This study reports on a five-year data set about the deaths of 599 individuals in New South Wales Australia, who at the time of their death were living in out-of-home care. Analysis aimed to: i) gain a clearer understanding of place of death for people with intellectual disability; and ii) identify and analyse associated variables to investigate how well they predict place of death for this population. Hospital admissions, polypharmacy and living situation were the strongest standalone predictors of place of death. A hospital death was more likely if the target population were subject to polypharmacy, lived in a group home, had a moderate intellectual disability or had GORD. Death, and place of death, is an issue requiring individual consideration. This study has identified some of the variables that need attention when supporting people with intellectual disability to have a good death.

Turning an object upside-down disrupts our ability to perceive it accurately, and this inversion effect is disproportionately larger for faces and whole bodies than most other objects. This disproportionate inversion effect is taken as an indicator of holistic processing for these stimuli. Large inversion effects are also found when viewing motion-only information from faces and bodies; however, these have not been compared to other moving objects in an identity task so it is unclear whether inversion effects remain disproportionately larger for faces and bodies when they are engaged in motion. The current study investigated the effect of inversion on static and moving unfamiliar faces, human bodies, and German Shepherd dogs in an old-new recognition memory task. Sensitivity and baseline corrected reaction time (RT) results revealed that inversion effects for faces and whole-bodies remained disproportionately larger than those for German Shepherd dogs, regardless of presentation type, suggesting that both static and moving faces and bodies are processed holistically.

Time-motion studies revolutionized the design and efficiency of repetitive work last century. Would time-idea studies revolutionize the rules of intellectual/creative work this century? Collaborating with seven professional dancers, we set out to discover if there were any significant temporal patterns to be found in a timeline coded to show when dancers come up with ideas and when they modify or reject them. On each of 3 days, the dancers were given a choreographic problem (or task) to help them generate a novel, high quality contemporary dance phrase. They were videoed as they worked on this task for sessions of 15, 30, and 45 min. At the end of each 15 min interval during each session, we had them perform the phrase they were creating. They recorded and then coded the video of themselves dancing during these sessions by using a coding language we developed with them to identify when ideas are introduced, modified, and rejected. We found that most ideas are created early and that though these early ideas are aggressively pruned early on, many still make it into the final product. The two competing accounts of creativity in design research make predictions for the temporal structure of creativity. Our results support neither account, rather showing a more blended version of the two. The iterative design view, arguably the dominant view, is that good ideas are the product of generating many ideas, choosing one fairly early, committing to it, and iteratively improving it. The “fail fast fail often” view is that good ideas are the product of rapidly generating and discarding ideas and holding back from early commitment to any one in particular. The result of holding back commitment, typically, is not that an idea is taken up later and then incrementally improved at the last minute, as much as that later designs are not completely novel, instead incorporating the best parts of the entire sequence of ideas. In our study, we found no evidence that one account or the other was more predictive for the domain of contemporary dance. The behavior of the dancers that we studied revealed elements of both, calling into question how predictive these theories are.

Holistic processing is considered one of the hallmarks of face recognition. Recent studies using the composite task claim to show a lack of holistic processing for dynamic faces, however they only presented moving faces in the learning phase and tested with static composite images. So while previous research has addressed the question of whether moving faces influence the processing of subsequently viewed static faces, the question of whether moving faces are processed holistically remains unanswered. We address that question here. In our study participants learned faces in motion and were tested on moving composite faces, or learned static faces and were tested on static composite faces. We found a clear composite effect for both upright static and dynamic faces, with no significant difference in the magnitude of those effects. Further, there was no evidence of composite or motion effects in inverted conditions, ruling out low level or other motion signal properties as explanations of performance in upright faces. Together, these results show that upright moving faces are processed holistically, in a similar manner to static faces, extending decades of research with static faces and confirming the importance of holistic processing to familiar face recognition.

Turning a face upside-down disrupts our ability to accurately perceive changes in spacing and feature shape information, and has been suggested to disrupt configural/holistic processing. When a face engages in motion the shape of the features and spacing between them undergo continual variation. However, little is known about the effect that inversion has on this added level of configural change within a moving face or whether this added level of change impacts on the perception of other non-face stimuli in a similar way. The aim of the current experiment was to explore the effect of inversion on moving and static unfamiliar faces and two comparable classes of biological stimuli - human bodies and dogs - in a long-term memory recognition task. It was hypothesised that the added disruption of spacing and feature shape change due to motion would increase inversion effect sizes for moving (compared to static) faces and bodies, but not dogs. Results revealed significantly larger inversion effects in inverse efficiency (IE) for all moving (compared to static) stimulus types. For moving faces (and perhaps bodies) this increased delay in IE may come about as a result of increased difficulty in tracking configural and feature shape change in an upside-down face. However, this interpretation seems unlikely given that a similar increase in IE was also found between static and moving dogs and patterns in inversion effect size differences between stimulus types remained consistent in the static and moving groups. The findings suggest that face perception remains quantitatively similar to whole-body perception and quantitatively dissimilar to dog perception regardless of whether the stimuli are static or moving. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014

presented at The Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV) 2014 19-22 July 2014, Takamatsu, Japan

It is widely agreed that the human face is processed differently from other objects. However there is a lack of consensus on what is meant by a wide array of terms used to describe this “special” face processing (e.g., holistic and configural) and the perceptually relevant information within a face (e.g., relational properties and configuration). This paper will review existing models of holistic/configural processing, discuss how they differ from one another conceptually, and review the wide variety of measures used to tap into these concepts. In general we favor a model where holistic processing of a face includes some or all of the interrelations between features and has separate coding for features. However, some aspects of the model remain unclear. We propose the use of moving faces as a way of clarifying what types of information are included in the holistic representation of a face.

Paper presented at the Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference 2015, 8-11 April 2015, Sydney, Australia. Keywords motion, unfamiliar, non, processed, holistically, engaged, rigid, faces Disciplines Education | Social and Behavioral Sciences Publication Details Piepers, D. W., Burke, D. C., Favelle, S. K., Stevens, C. J. & Robbins, R. A. (2015). Unfamiliar faces engaged in non-rigid motion are processed holistically. Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference 2015 This conference paper is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/sspapers/1583 spatial cue. Participants classified each target as a word or a nonword by reaching either forwards or backwards from a central start position. A motion-­‐capture system rapidly sampled the position of the participant’s hand throughout this movement. Interestingly, results indicated that the LVF cueing effect emerged early and resolved quickly. These results suggest that the hemisphere’s comparative word recognition abilities diverge during initial stages.