Perception of social interaction compresses subjective duration in an oxytocin-dependent manner

Communication through body gestures permeates our daily life. Efficient perception of the message therein reflects one's social cognitive competency. Here we report that such competency is manifested temporally as shortened subjective duration of social interactions: motion sequences showing agents acting communicatively are perceived to be significantly shorter in duration as compared with those acting noncommunicatively. The strength of this effect is negatively correlated with one's autistic-like tendency. Critically, intranasal oxytocin administration restores the temporal compression effect in socially less proficient individuals, whereas the administration of atosiban, a competitive antagonist of oxytocin, diminishes the effect in socially proficient individuals. These findings indicate that perceived time, rather than being a faithful representation of physical time, is highly idiosyncratic and ingrained with one's personality trait. Moreover, they suggest that oxytocin is involved in mediating time perception of social interaction, further supporting the role of oxytocin in human social cognition

Subliminal Impending Collision Increases Perceived Object Size and Enhances Pupillary Light Reflex

Fast detection of ambient danger is crucial for the survival of biological entities. Previous studies have shown that threatening information can bias human visual perception and enhance physiological reactions. It remains to be delineated whether the modulation of threat on human perceptual and physiological responses can take place below awareness. To probe this issue, we adopted visual looming stimuli and created two levels of threat by varying their motion trajectories to the observers, such that the stimuli could move in a path that either collided with the observers heads or just nearly missed. We found that when the observers could not explicitly discriminate any difference between the collision and the near-miss stimuli, the visual stimuli on the collision course appeared larger and evoked greater pupil constrictions than those on the near-miss course. Furthermore, the magnitude of size overestimation was comparable to when the impending collision was consciously perceived. Our findings suggest that threatening information can bias human visual perception and strengthen pupil constrictions independent of conscious representation of the threat, and imply the existence of the subcortical visual pathway dedicated to automatically processing threat-related signals in humans.</p

Affective factors in Foreign Language Teaching: Enlightenment From Dead Poets Society

The focus of foreign language teaching has been changed from the teacher-centered model to the student-centered model. The traditional duck-feeding model of teaching cannot meet the requirements of the new era for it fails to activate students’ affect in learning. Since students’ affective factors exert a great impact on foreign language teaching, how to effectively motivate students becomes our primary focus. This study aims to comprehensively investigate how affective factors may influence foreign language learning by taking American film Dead Poets Society as an example. Besides, it intends to provide some pedagogical implications for educators by analyzing Keating’s teaching mode in Dead Poets Society. In the film, Keating is dedicated to the cultivation of the students’ independent thinking and innovative ability over the teaching process. Through affective interaction with students, Keating finds a suitable way to achieve their self-actualization. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis, and non-intelligence theory, Keating’s teaching mode can effectively help students build up self-confidence and seek their self -actualization. As is generally recognized that affective factors like motivation, self-confidence, anxiety and inhibition play important roles in language learning. Keating’s success can have some enlightenment for foreign language teaching as well. We hold that foreign language teachers should motivate students to seek self-actualization, relieve their anxiety and build up their self-confidence, love and respect them, which can contribute to enhancing of teaching effects ultimately

WAR Metaphor’s Persistent Prevalence in Chinese Pandemic Coverage

The WAR metaphor pervades public discourse, offering a swift comprehension and eliciting urgency and rapid response. Universally, it emerges as the primary conceptualization for COVID-19 across nations. Nevertheless, certain Western media explore alternative metaphors, wary of potential adverse effects, while Chinese news media steadfastly embrace the WAR metaphor in pandemic coverage. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), this article qualitatively analyzes the phenomenon. Conclusively, the study reveals deep-seated historical, cultural, and social contextual motivations, evident in China's distinct war history, collectivist values, and the pandemic situation. This exploration sheds light on the unique discourse of Chinese media on pandemic response, aiding global understanding and contributing to metaphor in cultural and news discourse research

Class Similarity Transition: Decoupling Class Similarities and Imbalance from Generalized Few-shot Segmentation

In Generalized Few-shot Segmentation (GFSS), a model is trained with a large corpus of base class samples and then adapted on limited samples of novel classes. This paper focuses on the relevance between base and novel classes, and improves GFSS in two aspects: 1) mining the similarity between base and novel classes to promote the learning of novel classes, and 2) mitigating the class imbalance issue caused by the volume difference between the support set and the training set. Specifically, we first propose a similarity transition matrix to guide the learning of novel classes with base class knowledge. Then, we leverage the Label-Distribution-Aware Margin (LDAM) loss and Transductive Inference to the GFSS task to address the problem of class imbalance as well as overfitting the support set. In addition, by extending the probability transition matrix, the proposed method can mitigate the catastrophic forgetting of base classes when learning novel classes. With a simple training phase, our proposed method can be applied to any segmentation network trained on base classes. We validated our methods on the adapted version of OpenEarthMap. Compared to existing GFSS baselines, our method excels them all from 3% to 7% and ranks second in the OpenEarthMap Land Cover Mapping Few-Shot Challenge at the completion of this paper. Code: https://github.com/earth-insights/ClassTransComment: 9 pages, 5 figure

The Explicit Identities for Spectral Norms of Circulant-Type Matrices Involving Binomial Coefficients and Harmonic Numbers

The explicit formulae of spectral norms for circulant-type matrices are investigated; the matrices are circulant matrix, skew-circulant matrix, and g-circulant matrix, respectively. The entries are products of binomial coefficients with harmonic numbers. Explicit identities for these spectral norms are obtained. Employing these approaches, some numerical tests are listed to verify the results

Preparation and imaging of intravascular high-frequency transducer

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging is by far the most favorable imaging modality for coronary artery evaluation. IVUS transducer design and fabrication, a key technology for intravascular ultrasound imaging, has a significant impact on the performance of the imaging results. Herein, a 35-MHz side-looking IVUS transducer probe was developed. With a small aperture of 0.40 mm × 0.40 mm, the transducer exhibited a very wide -6 dB bandwidth of 85% and a very low insertion loss of -12 dB. Further, the in vitro IVUS imaging of a porcine coronary artery was performed to clearly display the vessel wall structure while the corresponding color-coded graph was constructed successfully to distinguish necrotic core and fibrous plaque via image processing. The results demonstrated that the imaging performance of the optimized design transducer performs favorably

How Well Does the ERA5 Reanalysis Capture the Extreme Climate Events Over China? Part I: Extreme Precipitation

ERA5 is the fifth-generation atmospheric reanalysis of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, with high spatiotemporal resolution and global coverage. However, the reliability of ERA5 for simulating extreme precipitation events is still unclear over China. In this study, 12 extreme precipitation indices and a comprehensive quantitative distance between indices of simulation and observation were used to evaluate ERA5 precipitation from three fundamental aspects: intensity, frequency, and duration. The geomorphological regionalization method was used to divide the subregions of China. The results showed that the ability of ERA5 to simulate annual total precipitation was better than that of daily precipitation. For the intensity indices, ERA5 performs well for simulating the PRCPTOT (annual total wet days precipitation) over China. ERA5 performs better on RX5day (max 5-days precipitation amount) and R95p (very wet days), especially in eastern China, than on RX1day (max 1-day precipitation amount) and R99p (extremely wet days). For the frequency indices, the ability of the ERA5 simulation increased as the amount of precipitation increased, except for northwestern China. However, the ability of ERA5 to simulate R50 mm (number of extreme heavy precipitation days) decreased. For the duration indices, ERA5 was better at simulating drought events than wet events in eastern China. Our results highlight the need for ERA5 to enhance the simulation of trend changes in extreme precipitation events