Does anxiety induced by social interaction influence the perception of bistable biological motion?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When observing point light walkers orthographically projected onto a frontoparallel plane, the direction in which they are walking is ambiguous. Nevertheless, observers more often perceive them as facing towards than as facing away from them. This phenomenon is known as the "facing-the-viewer bias" (FTV). Two interpretations of the facing-the-viewer bias exist in the literature: a top-down and a bottom-up interpretation. Support for the top-down interpretation comes from evidence that social anxiety correlates with the FTV bias. However, the direction of the relationship between the FTV bias and social anxiety is inconsistent across studies and evidence for a correlation has mostly been obtained with relatively small samples. Therefore, the first aim of the current study was to provide a strong test of the hypothesized relationship between social anxiety and the facing-the-viewer bias in a large sample of 200 participants recruited online. In addition, a second aim was to further extend top-down accounts by investigating if the FTV bias is also related to autistic traits. Our results replicate the FTV bias, showing that people indeed tend to perceive orthographically projected point light walkers as facing towards them. However, no correlation between the FTV bias and social interaction anxiety (tau = -0.01, p = .86, BF = 0.18) or autistic traits (tau = -0.0039, p = .45, BF = 0.18) was found. As such, our data cannot confirm the top-down interpretation of the facing-the-viewer bias.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".