Hyperbolic Figures

It’s natural for hyperbole to mix with metaphor and irony, and other figures of speech. How do they mix together and what kind of compound, if any, arises out of the mixing? In tackling this question, I shall argue that thinking of hyperbolic figures along the lines familiar from ironic metaphor compounds is a temptation we should resist. Looking in particular at hyperbolic metaphor and hyperbolic irony, I argue, they don’t yield a new encompassing compound figure with one figure building on another. Instead, what we have is one dominant figure colored with hyperbolic tinges. So what does hyperbole bring to the mixing pot? I suggest we should think of hyperbole in hyperbolic figures as being an interpretive effect, modulating the working of the partner figure and thus rendering more emphatic

Vicarious experiences and detection accuracy while observing pain and touch: the effect of perspective taking

In this study, we investigated the effects of observing pain and touch in others on vicarious somatosensory experiences and the detection of subtle somatosensory stimuli. Furthermore, the effect of taking a first- versus a third-person perspective was investigated. Undergraduates (N = 57) viewed videos depicting hands being pricked (pain), hands being touched by a cotton swab (touch), and control scenes (same approaching movement of a hand as in the other video categories, but without the painful/touching object) while experiencing vibrotactile stimuli themselves on the left, on the right, or on both hands. Participants reported the location at which they felt a somatosensory stimulus. The vibrotactile stimuli and visual scenes were applied in a spatially congruent or incongruent way, and other trials were presented without vibrotactile stimuli. The videos were depicted in first-person perspective and third-person perspective (i.e., the videos were shown upside down). We calculated the proportions of correct responses and false alarms (i.e., numbers of trials on which a vicarious somatosensory experience was reported congruent or incongruent to the site of the visual information). Pain-related scenes facilitated the detection of tactile stimuli and augmented the number of vicarious somatosensory experiences, as compared with observing the touch or control videos. Detection accuracy was higher for videos depicted in first-person perspective than for those in third-person perspective. Perspective had no effect on the number of vicarious somatosensory experiences. This study indicates that somatosensory detection is particularly enhanced during the observation of pain-related scenes, as compared to the observation of touch or control videos. These research findings further demonstrate that perspective taking impacts somatosensory detection, but not the report of vicarious experiences

Person, persona, and personality modification : An in-depth qualitative exploration of quantitative findings

Peer reviewedPostprin

Personalize Wayfinding Information for Fire Responders based on Virtual Reality Training Data

Modern buildings with increasing complexity can cause serious difficulties for first responders in emergency wayfinding. While real-time data collection and information analytics become easier in indoor wayfinding, a new challenge has arisen: cognitive overload due to information redundancy. Standardized and universal spatial information systems are still widely used in emergency wayfinding, ignoring first responders’ individual difference in information intake. This paper proposes and tests the theoretical framework of a spatial information systems for first responders, which reflects their individual difference in information preference and helps reduce the cognitive load in line of duty. The proposed method includes the use of Virtual Reality (VR) experiments to simulate real world buildings, and the modeling of first responders’ reactions to different information formats and contents in simulated wayfinding tasks. This work is expected to set a foundation of future spatial information system that correctly and effectively responds to first responders’ needs

Children's Third-Party Punishment Behaviour: The Roles of Deterrent Motives, Affective States and Moral Domains

Children engage in third-party punishment (3PP) from a young age in response to harm and fairness violations. However, several areas about children’s 3PP are still un-investigated: their motivations for engaging in 3PP; the emotional consequences of enacting 3PP; and the effect of moral domains on 3PP. In order to explore these topics, I developed two computerised paradigms: the MegaAttack game and the Minecraft Justice System. The former was used with 5- to 11-year-olds in the UK (Experiments 1-2) and Colombia (Experiment 3); the latter with British, Colombian and Italian 7- to 11-year-olds (Experiment 4). In both paradigms, as players violated different types of moral norms, children were asked to judge their behaviour and offered the opportunity to punish them. Additionally, in the Minecraft paradigm children could also compensate the victims. The type of transgression children watched did not fully predict their choice of 3PP type in terms of moral domains (Experiments 1-2), but significantly affected their severity and endorsement of 3PP (Experiment 4). Children did not appear motivated by reputational concerns, as their 3PP severity was not influenced by an audience, operationalised as cues of observation (Experiment 2) or accountability (Experiment 3). Children’s enjoyment of 3PP was generally low, although there were differences across countries (Experiments 2-3). In Experiment 4 children enjoyed compensating more than punishing. When asked whether they endorsed deterrence or retribution as their 3PP motive, children overwhelmingly chose deterrence, irrespective of their country, age and framing manipulation received. Reported deterrent motives, and lack of 3PP enjoyment or preference for compensation, together suggest that children, differently from adults, are not motivated by the retributive desire to see wrongdoers suffer. Results have implications for theoretical accounts of the cognitive and affective processes involved in 3PP, methodological implications for future research avenues and, potentially, practical implications for the development of intervention studies

An AI-Resilient Text Rendering Technique for Reading and Skimming Documents

Readers find text difficult to consume for many reasons. Summarization can address some of these difficulties, but introduce others, such as omitting, misrepresenting, or hallucinating information, which can be hard for a reader to notice. One approach to addressing this problem is to instead modify how the original text is rendered to make important information more salient. We introduce Grammar-Preserving Text Saliency Modulation (GP-TSM), a text rendering method with a novel means of identifying what to de-emphasize. Specifically, GP-TSM uses a recursive sentence compression method to identify successive levels of detail beyond the core meaning of a passage, which are de-emphasized by rendering words in successively lighter but still legible gray text. In a lab study (n=18), participants preferred GP-TSM over pre-existing word-level text rendering methods and were able to answer GRE reading comprehension questions more efficiently.Comment: Conditionally accepted to CHI 202