Priming the Semantic Neighbourhood during the Attentional Blink

Background: When two targets are presented in close temporal proximity amongst a rapid serial visual stream of distractors, a period of disrupted attention and attenuated awareness lasting 200–500 ms follows identification of the first target (T1). This phenomenon is known as the ‘‘attentional blink’ ’ (AB) and is generally attributed to a failure to consolidate information in visual short-term memory due to depleted or disrupted attentional resources. Previous research has shown that items presented during the AB that fail to reach conscious awareness are still processed to relatively high levels, including the level of meaning. For example, missed word stimuli have been shown to prime later targets that are closely associated words. Although these findings have been interpreted as evidence for semantic processing during the AB, closely associated words (e.g., day-night) may also rely on specific, well-worn, lexical associative links which enhance attention to the relevant target. Methodology/Principal Findings: We used a measure of semantic distance to create prime-target pairs that are conceptually close, but have low word associations (e.g., wagon and van) and investigated priming from a distractor stimulus presented during the AB to a subsequent target (T2). The stimuli were words (concrete nouns) in Experiment 1 and the corresponding pictures of objects in Experiment 2. In both experiments, report of T2 was facilitated when this item was preceded by a semantically-related distractor

Software Testing Techniques Revisited for OWL Ontologies

Ontologies are an essential component of semantic knowledge bases and applications, and nowadays they are used in a plethora of domains. Despite the maturity of ontology languages, support tools and engineering techniques, the testing and validation of ontologies is a field which still lacks consolidated approaches and tools. This paper attempts at partly bridging that gap, taking a first step towards the extension of some traditional software testing techniques to ontologies expressed in a widely-used format. Mutation testing and coverage testing, revisited in the light of the peculiar features of the ontology language and structure, can can assist in designing better test suites to validate them, and overall help in the engineering and refinement of ontologies and software based on them

Centre–surround inhibition is a general aspect of famous-person recognition: evidence from negative semantic priming from clearly visible primes

A Centre-Surround Attentional Mechanism was proposed by Carr and Dagenbach (1990) to account for their observations of negative semantic priming from hard-to-perceive primes. The mechanism cannot account for the observation of negative semantic priming when primes are clearly visible. Three experiments (n = 30, 46, and 30) used a familiarity decision to names of famous people preceded by prime names of the same or different occupation. Negative semantic priming was observed at 150 or 200ms SOA with positive priming at shorter (50ms) and longer (1000ms) SOA. Experiment 3 verified that the primes were easily recognisable in the priming task at a SOA that yielded negative semantic priming, which cannot be predicted by the original Centre-Surround mechanism. A modified version is proposed that explains transiently negative semantic priming by proposing that Centre-Surround inhibition is a normal, automatically invoked aspect of the semantic processing of visually-presented famous names