Familiar Parts Research Articles

Compositional diversity in visual concept learning

Humans leverage compositionality to efficiently learn new concepts, understanding how familiar parts can combine together to form novel objects. In contrast, popular computer vision models struggle to make the same types of inferences, requiring more data and generalizing less flexibly than people do. Here, we study these distinctively human abilities across a range of different types of visual composition, examining how people classify and generate “alien figures” with rich relational structure. We also develop a Bayesian program induction model which searches for the best programs for generating the candidate visual figures, utilizing a large program space containing different compositional mechanisms and abstractions. In few shot classification tasks, we find that people and the program induction model can make a range of meaningful compositional generalizations, with the model providing a strong account of the experimental data as well as interpretable parameters that reveal human assumptions about the factors invariant to category membership (here, to rotation and changing part attachment). In few shot generation tasks, both people and the models are able to construct compelling novel examples, with people behaving in additional structured ways beyond the model capabilities, e.g. making choices that complete a set or reconfigure existing parts in new ways. To capture these additional behavioral patterns, we develop an alternative model based on neuro-symbolic program induction: this model also composes new concepts from existing parts yet, distinctively, it utilizes neural network modules to capture residual statistical structure. Together, our behavioral and computational findings show how people and models can produce a variety of compositional behavior when classifying and generating visual objects.

Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia

In a deeply nuanced study, Kupperman deftly crafts a narrative based on her decades of study into the early Virginia colony and the Atlantic world, of the important role of captive children and the exchange of peoples in the settlement process. By highlighting the experiences of Pocahontas, Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole, Kupperman creates a model for insight into the fraught relationships these youths would have with both their communities of origin and their adoptive kin. The exchange of children in Virginia allowed for language acquisition, as child intermediaries learned the customs and languages of their communities, which in turn allowed them to become interpreters at a young age. This important tool in settlement, however, also placed enormous pressure on these four youths who were still malleable in their adolescence. The desires to please disparate masters led to fraught and tense situations for all involved. For the boys, Kupperman argues that “they were so young themselves that they might not necessarily understand everything about their own cultures and the deeper meanings attached to words and concepts,” leaving spaces for ambiguity that both the Algonquian and English leaders could make use of and manipulate (p. 12).While Pocahontas's story is a focus of some of the book, the greater contribution to the scholarship of early Virginia and the Atlantic World here is Kupperman's focus on Thomas, Henry, and Robert, providing a well-researched and illuminating understanding of their lives in the colony and the pressures they faced. Throughout seven chapters, Kupperman traces not only the history of the Virginia Company (and its failure) but the rise and fall of relationships and alliances, and the interpersonal public and private socio-politics of the era. Interweaving familiar parts of the narrative, including the infamous “rescue” of John Smith, with a close read of archival sources, Kupperman shares the story of the exchange of children caught in a series of wars, disease, trade, and colonial expansion. Within these stories are details of life and interaction; Kupperman asks, for example, about Thomas Savage, “Did he find it liberating to switch to Powhatan clothing, which was so much freer than the English? Or did he find it hard to adjust to being so exposed?” (p. 31).For Pocahontas, Kupperman shares what life was like in London at the time of her visit, describing the drastic change in dress for the young woman, including a “high-bodied” gown with a “large starched collar that was supported by a network of wires. So your clothes poked and scratched you throughout the day, not to mention how heavy it all was” (p. 114). These detailed analyses of the day-to-day experiences and the challenges these children faced provide scholars with excellent materials with which to inform classroom discussions as well as further research. Kupperman suggests the larger trauma that Pocahontas faced under English expectations that she act as an intermediary to convert her people to Christianity, opining that “inner turmoil over what would happen once they were back in Virginia must have been intolerable” (p. 139). Sadly missing from the story are some of the deeper Indigenous perspectives and analyses of the story of her abduction and conversion, a story that many view as one of the first missing and murdered Indigenous women.The last two chapters expand upon the rising tobacco economy and the failure of the Virginia Company as well as the role of young English and Native boys as interpreters, some of whom fared well and others who became casualties of the system as “manipulation and double dealing using young go-betweens happened everywhere in the Atlantic” (p. 173). By focusing on the children involved, their experiences, their losses, and the potential psychological impact of their captivity and exchange, Kupperman has produced an important synthesis of this era that allows a glimpse into a terrifying aspect of the colonial era and brings to life their circumstances and hardships.

