Faces capture attention: Evidence from Inhibition-of-return

The human face is a visual pattern of great social and biological importance. While previous studies have shown that attention may be preferentially directed and engaged longer by faces, the current study presents a new methodology to test the notion that faces can capture attention. The present study uses the occurrence of inhibition of return (IOR) as a diagnostic tool to determine the allocation of attention in visual space. Because previous research suggested that IOR at a location in space only occurs after attention has been reflexively moved to that location, the current finding of IOR at the location of the face provides converging support for the claim that faces do have the ability to summon attention. Faces capture attention: The human face constitutes one of the most important stimuli for social interactions. In addition, face perception is considered to be the most developed visual perceptual skill in humans. Research using single cell recording (Perrett, Hietanen, Oram, ..

Parametrizing horizontally-averaged wind and temperature profiles in the urban roughness sublayer

Tower-based measurements from within and above the urban canopy in two cities are used to evaluate several existing approaches that parametrize the vertical profiles of wind speed and temperature within the urban roughness sublayer (RSL). It is shown that current use of Monin–Obukhov similarity theory (MOST) in numerical weather prediction models can be improved upon by using RSL corrections when modelling the vertical profiles of wind speed and friction velocity in the urban RSL using MOST. Using anisotropic building morphological information improves the agreement between observed and parametrized profiles of wind speed and momentum fluxes for selected methods. The largest improvement is found when using dynamically-varying aerodynamic roughness length and displacement height. Adding a RSL correction to MOST, however, does not improve the parametrization of the vertical profiles of temperature and heat fluxes. This is expected since sources and sinks of heat are assumed uniformly distributed through a simple flux boundary condition in all RSL formulations, yet are highly patchy and anisotropic in a real urban context. Our results can be used to inform the choice of surface-layer representations for air quality, dispersion, and numerical weather prediction applications in the urban environment

Spatial working memory and Inhibition of Return

Recently we showed that maintaining a location in spatial working memory affects saccadic eye movement trajectories, in that the eyes deviate away from the remembered location (Theeuwes, Olivers, & Chizk, 2005). Such saccade deviations are assumed to be the result of inhibitory processes within the oculomotor system. The present study investigated whether this inhibition is related to the phenomenon of inhibition of return (IOR), the relatively slow selection of previously attended locations as compared with new locations. The results show that the size of IOR to a location was not affected by whether or not the location was kept in working memory, but the size of the saccade trajectory deviation was affected. We conclude that inhibiting working memory–related eye movement activity is not the same as inhibiting a previously attended location in space. Working memory is a system that allows for the temporary storage of information until a task is completed (see, e.g., Baddeley, 1986). Awh and colleagues (Awh & Jonides, 2001; Awh, Jonides, & Reuter-Lorenz, 1998) provided evidence for a strong link between working memory and attention. For example, they showed that when a locatio

Modelling wind farm effects in HARMONIE–AROME (cycle 43.2.2) – Part 1: Implementation and evaluation

With increasing number and proximity of wind farms, it becomes crucial to consider wind farm effects (WFEs) in the numerical weather prediction (NWP) models used to forecast power production. Furthermore, these WFEs are also expected to affect other weather-related parameters at least locally. Thus, we implement the explicit wake parameterization (EWP) in the NWP model HARMONIE–AROME (hereafter HARMONIE) along-side the existing wind farm parameterization (WFP) by Fitch et al. (2012) (FITCH). We evaluate and compare the two WFPs against research flight measurements as well as against similar simulations performed with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model using case studies. The case studies include a case for WFEs above a wind farm as well as two cases for WFEs at hub height in the wake of farms. The results show that EWP and FITCH have been correctly implemented in HARMONIE. For the simulated cases, EWP underestimates the WFEs on wind speed and strongly underestimates the effect on turbulent kinetic energy (TKE). FITCH agrees better with the observations, and WFEs on TKE are particularly well captured by HARMONIE–FITCH. After this successful evaluation, simulations with all wind turbines in Europe will be performed with HARMONIE and presented in the second part of this paper series.</p

The programming of sequences of saccades

Saccadic eye movements move the high-resolution fovea to point at regions of interest. Saccades can only be generated serially (i.e., one at a time). However, what remains unclear is the extent to which saccades are programmed in parallel (i.e., a series of such moments can be planned together) and how far ahead such planning occurs. In the current experiment, we investigate this issue with a saccade contingent preview paradigm. Participants were asked to execute saccadic eye movements in response to seven small circles presented on a screen. The extent to which participants were given prior information about target locations was varied on a trial-by-trial basis: participants were aware of the location of the next target only, the next three, five, or all seven targets. The addition of new targets to the display was made during the saccade to the next target in the sequence. The overall time taken to complete the sequence was decreased as more targets were available up to all seven targets. This was a result of a reduction in the number of saccades being executed and a reduction in their saccade latencies. Surprisingly, these results suggest that, when faced with a demand to saccade to a large number of target locations, saccade preparation about all target locations is carried out in paralle

Urban Water Storage Capacity Inferred From Observed Evapotranspiration Recession

Water storage plays an important role in mitigating heat and flooding in urban areas. Assessment of the water storage capacity of cities remains challenging due to the inherent heterogeneity of the urban surface. Traditionally, effective storage has been estimated from runoff. Here, we present a novel approach to estimate effective water storage capacity from recession rates of observed evaporation during precipitation-free periods. We test this approach for cities at neighborhood scale with eddy-covariance based latent heat flux observations from 14 contrasting sites with different local climate zones, vegetation cover and characteristics, and climates. Based on analysis of 583 drydowns, we find storage capacities to vary between 1.3 and 28.4 mm, corresponding to e-folding timescales of 1.8-20.1 days. This makes the urban storage capacity at least five times smaller than all the observed values for natural ecosystems, reflecting an evaporation regime characterized by extreme water limitation.Peer reviewe