Quantum cryptography: key distribution and beyond

Uniquely among the sciences, quantum cryptography has driven both foundational research as well as practical real-life applications. We review the progress of quantum cryptography in the last decade, covering quantum key distribution and other applications.Comment: It's a review on quantum cryptography and it is not restricted to QK

The Man Who Mistook His Neuropsychologist For a Popstar: When Configural Processing Fails in Acquired Prosopagnosia

We report the case of an individual with acquired prosopagnosia who experiences extreme difficulties in recognizing familiar faces in everyday life despite excellent object recognition skills. Formal testing indicates that he is also severely impaired at remembering pre-experimentally unfamiliar faces and that he takes an extremely long time to identify famous faces and to match unfamiliar faces. Nevertheless, he performs as accurately and quickly as controls at identifying inverted familiar and unfamiliar faces and can recognize famous faces from their external features. He also performs as accurately as controls at recognizing famous faces when fracturing conceals the configural information in the face. He shows evidence of impaired global processing but normal local processing of Navon figures. This case appears to reflect the clearest example yet of an acquired prosopagnosic patient whose familiar face recognition deficit is caused by a severe configural processing deficit in the absence of any problems in featural processing. These preserved featural skills together with apparently intact visual imagery for faces allow him to identify a surprisingly large number of famous faces when unlimited time is available. The theoretical implications of this pattern of performance for understanding the nature of acquired prosopagnosia are discussed.DY, Avery Braun, Jacob Waite, and Nadine Wanke, Bruno Rossion, Thomas Busigny and the grant awarded by AJ by the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS

Classical light vs. nonclassical light: Characterizations and interesting applications

We briefly review the ideas that have shaped modern optics and have led to various applications of light ranging from spectroscopy to astrophysics, and street lights to quantum communication. The review is primarily focused on the modern applications of classical light and nonclassical light. Specific attention has been given to the applications of squeezed, antibunched, and entangled states of radiation field. Applications of Fock states (especially single photon states) in the field of quantum communication are also discussed.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figures, a review on applications of ligh

Stochastic accumulation of feature information in perception and memory

It is now well established that the time course of perceptual processing influences the first second or so of performance in a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Over the last20 years, there has been a shift from modeling the speed at which a display is processed, to modeling the speed at which different features of the display are perceived and formalizing how this perceptual information is used in decision making. The first of these models(Lamberts, 1995) was implemented to fit the time course of performance in a speeded perceptual categorization task and assumed a simple stochastic accumulation of feature information. Subsequently, similar approaches have been used to model performance in a range of cognitive tasks including identification, absolute identification, perceptual matching, recognition, visual search, and word processing, again assuming a simple stochastic accumulation of feature information from both the stimulus and representations held in memory. These models are typically fit to data from signal-to-respond experiments whereby the effects of stimulus exposure duration on performance are examined, but response times (RTs) and RT distributions have also been modeled. In this article, we review this approach and explore the insights it has provided about the interplay between perceptual processing, memory retrieval, and decision making in a variety of tasks. In so doing, we highlight how such approaches can continue to usefully contribute to our understanding of cognition

Asymmetric spatial processing under cognitive load

Spatial attention allows us to selectively process information within a certain location in space. Despite the vast literature on spatial attention, the effect of cognitive load on spatial processing is still not fully understood. In this study we added cognitive load to a spatial processing task, so as to see whether it would differentially impact upon the processing of visual information in the left versus the right hemispace. The main paradigm consisted of a detection task that was performed during the maintenance interval of a verbal working memory task. We found that increasing cognitive working memory load had a more negative impact on detecting targets presented on the left side compared to those on the right side. The strength of the load effect correlated with the strength of the interaction on an individual level. The implications of an asymmetric attentional bias with a relative disadvantage for the left (vs the right) hemispace under high verbal working memory (WM) load are discussed