Massive Effects of Saliency on Information Processing in Visual Working Memory

Limitations in the ability to temporarily represent information in visual working memory (VWM) are crucial for visual cognition. Whether VWM processing is dependent on an object’s saliency (i.e., how much it stands out) has been neglected in VWM research. Therefore, we developed a novel VWM task that allows direct control over saliency. In three experiments with this task (on 10, 31, and 60 adults, respectively), we consistently found that VWM performance is strongly and parametrically influenced by saliency and that both an object’s relative saliency (compared with concurrently presented objects) and absolute saliency influence VWM processing. We also demonstrated that this effect is indeed due to bottom-up saliency rather than differential fit between each object and the top-down attentional template. A simple computational model assuming that VWM performance is determined by the weighted sum of absolute and relative saliency accounts well for the observed data patterns

Estimating the Timing of Cognitive Operations With MEG/EEG Latency Measures: A Primer, a Brief Tutorial, and an Implementation of Various Methods

The major advantage of MEG/EEG over other neuroimaging methods is its high temporal resolution. Examining the latency of well-studied components can provide a window into the dynamics of cognitive operations beyond traditional response-time (RT) measurements. While RTs reflect the cumulative duration of all time-consuming cognitive operations involved in a task, component latencies can partition this time into cognitively meaningful sub-steps. Surprisingly, most MEG/EEG studies neglect this advantage and restrict analyses to component amplitudes without considering latencies. The major reasons for this neglect might be that, first, the most easily accessible latency measure (peak latency) is often unreliable and that, second, more complex measures are difficult to conceive, implement, and parametrize. The present article illustrates the key advantages and disadvantages of the three main types of latency-measures (peak latency, onset latency, and percent-area latency), introduces a MATLAB function that extracts all these measures and is compatible with common analysis tools, discusses the most important parameter choices for different research questions and components of interest, and demonstrates its use by various group analyses on one planar gradiometer pair of the publicly available Wakeman and Henson (2015) data. The introduced function can extract from group data not only single-subject latencies, but also grand-average and jackknife latencies. Furthermore, it gives the choice between different approaches to automatically set baselines and anchor points for latency estimation, approaches that were partly developed by me and that capitalize on the informational richness of MEG/EEG data. Although the function comes with a wide range of customization parameters, the default parameters are set so that even beginners get reasonable results. Graphical depictions of latency estimates, baselines, and anchor points overlaid on individual averages further support learning, understanding and trouble-shooting. Once extracted, latency estimates can be submitted to any analysis also available for (averaged) RTs, including tests for mean differences, correlational approaches and cognitive modeling

Targeted Adversarial Attacks on Wind Power Forecasts

In recent years, researchers proposed a variety of deep learning models for wind power forecasting. These models predict the wind power generation of wind farms or entire regions more accurately than traditional machine learning algorithms or physical models. However, latest research has shown that deep learning models can often be manipulated by adversarial attacks. Since wind power forecasts are essential for the stability of modern power systems, it is important to protect them from this threat. In this work, we investigate the vulnerability of two different forecasting models to targeted, semitargeted, and untargeted adversarial attacks. We consider a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network for predicting the power generation of a wind farm and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for forecasting the wind power generation throughout Germany. Moreover, we propose the Total Adversarial Robustness Score (TARS), an evaluation metric for quantifying the robustness of regression models to targeted and semi-targeted adversarial attacks. It assesses the impact of attacks on the model's performance, as well as the extent to which the attacker's goal was achieved, by assigning a score between 0 (very vulnerable) and 1 (very robust). In our experiments, the LSTM forecasting model was fairly robust and achieved a TARS value of over 0.81 for all adversarial attacks investigated. The CNN forecasting model only achieved TARS values below 0.06 when trained ordinarily, and was thus very vulnerable. Yet, its robustness could be significantly improved by adversarial training, which always resulted in a TARS above 0.46.Comment: 20 pages, including appendix, 12 figure