THE LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTION OF IDIOMS IN TV DRAMA: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TEACHING IDIOMS TO IRAQI LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

As English is heavily idiomatic, this paper attempts to answer the question how Iraqi learners can better understand and speak English when interacting with native speakers of English from hearing and being exposed to constructed dialogue in TV drama. Hence, the paper has two focal points: the linguistic (semantic and syntactic) construction of idioms in dialogue scripted for the screen and the problems that Iraqi learners encounter in learning English idioms and fixed expressions. An idiom is the assigning of a new meaning to a group of words which already have their own meaning. Idioms can be easily identified with the familiar parts of speech. Thus, some idioms are clearly verbal in nature: "figure out/shy away from," an equally large number are nominal in nature: "feet of clay", many are adjectives: "butterflies in my stomach," and many are adverbial: "high and dry." These idioms which correlate with the familiar parts of speech can be called "lexemic idioms." The other most important group of idioms are of larger size. Often they are an entire clause in length: "have the guts," "have the stomach for," "to be caught between the rock and a hard place. As the English of advanced students, while grammatically, phonologically, and lexically correct, may sound rather bookish and pedantic to a native speaker. Iraqi learners have difficulties in understanding idioms for a number of reasons: idioms have figurative unpredictable meaning, distinctive cultural features, they exist in large numbers and thus difficult to memorize, lack of frequent use, and inadequate method of learning idioms. The study shows that learning idioms in the appropriate context of situation will result in learners' understanding and speaking better and more fluent English. The study hence not only contributes to the fields of linguistic stylistics and media studies, but also to applied linguistics and pragmatics, in particular through revising the concept and meaning of idioms.

Dynamic Hippocampal CA2 Responses to Contextual Spatial Novelty.

Hippocampal place cells are functional units of spatial navigation and are present in all subregions: CA1, CA2, CA3, and CA4. Recent studies on CA2 have indicated its role in social and contextual memories, but its contribution to spatial novelty detection and encoding remains largely unknown. The current study aims to uncover how CA2 processes spatial novelty and to distinguish its functional role towards the same from CA1. Accordingly, a novel 3-day paradigm was designed where animals were introduced to a completely new environment on the first day, and on subsequent days, novel segments were inserted into the existing spatial environment while the other segments remained the same, allowing us to compare novel and familiar parts of the same closed-loop track on multiple days. We found that spatial novelty leads to dynamic and complex hippocampal place cell firings at both individual neuron and population levels. Place cells in both CA1 and CA2 had strong responses to novel segments, leading to higher average firing rates and increased pairwise cross correlations across all days. However, CA2 place cells that fired for novel areas had lower spatial information scores than CA1 place cells active in the same areas. At the ensemble level, CA1 only responded to spatial novelty on day 1, when the environment was completely novel, whereas CA2 responded to it on all days, each time novelty was introduced. Therefore, CA2 was more sensitive and responsive to novel spatial features even when introduced in a familiar environment, unlike CA1.

Review: Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires, by Ana María León

Review: <i>Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires</i>, by Ana María León

Précis: Concern, Respect, and Cooperation

Précis: <i>Concern, Respect, and Cooperation</i>

Грамматика учебного текста и предметные знания (пресуппозиция)

