Geoff Cole

• University of Essex

The ability to be objective about the perspectives of others is often compromised by interference from our own knowledge, beliefs, and perceptions—an egocentric bias. However, recent research in visual perspective taking has found that this bias is eliminated immediately following a trial in which an alternative visual perspective is taken, suggest...

Scientists have a duty to spend their time, and hence public money, in an efficient manner. One particularly wasteful task concerns the formatting of articles submitted to academic journals. Around a decade or so ago some academics began to challenge this inefficiency and a small number of articles have been published advocating for change. There h...

Trypophobia is the condition in which individuals report a range of negative emotions when viewing clusters of small holes. Since the phenomenon was first described in the peer-reviewed literature a decade ago, 49 papers have appeared together with hundreds of news articles. There has also been much discussion on various Internet forums, including...

The ability to attribute mental states to others has sometimes been attributed to a domain-specific mechanism which privileges the processing of these states over similar but non-mental representations. If correct, then others’ beliefs should be processed more efficiently than similar information contained within non-mental states. We tested this b...

A number of authors have argued that the art of conjuring can assist the development of theories and knowledge in visual cognition and psychology more broadly. A central assumption of the so-called science of magic is that magicians possess particular insight into human cognition. In a series of experiments, we tested the Insight hypothesis by asse...

Previous research shows that women outperform men in the classic Stroop task, but it is not known why this difference occurs. There are currently two main hypotheses: (1) women have enhanced verbal abilities, and (2) women show greater inhibition. In two Stroop experiments, we examined the Inhibition hypothesis by adopting a procedure, often used i...

The pictorial theory of mental imagery was a central concern of cognitive science during the latter years of the last century. Proponents of the theory argued that images are reinterpreted by the same processes that act upon perceptual inputs. This idea has recently re-emerged within the context of visual perspective-taking. The perceptual simulati...

What happens when an observer takes an agent's visual perspective of a scene? We conducted a series of experiments designed to measure what proportion of adults take a stimulus-centered rather than agent-centered approach to a visual perspective taking task. Adults were presented with images of an agent looking at a number (69). From the perspectiv...

Visuo-spatial perspective taking (VSPT) concerns the ability to understand something about the visual relationship between an Agent or observation point on the one hand, and a target or scene on the other. Despite its importance to a wide variety of other abilities, from communication to navigation, and decades of research, there is as yet no theor...

Corrections applied by the visual system, like size constancy, provide us with a coherent and stable perspective from ever-changing retinal images. In the present experiment we investigated how willing adults are to examine their own vision as if it were an uncorrected 2D image, much like a photograph. We showed adult participants two lines on a wa...

In 2018, Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian published four “hoax” articles within a number of disciplines that rely on critical theory (e.g., gender studies, feminism). When revealing the project, the authors argued that they wanted to expose these fields as being primarily motivated by ideology and social justice rather than knowledge generation....

The ability to represent another agent's visual perspective has recently been attributed to a process called "perceptual simulation", whereby we generate an image-like or "quasi-perceptual" representation of another agent's vision. In an extensive series of experiments we tested this notion. Adult observers were presented with pictures of an agent...

Theory of mind is a ubiquitous notion that permeates many aspects of social cognition. A recent application has been in the context of ‘spontaneous perspective taking’ in which responses to target stimuli are facilitated if a human agent, present in a display, sees the same stimuli as an experimental participant. In the present work, we replicated...

Forcing is usually described as the effect in which stage magicians covertly influence decisions made by spectators. The phenomenon has been subject to a number of recent articles and is typically placed within the context of social influence, priming, decision making, awareness, free will, and the science of magic. In the present paper I will argu...

Many perspective-taking and theory of mind tasks require participants to pass over the answer that is optimal from the self-perspective. For instance, in the classic change-of-location (false belief) task participants are required to ignore where they know the object to be, and in the Director Task participants are required to ignore the best match...

Perspective-taking has been one of the central concerns of work on social attention and developmental psychology for the past 60 years. Despite its prominence, there is no formal description of what it means to represent another’s viewpoint. The present article argues that such a description is now required in the form of theory—a theory that shoul...

Background Trypophobia is a common condition in which sufferers are averse to images of small holes arranged in clusters. Methods We used photo-plethysmography to examine cardiovascular correlates and near infrared spectroscopy to examine cortical correlates of the phenomenon in order to validate the Trypophobia Questionnaire and explore the sever...

