Petr Adámek

Humans can recognize a vast number of previously seen images, yet their ability to recall fine details from visual memory remains limited. This study investigated whether prolonged study of a small number of stimuli could improve the recognition accuracy for memorizing details of the scene. We developed a novel experimental paradigm that allowed repeated testing of memory for individual images, allowing us to query images repeatedly and measure which parts of the scene were remembered, and which were forgotten. Our results revealed that participants struggled to achieve high accuracy in detail-oriented memory tasks, even with extensive effort and focus. Follow-up experiments explored potential factors contributing to this limitation, shedding light on why memorizing fine details is inherently difficult. These findings underscore the challenges of achieving high-detail visual memory in long-term memory for complex scenes—although we can memorize large numbers of scenes with low fidelity, we cannot memorize details even in a small number of scenes.

Background: Detrimental effects of misinformation were observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Presently, amid Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine, another wave of misinformation is spreading on the web and impacting our daily lives, with many citizens and politicians embracing Russian propaganda narratives. Despite the lack of an objective connection between these 2 societal issues, anecdotal observations suggest that supporters of misinformation regarding COVID-19 (BM-C) have also adopted misinformation about the war in Ukraine (BM-U) while sharing similar media use patterns and political attitudes. Objective: The aim of this study was to determine whether there is a link between respondents’ endorsement of the 2 sets of misinformation narratives, and whether some of the selected factors (media use, political trust, vaccine hesitancy, and belief rigidity) are associated with both BM-C and BM-U. Methods: We conducted a survey on a nationally representative sample of 1623 individuals in the Czech Republic. Spearman correlation analysis was performed to identify the relationship between BM-C and BM-U. In addition, multiple linear regression was used to determine associations between the examined factors and both sets of misinformation. Results: We discovered that BM-C and BM-U were moderately correlated (Spearman ρ=0.57; P<.001). Furthermore, increased trust in Russia and decreased trust in the local government, public media, and Western allies of the Czech Republic predicted both BM-C and BM-U. Media use indicating frustration with and avoidance of public or mainstream media, consumption of alternative information sources, and participation in web-based discussions indicative of epistemic bubbles predicted beliefs in misinformation narratives. COVID-19 vaccine refusal predicted only BM-C but not BM-U. However, vaccine refusers were overrepresented in the BM-U supporters (64/161, 39.8%) and undecided (128/505, 25.3%) individuals. Both beliefs were associated with belief rigidity. Conclusions: Our study provides empirical evidence that supporters of COVID-19 misinformation were susceptible to ideological misinformation aligning with Russian propaganda. Supporters of both sets of misinformation narratives were primarily linked by their shared trust or distrust in the same geopolitical actors and their distrust in the local government.

Humans can recognize a vast number of previously seen images, yet their ability to recall fine details from visual memory remains limited. This study investigated whether prolonged study of a small number of stimuli could improve the recognition accuracy for memorizing details of the scene. We developed a novel experimental paradigm that allowed repeated testing of memory for individual images, allowing us to query images repeatedly and measure which parts of the scene were remembered, and which were forgotten. Our results revealed that participants struggled to achieve high accuracy in detail-oriented memory tasks, even with extensive effort and focus. Follow-up experiments explored potential factors contributing to this limitation, shedding light on why memorizing fine details is inherently difficult. These findings underscore the challenges of achieving high-detail visual memory in long-term memory for complex scenes - Although we can memorize a large numbers of scenes with low fidelity, we cannot memorize details even in a small numbers of scenes.

Existing research indicates that the shape of various facial regions is linked to perceived attractiveness and perceived formidability. Interestingly, little evidence shows that people directly focus on these specific facial regions during judgments of attractiveness and formidability, and there is little support for the notion that the levels of attractiveness and formidability affect raters’ visual attention. We employed eye-tracking to examine visual attention (the number of fixations and dwell time) in 40 women and 37 men, while they assessed 45 male faces in life-sized photographs for attractiveness and formidability. The facial photographs were grouped by varying levels of attractiveness and formidability (low, medium, and high). Our results showed that regardless of the characteristics rated, both men and women paid the most visual attention to the eyes, nose, mouth, and forehead regions. We found statistically discernible variation in visual attention in relation to the rater’s sex or target’s attractiveness levels for other facial features (the chin, cheeks, or ears), but these differences may not be substantial enough to have practical implications. We suggest that the eyes, the nose, and the mouth regions play a central role in the evolution of face perception as regions most salient to the acquisition of informative cues about others. Further, during both attractiveness and formidability judgments, men looked longer at the stimuli than women did, which may hint at increased difficulty of this task for men, possibly because they compare themselves with the stimuli. Additionally, irrespective of sex, raters looked marginally longer at faces with a medium level of formidability than at those with a high formidability level, which may reflect ambiguity of these stimuli and uncertainty regarding assessment. We found no other significantly relationships between the target’s attractiveness and formidability levels and the rater's visual attention to whole faces.

