“Your ability to recognize objects and your ability to recognize scenes are independent,” says Steeves.��

Their study is published in the December issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience – “TMS to the Lateral Occipital Cortex Disrupts Object Processing but Facilitates Scene Processing”.

Left: Psychology Professor Jennifer Steeves applies rTMS stimulation to��PhD candidate Caitlin Mullin. Images of Mullin's brain can be seen on the adjacent screen��

The finding discounts an earlier theory that scene perception relies on the recognition of individual objects and instead finds that the gist of a scene can be ascertained by its spatial layout alone.

Steeves and Mullin conducted two experiments. Both showed that when the ability to see objects is impaired, the brain can still determine what it’s looking at by taking in the scene. But what surprised the researchers is that when object recognition was temporarily knocked out, the ability to categorize scenes, such as distinguishing a forest from a cityscape, increased.

“It’s like you can see the forest better when you can’t see the trees,” says Steeves, who heads up the Perceptual Neuroscience Lab��in 91��ɫ's . “We didn’t expect this at all. The stimulation��must be releasing some inhibitory process in people's brains.”

The experiments involved nine individuals with healthy brains. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) was applied to the left lateral occipital cortex (LO), the object processing area of the brain just behind each ear, to disrupt object processing. This was done while showing the subjects pictures of scenes and objects.

Right: Jennifer Steeves

The idea was to see how the LO contributed to the perception of scenes. The rTMS momentarily scrambled the neurons in the LO, preventing the subject from recognizing the objects, but they were able to categorize the scenes more quickly and accurately than before. The first experiment involved using a longer disruption time for object processing than that used in the second experiment.

“There was a split second interruption to the brain in the second experiment,” says Steeves. Still, the second experiment confirmed the findings of the first. “It’s a really robust effect. The TMS showed us that even though the two functions are independent, they still work together.”

Steeves and Mullin are now doing research find out what other parts of the brain are affected when rTMS is applied to specific areas. “We’re finding so far that stimulating one region can have an effect on other areas,” says Mullin.

The research is part of the nuts and bolts of mapping the brain, which could have implications down the road in helping people with brain injuries or informing computer modelling. “What’s nice is we’re learning about networks in the brain,” says Steeves. And that is where it all starts.

The experiments were funded through grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Research Fund and the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Here's an on June 24. The story's had 86 tweets and 335 Diggs:

It's long been an accepted truth among married couples that it's the wife who must usually steer the pair through social gatherings, reminding her husband if he's meeting someone for the first, second or 15th time – and science backs up that observation.

In lab settings, women routinely outperform men in facial recognition skills, both in terms of speed and reliability. Now, research from 91��ɫ in Toronto has added a wrinkle to the existing wisdom. It's not just women whose brains are so nimble, the investigators have determined, it's gay men, too.

In the Canadian study, Jennifer Steeves, a psychology professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, recruited a sample group composed of homosexual men, heterosexual men and heterosexual women. Significantly, she also took care to include both left- and right-handed people among the subjects. All of the volunteers were shown pictures of 10 faces and given time to try to memorize them. Those 10 faces were mixed with similarly edited images of 50 other people, and flashed on a screen for just milliseconds apiece. The subjects' job was to press a key when they saw a face they'd seen before.

The results confirmed what the investigators suspected they'd find: the gay men and the straight women scored about equally well in the test, and both did better than the straight men. What's more, within the straight male group, lefties outperformed righties. The explanation is rooted mostly in the genes.

All people are born with genetic coding that regulates body symmetry and asymmetry. This includes not just handedness, but which way the whorl in the hair at the crown of the head grows, or which hemisphere of the brain will be dominant for processing language. "Characteristics like this are determined very, very early on," says Steeves. "A baby's handedness can sometimes even be observed in utero."

If sex and symmetry get mixed up this way, there's no reason the phenomenon should sidestep the brain, and Steeves does not think it does. Gay men, she believes, probably do so well at recognizing faces because, like women, they're putting both hemispheres to work at once. Greater crosstalk between the two halves via the corpus callosum – the cable of nerve fibres that serves as sort of a superhighway between left and right – probably contributes to this as well. That, however, is not something Steeves and her colleagues have been able to demonstrate conclusively yet, since they have not had the chance to rerun their study while simultaneously scanning the brains of their subjects with a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI). "The University just doesn't have one," she says. "But we're getting one soon and we'll be able to take that next step then."

None of this means that it will ever be possible simply to take an fMRI of a brain and tell from that alone if it belongs to a homosexual or heterosexual – and given privacy concerns and the risk of bias, Steeves wouldn't even want to try. "I would hesitate to do post-hoc analysis," she says. "There are scary things that could happen with that." What it does mean, however, is that science's understanding of the roots of sexuality, so long shrouded in misinformation, is steadily edging into the light – and there's nothing scary about that.