In 2018, a peer-reviewed article was published under the name of Richard Baldwin in which the author presented a critique of fat exclusion and advocated “fat bodybuilding” as a sport. Some months later, it became apparent that the article was intended as a hoax written to raise awareness to, or “expose”, a certain ideology promoted by some academic...

Theory of mind (ToM) is defined as the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and is often said to be one of the cornerstones of efficient social interaction. In recent years, a number of authors have suggested that one particular ToM process occurs spontaneously in that it is rapid and outside of conscious control. This work has...

A large number of studies have now described the various ways in which the observation of another person’s dynamic movement can influence the speed with which the observer is able to prepare a motor action themselves. The typical results are most often explained with reference to theories that link perception and action. Such theories argue that th...

A number of studies have shown that the motor actions of one individual can affect the attention of an observer. In one notable example, "social inhibition of return," observers are relatively slow to initiate a response to a location where another individual has just responded. In the present article we examine the degree to which this phenomenon...

A number of authors have suggested that the computation of another person's visual perspective occurs automatically. In the current work we examined whether perspective-taking is indeed automatic or more likely to be due to mechanisms associated with conscious control. Participants viewed everyday scenes in which a single human model looked towards...

The "visual cocktail party effect" refers to superior report of a participant's own name, under conditions of inattention. An early selection account suggests this advantage stems from enhanced visual processing. A late selection account suggests the advantage occurs when semantic information allowing identification as one's own name is retrieved....

Parental investment theory suggests that women, due to greater investment in child rearing, can be more choosy than men when considering a potential mate. A corollary to this is that women should possess greater inhibition abilities compared to men in contexts related to sex and reproduction. This notion has found support from the inhibition litera...

Although the inhibition of return (IOR) effect is primarily studied when people act individually, IOR is also observed in social environments where a person observes a partner’s response before executing their own response (social or sIOR). Specifically, an observer takes longer to initiate a response to a target at a location that another individu...

Despite considerable interest in both action perception and social attention over the last 2 decades, there has been surprisingly little investigation concerning how the manual actions of other humans orient visual attention. The present review draws together studies that have measured the orienting of attention, following observation of another’s...

Social inhibition of return (sIOR) refers to the phenomenon in which the initiation of a reaching action is slowed if it is to a location that has just been reached to by another individual. Although sIOR is often argued to have arisen as a result of a Darwinian selection pressure for efficient foraging, the evolutionary theory of the effect has no...

Previous research shows that during joint action, observing a co-actor reaching to a spatial location can slow one’s own response to the same location, and even deter one from selecting that location in a free choice between alternatives. Some authors have argued that such joint action effects are mediated by higher-level processes that represent b...

A number of social cognition studies posit that humans spontaneously compute the viewpoint of other individuals. This is based on experiments showing that responses are shorter when a human agent, located in a visual display, can see the stimuli relevant to the observer's task. Similarly, responses are slower when the agent cannot see the task-rele...

Parental investment theory suggests that women, due to greater investment in child rearing, can be more choosy than men when considering a potential mate. A corollary to this is that women should possess greater inhibition abilities compared to men in contexts related to sex and reproduction. This notion has found support from the inhibition litera...

The Stroop test is a measure of inhibition. An extension of parental investment theory propose that women should outperform men, due to females employing a more choosy (inhibiting) mating strategy compared to males. Despite over 80 years of Stroop research, a thorough systematic analysis of gender effects has never been conducted. Using the meta-an...

The evolved inhibition hypothesis proposes that women should outperform men on inhibition tasks due to sex differences in mating strategies. One measure to investigate inhibition is the Stroop Colour-Word task, where previous research has found a small female advantage. However, it is unclear whether this advantage reflects superior inhibition or v...

Parental investment theory suggests that women, due to greater investment in child rearing, can be more choosy than men when considering a potential mate. A corollary to this is that women should possess greater inhibition abilities compared to men in contexts related to sex and reproduction. Here, we present and review the evidence for this hypoth...

A number of studies have shown that observation of another person’s actions can modulate one’s own actions, such as when 2 individuals cooperate in order to complete a joint task. However, little is known about whether or not direct matching of specific movements is modulated by the goals of the actions observed. In a series of 7 experiments, we em...

When two individuals alternate reaching responses to targets located in a visual display, reaction times are longer when responses are directed to where the co-actor just responded. Although an abundance of work has examined the many characteristics of this phenomenon it is not yet known why the effect occurs. In particular, some authors have argue...

An important development in cognitive psychology in the past decade has been the examination of visual attention during real social interaction. This contrasts traditional laboratory studies of attention, including “social attention,” in which observers perform tasks alone. In this review, we show that although the lone-observer method has been cen...

