Claus-Christian Carbon

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg · Institut für Psychologie

Vaccinations are instances of Human Enhancement (HE) because, as biotechnologies, they are capable of augmenting the human body’s capacities. We hypothesized that vaccination refusal, as observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, indicates a belief system that also determines attitudes toward HE. Rejection of both may be linked to well-known motives: i...

While sunbathing, our skin becomes susceptible to quite remarkable changes in visual appearance, that is, freckles appear or increase in intensity—most obviously on the face. Research on face adaptation repeatedly showed that the inspection of manipulated versions of faces (so-called adaptor faces) leads to robust and sustainable changes in the per...

The impact of face masks on social cognition and interaction became a popular topic due to the long-lasting COVID-19 pandemic. This theme persists in the focus of attention beyond the pandemic, since face covering not only reduces the overall amount of face information available but also introduces biases and prejudices affecting social perception...

Researchers in the field of empirical aesthetics who focus on art perception usually have at their disposal a wealth of digital art reproductions with extensive normative data. Up to now, nothing comparable exists for the equally important study of everyday aesthetic phenomena such as kitsch. To close this gap, we created the Bamberg Repository for...

In this work, we used a modified version of the Geistesblitz game to investigate how prior history primes speed of responses in a visual search task. In the game, players must identify a target among the game objects based on a subset of objects present in the trial attention set. An attention set can be direct when the target object is the only ob...

Perceptual multistability is well-known and mostly visually demonstrated: Common examples are Necker's cube or Rubin's face-vase that produce qualitatively different percepts continuously oscillating between the solutions despite physically stable stimuli. We lack knowledge about similar phenomena in other domains, for instance in linguistics, wher...

Creating works under very limited resources is a constant topic of contemporary art, and also of many forms of artistic expression throughout the 20th century. At the same time, shortages in energy, scarceness of raw materials, and concerns about pollution demand a critical reflection of one’s environmental footprint―artists are no exception. Howev...

A wide variety of sociocultural trends continuously flanks the globally expanding digitization. The ongoing enthusiasm for so-called ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos that are described as having the potential to trigger very strong thrills and chills, often termed “head orgasms”, needs rigorous scientific testing which has not yet...

Media images are fleeting: One day’s lead photographs might be forgotten the very next day. Some images, however, become ingrained in our collective memory. Those iconic photos attain a very high recognition value. Famous examples are the “Guerrillero heroic” photo by Alberto Korda, depicting Che Guevara, or Sam Shaw’s “flying skirt” photo of Maril...

Technology enables humans not only to adapt their environment to their needs but also to modify themselves. Means of Human Enhancement — embodied technologies to improve the human body’s capabilities or to create a new one — are the designated means of adapting ourselves instead of the environment. The debate about these technologies is typically f...

This study examines the perception of cognitive fluency of products in accordance with the Fluency Amplification Model. An experiment was conducted to compare the differences in product evaluations between two types of product representations, a tangible product and an image thereof, each assigned to a different group of participants. The results s...

Thinking about the universe also includes thinking about hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence. Two key questions arise: Why are we thinking about them in the first place? And why are we anthropomorphizing them? One possible explanation may be that the belief in extraterrestrials results from a subjective feeling of loneliness or the need for...

In the early days of computers, massive constraints (screen resolution, color palette, processing power) were responsible for a reductionistic and very distinct`look and feel´of games and applications. Today, this style (pixel art) is deliberately employed.

Communication is critical in a wide variety of fields. Successful intra-organizational communication plays a significant role in building trust by creating an environment that empowers leaders to lead effectively, motivates employees to work, and thus contributes to organizational performance. In the context of cluster management, communication wit...

Humans act according to theories. Noteworthy, theories are not only a matter of science. Instead, they structure and permeate virtually every aspect of human life. The Heidelberg Structure-Formation Technique is a qualitative method to visualize so-called subjective theories. It is not limited to a particular area. This technique was, for instance,...

