Journal articles on the topic 'Contextual color cues'

Here we report the results of a brief experiment investigating the role of attention in mediating contextual effects on synesthetic experiences. Specifically, we examine a grapheme–color synesthete for whom the grapheme letter ‘O’ and number ‘0’ are associated with two very different colors. We presented the grapheme ‘0’ in an array of graphemes that provided ambiguous contextual cues, such that the same grapheme could be perceived either as the number ‘0’ or as the letter ‘O’. We find that an attentional cue that draws attention to one or the other of the contexts biases the perceived synesthetic color of the ‘0’ grapheme to that associated with the cued context. This is true even when the physical color of the grapheme corresponds to the un-cued context.

The accuracy of saccades, as maintained by saccade adaptation, has been shown to be context dependent: able to have different amplitude movements to the same retinal displacement dependent on motor contexts such as orbital starting location. There is conflicting evidence as to whether purely visual cues also effect contextual saccade adaptation and, if so, what function this might serve. We tested what visual cues might evoke contextual adaptation. Over 5 experiments, 78 naive subjects made saccades to circularly moving targets, which stepped outward or inward during the saccade depending on target movement direction, speed, or color and shape. To test if the movement or context postsaccade were critical, we stopped the postsaccade target motion ( experiment 4) or neutralized the contexts by equating postsaccade target speed to an intermediate value ( experiment 5). We found contextual adaptation in all conditions except those defined by color and shape. We conclude that some, but not all, visual cues before the saccade are sufficient for contextual adaptation. We conjecture that this visual contextuality functions to allow for different motor states for different coordinated movement patterns, such as coordinated saccade and pursuit motor planning.

Recent studies have reported that human subjects show varying degrees of ability to use contextual cues to recall the motor skills required to compensate for different dynamic external force fields during arm movements. In particular, the subjects showed little or no ability to use color cues to adjust motor outputs in anticipation of the perturbing fields after limited periods of training that were sufficient to learn to compensate for the fields themselves. This is unexpected since humans and monkeys can use color cues to perform a wide range of visuomotor tasks. Here we show that a monkey with extensive practice compensating for viscous fields in an elbow-movement task can use associated color cues to adjust motor output in anticipation of an impending field before physically encountering it.

Several studies have shown that sensory contextual cues can reduce the interference observed during learning of opposing force fields. However, because each study examined a small set of cues, often in a unique paradigm, the relative efficacy of different sensory contextual cues is unclear. In the present study we quantify how seven contextual cues, some investigated previously and some novel, affect the formation and recall of motor memories. Subjects made movements in a velocity-dependent curl field, with direction varying randomly from trial to trial but always associated with a unique contextual cue. Linking field direction to the cursor or background color, or to peripheral visual motion cues, did not reduce interference. In contrast, the orientation of a visual object attached to the hand cursor significantly reduced interference, albeit by a small amount. When the fields were associated with movement in different locations in the workspace, a substantial reduction in interference was observed. We tested whether this reduction in interference was due to the different locations of the visual feedback (targets and cursor) or the movements (proprioceptive). When the fields were associated only with changes in visual display location (movements always made centrally) or only with changes in the movement location (visual feedback always displayed centrally), a substantial reduction in interference was observed. These results show that although some visual cues can lead to the formation and recall of distinct representations in motor memory, changes in spatial visual and proprioceptive states of the movement are far more effective than changes in simple visual contextual cues.

When the head does not move, rapid movements of the eyes called saccades are used to redirect the line of sight. Saccades are defined by a series of metrical and kinematic (evolution of a movement as a function of time) relationships. For example, the amplitude of a saccade made from one visual target to another is roughly 90% of the distance between the initial fixation point (T0) and the peripheral target (T1). However, this stereotypical relationship between saccade amplitude and initial retinal error (T1-T0) may be altered, either increased or decreased, by surreptitiously displacing a visual target during an ongoing saccade. This form of motor learning (called saccadic adaptation) has been described in both humans and monkeys. Recent experiments in humans and monkeys have suggested that internal (proprioceptive) and external (target shape, color, and/or motion) cues may be used to produce context-dependent adaptation. We tested the hypothesis that an external contextual cue (target color) could be used to evoke differential gain (actual saccade/initial retinal error) states in rhesus monkeys. We did not observe differential gain states correlated with target color regardless of whether targets were displaced along the same vector as the primary saccade or perpendicular to it. Furthermore, this observation held true regardless of whether adaptation trials using various colors and intrasaccade target displacements were randomly intermixed or presented in short or long blocks of trials. These results are consistent with hypotheses that state that color cannot be used as a contextual cue and are interpreted in light of previous studies of saccadic adaptation in both humans and monkeys.

