Matching two different images of a face is a very easy task for familiar viewers, but much harder for unfamiliar viewers. Despite this, use of photo-ID is widespread, and people appear not to know how unreliable it is. We present a series of experiments investigating bias both when performing a matching task and when predicting other people's performance. Participants saw pairs of faces and wer...

People overestimate their knowledge, at times claiming knowledge of concepts, events, and people that do not exist and cannot be known, a phenomenon called overclaiming. What underlies assertions of such impossible knowledge? We found that people overclaim to the extent that they perceive their personal expertise favorably. Studies 1a and 1b showed that self-perceived financial knowledge positi...

Idiomatic expressions such as kick the bucket or go down a storm can differ on a number of internal features, such as familiarity, meaning, literality, and decomposability, and these types of features have been the focus of a number of normative studies. In this article, we provide normative data for a set of Bulgarian idioms and their English translations, and by doing so replicate in a Slavic...

Feelings of familiarity are not direct products of memory. Although prior experience of a stimulus can produce a feeling of familiarity, that feeling can also be aroused in the absence of prior experience if perceptual processing of the stimulus is fluent (e.g., Whittlesea, Jacoby, & Girard, 1990). This suggests that feelings of familiarity arise through an unconscious inference about the sourc...

Instinctively responding to maternal face is an evolutionary function of enhancing survival and development. However, because of the confounding nature of familiarity, little is known concerning the neural mechanism involved in maternal face recognition. We had a rare opportunity to examine Mosuo preschool children who were raised in a matrilineal society in which mothers and aunts represent eq...

A web-based survey estimated the distribution of voice recognition abilities with a focus on determining the prevalence of developmental phonagnosia, the inability to identify a familiar person based on their voice. Participants matched clips of 50 celebrity voices to 1-4 named headshots of celebrities whose voices they had previously rated for familiarity. Given a strong correlation between ra...

An important topic in East Asian Studies is the way things have been measured throughout history. Although this is a highly technical subject, some familiarity with it is necessary if you are to understand how people keep track of things. As with many of the handouts for this course, the comments contained here are designed to introduce the basics and only suggest some of the deeper complexitie...

The basic topic will be the classification of manifolds with a focus on surgery theory; the classification of high dimensional manifolds. I will, however, cover topics of interest to low-dimensional topologists and algebraic topologists. The prerequisites are Math 521 and 522, in other words singular homology theory, CW complexes, fundamental group, and covering spaces. But familiarity with the...

BACKGROUND Personal continuity in general practice is considered to be a prerequisite of high quality patient care based on shared knowledge and mutual understanding. Not much is known about how personal continuity is reflected in the content of GP - patient communication. We explored whether personal continuity of care influences the content of communication during the consultation. METHODS ...

Significant research has been done on bent functions, yet researchers in switching theory have paid little attention to this important topic. The goal of this paper to provide a concise exposition. Bent functions are the most nonlinear functions among n-variable switching functions, and are useful in cryptographic applications. This paper discusses three other kinds of cyptographic properties, ...