Amount Of Contextual Information Research Articles

Multimodal Presentation of Interactive Audio-Tactile Graphics Supporting the Perception of Visual Information by Blind People

Due to the limitations in the perception of graphical information by blind people and the need to substitute the sense of sight with other senses, the correct use of multimedia in the presentation of graphics is particularly important. The aim of the authors was to correctly present visual information in the tactile and audio form and to provide contextually selected information to reduce the existing cognitive barriers. In this article, the authors decided to research the method of exploring a tactile picture by a blind person and providing contextual and semantic information about the touched image elements using the developed tool for multimodal presentation of interactive audio-tactile graphics supporting the perception of blind people. The use of multimedia should improve the perception of the conveyed content. Therefore, the effectiveness of interpreting the information contained in the tactile image is verified by analyzing the tactile, audio, and contextual perceptions during the experiments. The following issues were considered in detail from the point of view of the blind and visually impaired: the recognition of shapes of image elements depending on their size and properties, the optimal width of elements displayed on the tablet screen, the time intervals between taps on an image element, and the acceptable length of graphic element audio description. The results from this study suggest the need to select the image presentation parameters in various perception channels to the user's needs. The findings of our research on tactile shape perception of geometric figures indicate potential problems in recognizing the shapes of figures in the case of wrong preparation of tactile pictures. In the case of a small difference in the proportions of the length of the sides of the figure or a slight difference in the measures of the angles of the figure sides, we have noticed that most blind people fail to recognize its shape. Considerable progress in improving such perception can be achieved by increasing the proportions in the lengths of the sides and the measures of the angles between the sides of the figure. Further steps concern introducing an alternative audio description of the properties of the figure so as to improve the interpretability of the figure shape. For most users, the width of a virtual line in a digital image displayed on a tablet should be around 5 mm for a corresponding 1 mm tactile line. The configuration of the time intervals defining the user's gestures (two-taps, three-taps) should be about 340 ms. Applying audio descriptions to tactile picture elements improves the understanding and interpretation of the information presented on it. Most participants in the test group accepted 5 to 10 seconds of voice prompts. Longer messages were incomprehensible, and details were hard to remember. In the proposed solution, the audio description can be divided into two or three different descriptions available to the user after tapping two or three times on an image element. It allows the user to decide on the amount of contextual information needed about the touched tactile picture element. The research attempted to show the typical values of various image presentation parameters and their ranges of values and indicated effective methods of their selection for a specific system user.

Coping with syntactic complexity in English–Chinese sight translation by translation and interpreting students.

Abstract This study approaches syntactic complexity from a relative point of view and examines how translation and interpreting students cope with relative clauses and passive constructions, two exemplifications of syntactic complexity in English–Chinese sight translation. A group of students (N = 23) took part in the study. The study consisted of three parts: an English reading span test, a sight translation task, and a baseline reading task. During the sight translation task, the participants sight translated English sentences with different degrees of structural asymmetry into Chinese in the single sentence context and the discourse context. During the baseline reading task, they silently read the English sentences and answered the comprehension questions. The participants' eye movements in the sight translation and baseline reading tasks were recorded as indicators of cognitive load. Three major findings were generated: (1) Syntactic complexity resulted in a significant increase in cognitive load during the sight translation task. The syntactic aspects of the target language were activated during the initial stage of comprehension, which favoured the parallel view of translation. (2) Although sight translation became more time efficient due to wider contexts, a larger amount of contextual information did not make word-based processing less effortful, as indicated by more fixations and the longer regression path duration in the discourse context. (3) No correlations were found between reading span and cognitive load in addressing syntactical complexity.

An evaluation of the distribution properties, factor structure, and item response profile of an assessment of emotion recognition.

Many people with developmental disabilities, such as autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability have emotion recognition (ER) difficulties compared with typically developing (TD) peers. Accurate assessment of the extent and nature of differences in ER requires an understanding of the response profiles to ER assessment stimuli. We analysed data from 504 TD individuals in response to an ER assessment in respect of distribution properties, factor structure, and item response profile. Eighteen emotion items discriminated better at lower levels of ER ability in TD participants. Neutral expressions were the hardest to interpret; surprise, anger, happy, and bored were easiest. The amount of contextual information in combination with the emotion being depicted also appeared to influence level of difficulty. Similar psychometric research is needed with people with developmental disabilities.

