New research project aims to test if beauty is in the eye of the beholder

The project is built around a new technique developed by the Humphreys laboratory for studying the effects of personal social biases on perception. In this novel approach, the research team will ‘tag' stimuli for self-relevance to participants, which subsequently alters how the stimuli are perceived. Results show that there is a linked rapid change in brain activity reflecting the coding of personal relevance.

The new project will fund studies that examine: (i) which stages of perception are penetrated by personal relevance, (ii) how the brain reconfigures to general personal relevance, (iii) how these processes develop in children and change in older adulthood, (iv) how they change across different cultures, and (v) whether personal social relevance is mediated by reward or emotion-responding systems in the brain.

Professor Humphreys and his research team aim to prove that the prevailing view that visual perception is ‘informationally encapsulated' is flawed. The research will present a new account in which our perceptual processes are moderated by personal relevance.

Professor Humphreys is a cognitive neuroscientist with particular interests in the neuropsychology of visual object recognition, attention, and action. Earlier this year, he received the British Psychological Society Cognitive Psychology Prize 2012 for a paper he and his colleagues published entitled ‘Bridging the gap between physiology and behaviour'. In 2012 he was also awarded the Donald Broadbent prize by the European Society for Cognitive Psychology. 

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