Perceptual Boundaries Research Articles

Automatic Recognition Method of Letter Images in English Self-Learning Based on Partial Differential Equation Method

According to the current situation of knowledge popularization, students simply rely on the knowledge learned in the classroom that is far from adapting to the development of modern society; so, every student needs to have the consciousness and ability of independent learning. The research of the English self-help learning system based on partial differential equation method comes into being with information network technology as the foundation for survival and development. The existing partial differential equation recognition models based on average curvature motion are all edge-based and need to use the external force defined by the image gradient to attract the zero level set (evolution curve) to move to the target edge and finally stay on the target edge. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain ideal results when extracting fuzzy or discrete boundaries (perceptual boundaries), and it is very sensitive to the selection of initial contour and noise. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a new recognition model of partial differential equations based on mean curvature motion. This overcomes some defects of existing edge models because it is region-based and does not require image gradient as a condition to stop evolution. The proposed model can avoid manual initial curve selection and allow stopping conditions to be set in the algorithm. In addition, in the numerical solution of partial differential equations, the existing model uses upwind difference scheme, and the semi-implicit additive operator separation method is adopted in this paper. Some other layers are added, and some hyperparameters are adjusted when the convolutional neural networks of inception PDEs are constructed by stacking the structure of inception PDEs. In the contrast experiment with the prototype, the software and hardware environment are the same, and the input is exactly the same. For the handwritten English alphabet data set, the variant structure can obtain more than 90% of the training accuracy and verification accuracy, which is better than the experimental accuracy of the prototype. In addition, because the inception PDE structure contains fewer parameters than the prototype, it is more computationally efficient and takes less training time per batch than the prototype.

Between normality and disability: Sensitive cognitive boundaries

Within the framework of a cognitive sociology of everyday life (Schütz, 1962; Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Zérubavel, 1997), this article proposes to explore the effects of normality and of norms, accepted as reality/truth, on people who are experiencing rare situations. First, we will analyze the practical consequences of these norms on the use of the body and the physical environment. Then, based on the sociology of knowledge of everyday life, we will ex-plain the partial lack of semanticization (Gardien, 2008) of the reality lived by people in rare situations. These analyses will highlight the major role of generally accepted criteria of rele-vance, and of the poorly recognized perceptual and cognitive boundaries that result from them. The conclusion will lead to courses of action aimed at broadening the field of intersub-jectivity to include greater cognitive diversity.

The Influence of Perceptual-Motor Variability on the Perception of Action Boundaries for Reaching in a Real-World Setting.

The ability to accurately perceive the extent over which one can act is requisite for the successful execution of visually guided actions. Yet, like other outcomes of perceptual-motor experience, our perceived action boundaries are not stagnant, but in constant flux. Hence, the perceptual systems must account for variability in one’s action capabilities in order for the perceiver to determine when they are capable of successfully performing an action. Recent work has found that, after reaching with a virtual arm that varied between short and long each time they reach, individuals determined their perceived action boundaries using the most liberal reaching experience. However, these studies were conducted in virtual reality, and the perceptual systems may handle variability differently in a real-world setting. To test this hypothesis, we created a modified orthopedic elbow brace that mimics injury in the upper limb by restricting elbow extension via remote control. Participants were asked to make reachability judgments after training in which the maximum extent of their reaching ability was either unconstricted, constricted or variable over several calibration trials. Findings from the current study did not conform to those in virtual reality; participants were more conservative with their reachability estimates after experiencing variability in a real-world setting.

Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception

Anticipating the future is essential for efficient perception and action planning. Yet the role of anticipation in event segmentation is understudied because empirical research has focused on retrospective cues such as surprise. We address this concern in the context of perception of musical-phrase boundaries. A computational model of cognitive sequence processing was used to control the information-dynamic properties of tone sequences. In an implicit, self-paced listening task (N = 38), undergraduates dwelled longer on tones generating high entropy (i.e., high uncertainty) than on those generating low entropy (i.e., low uncertainty). Similarly, sequences that ended on tones generating high entropy were rated as sounding more complete (N = 31 undergraduates). These entropy effects were independent of both the surprise (i.e., information content) and phrase position of target tones in the original musical stimuli. Our results indicate that events generating high entropy prospectively contribute to segmentation processes in auditory sequence perception, independently of the properties of the subsequent event.