Various contextual factors, such as color, modify how emotions are perceived on the face. In particular, the color red enhances categorization of anger on faces. Yet, an open question remains as to whether red facilitates anger categorization uniformly or whether this effect is specific to targets with characteristics already highly associated with anger. The current work examines whether the color red facilitates anger categorization and whether this effect varies as a function of target gender. We found that red facilitates the processing of anger for male faces (Experiment 1) but not for female faces (Experiment 2), likely due to stronger implicit associations between red with anger for male faces (Experiment 3). The findings suggest that cues to emotion (e.g., red cueing anger) are most salient when the meaning of the signal (e.g., threat) matches observer's implicit notions about the target's characteristics (e.g., capability of doing harm; males).

Humans adopt very different head movement strategies for different gaze behaviors, for example, when playing sports versus watching sports on television. Such strategy switching appears to depend on both context and expectation of future gaze positions. Here, we explored the neural mechanisms for such behaviors by training three monkeys to make head-unrestrained gaze shifts toward eccentric radial targets. A randomized color cue provided predictive information about whether that target would be followed by either a return gaze shift to center or another, more eccentric gaze shift, but otherwise animals were allowed to develop their own eye-head coordination strategy. In the first two animals we then stimulated the frontal eye fields (FEF) in conjunction with the color cue, and in the third animal we recorded from neurons in the superior colliculus (SC). Our results show that 1) monkeys can optimize eye-head coordination strategies from trial to trial, based on learned associations between color cues and future gaze sequences, 2) these cue-dependent coordination strategies were preserved in gaze saccades evoked during electrical stimulation of the FEF, and 3) two types of SC responses (the saccade burst and a more prolonged response related to head movement) modulated with these cue-dependent strategies, although only one (the saccade burst) varied in a predictive fashion. These data show that from one moment to the next, the brain can use contextual sensory cues to set up internal “coordination states” that convert fixed cortical gaze commands into the brain stem signals required for predictive head motion.

The abrupt onset of a novel event captures attention away from, and disrupts, ongoing task performance. Less obvious is that intentional task switching compares with novelty-induced behavioral distraction. Here we explore the hypothesis that intentional task switching and attentional capture by a novel distracter both activate a common neural network involved in processing contextual novelty [Barcelo, F., Periáñez, J. A., & Knight, R. T. Think differently: A brain orienting response to task novelty. NeuroReport, 13, 1887–1892, 2002.]. Event-related potentials were recorded in two task-cueing paradigms while 16 subjects sorted cards following either two (color or shape; two-task condition) or three (color, shape, or number; three-task condition) rules of action. Each card was preceded by a familiar tone cueing the subject either to switch or to repeat the previous rule. Novel sound distracters were interspersed in one of two blocks of trials in each condition. Both novel sounds and task-switch cues impaired responses to the following visual target. Novel sounds elicited novelty P3 potentials with their usual peak latency and frontal-central scalp distribution. Familiar tonal switch cues in the three- and two-task conditions elicited brain potentials with a similar latency and morphology as the novelty P3, but with relatively smaller amplitudes over frontal scalp regions. Covariance and principal component analyses revealed a sustained frontal negative potential that was distorting concurrent novelty P3 activity to the tonal switch cues. When this frontal negativity was statistically removed, P3 potentials to novel sounds and task-switch cues showed similar scalp topographies. The degree of activation in the novelty P3 network seemed to be a function of the information (entropy) conveyed by the eliciting stimulus for response selection, over and above its relative novelty, probability of occurrence, task relevance, or feedback value. We conclude that novelty P3 reflects transient activation in a neural network involved in updating task set information for goal-directed action selection and might thus constitute one key element in a central bottleneck for attentional control.

