"Extreme Attention to the Real": Levinas and Religious Hermeneutics

One important area of Levinas's Jewish thought consists in his Talmudic read~ ings. Over the course of many years, he developed an approach to the reading of Talmud that relies, implicitly and explicitly, on various hermeneutical principles. A fundamental characteristic of rabbinic reading, according to Levinas, is "ex~ creme attention to the Real;' the complexity of both human nature and the many concrete situations to which human beings must respond. This essay uses one of the Talmudic readings as a springboard for an exploration of the hermeneutics that are at work in Levinas' approach, including, in this case, his own very real relationship to and disappointment with his teacher, Martin Heidegger

Measuring readiness-to-hand through differences in attention to the task vs. attention to the tool

New interaction techniques, like multi-touch, tangible inter-action, and mid-air gestures often promise to be more intuitive and natural; however, there is little work on how to measure these constructs. One way is to leverage the phenomenon of tool embodiment—when a tool becomes an extension of one’s body, attention shifts to the task at hand, rather than the tool itself. In this work, we constructed a framework to measure tool embodiment by incorporating philosophical and psychological concepts. We applied this framework to design and conduct a study that uses attention to measure readiness-to-hand with both a physical tool and a virtual tool. We introduce a novel task where participants use a tool to rotate an object, while simultaneously responding to visual stimuli both near their hand and near the task. Our results showed that participants paid more attention to the task than to both kinds of tool. We also discuss how this evaluation framework can be used to investigate whether novel interaction techniques allow for this kind of tool embodiment.Postprin

What does Attention in Neural Machine Translation Pay Attention to?

Attention in neural machine translation provides the possibility to encode relevant parts of the source sentence at each translation step. As a result, attention is considered to be an alignment model as well. However, there is no work that specifically studies attention and provides analysis of what is being learned by attention models. Thus, the question still remains that how attention is similar or different from the traditional alignment. In this paper, we provide detailed analysis of attention and compare it to traditional alignment. We answer the question of whether attention is only capable of modelling translational equivalent or it captures more information. We show that attention is different from alignment in some cases and is capturing useful information other than alignments.Comment: To appear in IJCNLP 201

Paying attention to meaning

Several paradigms show that responses to one event compromise responses to a second event for around 500 ms. Such effects are generally attributed to attentional capacity limitations associated with processing information in the first event. In a task in which targets could be distinguished only by their meaning, we varied the semantic relationship between distractors and targets following at different lags. Semantic relatedness alone produced a classic attentional blink. We conclude by discussing how attention theory might best accommodate these new effects

Innovations in practice: an objective measure of attention, impulsivity and activity reduces time to confirm attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis in children: a completed audit cycle

Background Diagnosing attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and young people typically relies on clinical observation and subjective parent, teacher and self-reports. The subjective nature of reports combined with contradictory or missing data can result in diagnostic uncertainty and delay. The aim of this study was to assess whether the addition of an objective test of attention, impulsivity and activity (QbTest) as an adjunct to standard ADHD assessment could accelerate the diagnostic process in routine National Health Service (NHS) settings. Method In a pre vs. post-test audit design, case records were examined in 40 cases diagnosed without the QbTest [pre-QbTest group] and 40 cases diagnosed with the QbTest [QbTest group], recording the number of consultations until a confirmed ADHD diagnosis was reached. Results Using Poisson regression, significantly fewer clinician consultations (mean 2.18 vs. 3.05; p < .02) were required to confirm the diagnosis of ADHD when the QbTest was used to augment assessment in comparison to standard assessment as usual. Conclusions The findings suggest that the addition of the QbTest to standard clinical assessment may reduce time to diagnosis and potentially result in cost savings to the NHS. These preliminary data suggest that there is a potentially clinically meaningful benefit of adding the QbTest to routine clinical ADHD assessment and this should be examined next in the context of a randomised controlled trial