Papers by Elizabeth Sheppard
Credibility of speed limits is a key factor affecting drivers’ compliance with speed limits. Two ... more Credibility of speed limits is a key factor affecting drivers’ compliance with speed limits. Two experiments were conducted to investigate how credibility of speed limits affects judgments of appropriate speed. The first experiment aimed to establish speeds deemed appropriate by investigating Malaysians drivers’ judgments of the appropriate speed to drive based on photographs of roads with the speed limit sign erased. Drivers chose speeds which correlated with but were higher than the actual speed limits of the roads. Analysis of road characteristics suggested they based their decisions mainly on features of the road itself rather than of the roadside. The second experiment tested the impact of credibility of speed limit information on the speed drivers judged appropriate. Drivers judged the appropriate speed to drive for the same photographs as in Experiment 1 with speed limit information provided. Four conditions were included: two conditions where the speed limit posted was 10% higher or 10% lower than the appropriate speed established in Experiment 1 (credible speed limits), and two conditions where the posted speed limit was 50% higher or 50% lower than the appropriate speed (non-credible speed limits). Posted speed limits did affect drivers’ judgments about the appropriate speed to drive. Credibility also influenced judgments whereby drivers selected appropriate speeds consistent with the speed limits for the 10% lower condition, but not for speed limits that deviated highly from the appropriate speed judged in Experiment 1.
The current study explored attentional processing of social and non-social stimuli in ASD within ... more The current study explored attentional processing of social and non-social stimuli in ASD within the context of a driving hazard perception task. Participants watched videos of road scenes and detected hazards while their eye movements were recorded. Although individuals with ASD demonstrated relatively good detection of driving hazards, they were slower to orient to hazards. Greater attentional capture in the time preceding the hazards’ onset was associated with lower verbal IQ. The findings suggest that individuals with ASD may distribute and direct their attention differently when identifying driving hazards.
How well can neurotypical adults’ interpret mental states in people with ASD? ‘Targets’ (ASD and ... more How well can neurotypical adults’ interpret mental states in people with ASD? ‘Targets’ (ASD and neurotypical) reactions to four events were video-recorded then shown to neurotypical participants whose task was to identify which event the target had experienced. In study 1 participants were more successful for neurotypical than ASD targets. In study 2, participants rated ASD targets equally expressive as neurotypical targets for three of the events, while in study 3 participants gave different verbal descriptions of the reactions of ASD and neurotypical targets. It thus seems people with ASD react differently but not less expressively to events. Because neurotypicals are ineffective in interpreting the behaviour of those with ASD, this could contribute to the social difficulties in ASD.
Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2016
Background: Previous research suggests people with ASD may have various difficulties in processin... more Background: Previous research suggests people with ASD may have various difficulties in processing and interacting with motion in the environment. We investigated whether individuals with ASD have difficulty judging the location of moving objects in a driving context using a time-to-arrival task. Methods: Participants with and without ASD viewed scenes that simulated self-motion towards a junction, while another car approached on a side road. Scenes terminated prior to either car reaching the junction and participants were required to decide which car would reach the junction first. Results: Participants with ASD made fewer correct responses although this was only true when self-motion was on a straight road. Conclusions: This difficulty in judging the location of moving objects could contribute to difficulties people with ASD experience in learning to drive.
British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953), 2016
This is an author response to commentaries on our original article (Wu, Sheppard & Mitchell, 2016... more This is an author response to commentaries on our original article (Wu, Sheppard & Mitchell, 2016). We abstract two main themes from the commentaries, and they are as follows: (1) What kind of clues in target behaviour allow perceivers to infer target EQ? And related with this, by what process do perceivers infer the target's EQ? (2) Do features of the target group naturally lead to a U-shaped function, whereby it is easy for perceivers to identify those at the extremes but not those in the middle of the continuum?
British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953), Jan 4, 2015
Mentalizing (otherwise known as 'theory of mind') involves a special process that is adap... more Mentalizing (otherwise known as 'theory of mind') involves a special process that is adapted for predicting and explaining the behaviour of others (targets) based on inferences about targets' beliefs and character. This research investigated how well participants made inferences about an especially apposite aspect of character, empathy. Participants were invited to make inferences of self-rated empathy after watching or listening to an unfamiliar target for a few seconds telling a scripted joke (or answering questions about him/herself or reading aloud a paragraph of promotional material). Across three studies, participants were good at identifying targets with low and high self-rated empathy but not good at identifying those who are average. Such inferences, especially of high self-rated empathy, seemed to be based mainly on clues in the target's behaviour, presented either in a video, a still photograph or in an audio track. However, participants were not as effect...
Perception, 2015
High performance level in face recognition studies does not seem to be replicable in real-life si... more High performance level in face recognition studies does not seem to be replicable in real-life situations possibly because of the artificial nature of laboratory studies. Recognizing faces in natural social situations may be a more challenging task, as it involves constant examination of dynamic facial motions that may alter facial structure vital to the recognition of unfamiliar faces. Because of the incongruences of recognition performance, the current study developed stimuli that closely represent natural social situations to yield results that more accurately reflect observers' performance in real-life settings. Naturalistic stimuli of African, East Asian, and Western Caucasian actors introducing themselves were presented to investigate Malaysian Chinese participants' recognition sensitivity and looking strategies when performing a face recognition task. When perceiving dynamic facial stimuli, participants fixated most on the nose, followed by the mouth then the eyes. Focusing on the nose may have enabled participants to gain a more holistic view of actors' facial and head movements, which proved to be beneficial in recognizing identities. Participants recognized all three races of faces equally well. The current results, which differed from a previous static face recognition study, may be a more accurate reflection of observers' recognition abilities and looking strategies.