Contextual predictability shapes signal autonomy

Aligning on a shared system of communication requires senders and receivers reach a balance between simplicity, where there is a pressure for compressed representations, and informativeness, where there is a pressure to be communicatively functional. We investigate the extent to which these two pressures are governed by contextual predictability: the amount of contextual information that a sender can estimate, and therefore exploit, in conveying their intended meaning. In particular, we test the claim that contextual predictability is causally related to signal autonomy: the degree to which a signal can be interpreted in isolation, without recourse to contextual information. Using an asymmetric communication game, where senders and receivers are assigned fixed roles, we manipulate two aspects of the referential context: (i) whether or not a sender shares access to the immediate contextual information used by the receiver in interpreting their utterance; (ii) the extent to which the relevant solution in the immediate referential context is generalisable to the aggregate set of contexts. Our results demonstrate that contextual predictability shapes the degree of signal autonomy: when the context is highly predictable (i.e., the sender has access to the context in which their utterances will be interpreted, and the semantic dimension which discriminates between meanings in context is consistent across communicative episodes), languages develop which rely heavily on the context to reduce uncertainty about the intended meaning. When the context is less predictable, senders favour systems composed of autonomous signals, where all potentially relevant semantic dimensions are explicitly encoded. Taken together, these results suggest that our pragmatic faculty, and how it integrates information from the context in reducing uncertainty, plays a central role in shaping language structure.

Safety reports on the off-label use of baclofen for alcohol-dependence: recommendations to improve causality assessment

ABSTRACTIntroduction: The off-label use of high-dose baclofen (HDB) for alcohol-dependence has recently spread. However, HDB has been associated with numerous reports of adverse events (AEs). Pharmacovigilance reporting is supposed to differentiate AEs from adverse drug reactions (ADRs), for which the causality of the drug is determined using validated methods.Areas covered: Since 2010, we found 20 publications on baclofen-related AEs in alcohol dependence, in Medline-referenced journals or national pharmacovigilance reports. We focused on whether these reports used causality algorithms, and provided essential elements for determining baclofen causality and excluding the involvement of alcohol and other psychoactive substances or psychotropic drugs. In half of the cases, no causality algorithm was used. Detailed information on baclofen dosing was found in 17 out of 20 (85%) articles, whereas alcohol doses were given only in 10 (50%) publications. Other psychoactive substances and psychotropic drugs were broached in 14 (70%) publications.Expert opinion: future publications reporting suspected HDB-induced ADRs should use validated causality algorithms and provide sufficient amount of contextual information for excluding other potential causes. For HDB, the psychiatric history, and the longitudinal description of alcohol consumptions and associated doses of psychoactive substances or psychotropic medications should be detailed for every reported case.

Culture, Perception, and Artistic Visualization: A Comparative Study of Children's Drawings in Three Siberian Cultural Groups

In a study of three indigenous and non-indigenous cultural groups in northwestern and northeastern Siberia, framed line tests and a landscape drawing task were used to examine the hypotheses that test-based assessments of context sensitivity and independence are correlated with the amount of contextual information contained in drawings, and with the order in which the focal and background objects are drawn. The results supported these hypotheses, and inspection of the regression relationships suggested that the intergroup variations in test performance were likely to result from differences in the attention accorded to contextual information, as revealed by the drawings. Social and environmental explanations for the group differences in context sensitivity are also discussed. The conclusions support the argument that cultural differences in artistic styles and perceptual tests reflect the same underlying perceptual tendencies, and they are consistent with the argument that these tendencies reflect corresponding differences in patterns of social and environmental interaction.

