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A database and challenge for acoustic scene classification and event detection
Making sense of real-world scenes
To interact with the world, we have to make sense of the continuous sensory input conveying information about our environment. A recent surge of studies has investigated the processes enabling scene understanding, using increasingly complex stimuli and sophisticated analyses to highlight the visual features and brain regions involved. However, there are two major challenges to producing a comprehensive framework for scene understanding. First, scene perception is highly dynamic, subserving multiple behavioral goals. Second, a multitude of different visual properties co-occur across scenes and may be correlated or independent. We synthesize the recent literature and argue that for a complete view of scene understanding, it is necessary to account for both differing observer goals and the contribution of diverse scene properties
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 43149ā164]. 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 Ā±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
What do we perceive in a glance of a real-world scene?
What do we see when we glance at a natural scene and how does it change as the glance becomes longer? We asked naive subjects to report in a free-form format what they saw when looking at briefly presented real-life photographs. Our subjects received no specific information as to the content of each stimulus. Thus, our paradigm differs from previous studies where subjects were cued before a picture was presented and/or were probed with multiple-choice questions. In the first stage, 90 novel grayscale photographs were foveally shown to a group of 22 native-English-speaking subjects. The presentation time was chosen at random from a set of seven possible times (from 27 to 500 ms). A perceptual mask followed each photograph immediately. After each presentation, subjects reported what they had just seen as completely and truthfully as possible. In the second stage, another group of naive individuals was instructed to score each of the descriptions produced by the subjects in the first stage. Individual scores were assigned to more than a hundred different attributes. We show that within a single glance, much object- and scene-level information is perceived by human subjects. The richness of our perception, though, seems asymmetrical. Subjects tend to have a propensity toward perceiving natural scenes as being outdoor rather than indoor. The reporting of sensory- or feature-level information of a scene (such as shading and shape) consistently precedes the reporting of the semantic-level information. But once subjects recognize more semantic-level components of a scene, there is little evidence suggesting any bias toward either scene-level or object-level recognition
An Empirical Evaluation of Visual Question Answering for Novel Objects
We study the problem of answering questions about images in the harder
setting, where the test questions and corresponding images contain novel
objects, which were not queried about in the training data. Such setting is
inevitable in real world-owing to the heavy tailed distribution of the visual
categories, there would be some objects which would not be annotated in the
train set. We show that the performance of two popular existing methods drop
significantly (up to 28%) when evaluated on novel objects cf. known objects. We
propose methods which use large existing external corpora of (i) unlabeled
text, i.e. books, and (ii) images tagged with classes, to achieve novel object
based visual question answering. We do systematic empirical studies, for both
an oracle case where the novel objects are known textually, as well as a fully
automatic case without any explicit knowledge of the novel objects, but with
the minimal assumption that the novel objects are semantically related to the
existing objects in training. The proposed methods for novel object based
visual question answering are modular and can potentially be used with many
visual question answering architectures. We show consistent improvements with
the two popular architectures and give qualitative analysis of the cases where
the model does well and of those where it fails to bring improvements.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted in CVPR 2017 (poster
Hippocampus dependent and independent theta-networks of working memory maintenance
Working memory is the ability to briefly maintain and manipulate information
beyond its transient availability to our senses. This process of short-term stimulus
retention has often been proposed to be anatomically distinct from long-term forms
of memory. Although itās been well established that the medial temporal lobe
(MTL) is critical to long-term declarative memory, recent evidence has suggested
that MTL regions, such as the hippocampus, may also be involved in the working
memory maintenance of configural visual relationships. I investigate this possibility
in a series of experiments using Magnetoencephalography to record the cortical
oscillatory activity within the theta frequency band of patients with bilateral
hippocampal sclerosis and normal controls. The results demonstrate that working
memory maintenance of configural-relational information is supported by a theta
synchronous network coupling frontal, temporal and occipital visual areas, and
furthermore that this theta synchrony is critically dependent on the integrity of the
hippocampus. Alternate forms of working memory maintenance, that do not require
the relational binding of visual configurations, engage dissociable theta synchronous
networks functioning independently of the hippocampus. In closing, I will explore
the interactions between long-term and short-term forms of memory and demonstrate
that through these interactions, memory performance can effectively be improved
The role of phonology in visual word recognition: evidence from Chinese
Posters - Letter/Word Processing V: abstract no. 5024The hypothesis of bidirectional coupling of orthography and phonology predicts that phonology plays a role in visual word recognition, as observed in the effects of feedforward and feedback spelling to sound consistency on lexical decision. However, because orthography and phonology are closely related in alphabetic languages (homophones in alphabetic languages are usually orthographically similar), it is difficult to exclude an influence of orthography on phonological effects in visual word recognition. Chinese languages contain many written homophones that are orthographically dissimilar, allowing a test of the claim that phonological effects can be independent of orthographic similarity. We report a study of visual word recognition in Chinese based on a mega-analysis of lexical decision performance with 500 characters. The results from multiple regression analyses, after controlling for orthographic frequency, stroke number, and radical frequency, showed main effects of feedforward and feedback consistency, as well as interactions between these variables and phonological frequency and number of homophones. Implications of these results for resonance models of visual word recognition are discussed.postprin
Interactive effects of orthography and semantics in Chinese picture naming
Posters - Language Production/Writing: abstract no. 4035Picture-naming performance in English and Dutch is enhanced by presentation of a word that is similar in form to the picture name. However, it is unclear whether facilitation has an orthographic or a phonological locus. We investigated the loci of the facilitation effect in Cantonese Chinese speakers by manipulatingāat three SOAs (2100, 0, and 1100 msec)āsemantic, orthographic, and phonological similarity. We identified an effect of orthographic facilitation that was independent of and larger than phonological facilitation across all SOAs. Semantic interference was also found at SOAs of 2100 and 0 msec. Critically, an interaction of semantics and orthography was observed at an SOA of 1100 msec. This interaction suggests that independent effects of orthographic facilitation on picture naming are located either at the level of semantic processing or at the lemma level and are not due to the activation of picture name segments at the level of phonological retrieval.postprin
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