A Remarkable Depth Confusion in Images of the Incomplete Statues of Bruno Catalano

Images of Bruno Catalano’s sculptures of incomplete bodies give rise to a remarkable depth confusion in which the background is partly pushed to the front. We argue that this confusion is related to what happens in the Kanizsa square, although the effect in the images of Catalano’s sculpture appears to be driven by knowledge-based processing.publishedVersio

First impressions: A survey on vision-based apparent personality trait analysis

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Mental rotation task of hands: differential influence number of rotational axes

Various studies on the hand laterality judgment task, using complex sets of stimuli, have shown that the judgments during this task are dependent on bodily constraints. More specific, these studies showed that reaction times are dependent on the participant’s posture or differ for hand pictures rotated away or toward the mid-sagittal plane (i.e., lateral or medial rotation, respectively). These findings point to the use of a cognitive embodied process referred to as motor imagery. We hypothesize that the number of axes of rotation of the displayed stimuli during the task is a critical factor for showing engagement in a mental rotation task, with an increased number of rotational axes leading to a facilitation of motor imagery. To test this hypothesis, we used a hand laterality judgment paradigm in which we manipulated the difficulty of the task via the manipulation of the number of rotational axes of the shown stimuli. Our results showed increased influence of bodily constraints for increasing number of axes of rotation. More specifically, for the stimulus set containing stimuli rotated over a single axis, no influence of biomechanical constraints was present. The stimulus sets containing stimuli rotated over more than one axes of rotation did induce the use of motor imagery, as a clear influence of bodily constraints on the reaction times was found. These findings extend and refine previous findings on motor imagery as our results show that engagement in motor imagery critically depends on the used number of axes of rotation of the stimulus set

Spatial dependency of action simulation

In this study, we investigated the spatial dependency of action simulation. From previous research in the field of single-cell recordings, grasping studies and from crossmodal extinction tasks, it is known that our surrounding space can be divided into a peripersonal space and extrapersonal space. These two spaces are functionally different at both the behavioral and neuronal level. The peripersonal space can be seen as an action space which is limited to the area in which we can grasp objects without moving the object or ourselves. The extrapersonal space is the space beyond the peripersonal space. Objects situated within peripersonal space are mapped onto an egocentric reference frame. This mapping is thought to be accomplished by action simulation. To provide direct evidence of the embodied nature of this simulated motor act, we performed two experiments, in which we used two mental rotation tasks, one with stimuli of hands and one with stimuli of graspable objects. Stimuli were presented in both peri- and extrapersonal space. The results showed increased reaction times for biomechanically difficult to adopt postures compared to more easy to adopt postures for both hand and graspable object stimuli. Importantly, this difference was only present for stimuli presented in peripersonal space but not for the stimuli presented in extrapersonal space. These results extend previous behavioral findings on the functional distinction between peripersonal- and extrapersonal space by providing direct evidence for the spatial dependency of the use of action simulation. Furthermore, these results strengthen the hypothesis that objects situated within the peripersonal space are mapped onto an egocentric reference frame by action simulation

Grouping effects in flash-induced perceptual fading

Contains fulltext : 57024.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)We show that the flash-induced fading effect can be influenced by grouping based on colour and shape similarity. In flash-induced fading, peripherally presented elements perceptually disappear after a flash has been presented around or next to the element(s) (Kanai and Kamitani, 2003 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 15 664-672). In the present study, two elements (which could either be similar or different in both colour and shape) were presented at an eccentricity of 2.6 degrees from a fixation cross. After 2 s, a short flash (40 ms) was presented around one of the elements. The two elements remained on the screen for 2.5 s after the flash. We found a higher percentage of mutual perceptual disappearance when the two elements were similar in colour or in shape. These results converge with other findings showing that perceptual fading phenomena are influenced by effects of perceptual grouping. This indicates that, besides low-level adaptation, more global processes play a part in perceptual fading as well and should thus be taken into account in giving a full explanation of perceptual fading in general.7 p

How Visual Perception of the Inside of Things Creates the Impossible Dovetail

Here, we consider a well-known wooden puzzle known as the impossible dovetail. We argue that an intriguing form of amodal completion, dealing with spontaneous interpretations of the inside of objects is the key to understanding why people find it difficult to see how the impossible dovetail is indeed possible