Online disinhibition effect describes the phenomenon where people feel less restrained in an online environment. People are therefore more likely to express thoughts and opinions that they normally would not share in a face-to-face interaction (Suler, 2004). Online disinhibition effect could either be benign or toxic. Students and instructors in an online learning environment often experience toxic disinhibition in several forms, including arguments about grades, emotional outbursts, potential death threat to the instructor, personal attacks, swearing, and heated arguments using upper-case letters (Rose, 2014). Suler (2004) proposed six factors that contribute to the online disinhibition effect. These six factors include dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority. Not all six factors proposed by Suler (2004) have received equal empirical evidence. Also, not all factors are relevant to online learning environments. This study therefore focused on the factor of invisibility and the lack of contextual cues as a result of invisibility. One of the ways to provide contextual cues in a situation that lacks face-to-face interaction is through the usage of color signaling. Color signaling refers to the usage of colored text to convey information (Elliot, 2015; Lemarié, Lorch, Eyrolle & Virbel, 2008). This study looked at the effects of red color signaling, because the color red has been associated with dominance and aggression (Elliot, Maier, Moller, Friedman & Meinhardt, 2007). It is also often associated with some type of warning sign, such as a stop light or a stop sign (Elliot, 2015). The implicit warning and danger conveyed by the color red has been shown to result in inhibited performance, such that participants who were exposed to the color red had lower performance on the subsequent achievement task (Elliot, Maier, Reidman & Meinhardt, 2007; Gnambs, Appel & Batinic, 2010). Similar effects have also been demonstrated in online gaming situations, where red priming messages lowered the amount of negative language usage (Maher, 2016). It is therefore likely that red priming message could also lower any potential toxic disinhibition in an online learning environment. The current study included two experiments that tested the effects of red priming message and black priming message on 1) participants’ expressed sentiment in their open- ended discussion posts, 2) participants’ self-rating of verbal aggressiveness, and 3) the total number of words generated in the open-ended responses. Past studies have shown that red color could inhibit task performance and reduce offensive language, but it is not clear how a red color priming message might affect discussion posts in a simulated online classroom. Similarly, black color has been shown not to inhibit behavior, but it is not clear how a priming message such as “exercise courtesy and professionalism” might affect participants’ behavior in an online discussion post. Results from the study indicated that red priming message caused participants to rate themselves as less verbally aggressive. This was likely due to increased attention to the priming message and the implicit warning conveyed by the color red. There was evidence that red priming message lowered the amount of negative sentiment expressed in the discussion posts. The results approached statistical significance, but it was not significant probably due to the low levels of negative sentiment expressed. Black priming message was found to be ineffective in lowering verbal aggression rating or negative sentiment expression. The findings from the current study have practical implications in the design of online courses. Instructors could use red priming messages as a strategy to promote a less verbally aggressive and negative online discussion environment.

Patients with alcohol use disorders (AUD) have difficulties with certain aspects of higher-order language functions (HOLF) but there is no data on a wide range of these functions in this group. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare different aspects of HOLF in patients with AUD and healthy controls (HC). A total of 31 patients with AUD and 44 HC took part in the study. We assessed HOLF with the Right Hemisphere Language Battery (RHLB) and measured control variables: depression using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) as well as the speed of processing and executive functions with the Color Trails Test (CTT). Patients with AUD had lower results on nine RHLB tests. Moreover, AUD patients had higher scores on PHQ and longer reaction times on CTT. The differences in most RHLB results remained significant after co-varying the control variables. Patients with AUD have difficulties with making inferences from the text, understanding the meaning of individual words, metaphorical content, and prosody, which may impede the comprehension and production of discourse in which linguistic elements must be integrated with non-verbal cues and contextual information. These disturbances may impact various spheres of everyday life and negatively influence social, private, and professional functioning.

Two experiments with human subjects assessed contextual dependencies in a stimulus equivalence paradigm. Subjects learned to form two sets of stimuli in a matching-to-sample training procedure. Each set was presented against one of two different background colours, the contextual cues. At test, the influence of a context change—that is, presenting each set against the other context—was measured on baseline, symmetry, and equivalence trials. These three trial types reflect a difference in task complexity. It was predicted that the magnitude of context-dependent effects would be a positive function of task complexity. In Experiment 1, the context change was realized by switching the stimulus set at test while keeping the background colour constant. In Experiment 2, the stimulus set remained constant, and the background colour was switched. In both experiments, a change in context only resulted in an increase in response latency on equivalence trials; no effect was seen on symmetry and baseline trials. Results were discussed in the framework of switch costs, habituation to contextual stimuli, and a model based on Shea and Wright (1995) that explains the differential influence of a context switch on easy versus difficult tasks.

Explicit or implicit assumptions about the source of illumination are a key determinant of perceived colours from the image of #TheDress. In addition, previous work showed that the extent of the processing of contextual cues in the image may be reduced in blue and black perceivers. This is a brief report of a questionnaire study which focused on the ambiguity of light direction as well as on the ambiguity of the content of #TheDress photograph itself. We replicated previous reports about the importance of perceived light direction: White and gold perceivers were more likely to report light from the back than sideways light. Descriptions of #TheDress image did not relate to perceived colour or light direction, but there were many erroneous reports and a high level of ambiguity. It is highly likely that the ambiguity of image content feeds into the importance of implicit factors that influence perceived illumination as determinants of dress colour.

