Vividness, Consciousness, and Mental Imagery

Today in many studies, mental images are still either treated as conscious by definition, or as empirical operations implicit to completing some type of task, such as the measurement of reaction time in mental rotation, an underlying mental image is assumed, but there is no direct determination of whether it is conscious or not. The vividness of mental images is a potentially helpful construct which may be suitable, as it may correspond to consciousness or aspects of the consciousness of images. In this context, a complicating factor seems to be the surprising variety in what is meant by the term vividness or how it is used or theorized. To fill some of the gaps, the goal of the present Special Issue is to create a publication outlet where authors can fully explore through sound research the missing theoretical and empirical links between vividness, consciousness and mental imagery across disciplines, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, to mention the most obvious ones, as well as transdisciplinary methodological (single, combined, or multiple) approaches

Ghetto of Venice: Access to the Target Node and the Random Target Access Time

Random walks defined on undirected graphs assign the absolute scores to all nodes based on the quality of path they provide for random walkers. In city space syntax, the notion of segregation acquires a statistical interpretation with respect to random walks. We analyze the spatial network of Venetian canals and detect its most segregated part which can be identified with canals adjacent to the Ghetto of Venice.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

CAD-model-based vision for space applications

A pose acquisition system operating in space must be able to perform well in a variety of different applications including automated guidance and inspections tasks with many different, but known objects. Since the space station is being designed with automation in mind, there will be CAD models of all the objects, including the station itself. The construction of vision models and procedures directly from the CAD models is the goal of this project. The system that is being designed and implementing must convert CAD models to vision models, predict visible features from a given view point from the vision models, construct view classes representing views of the objects, and use the view class model thus derived to rapidly determine the pose of the object from single images and/or stereo pairs

Perceptual Grouping for Contour Extraction

This paper describes an algorithm that efficiently groups line segments into perceptually salient contours in complex images. A measure of affinity between pairs of lines is used to guide group formation and limit the branching factor of the contour search procedure. The extracted contours are ranked, and presented as a contour hierarchy. Our algorithm is able to extract salient contours in the presence of texture, clutter, and repetitive or ambiguous image structure. We show experimental results on a complex line-set. 1

Dynamic coordination in brain and mind

Our goal here is to clarify the concept of 'dynamic coordination', and to note major issues that it raises for the cognitive neurosciences. In general, coordinating interactions are those that produce coherent and relevant overall patterns of activity, while preserving the essential individual identities and functions of the activities coordinated. 'Dynamic coordination' is the coordination that is created on a moment-by-moment basis so as to deal effectively with unpredictable aspects of the current situation. We distinguish different computational goals for dynamic coordination, and outline issues that arise concerning local cortical circuits, brain systems, cognition, and evolution. Our focus here is on dynamic coordination by widely distributed processes of self-organisation, but we also discuss the role of central executive processes

Dynamic coordination in brain and mind

Our goal here is to clarify the concept of 'dynamic coordination', and to note major issues that it raises for the cognitive neurosciences. In general, coordinating interactions are those that produce coherent and relevant overall patterns of activity, while preserving the essential individual identities and functions of the activities coordinated. 'Dynamic coordination' is the coordination that is created on a moment-by-moment basis so as to deal effectively with unpredictable aspects of the current situation. We distinguish different computational goals for dynamic coordination, and outline issues that arise concerning local cortical circuits, brain systems, cognition, and evolution. Our focus here is on dynamic coordination by widely distributed processes of self-organisation, but we also discuss the role of central executive processes

Structural matching by discrete relaxation

This paper describes a Bayesian framework for performing relational graph matching by discrete relaxation. Our basic aim is to draw on this framework to provide a comparative evaluation of a number of contrasting approaches to relational matching. Broadly speaking there are two main aspects to this study. Firstly we locus on the issue of how relational inexactness may be quantified. We illustrate that several popular relational distance measures can be recovered as specific limiting cases of the Bayesian consistency measure. The second aspect of our comparison concerns the way in which structural inexactness is controlled. We investigate three different realizations ai the matching process which draw on contrasting control models. The main conclusion of our study is that the active process of graph-editing outperforms the alternatives in terms of its ability to effectively control a large population of contaminating clutter