Estimating the Timing of Cognitive Operations With MEG/EEG Latency Measures: A Primer, a Brief Tutorial, and an Implementation of Various Methods

The major advantage of MEG/EEG over other neuroimaging methods is its high temporal resolution. Examining the latency of well-studied components can provide a window into the dynamics of cognitive operations beyond traditional response-time (RT) measurements. While RTs reflect the cumulative duration of all time-consuming cognitive operations involved in a task, component latencies can partition this time into cognitively meaningful sub-steps. Surprisingly, most MEG/EEG studies neglect this advantage and restrict analyses to component amplitudes without considering latencies. The major reasons for this neglect might be that, first, the most easily accessible latency measure (peak latency) is often unreliable and that, second, more complex measures are difficult to conceive, implement, and parametrize. The present article illustrates the key advantages and disadvantages of the three main types of latency-measures (peak latency, onset latency, and percent-area latency), introduces a MATLAB function that extracts all these measures and is compatible with common analysis tools, discusses the most important parameter choices for different research questions and components of interest, and demonstrates its use by various group analyses on one planar gradiometer pair of the publicly available Wakeman and Henson (2015) data. The introduced function can extract from group data not only single-subject latencies, but also grand-average and jackknife latencies. Furthermore, it gives the choice between different approaches to automatically set baselines and anchor points for latency estimation, approaches that were partly developed by me and that capitalize on the informational richness of MEG/EEG data. Although the function comes with a wide range of customization parameters, the default parameters are set so that even beginners get reasonable results. Graphical depictions of latency estimates, baselines, and anchor points overlaid on individual averages further support learning, understanding and trouble-shooting. Once extracted, latency estimates can be submitted to any analysis also available for (averaged) RTs, including tests for mean differences, correlational approaches and cognitive modeling

The mental representation in mental rotation : its content, timing, and neuronal source