The Hunter-Gatherer theory of human evolution suggests that men and women have been selected for cognitive abilities associated with hunting and gathering. This notion was put forward as an explanation for the findings that women tend to perform better on tasks concerned with object-location memory, whilst men tend to perform better on navigation t...

Bjorklund & Kipp (1996) suggested that women should have superior inhibition abilities compared to men, due to their differential sexual selection. This involves females being the choosy sex and therefore gain more by inhibiting their own behavior, since their mating strategy may involve evaluating and rejecting potential male partners. Inhibition...

Images associated with “trypophobia” (e.g., images of honeycomb or barnacles) comprise clusters of similar objects in close proximity, and despite their seemingly innocuous nature, these images have been reported to induce symptoms of discomfort and disgust. It has been proposed that the discomfort associated with trypophobia is induced by low-leve...

Trypophobia is an emotional aversion to specific images, usually referred to as a ‘fear of holes’. In two experiments, we sought to refine (1) the nature of the inducing images and (2) the nature of the emotion. Experiment 1 used clusters of objects that appeared concave or convex depending simply on the direction of the shading. Clusters that were...

The behavioral urgency hypothesis suggests that stimuli signaling potential danger will receive attentional priority. However, results from the gaze cueing paradigm have failed to consistently show that emotional expression modulates gaze following. One possible explanation for these null results is that participants are repeatedly exposed to the s...

When two participants alternate reaching responses to one of two target locations placed between them, one is slower to reach to the same location as their partner’s previous response. This phenomenon, called social inhibition of return (sIOR), is said to arise through processes involved in either action imitation or visuomotor inhibition. We teste...

A growing number of studies have begun to assess how the actions of one individual are represented in an observer. Using a variant of an action observation paradigm, four experiments examined whether one person's behaviour can influence the subjective decisions and judgements of another. In Experiment 1, two observers sat adjacent to each other and...

Theory of mind is said to be possessed by an individual if he or she is able to impute mental states to others. Recently, some authors have demonstrated that such mental state attributions can mediate the Bgaze cueing^ effect, in which observation of another individual shifts an observer's attention. One question that follows from this work is whet...

Abstract We developed and validated a symptom scale that can be used to identify "trypophobia", in which individuals experience aversion induced by images of clusters of circular objects. The trypophobia questionnaire (TQ) was based on reports of various symptom types, but it nevertheless demonstrated a single construct, with high internal consiste...

This study aimed to determine any gender effects on the Colour-Word subtask of the Stroop test, where participants are asked to name the ink colour of incongruous colour-words. Despite over 80 years of research on this topic, a systematic analysis of gender effects has never been conducted and previous reviews were based on subjective conclusions....

The evolved inhibition hypothesis proposes that women should outperform men on inhibition tasks due to sex differences in mating strategies. Specifically, females of any given species inhibit their mate choice more often than males, ensuring that the father of her offspring has the best possible genes. One measure to investigate inhibition is the S...

Even though they are not associated with threat, images of clusters of holes can often provoke phobic reactions, named trypophobia. We developed a Trypophobia Questionnaire (TQ) based on symptoms, which despite their heterogeneity demonstrated a single construct, with high internal consistency and test-retest reliability. The TQ did not correlate w...

When two individuals alternate reaching responses to visual targets presented on a shared workspace, one individual is slower to respond to targets occupying the same position as their partner's previous response. This phenomenon is thought to be due to processes that inhibit the initiation of a movement to a location recently acted upon. However,...

The hunter-gatherer theory suggests that a division of labor existed in early human settlements whereby men were predominantly hunters and women were predominantly gatherers. Support for this theory has come from the observation that females tend to perform better on tasks concerning object location memory, a skill required for successful gathering...

The most common explanation for joint-action effects has been the action co-representation account in which observation of another's action is represented within one's own action system. However, recent evidence has shown that the most prominent of these joint-action effects (i.e., the Social Simon effect), can occur when no co-actor is present. In...

A wealth of evidence now shows that human and animal observers display greater sensitivity to objects that move toward them than to objects that remain static or move away. Increased sensitivity in humans is often evidenced by reaction times that increase in rank order from looming, to receding, to static targets. However, it is not clear whether t...

Phobias are usually described as irrational and persistent fears of certain objects or situations, and causes of such fears are difficult to identify. We describe an unusual but common phobia (trypophobia), hitherto unreported in the scientific literature, in which sufferers are averse to images of holes. We performed a spectral analysis on a varie...

