Eye Movement Dynamics Differ between Encoding and Recognition of Faces

Facial recognition is widely thought to involve a holistic perceptual process, and optimal recognition performance can be rapidly achieved within two fixations. However, is facial identity encoding likewise holistic and rapid, and how do gaze dynamics during encoding relate to recognition? While having eye movements tracked, participants completed an encoding (“study”) phase and subsequent recognition (“test”) phase, each divided into blocks of one- or five-second stimulus presentation time conditions to distinguish the influences of experimental phase (encoding/recognition) and stimulus presentation time (short/long). Within the first two fixations, several differences between encoding and recognition were evident in the temporal and spatial dynamics of the eye-movements. Most importantly, in behavior, the long study phase presentation time alone caused improved recognition performance (i.e., longer time at recognition did not improve performance), revealing that encoding is not as rapid as recognition, since longer sequences of eye-movements are functionally required to achieve optimal encoding than to achieve optimal recognition. Together, these results are inconsistent with a scan path replay hypothesis. Rather, feature information seems to have been gradually integrated over many fixations during encoding, enabling recognition that could subsequently occur rapidly and holistically within a small number of fixations

The categories, frequencies, and stability of idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns to faces

The spatial pattern of eye-movements to faces considered typical for neurologically healthy individuals is a roughly T-shaped distribution over the internal facial features with peak fixation density tending toward the left eye (observer's perspective). However, recent studies indicate that striking deviations from this classic pattern are common within the population and are highly stable over time. The classic pattern actually reflects the average of these various idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns across individuals. The natural categories and respective frequencies of different types of idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns have not been specifically investigated before, so here we analyzed the spatial patterns of eye-movements for 48 participants to estimate the frequency of different kinds of individual eye-movement patterns to faces in the normal healthy population. Four natural clusters were discovered such that approximately 25% of our participants' fixation density peaks clustered over the left eye region (observer's perspective), 23% over the right eye-region, 31% over the nasion/bridge region of the nose, and 20% over the region spanning the nose, philthrum, and upper lips. We did not find any relationship between particular idiosyncratic eye-movement patterns and recognition performance. Individuals' eye-movement patterns early in a trial were more stereotyped than later ones and idiosyncratic fixation patterns evolved with time into a trial. Finally, while face inversion strongly modulated eye-movement patterns, individual patterns did not become less distinct for inverted compared to upright faces. Group-averaged fixation patterns do not represent individual patterns well, so exploration of such individual patterns is of value for future studies of visual cognition

Cross-hemispheric Alternating Current Stimulation During a Nap Disrupts Slow Wave Activity and Associated Memory Consolidation.

Slow Wave Activity (SWA), the low frequency (<4 Hz) oscillations that characterize Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) are thought to relate causally to declarative memory consolidation during nocturnal sleep. Evidence is conflicting relating SWA to memory consolidation during nap however

Photoluminescence Stokes shift and exciton fine structure in CdTe nanocrystals

The photoluminescence spectra of spherical CdTe nanocrystals with zincblende structure are studied by size-selective spectroscopic techniques. We observe a resonant Stokes shift of 15 meV when the excitation laser energy is tuned to the red side of the absorption band at 2.236 eV. The experimental data are analyzed within a symmetry-based tight-binding theory of the exciton spectrum, which is first shown to account for the size dependence of the fundamental gap reported previously in the literature. The theoretical Stokes shift presented as a function of the gap shows a good agreement with the experimental data, indicating that the measured Stokes shift indeed arises from the electron-hole exchange interaction.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, LaTe

Effect of the temperature and relative humidity in stored sotol (Dasylirion cedrosanum Trel.) seeds on fungi biodiversity

The objective of the research was to identify the fungi in sotol seeds at different conditions of temperature and relative humidity. Seeds were collected at Buñuelos, municipality, and taken to the Laboratory of the Center for Training and Development in Seed Technology (CCDTS) at Universidad Autonoma Agraria Antonio Narro. The seed was stored for a period of 90 days, whit conditions of 60, 75, 80 and 85% of relative humidity kept at 5, 15 and 25 °C. Fungi identifying by morphological criteria. A completely randomized experiment using R software, with factorial arrangement whit two replications. Pathogens identified were: Aspergillus glaucus, Aspergillus niger, Fusarium sp., Penicillium sp., Aspergillus candidus, Cladosporiun sp., Alternaria sp. and Aspergillus chraceus, the results showed that the higher the humidity, temperature and storage time, the incidence of fungi tends to be higher. Fungi with a higher presence in sotol seeds were: Aspergillus glaucus and Penicillium sp. Safe storage environments for sotol seeds reported in this work are 5 °C and a relative humidity of 60-75%. Sotol seeds tolerates conditions of 15 °C and a relative humidity up to 75%.&nbsp

Meaning-making from wordless (or nearly wordless) picturebooks: what educational research expects and what readers have to say

Wordless (or nearly wordless) picturebooks are intriguing in terms of how readers make meaning from them. This article offers a conceptualization of existing studies in the field of education that use wordless picturebooks with young readers. While some of these studies contribute to understanding meaning-making, the pragmatic use of wordless picturebooks often does not take account of their particular nature and of the heightened role of the reader, leading to a mismatch between what the picturebook expects from the implied reader and the researchers’ expectations of what ‘real’ readers must do with these books. By highlighting observations from children’s literature scholarship and reader-response studies, this article aims to encourage a more interdisciplinary understanding of meaning-making. It also seeks to persuade educational researchers and mediators to consider investigative approaches that are not based on verbalization but are more in tune with the invitations that wordless picturebooks extend to young readers

Evolution of the electronic structure with size in II-VI semiconductor nanocrystals

In order to provide a quantitatively accurate description of the band gap variation with sizes in various II-VI semiconductor nanocrystals, we make use of the recently reported tight-binding parametrization of the corresponding bulk systems. Using the same tight-binding scheme and parameters, we calculate the electronic structure of II-VI nanocrystals in real space with sizes ranging between 5 and 80 {\AA} in diameter. A comparison with available experimental results from the literature shows an excellent agreement over the entire range of sizes.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev.

