Kun Guo

University of Lincoln · School of Psychology

Souls-like games are one of the most popular and emerging genres in the contemporary gaming world. This study compared the behavioral characteristics, perspectives, and emotional expressions of players in Souls-like games from different cultural backgrounds, specifically examining the distinctions and commonalities among them. Natural language proc...

This study examined whether three subtypes of anxiety (trait anxiety, state anxiety, and social anxiety) have different effects on recognition of facial expressions. One hundred and thirty-eight participants matched facial expressions of three intensity levels (20 %, 40 %, 100 %) with one of the six emotion labels ("happy", "sad", "fear", "angry",...

Driver errors, such as distraction, perceptual blindness, and incorrect control manipulation, can either cause road accidents or reduce driving performance in daily driving tasks. Several works in literature have illustrated perceptual blindness and distraction are associated with insufficient attention to those activities vital for safe driving. A...

In contrast to prototypical facial expressions, we show less perceptual tolerance in perceiving vague expressions by demonstrating an interpretation bias, such as more frequent perception of anger or happiness when categorizing ambiguous expressions of angry and happy faces that are morphed in different proportions and displayed under high- or low-...

Dogs are good models for studying behaviour and cognition as they have complex social capabilities. In the current study, we observed how human emotional valences (positive, neutral and negative) affected aspects of dogs’ behaviour. We expected that dogs would exhibit more approaching behaviours in the positive condition and more signs of avoidance...

Comparative studies of human–dog cognition have grown exponentially since the 2000’s, but the focus on how dogs look at us (as well as other dogs) as social partners is a more recent phenomenon despite its importance to human–dog interactions. Here, we briefly summarise the current state of research in visual perception of emotion cues in dogs and...

The correct interpretation of an animal’s emotional state is crucial for successful human–animal interaction. When studying dog and cat emotional expressions, a key source of information is the pet owner, given the extensive interactions they have had with their pets. In this online survey we asked 438 owners whether their dogs and/or cats could ex...

The current “deep learning + large-scale data + strong supervised labeling” technology framework of collision avoidance for ground robots and aerial drones is becoming saturated. Its development gradually faces challenges from real open-scene applications, including small data, weak annotation, and cross-scene. Inspired by the neural structure and...

In this paper, we propose a non-intrusive and nonrestrictive multimodal deep learning model for estimating the engagement levels of game streamers. We incorporate three modalities from the streamers' videos (facial, pixel, and audio information) to train the multimodal neural network. Additionally, we introduce a novel interpretation technique that...

The judgment of female body appearance has been reported to be affected by a range of internal (e.g., viewers’ sexual cognition) and external factors (e.g., viewed clothing type and colour). This eye-tracking study aimed to complement previous research by examining the effect of facial expression on female body perception and associated body-viewin...

SIMON, T., K. Guo, E. Frasnelli, A. Wilkinson and D.S. Mills. Testing of behavioural asymmetries as markers for brain lateralization of emotional states in pet dogs: a critical review. NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV REV XX(X) XXX-XXX, XXXX. Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) hold a unique position in human society, particularly in their role as social companions;...

Children are often surrounded by other humans and companion animals (e.g., dogs, cats); and understanding facial expressions in all these social partners may be critical to successful social interactions. In an eye‐tracking study, we examined how children (4–10 years old) view and label facial expressions in adult humans and dogs. We found that chi...

In advanced industrial applications, computational visual attention models (CVAMs) could predict visual attention very similarly to actual human attention allocation. This has been used as a very important component of technology in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Given that the biological inspiration of the driving-related CVAMs could b...

It is of great significance for safe driving to study drivers' eye movement and driving operation behavior when they encounter other road users violating traffic rules. The underlying reason is that most drivers are unable to process the unexpected visual stimulation, which is more likely to lead to driving accidents, especially in a hybrid situati...

Research with humans and other animals has suggested that preferential limb use is linked to emotionality. A better understanding of this still under-explored area has the potential to establish limb preference as a marker of emotional vulnerability and risk for affective disorders. This study explored the potential relationship between paw prefere...

The ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the im...

Most full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) models first compute local quality scores and then pool them into an overall score. In this paper, we develop an innovative pooling strategy based on sample statistics to adaptively make the IQA more consistent with human visual assessment. The innovation of this work is threefold. First, we identi...

Driver identification has been popular in the field of driving behavior analysis, which has a broad range of applications in anti-thief, driving style recognition, insurance strategy, and fleet management. However, most studies to date have only researched driver identification without a robust verification stage. This paper addresses driver identi...

Face mask is now a common feature in our social environment. Although face covering reduces our ability to recognize other's face identity and facial expressions, little is known about its impact on the formation of first impressions from faces. In two online experiments, we presented unfamiliar faces displaying neutral expressions with and without...