In the natural world, we experience and adapt to multiple extrinsic perturbations. This poses a challenge to neural circuits in discriminating between different context-appropriate responses. Using event-related fMRI, we characterized the neural dynamics involved in this process by randomly delivering a position- or velocity-dependent torque perturbation to subjects’ arms during a target-capture task. Each perturbation was color-cued during movement preparation to provide contextual information. Although trajectories differed between perturbations, subjects significantly reduced error under both conditions. This was paralleled by reduced BOLD signal in the right dentate nucleus, the left sensorimotor cortex, and the left intraparietal sulcus. Trials included “NoGo” conditions to dissociate activity related to preparation from execution and adaptation. Subsequent analysis identified perturbation-specific neural processes underlying preparation (“NoGo”) and adaptation (“Go”) early and late into learning. Between-perturbation comparisons of BOLD magnitude revealed negligible differences for both preparation and adaptation trials. However, a network-level analysis of BOLD coherence revealed that by late learning, response preparation (“NoGo”) was attributed to a relative focusing of coherence within cortical and basal ganglia networks in both perturbation conditions, demonstrating a common network interaction for establishing arbitrary visuomotor associations. Conversely, late-learning adaptation (“Go”) was attributed to a focusing of BOLD coherence between a cortical–basal ganglia network in the viscous condition and between a cortical–cerebellar network in the positional condition. Our findings demonstrate that trial-to-trial acquisition of two distinct adaptive responses is attributed not to anatomically segregated regions, but to differential functional interactions within common sensorimotor circuits.

Previous studies report that viewing exaggerated, high-lifting reaches (versus direct reaches) primes higher vertical deviation in wrist trajectory in the observer’s subsequent reaches (trajectory priming), but it is unclear to what extent this effect depends upon task instructions relevant to top-down attention. In two experiments, participants were instructed to gaze at a dot presented on a large monitor for a colour-change go signal that cued them to execute a direct reach to a target. In the background, the monitor also displayed life-sized films of a human model. The films were of the model either remaining still or reaching to grasp a target with either a direct trajectory or an exaggerated, high-lifting trajectory. When the dot traced the human model’s wrist throughout her movement, a robust trajectory priming effect emerged. When the dot remained stationary in a central location but the human model reached in the background, the human model’s trajectory did not alter the participants’ trajectories. Finally, when the dot traced exaggerated and direct trajectories and the human model remained stationary, the dot’s movement produced an attenuated, non-significant trajectory priming effect. These findings show that top-down attentional factors modulate trajectory priming. In addition, a moving non-human stimulus does not produce the same degree of action priming when contextual factors make salient its independence of human agency and/or intention.

Many aspects of perception and cognition are supported by activity in neural populations that are tuned to different stimulus features (e.g., orientation, spatial location, color). Goal-directed behavior, such as sustained attention, requires a mechanism for the selective prioritization of contextually appropriate representations. A candidate mechanism of sustained spatial attention is neural activity in the alpha band (8–13 Hz), whose power in the human EEG covaries with the focus of covert attention. Here, we applied an inverted encoding model to assess whether spatially selective neural responses could be recovered from the topography of alpha-band oscillations during spatial attention. Participants were cued to covertly attend to one of six spatial locations arranged concentrically around fixation while EEG was recorded. A linear classifier applied to EEG data during sustained attention demonstrated successful classification of the attended location from the topography of alpha power, although not from other frequency bands. We next sought to reconstruct the focus of spatial attention over time by applying inverted encoding models to the topography of alpha power and phase. Alpha power, but not phase, allowed for robust reconstructions of the specific attended location beginning around 450 msec postcue, an onset earlier than previous reports. These results demonstrate that posterior alpha-band oscillations can be used to track activity in feature-selective neural populations with high temporal precision during the deployment of covert spatial attention.

Switching between motor tasks requires accurate adjustments for changes in dynamics (grasping a cup) or sensorimotor transformations (moving a computer mouse). Dual-adaptation studies have investigated how learning of context-dependent dynamics or transformations is enabled by sensory cues. However, certain cues, such as color, have shown mixed results. We propose that these mixed results may arise from two major classes of cues: "direct" cues, which are part of the dynamic state and "indirect" cues, which are not. We hypothesized that explicit strategies would primarily account for adaptation for an indirect color cue but would be limited to simple tasks while a direct visual separation cue would allow implicit adaptation regardless of task complexity. To test this idea, we investigated the relative contribution of implicit and explicit learning in relation to contextual cue type (colored or visually shifted workspace) and task complexity (one or eight targets) in a dual-adaptation task. We found that the visual workspace location cue enabled adaptation across conditions primarily through implicit adaptation. In contrast, we found that the color cue was largely ineffective for dual adaptation, except in a small subset of participants who appeared to use explicit strategies. Our study suggests that the previously inconclusive role of color cues in dual-adaptation may be explained by differential contribution of explicit strategies across conditions.