The paper describes the expository text as the model of disciplinary knowledge. Consideration is given to the type of epistemic modality associated with presupposition, i.e., knowledge known and relevant to the participants of communication. Text analysis functional methods are used to study expository texts from Russian textbooks on Social Sciences and Physics for secondary school. It has been found that presupposition is most often expressed through modal constructions referring to a reader (personal pronouns) occupying an initial or non-initial position in the text. The didactic function of the expressed presupposition is to actualize the reader’s knowledge necessary for text comprehension. At the same time, the expressed presupposition allows presenting a model of knowledge and a knowledge-building process by mapping a knowledge structure. The expressed presupposition represents the epistemic relations (1) between the familiar and unfamiliar parts of disciplinary knowledge and (2) between familiar parts of everyday life and unfamiliar disciplinary knowledge. The expressed presupposition presents the knowledge-building process by affecting the text deployment. The initial presupposition can occur as a global topic sentence expressing the most significant referents and determining the thematic text structure. Also, the initial presupposition can convey familiar segments of knowledge and set an information context to introduce unfamiliar significant referents in the following sentences. The non-initial presupposition expands the information context and tends to elaborate and detail the topic. To conclude, there is a correlation between the text-deployment potential of the expressed presupposition and the epistemic potential of the familiar knowledge.

The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity. By Edward J. Watts. Paperback ed

This is a book brimming with answers to searching questions, a good many of which no one had really asked before, but which, upon reading the book, now simply seem fundamental to the history of late antiquity. The paperback printing now makes this study more widely available, in keeping with its contents, which have been engagingly accessible to a broad range of readers since the book’s initial publication in 2015. Its carefully detailed and intriguing exploration of generational perspectives toward and within a major cultural shift makes this study a historiographical tour de force, with obvious appeal far beyond ancient historians. Even the most familiar parts of the fourth-century story are told in a refreshing way from which experts can learn something and likely a great deal. Who knew, for example, that the first regulation of belief (as opposed to simply conduct) in Roman history came at the hands of the emperor Julian, the only pagan Roman emperor to occupy the throne after Constantine?

Students’ Approach to Anatomical Terminology and Retention in Histology

Introduction & Objective Anatomical terminology, with its Latin and Greek roots, can be complex for students to comprehend as they navigate courses in the anatomical disciplines. Graduate students in anatomy courses have varying prior experience with classical languages and medical/anatomical terminology which impacts how they approach learning. While rote memorization of terms is often thought to be the prevailing approach, students may use many different methods to develop a vocabulary in the anatomical sciences. Although learning terminology is a necessary component of anatomical science courses, few studies focus on how students acquire their anatomical vocabulary and the impact it has on learning outcomes. The aim of this study was to evaluate how students approach anatomical terminology in a histology course, their retention of common terms, and the relationship between terminology retention and course performance. Materials & Methods Students in a graduate histology course at Indiana University were encouraged to voluntarily complete a post-course quiz. Students were asked to provide brief definitions for 10 anatomical terms and 10 combining forms relevant to material covered in histology and describe their approach to learning terminology. Suitable terms utilized in the instrument were determined by the frequency of each term in the required texts for the course. Quantitative data was analyzed using Spearman's correlation to determine the relationship between final course grades and quiz results. Responses to the learning approach questions were analyzed using thematic analysis Results Twelve students (36%) completed the post-course quiz. The average score on the quiz was a 63%. There was a statistically significant positive correlation (rs=.716, p=.009) between final grade and performance on the terminology quiz. Indicating students who performed well on the quiz also performed well in the histology course. Qualitative results suggest that students with some anatomical terminology experience found their background helpful in recalling terms. Many also reported making attempts to “break down” the words into more familiar parts. Others expressed a desire to understand the terminology prior to beginning the course to gain a deeper understanding of the content. Conclusion Overall, students felt that recognizing anatomical terminology helped them understand histology more clearly despite their performance in the course or on the terminology quiz. The relationship between terminology retention and final grade suggests that terminology remains an important component in engaging with and learning anatomical content. This study demonstrates a need for further research on how students obtain and use their anatomical vocabulary throughout the anatomical disciplines. Significance/Implication Understanding how students naturally approach anatomical terminology and the outcomes of those approaches may provide valuable insight for the development of interventions to assist in the learning of anatomical terminology and content.