People routinely wear face masks during the pandemic, but little is known about their impact on body perception. In this online study, we presented female body images of Caucasian avatars in common dress sizes displaying happy, angry, and neutral facial expressions with and without face masks, and asked women to rate the perceived body attractivene...

Automatic facial recognition technology (AFR) is increasingly used in criminal justice systems around the world, yet to date there has not been an international survey of public attitudes toward its use. In Study 1, we ran focus groups in the UK, Australia and China (countries at different stages of adopting AFR) and in Study 2 we collected data fr...

The abilities to identify individuals within the group, and to interpret their expressions and intentions are essential for many social animals. Face recognition in human and nonhuman primates stems from a conjunction of evolutionary inheritance and experience via exposure to faces present in the environment. Individuation is clearly a vital mechan...

Research has indicated that female body perception and associated body-viewing gaze behaviour in women viewers can be influenced by a variety of internal and external factors (e.g., own body satisfaction, clothing style, and viewing angle). Although the clothing colour affects women's visual and aesthetic appearance rated by men or women wearer the...

We often show an invariant or comparable recognition performance for perceiving prototypical facial expressions, such as happiness and anger, under different viewing settings. However, it is unclear to what extent the categorisation of ambiguous expressions and associated interpretation bias are invariant in degraded viewing conditions. In this exp...

Shifting attention between visual and auditory targets is associated with reaction time costs, known as the modality-shifting effect. The type of modality shifted from, e.g., auditory or visual is suggested to have an effect on the degree of cost. Studies report greater costs shifting from visual stimuli, yet notably used visual stimuli that are al...

Dogs have remarkable abilities to synergise their behaviour with that of people, but how dogs read facial and bodily emotional cues in comparison to humans remains unclear. Both species share the same ecological niche, are highly social and expressive, making them an ideal comparative model for intra- and inter-species emotion perception. We compar...

In natural vision, noisy and distorted visual inputs often change our perceptual strategy in scene perception. However, it is unclear the extent to which the affective meaning embedded in the degraded natural scenes modulates our scene understanding and associated eye movements. In this eye-tracking experiment by presenting natural scene images wit...

Vision in dogs is generally considered poor compared with humans, and recent reports have reviewed some of the physiological principles underpinning dog vision, but a systematic comparison of the physiological and neurobiological features of vision in dogs compared with humans appears to be lacking. This means there is a risk of an anthropocentric...

Facial expressions are a core component of the emotional response of social mammals. In contrast to Darwin's original proposition, expressive facial cues of emotion appear to have evolved to be species-specific. Faces trigger an automatic perceptual process, and so, inter-specific emotion perception is potentially a challenge; since observers shoul...

Our visual inputs are often entangled with affective meanings in natural vision, implying the existence of extensive interaction between visual and emotional processing. However, little is known about the neural mechanism underlying such interaction. This exploratory transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study examined the possible involvement of...

Neuronal responses in the primary visual cortex (V1) are driven by simple stimuli, but these stimulus-evoked responses can be markedly modulated by non-sensory factors, such as attention and reward [1], and shaped by perceptual training [2]. In real-life situations, neutral visual stimuli can become emotionally tagged by experience, resulting in al...

Common facial expressions of emotion have distinctive patterns of facial muscle movements that are culturally similar among humans, and perceiving these expressions is associated with stereotypical gaze allocation at local facial regions that are characteristic for each expression, such as eyes in angry faces. It is, however, unclear to what extent...

Evidence for the importance of bodily cues for emotion recognition has grown over the last two decades. Despite this growing literature, it is underspecified how observers view whole bodies for body expression recognition. Here we investigate to which extent body-viewing is face- and context-specific when participants are categorizing whole body ex...

Research has indicated that Caucasian women gaze more often at waist–hip and chest regions than other local body areas when assessing female body attractiveness and body size, and this stereotypical gaze distribution is further modulated by their own body satisfaction and body composition. However, little is known whether the model race and viewing...

There is growing scientific interest in both the ability of dogs to evaluate emotional cues and their response to social cueing, we therefore examined the interaction between these by investigating whether human facial expression impact on dogs’ approach preference to conflicting directional gestural signals. During testing, a human demonstrator si...

Recent research progress on the approach of visual attention modeling for mediated perception to advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) has drawn the attention of computer and human vision researchers. However, it is still debatable whether the actual driver’s eye fixation locations (EFLs) or the predicted EFLs which are calculated by computation...

Studies on facial attractiveness in human adults, infants, and newborns have consistently reported a visual preference for faces rated as attractive compared with faces rated as unattractive. Biological accounts of facial attractiveness have typically presented such preferences as arising from adaptations for mate choice or as by-products of genera...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

Preferential attention to living creatures is believed to be an intrinsic capacity of the visual system of several species, with perception of biological motion often studied and, in humans, it correlates with social cognitive performance. Although domestic dogs are exceptionally attentive to human social cues, it is unknown whether their sociabili...