While colorectal cancers (CRC) are paradigmatic tumors invaded by effector memory lymphocytes, the mechanisms accounting for the relative resistance of MSI negative CRC to immunogenic cell death mediated by oxaliplatin and immune checkpoint inhibitors has remained an open conundrum. Here, we propose the viewpoint where its microenvironmental contexture could be explained -at least in part- by macroenvironmental cues constituted by the complex interplay between the epithelial barrier, its microbial ecosystem, and the local immune system. Taken together this dynamic ménage-à-trois offers novel coordinated actors of the humoral and cellular immune responses actionable to restore sensitivity to immune checkpoint inhibition. Solving this paradox involves breaking tolerance to crypt stem cells by inducing the immunogenic apoptosis of ileal cells in the context of an ileal microbiome shifted towards immunogenic bacteria using cytotoxicants. This manoeuver results in the elicitation of a productive Tfh and B cell dialogue in mesenteric lymph nodes culminating in tumor-specific memory CD8+ T cell responses sparing the normal epithelium.

In the contextual cueing task, visual search is faster for targets embedded in invariant displays compared to targets found in variant displays. However, it has been repeatedly shown that participants do not learn repeated contexts when these are irrelevant to the task. One potential explanation lays in the idea of associative blocking, where salient cues (task-relevant old items) block the learning of invariant associations in the task-irrelevant subset of items. An alternative explanation is that the associative blocking rather hinders the allocation of attention to task-irrelevant subsets, but not the learning per se. The current work examined these two explanations. In two experiments, participants performed a visual search task under a rapid presentation condition (300 ms) in Experiment 1, or under a longer presentation condition (2,500 ms) in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the search items within both old and new displays were presented in two colors which defined the irrelevant and task-relevant items within each display. The participants were asked to search for the target in the relevant subset in the learning phase. In the transfer phase, the instructions were reversed and task-irrelevant items became task-relevant (and vice versa). In line with previous studies, the search of task-irrelevant subsets resulted in no cueing effect post-transfer in the longer presentation condition; however, a reliable cueing effect was generated by task-irrelevant subsets learned under the rapid presentation. These results demonstrate that under rapid display presentation, global attentional selection leads to global context learning. However, under a longer display presentation, global attention is blocked, leading to the exclusive learning of invariant relevant items in the learning session.