Studies have shown that while East Asians focused on the center of the face to recognize identiti... more Studies have shown that while East Asians focused on the center of the face to recognize identities, participants adapted their strategy by focusing more on the eyes to identify emotions, suggesting that the eyes may contain salient information pertaining to emotional state in Eastern cultures. However, Western Caucasians employ the same strategy by moving between the eyes and mouth to identify both identities and emotions. Malaysian Chinese have been shown to focus on the eyes and nose more than the mouth during face recognition task, which represents an intermediate between Eastern and Western looking strategies. The current study examined whether Malaysian Chinese continue to employ an intermediate strategy or shift towards an Eastern or Western pattern (by fixating more on the eyes or mouth respectively) during an emotion recognition task. Participants focused more on the eyes, followed by the nose then mouth. Directing attention towards the eye region resulted in better recognition of certain own-than other-race emotions. Although the fixation patterns appear similar for both tasks, further analyses showed that fixations on the eyes were reduced whereas fixations on the nose and mouth were increased during emotion recognition, indicating that participants adapt looking strategies based on their aims.
Background: Distinctive characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) include difficulties in... more Background: Distinctive characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) include difficulties in social cognition and interaction. Past research suggests that social difficulties in ASD may be explained by impaired mentalising ability- that is, processes utilised to understand emotions, mental states, and inferring of behaviours (e.g. Baron-Cohen et al., 1997). The majority of research on mentalising in those with and without ASD requires participants to make a prediction about what a person will do based on knowledge of the current situation. However, mentalising also plays a role in understanding a person’s current behaviour, by predicting what kind of circumstances could have caused it (retrodiction, e.g. Goldman & Sripada, 2005). Objectives: The current study focused on this neglected aspect of mentalising by investigating how individuals with and without ASD interpret people’s natural reactions (facial expressions) by deducing the event that had previously occurred; and what v...
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 2015
A Life-Span Perspective, 2008
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 2014
Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders, Fourth Edition, 2014
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2014
It has been proposed that mentalising involves retrodicting as well as predicting behaviour, by i... more It has been proposed that mentalising involves retrodicting as well as predicting behaviour, by inferring previous mental states of a target. This study investigated whether retrodiction is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Participants watched videos of real people reacting to the researcher behaving in one of four possible ways. Their task was to decide which of these four "scenarios" each person responded to. Participants' eye movements were recorded. Participants with ASD were poorer than comparison participants at identifying the scenario to which people in the videos were responding. There were no group differences in time spent looking at the eyes or mouth. The findings imply those with ASD are impaired in using mentalising skills for retrodiction.
British Journal of Psychology, 2011
PLOS One, 2012
East Asian and white Western observers employ different eye movement strategies for a variety of ... more East Asian and white Western observers employ different eye movement strategies for a variety of visual processing tasks, including face processing. Recent eye tracking studies on face recognition found that East Asians tend to integrate information holistically by focusing on the nose while white Westerners perceive faces featurally by moving between the eyes and mouth. The current study examines the eye movement strategy that Malaysian Chinese participants employ when recognizing East Asian, white Western, and African faces. Rather than adopting the Eastern or Western fixation pattern, Malaysian Chinese participants use a mixed strategy by focusing on the eyes and nose more than the mouth. The combination of Eastern and Western strategies proved advantageous in participants' ability to recognize East Asian and white Western faces, suggesting that individuals learn to use fixation patterns that are optimized for recognizing the faces with which they are more familiar.
2 Driving hazard perception This study investigated whether individuals with ASD (autistic spectr... more 2 Driving hazard perception This study investigated whether individuals with ASD (autistic spectrum disorders) are able to identify driving hazards, given their difficulties processing social information (Klin, Jones, Schultz, Volkmar, & Cohen, 2002). Twenty-three adult males with ASD and 21 comparison participants viewed 10 video clips containing driving hazards. In half of the clips the source of the hazard was a visible person (social); in the other half the source was a car (non-social). Participants with ASD identified fewer social hazards than the comparison participants (U = 163.00, N = 44, p < .05) but not non-social. Participants with ASD were also slower to respond than comparison participants, F(1,40) = 4.93, p < .05. This suggests that, although people with ASD can perceive driving hazards they may have specific difficulty identifying them if they involve a person.
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour
Autism, 2009
Mottron, Belleville and Ménard (1999) found that individuals with autism were less affected by ge... more Mottron, Belleville and Ménard (1999) found that individuals with autism were less affected by geometric impossibility than comparison participants on a copying task. The current experiment sought to determine whether a local perceptual style could account for this. Participants with and without autism copied possible and impossible geometric figures. Geometric impossibility had a larger effect on drawing time for comparison participants than those with autism. However, participants with autism did not use more localised drawing strategies. Strength of impossibility effect was associated with a global strategy among comparison participants but this relationship was not found among participants with autism. The findings suggest that differences in high-level conceptual processing may account for group differences in effects of impossibility.
Uploads
Papers by Elizabeth Sheppard