-free and effective technique that increases the chance of getting a crying infant to calm down and sleep in bed.

Most parents know the occasional frustration and discomfort of dealing with a crying baby. For some, it’s a regular occurrence that affects the baby’s ability to sleep and stresses out the parents. What can you do in this situation? Kuroda and her team found a “Transport Response” in distressed mouse pups and human babies in which infants calm down when carried by their mothers. The response is a complex series of parallel biological processes that result in reduced crying and lower heart rates, which helps parents to transport the infants.

The new study used a baby ECG machine and video cameras to systematically compare changes in heartrate and behavior as mothers acted out activities that are commonly used to calm infants, including carrying, being pushed in a stroller, and holding while sitting. Data during these activities were recorded from babies that were crying, awake and calm, or sleeping. At each heartbeat, behavior was assessed as asleep, alert, or crying, and scored accordingly. This way the researchers could track changes in both behavior and physiology with sub-second precision.

The experiment led to a few important findings. First, as Kuroda explains, “walking for five minutes promoted sleep, but only for crying infants. Surprisingly, this effect was absent when babies were already calm beforehand.” Among the babies studied, all had stopped crying by the end of the five-minute walk and had reduced heart rates, and about half were asleep. Second, sitting and holding crying babies was not calming; heart rates tended to go up and crying persisted.

The heartbeat measure allowed the researchers to dissect the effect of each micro-activity as infants were handled. The researchers found that the babies were extremely sensitive to all movements by their mothers. For example, heartrates went up when mothers turned or when they stopped walking. The most significant event that disturbed the sleeping infants happened just when they became separated from their mothers.

Every mother has experienced the disappointment of having a finally sleeping baby wake up again after being put down. The researchers pinpointed the problem using the heartbeat data. “Although we did not predict it,” says Kuroda, “the key parameter for successful laydown of sleeping infants was the latency from sleep onset.” Babies often woke up if they were put down before they got about 8 minutes of sleep. Thus, based on the data, Kuroda recommends that when babies are crying too much and can’t sleep, mothers should carry them steadily for about 5 minutes with few abrupt movements, followed by about 8 minutes of sitting before laying them down for sleep.

Although this procedure does not address why some babies cry excessively and cannot sleep, it offers an immediate solution that can help parents of newborns. Additionally, the researchers recognize the usefulness of heartrate data in this age of wearable fitness devices. “We are developing a “baby-tech” wearable device with which parents can see the physiological states of their babies on their smartphoness in real-time,” says Kuroda. “Like science-based fitness training, we can do science-based parenting with these advances, and hopefully help babies to sleep and reduce parental stress caused by excessive infant crying.”

Reference:
Ohmura  et al. (2022) A method to soothe and promote sleep in crying infants utilizing the Transport Response. Curr Biol. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.041

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.041 

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Sep-2022

Adults don’t get better at recognizing masked faces as time goes on, new study finds

Researchers find the face processing system in adults is rigidly fixed

Peer-Reviewed Publication

YORK UNIVERSITY

TORONTO, September 13, 2022 – More than two years after the start of the pandemic, adults still have difficulty recognizing people when their face is obscured by a mask, found a new study out of York University.

Many people might have assumed their ability to recognize people’s faces despite their mask would improve over time, but not according to the latest research by scientists from York and Ben-Gurion University in Israel. The research, Recognition of masked faces in the era of the pandemic: No improvement, despite extensive, natural exposure, was published today in the journal Psychological Science.

Researchers found repeated exposure of masked faces throughout the pandemic has made zero difference in adults’ ability to recognize these half-hidden faces.

“Neither time nor experience with masked faces changed or improved the face mask effect,” says York University Assistant Professor Erez Freud of Faculty of Health, the study’s senior author. “This tells us that the adult brain doesn’t not seem to have the ability to change how it processes faces, even when presented with masked faces over an extended period of time.”

The ongoing pandemic provided an unprecedented opportunity for the researchers to examine the plasticity of the mature face processing system.

The researchers repeatedly tested more than 2,000 adults by show them a series of faces, upright and inverted, with and without masks. Different groups of adults were tested at six different points in time during the pandemic. In addition, the researchers tested the same group near the start of the pandemic and 12-months later. In both the cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, adults showed absolutely no increase in their ability to recognize masked faces.