El álbum poético en portugués y en español: sinergia estética entre palabras e ilustraciones

Este estudo procurou problematizar a relação textual que se observa entre a palavra e a imagem em um tipo de texto especialmente concebido para crianças: o álbum poético. Para tal, utilizamos alguns exemplos textuais significativos desse subgênero literário/editorial ainda em emergência tanto em Portugal quanto na Espanha, e propusemos uma definição e uma caracterização baseadas no comentário de sequências poéticas nas quais a ilustração sustenta o conteúdo verbal. Efetivamente, centrando a atenção no álbum poético de potencial recepção infanto-juvenil, sugere-se uma análise de diversos títulos de autoria portuguesa e espanhola, assente em uma leitura dialógica do texto verbal e do visual. A sinergia que se concretiza entre as duas componentes enunciadas alicerça essa nova construção estética que tem, na verdade e na sua essência, a poesia como matriz e, em larga medida, é devedora dos efeitos expressivos da metáfora.This study aimed to discuss the relation between words and images in a type of text especially directed to children: the picture-poetry book. From significant examples of this literary subgenre still emerging in both Portugal and Spain, we propose a definition and characterization based on the review of poetic sequences in which illustrations support the verbal content. By focusing on picture-poetry books potentially aimed for adolescents and children, we present an analysis of several titles by Portuguese and Spanish authors, based on the dialogic reading between verbal and visual texts. The synergy found between these two components creates de foundantions of a new aesthetic construction which, in truth and in essence, has poetry as its matrix and owes its expressive effects to metaphors.Este estudio ha tenido como objetivo discutir la relación textual que existe entre la palabra y la imagen en un tipo texto especialmente creado para niños: el álbum poético. Para ello, utilizamos algunos ejemplos textuales significativos de un subgénero literario en emergencia tanto en Portugal cuanto en España, y hemos propuesto una definición de este subgénero y su caracterización a partir del comentario de secuencias poéticas en las cuales la imagen sustenta el contenido verbal. De hecho, centrando la atención en el álbum poético de potencial recepción infantil y juvenil, proponemos un análisis de diversos títulos de autoría portuguesa y española basado en la lectura dialógica entre el texto verbal y el texto ilustrativo. La sinergia que se establece entre estos dos componentes enunciados facilita una nueva construcción estética que da pie, en su esencia, a un tipo de poesía que, en gran medida, es deudora de los efectos expresivos de la metáfora.CIEC - Centro de Investigação em Estudos da Criança, IE, UMinho (UI 317 da FCT), Portugal. Fundos Nacionais através da FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) e cofinanciado pelo Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER) através do COMPETE 2020 – Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI) no âmbito do CIEC (Centro de Investigação em Estudos da Criança, da Universidade do Minho) com a referência POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007562info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Agroecosystem energy transitions in the old and new worlds: trajectories and determinants at the regional scale

Energy efficiency in biomass production is a major challenge for a future transition to sustainable food and energy provision. This study uses methodologically consistent data on agroecosystem energy flows and different metrics of energetic efficiency from seven regional case studies in North America (USA and Canada) and Europe (Spain and Austria) to investigate energy transitions in Western agroecosystems from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. We quantify indicators such as external final energy return on investment (EFEROI, i.e., final produce per unit of external energy input), internal final EROI (IFEROI, final produce per unit of biomass reused locally), and final EROI (FEROI, final produce per unit of total inputs consumed). The transition is characterized by increasing final produce accompanied by increasing external energy inputs and stable local biomass reused. External inputs did not replace internal biomass reinvestments, but added to them. The results were declining EFEROI, stable or increasing IFEROI, and diverging trends in FEROI. The factors shaping agroecosystem energy profiles changed in the course of the transition: Under advanced organic and frontier agriculture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, population density and biogeographic conditions explained both agroecosystem productivity and energy inputs. In industrialized agroecosystems, biogeographic conditions and specific socio-economic factors influenced trends towards increased agroecosystem specialization. The share of livestock products in a region's final produce was the most important factor determining energy returns on investment

Where you look matters for body perception: Preferred gaze location contributes to the body inversion effect

The Body Inversion Effect (BIE; reduced visual discrimination performance for inverted compared to upright bodies) suggests that bodies are visually processed configurally; however, the specific importance of head posture information in the BIE has been indicated in reports of BIE reduction for whole bodies with fixed head position and for headless bodies. Through measurement of gaze patterns and investigation of the causal relation of fixation location to visual body discrimination performance, the present study reveals joint contributions of feature and configuration processing to visual body discrimination. Participants predominantly gazed at the (body-centric) upper body for upright bodies and the lower body for inverted bodies in the context of an experimental paradigm directly comparable to that of prior studies of the BIE. Subsequent manipulation of fixation location indicates that these preferential gaze locations causally contributed to the BIE for whole bodies largely due to the informative nature of gazing at or near the head. Also, a BIE was detected for both whole and headless bodies even when fixation location on the body was held constant, indicating a role of configural processing in body discrimination, though inclusion of the head posture information was still highly discriminative in the context of such processing. Interestingly, the impact of configuration (upright and inverted) to the BIE appears greater than that of differential preferred gaze locations