Facial disfigurement, categorical perception, and the influence of Disgust Sensitivity

Previous research supports the categorical perception of faces on dimensions including emotion, identity, and gender. Two experiments using standard paradigms investigated whether facial disfigurement forms another perceptual category. In the Identification task, faces were presented in varying degrees of disfigurement for a simple disfigured / non-disfigured decision. As degree of disfigurement increased, the percentage of participants defining each image as disfigured increased non-linearly such that a cubic curve provided the best fit to the data, consistent with categorical perception (Experiment 1 and 2). In the ABX task, participants displayed superior discrimination between two faces when they crossed the category boundary between non-disfigured and disfigured (Experiment 1 and participants low in Disgust Sensitivity in Experiment 2). Participants high in Disgust Sensitivity (Experiment 2) showed a pattern that suggested the category boundary was shifted towards earlier perception of disfigurement. Overall, the results suggest categorical perception of facial disfigurement

Phonetic accommodation in non‑native directed speech supports L2 word learning and pronunciation

Published: 02 December 2023This study assessed whether Non-native Directed Speech (NNDS) facilitates second language (L2) learning, specifically L2 word learning and production. Spanish participants (N = 50) learned novel English words, presented either in NNDS or Native-Directed Speech (NDS), in two tasks: Recognition and Production. Recognition involved matching novel objects to their labels produced in NNDS or NDS. Production required participants to pronounce these objects’ labels. The novel words contained English vowel contrasts, which approximated Spanish vowel categories more (/i-ɪ/) or less (/ʌ-æ/). Participants in the NNDS group exhibited faster recognition of novel words, improved learning, and produced the /i-ɪ/ contrast with greater distinctiveness in comparison to the NDS group. Participants’ ability to discriminate the target vowel contrasts was also assessed before and after the tasks, with no improvement detected in the two groups. These findings support the didactic assumption of NNDS, indicating the relevance of the phonetic adaptations in this register for successful L2 acquisition.This research was supported by a Doctoral Fellowship (LCF/BQ/DI19/11730045) from “La Caixa” Foundation (ID 100010434) to G.P., and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Ramon y Cajal Research Fellowship (RYC2018-024284-I) to M.K. This research was supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2022-2025 program and by the Spanish State Research Agency through BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation CEX2020-001010-S. The research was also supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PID2020-113926GB-I00 to C.D.M.), and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 819093 to C.D.M.)

Rethinking residue, an investigation of pharyngeal residue on flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing: the past, present, and future directions

This dissertation investigated measures of pharyngeal residue as seen on flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES). Research in this area of deglutology has been stalled due to measurement problems. The particular aims of this project were to compare visual analog scale ratings to categorical ratings of residue on FEES, and to investigate various measurement aspects. METHODS: Speech language pathologists were asked to rate residue from 81 swallows on FEES that demonstrated a wide range of residue severity for thin liquid, applesauce, and cracker boluses. A total of 33 clinicians rated the amount of residue at the time point after the first swallow, twice in a randomized fashion: the first time on a visual analog scale (VAS) and the second time categorically on a five point Likert scale. The results were analyzed for (1) inter/intra-rater agreement, (2) correlations between ratings and residue severity for each rating method, and (3) clusters of ratings to better define the scales and their clinical significance. A total of 2,673 VAS ratings and 2,673 categorical ratings were collected. RESULTS: (1) Both inter- and intra-rater reliability met acceptable levels of agreement, although intra-rater reliability on VAS ratings were slightly higher (r=0.8–0.9) than categorical ratings (k=0.7–0.8). Expert ratings were not significantly different from other clinicians’ ratings for any severity of any of the 3 boluses. (2) Residue ratings fit best on a curvilinear model; a quadratic fit of the data significantly improved the r2 values for each bolus type. (3) An increased residue amount, rated on either the VAS or categorical scale, was significantly associated with worse penetration-aspiration scale scores, but no significant relationship was found between the two methods of residue ratings and measures of quality of life or diet. Novel computerized methods are proposed for future measurement pursuits. CONCLUSION: The results of this dissertation suggest that residue is best measured on a scale with unequal intervals, and clinicians can be reliable in rating overall amount of residue on FEES after the first swallow. Novel computerized measurement approaches are useful building blocks for future research. It is hoped that with better measurement will come better understanding of residue, its risks, and consequences

Rethinking residue, an investigation of pharyngeal residue on flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing: the past, present, and future directions

