Feature Binding and Object Perception. Does Object Awareness Require Feature Conjunction?

Recent work in different fields of cognitive sciences seems to support the idea that in order to explain awareness of visually presented objects some kind of binding mechanism is needed for the correct conjunction of different sensory features into a whole percept. Selective attention is commonly invoked as the key for solving this conjunction problem. Accordingly, the cognitive neurosciences have begun to investigate what kind of neural processing could underlie such a process. I analyse the evidence provided for justifying the existence of a binding problem and I argue against the claim that there is a feature binding problem to be solved in order to explain unity of object awareness. In particular, I question the definition of 'feature' and suggest some possible sources of misunderstanding related to this definition. Finally, I suggest an alternative approach in which perceived object unity does not rely exclusively on attentional conjunction of sensory features: instead of a general and unique mechanism mediating object awareness, I examine evidence that there are at least as many binding mechanisms as potential ways of interacting with visually presented objects

Building automated vandalism detection tools for Wikidata

Wikidata, like Wikipedia, is a knowledge base that anyone can edit. This open collaboration model is powerful in that it reduces barriers to participation and allows a large number of people to contribute. However, it exposes the knowledge base to the risk of vandalism and low-quality contributions. In this work, we build on past work detecting vandalism in Wikipedia to detect vandalism in Wikidata. This work is novel in that identifying damaging changes in a structured knowledge-base requires substantially different feature engineering work than in a text-based wiki like Wikipedia. We also discuss the utility of these classifiers for reducing the overall workload of vandalism patrollers in Wikidata. We describe a machine classification strategy that is able to catch 89% of vandalism while reducing patrollers' workload by 98%, by drawing lightly from contextual features of an edit and heavily from the characteristics of the user making the edit

Action-Dependent Perceptual Invariants: From Ecological to Sensorimotor Approaches

International audienceEcological and sensorimotor theories of perception build on the notion of action-dependent invariants as the basic structures underlying perceptual capacities. In this paper we contrast the assumptions these theories make on the nature of perceptual information modulated by action. By focusing on the question, how movement specifies perceptual information, we show that ecological and sensorimotor theories endorse substantially different views about the role of action in perception. In particular we argue that ecological invariants are characterized with reference to transformations produced in the sensory array by movement: such invariants are transformation-specific but do not imply motor-specificity. In contrast, sensorimotor theories assume that perceptual invariants are intrinsically tied to specific movements. We show that this difference leads to different empirical predictions and we submit that the distinction between motor equivalence and motor-specificity needs further clarification in order to provide a more constrained account of action/perception relations

Expert participation on Wikipedia: barriers and opportunities

On the occasion of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary, the Chronicle wrote that, nowadays, the project does not represent "the bottom layer of authority, nor the top, but in fact the highest layer without formal vetting" and, as such, it can serve as "an ideal bridge between the validated and unvalidated Web". An increasing number of university students use Wikipedia for "pre-research", as part of their course assignments or research projects. Yet many among academics, scientists and experts turn their noses up at the thought of contributing to Wikipedia, despite a growing number of calls from the expert community to join the project. The Association for Psychological Science launched an initiative to get the scientific psychology community involved in improving the coverage and quality of articles in their field; biomedical experts recently called upon their peers to help make public health information in Wikipedia rigorous and complete; historians have recently started to contribute references to Wikipedia in an effort to make their scholarly work more easily accessible to a broad readership; chemists are curating Wikipedia to include structured metadata in articles on chemical compounds. The Wikimedia Foundation itself is exploring strategies to engage with the expert community and with higher education at large, as part of initiatives such as USPP or the expert review proposal. These calls for participation, however, remain sporadic and most experts-- despite goodwill to contribute--still perceive major barriers to participation, which typically include issues of a technical, social and cultural nature, from the lack of incentives from the perspective of a professional career, to the poor recognition of one’s expertise within Wikipedia to issues of social interaction. In combination with the apparent anomaly of collaborative--and often anonymous--authorship and the resulting fluidity of Wikipedia articles, these factors create an environment that significantly differs from the ones experts are accustomed to. There has been so far only anecdotal evidence on what keeps experts (defined in the broadest possible sense to include academics, but also expert professionals in industry and in the public sector, as well as research students) from contributing to Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Research Committee ran a survey on expert participation between February and April 2011 with over 3K respondents to try and turn anecdotes about expert participation into data. The aim of this talk is to present the results of the survey and tackle questions such as: the different perception of participation in Wikipedia across academic fields; the effects of expertise, gender, discipline, wiki literacy on participation; the gap between shared attitudes and individual drivers of participation; the relation between participation in Wikipedia and attitudes towards open access and open science

Recommendations for accelerating open preprint peer review to improve the culture of science

Peer review is an important part of the scientific process, but traditional peer review at journals is coming under increased scrutiny for its inefficiency and lack of transparency. As preprints become more widely used and accepted, they raise the possibility of rethinking the peer-review process. Preprints are enabling new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial than traditional journal peer review, and to thus fundamentally shift the culture of peer review toward constructive collaboration. In this Consensus View, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to accelerate the growing momentum of preprint sharing and provide recommendations to empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints