Object Detection Through Exploration With A Foveated Visual Field

We present a foveated object detector (FOD) as a biologically-inspired alternative to the sliding window (SW) approach which is the dominant method of search in computer vision object detection. Similar to the human visual system, the FOD has higher resolution at the fovea and lower resolution at the visual periphery. Consequently, more computational resources are allocated at the fovea and relatively fewer at the periphery. The FOD processes the entire scene, uses retino-specific object detection classifiers to guide eye movements, aligns its fovea with regions of interest in the input image and integrates observations across multiple fixations. Our approach combines modern object detectors from computer vision with a recent model of peripheral pooling regions found at the V1 layer of the human visual system. We assessed various eye movement strategies on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset and show that the FOD performs on par with the SW detector while bringing significant computational cost savings.Comment: An extended version of this manuscript was published in PLOS Computational Biology (October 2017) at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.100574

Exogenous spatial precuing reliably modulates object processing but not object substitution masking

Object substitution masking (OSM) is used in behavioral and imaging studies to investigate processes associated with the formation of a conscious percept. Reportedly, OSM occurs only when visual attention is diffusely spread over a search display or focused away from the target location. Indeed, the presumed role of spatial attention is central to theoretical accounts of OSM and of visual processing more generally (Di Lollo, Enns, & Rensink, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 129:481–507, 2000). We report a series of five experiments in which valid spatial precuing is shown to enhance the ability of participants to accurately report a target but, in most cases, without affecting OSM. In only one experiment (Experiment 5) was a significant effect of precuing observed on masking. This is in contrast to the reliable effect shown across all five experiments in which precuing improved overall performance. The results are convergent with recent findings from Argyropoulos, Gellatly, and Pilling (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 39:646–661, 2013), which show that OSM is independent of the number of distractor items in a display. Our results demonstrate that OSM can operate independently of focal attention. Previous claims of the strong interrelationship between OSM and spatial attention are likely to have arisen from ceiling or floor artifacts that restricted measurable performance

Oculomotor Evidence for Top-Down Control following the Initial Saccade

The goal of the current study was to investigate how salience-driven and goal-driven processes unfold during visual search over multiple eye movements. Eye movements were recorded while observers searched for a target, which was located on (Experiment 1) or defined as (Experiment 2) a specific orientation singleton. This singleton could either be the most, medium, or least salient element in the display. Results were analyzed as a function of response time separately for initial and second eye movements. Irrespective of the search task, initial saccades elicited shortly after the onset of the search display were primarily salience-driven whereas initial saccades elicited after approximately 250 ms were completely unaffected by salience. Initial saccades were increasingly guided in line with task requirements with increasing response times. Second saccades were completely unaffected by salience and were consistently goal-driven, irrespective of response time. These results suggest that stimulus-salience affects the visual system only briefly after a visual image enters the brain and has no effect thereafter

A new world typology of cities and systems of cities

The chapter proposes an overview of global urbanization since 1950, relying on the structural and dynamic principles of the evolutionary theory of urban systems and on the observations of some of the major financial linkages connecting cities. We analyze first an overview of the state of urbanization at the world scale using statistics collected and provided for all 195 nation-states of the United Nations. We then examine the extent to which the income level and human development index of countries are correlated with the urbanization rates. Trajectories of cities underline the booming cities including many Asiatic and African cities opposed to the relative declining cities. The total weight of emerging metropolises mostly located in Southern countries passed the total population of the other groups of relatively declining cities between 1980 and 2010. It is highly critical for the urban future that the large majority of urban citizens of the world (more than 60%) will be living in these emerging cities in 2030. It will require finding adapted ways to manage urban growth and ecological transition in these developing systems. This global approach finally leads to the partition of the world we used in the book to analyze more precisely the evolution of individual national or continental urban systems

Five views of a secret: does cognition change during middle adulthood?

This study examined five aspects of change (or stability) in cognitive abilities in middle adulthood across a 12-year period. Data come from the Interdisciplinary Study on Adult Development. The sample consisted of N = 346 adults (43.8 years on average, 48.6% female). In total, 11 cognitive tests were administered to assess fluid and crystallized intelligence, memory, and processing speed. In a first series of analyses, strong measurement invariance was established. Subsequently, structural stability, differential stability, stability of divergence, absolute stability, and the generality of changes were examined. Factor covariances were shown to be equal across time, implying structural stability. Stability coefficients were around .90 for fluid and crystallized intelligence, and speed, indicating high, yet not perfect differential stability. The coefficient for memory was .58. Only in processing speed the variance increased across time, indicating heterogeneity in interindividual development. Significant mean-level changes emerged, with an increase in crystallized intelligence and decline in the other three abilities. A number of correlations among changes in cognitive abilities were significant, implying that cognitive change

EEG Correlates of Attentional Load during Multiple Object Tracking

While human subjects tracked a subset of ten identical, randomly-moving objects, event-related potentials (ERPs) were evoked at parieto-occipital sites by task-irrelevant flashes that were superimposed on either tracked (Target) or non-tracked (Distractor) objects. With ERPs as markers of attention, we investigated how allocation of attention varied with tracking load, that is, with the number of objects that were tracked. Flashes on Target discs elicited stronger ERPs than did flashes on Distractor discs; ERP amplitude (0–250 ms) decreased monotonically as load increased from two to three to four (of ten) discs. Amplitude decreased more rapidly for Target discs than Distractor discs. As a result, with increasing tracking loads, the difference between ERPs to Targets and Distractors diminished. This change in ERP amplitudes with load accords well with behavioral performance, suggesting that successful tracking depends upon the relationship between the neural signals associated with attended and non-attended objects

Ethnicity and Population Structure in Personal Naming Networks

Personal naming practices exist in all human groups and are far from random. Rather, they continue to reflect social norms and ethno-cultural customs that have developed over generations. As a consequence, contemporary name frequency distributions retain distinct geographic, social and ethno-cultural patterning that can be exploited to understand population structure in human biology, public health and social science. Previous attempts to detect and delineate such structure in large populations have entailed extensive empirical analysis of naming conventions in different parts of the world without seeking any general or automated methods of population classification by ethno-cultural origin. Here we show how 'naming networks', constructed from forename-surname pairs of a large sample of the contemporary human population in 17 countries, provide a valuable representation of cultural, ethnic and linguistic population structure around the world. This innovative approach enriches and adds value to automated population classification through conventional national data sources such as telephone directories and electoral registers. The method identifies clear social and ethno-cultural clusters in such naming networks that extend far beyond the geographic areas in which particular names originated, and that are preserved even after international migration. Moreover, one of the most striking findings of this approach is that these clusters simply 'emerge' from the aggregation of millions of individual decisions on parental naming practices for their children, without any prior knowledge introduced by the researcher. Our probabilistic approach to community assignment, both at city level as well as at a global scale, helps to reveal the degree of isolation, integration or overlap between human populations in our rapidly globalising world. As such, this work has important implications for research in population genetics, public health, and social science adding new understandings of migration, identity, integration and social interaction across the world

Predicting Eye Fixations on Complex Visual Stimuli Using Local Symmetry

Most bottom-up models that predict human eye fixations are based on contrast features. The saliency model of Itti, Koch and Niebur is an example of such contrast-saliency models. Although the model has been successfully compared to human eye fixations, we show that it lacks preciseness in the prediction of fixations on mirror-symmetrical forms. The contrast model gives high response at the borders, whereas human observers consistently look at the symmetrical center of these forms. We propose a saliency model that predicts eye fixations using local mirror symmetry. To test the model, we performed an eye-tracking experiment with participants viewing complex photographic images and compared the data with our symmetry model and the contrast model. The results show that our symmetry model predicts human eye fixations significantly better on a wide variety of images including many that are not selected for their symmetrical content. Moreover, our results show that especially early fixations are on highly symmetrical areas of the images. We conclude that symmetry is a strong predictor of human eye fixations and that it can be used as a predictor of the order of fixation

Human Visual Search Does Not Maximize the Post-Saccadic Probability of Identifying Targets

Researchers have conjectured that eye movements during visual search are selected to minimize the number of saccades. The optimal Bayesian eye movement strategy minimizing saccades does not simply direct the eye to whichever location is judged most likely to contain the target but makes use of the entire retina as an information gathering device during each fixation. Here we show that human observers do not minimize the expected number of saccades in planning saccades in a simple visual search task composed of three tokens. In this task, the optimal eye movement strategy varied, depending on the spacing between tokens (in the first experiment) or the size of tokens (in the second experiment), and changed abruptly once the separation or size surpassed a critical value. None of our observers changed strategy as a function of separation or size. Human performance fell far short of ideal, both qualitatively and quantitatively