Charles Spence
University of Oxford, Experimental Psychology, Faculty Member
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ABSTRACT
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Clinical decision making in osteopathy is heavily reliant on palpatory diagnostic findings. Although there is evidence that osteopathy is effective in the management of musculoskeletal conditions; the reliability of palpation as a... more
Clinical decision making in osteopathy is heavily reliant on palpatory diagnostic findings. Although there is evidence that osteopathy is effective in the management of musculoskeletal conditions; the reliability of palpation as a diagnostic tool remains controversial. Research examining the reproducibility of diagnostic palpation consistently demonstrates that it lacks clinically acceptable levels of reliability. These findings might be explained by how individual perceptual judgments regarding the nature of the lesion or dysfunction are made and by the clinician’s level of professional expertise. Preliminary results from our research indicate that the development of expertise in diagnostic palpation is associated with changes in cognitive processing. Whereas the experts’ diagnostic judgments are heavily influenced by top-down, non-analytical processing; students rely primarily on bottom-up sensory processing from vision and haptics. Ongoing training and clinical practice are, argu...
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Health messages designed to address obesity are typically focused on the long-term benefits of eating healthy food. However, according to the insurance hypothesis, obese people are food insecure, and this causes them to be overly... more
Health messages designed to address obesity are typically focused on the long-term benefits of eating healthy food. However, according to the insurance hypothesis, obese people are food insecure, and this causes them to be overly concerned about short-term consumption. As such, it is necessary to rethink public health messaging and consider how to reduce short-term insecurity by eating healthy food.
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Recently, it has been shown that various auditory stimuli modulate flavour perception. The present study attempts to understand the effects of environmental sounds (park, food court, fast food restaurant, cafe, and bar sounds) on the... more
Recently, it has been shown that various auditory stimuli modulate flavour perception. The present study attempts to understand the effects of environmental sounds (park, food court, fast food restaurant, cafe, and bar sounds) on the perception of chocolate gelato (specifically, sweet, bitter, milky, creamy, cocoa, roasted, and vanilla notes) using the Temporal Check-All-That-Apply (TCATA) method. Additionally, affective ratings of the auditory stimuli were obtained using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in terms of their valence, arousal, and dominance. In total, 58 panellists rated the sounds and chocolate gelato in a sensory laboratory. The results revealed that bitterness, roasted, and cocoa notes were more evident when the bar, fast food, and food court sounds were played. Meanwhile, sweetness was cited more in the early mastication period when listening to park and café sounds. The park sound was significantly higher in valence, while the bar sound was significantly higher in...
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Previous research shows that people systematically match tastes with shapes. Here, we assess the extent to which matched taste and shape stimuli share a common semantic space and whether semantically congruent versus incongruent... more
Previous research shows that people systematically match tastes with shapes. Here, we assess the extent to which matched taste and shape stimuli share a common semantic space and whether semantically congruent versus incongruent taste/shape associations can influence the speed with which people respond to both shapes and taste words. In Experiment 1, semantic differentiation was used to assess the semantic space of both taste words and shapes. The results suggest a common semantic space containing two principal components (seemingly, intensity and hedonics) and two principal clusters, one including round shapes and the taste word “sweet,” and the other including angular shapes and the taste words “salty,” “sour,” and “bitter.” The former cluster appears more positively-valenced whilst less potent than the latter. In Experiment 2, two speeded classification tasks assessed whether congruent versus incongruent mappings of stimuli and responses (e.g., sweet with round versus sweet with ...
People intuitively match basic tastes to sounds of different pitches, and the matches that they make tend to be consistent across individuals. It is, though, not altogether clear what governs such crossmodal mappings between taste and... more
People intuitively match basic tastes to sounds of different pitches, and the matches that they make tend to be consistent across individuals. It is, though, not altogether clear what governs such crossmodal mappings between taste and auditory pitch. Here, we assess whether variations in taste intensity influence the matching of taste to pitch as well as the role of emotion in mediating such crossmodal correspondences. Participants were presented with 5 basic tastants at 3 concentrations. In Experiment 1, the participants rated the tastants in terms of their emotional arousal and valence/pleasantness, and selected a musical note (from 19 possible pitches ranging from C2 to C8) and loudness that best matched each tastant. In Experiment 2, the participants made emotion ratings and note matches in separate blocks of trials, then made emotion ratings for all 19 notes. Overall, the results of the 2 experiments revealed that both taste quality and concentration exerted a significant effec...
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Despite 2 centuries of research, the question of whether attending to a sensory modality speeds the perception of stimuli in that modality has yet to be resolved. The authors highlight weaknesses inherent in this previous research and... more
Despite 2 centuries of research, the question of whether attending to a sensory modality speeds the perception of stimuli in that modality has yet to be resolved. The authors highlight weaknesses inherent in this previous research and report the results of 4 experiments in which a novel methodology was used to investigate the effects on temporal order judgments (TOJs) of attending to a particular sensory modality or spatial location. Participants were presented with pairs of visual and tactile stimuli from the left and/or right at varying stimulus onset asynchronies and were required to make unspeeded TOJs regarding which stimulus appeared first. The results provide the strongest evidence to date for the existence of multisensory prior entry and support previous claims for attentional biases toward the visual modality and toward the right side of space. These findings have important implications for studies in many areas of human and animal cognition.
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Three experiments were conducted to assess the effectiveness of dynamic vibrotactile warning signals with different spatial patterns and to compare dynamic towards-torso and towards-head vibrotactile warnings in a simulated driving task.... more
Three experiments were conducted to assess the effectiveness of dynamic vibrotactile warning signals with different spatial patterns and to compare dynamic towards-torso and towards-head vibrotactile warnings in a simulated driving task. The results revealed that embedding additional stimuli between the participant's hands and waist in the towards-torso cues (Experiment 1) and increasing the spatial distance between adjacent stimuli in the towards-head cues (Experiment 2) did not result in any further benefits in braking response times (BRTs). The triple towards-head cues resulting from the sequential operation of three pairs of stimuli on the torso gave rise to a significant advantage over the static cues; however, it did not outperform the dynamic towards-torso cues with just two pairs of stimuli. Taken together, these results demonstrated the promise of dynamic vibrotactile warnings (especially, the towards-torso warnings) in terms of the future design of more effective rear-...
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Traditional studies of spatial attention consider only a single sensory modality at a time (e.g. just vision, or just audition). In daily life, however, our spatial attention often has to be coordinated across several modalities. This is... more
Traditional studies of spatial attention consider only a single sensory modality at a time (e.g. just vision, or just audition). In daily life, however, our spatial attention often has to be coordinated across several modalities. This is a non-trivial problem, given that each modality initially codes space in entirely different ways. In the last five years, there has been a spate of studies on crossmodal attention. These have demonstrated numerous crossmodal links in spatial attention, such that attending to a particular location in one modality tends to produce corresponding shifts of attention in other modalities. The spatial coordinates of these crossmodal links illustrate that the internal representation of external space depends on extensive crossmodal integration. Recent neuroscience studies are discussed that suggest possible brain mechanisms for the crossmodal links in spatial attention.
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An experiment conducted in a naturalistic dining context is reported, in which the impact of different styles of plating on diners' experience of the food was assessed. A hundred and sixty three diners were separated into two groups... more
An experiment conducted in a naturalistic dining context is reported, in which the impact of different styles of plating on diners' experience of the food was assessed. A hundred and sixty three diners were separated into two groups during a luncheon event held in a large dining room. Each group of diners was served the same menu, with a variation in the visual presentation of the ingredients on the plate. The results revealed that the diners were willing to pay significantly more for the appetizer (a salad), when arranged in an artistically-inspired manner (M = £5.94 vs. £4.10). The main course was liked more, and considered more artistic, when the various elements were presented in the centre of the plate, rather than placed off to one side. The participants also reported being willing to pay significantly more for the centred than for the offset plating (M = £15.35 vs. £11.65). These results are consistent with the claim that people "eat first with their eyes", and ...
