Perceptual Ambiguity Research Articles

How do nurses work in chronic management in the age of artificial intelligence? development and future prospects.

AI is undeniably revolutionizing medical research and patient care across diverse fields. Chronic disease nursing care, a pivotal aspect of clinical management, has significantly reaped the benefits of AI across numerous dimensions. Understanding the operational principles of artificial intelligence before implementation is crucial, avoiding indiscriminate replacement of all tasks with AI. Nurses serve as the primary force in symptom group research, expanding beyond diabetes to encompass various chronic diseases; their primary responsibility involves recording patients' daily symptoms and vital signs. However, a substantial portion of current AI research excludes nurses from the developmental phase, encompassing them solely in user and feedback populations. The comprehensive design of the symptom analysis and long-term management approach necessitates the guidance and oversight of nurses; however, their current insufficient involvement might stem from nursing staff's comparatively limited comprehension of AI and their ambiguous perception of their role's value in AI. Therefore, an imperative exploration of nurses' roles in symptom analysis and long-term management, leveraging the latest research in these areas, is vital to pinpoint breakthroughs in nurses' AI involvement in the future.

MILITARY SERVANTS AS SUBJECTS OF ADMINISTRATIVE OFFENSES: GENERAL AND SPECIAL IN UNDERSTANDING

The article examines the peculiarities of the application of administrative responsibility to a special subject of the specified type of legal responsibility - a military serviceman. The norms of administrative-delict law and legislation of Ukraine are based on principles that are actually introduced into the national legal system of Ukraine and use the institution of substituting administrative responsibility with disciplinary responsibility. At the same time, changes made to the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses testify to an ambiguous attitude to the institution of substitution in administrative tort law. Thus, the updated procedural norms of the administrative-delict legislation give authorized officials the right to draw up protocols on administrative offenses against military personnel, which indicates the removal from the list of exceptions among subjects who do not bear administrative responsibility on a general basis - military personnel. At the same time, the general principles of the Code of Ukraine on administrative offenses state that military personnel may be subject to administrative liability in exceptional cases. Such an approach reveals an ambiguous perception of the substitute. At the same time, the institution of the substitute acquires an ambiguous functional meaning, when administrative responsibility is replaced by disciplinary responsibility, and disciplinary proceedings and its elements, as components of disciplinary responsibility, can be replaced by elements of the administrative-jurisdictional (administrative-delict) process, in particular, evidence in disciplinary proceedings can be collected in accordance with the norms procedural administrative-delict legislation and, thus, be legalized in disciplinary proceedings. Key words: administrative responsibility, disciplinary responsibility, substitute, military serviceman.

The influence of tDCS on perceived bouncing/streaming

Processing ambiguous situations is a constant challenge in everyday life and sensory input from different modalities needs to be integrated to form a coherent mental representation on the environment. The bouncing/streaming illusion can be studied to provide insights into the ambiguous perception and processing of multi-modal environments. In short, the likelihood of reporting bouncing rather than streaming impressions increases when a sound coincides with the moment of overlap between two moving disks. Neuroimaging studies revealed that the right posterior parietal cortex is crucial in cross-modal integration and is active during the bouncing/streaming illusion. Consequently, in the present study, we used transcranial direct current stimulation to stimulate this brain area. In the active stimulation conditions, a 9 cm2 electrode was positioned over the P4-EEG position and the 35 cm2 reference positioned over the left upper arm. The stimulation lasted 15 min. Each participant did the bouncing/streaming task three times: before, during and after anodal or sham stimulation. In a sample of N = 60 healthy, young adults, we found no influence of anodal tDCS. Bayesian analysis showed strong evidence against tDCS effects. There are two possible explanations for the finding that anodal tDCS over perceptual areas did not modulate multimodal integration. First, upregulation of multimodal integration is not possible using tDCS over the PPC as the integration process already functions at maximum capacity. Second, prefrontal decision-making areas may have overruled any modulated input from the PPC as it may not have matched their decision-making criterion and compensated for the modulation.

