Listeners build up statistically driven expectations of what they will hear; however, there is no consensus on how these statistics influence perception, attention, and behavior. Here, we manipulate two statistical properties: global probability (the likelihood of single ‘sound events’) and predictiveness (how often does one sound precede another). We ask how the probability and predictiveness of different acoustic frequencies affect performance on two paradigms where frequency is task-irrelevant: suprathreshold duration identification and near-threshold tone-detection-in-noise. We found that duration decisions are faster and detection decisions are more accurate for high-probability tone frequencies, compared to low-probability tone frequencies. Moreover, when a preceding “cue” tone’s frequency predicts that of a subsequent “target” tone, listeners are faster at judging the duration of the target tone. This latter effect is not solely a result of temporal cueing, as target responses are not facilitated if a cue does not predict the target tone’s frequency. Blending these paradigms to examine the same global and transitional probabilities across duration and detection decisions suggests that statistical learning shapes attention to perceptual dimensions, even when the dimensions are irrelevant to optimal task performance.

In the field of landscape characterization, it is difficult to obtain the tourists’ perceptions of a landscape. To overcome these drawbacks, online available reviews and comments from tourists can be utilized as an alternative way to characterize a landscape. This study examined the rural landscape characterization in Yayou Gou Village, which is a unique attraction in Shandong, China. A qualitative content analysis was undertaken on the tourists’ comments and reviews of Yayou Gou Village on tourist websites and social media platforms, including Qnar, Meituan, Ctrip, Dianping and Sina Microblog. NVivo 12 was used for the content analysis and qualitative coding. A variety of natural, cultural, and social, perceptual, and seasonal characteristics of a rural landscape, as well as facilities and infrastructure were revealed. Cultural and social landscape characters including performance landscape and festival activities, building, educational and home-stay landscape, diet landscape, and night landscape, which are obviously richer than other aspects in this rural village. Natural, perceptual, and seasonal landscape characters are not fully exploited for rural tourism and landscape. This study suggests that natural, cultural, and social rural landscape, and facility and infrastructure were influenced by spatial, seasonal, and perceptual dimensions. Suggestions for better landscape conservation and management can be acquired through the characterization process. This study provides an innovative approach for landscape characterization with online review data from various tourists. It demonstrates that online social media data contain abundant information about the landscape that they have visited and could be well used to explore the landscape’s characteristics in rural areas.

Four experiments investigated the extent to which abstract quantitative information can be conveyed by basic visual features. This was done by asking observers to estimate and discriminate Pearson correlation in graphical representations where the first data dimension of each element was encoded by its horizontal position, and the second by the value of one of its visual features; perceiving correlation then requires combining the information in the two encodings via a common abstract representation. Four visual features were examined: luminance, color, orientation, and size. All were able to support the perception of correlation. Indeed, despite the strikingly different appearances of the associated stimuli, all gave rise to performance that was much the same: Just noticeable difference was a linear function of distance from complete correlation, and estimated correlation a logarithmic function of this distance. Performance differed only with regard to the level of noise in the feature, with these values compatible with estimates of channel capacity encountered in classic experiments on absolute perceptual magnitudes. These results suggest that quantitative information can be conveyed by visual features that are abstracted at relatively low levels of visual processing, with little representation of the original sensory property. It is proposed that this is achieved via an abstract parameter space in which the values in each perceptual dimension are normalized to have the same means and variances, with perceived correlation based on the shape of the joint probability density function of the resultant elements. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel: A Synthesis of Corpus and Literary Perspectives

Neighbourhood parks are an essential activity venue for contemporary older adults and potentially impact their health. Most research has focused on the physical and visual dimensions of the park, with some studies demonstrating differences in the visual preferences of gender. Still, there is a lack of detailed research on the social and perceptual dimensions of male and female older people and a lack of research on psycho-emotional satisfaction and mechanisms to alleviate the psychological isolation of older people of different genders. In this study, a mixed research method was conducted to investigate the multi-dimensional interaction of older people using neighbourhood park, with a sample size of 418 participants from the Chaoyang district of Beijing, an integrated research method including questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and observation, Goodman and Kruskal’s gamma analysis and Grounded theory qualitative method applied by using SPSS and NVivo to analyse the elements of neighbourhood parks related psychological outcomes. A conceptual framework of multi-layered social interactions and the influence of different social interactions on the perceptual and psychological dimensions has been conducted, as well as the gender differences. The study found that the social, physical space and perceptual dimensions of neighbourhood parks all contribute to alleviating loneliness among older people, that site-based self-regulation also plays an important role, and that low-level social interactions generally affect older people. In contrast, mid-level social interactions have a significant effect on perceptual and psychological benefits, with a synergistic increase in impact, and older women show a more vital need for social activities and self-expression than men. The findings of this study provide a theoretical basis for a multidimensional spatial mediation to enhance the well-being of older people and provide new ideas for comprehensive multidimensional and multi-level ageing optimisation research.

