Distance Perception Research Articles

The Impact of Social Distance on Mask Wearing Behavior : A Construal Level Perspective

Objectives This study investigates the relationship between the perceived social distance, risk perception, and mask-wearing intentions. It further tests the interaction effect between the social distance perception and message intervention framed by two distinctive construal level terms (high-level and low-level) on mask-wearing intentions. Methods The first survey interrogates what delineates the most relevant social distance dimension that presumably feeds judgments about susceptibility to COVIDᐨ19. It is followed by a 2 X 2 factorial survey experiment (between groups) that examined the reciprocal effect of social distance and construal level (CLT) on behavioral intentions to wear a face mask as a COVIDᐨ19 preventive measure. Results Our finding substantiates social distance perception and its influence on the perceived susceptibility to COVIDᐨ19 and how social distance and construal level interact with one another to impact the individuals' willingness to wear a face mask. Conclusions The results suggest how policymakers and health campaign planners apply construal level framing to moderate the effect of social distance perception on preventive health behaviors.

Demonstrative Reference and Cognitive Space: A Memory Game on Mandarin-Speaking Children

The development of pragmatic ability is an essential topic in language acquisition, among which demonstratives are significant to reflect human’s cognition of the relation between language and the environment. The purpose of this research is to investigate the acquisition of spatial demonstratives “zhe” (this) and “na” (that) of Mandarin-speaking children through experimental design (different tool use, e.g. participants pointed at the objects with their finger or a laser pen), exploring the influence of perceptual distance on children’s choice of spatial demonstratives. Through comparison with adults’ data, results supported the view that 5- to 6-year-old children have already developed adult-like cognitive space when it comes to the use of spatial demonstratives, which produced an effect on the use of spatial demonstratives, proving speaker’s subjective involvement in choosing the proximal or distal demonstrative in the process of communication, and rendering more evidence on children’s early development of pragmatic ability.

Contributions of pictorial and binocular cues to the perception of distance in virtual reality

We assessed the contribution of binocular disparity and the pictorial cues of linear perspective, texture, and scene clutter to the perception of distance in consumer virtual reality. As additional cues are made available, distance perception is predicted to improve, as measured by a reduction in systematic bias, and an increase in precision. We assessed (1) whether space is nonlinearly distorted; (2) the degree of size constancy across changes in distance; and (3) the weighting of pictorial versus binocular cues in VR. In the first task, participants positioned two spheres so as to divide the egocentric distance to a reference stimulus (presented between 3 and 11 m) into three equal thirds. In the second and third tasks, participants set the size of a sphere, presented at the same distances and at eye-height, to match that of a hand-held football. Each task was performed in four environments varying in the available cues. We measured accuracy by identifying systematic biases in responses and precision as the standard deviation of these responses. While there was no evidence of nonlinear compression of space, participants did tend to underestimate distance linearly, but this bias was reduced with the addition of each cue. The addition of binocular cues, when rich pictorial cues were already available, reduced both the bias and variability of estimates. These results show that linear perspective and binocular cues, in particular, improve the accuracy and precision of distance estimates in virtual reality across a range of distances typical of many indoor environments.

Design of a hesitant movement gesture for mobile robots.

In previous experiments, a back-off movement was introduced as a motion strategy of robots to facilitate the order of passage at bottlenecks in human-robot spatial interaction. In this article we take a closer look at the appropriate application of motion parameters that make the backward movement legible. Related works in distance perception, size-speed illusions, and viewpoint-based legibility considerations suggest a relationship between the size of the robot and the observer's perspective on the expected execution of this movement. We performed a participant experiment (N = 50) in a virtual reality environment where participants adjusted the minimum required back-off length and preferred back-off speed as a result of the robot size, and the viewpoint of the back-off movement. We target a model-based approach on how appropriate back-off design translates to different sized robots and observer's viewpoints. Thus, we allow the application of back-off in a variety of autonomous moving systems. The results show a significant correlation between the increasingly expected back-off lengths with increasing robot size, but only weak effects of the viewpoint on the requirements of this movement. An exploratory analysis suggests that execution time might be a promising parameter to consider for the design of legible motion.

