In Pursuit of Existential Meaning: Motivation to Search for Meaning Facilitates Experiential Purchases Over Material Purchases

People are fundamentally motivated to search for meaning. What do people do when they want to find meaning in life? Despite the universality of humans’ searching for meaning, empirical research has yet sought answers to this question. Guided by theories and empirical evidence suggesting experiential purchases (buying life experiences) as having more existential values than material purchases (buying material possessions), the present research explored how the motivation to search for meaning influences preference for experiential purchases over material purchases. Using various methodologies (e.g., correlational, experimental), four studies tested the hypothesis that experiential purchases are preferred over material purchases as one is motivated to search for meaning. The present research demonstrated that participants perceived experiential purchases to be more instrumental for finding meaning in life than material purchases as they recommended more experiential than material purchases for people who are actively searching for meaning. The present research also employed a cross-lagged panel design and found that the motivation to search for meaning temporally preceded preference for experiential over material purchase, and vice versa. Establishing the causality, the present research experimentally manipulated the motivation to search for meaning and showed subsequent increase in preference for experiential purchases over material purchases. Finally, the present research developed an intervention method to induce one’s motivation to search for meaning and revealed that participants in the intervention condition exhibited greater preference for experiential purchases over material purchases over time. Importantly, the present research further demonstrated that the induced motivation to search for meaning fostered actual experiential purchases, which in turn enhanced a sense of meaning in life through relevant psychological functioning (e.g., autonomy). The present research offers implications for the role of the search for meaning in the experience of meaning and opens avenues for future research

Masked Autoencoder for Unsupervised Video Summarization

Summarizing a video requires a diverse understanding of the video, ranging from recognizing scenes to evaluating how much each frame is essential enough to be selected as a summary. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is acknowledged for its robustness and flexibility to multiple downstream tasks, but the video SSL has not shown its value for dense understanding tasks like video summarization. We claim an unsupervised autoencoder with sufficient self-supervised learning does not need any extra downstream architecture design or fine-tuning weights to be utilized as a video summarization model. The proposed method to evaluate the importance score of each frame takes advantage of the reconstruction score of the autoencoder's decoder. We evaluate the method in major unsupervised video summarization benchmarks to show its effectiveness under various experimental settings

K-polystability of the first secant varieties of rational normal curves

The first secant variety $\Sigma$ of a rational normal curve of degree $d \geq 3$ is known to be a $\mathbf{Q}$-Fano threefold. In this paper, we prove that $\Sigma$ is K-polystable, and hence, $\Sigma$ admits a weak K\"{a}hler-Einstein metric. We also show that there exists a $(-K_{\Sigma})$-polar cylinder in $\Sigma$.Comment: 17 page

Spatiotemporal Augmentation on Selective Frequencies for Video Representation Learning

Recent self-supervised video representation learning methods focus on maximizing the similarity between multiple augmented views from the same video and largely rely on the quality of generated views. In this paper, we propose frequency augmentation (FreqAug), a spatio-temporal data augmentation method in the frequency domain for video representation learning. FreqAug stochastically removes undesirable information from the video by filtering out specific frequency components so that learned representation captures essential features of the video for various downstream tasks. Specifically, FreqAug pushes the model to focus more on dynamic features rather than static features in the video via dropping spatial or temporal low-frequency components. In other words, learning invariance between remaining frequency components results in high-frequency enhanced representation with less static bias. To verify the generality of the proposed method, we experiment with FreqAug on multiple self-supervised learning frameworks along with standard augmentations. Transferring the improved representation to five video action recognition and two temporal action localization downstream tasks shows consistent improvements over baselines

Parental bereavement and the loss of purpose in life as a function of interdependent self-construal

Children are often inextricably linked to their parents’ hopes and dreams. As such, the loss of a child often represents one of the most traumatic experiences possible. The current research explores how this specific loss relates to one’s sense of purpose in life. We further explore whether the loss of a child is particularly detrimental to one’s sense of purpose for highly interdependent parents. Analyses of parents from the Midlife in the United States data set revealed, as expected, that the loss of child negatively predicts one’s sense of purpose in life, and that this effect is most pronounced for parents high in interdependent self-construal. Potential mechanisms and implications of the present findings are discussed.The open access fee for this work was funded through the Texas A&M University Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Fund

Parental bereavement and the loss of purpose in life as a function of interdependent self-construal

Citation: Parental bereavement and the loss of purpose in life as a function of interdependent self-construal. Front. Psychol. 6:1078. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015 Parental bereavement and the loss of purpose in life as a function of interdependent self-construal Children are often inextricably linked to their parents' hopes and dreams. As such, the loss of a child often represents one of the most traumatic experiences possible. The current research explores how this specific loss relates to one's sense of purpose in life. We further explore whether the loss of a child is particularly detrimental to one's sense of purpose for highly interdependent parents. Analyses of parents from the Midlife in the United States data set revealed, as expected, that the loss of child negatively predicts one's sense of purpose in life, and that this effect is most pronounced for parents high in interdependent self-construal. Potential mechanisms and implications of the present findings are discussed

Achieving Synergy in Cognitive Behavior of Humanoids via Deep Learning of Dynamic Visuo-Motor-Attentional Coordination

The current study examines how adequate coordination among different cognitive processes including visual recognition, attention switching, action preparation and generation can be developed via learning of robots by introducing a novel model, the Visuo-Motor Deep Dynamic Neural Network (VMDNN). The proposed model is built on coupling of a dynamic vision network, a motor generation network, and a higher level network allocated on top of these two. The simulation experiments using the iCub simulator were conducted for cognitive tasks including visual object manipulation responding to human gestures. The results showed that synergetic coordination can be developed via iterative learning through the whole network when spatio-temporal hierarchy and temporal one can be self-organized in the visual pathway and in the motor pathway, respectively, such that the higher level can manipulate them with abstraction.Comment: submitted to 2015 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robot

Acronym-Expansion Disambiguation for Intelligent Processing of Enterprise Information

An acronym is an abbreviation of several words in such a way that the abbreviation itself forms a pronounceable word. Acronyms occur frequently throughout various documents, especially those of a technical nature, for example, research papers and patents. While these acronyms can enhance document readability, in a variety of fields, they have a negative effect on business intelligence. To resolve this problem, we propose a method of acronym-expansion disambiguation to collect high-quality enterprise information. In experimental evaluations, we demonstrate its efficiency through the use of objective comparisons