Previous research showed that adults’ facial recognition abilities decreased by about 15 per cent when the person wore a mask using the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT), which as considered as the standard to tap face recognition abilities. Face masks also interfere with how unmasked faces are processed – which is normally made in a holistic manner, rather than by the individual parts of the face. This new study not only used the CFMT, but also the Glasgow Face Match Test, an additional measure of face perception, to determine if anything changed since the last study.

“This shows that face processing in humans, at least in adults, is rigid even after prolonged real-life exposure to partially covered faces,” says Freud.

Face sensitivity first shows up in newborns who exhibit a preference for faces or things that look similar to a face, and especially to familiar faces. In contrast to the mature face processing system, repeated exposure to faces as a child plays an important role in refining the face processing system, which continues to develop until the end of puberty.

Freud says it would be interesting to see if children’s ability to recognize masked faces changes over time with exposure, and whether the pandemic has interfered with their normal ability to recognize faces.

-30-

York University is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change and prepare our students for success. York's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. York’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contact:
Gloria Suhasini, York University Media Relations, 647-463-4354, suhasini@yorku.ca

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JOURNAL

Psychological Science

DOI

10.1177/09567976221105459 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Recognition of Masked Faces in the Era of the Pandemic: No Improvement Despite Extensive Natural Exposure

Risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s disease increases by 50-80% in older adults who caught COVID-19

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

CLEVELAND–Older people who were infected with COVID-19 show a substantially higher risk—as much as 50% to 80% higher than a control group—of developing Alzheimer’s disease within a year, according to a study of more than 6 million patients 65 and older.

In a study published today in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, researchers report that people 65 and older who contracted COVID-19 were more prone to developing Alzheimer’s disease in the year following their COVID diagnosis. And the highest risk was observed in women at least 85 years old.

The findings showed that the risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease in older people nearly doubled (0.35% to 0.68%) over a one-year period following infection with COVID. The researchers say it is unclear whether COVID-19 triggers new development of Alzheimer’s disease or accelerates its emergence.

“The factors that play into the development of Alzheimer’s disease have been poorly understood, but two pieces considered important are prior infections, especially viral infections, and inflammation,” said Pamela Davis, Distinguished University Professor and The Arline H. and Curtis F. Garvin Research Professor at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, the study’s coauthor.

“Since infection with SARS-CoV2 has been associated with central nervous system abnormalities including inflammation, we wanted to test whether, even in the short term, COVID could lead to increased diagnoses,” she said.

The research team analyzed the anonymous electronic health records of 6.2 million adults 65 and older in the United States who received medical treatment between February 2020 and May 2021 and had no prior diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

They then divided this population two groups: one composed of people who contracted COVID-19 during that period, and another with people who had no documented cases of COVID-19. More than 400,000 people were enrolled in the COVID study group, while 5.8 million were in the non-infected group.

“If this increase in new diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease is sustained, the wave of patients with a disease currently without a cure will be substantial, and could further strain our long-term care resources,” Davis said. “Alzheimer’s disease is a serious and challenging disease, and we thought we had turned some of the tide on it by reducing general risk factors such as hypertension, heart disease, obesity and a sedentary lifestyle. Now, so many people in the U.S. have had COVID and the long-term consequences of COVID are still emerging. It is important to continue to monitor the impact of this disease on future disability.”

Rong Xu, the study’s corresponding author, professor of Biomedical Informatics at the School of Medicine and director of the Center for AI in Drug Discovery, said the team plans to continue studying the effects of COVID-19 on Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders—especially which subpopulations may be more vulnerable—and the potential to repurpose FDA-approved drugs to treat COVID’s long-term effects.

Previous COVID-related studies led by CWRU have found that people with dementia are twice as likely to contract COVID; those with substance abuse disorder orders are more likely to contract COVID; and that 5% of people who took Paxlovid for treatment of COVID symptoms experienced rebound infections within a month.

 

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DOI

10.3233/JAD-220717 

ARTICLE TITLE

Association of COVID-19 with New-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Sep-2022