The hunter-gatherer theory suggests that a division of labor existed in early human settlements whereby men were predominantly hunters and women were predominantly gatherers. Support for this theory has come from the observation that females tend to perform better on tasks concerning object location memory, a skill required for successful gathering...

Phobias are usually described as an irrational and persistent fear of certain objects or situations, and causes of such fears are difficult to identify. We describe an unusual but common phobia (trypophobia), hitherto unreported in the scientific literature, in which sufferers are averse to images of holes. We performed a spectral analysis on a var...

Laboratory studies of social visual cognition often simulate the critical aspects of joint attention by having participants interact with a computer-generated avatar. Recently, there has been a movement toward examining these processes during authentic social interaction. In this review, we will focus on attention to faces, attentional misdirection...

Hunter-gatherer theory suggests that a labour division existed in early human settlements where men were hunters and women were gatherers. An evolutionary consequence of this would involve men developing a reaction mechanism that would be advantageous for dealing with animal stimuli, and women would evolve a similar mechanism for fruit stimuli. Thi...

Social inhibition of return is the phenomenon whereby an individual is slower to reach to locations to which another individual has recently responded. Although this suggests that an observer represents another person's action, little is known about which aspects of the action are encoded. The present work describes a series of three experiments ex...

The processing of luminance change is a ubiquitous feature of the human visual system and provides the basis for the rapid orienting of attention to potentially important events (e.g., motion onset, object onset). However, despite its importance for attentional capture, it is not known whether a luminance change attracts attention solely because of...

The allocation of visual attention is known to be influenced by objects (B. Scholl, 2001). This object sensitivity is commonly assumed to derive from a pre-attentive stage of scene segmentation that provides a parallel representation of important structural features that can play a functional role in guiding the allocation of processing resources....

In numerous experiments, using a variety of techniques and tasks, observers have responded more rapidly to a target that was a new onset visual object than to a target created by transformation of an already present object. New objects are said to "capture" attention in that they are processed with higher priority than old objects. When new and old...

The presentation of a stimulus below the threshold of conscious awareness can exert an influence on the processing of a subsequent target. One such consequence of briefly presented "primes" is seen in the negative compatibility effect. The response time (RT) to determine the left-right orientation of an arrow (i.e., the target) is relatively slow i...

Responses to a target stimulus can be slower when it appears in the same rather than a different location to a previous event, an effect known as inhibition of return (IOR). Recently, it has been shown that when two people alternate responses to a target, one person's responses are slower when they are directed to the same locations as their partne...

We designed a magic trick in which misdirection was used to orchestrate observers’ attention in order to prevent them from detecting the to-be-concealed event. By experimentally manipulating the magician's gaze direction we investigated the role that gaze cues have in attentional orienting, independently of any low level features. Participants were...

Five experiments examined whether the appearance of a new object is able to orient attention in the absence of an accompanying sensory transient. A variant of the precueing paradigm (Posner & Cohen, 198427. Posner , M. I. and Cohen , Y. 1984. “Components of attention”. In Attention and performance X, Edited by: Bouma , H. and Bouwhuis , D. G. 5...

Franconeri and Simons (2003) reported that simulated looming objects (marked by a size increase) captured attention, whereas simulated receding objects (marked by a size decrease) did not. This finding has been challenged with the demonstration that receding objects can capture attention when they move in three-dimensional depth. In the present stu...

In two experiments we examined whether the appearance of a new object has attentional priority over disappearance. Previous failures to show differences are possibly due to onsets and offsets always being presented as a sole visual transient. Rather than presenting each alone, we presented onset and offset singletons simultaneously with a display-w...

Six experiments are reported investigating whether a discontinuity in colour can accrue attentional priority. In addition to a standard visual search paradigm, we examined the degree to which colour singletons and nonsingletons are susceptible to change blindness. Results showed that changes occurring at colour singletons were relatively more resis...

When comparing two target elements placed on the same convoluted curve, response times are dependent on the distance between the targets along the curve, despite being separated by a constant Euclidean distance. The present study assessed whether such line tracing is obligatory across the whole of the line even when the task demands do not require...

Magicians use misdirection to manipulate people's attention in order to prevent their audiences from uncovering their methods. Here we used a prerecorded version of a magic trick to investigate some of the factors that accompany successful misdirection. Prior information about the nature of the trick significantly improved participants' detection o...

We examined whether the onset of a new object defined by illusory contours is detected with greater frequency than offset when neither is associated with a unique sensory transient. Observers performed a "one-shot" change detection task in which offsetting or onsetting elements of high luminance contrast circles generated the appearance or disappea...

