Recent research has shown that the perception of biological motion may be influenced by aspects of the observer’s personality. In this study, we sought to determine how participant characteristics (including demographics, response inhibition, autism spectrum quotient, empathy, social anxiety, and motion imagery) might influence the use of form and motion to identify the actor’s sex in biological motion displays. We varied the degree of form and motion in biological motion displays and correlated 76 young adult participants’ performances for identifying the actor’s sex in these varied conditions with their individual differences on variables of interest. Differences in the separate use of form and motion cues were predictive of participant performance generally, with use of form most predictive of performance. Female participants relied primarily on form information, while male participants relied primarily on motion information. Participants less able to visualize movement tended to be better at using form information in the biological motion task. Overall, our findings suggest that similar group level performances across participants in identifying the sex of the actor in a biological motion task may result from quite different individual processing.

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Glutalytic action can be defined as digestion of intolerance-and inflammation-promoting gluten proteins and may be useful in related conditions. To determine tolerance and potential effectiveness in a healthy population, a glutalytic supplement or placebo was randomly provided to twenty-three reportedly healthy college students for 30 days of consumption with meals three times daily. Both supplement and placebo were well-tolerated and despite no expectation of improvement on metabolic and humoral indices in this healthy population, some humoral responses were observed.

This pilot study would to explore the ideas of a possible correlation between the goodness of surgical performance in robotic assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) activity. This cortical area is known to be involved in stereoscopic vision (Sakata et al., 1997), visual control of eye movements and hand-eye coordination (Shikata et al., 1996). This issue is of great interest because robotic assisted surgery provides the surgeon with a stereoscopic view of the operative field combined with aligned motor-visual axes and mechatronically controlled instruments. In this contribution, we conduct an exploratory experiment aiming at investigating the hypothesis of a correlation between the performance in reached in a surgically relevant task and the activation of PPC channels as revealed by the fNIRS measurements. First results are very promising and suggest the occurrence of a link between performance and channel activation.