Why do leaders engage in destructive behaviours? The role of leaders’ working environment and stress

AbstractComplementing previous research on antecedents of destructive leadership, we examined the role of work stressors in the emergence of active and passive destructive leadership behaviours. Building on conservation of resources theory, we examined direct and indirect relations between leaders’ perceptions of workload, role ambiguity and intragroup conflict on ratings of their own destructive leadership, as well as mediating paths through perceived stress. We used a two‐wave survey design consisting of a random sample of 1311 managers. Structural equation modelling revealed that work stressors were only related to passive forms of destructive leadership, whereas personality was related to both active and passive forms of destructive leadership. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Ambiguous perception from bottom to top

Ambiguous perception from bottom to top

THE THE RIGHT OF PERMANENT USE OF A LAND PLOT OF CITIZENS AND THE LEGAL MODEL OF ITS PROTECTION IN COURT

The study is caused by the spread of land conflicts in society between territorial communities (local self-government bodies) as landowners and citizens as users of such lands on the right of permanent use, as well as ambiguous perception, interpretation and application of land legislation in the settlement of such conflicts. The purpose of the article is to formulate a legal model for resolving a dispute over the right of a land user to appeal to a court against a decision of a local self-government body to withdraw a land plot owned by him (land user) on the right of permanent use. The methodological basis of the article is a positivist approach, based on a critical analysis of the provisions of regulations and case law, as well as method of formal and legal analysis, the hermeneutic method, methods of comparison and contrast. The study distinguishes between the concept of termination of ownership of a land plot and the concept of termination of use (including permanent one) a land plot. Is being proved that the legal basis for the termination of these types of rights is different, which significantly affects the further determination of the jurisdiction of the dispute. A model of resolved disputes over claims of power entities (landowners) regarding the withdrawal of a land plot, granted to a person for permanent use from state and communal lands, in the absence of a person's consent to such withdrawal, etc., is proposed.

Ambiguity is a linking feature for interocular grouping.

Ambiguity is implicit in neural representations of the physical world. Previous work has examined how the visual system resolves ambiguous neural signals that represent various features, such as the percept resulting from rivalrous chromaticities or forms. Relatively little is known, however, about the contribution of unambiguous neural representations to perceptual resolution of ambiguous ones. This is addressed here by measuring perceptual resolution of ambiguity by grouping, which is operationalized as the tendency for multiple similar ambiguous representations to be seen as identical to each other. Multiple chromatically ambiguous representations were created using interocular switch rivalry and presented together with a nearby but separate unambiguous (non-rivalrous) chromaticity. The magnitude of grouping the chromatic regions was compared when ambiguous regions were seen alone versus with unambiguous regions seen simultaneously. Contrary to prevailing theory that the resolution of the ambiguous percepts would follow the unambiguous ones, the ambiguous chromatic regions consistently appeared identical to each other, but their appearance was not found to be attracted to the unambiguous color percept. This supports the proposition that the ambiguity itself in a neural representation is a linking feature contributing to perceptual disambiguation.

Using LEGO® Serious Play® Methodology in supporting Nigerian nursing students' sociocultural transitions to UK higher education: A phenomenological research study

