348 research outputs found
Inaccessible time to visual awareness during attentional blinks in macaques and humans
知覚のコマ落ちから、意識の時間を可視化 --意識の進化的側面にもアプローチ--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2023-11-01.Even when we attend to successive visual events, we often cannot notice an event occurring during a certain temporal window. Such an inaccessible time for visual awareness is known as "attentional blink" (AB). Whether AB is a phenomenon unique to humans or exists also in other animals is unclear. Using a dual-task paradigm shared between macaques and humans, we here demonstrate a nonhuman primate model of AB. Although macaques also showed behavioral signatures of AB, their AB effect lasted longer than that of humans. To map the relation between macaque and human ABs, we introduced a time warping analysis. The analysis revealed a formal structure behind the interspecies difference of AB; the temporal window of macaque AB was scaled from that of human AB. The present study opens the door to combining the approaches of neuroscience, psychophysics, and theoretical models to further identify a scale-invariant biological substrate of visual awareness
Early Spectral Evolution of the Rapidly Expanding Type Ia SN 2006X
We present optical spectroscopic and photometric observations of Type Ia
supernova (SN) 2006X from --10 to +91 days after the -band maximum. This SN
exhibits one of the highest expansion velocity ever published for SNe Ia. At
premaximum phases, the spectra show strong and broad features of
intermediate-mass elements such as Si, S, Ca, and Mg, while the O{\sc
i}7773 line is weak. The extremely high velocities of Si{\sc ii} and
S{\sc ii} lines and the weak O{\sc i} line suggest that an intense
nucleosynthesis might take place in the outer layers, favoring a delayed
detonation model. Interestingly, Si{\sc ii}5972 feature is quite
shallow, resulting in an unusually low depth ratio of Si{\sc ii}5972
to 6355, (Si{\sc ii}). The low (Si{\sc ii}) is usually
interpreted as a high photospheric temperature. However, the weak Si{\sc
iii}4560 line suggests a low temperature, in contradiction to the low
(Si{\sc ii}). This could imply that the Si{\sc ii}5972 line
might be contaminated by underlying emission. We propose that (Si{\sc
ii}) may not be a good temperature indicator for rapidly expanding SNe Ia at
premaximum phases.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, (Received 2008 August 17; Accepted 2009 April
13
Bayesian Approach to Find a Long-Term Trend in Erratic Polarization Variations Observed in Blazars
We developed a method to separate a long-term trend from observed temporal
variations of polarization in blazars using a Bayesian approach. The temporal
variation of the polarization vector is apparently erratic in most blazars,
while several objects occasionally exhibited systematic variations, for
example, an increase of the polarization degree associated with a flare of the
total flux. We assume that the observed polarization vector is a superposition
of distinct two components, a long-term trend and a short-term variation
component responsible for short flares. Our Bayesian model estimates the
long-term trend which satisfies the condition that the total flux correlates
with the polarized flux of the short-term component. We demonstrate that
assumed long-term polarization components are successfully separated by the
Bayesian model for artificial data. We applied this method to photopolarimetric
data of OJ 287, S5 0716+714, and S2 0109+224. Simple and systematic long-term
trends were obtained in OJ 287 and S2 0109+224, while no such a trend was
identified in S5 0716+714. We propose that the apparently erratic variations of
polarization in OJ 287 and S2 0109+224 are due to the presence of the long-term
polarization component. The behavior of polarization in S5 0716+714 during our
observation period implies the presence of a number of polarization components
having a quite short time-scale of variations.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in PAS
The evolution of the peculiar Type Ia supernova SN 2005hk over 400 days
photometry and medium resolution optical spectroscopy of peculiar
Type Ia supernova SN 2005hk are presented and analysed, covering the
pre-maximum phase to around 400 days after explosion. The supernova is found to
be underluminous compared to "normal" Type Ia supernovae. The photometric and
spectroscopic evolution of SN 2005hk is remarkably similar to the peculiar Type
Ia event SN 2002cx. The expansion velocity of the supernova ejecta is found to
be lower than normal Type Ia events. The spectra obtained \gsim 200 days
since explosion do not show the presence of forbidden [\ion{Fe}{ii}],
[\ion{Fe}{iii}] and [\ion{Co}{iii}] lines, but are dominated by narrow,
permitted \ion{Fe}{ii}, NIR \ion{Ca}{ii} and \ion{Na}{i} lines with P-Cygni
profiles. Thermonuclear explosion model with Chandrasekhar mass ejecta and a
kinetic energy smaller (\KE = 0.3 \times 10^{51} {\rm ergs}) than that of
canonical Type Ia supernovae is found to well explain the observed bolometric
light curve. The mass of \Nifs synthesized in this explosion is 0.18 \Msun.
The early spectra are successfully modeled with this less energetic model with
some modifications of the abundance distribution. The late spectrum is
explained as a combination of a photospheric component and a nebular component.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Minor
revision, discussion section adde
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