Task set and instructions influence the weight of figural priors: A psychophysical study with extremal edges and familiar configuration

In figure–ground organization, the figure is defined as a region that is both “shaped” and “nearer.” Here we test whether changes in task set and instructions can alter the outcome of the cross-border competition between figural priors that underlies figure assignment. Extremal edge (EE), a relative distance prior, has been established as a strong figural prior when the task is to report “which side is nearer?” In three experiments using bipartite stimuli, EEs competed and cooperated with familiar configuration, a shape prior for figure assignment in a “which side is shaped?” task.” Experiment 1 showed small but significant effects of familiar configuration for displays sketching upright familiar objects, although “shaped-side” responses were predominantly determined by EEs. In Experiment 2, instructions regarding the possibility of perceiving familiar shapes were added. Now, although EE remained the dominant prior, the figure was perceived on the familiar-configuration side of the border on a significantly larger percentage of trials across all display types. In Experiment 3, both task set (nearer/shaped) and the presence versus absence of instructions emphasizing that familiar objects might be present were manipulated within subjects. With familiarity thus “primed,” effects of task set emerged when EE and familiar configuration favored opposite sides as figure. Thus, changing instructions can modulate the weighing of figural priors for shape versus distance in figure assignment in a manner that interacts with task set. Moreover, we show that the influence of familiar parts emerges in participants without medial temporal lobe/ perirhinal cortex brain damage when instructions emphasize that familiar objects might be present.

Ecumenism as Encounter

AbstractThis article is a personal testimony of the encounter between Orthodox and Anglican traditions in the 20th and the 21st centuries. It offers an overview of more than 40 years of experience in ecumenical work with Orthodox churches, beginning with an experience of Orthodoxy in Serbia in 1974 and a meeting with Fr Justin Popović. It continues with an account of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, which has enabled Anglicans to meet and worship with Orthodox. It concludes with a discussion of the ways in which these relationships matured after the fall of communism with the creation of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge as an example of shared theological education. The article also highlights how traditions from the East of spiritual fatherhood, the Jesus Prayer, and icons have become familiar parts of Anglican church life.

Artificial intelligence and philosophical creativity: From analytics to crealectics

Abstract The tendency to idealise artificial intelligence as independent from human manipulators, combined with the growing ontological entanglement of humans and digital machines, has created an “anthrobotic” horizon, in which data analytics, statistics and probabilities throw our agential power into question. How can we avoid the consequences of a reified definition of intelligence as universal operation becoming imposed upon our destinies? It is here argued that the fantasised autonomy of automated intelligence presents a contradistinctive opportunity for philosophical consciousness to understand itself anew as holistic and co-creative, beyond the recent “analytic” moment of the history of philosophy. Here we introduce the concept of “crealectic intelligence”, a meta-analytic and meta-dialectic aspect of consciousness. Intelligent behaviour may consist in distinguishing discrete familiar parts or reproducible functions in the midst of noise via an analytic process of segmentation; intelligence may also manifest itself in the constitution of larger wholes and dynamic unities through a dialectic process of association or assemblage. But, by contrast, crealectic intelligence co-creates realities in the image of an ideal or truth, taking into account the desiring agent imbued with a sense of possibility, in a relationship not only with the Real but also with the creative sublime or “Creal”.

Normative data for an expanded set of stimuli for testing high-level influences on object perception: OMEFA-II

We present normative data for an expanded set of stimuli designed to investigate past experience effects on object detection. The stimuli are vertically-elongated “bipartite” displays comprising two equal-area regions meeting at an articulated central border. When the central border is assigned to one side, a shaped figure (i.e., an object) is detected on that side. Participants viewing brief masked exposures typically detect figures more often on the critical side of Intact displays where a common (“familiar”) object is depicted than on a matched critical side of Part-Rearranged (PR) displays comprising the same parts arranged in novel configurations. This pattern of results showed that past experience in the form of familiar configuration rather than familiar parts is a prior for figure assignment. Spurred by research implicating a network involving the perirhinal cortex of the medial temporal lobe in these familiar configuration effects, we enlarged the stimulus set from 24 to 48 base stimuli to increase its usefulness for behavioral, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging experiments. We measured the percentage of participants who agreed on a single interpretation for each side of Intact, Upright PR, and Inverted PR displays (144 displays; 288 sides) under long exposure conditions. High inter-subject agreement is taken to operationally define a familiar configuration. This new stimulus set is well-suited to investigate questions concerning how parts and wholes are integrated and how high- and low-level brain areas interact in object detection. This set also allows tests of predictions regarding cross-border competition in figure assignment and assessments of individual differences. The displays, their image statistics, and normative data are available online (https://osf.io/j9kz2/).

