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

The Role of Eye Gaze During Natural Social Interactions in Typical and Autistic People

Social interactions involve complex exchanges of a variety of social signals, such as gaze, facial expressions, speech and gestures. Focusing on the dual function of eye gaze, this review explores how the presence of an audience, communicative purpose and temporal dynamics of gaze allow interacting partners to achieve successful communication. First, we focus on how being watched modulates social cognition and behavior. We then show that the study of interpersonal gaze processing, particularly gaze temporal dynamics, can provide valuable understanding of social behavior in real interactions. We propose that the Interpersonal Gaze Processing model, which combines both sensing and signaling functions of eye gaze, provides a framework to make sense of gaze patterns in live interactions. Finally, we discuss how autistic individuals process the belief in being watched and interpersonal dynamics of gaze, and suggest that systematic manipulation of factors modulating gaze signaling can reveal which aspects of social eye gaze are challenging in autism

The Future of Humanoid Robots

This book provides state of the art scientific and engineering research findings and developments in the field of humanoid robotics and its applications. It is expected that humanoids will change the way we interact with machines, and will have the ability to blend perfectly into an environment already designed for humans. The book contains chapters that aim to discover the future abilities of humanoid robots by presenting a variety of integrated research in various scientific and engineering fields, such as locomotion, perception, adaptive behavior, human-robot interaction, neuroscience and machine learning. The book is designed to be accessible and practical, with an emphasis on useful information to those working in the fields of robotics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational methods and other fields of science directly or indirectly related to the development and usage of future humanoid robots. The editor of the book has extensive R&D experience, patents, and publications in the area of humanoid robotics, and his experience is reflected in editing the content of the book

VISUAL SALIENCY ANALYSIS AND APPLICATIONS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH