Breaking through the attentional window: Capture by abrupt onsets versus color singletons

Theeuwes (2004) proposed that stimulus-driven capture occurs primarily for salient stimuli that fall within the observer's attentional window, such as when performing a parallel search. This proposal, supported by some studies, can explain many seemingly discrepant results in the literature. The present study tested this proposal using a modified pre-cuing paradigm. Search mode was manipulated via target-distractor similarity in color space. In the parallel search condition, the orange target “popped out” from a set of distantly colored distractors (blue and green). In the serial search condition, the orange target was more difficult to find amongst a set of similarly colored distractors (yellow and red). In Experiments 1 and 2, cue validity effects for irrelevant color singleton cues were greater under parallel search than serial search, at least partially replicating previous studies favoring the attentional window account (e.g., Belopolsky et al., 2007). We found the opposite pattern, however, for capture by abrupt onsets (Experiments 3 and 4). Here, capture effects were actually greater under serial search. In sum, parallel search appears to facilitate capture by color singletons, yet inhibit capture by abrupt onsets.Keywords: attentional capture, visual search, spatial attentio

Snake fang-inspired stamping patch for transdermal delivery of liquid formulations

A flexible microneedle patch that can transdermally deliver liquid-phase therapeutics would enable direct use of existing, approved drugs and vaccines, which are mostly in liquid form, without the need for additional drug solidification, efficacy verification, and subsequent approval. Specialized dissolving or coated microneedle patches that deliver reformulated, solidified therapeutics have made considerable advances; however, microneedles that can deliver liquid drugs and vaccines still remain elusive because of technical limitations. Here, we present a snake fang-inspired microneedle patch that can administer existing liquid formulations to patients in an ultrafast manner (< 15 s). Rear-fanged snakes have an intriguing molar with a groove on the surface, which enables rapid and efficient infusion of venom or saliva into prey. Liquid delivery is based on surface tension and capillary action. The microneedle patch uses multiple open groove architectures that emulate the grooved fangs of rear-fanged snakes: Similar to snake fangs, the microneedles can rapidly and efficiently deliver diverse liquid-phase drugs and vaccines in seconds under capillary action with only gentle thumb pressure, without requiring a complex pumping system. Hydrodynamic simulations show that the snake fang-inspired open groove architectures enable rapid capillary force-driven delivery of liquid formulations with varied surface tensions and viscosities. We demonstrate that administration of ovalbumin and influenza virus with the snake fang-inspired microneedle patch induces robust antibody production and protective immune response in guinea pigs and mice

A Phenome-Based Functional Analysis of Transcription Factors in the Cereal Head Blight Fungus, Fusarium graminearum

Fusarium graminearum is an important plant pathogen that causes head blight of major cereal crops. The fungus produces mycotoxins that are harmful to animal and human. In this study, a systematic analysis of 17 phenotypes of the mutants in 657 Fusarium graminearum genes encoding putative transcription factors (TFs) resulted in a database of over 11,000 phenotypes (phenome). This database provides comprehensive insights into how this cereal pathogen of global significance regulates traits important for growth, development, stress response, pathogenesis, and toxin production and how transcriptional regulations of these traits are interconnected. In-depth analysis of TFs involved in sexual development revealed that mutations causing defects in perithecia development frequently affect multiple other phenotypes, and the TFs associated with sexual development tend to be highly conserved in the fungal kingdom. Besides providing many new insights into understanding the function of F. graminearum TFs, this mutant library and phenome will be a valuable resource for characterizing the gene expression network in this fungus and serve as a reference for studying how different fungi have evolved to control various cellular processes at the transcriptional level

Error resilient video coding for wireless applications

Ph.D.Committee Chair: Russell M. Mercerea

Mismatches between Humans and Latent Semantic Analysis in Document Similarity Judgments

Modeling how humans judge the semantic similarity between documents (e.g., abstracts from two different psychology articles) is an interesting and challenging topic in cognitive psychology. It also has practical implications for developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially those designed for retrieving relevant information from a large database in response to a given query (e.g., finding new research articles related to a given abstract). Conversely, AI algorithms can provide a useful tool for testing human cognitive models. They can precisely simulate the consequences of specific assumptions about cognition, and these consequences can then be compared against actual human performance. In the process of developing both human cognitive models and AI models, investigating the discrepancy between human and AI performance is essential, although it has rarely been explored with respect to document relatedness judgments. In the current study, I identified a set of document pairs whose relatedness was judged radically differently between humans and a computational model called latent semantic analysis (LSA). Based on an examination of those misjudged document pairs, I proposed a tentative model of human document relatedness judgment, called the key-features overlap model. According to this model, document relatedness judgments by humans and computational algorithms can be explained, in part, by the degree of word-pair association across documents. Critically, it suggests that, to judge document relatedness, humans focus primarily on the association between the keywords in each document, while computational algorithms including LSA typically do not. Modifications of target documents to emphasize their keywords, while also providing keyword-relevant background documents to LSA improved LSA’s document relatedness judgments. Such improvement demonstrated the usefulness of the key-feature overlap model-based approach for improving AI algorithms.PsychologyDoctoralUniversity of New Mexico. Dept. of PsychologyRuthruff, EricGoldsmith, TimothyDelaney, HaroldLuger, Georg

An overload-resilient flow removal algorithm for M-LWDF scheduler

In the real-time multimedia applications, packet delay should meet stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Delay Earliest Due Date (EDD) scheduler, originally designed for wireline data networks to operate under a maximum allowed delay, cannot be directly applied to wireless networks, due to the location-dependent errors and time-varying channel conditions. Several modifications of EDD scheduler have been proposed for wireless applications, which typically assume successful admission control, a condition hard to satisfy with wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a removal algorithm for downlink scheduler designed to perform under overloaded situations. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional ones in the QoS guaranteed flows

Comparison of symmetric and asymmetric routing for fixed two-hop cellular relaying network

In this paper, routing strategies for fixed two-hop cellular relaying networks are discussed in terms of area spectral efficiency. We consider symmetric and asymmetric routing in uplink and downlink. Simulation results show that relaying increases the average throughput in comparison with conventional cellular networks and the area spectral efficiency of asymmetric routing is slightly better than that of the symmetric