Patients were shown the 20 pairs of chimeric face

tasks in turn and asked to indicate verbally for each display whether the upper or lower member of each pair looked happier, just as in Mattingley et al., 1993 and Ferber et al., 2003 and Sarri et al. (2006). The stimuli were placed in front of the patients on a table, centred on the mid-sagittal plane of their head and trunk, and remained in view until the patients gave a response, without any time limit. For the gradients task, 20 pairs of greyscale gradients were constructed analogously to those in Mattingley et al. (1994). 10 pairs of greyscale gradient rectangles, consisting of a continuous scale of grey shades varying from absolute white at one end to absolute black at the Docetaxel cost other end were produced and printed on A4 sheets of paper. Each pair consisted of two rectangles, one being the mirror-reversed image of the other, one presented above and one below (see Fig. 3C). Each rectangle was bound by a .5 mm black outline.

The two rectangular strips varied in length from 10–20 cm (thus subtending approximately 15–28°), in increments of 1.5 cm and were kept at a constant height of 5 cm (approximately 4°). The two strips were always kept apart at a constant vertical separation of 2 cm. These 10 pairs were then mirror reversed to produce another 10 pairs. Patients were presented with all 20 pairs of identical but mirror-reversed greyscale gradient rectangles and asked to report verbally Atorvastatin whether the upper

or lower member of each pair looked darker (by saying ‘top’ or ‘bottom’), as in selleck inhibitor Mattingley et al. (1994). The stimuli were placed in front of the patients on a table, centred on the mid-sagittal plane of their head and trunk and remained in view until the patients gave a response, without any time limit. For the explicit chimeric/non-chimeric face discrimination task, 20 non-chimeric (‘real’) and 20 chimeric face stimuli were used, taken and adapted from Mattingley et al. (1993). The chimeric face stimuli were constructed from half-parts of the 20 non-chimeric face stimuli. The construction of the chimeric face stimuli was identical to the one described for the chimeric face lateral preference task. Each face stimulus subtended approximately 12° × 16° and unlike the emotional judgement task, where faces were presented in pairs, each face here was now presented individually. See Fig. 3B for an example of a non-chimeric and a matched chimeric face stimulus (note that this illustration depicts two potential successive trials, although in practice the face on one trial was unlikely to relate to that on the next). All 20 chimeric face stimuli were intermingled with the 20 non-chimeric face stimuli, so a total of 40 individual face stimuli were presented in random sequence. Each stimulus was presented briefly in the centre of a computer monitor for approximately 2.