Nascent Entrepreneurs and the Moderators of Race, Gender, and Government Support

Purpose: In a better attempt to understand nascent entrepreneurship, this paper explores the relationship between opportunity recognition and entrepreneurial intent of nascent entrepreneurs. Contrary to conventional wisdom, research on this relationship is fragmented and empirically underdeveloped. In addition, the contextual and perceptual boundary conditions of government support, gender, and minorities are explored. Design: We surveyed 1246 nascent entrepreneurs in the state of Florida, which is the largest data set on this topic. Respondents answered 55 survey questions on potential barriers to entrepreneurship to help understand how their context impacts their intent. Findings: Our empirical results indicate that opportunity recognition by nascent entrepreneurs significantly affects entrepreneurial intent, the strength of which is moderated by government support and gender, but not by minorities. Originality: The nascent entrepreneur is viewed through the lens of entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) which refers to an individual’s belief in one’s capability to produce entrepreneurial outcomes and engage in entrepreneurial behavior. This study provides a more nuanced understanding of contextual factors that influence nascent entrepreneurs within the state of Florida.

Porous Kirkenes: Crumbling Mining Town or Dynamic Port Cityscape?

The great number of actors in port city regions, such as port authorities, municipalities, national governments, private companies, societal groups, and flora and fauna, need to develop shared visions. Collaborative approaches that focus on combined values can help achieve long-term resilience and enable a sustainable and just coexistence of port and city actors within the same territory. However, the sheer focus on economic profit generated by port activities overshadows and ignores equally essential cultural, societal, and environmental values and needs. The lack of pluralities in planning and decision-making processes creates challenges for the cohabitation of the many actors and their interests within port-city regions. On the one hand, contemporary spaces in port cities cannot be classified and defined by traditional dichotomies anymore. On the other hand, the perception of spatial and institutional boundaries between port and city leads to a positivistic-driven definition of a rigid and inflexible, line-like interface physically and mentally separating the port from the urban activities and stakeholders, neglecting the inseparable character of many parts of our society. By investigating and re-imagining the future port-development plans within the historic mining town of Kirkenes, located around 400 km above the Arctic Circle in Northern Norway, the aim of this article is to explore and combine the concepts of negative and positive porosity and liminality and arrive at a renewed perception of the port cityscape, which can function as dynamic thresholds inbetween the multiple dualities and realities of various port and city actors. The article bridges the theoretical/conceptual sphere of urban porosity and the practical approaches of liminal design. By using Design Fiction as a tool for creating new, innovative, and pluralistic port city narratives, the article contributes to contemporary research that aims for imaginary, value-based, and history-informed approaches to designing future-proof, resilient, just, and sustainable port cities.

The perceived salience of vocal emotions is dampened in non-clinical auditory verbal hallucinations

ABSTRACT Introduction: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a cardinal symptom of schizophrenia but are also reported in the general population without need for psychiatric care. Previous evidence suggests that AVH may reflect an imbalance of prior expectation and sensory information, and that altered salience processing is characteristic of both psychotic and non-clinical voice hearers. However, it remains to be shown how such an imbalance affects the categorisation of vocal emotions in perceptual ambiguity. Methods: Neutral and emotional nonverbal vocalisations were morphed along two continua differing in valence (anger; pleasure), each including 11 morphing steps at intervals of 10%. College students (N = 234) differing in AVH proneness (measured with the Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale) evaluated the emotional quality of the vocalisations. Results: Increased AVH proneness was associated with more frequent categorisation of ambiguous vocalisations as ‘neutral’, irrespective of valence. Similarly, the perceptual boundary for emotional classification was shifted by AVH proneness: participants needed more emotional information to categorise a voice as emotional. Conclusions: These findings suggest that emotional salience in vocalisations is dampened as a function of increased AVH proneness. This could be related to changes in the acoustic representations of emotions or reflect top-down expectations of less salient information in the social environment.

