Initial fixation placement in face images is driven by top-down guidance

The eyes are often inspected first and for longer period during face exploration. To examine whether this saliency of the eye region at the early stage of face inspection is attributed to its local structure properties or to the knowledge of its essence in facial communication, in this study we investigated the pattern of eye movements produced by rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) as they free viewed images of monkey faces. Eye positions were recorded accurately using implanted eye coils, while images of original faces, faces with scrambled eyes, and scrambled faces except for the eyes were presented on a computer screen. The eye region in the scrambled faces attracted the same proportion of viewing time and fixations as it did in the original faces, even the scrambled eyes attracted substantial proportion of viewing time and fixations. Furthermore, the monkeys often made the first saccade towards to the location of the eyes regardless of image content. Our results suggest that the initial fixation placement in faces is driven predominantly by ‘top-down’ or internal factors, such as the prior knowledge of the location of “eyes” within the context of a face

Author Correction: Gap junction protein Connexin-43 is a direct transcriptional regulator of N-cadherin in vivo

Correction to: Nature Communications (2018); https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06368-x, published online 21 September 2018. The original version of this Article contained an error in the spelling of the author Alexandra Schambony, which was incorrectly given as Alexandra Schambon. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article

Gap junction protein Connexin-43 is a direct transcriptional regulator of N-cadherin in vivo

Connexins are the primary components of gap junctions, providing direct links between cells under many physiological processes. Here, we demonstrate that in addition to this canonical role, Connexins act as transcriptional regulators. We show that Connexin 43 (Cx43) controls neural crest cell migration in vivo by directly regulating N-cadherin transcription. This activity requires interaction between Cx43 carboxy tail and the basic transcription factor-3, which drives the translocation of Cx43 tail to the nucleus. Once in the nucleus they form a complex with PolII which directly binds to the N-cadherin promoter. We found that this mechanism is conserved between amphibian and mammalian cells. Given the strong evolutionary conservation of connexins across vertebrates, this may reflect a common mechanism of gene regulation by a protein whose function was previously ascribed only to gap junctional communication

Age at onset as stratifier in idiopathic Parkinson's disease - effect of ageing and polygenic risk score on clinical phenotypes

Several phenotypic differences observed in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients have been linked to age at onset (AAO). We endeavoured to find out whether these differences are due to the ageing process itself by using a combined dataset of idiopathic PD (n = 430) and healthy controls (HC; n = 556) excluding carriers of known PD-linked genetic mutations in both groups. We found several significant effects of AAO on motor and non-motor symptoms in PD, but when comparing the effects of age on these symptoms with HC (using age at assessment, AAA), only positive associations of AAA with burden of motor symptoms and cognitive impairment were significantly different between PD vs HC. Furthermore, we explored a potential effect of polygenic risk score (PRS) on clinical phenotype and identified a significant inverse correlation of AAO and PRS in PD. No significant association between PRS and severity of clinical symptoms was found. We conclude that the observed non-motor phenotypic differences in PD based on AAO are largely driven by the ageing process itself and not by a specific profile of neurodegeneration linked to AAO in the idiopathic PD patients

Cross-Domain Polarity Models to Evaluate User eXperience in E-learning

[EN] Virtual learning environments are growing in importance as fast as e-learning is becoming highly demanded by universities and students all over the world. This paper investigates how to automatically evaluate User eXperience in this domain using sentiment analysis techniques. For this purpose, a corpus with the opinions given by a total of 583 users (107 English speakers and 476 Spanish speakers) about three learning management systems in different courses has been built. All the collected opinions were manually labeled with polarity information (positive, negative or neutral) by three human annotators, both at the whole opinion and sentence levels. We have applied our state-of-the-art sentiment analysis models, trained with a corpus of a different semantic domain (a Twitter corpus), to study the use of cross-domain models for this task. Cross-domain models based on deep neural networks (convolutional neural networks, transformer encoders and attentional BLSTM models) have been tested. In order to contrast our results, three commercial systems for the same task (MeaningCloud, Microsoft Text Analytics and Google Cloud) were also tested. The obtained results are very promising and they give an insight to keep going the research of applying sentiment analysis tools on User eXperience evaluation. This is a pioneering idea to provide a better and accurate understanding on human needs in the interaction with virtual learning environments and a step towards the development of automatic tools that capture the feed-back of user perception for designing virtual learning environments centered in user's emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, responses, behaviors and accomplishments that occur before, during and after the interaction.Partially supported by the Spanish MINECO and FEDER founds under Project TIN2017-85854-C4-2-R. Work of J.A. Gonzalez is financed under Grant PAID-01-17Sanchis-Font, R.; Castro-Bleda, MJ.; González-Barba, JÁ.; Pla Santamaría, F.; Hurtado Oliver, LF. (2021). Cross-Domain Polarity Models to Evaluate User eXperience in E-learning. 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Flash-lag chimeras: the role of perceived alignment in the composite face effect