This dissertation investigated measures of pharyngeal residue as seen on flexible endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES). Research in this area of deglutology has been stalled due to measurement problems. The particular aims of this project were to compare visual analog scale ratings to categorical ratings of residue on FEES, and to investigate various measurement aspects. METHODS: Speech language pathologists were asked to rate residue from 81 swallows on FEES that demonstrated a wide range of residue severity for thin liquid, applesauce, and cracker boluses. A total of 33 clinicians rated the amount of residue at the time point after the first swallow, twice in a randomized fashion: the first time on a visual analog scale (VAS) and the second time categorically on a five point Likert scale. The results were analyzed for (1) inter/intra-rater agreement, (2) correlations between ratings and residue severity for each rating method, and (3) clusters of ratings to better define the scales and their clinical significance. A total of 2,673 VAS ratings and 2,673 categorical ratings were collected. RESULTS: (1) Both inter- and intra-rater reliability met acceptable levels of agreement, although intra-rater reliability on VAS ratings were slightly higher (r=0.8–0.9) than categorical ratings (k=0.7–0.8). Expert ratings were not significantly different from other clinicians’ ratings for any severity of any of the 3 boluses. (2) Residue ratings fit best on a curvilinear model; a quadratic fit of the data significantly improved the r2 values for each bolus type. (3) An increased residue amount, rated on either the VAS or categorical scale, was significantly associated with worse penetration-aspiration scale scores, but no significant relationship was found between the two methods of residue ratings and measures of quality of life or diet. Novel computerized methods are proposed for future measurement pursuits. CONCLUSION: The results of this dissertation suggest that residue is best measured on a scale with unequal intervals, and clinicians can be reliable in rating overall amount of residue on FEES after the first swallow. Novel computerized measurement approaches are useful building blocks for future research. It is hoped that with better measurement will come better understanding of residue, its risks, and consequences

Intrinsic Motivation Systems for Autonomous Mental Development

Exploratory activities seem to be intrinsically rewarding for children and crucial for their cognitive development. Can a machine be endowed with such an intrinsic motivation system? This is the question we study in this paper, presenting a number of computational systems that try to capture this drive towards novel or curious situations. After discussing related research coming from developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental robotics, and active learning, this paper presents the mechanism of Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity, an intrinsic motivation system which pushes a robot towards situations in which it maximizes its learning progress. This drive makes the robot focus on situations which are neither too predictable nor too unpredictable, thus permitting autonomous mental development.The complexity of the robot’s activities autonomously increases and complex developmental sequences self-organize without being constructed in a supervised manner. Two experiments are presented illustrating the stage-like organization emerging with this mechanism. In one of them, a physical robot is placed on a baby play mat with objects that it can learn to manipulate. Experimental results show that the robot first spends time in situations which are easy to learn, then shifts its attention progressively to situations of increasing difficulty, avoiding situations in which nothing can be learned. Finally, these various results are discussed in relation to more complex forms of behavioral organization and data coming from developmental psychology. Key words: Active learning, autonomy, behavior, complexity, curiosity, development, developmental trajectory, epigenetic robotics, intrinsic motivation, learning, reinforcement learning, values

The Mechanics of Embodiment: A Dialogue on Embodiment and Computational Modeling

Embodied theories are increasingly challenging traditional views of cognition by arguing that conceptual representations that constitute our knowledge are grounded in sensory and motor experiences, and processed at this sensorimotor level, rather than being represented and processed abstractly in an amodal conceptual system. Given the established empirical foundation, and the relatively underspecified theories to date, many researchers are extremely interested in embodied cognition but are clamouring for more mechanistic implementations. What is needed at this stage is a push toward explicit computational models that implement sensory-motor grounding as intrinsic to cognitive processes. In this article, six authors from varying backgrounds and approaches address issues concerning the construction of embodied computational models, and illustrate what they view as the critical current and next steps toward mechanistic theories of embodiment. The first part has the form of a dialogue between two fictional characters: Ernest, the �experimenter�, and Mary, the �computational modeller�. The dialogue consists of an interactive sequence of questions, requests for clarification, challenges, and (tentative) answers, and touches the most important aspects of grounded theories that should inform computational modeling and, conversely, the impact that computational modeling could have on embodied theories. The second part of the article discusses the most important open challenges for embodied computational modelling

Continuous Estimation of Emotions in Speech by Dynamic Cooperative Speaker Models

Automatic emotion recognition from speech has been recently focused on the prediction of time-continuous dimensions (e.g., arousal and valence) of spontaneous and realistic expressions of emotion, as found in real-life interactions. However, the automatic prediction of such emotions poses several challenges, such as the subjectivity found in the definition of a gold standard from a pool of raters and the issue of data scarcity in training models. In this work, we introduce a novel emotion recognition system, based on ensemble of single-speaker-regression-models (SSRMs). The estimation of emotion is provided by combining a subset of the initial pool of SSRMs selecting those that are most concordance among them. The proposed approach allows the addition or removal of speakers from the ensemble without the necessity to re-build the entire machine learning system. The simplicity of this aggregation strategy, coupled with the flexibility assured by the modular architecture, and the promising results obtained on the RECOLA database highlight the potential implications of the proposed method in a real-life scenario and in particular in WEB-based applications