Our capability of recognizing facial expressions of emotion under different viewing conditions implies the existence of an invariant expression representation. As natural visual signals are often distorted and our perceptual strategy changes with external noise level, it is essential to understand how expression perception is susceptible to face di...

Dogs are able to perceptually discriminate emotional displays of conspecifics and heterospecifics and possess the cognitive prototypes for emotional categorisation, however, it remains unclear whether dogs can respond appropriately to this information. One way to assess associations between specific behaviours and the perception of emotionally comp...

The commonality of facial expressions of emotion has been studied in different species since Darwin, with most of the research focusing on closely related primate species. However, it is unclear to what extent there exists common facial expression in species more phylogenetically distant, but sharing a need for common interspecific emotional unders...

https://www.applied-ethology.org/res/Abstract%20book%20ISAE2017.pdf

Careful systematic tests of hearing ability may miss the cognitive consequences of sub-optimal hearing when listening in the real world. In Experiment One, sub-optimal hearing is simulated by presenting an audiobook at a quiet but discriminable level over 50 minutes. Recall of facts, words and inferences are assessed and performance compared to ano...

Recent research progress on the topic of human visual attention allocation in scene perception and its simulation is based mainly on studies with static images. However, natural vision requires us to extract visual information that constantly changes due to egocentric movements or dynamics of the world. It is unclear to what extent spatio-temporal...

Coded gaze data and modelling results

Our prior visual experience plays a critical role in face perception. We show superior perceptual performance for differentiating conspecific (vs non-conspecific), own-race (vs other-race) and familiar (vs unfamiliar) faces. However, it remains unclear whether our experience with faces of other species would influence our gaze allocation for extrac...

Often with minimally clothed figures depicting extreme body sizes, previous studies have shown women tend to gaze at evolutionary determinants of attractiveness when viewing female bodies, possibly for self-evaluation purposes, and their gaze distribution is modulated by own body dissatisfaction level. To explore to what extent women's body-viewing...

Individuals vary in perceptual accuracy when categorising facial expressions, yet it is unclear how these individual differences in non-clinical population are related to cognitive processing stages at facial information acquisition and interpretation. We tested 104 healthy adults in a facial expression categorisation task, and correlated their cat...

The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other. This usually takes place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be advantageous to recognize the emotions of humans as well as other dogs. In this sense, the combination of visual and auditory cues to cate...

Why attention lapses during prolonged tasks is debated, specifically whether errors are a consequence of under-arousal or exerted effort. To explore this, we investigated whether increased impulsivity is associated with effortful processing by modifying the demand of a task by presenting it at a quiet intensity. Here, we consider whether attending...

A central research question in natural vision is how to allocate fixation to extract informative cues for scene perception. With high quality images, psychological and computational studies have made significant progress to understand and predict human gaze allocation in scene exploration. However, it is unclear whether these findings can be genera...

Recent studies measuring the facial expressions of emotion have focused primarily on the perception of frontal face images. As we frequently encounter expressive faces from different viewing angles, having a mechanism which allows invariant expression perception would be advantageous to our social interactions. Although a couple of studies have ind...

Research on non-offending heterosexual participants has indicated that men's gaze allocation reflects their sexual preference. In this exploratory pilot study we investigated whether naturalistic gaze behaviour is sensitive to deviant sexual preferences. We compared gaze patterns of convicted heterosexual child sex offenders (CSOs; n = 13) with fem...

Background / Purpose: We frequently encounter expressive faces from different viewing angles; invariant expression perception would be to our advantage in social interactions. Previous research is inconsistent about how face orientation affects expression categorization. It is also unknown how gaze behaviour accommodates this variable, given that...

This study investigated whether training-related improvements in facial expression categorization are facilitated by spontaneous changes in gaze behaviour in adults and nine-year old children. Four sessions of a self-paced, free-viewing training task required participants to categorize happy, sad and fear expressions with varying intensities. No in...

Blushing has been identified as an indicator of deception, shame, anxiety and embarrassment. Although normally associated with the skin coloration of the face, a blush response also affects skin surface temperature. In this paper, an approach to detect a blush response automatically is presented using the Argus P7225 thermal camera from e2v. The al...

Contour integration is a fundamental visual process. The constraints on integrating discrete contour elements and the associated neural mechanisms have typically been investigated using static contour paths. However, in our dynamic natural environment objects and scenes vary over space and time. With the aim of investigating the parameters affectin...

Humans, great apes and old world monkeys show selective attention to faces depending on conspecificity, familiarity, and social status supporting the view that primates share similar face processing mechanisms. Although many studies have been done on face scanning strategy in monkeys and humans, the mechanisms influencing viewing preference have re...