The replacement of conventional material with recyclates affects product personality, particularly regarding sustainability aspects influencing consumer behaviour. A definition of personality for products made of recyclates is missing in literature. As these products require appropriate aesthetics based on material origin to communicate the advanta...

Mindset has been identified as an essential aspect of design and innovation, impacting both behaviours and performance. However, the concept of design mindset is elusive. Often design mindset is used indistinguishably from design behaviour, diminishing the complexity of the mechanisms and cognitive processes underlying design behaviour. As the init...

Facing increasing interregional and international competition, the need for innovating economic and socio-institutional structures is virulent. One possibility is establishing clusters to promote the idea that developing a network of companies with a mix of cooperative and competitive practices leads to competitive advantages for the respective are...

Digitalization is a global megatrend that changes companies’ internal and external value-creation activities. The introduction of digital technologies requires organizations to adapt their internal operations and external product and service offerings to remain competitive. Leaders must possess specific skills and characteristics to guide their org...

Exploration of outer space is a mesmerizing and thought-provoking endeavor. The fascination about what may be out there is only matched by asking who might be out there. Exopsychology is concerned about how humans think about extraterrestrials, but also how extraterrestrials may think, feel, and behave. It strives to find generalizable psychologica...

User experience (UX) application in the practice of engineering and product design is still limited. The present paper provides insights into research on UX design and recommendations for design practitioners by pointing out common criticalities. These outcomes are achieved through a literature review on how UX relates to design. First, issues in b...

Background: Many Western people enjoy sunshine, and through the sun’s stimulated increase in melanin, the skin tone or skin complexion will darken (and lighten again during winter). Although the initial salience of such a new look is remarkable – especially in the face – we seem to adapt to this new look relatively quickly. Research on face adaptat...

One major challenge in the industries is digital transformation. Ambidexterity, the ability to optimise the existing and innovate new business concepts, is widely accepted as a critical concept of sustainable success. We conducted a literature review (period from 2010 to 2021) on what differential aspects of exploration and exploitation are needed...

Background: Even if vaccinations are widely available, a considerable number of people reject them. As sophisticated biotechnologies capable of augmenting the human body's capacities, vaccinations are an instance of Human Enhancement (HE): The effort to use technologies to improve humans. Global vaccination efforts against SARS-CoV-2 evoke public c...

When multistable displays are presented intermittently with long blank intervals, their onset perception is determined by perceptual memory of multistable displays. We investigated when and how it is formed using a reverse correlation method and bistable kinetic depth effect displays. Each experimental block consisted of interleaved fully ambiguous...

In addition to the well-known research traditions of quantitative and qualitative research, mixed methods as a "third" research paradigm are increasingly gaining the interest of the music therapy research community. Mixed methods are understood as the combined use of qualitative and quantitative methods within a research project. The methodological...

Exploration of outer space is a mesmerizing and thought-provoking endeavor. The fascination about what may be out there is only matched by asking who might be out there. Exopsychology is concerned about how humans think about extraterrestrials but also how extraterrestrials may think, feel, and behave. It strives to find generalizable psychological...

When we attend sculptures in museums, they might fascinate us due to the mastery of the material, the inherent dynamics of body language or due to contrapposto or the sheer size of some of these statues such as Michelangelo's David. What is less convincing, however, is the life-alikeness of the face. Actually, most visitors experience dead faces, d...

Multistability - spontaneous switches of perception when viewing a stimulus compatible with several percepts - is often characterized by the distribution of durations of dominance phases. For continuous viewing conditions, these distributions are similar for various multistable displays and share two characteristic features: a Gamma-like distributi...

Mental health is an important issue billions of humans struggle with and talk about. Is this an Earth-centered property or found all over the universe? We will explore the etiological generalizability of the cognitive foundation of depression and ask ourselves: If extraterrestrials exist, are they inclined to develop depression, too? Answering this...

The cyberpunk genre portrays a dystopian future where humans – in the light of social inequality and everyday violence – enhance their bodies to cope with a hazardous socio-economic environment. The series “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” (2022) by Hiroyuki Imaishi combines this genre with the culturally well-known idea of space as a refuge. By displaying...

