I know you are beautiful even without looking at you: discrimination of facial beauty in peripheral vision

Prior research suggests that facial attractiveness may capture attention at parafovea. However, little is known about how well facial beauty can be detected at parafoveal and peripheral vision. Participants in this study judged relative attractiveness of a face pair presented simultaneously at several eccentricities from the central fixation. The results show that beauty is not only detectable at parafovea but also at periphery. The discrimination performance at parafovea was indistinguishable from the performance around the fovea. Moreover, performance was well above chance even at the periphery. The results show that the visual system is able to use the low spatial frequency information to appraise attractiveness. These findings not only provide an explanation for why a beautiful face could capture attention when central vision is already engaged elsewhere, but also reveal the potential means by which a crowd of faces is quickly scanned for attractiveness

Decay and interference effects in visuospatial short-term memory

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Perception-aware Path Planning

In this paper, we give a double twist to the problem of planning under uncertainty. State-of-the-art planners seek to minimize the localization uncertainty by only considering the geometric structure of the scene. In this paper, we argue that motion planning for vision-controlled robots should be perception aware in that the robot should also favor texture-rich areas to minimize the localization uncertainty during a goal-reaching task. Thus, we describe how to optimally incorporate the photometric information (i.e., texture) of the scene, in addition to the the geometric one, to compute the uncertainty of vision-based localization during path planning. To avoid the caveats of feature-based localization systems (i.e., dependence on feature type and user-defined thresholds), we use dense, direct methods. This allows us to compute the localization uncertainty directly from the intensity values of every pixel in the image. We also describe how to compute trajectories online, considering also scenarios with no prior knowledge about the map. The proposed framework is general and can easily be adapted to different robotic platforms and scenarios. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated with extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments using a vision-controlled micro aerial vehicle.Comment: 16 pages, 20 figures, revised version. Conditionally accepted for IEEE Transactions on Robotic

Herbal Medicine Perception and Practice Among Childbearing Mother with Medical Education Background in Bandung: a Preliminary Study

Herbal medicine has been widely used among Indonesians as an alternative medicine to chemical based drugs. However, there is still a doubt about its effectiveness and efficiency. Many studies report that natural side of herbal medicine has healthier effect than additive or chemistry ingredient of chemical based drugs. Nowadays, there is a shifting in nurturing children among childbearing mother, including mother with medical education background, living in more nature. The aim of this study is to explore their perception and practice towards herbal medicine. Open-ended questionnaires were online distributed among 30 childbearing mothers with medical education background and analyzed using descriptive method. The result shows that 73% of respondents use herbal medicine such as honey (33.3%), onion (13.3%), lime (13.3%), etc. The less side-effect is a strongest point of their USAges (45%), followed by mild illness treatment (36%), and natural ingredient (18%). Those respondents admitted the symptoms were reduced after using herbal medicine, but 81.6% of them would use chemical drugs when the symptoms persisted. Twenty seven percent of the respondents never used herbal medicine because of complicated preparation and unclear effect. However, the entire respondents said chemical drugs have a clear effect, and its effectiveness and efficiency even better than herbal medicine. Hence, it can be concluded that most respondents even though have medical knowledge would use herbal medicine on first medication for their children rather than chemical based drug

Short-and medium-term plasticity for speaker adaptation seem to be independent

The author wishes to thank James McQueen and Elizabeth Johnson for comments made on an earlier drafts of this paper.In a classic paper, Ladefoged and Broadbent [1] showed that listeners adapt to speakers based on short-term exposure of a single phrase. Recently, Norris, McQueen, and Cutler [2] presented evidence for a lexically conditioned medium-term adaptation to a particular speaker based on an exposure of 40 critical words among 200 items. In two experiments, I investigated whether there is a connection between the two findings. To this end, a vowel-normalization paradigm (similar to [1]) was used with a carrier phrase that consisted of either words or nonwords. The range of the second formant was manipulated and this affected the perception of a target vowel in a compensatory fashion: A low F2-range made it more likely that a target vowel was perceived as a front vowel, that is, with an inherently high F2. Manipulation of the lexical status of the carrier phrase, however, did not affect vowel normalization. In contrast, the range of vowels in the carrier phrase did influence vowel normalization. If the carrier phrase consisted of high-front vowels only, vowel categories shifted only for high-front vowels. This may indicate that the short-term and medium-term adaptations are brought about by different mechanisms.peer-reviewe

Form Perception

National Science Foundation (SBE-0354378); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624