How far can I reach? The perception of upper body action capabilities in Parkinson\u2019s disease

Successful interaction within the environment is contingent upon one’s ability to accurately perceive the extent over which they can successfully perform actions, known as action boundaries. Healthy young adults are accurate in estimating their action boundaries and can flexibly update them to accommodate stable changes in their action capabilities. However, there are conditions in which motor abilities are subject to variability over time such as in Parkinson’s disease (PD). PD impairs the ability to perform actions and can lead to variability in perceptual-motor experience, but the effect on the perceptions of their action boundaries remains unknown. This study investigated the influence of altered perceptual-motor experience during PD, on the perceptions of action boundaries for reaching, grasping, and aperture passing. Thirty participants with mild-to-moderate idiopathic PD and 26 healthy older adults provided estimates of their reaching, grasping, and aperture-passing ability. Participants’ estimates were compared with their actual capabilities. There was no evidence that individuals with PD’s perceptions were less accurate than those of healthy controls. Furthermore, there was some evidence for more conservative estimates than seen in young healthy adults in reaching (both groups) and aperture passing (PD group). This suggests that the ability to judge action capabilities is preserved in mild to moderate PD.

Nascent Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy, and the Moderators of Race, Gender, and Government Support

Abstract In a better attempt to understand nascent entrepreneurship, this paper explores the relationship between opportunity recognition and the entrepreneurial intent of nascent entrepreneurs. Contrary to conventional wisdom, research on this relationship is fragmented and empirically underdeveloped. In addition, the contextual and perceptual boundary conditions of government support, gender, and minorities are explored. We surveyed 1246 nascent entrepreneurs in the state of Florida, which is the largest data set on this topic in Florida. Respondents answered 55 survey questions on potential barriers to entrepreneurship to help understand how their context impacts their intent to start a new business. Our empirical results indicate that opportunity recognition by nascent entrepreneurs significantly affects entrepreneurial intent, the strength of which is moderated by government support and gender, but not by minorities. Our study is a direct response to the call-in existing entrepreneurship literature for new research in geographically narrower contexts as the largest survey-based study at the state level in the US that we know of. We extend and demarcate entrepreneurial self-efficacy into a new context while clarifying boundary conditions. Lastly, our dependent variable measures intensity of intention to start a business along a time dimension which empirically narrows the gap between studies on entrepreneurial intention and studies on entrepreneurial action.

Appraising the community in community-based tourism

Community-based tourism (CBT) emphasises attributes such as sustainability, local participation, and the maximisation of benefits to the community. However, limited scholarly interventions and critical debates have been conducted regarding what constitutes a community in tourism destinations. In Taman Negara, Malaysia, residents of various ethnic groups have considerably different interpretations of community and boundaries therein. Malay, Malaysian Chinese, and Orang Asli Batek people have contradicting claims and perceptions regarding who is Indigenous, who is a local, and who is the rightful host community of Taman Negara. The perceptions of such boundaries can be highly political; consequently, certain groups feel threatened when they are seemingly peripheral to official designations. The fuzzy boundaries of what constitutes a community make governance and the assessment of CBT considerably challenging. A suggestion is to resist predefining a community and to instead consider its fluid boundaries and heterogeneity in CBT planning and research.

Background stimulus delays detection of target stimulus in a familiar odor\u2013odor combination

Familiarity of odor–odor combinations is enhanced through food intake in daily life. As familiarity increases, the perceptual boundary between two odors may become ambiguous; therefore, we hypothesized that exposure to one odor would delay detection of the other in a high-familiarity combination but not in a low-familiarity combination. To test this hypothesis, we measured the speed of odor detection using two types of background stimuli (black tea odor and odorless air) and two types of target stimuli (lemon odor and almond odor). For Japanese participants, the combination of black tea and lemon odor has high familiarity, whereas the combination of black tea and almond odors has low familiarity. Reaction time for detection of target stimulus was measured by inserting a pulsed target stimulus into the flow of the background stimulus (i.e., replacing the background stimulus with the target stimulus for a short time). Reaction time for detection of lemon odor was significantly longer under the black tea odor condition than under the odorless air condition. Reaction time for detection of almond odor was similar between the black tea odor and odorless air conditions. These results are in line with the hypothesis that familiarity of an odor–odor combination affects odor detection speed. Further investigations are required to reach more robust conclusions.