IntroductionFrom an historical perspective the United Kingdom (UK) has been the first European country of choice for Nigerian students wishing to study overseas. As an international contingent, Nigerian students continue to represent the UK's third largest international student body. This paper provides an insight into research undertaken to examine students' capacity to transition into the UK Higher Education system from a sociocultural perspective. Across the UK Higher Education Institutions (HEI's) have addressed issues surrounding internationalisation and decolonisation of the portfolio of programmes available to overseas students, with strategic curriculum design and justification processes evident in the extant literature. This project uses an innovative approach for the facilitation of dialogue with international students about their experiences of transitioning into UK systems of learning and teaching using a social constructivism approach. AimsThe aim of the research was to explore sociocultural perspectives which impacted on self-reported transitions to UK HEI's by Nigerian students. The objectives of the study were to a) provide a reflective lens of perspective on international student transitioning experiences for HEIs, educators and policymakers b) illuminate the challenges and barriers faced by Nigerian students during their transition from Nigerian to UK HE systems and infrastructures and c) to co-construct authentic and pragmatic knowledge of how best Nigerian students can be supported in their transition to UK HEI's. MethodsSmith (2010) interpretive phenomenological analysis, integrating qualitative research methods was implemented as a means of undertaking research facilitated using LEGO® Serious Play® Methodology as an innovative method of data collection. Twenty participants were recruited purposively to the study from an annual cohort of nursing students at a satellite Higher Education Institution (HEI) campus in Metropolitan city. Quirkos was used as a software package in analysing the data and establishing the salience as well as the commonality of emergent themes. ResultsFindings reveal the extent to which sociocultural acclimation is of importance in the process of transition to UK HEIs. The perception of complex ambiguity surrounding the design and delivery of UK academic curricula was also reported as challenging by Nigerian students. Self-reported comments from Nigerian nursing students revealed the priori existence of negative learning experience, including lack of IT facilities, culturally rooted family expectations and responsibilities which then influenced perceptions and experiences of learning and teaching in the UK. Negative experiences included perceptions of racism regarding skin colour, fashion sense and UK practice focused on authentic assessment opportunities. ConclusionThe small purposive sample of participants who engaged in this study, illuminated that students' prior experiences have the potential to influence their current pedagogical experience, in accordance with the principles of social constructivism. Most participants reported their experience of the transition period of entry to UK education varied between individuals, perhaps most significantly that perceptions of acculturation, acclimatisation and overall transition to the UK took between four and six months for a programme that may only have one year's duration.

Benefits of active listening during 3D sound localization

In everyday life, sound localization entails more than just the extraction and processing of auditory cues. When determining sound position in three dimensions, the brain also considers the available visual information (e.g., visual cues to sound position) and resolves perceptual ambiguities through active listening behavior (e.g., spontaneous head movements while listening). Here, we examined to what extent spontaneous head movements improve sound localization in 3D—azimuth, elevation, and depth—by comparing static vs. active listening postures. To this aim, we developed a novel approach to sound localization based on sounds delivered in the environment, brought into alignment thanks to a VR system. Our system proved effective for the delivery of sounds at predetermined and repeatable positions in 3D space, without imposing a physically constrained posture, and with minimal training. In addition, it allowed measuring participant behavior (hand, head and eye position) in real time. We report that active listening improved 3D sound localization, primarily by ameliorating accuracy and variability of responses in azimuth and elevation. The more participants made spontaneous head movements, the better was their 3D sound localization performance. Thus, we provide proof of concept of a novel approach to the study of spatial hearing, with potentials for clinical and industrial applications.

Real-life and posed vocalizations to lottery wins differ fundamentally in their perceived valence.

A basic premise of classic emotion theories is that distinct emotional experiences yield distinct emotional vocalizations-each informative of its situational context. Furthermore, it is commonly assumed that emotional vocalizations become more distinct and diagnostic as their intensity increases. Critically, these theoretical assumptions largely rely on research utilizing posed vocal reactions of actors, which may be overly simplified and stereotypical. While recent work suggests that intense, real-life vocalizations may be nondiagnostic, the exact way in which increasing degrees of situational intensity affect the perceived valence of real-life versus posed expressions remains unknown. Here we compared real-life and posed vocalizations to winning increasing amounts of money in the lottery. Results show that while posed vocalizations are perceived as positive for both low- and high-sum wins, real-life vocalizations are perceived as positive only for low-sum wins, but as negative for high-sum wins. These findings demonstrate the potential gaps between real-life and posed expressions and highlight the role of situational intensity in driving perceptual ambiguity for real-life emotional expressions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

What is shared in shared bicycles? Mobility, space, and capital

As sustainability has become a keyword for urban mobility, cycling and bicycles are often perceived as an inherently progressive force for a more environmentally friendly and equitable society. This article joins the growing scholarship that critically examines bicycle mobility as a socio-technical system with complex effects on urban lives. Drawing on long-term fieldwork on mobilities in the urban areas of the Pearl River Delta area in South China, this ethnography of the platform-based, bicycle-sharing programs unpacks the complex politico-economic, spatial-infrastructural, and social entanglement that has shaped this reincarnated form of pedalled mobility when China has moved away from a kingdom of bicycles to a country of cars in the past two decades. I argue that dockless bicycle-sharing programs emerged a capitalist technological fix for a socio-spatial condition produced by the process of urban transformation. Shaped by marketing strategies common in the sharing economy, bicycle-sharing companies capitalize on an ambiguous perception of public space. Yet this individualized form of mobility reproduces rather than disrupts the existing social hierarchy. This study sheds light on the importance of a socio-technical critique of the assemblage of infrastructure, capital, and technology to produce more sustainable forms of urban mobilities.