Biracial Phenotypes as Ambivalent SignifiersRacialisation is the process of imbuing a body with meaning (Ahmed). Rockquemore et al.’s study on American Black-White middle-class college youth emphasises the importance of phenotypes in interracial children because “physical appearance is the primary cue for racial group membership… and remains the greatest factor in how mixed-race children are classified by others” (114). Wilson’s work on British mixed race 6 to 9-year-olds argues that interracial children classify other children based on how “they locate themselves in the racial structure and how they feel about the various racial groups” (64).However, interracial children often struggle with claiming a racial identity that does not correspond to their obvious physical appearance because society is more likely to classify or perceive the child based on their corporeal manifestations than their self-identified racial master status. In instances where they are unacknowledged or rejected by homoethinc groups, interracial persons may be deemed ‘illegitimate’ trespassers within social contexts. In response, interracial bodies may selectively hyper/under-visibilise one racial identity depending on personal connotations of the social group in particular settings (Choudhry 119). Choudhry’s book on the ‘chameleon identities’ of mixed race Black-Asian and White-Asian British young people sets out four ‘interpretative repertoires’ that interracials cognitively adopt: ‘Identity in Transition’ where individuals are still coming to terms with their master status; ‘One Ethnic Identity’ where individuals always privilege one race over the other regardless of context; ‘Interethnic Identity’ where individuals consciously and equally express their dual race and parentage at all times; and ‘Situational/Chameleon-like Identity’ where individuals selectively emphasise one race over the other when it benefits them (112-116). This paper follows on a similar mode of enquiry among Malay-Chinese women in Singapore, whose racial master status is situationally-based.In ethnically heterogeneous and culturally diverse Singapore, an individual’s racial phenotype is convenient shorthand that demarcates Others’ appropriate interactions with and expectations of them. Malbon describes these brief encounters in crowded urban settings as ‘mismeetings’, in which a body’s visual markers allow for a quick assessment and situation of a person’s identity and status. A visibly racialised body thus informs Others on how to negotiate cross-cultural sensitivities and understandings with them in a shared social space. For instance, this visibility may help inform the Other of an appropriate choice of mother tongue to be adopted in conversation with a stranger, or whether to extend non-halal food to a ‘Malay-looking’ – and by extension in most parts of South East Asia, Muslim – person.Unlike previous studies, this paper is not focused on interracial individuals’ felt-race, cognitive development, or the ethnic influence in their upbringing. Instead, it concentrates on their praxis of enacting corporeal markers to enable homophilous interactions with homoethnic social groups. Some Malay-Chinese in Singapore have phenotypic features that may not distinctly reflect their ethnic diversity. Hence, they are not readily acknowledged or accepted into some homoethnic contexts and are deemed ‘illegitimate’ trespassers. It is important for Others to be able to situate them since this “brings with it privileges or deprivations that affect [their] relationships with others and [their] relation to the world” (Mohanty 109). Every day interactions that affirm or negate one’s biraciality then become micropolitics of legitimating one’s in-group status; in the words of one woman’s reactions to Malay classmates excluding her from conversations about Hari Raya, “I also Melayu ok”. These women thus find themselves under- or hyper-visibilising facets of their biracial corporeality to negotiate legitimacy and sense of belonging. Through in-depth interviews with five young Malay-Chinese women who have had to renegotiate their biraciality in educational institutions each school year, this paper seeks to document the intentional under/hyper-performativity of biraciality through visible bodily signifiers. It argues that these biracial women who are perceived as illegitimate inhabitants of social settings have agentically adopted the ambivalence others display towards them as everyday micro-actions to exercise their autonomy, and strategically reposition themselves favourably.The five women were contacted through snowball sampling among personal networks in polytechnics and universities, which are education settings where students have the liberty to dress themselves, and thus, visibilise facets of their identity. These settings were also places in which the women had to continually under/hyper-visibilise and remark their race and ethnicity in rotating tutorial and lecture groups every semester, therefore (re)constructing their identities through peer interactions (Wilson in Choudhry 112).They were aged between 18 and 23 at the time of the interview. Their state-documented ‘official’ race, self-identified religion, and state-assigned mother tongue are tabulated below. Pseudonyms are employed.Semi-structured open-ended interviews were conducted to draw out personal nuances and interpretations of their bodies as read by Others. Our face-to-face interaction proved to be especially useful when informants physically referenced bodily markers or performed verbal cues to convey their under/hyper-visibility strategies.InformantNadiaAtiqahSaraClaireWahidaSexFemaleFemaleFemaleFemaleFemaleAge2322221822‘Official’ raceMalayMalayMalayMalayChineseReligionChristianMuslimChristianChristianMuslimMother tongueMandarinMalayMandarin MandarinMalayThe Body BeingAmong primary phenotypic cues, the women acknowledged popular perceptions of Chinese as fair-skinned and Malay as darker-skinned. This shorthand has been ingrained into society through rampant media images, especially in annual national-wide initiatives based in educational institutes such as Racial Harmony Day, International Friendship Day, and National Day. These settings utilise a ‘racial colour code’ to represent the CMIO – Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others; the four racial categories all Singaporeans are officially categorised into by the state – multiracialism in Singapore. Media imagery employs four children of different skin tones clad in ethnic dress, holding hands as symbolic of unity across diversity. So normative was this image even at the level of Primary School (7-12 year-olds) that Sara found her legitimacy in Chinese lessons