Economic Evaluation Air Pollution Removal and Oxygen Production based on I-Tree program for Atrush Forest/Kurdistan Region Of Iraq*

The objectives of this study are to testing the impacts of Atrush forests on the environment and oxygen production based on I-Tree program, function and management decisions that will improve human health and environmental quality. Human communities derive many essential benefits from natural ecosystems; these benefits represent important and familiar parts of the economy. What has been less appreciated up to this day is that natural ecosystems also perform fundamental life-support services without them human civilizations would cease to thrive. Evaluation of the vegetation structure, conducted during 2017. Data from 21 fields located were analyzed using the I-Tree Eco program. The most common species of trees are Pinus brutia (Turkish pine). Quercus aegilops (Ajo mountain scrub oak ), Plantanus orientalis (Oriental plane tree), Pistacia atlantica (Mt.atlas mastic tree) as well as shrubs Crataegus azarolus (Mediterranean Medlar), Junipours occidentalis (Western juniper), Prunus amygdalus (Almendro), Rhus coriaria (sumac spp), Nerium oleander (Oleander). Results show that the Pollution removal is ( 0.106 ton/year) referred ($280 /year) for sum of surveyed trees and shrubs in Atrush location, and oxygen production is (2 ton/year) .That means there are a effected role of trees on ecosystem in selected area.

Linguistic inferences without words

Contemporary semantics has uncovered a sophisticated typology of linguistic inferences, characterized by their conversational status and their behavior in complex sentences. This typology is usually thought to be specific to language and in part lexically encoded in the meanings of words. We argue that it is neither. Using a method involving "composite" utterances that include normal words alongside novel nonlinguistic iconic representations (gestures and animations), we observe successful "one-shot learning" of linguistic meanings, with four of the main inference types (implicatures, presuppositions, supplements, homogeneity) replicated with gestures and animations. The results suggest a deeper cognitive source for the inferential typology than usually thought: Domain-general cognitive algorithms productively divide both linguistic and nonlinguistic information along familiar parts of the linguistic typology.

Vascularized Composite Allograft Donation and Transplantation: A Survey of Public Attitudes in the United States.

Vascularized composite allograft (VCA) transplantation has emerged as a groundbreaking surgical intervention to return identity and function following traumatic injury, congenital deformity, or disfigurement. While public attitudes toward traditional organ/tissue donation are favorable, little is known about attitudes toward VCA donation and transplantation. A survey was conducted of 1485 U.S. residents in August 2016 to assess VCA donation attitudes. Participants also completed the Revised Health Care System Distrust Scale. Most respondents were willing to donate hands/forearms (67.4%) and legs (66.8%), and almost half (48.0%) were willing to donate the face. Three-quarters (74.4%) of women were willing to donate the uterus; 54.4% of men were willing to donate the penis. VCA donation willingness was more likely among whites and Hispanics (p < 0.001), registered organ/tissue donors (p < 0.001), and those with less health care system distrust (p < 0.001) and media exposure to VCA transplantation (p = 0.003). Many who opposed VCA donation expressed concerns about psychological discomfort, mutilation, identity loss, and the reaction of others to seeing familiar body parts on a stranger. Attitudes toward VCA donation are favorable overall, despite limited exposure to VCA messaging and confusion about how VCA donation occurs. These findings may help guide the development and implementation of VCA public education campaigns.