Spatial alignment of different face halves results in a configuration that mars the recognition of the identity of either face half (). What would happen to the recognition performance for face halves that were aligned on the retina but were perceived as misaligned, or were misaligned on the retina but were perceived as aligned? We used the 'flash-lag' effect () to address these questions. We created chimeras consisting of a stationary top half-face initially aligned with a moving bottom half-face. Flash-lag chimeras were better recognized than their stationary counterparts. However when flashed face halves were presented physically ahead of moving halves thereby nulling the flash-lag effect, recognition was impaired. This counters the notion that relative movement between the two face halves per se is sufficient to explain better recognition of flash-lag chimeras. Thus, the perceived spatial alignment of face halves (despite retinal misalignment) impairs recognition, while perceived misalignment (despite retinal alignment) does not

Separate cortical stages in amodal completion revealed by functional magnetic resonance adaptation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Objects in our environment are often partly occluded, yet we effortlessly perceive them as whole and complete. This phenomenon is called visual amodal completion. Psychophysical investigations suggest that the process of completion starts from a representation of the (visible) physical features of the stimulus and ends with a completed representation of the stimulus. The goal of our study was to investigate both stages of the completion process by localizing both brain regions involved in processing the physical features of the stimulus as well as brain regions representing the completed stimulus.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Using fMRI adaptation we reveal clearly distinct regions in the visual cortex of humans involved in processing of amodal completion: early visual cortex – presumably V1 -processes the local contour information of the stimulus whereas regions in the inferior temporal cortex represent the completed shape. Furthermore, our data suggest that at the level of inferior temporal cortex information regarding the original local contour information is not preserved but replaced by the representation of the amodally completed percept.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These findings provide neuroimaging evidence for a multiple step theory of amodal completion and further insights into the neuronal correlates of visual perception.</p

Size Matters: Large Objects Capture Attention in Visual Search

Can objects or events ever capture one's attention in a purely stimulus-driven manner? A recent review of the literature set out the criteria required to find stimulus-driven attentional capture independent of goal-directed influences, and concluded that no published study has satisfied that criteria. Here visual search experiments assessed whether an irrelevantly large object can capture attention. Capture of attention by this static visual feature was found. The results suggest that a large object can indeed capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner and independent of displaywide features of the task that might encourage a goal-directed bias for large items. It is concluded that these results are either consistent with the stimulus-driven criteria published previously or alternatively consistent with a flexible, goal-directed mechanism of saliency detection

Is it really search or just matching? The influence of goodness, number of stimuli and presentation sequence in same-different tasks

The Goodness of Garner dot patterns has been shown to influence same-different response times in a specific way, which has led to the formulation of a memory search model of pattern comparison. In this model, the space of possible variations of each pattern is searched separately for each pattern in the comparison, resulting in faster response times for patterns that have fewer alternatives. Compared to an alternative explanation based on stimulus encoding plus mental rotation, however, the existing data strongly favor this explanation. To obtain a more constraining set of data to distinguish between the two possible accounts, we extended the original paradigm to a situation in which participants needed to compare three, rather than two patterns and varied the way the stimuli were presented (simultaneously or sequentially). Our findings suggest that neither the memory search nor the encoding plus mental rotation model provides a complete description of the data, and that the effects of Goodness must be understood in a combination of both mechanisms, or in terms of cascades processing

Measurements of Transverse Energy Flow in Deep-Inelastic Scattering at HERA

Measurements of transverse energy flow are presented for neutral current deep-inelastic scattering events produced in positron-proton collisions at HERA. The kinematic range covers squared momentum transfers Q^2 from 3.2 to 2,200 GeV^2, the Bjorken scaling variable x from 8.10^{-5} to 0.11 and the hadronic mass W from 66 to 233 GeV. The transverse energy flow is measured in the hadronic centre of mass frame and is studied as a function of Q^2, x, W and pseudorapidity. A comparison is made with QCD based models. The behaviour of the mean transverse energy in the central pseudorapidity region and an interval corresponding to the photon fragmentation region are analysed as a function of Q^2 and W.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Eur. Phys.