Anlässlich des Positionspapier der Psychologie-Fachschaften-Konferenz (PsyFaKo e.V.) zum Thema Autor*innenschaft (https://psyfako.org/wp-content/uploads/35-PsyFaKo-PP-Open-Science-AutorInnenschaft-transparentere-Vergabe.pdf) nehmen wir im Folgenden zu den dort vorgeschlagenen Maßnahmen Stellung. Wir möchten uns damit der Diskussion anschließen, die...

A major bottleneck in search-based program synthesis is the exponentially growing search space which makes learning large programs intractable. Humans mitigate this problem by leveraging the compositional nature of the real world: In structured domains, a logical specification can often be decomposed into smaller, complementary solution programs. W...

We examined if the effect of facial coverings on person perception is influenced by the perceiver’s attitudes. We used two online experiments in which participants saw the same human target persons repeatedly appearing with and without a specific piece of clothing and had to judge the target persons’ character. In Experiment 1 ( N = 101), we invest...

Purpose Afghan migrants are at an increased risk of mental disorders due to various political, economic and security-associated stressors. COVID-19 has brought extra concerns for this group of migrants around the world. Few studies have examined how the perception of the host society and perceived stress are associated with the mental health of mig...

The enhancement of social inclusion is a key to maintaining cohesion in society and to foster the benefits of cultural diversity. Using insights from the Dual Identity Model (DIM) with a special focus on active categorization, we develop an intervention to increase social inclusion. Our intervention encourages the participants to (re-)categorize on...

The Umwelt is full of affordances normatively embedded in the socio-cultural context. The Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) project is the worlds’ largest decentralized project of commemoration, specifically to bring victims of the Nazi regime to mind. The standardized “stone” is a squared inscribed brass plaque (96 mm x 96 mm) inserted into the sid...

Presenting pictures of people with and without facial masks, we employed a 6-AFC paradigm (emotional states happy, angry, fearful, sad, disgusted, and neutral), accompanied by a confidence rating of the own recognition performance. Simultaneously, we recorded participants’ gaze via an eye tracker and their facial expression via a HD video camera to...

When multistable displays are presented intermittently with a long blank interval, they become stabilized via perceptual memory. However, we still lack an understanding of perceptual memory’s role in daily vision, its mechanisms, and even the conditions that lead to its formation. Therefore, we used a reverse correlation method to recover a biasing...

Kitsch is considered one of the most puzzling and elusive categories of (post)modern aesthetics. Available typologies are outdated and lack an empirical foundation. The Bamberg Repository of Contemporary Kitsch (BAROCK) shall close this gap by providing standardised visual stimuli based on an empirically validated canvas of kitsch. In a first valid...

According to Fechner (1866), aesthetic evaluations are shaped by stimulus properties (direct factors) that will inevitably resonate with one’s learning history to produce personal recollections (associative factors). In the eye of the beholder, the sensory colour of the proximate sensation and the mental colour of the distal one merge into a single...

Inattentional unawareness potentially occurs in several different sensory domains but is mainly described in visual paradigms (“inattentional blindness”; e.g., Simons & Chabris, 1999, Perception, 28, 1059–1074). Dalton and Fraenkel (2012, Cognition, 124, 367–372) were introducing “inattentional deafness” by showing that participants missed by 70% a...

The days of 320 by 200 pixel displays and a 16 colour palette might be gone, but even with cutting-edge technology, digital art is shaped by constraints in several dimensions such as resolution, colour space, and in the palette of tools the artist can potentially use. Human-computer-interfaces are a bottleneck and nowhere close to the haptic feedba...

The materiality of art and its impact on aesthetic appreciation has been discussed widely and recently, but mostly for paintings. The physical realization of a work, with the specific usage of the canvas, brushes and colours resulting in artistic styles, peculiarities and specific types of imperfection, can shape our impressions and our appreciatio...

