Background Academic integrity (AI) is of increasing importance in higher education. At the same time, students are becoming more consumer-oriented and more inclined to appeal against, or complain about, a penalty imposed for a breach of AI. This combination of factors places pressure on institutions of higher education to handle alleged breaches of AI in a way acceptable to students that motivates them to continue to engage with their studies. Method Students (n = 8) were interviewed to discover their perceptions (...) of the process for dealing with breaches of AI. All students were based in one university in a very diverse area of London which has many first-generation students from non-traditional academic backgrounds. Results Students reported strong emotional reactions featuring high levels of anxiety and stress. Some found the process to be threatening and demotivating and questioned continuation on their course of study, while others used more adaptive coping strategies. Students also went to great pains to make it clear that their own, and their friends’, breaches of AI were unintentional, while expressing the view that other people were deliberately cheating and should be penalised. Key recommendations include: support for students to re-engage after the intervention; support for students to develop effective self-regulatory learning strategies and time management; provision of specific examples to clarify what is, and is not, acceptable academic practice; recognition of the strong emotions likely to be invoked, especially if accompanied by declarations of unintentionality. (shrink)

The nonconscious orientation of attention to famous faces was investigated using masked 17 ms stimulus exposure. Each trial presented a simultaneous pair of one famous and one unfamiliar face, matched on physical characteristics, one each in left visual field (LVF) and right visual field (RVF). These were followed by a dot probe in either LVF or RVF to which participants made a speeded two-alternative forced-choice discrimination response. Participants subsequently evaluated the affective valence (good/evil) of the famous persons on a 7-point (...) scale. Higher accuracy of dot probe discrimination in the same visual field (VF) as the famous face suggested that attention was oriented towards faces of persons evaluated “good”, but a reverse orientation effect was observed for those evaluated “evil”. The awareness check presented the same face pairs under the same conditions, and participants were at chance in a task of selecting the famous face in each pair. The results suggest that famous faces can be identified without awareness, and that attention is attracted by the faces of famous persons not regarded as “evil”. (shrink)

Participants who were unable to detect familiarity from masked 17 ms faces did report a vague, partial visual percept. Two experiments investigated the relative strength of the visual percept generated by famous and unfamiliar faces, using masked 17 ms exposure. Each trial presented simultaneously a famous and an unfamiliar face, one face in LVF and the other in RVF. In one task, participants responded according to which of the faces generated the stronger visual percept, and in the other task, they (...) attempted an explicit familiarity decision. The relative strength of the visual percept of the famous face compared to the unfamiliar face was moderated by response latency and participants’ attitude towards the famous person. There was also an interaction of visual field with response latency, suggesting that the right hemisphere can generate a visual percept differentiating famous from unfamiliar faces more rapidly than the left hemisphere. Participants were at chance in the explicit familiarity decision, confirming the absence of awareness of facial familiarity. (shrink)

Stone and Valentine presented masked 17 ms faces in simultaneous pairs of one famous and one unfamiliar face. Accuracy in selecting the famous face was higher when the famous person was regarded as “good” or liked than when regarded as “evil” or disliked. Experiment 1 attempted to replicate this phenomenon, but produced a different pattern of results. Experiment 2 investigated alternative explanations and found evidence supporting only the effect of response latency: responses made soon after stimulus onset were more accurate (...) to liked than to disliked faces, whereas responses made after a longer delay were equally accurate to disliked faces. It appears that the effect of negative valence was corrected within the space of a few hundred milliseconds. Experiment 3, using an affective priming paradigm, supported the concept that an early-arising effect of valence is corrected if it is misleading to the directed task. (shrink)