An Ecological Alternative to Snodgrass & Vanderwart: 360 High Quality Colour Images with Norms for Seven Psycholinguistic Variables

This work presents a new set of 360 high quality colour images belonging to 23 semantic subcategories. Two hundred and thirty-six Spanish speakers named the items and also provided data from seven relevant psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, familiarity, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Furthermore, we also present lexical frequency data derived from Internet search hits. Apart from the high number of variables evaluated, knowing that it affects the processing of stimuli, this new set presents important advantages over other similar image corpi: (a) this corpus presents a broad number of subcategories and images; for example, this will permit researchers to select stimuli of appropriate difficulty as required, (e.g., to deal with problems derived from ceiling effects); (b) the fact of using coloured stimuli provides a more realistic, ecologically-valid, representation of real life objects. In sum, this set of stimuli provides a useful tool for research on visual object-and word- processing, both in neurological patients and in healthy controls

A corpus-based writing aid for Spanish language authors: the scientific abstract generator prototype

Producción CientíficaAbstracts are a secondary genre based on the Research Paper (RP) that have often been analyzed in English for insights into rhetorical structure and information distribution. However, this wealth of descriptive research has not produced particularly useful results for scientists who are not native speakers of English nor has it been “directly amenable to applied endeavours”. The aim of this paper is to describe the methodology and the tools devised by the ACTRES research group to bridge the transition between the descriptive and the procedural approach. The findings obtained will feed into a writing application for Spanish-speaking scientists who need to report their work in English to the global research community: it is called the Scientific_Abstract_Generator. A custom-made comparable corpus, BioABSTRACTS_C-ACTRES, has been compiled and analyzed for rhetorical and lexico-grammatical features of this genre in both English and Spanish. Then, crosslinguistic similarities and differences relevant for our intended users have been identified and will be used to build a writing prototype available as a useful and usable computer interface

COLosSAL: A Benchmark for Cold-start Active Learning for 3D Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a critical task in medical image analysis. In recent years, deep learning based approaches have shown exceptional performance when trained on a fully-annotated dataset. However, data annotation is often a significant bottleneck, especially for 3D medical images. Active learning (AL) is a promising solution for efficient annotation but requires an initial set of labeled samples to start active selection. When the entire data pool is unlabeled, how do we select the samples to annotate as our initial set? This is also known as the cold-start AL, which permits only one chance to request annotations from experts without access to previously annotated data. Cold-start AL is highly relevant in many practical scenarios but has been under-explored, especially for 3D medical segmentation tasks requiring substantial annotation effort. In this paper, we present a benchmark named COLosSAL by evaluating six cold-start AL strategies on five 3D medical image segmentation tasks from the public Medical Segmentation Decathlon collection. We perform a thorough performance analysis and explore important open questions for cold-start AL, such as the impact of budget on different strategies. Our results show that cold-start AL is still an unsolved problem for 3D segmentation tasks but some important trends have been observed. The code repository, data partitions, and baseline results for the complete benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/MedICL-VU/COLosSAL.Comment: Accepted by MICCAI 202

A systematic review of normative studies using images of common objects

Common objects comprise living and non-living things people interact with in their daily-lives. Images depicting common objects are extensively used in different fields of research and intervention, such as linguistics, psychology, and education. Nevertheless, their adequate use requires the consideration of several factors (e.g., item-differences, cultural-context and confounding correlated variables), and careful validation procedures. The current study presents a systematic review of the available published norms for images of common objects. A systematic search using PRISMA guidelines indicated that despite their extensive use, the production of norms for such stimuli with adult populations is quite limited (N = 55), particularly for more ecological images, such as photos (N = 14). Among the several dimensions in which the items were assessed, the most commonly referred in our sample were familiarity, visual complexity and name agreement, illustrating some consistency across the reported dimensions while also indicating the limited examination of other potentially relevant dimensions for image processing. The lack of normative studies simultaneously examining affective, perceptive and semantic dimensions was also documented. The number of such normative studies has been increasing in the last years and published in relevant peer-reviewed journals. Moreover, their datasets and norms have been complying with current open science practices. Nevertheless, they are still scarcely cited and replicated in different linguistic and cultural contexts. The current study brings important theoretical contributions by characterizing images of common objects stimuli and their culturally-based norms while highlighting several important features that are likely to be relevant for future stimuli selection and evaluative procedures. The systematic scrutiny of these normative studies is likely to stimulate the production of new, robust and contextually-relevant normative datasets and to provide tools for enhancing the quality of future research and intervention.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Response alternatives: the impact of their choice and presentation order