Are All Lockdown Teams Created Equally? Work Characteristics and Team Perceived Virtuality

Team virtuality has been mostly conceptualized as structural features, such as the percentage of time team members communicate via technology. However, the perception of distance and of information deficits (team perceived virtuality, TPV) may be an indispensable construct to understand virtual teams’ functioning. The lockdowns imposed on most countries due to COVID-19 created virtual teams with high degrees of structural virtuality. With structural virtuality held constant among teams, we explore configurations of work characteristics (autonomy, interdependence, and organizational support) that influence TPV. With a sample of 296 multinational workers, a Latent Profile Analysis identified four distinct profiles of those work characteristics. Those profiles related differently to TPV. Contrary to previous findings, interdependence seems to play an important role in these teams high in structural virtuality when their autonomy is also high, highlighting the pivotal role of frequent interaction among team members, under conditions of high structural virtuality.

Working commuters’ tendency toward a travel pattern with potentially more walking: Examining the relative influence of personal and environmental measures

In this study, a binomial random effect model was developed to understand in what factors would most encourage commuters to consider using an alternative work-tour(s) in which the walking time was more. Effects of eight measures were compared to “improving the quality of the sidewalks”. A survey of 445 commuters in the city of Rasht, Iran was used. Results showed that making part of the path to/from work specifically for pedestrians was the most favorable measure and planting trees and increasing green space along sidewalks was the second important measure that encouraged commuters to consider using their alternative commute pattern. This finding in addition to the significant effect of built-environmental characteristics showed that in order to motivate people to an alternative travel pattern with more walking; paying attention to built-environmental characteristics is very important. However, measures that do not need changes in the built-environment, such as “flexibility in work hours” which was found with a high positive effect in this study, should also be considered by policy makers. Furthermore, from the significant effect of individual's perception of walking distance it was concluded that the effect of subjective factors cannot be ignored in future planning.

Robot-Touch Promotes Memory Sensitization

Research show that we are more skeptical of the machines than fellow humans. They also find that we are reluctant to change this perception in spite of the possibility for increased efficiency through cooperative engagement with them. However, these findings that primarily focused on algorithmic agents may not readily be attributable to the case of robots. To fill this gap, the present study investigated whether the background information about the level of autonomy of a robot would have any effect on its perception by individuals whom it made a physical contact with. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment in which a robot-arm touched the left arm of thirty young Japanese adults (fifteen females, age: 22 ± 1.64) in two trials. While the robot was autonomous in both trials, we told our participants that in one of their trials the robot was controlled by a human operator while in the other the robot moved autonomously. We observed that the previous findings on soft agents extended to the case of robots in that participants significantly preferred their trial that was supposedly operated by a human. More importantly, we identified a memory sensitization with respect to the trial-order in which participants preferred their first trial, regardless of whether it was a robot- or a supposedly human-controlled scenario. As a type of nondeclarative memory that contributes to nonassociative learning, the observed memory sensitization highlighted participants’ growing perceptual distance to the robot-touch that was primarily triggered by the unconscious learning-component of their physical contact with the robot. The present findings substantiate the necessity for more in-depth and socially situated study and analysis of these new generation of our tools to better comprehend the extent of their (dis)advantages to more effectively introduce them to our society.

Relationship concept ‘autoimage’ and ‘heteroimage’ (Perception of the sociocultural aspects of novels)

The paper aims to introduce research in the field of the literary imagology and text semiotics. It focuses on the analysis of the creation of “autoimage”, or rather a self-image, and “hereroimage”, or a counter-mage, the image of otherness, as a means of shaping national identity, by interpreting the artistic texts written by the Czech writer Jáchym Topol and the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. It pays attention particularly to their novels from the first decade of the 21st century. The texts will be compared in a broader context of social discourse. Moreover, it will address the issue of the disproportion between the intensity of attention of one nation to another (Czech-Russian and Russian-Czech) and the differences in the perception of cultural distance.

