1,602 research outputs found
The Cat Is On the Mat. Or Is It a Dog? Dynamic Competition in Perceptual Decision Making
Recent neurobiological findings suggest that the brain solves simple perceptual decision-making tasks by means of a dynamic competition in which evidence is accumulated in favor of the alternatives. However, it is unclear if and how the same process applies in more complex, real-world tasks, such as the categorization of ambiguous visual scenes and what elements are considered as evidence in this case. Furthermore, dynamic decision models typically consider evidence accumulation as a passive process disregarding the role of active perception strategies. In this paper, we adopt the principles of dynamic competition and active vision for the realization of a biologically- motivated computational model, which we test in a visual catego- rization task. Moreover, our system uses predictive power of the features as the main dimension for both evidence accumulation and the guidance of active vision. Comparison of human and synthetic data in a common experimental setup suggests that the proposed model captures essential aspects of how the brain solves perceptual ambiguities in time. Our results point to the importance of the proposed principles of dynamic competi- tion, parallel specification, and selection of multiple alternatives through prediction, as well as active guidance of perceptual strategies for perceptual decision-making and the resolution of perceptual ambiguities. These principles could apply to both the simple perceptual decision problems studied in neuroscience and the more complex ones addressed by vision research.Peer reviewe
The Levels of Ambience: An Introduction to Integrative Rhetoric
Although felt as a vague though often powerful sense of the worldâs presence as we engage in a rhetorical situation, ambience is the highly complex and integrated totality of the worldâs environmental, behavioral, symbolic, and temporal dimensions and their fields of objects, agents, relations, and forces of which we may or may not become aware and with which we may or may not intentionally engage. Although we may feel it so, ambience is not merely a vague, amorphous background to our conscious acts which gives it meaning; rather, it is itself highly organized and organizing, developing from our interactions with the world in a series of succeeding integrative levels, each with its own structures based upon and providing purpose to the lower, earlier developed structures it supervenes and each providing meaning to the higher, later developed structures that depend upon it
Linguistically Modulated Perception and Cognition: The Label-Feedback Hypothesis
How does language impact cognition and perception? A growing number of studies show that language, and specifically the practice of labeling, can exert extremely rapid and pervasive effects on putatively non-verbal processes such as categorization, visual discrimination, and even simply detecting the presence of a stimulus. Progress on the empirical front, however, has not been accompanied by progress in understanding the mechanisms by which language affects these processes. One puzzle is how effects of language can be both deep, in the sense of affecting even basic visual processes, and yet vulnerable to manipulations such as verbal interference, which can sometimes nullify effects of language. In this paper, I review some of the evidence for effects of language on cognition and perception, showing that performance on tasks that have been presumed to be non-verbal is rapidly modulated by language. I argue that a clearer understanding of the relationship between language and cognition can be achieved by rejecting the distinction between verbal and non-verbal representations and by adopting a framework in which language modulates ongoing cognitive and perceptual processing in a flexible and task-dependent manner
Expanding the concept of social behavior to interspecific interactions
In pretty much any species, an individual's survival and reproduction depends crucially on the outcome of interactions with other individuals. Key interactions may take
place between individuals of the same species but also between individuals belonging to different species. However, the most accepted definition of social behavior
only considers interactions between conspecifics. Here, we argue that the distinction between intra- and interspecific interactions is largely artificial and hinders the
integration of the historically separately developed concepts. At the ultimate level,
given that the ecological landscape of organisms is composed both by interactions
with conspecifics and with heterospecifics, and both types of interactions may have
evolutionary consequences. Although intraspecific interactions usually have a higher
impact in fitness because in most species interactions relevant for reproduction (mating, parenting) exclusively involve conspecifics, and interactions relevant for survival
are more probable between conspecifics because they share the same ecological
niche, hence competing for the same resources (e.g., food, shelter), there are notable
exceptions in both fitness components (e.g., heterospecific mating in parthenogenic
all-female species; heterospecific brood parasitism; heterospecific aggression in sympatric species that compete for shared resources). At the proximate level, behaviors
and cognitive decision-making rules used to interact with other organisms may be
shared between intra- and interspecific interactions, and the mechanistic differences
between conspecific social behaviors used in distinct functional domains, such as
mating, aggression, or parenting, can be more expressive than those found within the
same functional domain between conspecific and heterospecific behavior. Therefore,
there are neither fundamental conceptual (ultimate) reasons, nor key differences in
mechanisms underlying behaviors involved in conspecific vs. heterospecific interactions that support the exclusion of interspecific interactions from the conceptual
framework of social behaviorFundação para a CiĂȘncia e Tecnologia - FCTinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Simulating Speed in Language: Contributions from vision, audition and action
Embodied theories propose that understanding meaning in language requires the mental simulation of entities being referred to. These mental simulations would make use of the same modality-specific systems involved in perceiving and acting upon such entities in the world, grounding language in the real world. However, embodied theories are currently underspecified in terms of how much information from an event is contained in mental simulations, and what features of experience are included. The thesis addresses comprehension of language that describes speed of events. Investigating speed allows embodied theories to be extended to a more complex feature of events. Further, speed is a fine-grained feature and thus testing an embodied theory of speed will reveal whether or not mental simulations include the fine details of real-world experience. Within the thesis four main methods of investigation were used, assessing simulation of speed with different types of speed language under different conditions: behavioural testing combining speed in language with speed in perception and action, eye-tracking investigating whether eye-movements to a visual scene are affected by speed in sentences, a psychophysics paradigm assessing whether speed in language affects visual perception processes, and finally, as a crucial test of embodiment, whether or not Parkinsonâs patients, who have difficulty moving speedily, also have problems with comprehension of speed language. The main findings of the thesis are that: (1) speed, a fine-grained and abstract dimension, is simulated during comprehension, (2) simulations are dynamic and context-dependent, and (3) simulations of speed are specific to biological motion and can encode specific effectors used in an action.
These results help to specify current embodied theories in terms of what the nature of simulations are and what factors they are sensitive to, in addition to broadly providing support for the sharing of cognitive/neural processes between language, action and perception
Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation
This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any productâs acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion
Learning, Categorization, Rule Formation, and Prediction by Fuzzy Neural Networks
National Science Foundation (IRI 94-01659); Office of Naval Research (N00014-91-J-4100, N00014-92-J-4015) Air Force Office of Scientific Research (90-0083, N00014-92-J-4015
Integrating perceptual, semantic and syntactic information in sentence production
The experimental work and the theoretical model presented in this thesis explore the behaviour of the sentence production system in perceptually, conceptually, and syntactically changing environments across languages. Nine experiments examine how speakers of different languages integrate available perceptual, conceptual, and syntactic information during production of sentences. Such integration occurs under the global control of canonical causality and automated syntax. Analysis of speakers' performance in perceptually manipulated setting demonstrated that perceptual motivations for word order alternation are relatively weak and limited to the initial event apprehension. In addition, salience-driven choices of word order are realized differently in different syntactic structures and in languages with different grammatical systems. Combining perceptual and conceptual priming paradigms did not substantially improve cueing efficiency. Contrasting, early availability of lexical and syntactic information led to the most consistent alternation of the work order.
I conclude that the uptake of perceptual information does not directly influence structural processing. General cognitive processes, such as attentional control and higher memorial activation actively contribute to the concept's accessibility status, but the syntactic organization of a spoken sentence constitutes a relatively independent psychological reality that can be realized partially as a product of the aforementioned operations but does not directly depend on them
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