This thesis compared face-to-face (FTF) communication with the computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools, email and chat, for collaborative learning purposes in higher education. Participants (n = 60) worked in groups of three in one of two communication conditions: FTF or CMC. Each group completed two tasks that required different ways of thinking: convergent thinking (finding one correct answer) and divergent thinking (formulating many solutions). Students obtained comparable task scores regardless of communication media. CMC participants appreciated the divergent thinking task more, had more concerns about time, more difficulties with scheduling, more anxiety about completing tasks on time, and fewer three-person meetings than did FTF groups. Participants in both conditions appreciated working in groups. The communication framework of grounding (Clark & Brennan, 1991), proved useful when analysing the results. The study identified key areas for further research and provided grounds for practical recommendations.

Mental-state and emotion understanding are important constructs for successful interpretation of behaviour and interaction with others. While false-belief understanding has been the main focus of investigations into children�s mentalising over the past 30 years, we now have tasks available that allow assessment of a broader range and more advanced set of mentalising skills amongst older age groups of typically developing young people (Baron-Cohen, Jolliffe, Mortimore, & Robertson, 1997a; Baron-Cohen, O�Riordan, Stone, Jones, & Plaisted, 1999; Happé, 1994). A recent trend has seen a shift away from investigating when children attain these skills towards examining individual differences in their performance. This has included consideration of both the factors that contribute to (Carlson & Moses, 2001; Hughes & Dunn, 1997; Meins et al., 2002; Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007; Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002), and the factors that are influenced by (Astington & Jenkins, 2000; Cassidy, Werner, Rourke, Zubernis, & Balaraman, 2003; Diesendruck & Ben-Eliyahu, Repacholi, Slaughter, Pritchard, & Gibbs, 2003) individual differences in mental-state understanding. One of the interesting questions in this area is what are the subsequent benefits or harm that individual differences in mentalising and emotion skills hold for children�s social competence? The current study investigates young people�s growing socioemotional understanding and how it is related to their social abilities, both prosocial and antisocial. The aims were to provide information on the relations amongst advanced mental-state skills, to investigate how these skills were related to emotion understanding, and, further, to investigate how socioemotional skills were related to social competence. The current study also extended the literature by addressing these aims amongst older children. Two studies were conducted, involving children (4- to 7-years) seen on four occasions in a three-year longitudinal study, and adolescents (13- to 17-years) in a cross-sectional study. There were a number of key findings. Individual differences in children�s advanced mental-state understanding are relatively stable across time, and the relations which they show with emotion skills are more consistent when examining tasks that shared skill sets. Language plays an important mediating role in the relation between socioemotional skills, although this influence appears to decrease with age. Mental-state and emotion understanding are both important for children and adolescents� social competence. It seems that greater socioemotional abilities influence prosocial behaviours, and poorer socioemotional abilities influence antisocial behaviours. Overall, the current study provides evidence that socioemotional skills are overlapping but distinct constructs, that they show varied interactions in social settings, and that future investigations of how children come to understand and interact with others will be best served by careful consideration of appropriate measures and by including multiple aspects of children�s social cognition.

This is a study of the factors that affect face shapes, and the techniques that can be used to measure variations in two dimensional representations of faces. The materials included thirty photographs of people in natural poses and thirty portraits that were based on the pose photographs. Visual assessors were asked to score the photographs and portraits in terms of pose (cant, turn and pitch) and also to compare the portraits to the photographs and score them in terms of likeness in the depiction of the face and its component features. Anthropometric indices were derived and used to score the images for the pose variables as well as for aspects of individual variation in external face shape and the spatial arrangement of the features. Geometric morphometric analysis was also used to determine the shape variation occurring in the photographs, the variation within the portraits, and to specifically discern where the portraits differ from the photographs in the depiction of head pose and individual differences in facial morphology. For the analysis of pose it was found that visual assessors were best at discerning the extent of head turning and poorest at discerning head pitch. These tendencies occurred in the visual assessments of both the photographs and the portrait drawings. For the analysis of the individual variation in face shapes it was found that external face shape varies according to upper face dimensions and the shape of the chin, and that vertical featural configurations are strongly linked to external face shape. When the portrait and photograph data were placed in the same geometric morphometric analysis the inaccuracies in the portrait drawings became evident. When these findings were compared to the visual assessments it transpired that, on average, visual assessment was generally congruent with the geometric morphometric analysis, but were possibly confounded by patterns of dysmorphology in the portraits that were contrary to what this study suggests are normal patterns of face shape variation. Overall this study has demonstrated that while anthropometric and visual assessments of facial differences are quite good, both were comparatively poor at assessing head pitch and tended to be confounded by the dysmorphologies arising in the portrait drawings. Geometric morphometric analysis was found to be very powerful in discerning complex shape variations associated with head pose and individual differences in facial morphology, both within and between the photographs and portraits.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, 2000. / "A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy". Bibliography : leaves 188-199.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-200).

Thesis (M.A.)--Brandeis University, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 29, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Eng.), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1999. / Bibliography: p. 117-119.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Psychology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

In this thesis, I use a Darwinian approach to explore the role of sexual-dimorphism in human behaviour across development and into early adulthood, and its impact on adult mating-strategies. In Studies 1-2, I explore the importance of heredity and developmental stability of facial characteristics in light of theories of sexual selection. Using family photos, judgements of faces of parents and offspring revealed that facial sexual-dimorphism is passed on from father to son and mother to daughter, while inheritance of attractiveness is apparent only in daughters. I also examine the stability of facial appearance across development (infancy, childhood, young-adult), and find that sexual-dimorphism remains stable for both sexes, while attractiveness is stable only in females. Feminine characteristics are perceived as attractive in infant faces, and feminine characteristics have been perceived as looking more neotenous. In light of these data, I develop a theory for increased preferences for neoteny in human infants (Chapter 4). In studies 3-4, I examine the developmental milestones, puberty and first sexual intercourse in relationship to adult mate-choice strategies. Women who experience first coitus early prefer increased facial-masculinity in potential mates. In men, both early coitus and early puberty relate to increased preferences for facial-femininity in potential mates. In study 5, I look at attributions of peri-pubertal children (aged 11-12 years) to peer faces manipulated on sexually-dimorphic features. Children's attractiveness judgements show evidence of adult-like preferences, with boys preferring feminine girls' faces and girls preferring feminised boys' faces. Both girls and boys attribute the negative stereotype of bullying to more masculinised boys' faces. Study 6 concerns the relationship between two modalities of sexual-dimorphism, pheromones and facial characteristics. Adults indicate preferences from a continuum of sexually-dimorphic face-shapes, in addition to rating sex-specific pheromones on pleasantness. Individuals who prefer sex-typical facial characteristics in opposite-sex faces also judged the sex-typical pheromone as more pleasant.

Les études menées dans cette thèse portent sur le rôle des visages dans l'attention visuelle. Nous avons cherché à mieux comprendre l'influence des visages dans les vidéos sur les mouvements oculaires, afin de proposer un modèle de saillance visuelle pour la prédiction de la direction du regard. Pour cela, nous avons analysé l'effet des visages sur les fixations oculaires d'observateurs regardant librement (sans consigne ni tâche particulière) des vidéos. Nous avons étudié l'impact du nombre de visages, de leur emplacement et de leur taille. Il est apparu clairement que les visages dans une scène dynamique (à l'instar de ce qui se passe sur les images fixes) modifie fortement les mouvements oculaires. En nous appuyant sur ces résultats, nous avons proposé un modèle de saillance visuelle, qui combine des caractéristiques classiques de bas-niveau (orientations et fréquences spatiales, amplitude du mouvement des objets) avec cette caractéristique importante de plus haut-niveau que constitue les visages. Enfin, afin de permettre des traitements plus proches du temps réel, nous avons développé une implémentation parallèle de ce modèle de saillance visuelle sur une plateforme multi-GPU. Le gain en vitesse est d'environ 130 par rapport à une implémentation sur un processeur multithread. / Studies conducted in this thesis focuses on faces and visual attention. We are interested to better understand the influence and perception of faces, to propose a visual saliency model with face features. Throughout the thesis, we concentrate on the question, "How people explore dynamic visual scenes, how the different visual features are modeled to mimic the eye movements of people, in particular, what is the influence of faces?" To answer these questions we analyze the influence of faces on gaze during free-viewing of videos, as well as the effects of the number, location and size of faces. Based on the findings of this work, we propose model with face as an important information feature extracted in parallel alongside other classical visual features (static and dynamic features). Finally, we propose a multi-GPU implementation of the visual saliency model, demonstrating an enormous speedup of more than 132 times compared to a multithreaded CPU.