Fechner’s approach to empirical aesthetics comprises two sides: the idea of aesthetics from below and the aesthetic association principle (Fechner, 1866; Ortlieb et.al., 2020). Empirical research on design with its strong focus on objects and their features primarily relates to aesthetics from below. With the present work, we explicitly include the...

The interior soundscape of a vehicle is an essential asset for experienced comfort and feedback of a car's driver, especially in the premium automotive industry. Here we offer a literature review on the perception of acoustic characteristics of electrified vehicles (EVs) and the impressions and associations they convey to the individual-the driver,...

One side of the great contact equation between humans and extraterrestrials is already known: SETI is a human enterprise, so any success of a first contact depends on the compatibility between the human and extraterrestrial condition in interplay with contact parameters. Perceiving of, communicating with, and eventually understanding extraterrestri...

Since the COVID-19 crisis has caused the cancellation of a great number of travel plans in the last two years, this study examines the prospects of the post-COVID-19 era, during which we expect tourism will return strongly. The impact of the epidemic on people’s attitudes toward tourism, particularly their tourist choices, appears to be a major cha...

Review of: Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat , Ai Hisano (2019) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 336 pp., p/bk, $39.50 ISBN 978-0-67498-389-2

Background While neighborhood safety and stranger danger have been mostly canonized to play a part in parents’ physical activity (PA) avoidance, less is known about the impact of parental stress and perceived risk on children’s PA avoidance and consequently on children’s level of PA and wellbeing. Understanding the contributors to children’s wellbe...

The ability to read emotions in faces helps humans efficiently assess social situations. We tested how this ability is affected by aspects of familiarization with face masks and personality, with a focus on emotional intelligence (measured with an ability test, the MSCEIT, and a self-report scale, the SREIS). To address aspects of the current pande...

Perceptual science is important to understand how humans and other animals perceive and experience scenes, objects and events. So, it is the essential science to predict how we construct reality and our Umwelt. We learn from perceptual phenomena that we only need a minimal amount of information to create rich worlds of imagination and perception. A...

For a research article (RA) to be accepted, not only for publication, but also by its readers, it must display proficiency in the content, methodologies and discourse conventions of its specific discipline. While numerous studies have investigated the linguistic characteristics of different research disciplines, none have utilised Social Network An...

After decades of research and development, haptic feedback is increasingly appearing in consumer products. While the prevalence of haptic feedback is increasing, the integration rarely offers increased fidelity to previous generations. We argue this is because of the tremendous complexity of successful haptic design engineering, but critically, als...

Our fovea centralis, the area on our retina that allows for sharp and highly accurate vision, is small: only about 1.5 mm in diameter, with an even smaller area of around 0.5 mm where no blood vessels impede the light trajectory. This approximates around 4.5-1.5 visual degrees, respectively; coarsely the area of our thumb when we extend our arm. Mu...

Background Vaccination is an essential strategy for mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides its significance as a public health measure, vaccination is a sophisticated example of modern biotechnology. Since vaccination gives the human body an ability that it does not naturally possess, the question arises as to its classification as Human Enhance...

Advancements in user interface technologies and demands of design engineering led to increasing implementation of large and mostly flat interactive surfaces in automotive. Recent discussions in the context of in-vehicle usage of touchscreens advocate for the use of haptic feedback to restore the explore- and feel-qualities typically experienced in...

When several multistable displays are viewed simultaneously, their perception is synchronized, as they tend to be in the same perceptual state. Here, we investigated the possibility that perception may reflect embedded statistical knowledge of physical interaction between objects for specific combinations of displays and layouts. We used a novel di...

Recognizing familiar faces requires a comparison of the incoming perceptual information with mental face representations stored in memory. Mounting evidence indicates that these representations adapt quickly to recently perceived facial changes. This becomes apparent in face adaptation studies where exposure to a strongly manipulated face alters th...