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Upright and inverted audiovisual video clips of a monkey producing a... more
Upright and inverted audiovisual video clips of a monkey producing a 'coo' and a human imitating this vocalization were presented at a range of stimulus onset asynchronies. Participants made temporal order judgments regarding which modality stream appeared to have been presented first. The results showed that inverting the dynamic human visual display led to a significant differences in the point of subjective simultaneity, with the inverted human faces requiring more time to be processed compared with the upright displays. No such inversion effect was found for the monkey visual displays. These results demonstrate that the effect of inversion on the temporal perception of audiovisual speech stimuli are driven by the viewing of a human face rather than by the integration of audiovisual speech.
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Mareschal and his colleagues argue that cognition consists of partial representations emerging from organismic constraints placed on information processing through development. However, any notion of constraints must consider multiple... more
Mareschal and his colleagues argue that cognition consists of partial representations emerging from organismic constraints placed on information processing through development. However, any notion of constraints must consider multiple sensory modalities, and their gradual integration across development. Multisensory integration constitutes one important way in which developmental constraints may lead to enriched representations that serve more than immediate behavioural goals.
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Psychology and Perception
The autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is an atypical sensory phenomenon involving electrostatic-like tingling sensations in response to certain sensory, primarily audio-visual, stimuli. The current study used an online... more
The autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is an atypical sensory phenomenon involving electrostatic-like tingling sensations in response to certain sensory, primarily audio-visual, stimuli. The current study used an online questionnaire, completed by 130 people who self-reported experiencing ASMR. We aimed to extend preliminary investigations into the experience, and establish key multisensory factors contributing to the successful induction of ASMR through online media. Aspects such as timing and trigger load, atmosphere, and characteristics of ASMR content, ideal spatial distance from various types of stimuli, visual characteristics, context and use of ASMR triggers, and audio preferences are explored. Lower-pitched, complex sounds were found to be especially effective triggers, as were slow-paced, detail-focused videos. Conversely, background music inhibited the sensation for many respondents. These results will help in designing media for ASMR induction.
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The last quarter of a century has seen a dramatic rise of interest in the spatial constraints on multisensory integration. However, until recently, the majority of this research has investigated integration in the space directly in front... more
The last quarter of a century has seen a dramatic rise of interest in the spatial constraints on multisensory integration. However, until recently, the majority of this research has investigated integration in the space directly in front of the observer. The space around us, however, extends in three spatial dimensions in the front and to the rear beyond such a limited area. The question to be addressed in this review concerns whether multisensory integration operates according to the same rules throughout the whole of three-dimensional space. The results reviewed here not only show that the space around us seems to be divided into distinct functional regions, but they also suggest that multisensory interactions are modulated by the region of space in which stimuli happen to be presented. We highlight a number of key limitations with previous research in this area, including: (1) The focus on only a very narrow region of two-dimensional space in front of the observer; (2) the use of...
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Multisensory and Brill
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Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Food Science, Gastronomy, and 15 moreDigital Media, Food, Consumer Behavior, Food and Nutrition, Cognitive Neuroscience, Medicine, Hunger, Esthetics, Multisensory perception, Brain, Humans, Feeding Behavior, Food Porn, Neurosciences, and Gastroporn
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Four experiments were conducted in order to assess the effectiveness of dynamic vibrotactile collision-warning signals in potentially enhancing safe driving. Auditory neuroscience research has demonstrated that auditory signals that move... more
Four experiments were conducted in order to assess the effectiveness of dynamic vibrotactile collision-warning signals in potentially enhancing safe driving. Auditory neuroscience research has demonstrated that auditory signals that move toward a person are more salient than those that move away. If this looming effect were found to extend to the tactile modality, then it could be utilized in the context of in-car warning signal design. The effectiveness of various vibrotactile warning signals was assessed using a simulated car-following task. The vibrotactile warning signals consisted of dynamic toward-/away-from-torso cues (Experiment 1), dynamic versus static vibrotactile cues (Experiment 2), looming-intensity- and constant-intensity-toward-torso cues (Experiment 3), and static cues presented on the hands or on the waist, having either a low or high vibration intensity (Experiment 4). Braking reaction times (BRTs) were significantly faster for toward-torso as compared to away-fro...