Misalignment between perceptual boundaries and weight categories reflects a new normal for body size perception

Combatting the current global epidemic of obesity requires that people have a realistic understanding of what a healthy body size looks like. This is a particular issue in different population sub-groups, where there may be increased susceptibility to obesity-related diseases. Prior research has been unable to systematically assess body size judgement due to a lack of attention to gender and race; our study aimed to identify the contribution of these factors. Using a data-driven multi-variate decision tree approach, we varied the gender and race of image stimuli used, and included the same diversity among participants. We adopted a condition-rich categorization visual task and presented participants with 120 unique body images. We show that gender and weight categories of the stimuli affect accuracy of body size perception. The decision pattern reveals biases for male bodies, in which participants showed an increasing number of errors from leaner to bigger bodies, particularly under-estimation errors. Participants consistently mis-categorized overweight male bodies as normal weight, while accurately categorizing normal weight. Overweight male bodies are now perceived as part of an expanded normal: the perceptual boundary of normal weight has become wider than the recognized BMI category. For female bodies, another intriguing pattern emerged, in which participants consistently mis-categorized underweight bodies as normal, whilst still accurately categorizing normal female bodies. Underweight female bodies are now in an expanded normal, in opposite direction to that of males. Furthermore, an impact of race type and gender of participants was also observed. Our results demonstrate that perceptual weight categorization is multi-dimensional, such that categorization decisions can be driven by ultiple factors.

Age-based perceptions of a reversing regional sound change

Sound changes in progress can be examined in apparent time through differences in production across speaker age groups. Additionally, perceptions of sound changes in progress have been shown to be influenced by listener characteristics, including listener age, in ways that mirror production patterns. However, relatively little is known about the ways in which sound changes that have moved from advancing to reversing in production over time are perceived by community members. This paper examines how listeners of various ages within one U.S. community in Chicago produce and perceive vowels implicated in the region’s characteristic Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS), which is undergoing reversal over time. Findings from a vowel categorization task show that significant age differences emerged in the opposite direction from those in production—younger participants show significantly more NCS-like perceptual boundaries than older speakers for just those features for which they are reversing the NCS in production. Results suggest that sociolinguistic perception is not simply a reflection of an individual’s static social position within a community, from which matched production and perceptual patterns are derived. Instead, a listener’s own positionality, experience and ideas about others in their community may condition their sociolinguistic expectations.

Rethinking Diaspora through Borders: Contemporary Somali Literature in English and Italian

AbstractThis article examines contemporary Somali diasporic literature by proposing a comparative analysis of Nuruddin Farah’s Maps and a selection of texts written by authors of Somali origin currently writing in Italian: Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Cristina Ubah Ali Farah, and Igiaba Scego. Drawing on diaspora studies, theories of narrative space, and contemporary theories of world literature, this article argues that Somali diasporic literature places at its imaginative and symbolic core the concept of the border. In so doing, Somali diasporic literature interlocks formal and narrative strategies to political and literary histories in order to challenge the naturalized perception of linguistic and territorial boundaries. Through the investigation of how processes of border production and contestation define both the narrative geographies and the dynamics of institutional recognition of Somali literature written by the members of its global diaspora, this article further suggests that Somali diasporic writers engage with border epistemologies to articulate more historically conscious modalities of belonging to place and language.

An enhanced loss function simplifies the deep learning model for characterizing the 3D organoid models.

