Attitudes toward the Income Gap: Japan-U.S. Comparison

Employing the Japan-U.S. international survey, this study analyzed the cause of rising perception of the widening income gap in Japan. Between these two countries, their distinct value judgments on the substance of gap influence their recognition. Japanese have negative perception of the income gap caused by talent, academic background or luck; it seems relatively weak in the U.S. A large portion of Japanese also think one's income is recently decided by talent, academic background or luck though it should not be. Such disagreement between the desirable and recognized determinants of income is thought to raise their perception of the gap.

Incremental Learning for Robot Perception through HRI

Scene understanding and object recognition is a difficult to achieve yet crucial skill for robots. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), have shown success in this task. However, there is still a gap between their performance on image datasets and real-world robotics scenarios. We present a novel paradigm for incrementally improving a robot's visual perception through active human interaction. In this paradigm, the user introduces novel objects to the robot by means of pointing and voice commands. Given this information, the robot visually explores the object and adds images from it to re-train the perception module. Our base perception module is based on recent development in object detection and recognition using deep learning. Our method leverages state of the art CNNs from off-line batch learning, human guidance, robot exploration and incremental on-line learning

Visual Similarity Perception of Directed Acyclic Graphs: A Study on Influencing Factors

While visual comparison of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is commonly encountered in various disciplines (e.g., finance, biology), knowledge about humans' perception of graph similarity is currently quite limited. By graph similarity perception we mean how humans perceive commonalities and differences in graphs and herewith come to a similarity judgment. As a step toward filling this gap the study reported in this paper strives to identify factors which influence the similarity perception of DAGs. In particular, we conducted a card-sorting study employing a qualitative and quantitative analysis approach to identify 1) groups of DAGs that are perceived as similar by the participants and 2) the reasons behind their choice of groups. Our results suggest that similarity is mainly influenced by the number of levels, the number of nodes on a level, and the overall shape of the graph.Comment: Graph Drawing 2017 - arXiv Version; Keywords: Graphs, Perception, Similarity, Comparison, Visualizatio

Exploratory Practice: Researching the Impact of Songs on EFL Learners' Verbal Memory

Traditionally popular songs have been used as a way of enhancing listening and auditory perception skills and teaching vocabulary, but not necessarily for memory recall. Popular song gap-fills are already commonplace within the EFL (English as a foreign language) field; however, this study found that more attention needs to be given, to the lexical, grammatical and phonological items that learners are instructed to retain. The results of this study suggest that, verbal memory is a vital part of language learning that should be incorporated into popular song gap-fills and that EFL teachers, theorists and textbook authors need to review the way language in popular songs is encoded, stored and retrieved, by incorporating memory strategies, following guidelines on gap-selection, including a phonological aspect and using a recycling activity. In this article traditional and contemporary understandings of verbal memory and popular song are outlined and comprehensively analysed within relevant fields that embrace ELT (English language teaching), Biology, Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Psychology perspectives and discusses their pedagogical implications

Parametric Representation of Tactile Numerosity in Working Memory

Estimated numerosity perception is processed in an approximate number system (ANS) that resembles the perception of a continuous magnitude. The ANS consists of a right lateralized frontoparietal network comprising the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and the intraparietal sulcus. Although the ANS has been extensively investigated, only a few studies have focused on the mental representation of retained numerosity estimates. Specifically, the underlying mechanisms of estimated numerosity working memory (WM) is unclear. Besides numerosities, as another form of abstract quantity, vibrotactile WM studies provide initial evidence that the right LPFC takes a central role in maintaining magnitudes. In the present fMRI multivariate pattern analysis study, we designed a delayed match-to-numerosity paradigm to test what brain regions retain approximate numerosity memoranda. In line with parametric WM results, our study found numerosity-specific WM representations in the right LPFC as well as in the supplementary motor area and the left premotor cortex extending into the superior frontal gyrus, thus bridging the gap in abstract quantity WM literature

Students academic self-perception

Participation rates in higher education differ persistently between some groups in society. Using two British datasets we investigate whether this gap is rooted in students' mis-perception of their own and other's ability, thereby increasing the expected costs to studying. Among high school pupils, we find that pupils with a more positive view of their academic abilities are more likely to expect to continue to higher education even after controlling for observable measures of ability and students' characteristics. University students are also poor at estimating their own test-performance and over-estimate their predicted test score. However, females, white and working class students have less inflated view of themselves. Self-perception has limited impact on the expected probability of success and expected returns amongst these university students.Test performance, self-assessment, higher education participation, academic self-perception

Physics holo.lab learning experience: Using Smartglasses for Augmented Reality labwork to foster the concepts of heat conduction

Fundamental concepts of thermodynamics rely on abstract physical quantities such as energy, heat and entropy, which play an important role in the process of interpreting thermal phenomena and statistical mechanics. However, these quantities are not covered by human (visual) perception and thus, an intuitive understanding often is lacking. Today immersive technologies like head-mounted displays of the newest generation, especially HoloLens, allow for high quality augmented reality learning experiences, which can overcome this perception gap and simultaneously avoid a split attention effect. In a mixed reality (MR) scenario as presented in this paper---which we call a holo.lab---human perception can be extended to the thermal regime by presenting false-color representations of the temperature of objects as a virtual augmentation directly on the real object itself in real-time. Direct feedback to experimental actions of the users in form of different representations allows for immediate comparison to theoretical principles and predictions and therefore is supposed to intensify the theory-experiment interactions and to increase the conceptual understanding. We tested this technology for an experiment on thermal conduction of metals in the framework of undergraduate laboratories. A pilot study with treatment and control groups (N = 59) showed a small positive effect of MR on students' performance measured with a standardized concept test for thermodynamics, indicating an improvement of the understanding of the underlying physical concepts