Cole, Gellatly, and Blurton have shown that targets presented adjacent to geometric corners are detected more efficiently than targets presented adjacent to straight edges. In six experiments, we examined how this corner enhancement effect is modulated by corner-of-object representations (i.e., corners that define an object's shape) and local base-...

Same-object bias occurs when tasks associated with processing a single object are faster than tasks associated with two objects. Over five experiments we assessed whether same-object bias is mediated by the collinearity of the targets. Participants decided whether two targets, presented either within a single object or across two objects, were the...

Object substitution masking (OSM) is said to occur when a perceptual object is hypothesized that is mismatched by subsequent sensory evidence, leading to a new hypothesized object being substituted for the first. For example, when a brief target is accompanied by a longer lasting display of nonoverlapping mask elements, reporting of target features...

A large body of work suggests that the visual system is particularly sensitive to the appearance of new objects. This is based partly on evidence from visual search studies showing that onsets capture attention whereas many other types of visual event do not. Recently, however, the notion that object onset has a special status in visual attention h...

The parvocellular visual pathway in the primate brain is known to be involved with the processing of color. However, a subject of debate is whether an abrupt change in color, conveyed via this pathway, is capable of automatically attracting attention. It has been shown that the appearance of new objects defined solely by color is indeed capable of...

The relative efficacy with which appearance of a new object orients visual attention was investigated. At issue is whether the visual system treats onset as being of particular importance or only 1 of a number of stimulus events equally likely to summon attention. Using the 1-shot change detection paradigm, the authors compared detectability of new...

The local chromatic contrast between surfaces in a visual scene plays an important role in theories of color perception. Our studies of cerebral achromatopsia suggest that this contrast signal is computed independently of the more complex processes such as edge integration and anchoring. We report a study in which we attempted to determine whether...

Cerebral achromatopsia is a rare condition in which damage to the ventromedial occipital area of the cortex results in the loss of colour experience. Nevertheless, cortically colour-blind patients can still use wavelength variation to perceive form and motion. In a series of six experiments we examined whether colour could also direct exogenous att...

The human visual system is particularly sensitive to abrupt onset of new objects that appear in the visual field. Onsets have been shown to capture attention even when other transients simultaneously occur. This has led some authors to argue for the special role that object onset plays in attentional capture. However, evidence from the change detec...

Reaction time (RT) to abrupt-onset stimuli has been widely used for more than a century to measure the duration of perceptuo-cognitive and motor processes [Donders, 1868/1969 Attention and Performance II (1969 Acta Psychologica 30 412-431)]. A complicating factor with the RT method is that of response withholding, or response inhibition (RI). The o...

There now exists considerable evidence to suggest that the appearance of a new object in the visual field captures visual attention. One of the consequences of this attentional capture is that the object initiates a redistribution of attentional resources across visual space. This is classically observed in the precuing paradigm in which the onset...

Reports an error in the original article by A. Gellatly and G. Cole ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2000, Vol. 26 [3], 889–899). On page 892, erroneous data were inserted in Table 1. Additionally, on p. 895, an incorrect version of Figure 3 was shown. The corrected table and figure are provided in this errata...

Reports an error in the original article by A. Gellatly and G. Cole ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance , 2000, Vol. 26 [3], 889–899). On page 892, erroneous data were inserted in Table 1. Additionally, on p. 895, an incorrect version of Figure 3 was shown. The corrected table and figure are provided in this errat...

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated accuracy of detecting a target among nontargets. In some experiments, the target was a second-order square of stationary lines on a background of downward-moving lines, and nontargets were second-order squares of upward-moving lines. In other experiments, target and nontarget squares and background were sh...

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated accuracy of detecting a target among nontargets. In some experiments, the target was a second-order square of stationary lines on a background of downward-moving lines, and nontargets were second-order squares of upward-moving lines. In other experiments, target and nontarget squares and background were sh...

S. Yantis and A. P. Hillstrom (1994) have claimed that abrupt onset of a new visual object captures attention even when the new object is equiluminant with its background, implying that attention is captured at the level of object descriptions rather than at the level of luminance change detection. S. Yantis and A. P. Hillstrom's experiments contai...

Same-object bias occurs when tasks associated with processing a single object are faster than tasks associated with two objects. Over five experiments we assessed whether same-object bias is mediated by the collinearity of the targets. Participants decided whether two targets, presented either within a single object or across two objects, were the...