Never-married single adults’ experiences with online dating websites and mobile applications: A qualitative content analysis

The current article presents the results of interviews with 30 Polish never-married singles (14 women and 16 men) aged 20–43 years. Four themes were identified: (1) ambiguous perception of the usefulness of dating services as a means to search for a romantic partner, (2) acquiring skills in using dating services, (3) personal difficulties and failures in using dating services, and (4) online dating as self-obligation. The participants positioned themselves with regard to dating technology through ambiguous opinions and beliefs about the usefulness of dating services. They perceived using dating services to be a task that requires skills in self-commodification and self-branding and a good opportunity to gain practice in dating; they experienced various difficulties related to using dating platforms, and sometimes they reported a feeling of self-obligation to use such services. Single adults related to dating technology in various modes in the context of their singlehood and relationship desires.

Implicit intention communication as a design opportunity for automated vehicles: Understanding drivers’ interpretation of vehicle trajectory at narrow passages

To ensure road safety in mixed traffic, automated vehicles (AVs) must be equipped with distinct and easy-to-understand communication strategies. For this, the communication design of AVs might be oriented toward implicit communication between manually driven vehicles. This research focused on how drivers interpret observable vehicle behavior (vehicle trajectory) to predict vehicle intentions and planned maneuvers. In addition, the processing and interpretation of contradictory cues were examined as a possible cause for misunderstandings and failed coordination. Two video-based experiments investigated the presumed intention (yielding or insisting on priority), intention recognition time, distinctiveness, and cooperativeness of a vehicle’s implicit communication at narrow road passages. For this, two vehicles approached a bottleneck from opposite sides, and only one vehicle could pass at a time. The driving behavior of the oncoming vehicle consisted of longitudinal (decelerating, stopping, accelerating, maintaining speed) and lateral movements (driving to the center, driving to the edge of the road, no lateral deviation) at different timings (early, late). The results indicated advantages of lateral vehicle movements for distinct intention communication. Lateral movements were interpreted the fastest, perceived more distinct, and were more decisive for the presumed intention than longitudinal movements. Early communication was preferred by drivers but increased the intention recognition time, especially for longitudinal movements. However, early lateral communication was interpreted as fast as late longitudinal communication. Furthermore, lateral and longitudinal vehicle movements within a driving pattern that contradicted each other led to ambiguous perceptions. For AVs, early distinct communication via lateral vehicle movement is recommended. Minimizing ambiguity in the interpretation of communication cues might maximize the probability of the safest response from human drivers and contribute to accident prevention in mixed traffic.

Foreign policy activities of the Visegrad Group in the period 2004-2014

The subject of the study is the historical conditions in which the process of designing and implementing the Eastern Partnership program began, which became the only significant foreign policy initiative of the Visegrad Four. The role of Poland, which positioned itself as a link between the EU and part of the post-Soviet space, is considered. The plans of France, Bulgaria and Romania in 2003-2004 for a number of post-Soviet countries, reflecting the ambitions of Paris, Sofia and Bucharest in the Black Sea and Mediterranean region, are presented. But under pressure from the European Commission, these initiatives were not further developed, and a decision was made to implement the Eastern Partnership project. The development tools used by V4 for the implementation of the Eastern Partnership project, due to the limited resource base of the Quartet countries, are considered. The criticism of the Eastern Partnership project is being studied, due to the lack of a common understanding among EU members of what prospects the new project can offer to "partner countries". The novelty of the scientific research in the framework of this article is expressed in the analysis of the "energy crises" and the change in the EU's approaches to the post-Soviet space in the late 2000s, which became the basis for the development and implementation by the Visegrad Group in 2004-2014 of the Eastern Partnership program. In this program, the "four" countries played the role of curators and a link between the EU and the post-Soviet space. The implementation of the project allowed V4 to gain political weight within the European Union. When developing relations with the "partner countries", the Visegrad Group tried to make maximum use of all available mechanisms and tools (for example, the potential and experience of implementing joint projects within the framework of the International Visegrad Foundation). At the same time, our own capabilities and resources (coupled with the ambiguous perception of the Eastern Partnership in the EU) did not allow us to fully implement all the stated strategic goals, which seriously affected the effectiveness of the project and the results obtained.

