Why do we look at people's eyes?

We have previously shown that when observers are presented with complex natural scenes that contain a number of objects and people, observers look mostly at the eyes of the people. Why is this? It cannot be because eyes are merely the most salient area in a scene, as relative to other objects they are fairly inconspicuous. We hypothesized that people look at the eyes because they consider the eyes to be a rich source of information. To test this idea, we tested two groups of participants. One set of participants, called the Told Group, was informed that there would be a recognition test after they were shown the natural scenes. The second set, the Not Told Group, was not informed that there would be a subsequent recognition test. Our data showed that during the initial and test viewings, the Told Group fixated the eyes more frequently than the Not Told group, supporting the idea that the eyes are considered an informative region in social scenes. Converging evidence for this interpretation is that the Not Told Group fixated the eyes more frequently in the test session than in the study session

Eco-nostalgia in Popular Turkish Cinema

Book Summary: Ecomedia: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook introducing the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies to provide an overview of the interface between environmental issues and the media globally. Linking the world of media production, distribution, and consumption to environmental understandings, the book addresses ecological meanings encoded in media texts, the environmental impacts of media production, and the relationships between media and cultural perceptions of the environment. [From the publisher

The Role of Landscapes and Landmarks in Bee Navigation: A Review.

The ability of animals to explore landmarks in their environment is essential to their fitness. Landmarks are widely recognized to play a key role in navigation by providing information in multiple sensory modalities. However, what is a landmark? We propose that animals use a hierarchy of information based upon its utility and salience when an animal is in a given motivational state. Focusing on honeybees, we suggest that foragers choose landmarks based upon their relative uniqueness, conspicuousness, stability, and context. We also propose that it is useful to distinguish between landmarks that provide sensory input that changes ("near") or does not change ("far") as the receiver uses these landmarks to navigate. However, we recognize that this distinction occurs on a continuum and is not a clear-cut dichotomy. We review the rich literature on landmarks, focusing on recent studies that have illuminated our understanding of the kinds of information that bees use, how they use it, potential mechanisms, and future research directions

Future Person Localization in First-Person Videos

We present a new task that predicts future locations of people observed in first-person videos. Consider a first-person video stream continuously recorded by a wearable camera. Given a short clip of a person that is extracted from the complete stream, we aim to predict that person's location in future frames. To facilitate this future person localization ability, we make the following three key observations: a) First-person videos typically involve significant ego-motion which greatly affects the location of the target person in future frames; b) Scales of the target person act as a salient cue to estimate a perspective effect in first-person videos; c) First-person videos often capture people up-close, making it easier to leverage target poses (e.g., where they look) for predicting their future locations. We incorporate these three observations into a prediction framework with a multi-stream convolution-deconvolution architecture. Experimental results reveal our method to be effective on our new dataset as well as on a public social interaction dataset.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201