Organization of the organoid models, imaged in 3D with a confocal microscope, is an essential morphometric index to assess responses to stress or therapeutic targets. In fact, differentiating malignant and normal cells is often difficult in monolayer cultures. But in 3D culture, colony organization can provide a clear set of indices for differentiating malignant and normal cells. The limiting factors are delineating each cell in a 3D colony in the presence of perceptual boundaries between adjacent cells and heterogeneity associated with cells being at different cell cycles. In a previous paper, we defined a potential field for delineating adjacent nuclei, with perceptual boundaries, in 2D histology images by coupling three deep networks. This concept is now extended to 3D and simplified by an enhanced cost function that replaces three deep networks with one. Validation includes four cell lines with diverse mutations, and a comparative analysis with the UNet models of microscopy indicates an improved performance with the F1-score of 0.83. All software and annotated images are available through GitHub and Bioinformatics online. The software includes the proposed method, UNet for microscopy that was extended to 3D and report generation for profiling colony organization. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Prosody-syntax interface and prosodic phrasing in brazilian portuguese

This paper focuses on the Brazilian Portuguese (PB) prosodic phrasing and has two main goals: (1) to find a correlation between the prosodic constituents boundaries, as described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory (Nespor & Vogel, 2007 [1986], a.o.) and the perception and production of spontaneous and reading speech breaks, and (2) to describe the phonological characteristics and the syntactic ranking of perceived and non perceived edges. The corpus under analysis includes 5 extracts both of spontaneous and reading speech lasting about 2 minutes each. The reading speech (LE) emerged from the spontaneous speech (FE) orthographic transcription which was collected from an interview in an informal environment. In the perception test, 11 referees heard the 10 speaking extracts, without punctuation, and marked the perceived breaks in the orthographic transcription of each of them. Both the 5 speakers and the 11 referees were students at UFRJ, born in Rio de Janeiro, and were between 22 and 38 years old.The results point out that the prosodic breaks are mainly perceived at the intonational phrase (I) boundary, regardless of the speech style (FE: 91%; LE 99%). However, in LE, 64% of the foreseen I boundaries, described by the Prosodic Hierarchy Theory, were perceived as breaks, but in FE, just 37% were perceived. The most usual nuclear contour in both styles is H+L* L% (this being the Portuguese neutral declarative contour), but its occurrence frequency at perceived breaks draws a distinction between LE and FE (67% and 30%, respectively). In FE, contours like L+H* H% and L*+H H% are also produced (34%). In general, descendant nuclei in LE are predominant, as well as the edge tone L; in FE, both the descendant and ascendant nuclei distribution and low or high boundaries are similar. After running a statistic test, the appearance of an L edge, as a predictive for perception, was globally significant. Concerning the syntactic boundary, it was statistically checked and the result points out that breaks are mainly perceived at the matrix phrase limit (LE: 59%; FE: 61%,), showing the endurance of the matrix phrase edge/I boundary mapping. In general, FE has proved to have a bigger variation on the relation of predicted, perceived and produced, as it was expected, which was also confirmed by statistics. Therefore, the results show that the foreseen I phrasing is fairly robust in both styles, once only 13% of the predicted I boundaries have not been produced as so, regarding intonation. Besides, just 1,4% of the predicted phonological phrase (f) boundaries (and produced as Is) were perceived as breaks by the referees. With this study one may conclude that LE and FE share the same prosodic grammar, performed by the same type of phonological/syntactic cues; nevertheless, these are more consistent in LE and have a more disperse way in FE, adding to a greater difficulty at the systematic perception of prosodic boundaries in FE than in LE.

LIDAR based detection of road boundaries using the density of accumulated point clouds and their gradients

Autonomous driving and driver assistance require a continuous and reliable perception of the road boundaries, namely curbs and berms, including also other minor, or not so minor, obstacles in the neighborhood of the car. This paper proposes to use a 4-layer LIDAR placed close to the ground to capture measurements of the road ahead of the car and allow the detection of the boundaries. This setup provides a special point of view that allows the accumulation of points on vertical surfaces on the road as the car moves, which increases the point density in vertical surfaces but keeps it limited in horizontal surfaces. This technique allows to successfully distinguish curbs from the flat parts of the road. However, this approach has some limitations, namely to detect berms, and another approach had to be developed using the gradient of point density, which extends the detection capabilities to berms and negative obstacles. This is achieved by flattening the point clouds to 2D and use traditional computer vision gradient and edge detection techniques, which also improves the processing speed. Results are obtained on the ATLASCAR real system, at different velocities, and a good performance is reached when comparing to a manually created ground truth.