The effect of navigation method and visual display on distance perception in a large-scale virtual building

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology has become a popular method for fundamental and applied spatial cognition research. One challenge researchers face is emulating walking in a large-scale virtual space although the user is in fact in a small physical space. To address this, a variety of movement interfaces in VR have been proposed, from traditional joysticks to teleportation and omnidirectional treadmills. These movement methods tap into different mental processes of spatial learning during navigation, but their impacts on distance perception remain unclear. In this paper, we investigated the role of visual display, proprioception, and optic flow on distance perception in a large-scale building by manipulating four different movement methods. Eighty participants either walked in a real building, or moved through its virtual replica using one of three movement methods: VR-treadmill, VR-touchpad, and VR-teleportation. Results revealed that, first, visual display played a major role in both perceived and traversed distance estimates but did not impact environmental distance estimates. Second, proprioception and optic flow did not impact the overall accuracy of distance perception, but having only an intermittent optic flow (in the VR-teleportation movement method) impaired the precision of traversed distance estimates. In conclusion, movement method plays a significant role in distance perception but does not impact the configurational knowledge learned in a large-scale real and virtual building, and the VR-touchpad movement method provides an effective interface for navigation in VR.

Call them COVIDiots: Exploring the effects of aggressive communication style and psychological distance in the communication of COVID-19.

This study examined the influences of perceived distance to communicator on the effects of aggressive style (i.e. personal attacks and intense languages) in communicating scientific issues such as COVID-19 to the public. With a multi-site experiment (N = 464), we found that aggression led to a heightened violation of expected social norm regarding communication styles. However, the interpretation of violation varied depending on the individual’s perceived distance to the communicator. Close distance articulated the urgency and severity of COVID-19 risks conveyed with aggression, which further increased compliance with the message. Far distance perception amplified aggression’s negative influence on writer likeability. The findings showed that aggressive communication may generate positive outcomes when dealing with public understanding of scientific issues such as COVID-19, but communicators need to build a closer connection with their audience.

Semantic Discriminability for Visual Communication.

To interpret information visualizations, observers must determine how visual features map onto concepts. First and foremost, this ability depends on perceptual discriminability; observers must be able to see the difference between different colors for those colors to communicate different meanings. However, the ability to interpret visualizations also depends on semantic discriminability, the degree to which observers can infer a unique mapping between visual features and concepts, based on the visual features and concepts alone (i.e., without help from verbal cues such as legends or labels). Previous evidence suggested that observers were better at interpreting encoding systems that maximized semantic discriminability (maximizing association strength between assigned colors and concepts while minimizing association strength between unassigned colors and concepts), compared to a system that only maximized color-concept association strength. However, increasing semantic discriminability also resulted in increased perceptual distance, so it is unclear which factor was responsible for improved performance. In the present study, we conducted two experiments that tested for independent effects of semantic distance and perceptual distance on semantic discriminability of bar graph data visualizations. Perceptual distance was large enough to ensure colors were more than just noticeably different. We found that increasing semantic distance improved performance, independent of variation in perceptual distance, and when these two factors were uncorrelated, responses were dominated by semantic distance. These results have implications for navigating trade-offs in color palette design optimization for visual communication.

The Effect of Letter versus Number Cues on Distance Perception

People experience the world through distance perceptions, such as perceiving distance when moving through store aisles, locating movie theater seats, spotting parking spaces, or navigating airport gates. The distance can be perceived using qualitative (e.g., letter) or quantitative (e.g., number) cues. In this research, we focus on how the type of cues can influence consumers’ distance perceptions and affect their everyday judgments. Specifically, we suggest that in pretask estimates (referred to as the preaction stage), letter cues lead to lesser distance perceptions. However, in posttask estimates (referred to as the postaction stage), letter cues lead to greater distance perceptions. We explain the result pattern in the preaction stage using naive beliefs about the ease of computation and magnitude judgments (i.e., computational fluency). In the postaction stage, we propose that expectation–disconfirmation causes such a reversal in distance perceptions. We test the proposed patterns of results and theoretical accounts across two laboratory studies and two field studies.

A Qualitative Exploration of Individual Experiences of Environmental Virtual Reality Through the Lens of Psychological Distance

ABSTRACT How to increase public engagement in environmental issues is a central question in environmental communication and environmental psychology literatures. Psychological distance (PD) is one potential barrier to public engagement. PD describes the perceptual distance between a person’s experience and an external target. Immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) have the potential to shrink PD. Yet, we know little about how people perceive and react to an environmental VR experience or about the role that PD plays in these reactions. To address this gap, we use interviews and focus groups to examine how people react to a VR experience about ocean acidification. We find that PD is prevalent in the reactions of VR users, especially first-time users, and that 62% of participants described feeling psychologically close to ocean acidification.