Daß die Auswahl und die Anordnung der Antwortalternativen einen großen Einfluß auf die erlangten Ergebnisse haben, ist nichts Neues und ist weitreichend dokumentiert. Die dem zugrundeliegenden kognitiven und kommunikativen Prozesse sind nicht leicht zu verstehen, denn sie machen es schwierig vorherzusagen, welche Auswirkungen unter welchen Bedingungen erwartet werden können. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein kognitives Forschungsprogramm eingehend überprüft, das die psychologischen Prozesse untersucht, die die Wirkung von Antwortalternativen auf die Reaktionen der Befragten vermitteln. Zusätzlich zur Zusammenfassung von Teilen einer Studie der Autoren wird eine selektive Übersicht und eine konzeptionelle Integration der zur Verfügung stehenden Literatur geliefert, die sich auf die Auswahl und Reihenfolge der Antwortalternativen bezieht. Die Autoren beginnen mit einem Vergleich von Formen offener und geschlossener Fragestellungen mit dem Schwerpunkt auf der Information, die die Befragten den ihnen vorgelegten Antwortalternativen entnehmen. Anschließend werden die Wirkungen der Reihenfolge untersucht, in der die Antwortalternativen dargestellt werden, und ein kognitives Modell der Auswirkungen der Reihenfolge der Antwortmöglichkeiten entworfen. (KW

Factors Shaping the Effects of Visual Media Texts on Viewer Understandings

This project seeks to clarify the mechanisms through which the media contribute to audiences’ understandings of social groups. It encompasses two inter-linked studies. One study identifies two dimensions through which audiences evaluate the realism of media characters. It then investigates how one of these dimensions, character representativeness, is associated with the audience’s level of familiarity with the society portrayed in the media text and with their sense of the variability of the represented society. Participants from two different societies, the US and Greater China, evaluated the characters in two film segments, one from a culture with which they were familiar and one from a society with which they were unfamiliar. They then evaluated the homogeneity of the films’ societies. I assessed the participants’ perceptions of the characters’ representativeness through two measures. One measure supported the initial hypotheses of the study. Characters from socially distant societies were seen as significantly more representative than those from socially near ones. The other measure did not provide any support for this hypothesis. There was no consistent evidence that the perceived variability of a film’s society moderates perceptions of the representativeness of the film’s characters. iv The second study investigates whether viewers’ perceptions of the representativeness of a text’s characters shape the strength of the text’s effect on viewers’ perceptions. It also sought to determine whether the activation of particular category structures or viewer attributions of character behavior influenced effects. Volunteers saw a film clip and then completed a questionnaire about the representativeness of the characters and their perceptions of the source society. Before seeing the film clip, half the participants were primed with publication materials designed to activate the category structure of society membership. Neither the representativeness of the characters nor the variability of the film society is associated with the application of the characters’ attributes to the viewers’ perceptions. There are no consistent differences between the priming and control groups on any of the outcome measures. There is no consistent evidence that audience members’ attributions shape the media representations’ effect. Possible reasons for the studies’ failure as well as implications for future research are discussed

Semantic representations of English verbs and their influence on psycholinguistic performance in healthy and language-impaired speakers

PhD ThesisBackground – English verbs are linguistically more complex than nouns and this has contributed to the dearth of in-depth investigation into similarities and differences between their representations within semantic memory and subsequent implications for language processing. However, recent theoretical accounts have argued that verbs and nouns are represented within a unitary semantic system. Aims – This thesis investigates the semantic representations of English verbs with particular attention to how verbs are inter-related as a consequence of semantic similarity. This is achieved through a series of psycholinguistic experiments with healthy adult speakers and an intervention study with adults with aphasia (i.e. acquired communication impairment). Throughout the thesis, comparisons are made to the semantic representations of nouns either directly (i.e. through parallel experimentation) or indirectly (i.e. through the existing literature). Methods – The experiments conducted with healthy adult speakers included: (1) category listing of verbs; (2) typicality rating of verbs within categories; (3) similarity rating of verb pairs; (4) an analysis of verbs’ semantic features; (5) category verification of verbs; and (6) semantically primed picture naming of actions. The intervention study carried out with adults with aphasia compared patterns of improvement in verb and noun retrieval following a semantically-based therapy task. Results and discussion – The results of the experiments shed light on the nature of semantic representations of verbs, in particular, in relation to the similarity between the semantic representations of verbs and those of nouns and also where they differ. These insights are considered in terms of how they provide evidence for or against a unitary semantic system for verbs’ and nouns’ semantic representations and parallel mechanisms for accessing these representations. Two themes emerged in terms of future research potential: (1) the influence of polysemy on speaker’s performance in psycholinguistic tasks; and (2) the nature and influence of typicality within categories/cluster of verbs