Synaesthesia quotient: operationalising an individual index of phenotypic expressivity of developmental synaesthesia

The primary purpose of our current study is to develop a novel selfadministered or/and interviewer-assisted instrument rating an individual degree of phenotypic expressivity of synaesthesia. A measurement index of such a degree is conceptualised as Synaesthesia Quotient (SynQ). This article will detail the initial stage of the scale development; i.e., conceptualisation, domains identification, item generation, and identification of rating values of the proposed scale. Ten preliminary domains are determined and related items are generated on the basis of empirical data from synaesthesia literature review, extant measures, and external neuroscientific results. Further work is underway to perform judgment-based item expansion (or reduction) informed by expert opinion and to assess the validity and reliability of the Synaesthesia Quotient inventory (SynQ-i). This paper is also intended to solicit postpublication feedback and generate specialist discussion

Introspective physicalism as an approach to the science of consciousness

Most ‘theories of consciousness’ are based on vague speculations about the properties of conscious experience. We aim to provide a more solid basis for a science of consciousness. We argue that a theory of consciousness should provide an account of the very processes that allow us to acquire and use information about our own mental states – the processes underlying introspection. This can be achieved through the construction of information processing models that can account for ‘Type-C’ processes. Type-C processes can be specified experimentally by identifying paradigms in which awareness of the stimulus is necessary for an intentional action. The Shallice (1988b) framework is put forward as providing an initial account of Type-C processes, which can relate perceptual consciousness to consciously performed actions. Further, we suggest that this framework may be refined through the investigation of the functions of prefrontal cortex. The formulation of our approach requires us to consider fundamental conceptual and methodological issues associated with consciousness. The most significant of these issues concerns the scientific use of introspective evidence. We outline and justify a conservative methodological approach to the use of introspective evidence, with attention to the difficulties historically associated with its use in psychology

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Highly efficient low-level feature extraction for video representation and retrieval.

PhDWitnessing the omnipresence of digital video media, the research community has raised the question of its meaningful use and management. Stored in immense multimedia databases, digital videos need to be retrieved and structured in an intelligent way, relying on the content and the rich semantics involved. Current Content Based Video Indexing and Retrieval systems face the problem of the semantic gap between the simplicity of the available visual features and the richness of user semantics. This work focuses on the issues of efficiency and scalability in video indexing and retrieval to facilitate a video representation model capable of semantic annotation. A highly efficient algorithm for temporal analysis and key-frame extraction is developed. It is based on the prediction information extracted directly from the compressed domain features and the robust scalable analysis in the temporal domain. Furthermore, a hierarchical quantisation of the colour features in the descriptor space is presented. Derived from the extracted set of low-level features, a video representation model that enables semantic annotation and contextual genre classification is designed. Results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the temporal analysis algorithm that runs in real time maintaining the high precision and recall of the detection task. Adaptive key-frame extraction and summarisation achieve a good overview of the visual content, while the colour quantisation algorithm efficiently creates hierarchical set of descriptors. Finally, the video representation model, supported by the genre classification algorithm, achieves excellent results in an automatic annotation system by linking the video clips with a limited lexicon of related keywords

Crowdsourced intuitive visual design feedback

For many people images are a medium preferable to text and yet, with the exception of star ratings, most formats for conventional computer mediated feedback focus on text. This thesis develops a new method of crowd feedback for designers based on images. Visual summaries are generated from a crowd’s feedback images chosen in response to a design. The summaries provide the designer with impressionistic and inspiring visual feedback. The thesis sets out the motivation for this new method, describes the development of perceptually organised image sets and a summarisation algorithm to implement it. Evaluation studies are reported which, through a mixed methods approach, provide evidence of the validity and potential of the new image-based feedback method. It is concluded that the visual feedback method would be more appealing than text for that section of the population who may be of a visual cognitive style. Indeed the evaluation studies are evidence that such users believe images are as good as text when communicating their emotional reaction about a design. Designer participants reported being inspired by the visual feedback where, comparably, they were not inspired by text. They also reported that the feedback can represent the perceived mood in their designs, and that they would be enthusiastic users of a service offering this new form of visual design feedback