Several technological and scientific advances have been achieved recently in the fields of immersive systems (e.g., 360-degree/multiview video systems, augmented/mixed/virtual reality systems, immersive audio-haptic systems, etc.), which are offering new possibilities to applications and services in different communication domains, such as entertainment, virtual conferencing, working meetings, social relations, healthcare, and industry. Users of these immersive technologies can explore and experience the stimuli in a more interactive and personalized way than previous technologies (e.g., 2D video). Thus, considering the new technological challenges related to these systems and the new perceptual dimensions and interaction behaviors involved, a deep understanding of the users’ Quality of Experience (QoE) is required to satisfy their demands and expectations. In this sense, it is essential to foster the research on evaluating the QoE of immersive communication systems, since this will provide useful outcomes to optimize them and to identify the factors that can deteriorate the user experience. With this aim, subjective tests are usually performed following standard methodologies (e.g., ITU recommendations), which are designed for specific technologies and services. Although numerous user studies have been already published, there are no recommendations or standards that define common testing methodologies to be applied to evaluate immersive communication systems, such as those developed for images and video. Taking this into account, a revision of the QoE evaluation methods designed for previous technologies is required to develop robust and reliable methodologies for immersive communication systems. Thus, the objective of this paper is to provide an overview of existing immersive communication systems and related user studies, which can help on the definition of basic guidelines and testing methodologies to be used when performing user tests of immersive communication systems, such as 360-degree video-based telepresence, avatar-based social VR, cooperative AR, etc.

What are the geometric and information processing characteristics of elementary figures composed of simple physical dimensions? There have been a number of investigations of perception of rectangles, including debate about configurality (e.g., integrality and gestalt properties) as well as the prime perceptual dimensions. Yet, because of ambiguity even in the "right" definition of configurality and an absence of penetrating methodologies, there is still little known concerning the information processing of these patterns. To this end, the present study brings together two separate theory-driven methodologies, general recognition theory (GRT) and systems factorial technology (SFT). The first attacks the problem of dimensional interactions while the latter seeks to uncover process characteristics such as architecture, decisional stopping rules, and workload capacity. The same observers and as much as possible, the same stimuli were used in both approaches. Through our GRT analyses, we found strong evidence for dependencies between the percepts of height and width on both within-stimulus and cross-stimulus bases. Height perception was better with narrow widths and width perception was superior with short heights. In addition, a significant positive within-trial correlation of dimensions was evidenced within squares but not with rectangles. Our SFT initiative uncovered consistent signatures of parallelism paired with super capacity, the latter appearing both through the traditional conditioning on being correct and still present when modest speed accuracy trade-off was accounted for. Thus, the SFT and GRT inferences were quite compatible with a plausible cause of the positive correlations being across-channel facilitatory interactions which led to super capacity processing.

Several studies have shown the presence of large anisotropies for tactile distance perception across several parts of the body. The tactile distance between two touches on the dorsum of the hand is perceived as larger when they are oriented mediolaterally (across the hand) than proximodistally (along the hand). This effect can be partially explained by the characteristics of primary somatosensory cortex representations. However, this phenomenon is significantly attenuated relative to differences in acuity and cortical magnification, suggesting a process of tactile size constancy. It is unknown whether the same kind of compensation also takes place when estimating the size of a continuous object. Here, we investigate whether the tactile anisotropy that typically emerges when participants have to estimate the distance between two touches is also present when a continuous object touches the skin and participants have to estimate its size. In separate blocks, participants judged which of two tactile distances or objects on the dorsum of their hand felt larger. One stimulation (first or second) was aligned with the proximodistal axis (along the hand) and the other with the mediolateral axis (across the hand). Results showed a clear anisotropy for distances between two distinct points, with across distances consistently perceived as larger than along distances, as in previous studies. Critically, however, this bias was significantly reduced or absent for judgments of the length of continuous objects. These results suggest that a tactile size constancy process is more effective when the tactile size of an object has to be approximated compared to when the distance between two touches has to be determined. The possible mechanism subserving these results is described and discussed. We suggest that a lateral inhibition mechanism, when an object touches the skin, provides information through the distribution of the inhibitory subfields of the RF about the shape of the tactile RF itself. Such a process allows an effective tactile size compensatory mechanism where a good match between the physical and perceptual dimensions of the object is achieved.