What is rotated in mental rotation? The implicitly or explicitly most widely accepted assumption is that the rotated representation is a visual mental image. We here provide converging evidence that instead mental rotation is a process specialized on a certain type of spatial information. As a basis, we here develop a general theory on how to manipulate and empirically examine representational content. One technique to examine the content of the representation in mental rotation is to measure the influence of stimulus characteristics on rotational speed. Experiment 1a and 1b show that the rotational speed of university students (10 men, 10 women and 10 men, 11 women, respectively) is influenced exclusively by the amount of represented orientation-dependent spatial-relational information but not by orientation-independent spatial-relational information, visual complexity, or the number of stimulus parts. Obviously, only explicit orientation-dependent spatial-relational information in an abstract, nonvisual form is rotated. As information in mental-rotation tasks is initially presented visually, a nonvisual representation during rotation implies that at some point during processing information is recoded. Experiment 2 provides more direct evidence for this recoding. While university students (12 men, 12 women) performed our mental-rotation task, we recorded their EEG in order to extract slow potentials, which are sensitive to working-memory load. During initial stimulus processing, slow potentials were sensitive to the amount of orientation-independent information or to the visual complexity of the stimuli. During rotation, in contrast, slow potentials were sensitive to the amount of orientation-dependent information only. This change in slow potential behavior constitutes evidence for the hypothesized recoding of the content of the mental representation from a visual into a nonvisual form. We further assumed that, in order to be accessible for the process of mental rotation, orientation-dependent information must be represented in those brain areas that are also responsible for mental rotation proper. Indeed, in an fMRI study on university students (12 men, 12 women) the very same set of brain areas was specifically activated by both the amount of mental rotation and of orientation-dependent information. The amount of orientation-independent information/visual complexity, in contrast, influenced activation in a different set of brain areas. Together, all activated areas constitute the so-called mental rotation network. In sum, the present work provides a general theory and several techniques to examine mental representations and employs these techniques to identify the content, timing, and neuronal source of the mental representation in mental rotation.Was wird bei mentaler Rotation rotiert? Die implizit oder explizit am weitesten verbreitete Annahme ist, dass die rotierte Repräsentation ein mentales Bild ist. Wir berichten hier konvergierende Evidenz, dass mentale Rotation stattdessen ein auf einen bestimmten Typ räumlicher Information spezialisierter Prozess ist. Als Grundlage entwickeln wir hier zunächst eine allgemeine Theorie, wie der Inhalt einer Repräsentation manipuliert und empirisch untersucht werden kann. Eine Technik, den Inhalt der Repräsentation bei mentaler Rotation zu untersuchen, ist den Einfluss von Stimuluseigenschaften auf die Rotationsgeschwindigkeit zu messen. Experiment 1a und 1b zeigen, dass die Rotationsgeschwindigkeit von Studenten (10 Männer, 10 Frauen bzw. 10 Männer, 11 Frauen) ausschließlich von der Menge an repräsentierter orientierungsabhängiger räumlich-relationaler Information, aber nicht von orientierungsunabhängiger räumlich-relationaler Information, visueller Komplexität oder der Anzahl an Stimulusteilen beeinflusst wird. Offensichtlich wird nur explizite orientierungsabhängige räumlich-relationale Information in einer abstrakten, nicht-visuellen Form rotiert. Da Informationen in Experimenten zur mentalen Rotation ursprünglich visuell präsentiert werden, impliziert eine nicht-visuelle Repräsentation während der Rotation, dass, zu einem gewissen Punkt während der Verarbeitung, Informationen umkodiert werden. Experiment 2 liefert direktere Evidenz für diese Umkodierung: Während Studenten (12 Männer, 12 Frauen) an unserem Experiment zur mentalen Rotation teilnahmen, zeichneten wir ihr EEG auf, um langsame Potentiale zu extrahieren, welche sensitiv für Arbeitsgedächtnisbelastung sind. Zu Beginn der Stimulus-Verarbeitung waren diese langsamen Potentiale sensitiv für die Menge an orientierungsunabhängiger Information bzw. für die visuelle Komplexität der Stimuli. Im Gegensatz dazu waren die langsamen Potentiale während der Rotation ausschließlich sensitiv für die Menge an orientierungsabhängiger Information. Diese Veränderung der langsamen Potentiale stellt Evidenz für die postulierte Umkodierung des Inhalts der mentalen Repräsentation von einer visuellen in eine nicht-visuelle Form dar. Weiterhin nahmen wir an, dass, damit sie für den Prozess der mentalen Rotation zugänglich ist, orientierungsabhängige Information in den Hirnarealen repräsentiert sein muss, die auch für die mentale Rotation selbst zuständig sind. Tatsächlich war in einer fMRI-Studie mit Studenten (12 Männer, 12 Frauen) dasselbe Netz an Hirnarealen, das spezifisch durch die Menge an mentaler Rotation aktiviert war, auch spezifisch durch die Menge an orientierungsabhängiger Information aktiviert. Die Menge an orientierungsunabhängiger Information hingegen beeinflusste die Aktivation in einem anderen Netz an Hirnarealen. In ihrer Gesamtheit stellen alle aktivierten Areale das sogenannte Netzwerk der mentalen Rotation dar. Zusammengefasst liefert die vorliegende Arbeit eine allgemeine Theorie und mehrere Techniken zur Untersuchung von mentalen Repräsentationen und setzt diese Techniken ein, um den Inhalt, den zeitlichen Verlauf und den neuronalen Ursprung der mentalen Repräsentation bei mentaler Rotation zu untersuchen

Factors on Vibrational Harm during Hammer Drilling : Influences of Lateral Force, Feed Force, Hammer Drill and Drill Bit Type