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Two experiments investigated infants' ability to localize tactile sensations in peripersonal space. Infants aged 10 months (Experiment 1) and 6.5 months (Experiment 2) were presented with vibrotactile stimuli unpredictably to either... more
Two experiments investigated infants' ability to localize tactile sensations in peripersonal space. Infants aged 10 months (Experiment 1) and 6.5 months (Experiment 2) were presented with vibrotactile stimuli unpredictably to either hand while they adopted either a crossed- or uncrossed-hands posture. At 6.5 months, infants' responses were predominantly manual, whereas at 10 months, visual orienting behavior was more evident. Analyses of the direction of the responses indicated that (a) both age groups were able to locate tactile stimuli, (b) the ability to remap visual and manual responses to tactile stimuli across postural changes develops between 6.5 and 10 months of age, and (c) the 6.5-month-olds were biased to respond manually in the direction appropriate to the more familiar uncrossed-hands posture across both postures. The authors argue that there is an early visual influence on tactile spatial perception and suggest that the ability to remap visual and manual direct...
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Research has shown that inversion is more detrimental to the perception of faces than to the perception of other types of visual stimuli. Inverting a face results in an impairment of configural information processing that leads to slowed... more
Research has shown that inversion is more detrimental to the perception of faces than to the perception of other types of visual stimuli. Inverting a face results in an impairment of configural information processing that leads to slowed early face processing and reduced accuracy when performance is tested in face recognition tasks. We investigated the effects of inverting speech and non-speech stimuli on audiovisual temporal perception. Upright and inverted audio-visual video clips of a person uttering syllables (experiments 1 and 2), playing musical notes on a piano (experiment 3), or a rhesus monkey producing vocalisations (experiment 4) were presented. Participants made unspeeded temporal-order judgments regarding which modality stream (auditory or visual) appeared to have been presented first. Inverting the visual stream did not have any effect on the sensitivity of temporal discrimination responses in any of the four experiments, thus implying that audiovisual temporal integra...
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Psychology, Cognitive Science, Music, Auditory Perception, Attention, and 15 moreMedicine, Speech, Humans, Judgment, Female, Male, Reaction Time, Adult, Empirical evidence, Analysis of Variance, Neurosciences, Performance Measure, Acoustic Stimulation, photic stimulation, and Just noticeable difference
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Neuroscience, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Auditory Perception, and 13 moreMotion perception, Medicine, Humans, Multisensory Integration, Apparent Motion, Perceptual grouping, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Visual Motion, Neurosciences, Acoustic Stimulation, Psychomotor Performance, and photic stimulation
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Welcome to this Special Issue of Array: Proceedings of Si15, the 2nd International Symposium on Sound and Interactivity. The articles in the present issue originated in the Si15 Soundislands Festival, which was held in Singapore 18–23... more
Welcome to this Special Issue of Array: Proceedings of Si15, the 2nd International Symposium on Sound and Interactivity.
The articles in the present issue originated in the Si15 Soundislands Festival, which was held in Singapore 18–23 August 2015. The festival events included five invited artist performances, two scientific keynotes and two days of proceedings, a commissioned sound installation, an afternoon of public talks, an internet panel, two pedagogic workshops, a concert with young performers, and more than fifty artworks and scientific papers in numerous forms and formats selected from an open call (http://soundislands.com/si15).
We are thrilled to present 20 articles, by 31 authors, emanating from Si15. The articles have been extended and thoroughly revised for this special issue of Array. They cover a range of topics related to aesthetics, percep-tion, technology, and sound art. We hope that you will enjoy the fruits of the authors' labour and therein discover many a stimulating thought.