Shape-Driven Coordinate Ordering for Star Glyph Sets via Reinforcement Learning.

We present a neural optimization model trained with reinforcement learning to solve the coordinate ordering problem for sets of star glyphs. Given a set of star glyphs associated to multiple class labels, we propose to use shape context descriptors to measure the perceptual distance between pairs of glyphs, and use the derived silhouette coefficient to measure the perception of class separability within the entire set. To find the optimal coordinate order for the given set, we train a neural network using reinforcement learning to reward orderings with high silhouette coefficients. The network consists of an encoder and a decoder with an attention mechanism. The encoder employs a recurrent neural network (RNN) to encode input shape and class information, while the decoder together with the attention mechanism employs another RNN to output a sequence with the new coordinate order. In addition, we introduce a neural network to efficiently estimate the similarity between shape context descriptors, which allows to speed up the computation of silhouette coefficients and thus the training of the axis ordering network. Two user studies demonstrate that the orders provided by our method are preferred by users for perceiving class separation. We tested our model on different settings to show its robustness and generalization abilities and demonstrate that it allows to order input sets with unseen data size, data dimension, or number of classes. We also demonstrate that our model can be adapted to coordinate ordering of other types of plots such as RadViz by replacing the proposed shape-aware silhouette coefficient with the corresponding quality metric to guide network training.

Spatial distribution and determinants of the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice over time in Ethiopia: A spatial and multivariate decomposition analysis.

Pre-lacteal feeding persists in low and middle-income countries as deep-rooted nutritional malpractice. It imposes significant negative consequences on neonatal health, including increased risk of illness and mortality. Different studies revealed that pre-lacteal feeding practice is decreased over time. Even though different studies are done on the prevalence and determinants of pre-lacteal feeding practice, up to our knowledge, the spatial distribution and the determinants of the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice over time are not researched. To assess the spatial distribution and determinants of the change in pre-lacteal feeding practice over time in Ethiopia. We used the Ethiopian demographic and health surveys (EDHSs) data. For this study, a total weighted sample of 14672 (5789 from EDHS 2005, 4510 from EDHS 2011, and 4373 from EDHS 2016) reproductive-age women who gave birth within two years preceding the respective surveys and whoever breastfeed were used. The logit-based multivariate decomposition analysis was used to identify factors that contributed to the decrease in pre-lacteal feeding practice over the last 10 years (from 2005 to 2016). Using the 2016 EDHS data, we also conducted a spatial analysis by using ArcGIS version 10.3 and SaTScan version 9.6 software to explore the spatial distribution and hotspot clusters of pre-lacteal feeding practice. Pre-lacteal feeding practice was decreased from 29% [95% Confidence interval (CI): 27.63-29.96%] in 2005 to 8% [95% CI: 7.72-8.83%] in 2016 with annual rate of reduction of 7.2%. The overall decomposition analysis showed that about 20.31% of the overall decrease in pre-lacteal feeding practice over the last 10 years was attributable to the difference in composition of women (endowment) across the surveys, while, the remaining 79.39% of the overall decrease was explained by the difference in the effect of characteristics (coefficient) across the surveys. In the endowment component, the difference in composition of residence, perception of distance from the health facility, maternal educational level, wealth status, occupation, ANC visit, place of delivery, the timing of breastfeeding initiation, and wanted last-child/pregnancy were found to be significant contributing factors for the decrease in pre-lacteal feeding practice. After controlling for the role of compositional changes, the difference in the effect of distance from the health facility, wealth status, occupation, antenatal care (ANC) visit, and wanted last-child/pregnancy across the surveys were significantly contributed to the observed decrease in pre-lacteal feeding practice. Regarding the spatial distribution, pre-lacteal feeding practice was non-random in Ethiopia in which the primary and secondary clusters' of pre-lacteal feeding identified in Somalia and the Afar region respectively. Pre-lacteal feeding practice has shown a significant decline over the 10-year period. Program interventions considering women with poor maternal health service utilization such as ANC visits, women with poor socioeconomic status, women with an unintended pregnancy, and women from remote areas especially at border areas such as Somali and Afar could decrease pre-lacteal feeding practice in Ethiopia.