Hierarchical Elemental Odor Coding for Fine Discrimination Between Enantiomer Odors or Cancer-Characteristic Odors.

Odors trigger various emotional responses such as fear of predator odors, aversion to disease or cancer odors, attraction to male/female odors, and appetitive behavior to delicious food odors. Odor information processing for fine odor discrimination, however, has remained difficult to address. The olfaction and color vision share common features that G protein-coupled receptors are the remote sensors. As different orange colors can be discriminated by distinct intensity ratios of elemental colors, such as yellow and red, odors are likely perceived as multiple elemental odors hierarchically that the intensities of elemental odors are in order of dominance. For example, in a mixture of rose and fox-unique predator odors, robust rose odor alleviates the fear of mice to predator odors. Moreover, although occult blood odor is stronger than bladder cancer-characteristic odor in urine samples, sniffer mice can discriminate bladder cancer odor in occult blood-positive urine samples. In forced-choice odor discrimination tasks for pairs of enantiomers or pairs of body odors vs. cancer-induced body odor disorders, sniffer mice discriminated against learned olfactory cues in a wide range of concentrations, where correct choice rates decreased in the Fechner's law, as perceptual ambiguity increased. In this mini-review, we summarize the current knowledge of how the olfactory system encodes and hierarchically decodes multiple elemental odors to control odor-driven behaviors.

Introduction to the special issue “Trust, mistrust, distrust, and trust-building in the nuclear sector: historical and comparative experience from Europe”

Trust is essential for successful participatory policymaking in high-risk industries, such as nuclear energy and radioactive waste management. However, while efforts at building trust are omnipresent in policy practice, the downsides of excessive trust and the potential virtues of mistrust and distrust are poorly recognised by practitioners, and remain under-researched in social science scholarship. This special issue contributes to filling the research gap by presenting a unique collection of articles transnational, comparative and historical analysis of trust, mistrust, and distrust in empirical cases of past and present nuclear energy and radioactive waste management projects across Europe. This introduction presents a shared conceptual framework for the articles of the special issue, built on two distinctions: 1) the three key concepts of trust, mistrust, and distrust, and 2) the three dimensions – social, institutional, and ideological – that cut across those three key concepts. A number of tasks for future research are identified. These include more fine-grained and context-sensitive analysis that would help operationalise concepts such as prudent scepticism and mistrustful civic vigilance in real-world situations; better understanding of when constructive mistrust might turn into dysfunctional distrust; the dynamics of trust, mistrust, and distrust in non-democratic societies; and the interaction between interpersonal, institutional, and ideological dimensions of trust, mistrust, and distrust. Finally, more conceptual and empirical work is needed to integrate and operationalise the principle of mistrustful vigilance in existing social science research on techno-scientific promises and expectations, in an effort at developing new ‘regimes of promise’, better in tune with the current era of apocalyptic threats and ambiguous perceptions concerning the risks and blessings of techno-science.

Models of Dynamic Belief Updating in Psychosis-A Review Across Different Computational Approaches.