Phenomenon of urban boundary in a structure of a city. The case of Vilnius.

The article presents a theoretical – fundamental study of phenomenon of physical boundaries in a city and their meaning for the existing urban fabric. The paper draws attention to their different nature and possibilities of integration. In terms of its impact, an urban boundary can be both a catalyst and a tool that forces/stimulates/determines some or other conditions significant in formation of an urban structure. The aim of research is to identify/distinguish these boundaries in a city and see their multi-dimensional character, both in terms of positive and negative impacts on the existing environment. The article studies both the theoretical platform for urban boundaries and the practical works/projects, on the basis of which the laws of urban structure resulting from the perception of physical boundaries and principled solutions to eliminate the negative consequences of these boundaries and to promote positive ones are sought. The article moves from theory to practice by identifying the urban boundaries by means of an experiment, for implementation of which a complex city and then a particular district of it are selected. The city of Vilnius and its district Naujoji Vilnia have been chosen for this role. Vilnius is known for its rich topography, which allows the observation of natural boundaries formed by nature. And the selected district perfectly visualizes a merger of different physical boundaries that is interesting in its multi-dimensional character and impact on the structure. The authors study the general extent to which physical boundaries have common points of contact in territories of different scale, what they are, where they are located and how they operate in the local context and what principles could be applied in order to highlight them or diminish their effect

Pathways to Becoming a Culturally Responsive Teacher: Narrative Inquiries into a Translanguaging Read Aloud

The increasing mismatch between the cultural backgrounds of teachers and students has caused teacher education programs (TEPs) to scramble to identify effective pedagogy that will prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to work with diverse populations. One unexamined technique is the use of translanguaging books, which intertwine two languages for a myriad of social, emotional, and cognitive benefits. The present narrative inquiry follows two PSTs, Kathleen and Laura, who engaged in shared readings of translanguaging books within an after-school literacy program for struggling second grade English language learners (ELLs). Data include journal reflections and individual interviews. Results show that the translanguaging books shattered their perceptions of the linguistic boundaries between English and Spanish, and illustrated how language can be used to alienate students. However, Kathleen and Laura had contrasting views about the purpose of the translanguaging read alouds which illustrate implications for TEPs: a) authentic experience is essential to enable PSTs to challenge current monolingual ideologies; b) PSTs must be given the opportunity to engage in tasks that challenge their underlying assumptions; and c) TEPs should focus on the importance of cultural responsiveness, so that PSTs develop a prominent belief system that can be quickly recalled and enacted in the classroom.

Activity Locations, Residential Segregation, and the Significance of Residential Neighborhood Boundary Perceptions.

The inadequacies of residential census geography in capturing urban residents' routine exposures have motivated efforts to more directly measure residents' activity spaces. In turn, insights regarding urban activity patterns have been used to motivate alternative residential neighborhood measurement strategies incorporating dimensions of activity space in the form of egocentric neighborhoods-measurement approaches that place individuals at the center of their own residential neighborhood units. Unexamined, however, is the extent to which the boundaries of residents' own self-defined residential neighborhoods compare with census-based and egocentric neighborhood measurement approaches in aligning with residents' routine activity locations. We first assess this question, examining whether the boundaries of residents' self-defined residential neighborhoods are in closer proximity to the coordinates of a range of activity location types than are the boundaries of their census and egocentric residential neighborhood measurement approaches. We find little evidence that egocentric or, crucially, self-defined residential neighborhoods better align with activity locations, suggesting a division in residents' activity locations and conceptions of their residential neighborhoods. We then examine opposing hypotheses about how self-defined residential neighborhoods and census tracts compare in socioeconomic and racial composition. Overall, our findings suggest that residents bound less segregated neighborhoods than those produced by census geography, but self-defined residential neighborhoods still reflect a preference toward homophily when considering areas beyond the immediate environment of their residence. These findings underscore the significance of individuals' conceptions of residential neighborhoods to understanding and measuring urban social processes such as residential segregation and social disorganization.