BACKGROUND Detrimental effects of misinformation were observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Presently, amid Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine, another wave of misinformation is spreading on the web and impacting our daily lives, with many citizens and politicians embracing Russian propaganda narratives. Despite the lack of an objective connection between these 2 societal issues, anecdotal observations suggest that supporters of misinformation regarding COVID-19 (BM-C) have also adopted misinformation about the war in Ukraine (BM-U) while sharing similar media use patterns and political attitudes. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine whether there is a link between respondents’ endorsement of the 2 sets of misinformation narratives, and whether some of the selected factors (media use, political trust, vaccine hesitancy, and belief rigidity) are associated with both BM-C and BM-U. METHODS We conducted a survey on a nationally representative sample of 1623 individuals in the Czech Republic. Spearman correlation analysis was performed to identify the relationship between BM-C and BM-U. In addition, multiple linear regression was used to determine associations between the examined factors and both sets of misinformation. RESULTS We discovered that BM-C and BM-U were moderately correlated (Spearman ρ=0.57; P<.001). Furthermore, increased trust in Russia and decreased trust in the local government, public media, and Western allies of the Czech Republic predicted both BM-C and BM-U. Media use indicating frustration with and avoidance of public or mainstream media, consumption of alternative information sources, and participation in web-based discussions indicative of epistemic bubbles predicted beliefs in misinformation narratives. COVID-19 vaccine refusal predicted only BM-C but not BM-U. However, vaccine refusers were overrepresented in the BM-U supporters (64/161, 39.8%) and undecided (128/505, 25.3%) individuals. Both beliefs were associated with belief rigidity. CONCLUSIONS Our study provides empirical evidence that supporters of COVID-19 misinformation were susceptible to ideological misinformation aligning with Russian propaganda. Supporters of both sets of misinformation narratives were primarily linked by their shared trust or distrust in the same geopolitical actors and their distrust in the local government.

Schizophrenia (SCHZ) notably impacts various human perceptual modalities, including vision. Prior research has identified marked abnormalities in perceptual organization in SCHZ, predominantly attributed to deficits in bottom-up processing. Our study introduces a novel paradigm to differentiate the roles of top-down and bottom-up processes in visual perception in SCHZ. We analysed eye-tracking fixation ground truth maps from 28 SCHZ patients and 25 healthy controls (HC), comparing these with two mathematical models of visual saliency: one bottom-up, based on the physical attributes of images, and the other top-down, incorporating machine learning. While the bottom-up (GBVS) model revealed no significant overall differences between groups (beta = 0.01,p = 0.281, with a marginal increase in SCHZ patients), it did show enhanced performance by SCHZ patients with highly salient images. Conversely, the top-down (EML-Net) model indicated no general group difference (beta = −0.03,p= 0.206, lower in SCHZ patients) but highlighted significantly reduced performance in SCHZ patients for images depicting social interactions (beta = −0.06,p< 0.001). Over time, the disparity between the groups diminished for both models. The previously reported bottom-up bias in SCHZ patients was apparent only during the initial stages of visual exploration and corresponded with progressively shorter fixation durations in this group. Our research proposes an innovative approach to understanding early visual information processing in SCHZ patients, shedding light on the interplay between bottom-up perception and top-down cognition.

Previous studies show that men and women attend to visual cues during the perception of others, and their conscious/explicit judgments strongly agree in inferring socially relevant characteristics such as formidability and attractiveness. Although the adaptive evolution of neural substrates facilitating this perception was hypothesized, relatively little is known about how neural systems underlie the perception. Using fMRI, we explored the proposed neural processes (e.g., activation of distinct brain regions) involved in the assessments of male quality in the context of male intrasexual and intersexual competition and compared differences in explicit ratings and psychophysiological processes involved in their formation.Seventy-five raters (men and women) took part in the neuroimaging and rating sessions, where they assessed sets of male facial and body images on both attractiveness and formidability while their brain activity was recorded. While we observed no sex differences in explicit ratings, the fMRI results did show context-dependent and sex-specific differences in brain activations underlying assessments of male quality. Compared to attractiveness, formidability perception involved the primary somatosensory cortex, supplementary motor area, and areas active in self-referential processing. During the formidability rating, men exhibited considerable differences in neural activation across the whole brain compared to women. In women, the formidability rating did not elicit any additional activations contrasted to attractiveness.This insight into the comparison of brain activity during sexual selection-related social perception of faces and bodies of men beyond evidence commonly acquired by solely explicit ratings provides support for the existence of hypothesized evolved neuro-cognitive complexes involved in social assessments.

Existing research indicates that the shape of various facial regions is linked to perceived attractiveness and perceived formidability. Interestingly, there is little evidence showing that people actually focus on these specific facial regions during judgements of attractiveness and formidability and little support for the notion that the levels of attractiveness and formidability affect raters’ visual attention.We have employed eye tracking to examine visual attention (the number of fixations and dwell time) in 40 women and 37 men while they assessed 45 male faces in life-sized photographs. The facial photographs were grouped by varying levels of attractiveness and formidability (low, medium, high).Our results show that regardless of the characteristics rated, both men and women paid the most visual attention to the eyes, nose, mouth, and forehead regions. We found statistically discernible variation in visual attention in relation to the rater’s sex or target’s attractiveness levels for other facial features (the chin, cheeks, or ears), but these differences may not be substantial enough to have practical implications. We suggest that the eyes, the nose, and the mouth regions play a central role in the evolution of face perception as regions most salient to the acquisition of informative cues about others. Further, during both attractiveness and formidability judgements, men looked longer at the stimuli than women did, which may hint at increased difficulty of this task for men – perhaps because they compare themselves with the stimuli. Additionally, irrespective of sex, raters looked marginally longer at faces with a medium level of formidability than at those with a high formidability level, which may reflect ambiguity of these stimuli and uncertainty regarding assessment. We found no other relationships between the target’s attractiveness and formidability level in the context of visual attention to whole faces.