To understand the dysfunctional mechanisms underlying maladaptive reasoning of psychosis, computational models of decision making have widely been applied over the past decade. Thereby, a particular focus has been on the degree to which beliefs are updated based on new evidence, expressed by the learning rate in computational models. Higher order beliefs about the stability of the environment can determine the attribution of meaningfulness to events that deviate from existing beliefs by interpreting these either as noise or as true systematic changes (volatility). Both, the inappropriate downplaying of important changes as noise (belief update too low) as well as the overly flexible adaptation to random events (belief update too high) were theoretically and empirically linked to symptoms of psychosis. Whereas models with fixed learning rates fail to adjust learning in reaction to dynamic changes, increasingly complex learning models have been adopted in samples with clinical and subclinical psychosis lately. These ranged from advanced reinforcement learning models, over fully Bayesian belief updating models to approximations of fully Bayesian models with hierarchical learning or change point detection algorithms. It remains difficult to draw comparisons across findings of learning alterations in psychosis modeled by different approaches e.g., the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter and change point detection. Therefore, this review aims to summarize and compare computational definitions and findings of dynamic belief updating without perceptual ambiguity in (sub)clinical psychosis across these different mathematical approaches. There was strong heterogeneity in tasks and samples. Overall, individuals with schizophrenia and delusion-proneness showed lower behavioral performance linked to failed differentiation between uninformative noise and environmental change. This was indicated by increased belief updating and an overestimation of volatility, which was associated with cognitive deficits. Correlational evidence for computational mechanisms and positive symptoms is still sparse and might diverge from the group finding of instable beliefs. Based on the reviewed studies, we highlight some aspects to be considered to advance the field with regard to task design, modeling approach, and inclusion of participants across the psychosis spectrum. Taken together, our review shows that computational psychiatry offers powerful tools to advance our mechanistic insights into the cognitive anatomy of psychotic experiences.

Associations between psychological ownership and the service impact among Chinese disability support workers.

Ambiguous perceptions of job roles by service providers may lead to poor service quality. This study sought to examine the relationship between role ambiguity and service impact among disability support workers, and further, to compare the mediating effects of job-based and collective psychological ownership in the role ambiguity-service impact link. Data were derived from a longitudinal survey conducted in 56 cities in mainland China in 2019. 1153 social workers working in disability and rehabilitation services sectors completed the questionnaire. Structural equation modeling analyses and bootstrapping were applied to test the proposed model. The results revealed that role ambiguity is a risk factor for disability support workers' service impact. Furthermore, psychological ownership serves mediating roles in the relationship between role ambiguity and service impact among disability support workers. Even more, job-based psychological ownership plays a more critical buffering role than collective psychological ownership does among Chinese disability support workers experiencing role ambiguity. The main findings imply that human service organizations in China face the dilemma of insufficient organizational capacity, with employees tending to resolve problems by relying more on their own resources than organizational resources. Therefore, policymakers and human service organizations should develop the organizational capacity of human service organizations to help employees overcome role ambiguity.

Perceptions of role ambiguity for Sporting Directors in professional football

ABSTRACT The Sporting Director is one strategy football clubs have adopted to protect their financial sustainability. Little to no research has been undertaken on the Sporting Director role in football. This article draws upon a qualitative methodology to examine perceptions and practices related to the role and its potential implications in football’s growing global business. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with senior stakeholders in football (N = 21). The data was thematically analysed. Findings indicate that the Sporting Director role would be a strategic benefit for football clubs, however several issues related to role ambiguity. The novel empirical insight surrounds three key themes, notably the perception of the role, job description clarity and communication. The study provides novel insights into the elite football stakeholder perceptions of the Sporting Directors. This research offers decision-makers considerations for developing the Sporting Director role in football and recommendations for future research.

Confusion2Vec 2.0: Enriching ambiguous spoken language representations with subwords.

Word vector representations enable machines to encode human language for spoken language understanding and processing. Confusion2vec, motivated from human speech production and perception, is a word vector representation which encodes ambiguities present in human spoken language in addition to semantics and syntactic information. Confusion2vec provides a robust spoken language representation by considering inherent human language ambiguities. In this paper, we propose a novel word vector space estimation by unsupervised learning on lattices output by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. We encode each word in Confusion2vec vector space by its constituent subword character n-grams. We show that the subword encoding helps better represent the acoustic perceptual ambiguities in human spoken language via information modeled on lattice-structured ASR output. The usefulness of the proposed Confusion2vec representation is evaluated using analogy and word similarity tasks designed for assessing semantic, syntactic and acoustic word relations. We also show the benefits of subword modeling for acoustic ambiguity representation on the task of spoken language intent detection. The results significantly outperform existing word vector representations when evaluated on erroneous ASR outputs, providing improvements up-to 13.12% relative to previous state-of-the-art in intent detection on ATIS benchmark dataset. We demonstrate that Confusion2vec subword modeling eliminates the need for retraining/adapting the natural language understanding models on ASR transcripts.