The articles in the present issue originated in the Si15 Soundislands Festival, which was held in Singapore 18–23 August 2015. The festival events included five invited artist performances, two scientific keynotes and two days of proceedings, a commissioned sound installation, an afternoon of public talks, an internet panel, two pedagogic workshops, a concert with young performers, and more than fifty artworks and scientific papers in numerous forms and formats selected from an open call (http://soundislands.com/si15).
We are thrilled to present 20 articles, by 31 authors, emanating from Si15. The articles have been extended and thoroughly revised for this special issue of Array. They cover a range of topics related to aesthetics, percep-tion, technology, and sound art. We hope that you will enjoy the fruits of the authors' labour and therein discover many a stimulating thought.
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Psychology, Music, Perception, Music Technology, Languages and Linguistics, and 16 moreEthnomusicology, Installation Art, Interdisciplinarity, Sound, Singapore, Art and Science, Contemporary Music, Perception (Psychology), Sound Art, Interactivity, Interactive / Reactive Sculpture, Sound Sculptures, Installation Art, Video Art, Live Video Mixing, Motion tracking, HCI, Interactive / Reactive Lighting, The Senses, Crossdisciplinarity, Sound Technology, Contemporary Chinese Music, and Japanese Noise Music
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https://cops.ifp.uni-ulm.de/teap2021/downloads/TeaP2021_AbstractBooklet.pdf In this presentation, we review the evidence concerning the representation of the self in each of the senses, as well as in a multisensory / cross-modal... more
https://cops.ifp.uni-ulm.de/teap2021/downloads/TeaP2021_AbstractBooklet.pdf
In this presentation, we review the evidence concerning the representation of the self in each of the senses, as well as in a multisensory / cross-modal context. We consider how the self-prioritization effect (SPE) can be, and in some cases already has been, intuitively used by marketers / advertisers in order to increase the perceived value of products. The SPE has been demonstrated in the visual, auditory, and tactile modalities (Schäfer, Wesslein, Spence, Wentura, & Frings, 2016), and both crossmodal and multisensory variants of the audiovisual SPE have now also been documented (Schäfer, Wesslein, Spence, & Frings, 2021). In due course, the SPE will presumably be shown with chemosensory stimuli too (e.g., “This perfume is your scent.”). In this talk, we will take a closer look at the crossmodal and multisensory variants of the SPE and consider some of the ways in which marketers may intuitively have picked-up on certain of the information processing benefits of the SPE. One might, for example, consider the use of a first-person perspective or the presentation (or appearance) of stimuli in peri-personal space in advertisements/product placement as operating in just this space. Similarly everything from Starbucks scrawling your name on the coffee cup, though to the suggestion that hot beverages taste better from your own cup (Spence, 2017) can also potentially be recast as providing real-world examples of the benefits of self-prioritization.
In this presentation, we review the evidence concerning the representation of the self in each of the senses, as well as in a multisensory / cross-modal context. We consider how the self-prioritization effect (SPE) can be, and in some cases already has been, intuitively used by marketers / advertisers in order to increase the perceived value of products. The SPE has been demonstrated in the visual, auditory, and tactile modalities (Schäfer, Wesslein, Spence, Wentura, & Frings, 2016), and both crossmodal and multisensory variants of the audiovisual SPE have now also been documented (Schäfer, Wesslein, Spence, & Frings, 2021). In due course, the SPE will presumably be shown with chemosensory stimuli too (e.g., “This perfume is your scent.”). In this talk, we will take a closer look at the crossmodal and multisensory variants of the SPE and consider some of the ways in which marketers may intuitively have picked-up on certain of the information processing benefits of the SPE. One might, for example, consider the use of a first-person perspective or the presentation (or appearance) of stimuli in peri-personal space in advertisements/product placement as operating in just this space. Similarly everything from Starbucks scrawling your name on the coffee cup, though to the suggestion that hot beverages taste better from your own cup (Spence, 2017) can also potentially be recast as providing real-world examples of the benefits of self-prioritization.