Our human visual system exploits spatiotemporal regularity to interpret incoming visual signals. With a dynamic stimulus sequence of four collinear bars (predictors) appearing consecutively towards the fovea, followed by a target bar with varying contrasts, we have previously found that this predictable spatiotemporal stimulus structure enhances ta...

As faces often appear under very different viewing conditions (eg brightness, viewing angle, or viewing distance), invariant facial information recognition is a key to our social interactions. Although we would clearly benefit from differentiating different facial expressions (eg angry vs happy) at a distance, there is surprisingly little research...

Group-living primates frequently interact with each other to maintain social bonds as well as to compete for valuable resources. Observing such social interactions between group members provides individuals with essential information (e.g. on the fighting ability or altruistic attitude of group companions) to guide their social tactics and choice o...

Group-living primates frequently interact with each other to maintain social bonds as well as to compete for valuable resources. Observing such social interactions between group members provides individuals with essential information (e.g. on the fighting ability or altruistic attitude of group companions) to guide their social tactics and choice o...

Gaze patterns to figure images have been proposed to reflect the observer's sexual interest, particularly for men. This eye-tracking study investigated how individual differences in sexual motivation tendencies are manifested in naturalistic gaze patterns. Heterosexual men and women (M = 21.0 years, SD = 2.1) free-viewed plain-clothed male and fema...

Using faces representing exaggerated emotional expressions, recent behaviour and eye-tracking studies have suggested a dominant role of individual facial features in transmitting diagnostic cues for decoding facial expressions. Considering that in everyday life we frequently view low-intensity expressive faces in which local facial cues are more am...

Sensitivity to the emotions of others provides clear biological advantages. However, in the case of heterospecific relationships, such as that existing between dogs and humans, there are additional challenges since some elements of the expression of emotions are species-specific. Given that faces provide important visual cues for communicating emot...

Visual perception is influenced at early processing stages by geometric spatiotemporal context regularities (consistent with the "vision-as-inference" view) and by attention, yet little is known about the interaction between these two influences on visual processing. Here, we investigate the temporal dynamics of the interaction between attention an...

While viewing faces, humans often demonstrate a natural gaze bias towards the left visual field, that is, the right side of the viewee's face is often inspected first and for longer periods. Previous studies have suggested that this gaze asymmetry is a part of the gaze pattern associated with face exploration, but its relation with perceptual proce...

Earlier research suggests that facial attractiveness may capture attention at parafovea. However, little is known about how well facial beauty can be detected at parafoveal and peripheral vision. Participants in this study judged relative attractiveness of a face pair presented simultaneously at several eccentricities from the central fixation. The...

Our human visual system exploits spatiotemporal regularity to interpret incoming visual signals. With a dynamic stimulus sequence of four collinear bars (predic-tors) appearing consecutively toward the fovea, followed by a target bar with varying contrasts, we have previously found that this predictable spatiotemporal stimulus structure enhances ta...

Blushing has been identified as an indicator of deception, shame, anxiety and embarrassment. Although normally associated with the skin coloration of the face, a blush response also affects skin surface temperature. In this paper, an approach to detect a blush response automatically is presented using the Argus P7225 thermal camera from e2v. The al...

We have evolved to operate within a dynamic visual world in which natural visual signals are not random but have various statistical regularities. Our rich experience of the probability structure of these regularities could influence visual computation. Considering that spatiotemporal regularity, co-linearity and co-circularity are common geometric...

Growing interest in canine cognition and visual perception has promoted research into the allocation of visual attention during free-viewing tasks in the dog. The techniques currently available to study this (i.e. preferential looking) have, however, lacked spatial accuracy, permitting only gross judgements of the location of the dog's point of gaz...

The gaze pattern associated with image exploration is a sensitive index of our attention, motivation, and preference. To examine whether an individual's gaze behavior can reflect his or her sexual interest, this study compared gaze patterns of young heterosexual men and women (M = 19.94 years, SD = 1.05) while they viewed photographs of plain-cloth...

Clear differences in perceptual and neural processing of faces of different species have been reported, implying the contribution of visual experience to face perception. Can these differences be revealed by our eye scanning patterns while we extract salient facial information? Here, we systematically compared non-pet-owners' gaze patterns while ex...

Although domestic dogs can respond to many facial cues displayed by other dogs and humans, it remains unclear whether they can differentiate individual dogs or humans based on facial cues alone and, if so, whether they would demonstrate the face inversion effect, a behavioural hallmark commonly used in primates to differentiate face processing from...

Spatiotemporal regularities in stimulus structure have been shown to influence visual target detection and discrimination. Here, we investigate whether the influence of spatiotemporal regularities is associated with the modulation of early components (P1/N1) in event-related potentials. Stimuli consisted of five horizontal bars (predictors) appeari...