Diagnostic colours of emotions

This thesis investigates the role of colour in the cognitive processesing of emotional information. The research is guided by the effect of colour diagnosticity which has been shown previously to influence recognition performance of several types of objects as well as natural scenes. The research presented in Experiment 1 examined whether colour information is considered a diagnostic perceptual feature of seven emotional categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise and neutral. Participants (N = 119), who were naïve to the specific purpose and expectations of the experiment, chose colour more than any other perceptual quality (e.g. shape and tactile information) as a feature that describes the seven emotional categories. The specific colour features given for the six basic emotions were consistently different from those given to the non-emotional neutral category. While emotional categories were often described by chromatic colour features (e.g. red, blue, orange) the neutral category was often ascribed achromatic colour features (e.g. white, grey, transparent) as the most symptomatic perceptual qualities for its description. The emotion 'anger' was unique in being the only emotion showing an agreement higher that 50% of the total given colour features for one particular colour - red. Confirming that colour is a diagnostic feature of emotions led to the examination of the effect of diagnostic colours of emotion on recognition memory for emotional words and faces: the effect, if any, of appropriate and inappropriate colours (matched with emotion) on the strength of memory for later recognition of faces and words (Experiments 2 & 3). The two experiments used retention intervals of 15 minutes and one week respectively and the colour-emotion associations were determined for each individual participant. Results showed that regardless of the subject’s consistency level in associating colours with emotions, and compared with the individual inappropriate or random colours, individual appropriate colours of emotions significantly enhance recognition memory for six basic emotional faces and words. This difference between the individual inappropriate colours or random colours and the individual appropriate colours of emotions was not found to be significant for non-emotional neutral stimuli. Post hoc findings from both experiments further show that appropriate colours of emotion are associated more consistently than inappropriate colours of emotions. This suggests that appropriate colour-emotion associations are unique both in their strength of association and in the form of their representation. Experiment 4 therefore aimed to investigate whether appropriate colour-emotion associations also trigger an implicit automatic cognitive system that allows faster naming times for appropriate versus inappropriate colours of emotional word carriers. Results from the combined Emotional-Semantic Stroop task confirm the above hypothesis and therefore imply that colour plays a substantial role not only in our conceptual representations of objects but also in our conceptual representations of basic emotions. The resemblance of the present findings collectively to those found previously for objects and natural scenes suggests a common cognitive mechanism for the processing of emotional diagnostic colours and the processing of diagnostic colours of objects or natural scenes. Overall, this thesis provides the foundation for many future directions of research in the area of colour and emotion as well as a few possible immediate practical implications

Conceptualizing Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Landscape Categories with Navajo and English-speaking Participants

Abstract. Understanding human concepts, spatial and other, is not only one of the most prominent topics in the cognitive and spatial sciences; it is also one of the most challenging. While it is possible to focus on specific aspects of our spatial environment and abstract away complexities for experimental purposes, it is important to understand how cognition in the wild or at least with complex stimuli works, too. The research presented in this paper addresses emerging topics in the area of landscape conceptualization and explicitly uses a diversity fostering approach to uncover potentials, challenges, complexities, and patterns in human landscape concepts. Based on a representation of different landscapes (images) responses from two different populations were elicited: Navajo and the (US) crowd. Our data provides support for the idea of conceptual pluralism; we can confirm that participant responses are far from random and that, also diverse, patterns exist that allow for advancing our understanding of human spatial cognition with complex stimuli

Colour Communication Within Different Languages

For computational methods aiming to reproduce colour names that are meaningful to speakers of different languages, the mapping between perceptual and linguistic aspects of colour is a problem of central information processing. This thesis advances the field of computational colour communication within different languages in five main directions. First, we show that web-based experimental methodologies offer considerable advantages in obtaining a large number of colour naming responses in British and American English, Greek, Russian, Thai and Turkish. We continue with the application of machine learning methods to discover criteria in linguistic, behavioural and geometric features of colour names that distinguish classes of colours. We show that primary colour terms do not form a coherent class, whilst achromatic and basic classes do. We then propose and evaluate a computational model trained by human responses in the online experiment to automate the assignment of colour names in different languages across the full three-dimensional colour gamut. Fourth, we determine for the first time the location of colour names within a physiologically-based cone excitation space through an unconstrained colour naming experiment using a calibrated monitor under controlled viewing conditions. We show a good correspondence between online and offline datasets; and confirm the validity of both experimental methodologies for estimating colour naming functions in laboratory and real-world monitor settings. Finally, we present a novel information theoretic measure, called dispensability, for colour categories that predicts a gradual scale of basicness across languages from both web- and laboratory- based unconstrained colour naming datasets. As a result, this thesis contributes experimental and computational methodologies towards the development of multilingual colour communication schemes