The role of normalization in phoneme recognition and speaker definition

There is size information in speech sounds because the vocal tract and the vocal cords both grow as a child develops into an adult. Specifically, average pitch and mean formant frequency decrease as speaker size increases. Nevertheless, human speech recognition is effectively size invariant across the full range of sizes in the normal population of speakers and well beyond. It is also the case that listeners can discriminate speaker size with great accuracy; indeed, with greater accurately than they can discriminate the loudness of sound or the brightness of light. The first part of this talk describes how the peripheral auditory system normalizes speech sounds automatically to produce a size invariant representation for speech recognition. The second part presents a model of how the central auditory system transforms information in the cochlea into our perception of who is speaking and what they are saying. The model suggests that the system combines information about vocal resonator size with a small amount of contextual information to determine what the person is saying (at the phonological level), and then it adds voice pitch information to determine who is speaking (in the sense of the sex and size of the speaker).

Item memory, context memory and the hippocampus: fMRI evidence

Dual-process models of recognition memory distinguish between the retrieval of qualitative information about a prior event (recollection), and judgments of prior occurrence based on an acontextual sense of familiarity. fMRI studies investigating the neural correlates of memory encoding and retrieval conducted within the dual-process framework have frequently reported findings consistent with the view that the hippocampus selectively supports recollection, and has little or no role in familiarity-based recognition. An alternative interpretation of these findings has been proposed, however, in which it is argued that the hippocampus supports the encoding and retrieval of ‘strong’ memories, regardless of whether the memories are recollection- or familiarity-based. Here, we describe the findings of eight fMRI studies from our laboratory: one study of source memory encoding, four studies of the retrieval of contextual information, and three studies of continuous recognition. Together, the findings support the proposal that hippocampal activity co-varies with the amount of contextual information about a study episode that is encoded or retrieved, and not with the strength of an undifferentiated memory signal.

Intuitive Expertise and Perceptual Templates

We provide the first demonstration of an artificial neural network encoding the perceptual templates that form an important component of the high level strategic understanding developed by experts. Experts have a highly refined sense of knowing where to look, what information is important and what information to ignore. The conclusions these experts reach are of a higher quality and typically made in a shorter amount of time than those of non-experts. Understanding the manifestation of such abilities in terms of both the psychology of expert performance and the underlying neural mechanisms constitutes one of the most challenging problems in the cognitive sciences. Using perceptual templates we show how the amount of contextual information can change significantly even within a given task, the relationship between local and non-local contexts and finally why there is very little correlation between measures of intelligence and level of expertise in many of the most complex tasks performed by humans.

Remarks on the future of AI: machines and communication

Artificial Intelligence will continue to flourish in many ways. In this article, we present a view that centers on communication. Genuine human---computer communication has been an ambitious goal of artificial intelligence for decades and bears great potential for its future, yet nature still remains the sole successful crafter of systems capable of this art. Observations of natural communication processes suggest a holistic view that unites different means and levels of communication. Patterns from various senses as well as vast amounts of contextual information are integrated to yield an approximate understanding of reality. Rather than focusing on individual aspects of high-level communication techniques, we advocate tracing this holistic approach to communication, and systematically increasing algorithmic, integrative communication capabilities.

Perception of alternated speech operates similarly in young and older adults with age-normal hearing.

When speech is rapidly alternated between the two ears, intelligibility declines as the rate of alternation approaches 3 to 5 switching cycles per second, and then, paradoxically, returns to a good level beyond that point. We tested intelligibility when shadowing was used as a response measure (Experiment 1), when recall was used as a response measure (Experiment 2), and when time-compression was used to vary the speech rate of the presented materials (Experiment 3). In spite of claims that older adults are generally slower in switching attention, younger and older adults did not differ in the critical alternation rates producing minimal intelligibility. We suggest that the point of minimal intelligibility in alternated speech reflects an interaction between (1) the rate of disruption induced by breaking the speech stream between two sound sources, (2) the amount of contextual information per ear, and (3) the size of the silent gaps separating the speech elements that must be perceptually bridged.

On Dynamically Presenting a Topology Course

Authors of traditional mathematical texts often have difficulty balancing the amount of contextual information and proof detail. We propose a simple hypermedia framework that can assist in the organisation and presentation of mathematical theorems and definitions. We describe the application of the framework to convert an existing course in general topology to a web-based set of materials. Two user evaluations of the materials indicated both successful and unsuccessful aspects of the framework. We discuss further lines of investigation, in particular, the presentation of larger bodies of work.