A motion effect, the vestibular stimulus generated by a moving chair, is crucial in improving user experiences in many virtual reality (VR) and entertainment applications. However, the perceptual characteristics of motion effects remain unexplored to a great extent. This paper constructs a perceptual space that accounts for many motion effects based on their perceptual distances and then demonstrates smooth-rough and irregular-regular as its two primary perceptual dimensions. An authoring space is constructed with these two pairs as the axes. We also present methods for synthesizing new motion effects with a specific property in the authoring space. The contributions of this work are with new insights into the perceptual characteristics of motion effects and the first design methods of motion effects achieving desired perceptual properties.

Measuring residents’ perceptions of city streets to inform better street planning through deep learning and space syntax

The objective of this work was to establish the reliability and validity of an instrument that mea-sured the perception of Internet use. A non-experimental work was carried out with a non-pro-babilistic selection of 340 students from a public university in central Mexico. The results show a total percentage of variance explained by two perceptual dimensions that allude to the search and selection of information, although the type of design limited the results to the research scenario, suggesting the inclusion of factors related to the beliefs of use of Internet and the provisions as determinants of intentions and the use of digital networks.

Biosafety, understood as a protocol to avoid contagion, illness and death of people, has established itself as a central topic for discussion on the public agenda. The objective of the present work was to explore the perceptual dimension of biosafety. A retrospective, exploratory and documentary work was carried out with a selection of sources indexed to regional repositories. The prevalence of the informative and speculative dimension of biosecurity was established, suggesting to extend the project to other risk scenarios.

When designing multisensorial experiences, robustly predicting the crossmodal perception of olfactory stimuli is a critical factor. We investigate the possibility of predicting olfactory crossmodal correspondences using the underlying physicochemical features. An electronic nose was tuned to the crossmodal perceptual axis of olfaction and was used to foretell people's crossmodal correspondences between odors and the angularity of shapes, smoothness of texture, perceived pleasantness, pitch, and colors. We found that the underlying physicochemical features of odors could be used to predict people's crossmodal correspondences. The human-machine perceptual dimensions that correlated well are the angularity of shapes (r = 0.71), the smoothness of texture (r = 0.82), pitch (r = 0.70), and the lightness of color (r = 0.59). The human-machine perceptual dimensions that did not correlate well (r < 0.50) are the perceived pleasantness (r = 0.20) and the hue of the color (r = 0.42 & 0.44). All perceptual dimensions except for the perceived pleasantness could be robustly predicted (p-values < 0.0001) including the hue of color. While it is recognized that olfactory perception is strongly shaped by learning and experience, our findings suggest that there is a systematic and predictable link between the physicochemical features of odorous stimuli and crossmodal correspondences. These findings may provide a crucial building block towards the digital transmission of smell and enhancing multisensorial experiences with better designs as well as more engaging, and enriched experiences.

In English, the strongest acoustic cues to preserving the voicing contrast in coda stops are in the preceding vowel: a voiced coda is associated with a longer vowel and a voiceless coda with a shorter vowel. Our recent work (Jacewicz et al., 2021) examining structured variability in stop voicing implementation in female productions showed that the cues to stop coda voicing extended to the syllable initial stop. In running speech, the /b/-closure in “bad” was shorter when coda was voiced, and it was longer when coda was voiceless (“bat”). Here, we test the hypothesis that voicing contrast cueing the “bad-bat” distinction is reinforced syllable-wide and involves specific long-distance timing relationships between closures of both stops, the extent of their closure voicing, vowel duration, and positive VOT. The current dataset consists of 2610 productions by 45 adult males, who are also diversified by dialect. Preliminary analyses confirmed that segmental voicing information is distributed over long domains (here, a monosyllabic word) and that cues to coda voicing are available in the syllable onset. These findings imply that temporal relationships among acoustic phonetic detail cueing lexical distinctions can potentially enhance the perceptual dimensions of perceived syllable- or word-wide voicelessness and voicing.