The Times of India Online and DailyIndia.com covered the research June 23:

A new study by 91��ɫ researchers has shown that gay men can recall familiar faces faster and more accurately than their heterosexual counterparts because, like women, they use both sides of their brains.

The study examined the influence of gender, sexual orientation and whether we’re right- or�� left-handed on our ability to recognize faces. It found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – the usage of both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks.

Jennifer Steeves, psychology professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, and her colleagues also investigated the influence of hand dominance on such tasks. They found that left-handed heterosexual participants had better face recognition abilities than left-handed homosexuals, and also outperformed right-handed heterosexuals. “Our findings are consistent with what we know about the organization and laterality of how we process faces depending on our gender, sexual orientation and handedness,” Steeves says.

The study was also covered in :

Gay men are on a par with women when it comes to never forgetting a face, according to a study.��Homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – using both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women.

"Our results suggest that both gay men and heterosexual women code faces bilaterally. That allows for faster retrieval of stored information," said study lead author Jennifer Steeves, at Toronto’s 91��ɫ.

Stories on the research also appeared in Sun Media newspapers and June 22.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post 91��ɫ study on gay men's brains covered on TIME.com, other international outlets appeared first on Research & Innovation.

The study, published in the journal, , examined the influence of gender, sexual orientation and whether we’re right-or-left-handed on our ability to recognize faces. It found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – the usage of both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks.

“Our results suggest that both gay men and heterosexual women code faces bilaterally. That allows for faster retrieval of stored information,” says study lead author Jennifer Steeves, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, .

Study participants were asked to memorize photographs of ten faces, and differentiate them from 50 others, shown to them for only milliseconds each. The images were rendered in black and white and edited to remove ears, hair and blemishes, which can serve as obvious identifying cues. Participants then had to relay which faces were new, as quickly and accurately as possible.

Steeves and her colleagues also investigated the influence of hand dominance on such tasks. They found that left-handed heterosexual participants had better face recognition abilities than left-handed homosexuals, and also outperformed right-handed heterosexuals.

Hand dominance is thought to be linked with both hemispheric functioning and sexual orientation; previous studies have shown that homosexual individuals are 39 per cent more likely to be left-handed.

“Our findings are consistent with what we know about the organization and laterality of how we process faces depending on our gender, sexual orientation and handedness,” Steeves says.

Anatomical studies of the corpus callosum, which facilitates communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, also indicate differences in handedness: women and left-handed men have been shown to possess larger corpus callosum and more symmetrical cortices than right-handed men.

“These anatomical differences likely contribute to the more lateralized performance results seen among right-handed and heterosexual men,” says Steeves.

The study, “Sex differences in face processing are mediated by handedness and sexual orientation,” was co-authored by 91��ɫ psychology graduate student Caitlin R. Mullin, and 91��ɫ undergraduate psychology students Paul W. H. Brewster, and Roxana A. Dobrin.

By Melissa Hughes, media relations officer.

The post Gay men's bilateral brains better at remembering faces: 91��ɫ U study appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Wearing red at the Olympics may give an athlete an easy advantage, according to a 91��ɫ study that shows perceptions of motion are subconsciously affected by colour.

“All things being equal between two figure skaters – including their actual speed on the ice – the judges will perceive a skater in red is moving with greater speed than a skater in blue, and may reward the skater in red with higher marks,” says Mazyar Fallah, a��professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health.

Above: The 2010 Canadian Olympic team in their red uniforms. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The study, conducted by Fallah and co-author Illia Tchernikov in 91��ɫ’s Centre for Vision Research, was published today by the��the Public Library of Science open access peer-reviewed journal .

Their research on visual processing found that people’s eyes more quickly follow a red target on a computer screen more quickly than a green, yellow or especially a blue target.

VIDEO--The Daily Planet covered . The clip runs approximately 20 seconds and begins at the 7:50 mark.

“In sports, the outcome of a competition is supposed to depend on the abilities of the players, rather than the colours they are wearing,” says Fallah. “However, our research shows it may make sense to wear red in a sport such as figure skating, in which you want to be perceived as quick. In contrast, it may be best to wear another colour in a sport in which a referee is handing out penalties.”

The finding that there is a colour hierarchy that automatically guides the selection of what someone will focus on has implications for many sports such as figure skating and gymnastics in which speed may be perceived by a judge rather than measured in milliseconds, Fallah says. It may also be important for other fields such as advertising, in which capturing attention is paramount, and in designing human-computer interfaces that are effective, he said.

Left: Canadian figure skating champion and Olympic competitor Joannie Rochette. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Five subjects took part in the study, with each completing about��a thousand��tests. Each participant automatically focused on targets on the screen and all produced the same colour hierarchy, choosing red targets first, followed by green, yellow and blue. This suggests, says Fallah, that the colour hierarchy is inherent, either because of evolution – red is the colour of blood, whereas blue is the colour of the sky – or as a result of experience − red stop signs and traffic signals indicate danger.

Fallah's research was covered by and .

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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