Orienting of willed temporal attention: an EEG study

Temporal attention enables people to select relevant stimuli across time allowing for prioritisation of information. In most studies on temporal orienting external cues have been used to direct participants' attention. However, in everyday life, we also make internal choices, without external cues, of when to orient our attention. Recent studies in visual-spatial attention developed a paradigm aiming to explore how voluntary attention is initiated and controlled when no direct instructions are used. This paradigm includes a new type of trial in which a participant is asked to choose where to orient their attention (willed attention) in contrast to being instructed where to orient their attention (instructed attention). The current study draws on this distinction and it aims to explore whether and how willed temporal attention affects behaviour and whether it is different from instructed temporal attention by looking at both behavioural data as well as EEG. To explore that question the temporal cueing task was used in which a cue instructed a participant to anticipate either short (800 ms) or a long (2000 ms) interval between cue and target presentation times. Alternatively, a cue instructed a participant to decide for themselves to expect the target after one of these two intervals. The experiment demonstrated no significant differences in RTs and EEG recordings. However, a difference between two attention types in the CNV recorded in the time interval directly preceding the target in the short cue-target interval showed a medium effect size. Furthermore, a comparison of the CNV recorded in the willed and instructed attention in the post cue time interval demonstrated medium effect size with posterior scalp distribution. It was only recorded in the short cue-target interval. There, also, was a lateralised activity in the N1 time range in the instructed attention condition. Finally, a small decrease in the power of the theta activity was observed in the willed attention condition in the long cue-target interval at the Fz electrode. These differences could potentially become significant with more power. To the author's knowledge, this is the first study on electrophysiological correlates of willed temporal attention, and it demonstrates the feasibility of the paradigm used

Hard to Cheat: A Turing Test based on Answering Questions about Images

Progress in language and image understanding by machines has sparkled the interest of the research community in more open-ended, holistic tasks, and refueled an old AI dream of building intelligent machines. We discuss a few prominent challenges that characterize such holistic tasks and argue for "question answering about images" as a particular appealing instance of such a holistic task. In particular, we point out that it is a version of a Turing Test that is likely to be more robust to over-interpretations and contrast it with tasks like grounding and generation of descriptions. Finally, we discuss tools to measure progress in this field.Comment: Presented in AAAI-15 Workshop: Beyond the Turing Tes

Vector lattice covers of ideals and bands in pre-Riesz spaces

Pre-Riesz spaces are ordered vector spaces which can be order densely embedded into vector lattices, their so-called vector lattice covers. Given a vector lattice cover $Y$ for a pre-Riesz space $X$, we address the question how to find vector lattice covers for subspaces of $X$, such as ideals and bands. We provide conditions such that for a directed ideal $I$ in $X$ its smallest extension ideal in $Y$ is a vector lattice cover. We show a criterion for bands in $X$ and their extension bands in $Y$ as well. Moreover, we state properties of ideals and bands in $X$ which are generated by sets, and of their extensions in $Y$