Prestimulus oscillatory brain activity interacts with evoked recurrent processing to facilitate conscious visual perception.

We investigated whether prestimulus alpha-band oscillatory activity and stimulus-elicited recurrent processing interact to facilitate conscious visual perception. Participants tried to perceive a visual stimulus that was perceptually masked through object substitution masking (OSM). We showed that attenuated prestimulus alpha power was associated with greater negative-polarity stimulus-evoked ERP activity that resembled the visual awareness negativity (VAN), previously argued to reflect recurrent processing related to conscious perception. This effect, however, was not associated with better perception. Instead, when prestimulus alpha power was elevated, a preferred prestimulus alpha phase was associated with a greater VAN-like negativity, which was then associated with better cue perception. Cue perception was worse when prestimulus alpha power was elevated but the stimulus occurred at a nonoptimal prestimulus alpha phase and the VAN-like negativity was low. Our findings suggest that prestimulus alpha activity at a specific phase enables temporally selective recurrent processing that facilitates conscious perception in OSM

Comparison of two models for managing reliability growth during product design

Relying on reliability growth testing to improve system design is neither usually effective nor efficient. Instead it is important to design in reliability. This requires models to estimate reliability growth in the design that can be used to assess whether goal reliability will be achieved within the target timescale for the design process. Many models have been developed for analysis of reliability growth on test, but there has been much less attention given to reliability growth in design. This paper describes and compares two models: one motivated by the practical engineering process; the other by extending the reasoning of statistical reliability growth modelling. Both models are referenced in the recently revised edition of international standard IEC 61164. However, there has been no reported evaluation of their properties. Therefore, this paper explores the commonalities and differences between these models through an assessment of their logic and their application to an industrial example. Recommendations are given for the use of reliability growth models to aid management of the design process and to inform product development

Modeling reliabilty growth in the product design process

Relying on reliability growth testing to improve system design is not always cost effective and certainly not efficient. Instead, it is important to design in reliability. This requires models to estimate reliability growth in the design and to assess whether goal reliability will be achieved within the target timescale. While many models have been developed for analysis of reliability growth in test, there has been less attention given to reliability growth in design. This paper proposes and compares two models - one motivated by the practical engineering process (the modified power law) and the other by extending the reasoning of statistical reliability growth modeling (the modified IBM). The commonalities and differences between these models are explored through an assessment of their logic and an application. We conclude that the choice of model depends on the growth process being modeled. Key drivers are the type of system design and the project management of the growth process. When the design activities are well understood and project workloads can be managed evenly, leading to predictable and equally spaced modifications each of which having a similar effect on the reliability of the item, then the modified power law is a more appropriate model. On the other hand, the modified IBM is more appropriate for more uncertain situations, where the reliability improvement of a design is driven by the removal of faults, which are yet unknown and only through further investigation of the design, these can be identified. These situations have less predictable workloads and fewer modifications are likely later on in the project

The Eye-Mind Wandering Link: Identifying Gaze Indices of Mind Wandering Across Tasks

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Gaze-based signatures of mind wandering during real-world scene processing

Item does not contain fulltextPhysiological limitations on the visual system require gaze to move from location to location to extract the most relevant information within a scene. Therefore, gaze provides a real-time index of the information-processing priorities of the visual system. We investigated gaze allocation during mind wandering (MW), a state where cognitive priorities shift from processing task-relevant external stimuli (i.e., the visual world) to task-irrelevant internal thoughts. In both a main study and a replication, we recorded the eye movements of college-aged adults who studied images of urban scenes and responded to pseudorandom thought probes on whether they were mind wandering or attentively viewing at the time of the probe. Probe-caught MW was associated with fewer and longer fixations, greater fixation dispersion, and more frequent eyeblinks (only observed in the main study) relative to periods of attentive scene viewing. These findings demonstrate that gaze indices typically considered to represent greater engagement with scene processing (e.g., longer fixations) can also indicate MW. In this way, the current work exhibits a need for empirical investigations and computational models of gaze control to account for MW for a more accurate representation of the moment-to-moment information-processing priorities of the visual system