Two experiments were conducted for the derivation of psychophysical scales of the following audio descriptors: spectral centroid, spectral spread, spectral skewness, odd-to-even harmonic ratio, spectral deviation, and spectral slope. The stimulus sets of each audio descriptor were synthesized and (wherever possible) independently controlled through appropriate synthesis techniques. Partition scaling methods were used in both experiments, and the scales were constructed by fitting well-behaving functions to the listeners' ratings. In the first experiment, the listeners' task was the estimation of the relative differences between successive levels of a particular audio descriptor. The median values of listeners' ratings increased with increasing feature values, which confirmed listeners' abilities to estimate intervals. However, there was a large variability in the reliability of the derived interval scales depending on the stimulus spacing in each trial. In the second experiment, listeners had control over the stimulus values and were asked to divide the presented range of values into perceptually equal intervals, which provides a ratio scale. For every descriptor, the reliability of the derived ratio scales was excellent. The unit of a particular ratio scale was assigned empirically so as to facilitate qualitative comparisons between the scales of all audio descriptors. The construction of psychophysical scales based on univariate stimuli allowed for the establishment of cause-and-effect relations between audio descriptors and perceptual dimensions, contrary to past research that has relied on multivariate stimuli and has only examined the correlations between the two. Most importantly, this study provides an understanding of the ways in which the sensation magnitudes of several audio descriptors are apprehended.

This paper aimed to develop a multisensory approach in a university campus, based on quantitative and qualitative approaches, investigating sense walk experiences (thermo-visual sound walk) under interactions of luminous, thermal, and auditory environments. The study was conducted in October 2021, in Chetma university campus in Biskra city, southern Algeria, which remains a famous oasis settlement of arid regions over the country. A comparative and correlation analysis was performed between the physical dimensions collected through a walking experience in three campus routes (outdoor, semi-outdoor and indoor). In addition, a multisensory survey of the walking experience on perceptual dimensions was evaluated in parallel to the empirical contribution. The paper shows that walkers’ thermal levels were balanced between neural and slightly hot in different spatial aspects. The glare was almost unperceived regarding the luminous conditions in the study site. The auditory experience reveals that the conducted points were generally quiet and well placed for educational requirements. Findings also show a strong relationship between the physical dimensions of the luminous and auditory environment. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the thermal and luminous environments are more perceptible than the auditory environment for the walkers of the outdoor and indoor routes. In contrast, the semi-outdoor route is often perceptible by the perceptual dimensions of the luminous and auditory environments. The findings on sensorial thresholds and spatial adaption are essential for the educational practices’ architectural and urban strategies for the Saharan cities and oasis settlements.

In a sequence of otherwise equal sounds, listeners tend to hear a series of trochees (groups of two sounds with an initial beat) when every other sound is louder; they tend to hear a series of iambs (groups of two sounds with a final beat) when every other sound is longer. The article presents evidence that this so-called "Iambic-Trochaic Law" (ITL) is a consequence of the way listeners parse the signal along two orthogonal dimensions, grouping (Which tone is first/last?) and prominence (Which tone is prominent?). A production experiment shows that in speech, intensity and duration correlate when encoding prominence, but anticorrelate when encoding grouping. A model of the production data shows that the ITL emerges from the cue distribution based on a listener's predicted decisions about prominence and grouping respectively. This, and further predictions derived from the model, are then tested in speech and tone perception. The perception results provide evidence that intensity and duration are excellent cues for grouping and prominence, but poor cues for the distinction between iamb and trochee per se. Overall, the findings illustrate how the ITL derives from the way listeners recover two orthogonal perceptual dimensions, grouping and prominence, from a single acoustic stream. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

It is a commonplace in certain areas of art theory and contemporary art practices to consider Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades as ordinary objects, which have an artistic value that depends more on a theoretical or institutional framework than on an aesthetic experience. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to show the historical emergence of these artifacts on the light of the impact of the industrial production in avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. Discussing Walter Benjamin’ s and Jean Brun’s, it argues that Duchamp’s practice has an explanatory principle, both in the mechanical reproduction of the work of art and in the aestheticization of the machine. On the other hand, it brings forward some observations regarding Duchamp’s insight on the “total lack of good or bad taste” and the perceptual dimension of a sculptural object as the Large Glass, coming back to Arthur Danto’s interpretation of ready-mades and to the notion of “implementation” introduced by Nelson Goodman to define “the process of bringing about the aesthetic functioning that provides the basis for the notion of a work of art”.

Equilibrium as the common ground: Introducing embodied perception into structural design with graphic statics

Cross-modal integration between sound and texture is important to perception and action. Here we show this has repercussions for the structure of spoken languages. We present a new statistical universal linking speech with the evolutionarily ancient sense of touch. Words that express roughness—the primary perceptual dimension of texture—are highly likely to feature a trilled /r/, the most commonly occurring rhotic consonant. In four studies, we show the pattern to be extremely robust, being the first widespread pattern of iconicity documented not just across a large, diverse sample of the world’s spoken languages, but also across numerous sensory words within languages. Our deep analysis of Indo-European languages and Proto-Indo-European roots indicates remarkable historical stability of the pattern, which appears to date back at least 6000 years.