The perception of interpersonal distance is distorted by the M\xfcller-Lyer illusion

There is growing interest in how human observers perceive social scenes containing multiple people. Interpersonal distance is a critical feature when appraising these scenes; proxemic cues are used by observers to infer whether two people are interacting, the nature of their relationship, and the valence of their current interaction. Presently, however, remarkably little is known about how interpersonal distance is encoded within the human visual system. Here we show that the perception of interpersonal distance is distorted by the Müller-Lyer illusion. Participants perceived the distance between two target points to be compressed or expanded depending on whether face pairs were positioned inside or outside the to-be-judged interval. This illusory bias was found to be unaffected by manipulations of face direction. These findings aid our understanding of how human observers perceive interpersonal distance and may inform theoretical accounts of the Müller-Lyer illusion.

Perception of Emotions and Cultural Distance Among International Students in Russia

The accurate perception of culture-specific emotions of the people living in the host country, may be the most significant, and yet the most underestimated challenge for the international students in the process of adjusting to a new culture. The latest report of the Institute of International Education (IIE) about Russia, confirmed that, in the year 2020, around 353,000 international students are currently studying in the Russian Federation. The studies of van de Vijver in 2007 and 2009 have confirmed that the foreign students from former Soviet republics or former USSR countries (students from post-soviet states, not including Russia: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan) have lower degrees of perceived cultural distance with Russian culture, this can be explained by the fact that the students from former Soviet republics can speak Russian language fluently, and share religion and traditions with Russian culture. Consequently, the group of students from former USSR countries adapt better to Russia in comparation to the rest of international students. The results of our study in 2020, revealed that the perception of Russian culture-specific emotions among international students studying in the Russian Federation, is significantly predicted by the similarity between the culture of the international students living in Russia and the culture of Russian society. Moreover, our study confirmed that the group of students from former Soviet republics, or former USSR countries, perceived more similarities with Russian national culture; therefore, this result is consistent with the findings of the aforementioned studies of van de Vijver in 2007 and 2009. Thus, we can consider that the accurate recognition of Russian culture-specific emotions and the perceived similarities to Russian cultural standards, may be very significant for the international students studying in the Russian Federation, especially for their process of adjusting to Russian culture. Nevertheless, further research on this topic is needed.

Toward Visual Distortion in Black-Box Attacks

Constructing adversarial examples in a black-box threat model injures the original images by introducing visual distortion. In this paper, we propose a novel black-box attack approach that can directly minimize the induced distortion by learning the noise distribution of the adversarial example, assuming only loss-oracle access to the black-box network. To quantify visual distortion, the perceptual distance between the adversarial example and the original image, is introduced in our loss. We first approximate the gradient of the corresponding non-differentiable loss function by sampling noise from the learned noise distribution. Then the distribution is updated using the estimated gradient to reduce visual distortion. The learning continues until an adversarial example is found. We validate the effectiveness of our attack on ImageNet. Our attack results in much lower distortion when compared to the state-of-the-art black-box attacks and achieves 100% success rate on InceptionV3, ResNet50 and VGG16bn. Furthermore, we theoretically prove the convergence of our model. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Alina-1997/visual-distortion-in-attack.

A Behavioral Paradigm for Measuring Perceptual Distances in Mice

A Behavioral Paradigm for Measuring Perceptual Distances in Mice

TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL PERCEPTION IN PURCHASE CHOICE

Time and space are thoroughly interlinked, not only in human perception, but in everyday life. While it may still be unclear where the time and distance perception originates and what function can be assigned to their relationship, the behavioral point of view demonstrates enough evidence of similar patterns. The aim of this research is to make another step in the direction of connecting those constructs and offer a research example with application. The objective of this research is to examine time and distance preferences in purchase situations where additional unit of time or distance saves respondent's money, and to offer a research example with application in consumer choice. Two sets of survey data of responses to hypothetical situations enable response examination. Descriptive statistical analysis is followed with the cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling and unfolding, and nonparametric tests. The results are discussed in terms of possible extension of the intertemporal choice terminology and findings to the spatio-temporal context. The findings indicate dominant susceptibility to discount amount, but also reveal similarity in responses involving the time and space distances at the similar construal level. Practical implications indicate possibility for application of space and time interchangeably in discount management, which might enable higher flexibility in the supply and decrease the customer clustering on the discount days.