Fits 2D and 3D geometric transformations via 'Stan' probabilistic programming engine. Returns posterior distribution for individual parameters of the fitted distribution. Allows for computation of LOO and WAIC information criteria (Vehtari A, Gelman A, Gabry J (2017) <doi:10.1007/s11222-016-9696-4>) as well as Bayesian R-squared (Gelman A, Goodrich...

The technical specifications of electrified vehicles (xEVs) will drastically change the way future vehicles might sound compared to conventional vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICEVs). The electrified powertrain is responsible for a profoundly different profile in vibro-acoustical characteristics (NVH: noise, vibration, and harshness) an...

Faces undergo massive changes over time and life events. We need a mental representation which is flexible enough to cope with the existing visual varieties, but which is also stable enough to be the basis for valid recognition. Two main theoretical frameworks exist to describe facial representations: prototype models assuming one central item comp...

Seeing Earth from outer space has been described as a trigger for transforming effects accompanied by intense cognitive and affective experience. In this study, we followed an exploratory approach to investigate which factors shape the aesthetics of outer space. N = 67 participants rated 42 space pictures on eight scales: Awe, loneliness, danger, l...

Today, reproductions of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings adorn smartphone covers and paper napkins, while his potato eaters still go widely unnoticed. Can we estimate which artworks will eventually end up as kitsch? We used 19 relatively unknown paintings by distinguished artists of the 19th and 20th century to test the predictive validity of five mu...

Although enjoying a painting is mainly a visual experience, some visual features such as textures, brushstrokes, glossiness, or color might invite the viewer to touch it. For preservation reasons, people are not allowed to touch paintings in museums, often limiting the aesthetic appreciation to vision only. We investigated how tactile inputs affect...

Advertisers often neglect cognito-perceptual factors, especially the power of associations, even though such factors make advertising what it wants to be: an incentive to buy. Knowing how to influence the viewer’s perception of the product, namely by evoking associations, is the key to successful advertising. Fechner’s Aesthetic Association Princip...

We investigated how changes in dynamic spatial context influence visual perception. Specifically, we reexamined the perceptual coupling phenomenon when two multistable displays viewed simultaneously tend to be in the same dominant state and switch in accord. Current models assume this interaction reflecting mutual bias produced by a dominant percep...

Background: To date, the process of adaptation in the setting of aesthetic medicine has not been investigated. The combination of complex advanced feedback in the current intense social media milieu, in conjunction with easily accessible and effective aesthetic treatments, has produced pockets of overtreated patients and over-zealous practitioners...

Novel tangible user interface technologies facilitate current trends toward seamless user interfaces. They enable the design of yet unseen interfaces and thus the creation of a new kind of haptic language. In order to use the benefits of a touch-and-feel design for a positive user experience, carefully designed haptic feedback plays an important ro...

Wearing face masks has become a usual practice in acute infection events inducing the problem of misinterpreting the emotions of others. Empirical evidence about face masks mainly relies on adult data, neglecting, for example, school kids who firmly are dependent on effective nonverbal communication. Here we offer insights from a joint school–unive...

Inspecting new visual information in a face can affect the perception of subsequently seen faces. In experimental settings for example, previously seen manipulated versions of a face can lead to a clear bias of the participant’s perception of subsequent images: Original images are then perceived as manipulated in the opposite direction of the adapt...

Many aspects of handling the COVID-19 pandemic bear a resemblance to patterns found in games. We observe point displays and leader boards, the visible assumption of roles, classic archetypes, the collection of resources, and spatial awareness. We argue that these patterns manifest spontaneously as a form of analogical reasoning, because people lack...

Our words shape our thinking, our thinking creates action. Scientific terms can be particularly influential when used in everyday language in terms of allegedly scientific arguments that back certain views or actions. Such use can be especially toxic when the terms refer to concepts that are ill-defined, outdated or questionable themselves. The ter...

Wearing face masks in times of COVID-19 is one of the essential keystones for effectively decreasing the rate of new infections and thus for mitigating the negative consequences for individuals as well as for society. Acceptance of wearing masks is still low in many countries, making it extremely difficult to keep the pandemic at bay. In an experim...