Meaning Extension of the Body-part Term, ‘Eye’, between Chinese and Korean

Body-part terms do not just mean our body parts but are used in a range of areas in our daily life. From the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy play a representative role in the process of extending meaning of body-part terms, which is calculated from the relationship between similarity and adjacency. The study investigated what concepts `eye`, one of the most important body parts, hold in Chinese and Korean each and how it is used to be expressed in language; also, metaphorical transfer of the conceptual domain by Heine et al was used to study how the meaning is extended. As a result of the comparison, the meaning of the Chinese body-part term `眼/目` has been extended in the order of man ＞ animal ＞ plant ＞ object ＞ action ＞ space ＞ time ＞ quantity ＞ abstraction area, while the Korean `눈` has been extended in the order of man ＞ animal ＞ plant ＞ object ＞ action ＞ space ＞ time ＞ abstraction area. This resulted from linking the characteristics of familiar body parts to different concepts; it was revealed that language is deeply related to recognition and physical experience of human being. As for meaning extension, functional characteristics take the biggest proportion, followed by morphological characteristics, structural characteristics and positional characteristics. Speakers with different language and cultural backgrounds see the same object in a different point of view, and this may result in unique and its own meaning extension for Chinese and Korean each by highlighting different aspects. For example, differences are shown in plant, object, time and quantity domains. As for morphological characteristics of the word: first, as some Chinese words have different meanings in a single form, `眼` shows grammatical metonymy that it is used as a unit noun; meanwhile, Korean has no such phenomenon. Second, the meaning extension in Chinese is mainly complex forms, but that in Korean is usually a single form; this reveals that Chinese has comprehensive meanings, while Korean is very flexible and highly depends on the context.

Analysis on Individual Strategy Behavior Based on Differentiating Spatial Cognition in Special Event

Among the one of most interesting and challenging theoretical and practical problems in describing pedestrians behavior are evacuating tactics preference. Compared to other modes of transports, the features of pedestrian route preference are that everyone has a different decision-making ability based on differentiating spatial recognition. This article focused on the correlative issues between pedestrian characteristic and their routing choice behavior in special event. As the data collected from a field survey conducted in a large market exposed, we analyzed the difference of individual strategy behavior, which showed that different pedestrians held different preferences and probabilities of choosing a particular road for evacuation due to diversity of spatial cognition. They searched their corresponding personalized spatial cognitive road network to find some roads which maybe a route to the destination. According to the questionnaire, it was the fact that 62% of people would choose the most familiar paths parts of which may be shortest one. Each pedestrian derived his own road network from the roads selected from different levels consisted with personal characteristics. Through this paper, the author expected to make a step that the pedestrian behavior simulation will advance on integrating the human cognition from theoretical precision and managers can realize the importance of spatial knowledge and correct strategy for evacuation.

Spatially rearranged object parts can facilitate perception of intact whole objects.

The familiarity of an object depends on the spatial arrangement of its parts; when the parts are spatially rearranged, they form a novel, unrecognizable configuration. Yet the same collection of parts comprises both the familiar and novel configuration. Is it possible that the collection of familiar parts activates a representation of the intact familiar configuration even when they are spatially rearranged? We presented novel configurations as primes before test displays that assayed effects on figure-ground perception from memories of intact familiar objects. In our test displays, two equal-area regions shared a central border; one region depicted a portion of a familiar object. Previous research with such displays has shown that participants are more likely to perceive the region depicting a familiar object as the figure and the abutting region as its ground when the familiar object is depicted in its upright orientation rather than upside down. The novel primes comprised either the same or a different collection of parts as the familiar object in the test display (part-rearranged and control primes, respectively). We found that participants were more likely to perceive the familiar region as figure in upright vs. inverted displays following part-rearranged primes but not control primes. Thus, priming with a novel configuration comprising the same familiar parts as the upcoming figure-ground display facilitated orientation-dependent effects of object memories on figure assignment. Similar results were obtained when the spatially rearranged collection of parts was suggested on the groundside of the prime's border, suggesting that familiar parts in novel configurations access the representation of their corresponding intact whole object before figure assignment. These data demonstrate that familiar parts access memories of familiar objects even when they are arranged in a novel configuration.

Editorial: Proceedings and Symposia in CORR ®: What They Are, and Why We Publish Them

Editorial: Proceedings and Symposia in CORR ®: What They Are, and Why We Publish Them