When using hammer drills, the user is exposed to vibrations which can cause damage to the body. Those vibrations can be affected by external factors such as feed forces, which can increase the degree of damage to the user. However, currently there is a lack of knowledge as to whether the lateral forces applied by the user also have an influence on the technical system and whether these influences depend on the system. For this reason, a study with 1152 test runs was carried out on a test rig to investigate the relationship between the feed force and the lateral force as a function of the hammer drill setup on the vibrations at the hammer drill housing and main handle. The experiment showed that the feed (p = < .001, up to r = 0.57) and lateral (p = < .001, up to r = 0.77) forces had an influence on the vibrations of the hammer drill. However, these depended strongly on the technical system and hence cannot be generalized. Furthermore, it was proven that the impact frequency of the hammer drill was reduced by increasing both the feed force (p = < .001, r = 0.55) and the lateral force (p = < .001, r = 0.23). The findings can not only be used by engineers and scientists to further develop vibration standards, but also to design more ergonomic hammer drills. Hence, the vibration decoupling of hammer drills should be redesigned so that lateral forces do not lead to an increase in vibrations that are harmful to the user

Reading English-language haiku: An eye-movement study of the ‘cut effect’

The current study, set within the larger enterprise of Neuro-Cognitive Poetics, was designed to examine how readers deal with the ‘cut’ – a more or less sharp semantic-conceptual break – in normative, three-line English-language haiku poems (ELH). Readers were presented with three-line haiku that consisted of two (seemingly) disparate parts, a (two-line) ‘phrase’ image and a one-line ‘fragment’ image, in order to determine how they process the conceptual gap between these images when constructing the poem’s meaning – as reflected in their patterns of reading eye movements. In addition to replicating the basic ‘cut effect’, i.e., the extended fixation dwell time on the fragment line relative to the other lines, the present study examined (a) how this effect is influenced by whether the cut is purely implicit or explicitly marked by punctuation, and (b) whether the effect pattern could be delineated against a control condition of ‘uncut’, one-image haiku. For ‘cut’ vs. ‘uncut’ haiku, the results revealed the distribution of fixations across the poems to be modulated by the position of the cut (after line 1 vs. after line 2), the presence vs. absence of a cut marker, and the semantic-conceptual distance between the two images (context–action vs. juxtaposition haiku). These formal-structural and conceptual-semantic properties were associated with systematic changes in how individual poem lines were scanned at first reading and then (selectively) re-sampled in second- and third-pass reading to construct and check global meaning. No such effects were found for one-image (control) haiku. We attribute this pattern to the operation of different meaning resolution processes during the comprehension of two-image haiku, which are invoked by both form- and meaning-related features of the poems

LINC01133 inhibits invasion and promotes proliferation in an endometriosis epithelial cell line

Endometriosis is a common gynecological disorder characterized by ectopic growth of endometrium outside the uterus and is associated with chronic pain and infertility. We investigated the role of the long intergenic noncoding RNA 01133 (LINC01133) in endometriosis, an lncRNA that has been implicated in several types of cancer. We found that LINC01133 is upregulated in ectopic endometriotic lesions. As expression appeared higher in the epithelial endometrial layer, we performed a siRNA knockdown of LINC01133 in an endometriosis epithelial cell line. Phenotypic assays indicated that LINC01133 may promote proliferation and suppress cellular migration, and affect the cytoskeleton and morphology of the cells. Gene ontology analysis of differentially expressed genes indicated that cell proliferation and migration pathways were affected in line with the observed phenotype. We validated upregulation of p21 and downregulation of Cyclin A at the protein level, which together with the quantification of the DNA content using fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) analysis indicated that the observed effects on cellular proliferation may be due to changes in cell cycle. Further, we found testis-specific protein kinase 1 (TESK1) kinase upregulation corresponding with phosphorylation and inactivation of actin severing protein Cofilin, which could explain changes in the cytoskeleton and cellular migration. These results indicate that endometriosis is associated with LINC01133 upregulation, which may affect pathogenesis via the cellular proliferation and migration pathways