questioned: “I used to be quite tanned in Primary School, quite Malay-looking… during Chinese lessons, the teacher always explained [difficult things] to me in English, as if I don’t understand Mandarin. But I even took higher Chinese...”The non-congruence of Sara’s apparently Malay phenotype and Mandarin mother tongue was perceived by her teacher as incompetence; Sara was an ‘illegitimate’ pupil in Mandarin class. Despite having been qualified enough to enrol in the higher Chinese stream that she says only takes in 10% of her cohort annually, Sara felt her high performance was negated because the visual marker of her Malayness took precedence during interactions with the teacher. Instead, English was adopted as a ‘neutral’ third language for conversing.In other instances, the women reported that while their skin tone generally enabled an audience to assign them a race, closer observations of their facial features such as their eyes signposted their racial hybridity. Claire states: “People always ask if I’m mixed blood because my eyelashes are very long and thick.” Sara experienced similar questioning gazes from strangers: “… maybe it’s my big eyes, and thick eyebrows… and my double eyelids are also very ‘Malay’?"Both Claire and Sara pointed out anatomic subtleties such as the folds of their eyelids, the size of their eyes, the volume of their eyebrows, and the length of their eyelashes as markers of their racial hybridity. There also emerged a consensus based on personal experience that Malays are more likely to have double eyelids, larger eyes, thicker eyebrows, and longer lashes, than to Chinese.Visual emphases on subtle characteristics thus help audiences interpret the biraciality of these women despite the apparent ‘incongruence’ of their skin tone and facial features. However, since racial identity is “influenced by historical, cultural, and contextual factors” (Rockquemore et al. 121), corporeal indications only serve as a primary racial cue. The next segment places these women in the context of secondary cues where the body is actively engaged in performing biraciality.The Body SpeakingThe women code-switched with choice of language, mother tongue, and manner of accents and vocal inflexions to contest initial readings of their racial status. Atiqah shares: “People always think I’m Chinese, until I open my mouth and speak Malay to ‘shock’ them. After that, they just ‘get’ that I am Malay.”Atiqah’s raised vocal inflexions and increasingly enthusiastic body language – she was clenching her fist as if to symbolically convey her victory at this point of the interview – seemed to imply that she relished in the ‘shock value’ of her big racial ‘reveal’. In a setting where her racial status was misidentified, she responded by asserting her racial legitimacy by displaying her competency of the Malay language.However, this has not always had a lasting impact in her interactions. She adds that within familiar social groups where she has long asserted her racial identity, she does not always feel acknowledged. Atiqah then attempts to ‘fit in’ by quietly deciphering her peers’ verbal exchanges: “… sometimes my Chinese friends forget that I’m ‘different’ because I’m so fair. They always talk in Mandarin… and I’ll try to figure out what they are saying from facial expressions and gestures.”Given her fair skin tone, Atiqah finds herself hypervisiblising her Malayness by utilizing the Malay language among Malay friends, even though they often converse in English themselves. In contrast, among Chinese friends where she feels her phenotypic Chinese features are visually dominant, she appears to under-visibilise this same Malayness by not speaking up about her language barrier. Language’s potential to demarcate social boundaries thus becomes a negotiative tool for Malay-Chinese women, while they simultaneously “shift their involvement and alliances” (Choudhry 119) to exercise choice over their identity.In another instance, Wahida is a fair skinned, tudung-clad, officially documented Chinese woman who identifies more as Malay. Her apparent ‘incongruence’ is of particular concern because Wahida had been attending a Madrasah up till the age of 18. Madrasahs are Islamic learning schools which also provide full-time education from Kindergarten to Junior College level, as an alternative to the mainstream track offered by the Ministry of Education in Singapore; a vast majority of Madrasah students self-identify as Malay Muslims. The desire for a sense of belonging encouraged Wahida to undervisibilise her Chineseness when she was younger:There was once my father came to pick me up from Madrasah… I forgot why but he scolded me so loudly in Mandarin! Everybody stared at me… I was so embarrassed! I already tried so hard to hide my Chinese-ness, he ruined it.Although Wahida never spoke Mandarin in school to underplay her Chineseness, ‘passing’ as a Malay necessitated intimate Others to sustain the racial construct. In this instance, her father had broken the ‘Malay’ persona she had deliberately crafted by conversing fluently in Malay in the Madrasah.Butler’s work on ‘gender as performed’ may be applied here in that what she describes as the “sustained set of acts” or a “stylization of the body” (xv) is also necessary to enact a sustained visual signifier of one’s racial identity. Although portrayed as a natural, innate, or unquestioned heritage in CMIO media portrays for Singapore, race is in fact an intentional construction. It is the practice of a certain regime of actions that contributes to the establishment of one’s raced personality. One is not naturally ‘Malay’ or ‘Chinese’ for these identities have to be carefully rehearsed and performed in order to translate one’s hereditary race into an outward expression of visible-race as practiced. As evidenced, this constant performance of Wahida’s racial self is fragile and dialectic, especially when other actors (such as her father) do not respond favourably to her intended presentation of self.Within a supposedly neutral third language such as English, the women also demonstrated their manipulation of accents emphasising or underplaying what they deem to be Malay or Chinese intonations and syllabic stresses. Sara explains:When I’m with my Malay friends, I speak with the mat [shortened from the local colloquial term matrep which loosely stands for the Malay version of a chav or a redneck] accent. Sometimes it’s subconscious… but sometimes it’s on purpose... they all speak like that… when I speak my ‘proper’ English, I feel out of place.Sara then demonstrates that Malay-accented English nasally accentuates the ‘N’ consonant, where words such ‘morning’ and ‘action’ have weighted pronunciations as ‘mornang’ and ‘actione’. Words that begin with a ‘C’ consonant are also developed into a voiced plosive ‘K’ sound, where words such as ‘corner’ and ‘concept’ are articulated as ‘korner’ and ‘koncept’, similar to the Malay language. Claire, who demonstrated similar Malay-accented utterances, supported this.Claire also noted that within Singlish – the colloquial spoken Singaporean English – Malay-accented English also tends towards end-sentence inflexions such as “seh”, “sia”, and “siol” in place of the more Mandarin-accented English that employs the end-sentence inflexions “ba”, and “ma”.Racialising spoken English is a symbolic interaction that interracial bodies may utilise to gain recognition and acceptance into a racial group that has not yet acknowledged their ‘legitimate’ membership. This is a manifestation of Cooley’s ‘looking glass self’ where an individual’s presentation of the body is based how they think other actors’ perceive them. In doing so, biracial bodies are able to exaggerate or obscure some corporeal traits to convey their preferred racial master status.The Body DoingPhysical gestures that constitute a ‘racial code’ are mirrored and socialised among children during their upbringing, since these designate one’s bodily boundaries and limits of exchange. Thus, while unseen by outsiders, insiders of the racial group may appropriate subtle gesticulations to demarcate and legitimate each other’s membership. Atiqah contends: “We [the Malays] always salaam each other when we first meet, it’s like a signal to show that we are ‘the same’ you know, so as long as I ‘act’ Malay, then my [colour] doesn’t really matter.”The salaam is a salutation of Islamic origin, signifying ‘peace to you’. It usually involves taking the back of the hand of a senior and bringing it to one’s forehead, heart, or lips. It is commonly practiced among Malays and Muslims. However, when a body’s phenotypic markers do not adequately signify racial identity, insiders may not extend such affective body language to them. As Nadia laments:When I first came to uni, the Malay kampong [literally translates into ‘village’, but figuratively stands for a social group in which reciprocal Malay cultural relationality is attached] couldn’t tell I was one of them… when I tried to salaam one of [the boys], he asked me why I was shaking his hand!Butler illuminated the notion of bodily signifiers (skin tone) marking access and limitations of corporeal exchange (salaam). Visual signifiers on biracial bodies must thus be significant enough to signpost one’s racial master status, in order to be positively assessed, acknowledged, and legitimated by Others.Among the women, only Wahida had committed to wearing a tudung at the time of the interview. Although a religious Islamic practice (as opposed to a culturally Malay one), such ethnic dress as ethnic signifier takes precedence over one’s ambivalent bodily markers. Wahida expressed that dressing in her jubah hyper-visualised her Malayness, especially when she was schooling in a Madrasah where fellow students dressed similarly.Omar’s concept of Masuk Melayu – literally ‘to enter Malayness’ – describes non-ethnic Malays who ‘become’ Malay through converting into Islam and practising the religion. Despite Wahida’s ambivalent fair skin tone, donning a tudung publically signifies her religious inclination and signals to Other Malays her racial master status. This thus earns her legitimacy in the social group more so than other ambivalent Malay-Chinese women without such religious symbolism.Agentic IllegitimacyIn negotiating their biraciality within the setting of educational institutions, these five Malay-Chinese women expressed the body ‘being’, ‘speaking’, and ‘doing’ strategies in which selected traits more commonly associated with Malayness or Chineseness were hyper-visibilised or under-visibilised, depending on the setting in which they find themselves (Wilson), and social group in which they want to gain membership and favour. Sara recalls having to choose an ethnic dress to wear to her Primary School’s Racial Harmony Day. Her father suggested “a mix” such as “a red baju kurung” or a “green cheong sum” (in Singapore, red is associated with the festivities of Chinese New Year and green with Hari Raya) where she could express her biraciality. Owing to this childhood memory, she says she still attempts to convey her racial hybridity by dressing strategically at festive family gatherings. Atiqah similarly peppers conversations with Chinese friends with the few Mandarin phrases she knows, partly to solicit an affective response when they tease her for “trying”, and also to subtly remind them of her desire for acknowledgement and inclusivity. Despite expressing similar frustrations over their exclusion and ‘illegitimate’ status in homoethnic settings, the women reacted agentically by continuously asserting emic readings of their corporeal ambivalence, and entering into spaces that give them the opportunity to reframe Others’ readings of their visual markers through microactions. However, enacting this agentic ethnic repertoire necessitates an intimate understanding of both Malay and Chinese social markers (Choudhry 120).None of the women suggested completely dissociating themselves from either Malayness or Chineseness, although they may selectively hyper-visibilise one over the other to legitimate their group membership. Instead, they engage in a continuously dialectic repositioning that requires reflexivity, self-awareness, and an attentiveness to how they are perceived from the etic. By inculcating Malay and Chinese social cues into their repertoire, these biracial women can strategically enact their desired racial master status fluently, treating ethnic identity as fluid and in flux (Choudhry 120). In transgressing popular perceptions of CMIO imagery, Malay-Chinese women use their bodies as a sustained site for contesting visual racial stereotypes and reframe their everyday ‘illegitimacy’ into agentic ambivalence, albeit only selectively in spaces where their racial membership would be favourable.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Racialized Bodies.” Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction. Ed. Mary Evans, and Ellie Lee. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 46-63.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.Choudhry, Sultana. Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.Cooley, Charles. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner's, 1902. Katz, Ilan. The Construction of Racial Identity in Children of Mixed Parentage – Mixed Metaphors. London: J. Kingsley Publishers, 1996.Malbon, Ben. “The Club. 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