Eye guidance during real-world scene search:The role color plays in central and peripheral vision

The visual system utilizes environmental features to direct gaze efficiently when locating objects. While previous research has isolated various features' contributions to gaze guidance, these studies generally used sparse displays and did not investigate how features facilitated search as a function of their location on the visual field. The current study investigated how features across the visual field-particularly color-facilitate gaze guidance during real-world search. A gaze-contingent window followed participants' eye movements, restricting color information to specified regions. Scene images were presented in full color, with color in the periphery and gray in central vision or gray in the periphery and color in central vision, or in grayscale. Color conditions were crossed with a search cue manipulation, with the target cued either with a word label or an exact picture. Search times increased as color information in the scene decreased. A gaze-data based decomposition of search time revealed color-mediated effects on specific subprocesses of search. Color in peripheral vision facilitated target localization, whereas color in central vision facilitated target verification. Picture cues facilitated search, with the effects of cue specificity and scene color combining additively. When available, the visual system utilizes the environment's color information to facilitate different real-world visual search behaviors based on the location within the visual field

Advertising and Word-of-Mouth Effects on Pre-launch Consumer Interest and Initial Sales of Experience Products

This study examines how consumers' interest in a new experience product develops as a result of advertising and word-of-mouth activities during the pre-launch period. The empirical settings are the U.S. motion picture and video game industries. The focal variables include weekly ad spend, blog volume, online search volume during pre-launch periods, opening-week sales, and product characteristics. We treat pre-launch search volume of keywords as a measure of pre-launch consumer interest in the related product. To identify probable persistent effects among the pre-launch time-series variables, we apply a vector autoregressive modeling approach. We find that blog postings have permanent, trend-setting effects on pre-launch consumer interest in a new product, while advertising has only temporary effects. In the U.S. motion picture industry, the four-week cumulative elasticity of pre-launch consumer interest is 0.187 to advertising and 0.635 to blog postings. In the U.S. video game industry, the elasticities are 0.093 and 1.306, respectively. We also find long-run co-evolution between blog and search volume, which suggests that consumers' interest in the upcoming product cannot grow without bounds for a given level of blog volume

On Scattering of Electromagnetic Waves by a Wormhole

We consider scattering of a plane electromagnetic wave by a wormhole. It is found that the scattered wave is partially depolarized and has a specific interference picture depending on parameters of the wormhole and the distance to the observer. It is proposed that such features can be important in the direct search of wormholes

Search in the Product Market and the Real Business Cycle

Empirical evidence suggests that most firms operate in imperfectly competitivemarkets. We develop a search-matching model between wholesalers and retailers. Firms face search costs and form long-term relationships. Price bargain results in both wholesaler and retailer markups, depending on firms’ relative bargaining power. We simulate the model to explore the role of product market search frictions in business cycles. We show that the way search costs are modelled is crucial to provide a realistic picture of firms’ business environment and improve the cyclical properties of an otherwise standard real business cycle model.Business cycle, Frictions, Product market, Price bargain

An Empirical Analysis of Search in GSAT

We describe an extensive study of search in GSAT, an approximation procedure for propositional satisfiability. GSAT performs greedy hill-climbing on the number of satisfied clauses in a truth assignment. Our experiments provide a more complete picture of GSAT's search than previous accounts. We describe in detail the two phases of search: rapid hill-climbing followed by a long plateau search. We demonstrate that when applied to randomly generated 3SAT problems, there is a very simple scaling with problem size for both the mean number of satisfied clauses and the mean branching rate. Our results allow us to make detailed numerical conjectures about the length of the hill-climbing phase, the average gradient of this phase, and to conjecture that both the average score and average branching rate decay exponentially during plateau search. We end by showing how these results can be used to direct future theoretical analysis. This work provides a case study of how computer experiments can be used to improve understanding of the theoretical properties of algorithms.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file