Auditory conflict and congruence in frontotemporal dementia.

Impaired analysis of signal conflict and congruence may contribute to diverse socio-emotional symptoms in frontotemporal dementias, however the underlying mechanisms have not been defined. Here we addressed this issue in patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; n = 19) and semantic dementia (SD; n = 10) relative to healthy older individuals (n = 20). We created auditory scenes in which semantic and emotional congruity of constituent sounds were independently probed; associated tasks controlled for auditory perceptual similarity, scene parsing and semantic competence. Neuroanatomical correlates of auditory congruity processing were assessed using voxel-based morphometry. Relative to healthy controls, both the bvFTD and SD groups had impaired semantic and emotional congruity processing (after taking auditory control task performance into account) and reduced affective integration of sounds into scenes. Grey matter correlates of auditory semantic congruity processing were identified in distributed regions encompassing prefrontal, parieto-temporal and insular areas and correlates of auditory emotional congruity in partly overlapping temporal, insular and striatal regions. Our findings suggest that decoding of auditory signal relatedness may probe a generic cognitive mechanism and neural architecture underpinning frontotemporal dementia syndromes

The Chemical Senses

Long-standing neglect of the chemical senses in the philosophy of perception is due, mostly, to their being regarded as ‘lower’ senses. Smell, taste, and chemically irritated touch are thought to produce mere bodily sensations. However, empirically informed theories of perception can show how these senses lead to perception of objective properties, and why they cannot be treated as special cases of perception modelled on vision. The senses of taste, touch, and smell also combine to create unified perceptions of flavour. The nature of these multimodal experiences and the character of our awareness of them puts pressure on the traditional idea that each episode of perception goes one or other of the five senses. Thus, the chemical senses, far from being peripheral to the concerns of the philosophy of perception, may hold important clues to the multisensory nature of perception in general

The Impact of Congruence between Brand and Celebrity Endorsers on Advertising Effectiveness: An Eye-tracking Study

Department of Human Factors EngineeringRecent studies on the role of celebrity endorsers in the advertising of attractiveness-related products (e.g. cosmetics, perfumes, etc.) have demonstrated that congruence between brand and celebrity affects advertising effectiveness. According to the previous research, less congruence causes the vampire effect defined as a decrease in the brand recall due to attraction towards a celebrity endorser in advertising. By far, studies on celebrity endorsement have only focused on congruence between brand and the physical appearance of a celebrity endorser (appearance congruence) based on the theoretical background of source attractiveness and match-up hypothesis. Today, however, meaning transfer model should be significantly considered because of the increase of a variety of communication windows between celebrity and consumers. In that sense, congruence between the brand value and celebrities??? personal image (value congruence) can influence advertising effectiveness, by making it fluent to retrieve the associative memory of advertising with celebrity based on an accessibility-diagnostic framework. Therefore, the present study investigates whether value congruence is as important as appearance congruence for improving advertising effectiveness and whether the congruences have an impact on the changed attention leading to advertising effectiveness. In this study, the main experiment was carried out with the newly recruited 24 female subjects. The stimuli for the main experiment was selected through the preliminary experiment. During the experiment, subjects were shown a series of 60 stimuli in the form of an advertisement poster, and their eye-gaze was recording. Next, subjects were requested to rank the level of appropriateness of each stimulus while their eye-gaze was tracked. After that, advertising recall and recognition tests were done, and they were also asked to evaluate value congruence as well as appearance congruence. Finally, subjects evaluated appropriateness, effectiveness, and liking of each stimulus. Results showed that both appearance congruence and value congruence were crucial for advertising effectiveness. Behavioral responses revealed that it was more appropriate for a celebrity who has both appearance congruence and value congruence to promote the brand, and especially, value congruence was more influential than appearance congruence. The eye-tracking data also implies that the memory regarding advertising can be encoded by associative celebrity endorser faster without the longer attention. In summary, the results indicated that value congruence could play an important role for more accurate recall. These findings suggest that value congruence is as important as value congruence for improvement of the advertising effectiveness. Therefore, to establish brand identity effectively, considering value congruence may enhance print advertising effectiveness beyond the level by simply focusing on appearance congruence.ope

Visual Search in Naturalistic Imagery

Visual search has been extensively studied in the laboratory, yielding broad insights into how we search through and attend to the world around us. In order to know if these insights are valid, however, this research must not be confined to the sanitized imagery typically found within the lab. Comparatively little research has been conducted on visual search within naturalistic settings, and this gap must therefore be bridged in order to further our understanding of visual search. Based on the results of Experiment 1, Experiment 2 was conducted to test three common effects observed in previous studies of visual search: the effects of background complexity, target-background similarity, and target-distractor similarity on response time. Results show that these hypotheses carry over to the natural world, but also that there are other effects present not accounted for by current theories of visual search. The argument is made for the modification of these theories to incorporate this naturalistic information

Can speaker gaze modulate syntactic structuring and thematic role assignment during spoken sentence comprehension?

Knoeferle P, Kreysa H. Can speaker gaze modulate syntactic structuring and thematic role assignment during spoken sentence comprehension? Frontiers in Psychology. 2012;3:538.During comprehension, a listener can rapidly follow a frontally seated speaker’s gaze to an object before its mention, a behavior which can shorten latencies in speeded sentence verification. However, the robustness of gaze-following, its interaction with core comprehension processes such as syntactic structuring, and the persistence of its effects are unclear. In two “visual-world” eye-tracking experiments participants watched a video of a speaker, seated at an angle, describing transitive (non-depicted) actions between two of three Second Life characters on a computer screen. Sentences were in German and had either subjectNP1-verb-objectNP2 or objectNP1-verb-subjectNP2 structure; the speaker either shifted gaze to the NP2 character or was obscured. Several seconds later, participants verified either the sentence referents or their role relations. When participants had seen the speaker’s gaze shift, they anticipated the NP2 character before its mention and earlier than when the speaker was obscured. This effect was more pronounced for SVO than OVS sentences in both tasks. Interactions of speaker gaze and sentence structure were more pervasive in role-relations verification: participants verified the role relations faster for SVO than OVS sentences, and faster when they had seen the speaker shift gaze than when the speaker was obscured. When sentence and template role-relations matched, gaze-following even eliminated the SVO-OVS response-time differences. Thus, gaze-following is robust even when the speaker is seated at an angle to the listener; it varies depending on the syntactic structure and thematic role relations conveyed by a sentence; and its effects can extend to delayed post-sentence comprehension processes. These results suggest that speaker gaze effects contribute pervasively to visual attention and comprehension processes and should thus be accommodated by accounts of situated language comprehension

Freeform User Interfaces for Graphical Computing

報告番号: 甲15222 ; 学位授与年月日: 2000-03-29 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 博工第4717号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科情報工学専