Perceptual Filter Research Articles

Water Element as an Aesthetic Aspect of Landscape Design

Abstract: Researchers have considered and landscape architects have employed the aquatic element as a differentiating aesthetic aspect. Its meaning and perception in Both physical (visual and nonvisual) landscapes and virtual landscapes are affected by the idiosyncrasy and the observer's perceptual filter. Methodologies both theoretical and empirical have been presented on the role of water, whether lentic or lotic, to a great or small extent, sweet or sour. Seawater, whether turbulent or calm. In general, the aquatic element serves as a link between scenery, literature, or other arts, as well as a way to alleviate the monotony imposed by architects or artists uses solid materials. Water serves as a foundation for literary and artistic perceptions of landscape, as well as a neutral architectural element that cannot be properly classified as "natural" or "built." The diversity of its usage and perception, as well as its diachronic and extensive application and resonance, show the universality of the aquatic element as an aesthetic aspect and architectural means.

Environmental anxiety and its impact on the mental health of the individual

In this study, “environmental anxiety” refers to a state of anxiety and tension that arises as a result of concern about the state of the environment and its impact on human health and safety. Psychological distress can be caused by various factors, such as stressful situations, genetic characteristics, neurochemical imbalances, psychological factors, traumatic events, chronic diseases, drug and alcohol use, as well as sociocultural influences. The main forms of environmental anxiety include: fear of environmental problems, disturbing thoughts, concern about possible health effects, hypersensitivity syndrome to environmental factors, anxiety in connection with environmental crises, social anxiety due to environmental aspects, anxiety due to news and media. These forms of anxiety can manifest in different symptoms and manifest at different levels of the personality: physical manifestations, psychological reactions, emotional manifestations, behavioral changes and physiological reactions. The possibility of developing environmental anxiety in the context of environmental issues can be explained by various psychological mechanisms, such as a perceptual filter, catastrophic thinking, a sense of security, social influence, a sense of loss of control and uncertainty, as well as psychosomatic reactions. The publication also provides various psychological approaches and methods aimed at reducing the level of environmental anxiety, such as psychological counseling, cognitive-behavioral therapy, meditation and mindfulness, exposure therapy, stress management, journaling, healthy lifestyle, outdoor recreation, positive perception and understanding of environmental aspects.

Executivo Central e Seleção de Alvos na Memória de Trabalho Visual

Abstract The goal of this study was to investigate if the selection of external information for storage in visual working memory requires control by the central executive when the categorization of targets is guided by instructions. The design was experimental 3 (concurrent task) x 2 (instruction). Forty-eight university students saw eight colored shapes, four of them surrounded by square outlines. Memory was assessed using a recognition task. Targets varied with instructions: targets were presented within squares in the first block and outside squares in the second block. There were three concurrent tasks: no task, articulatory suppression, and backward counting. Performance was measured by hits, false alarms, corrected recognition, and sensitivity (A’), compared using within-subject ANOVAs. Results showed a main effect only for concurrent task, with lower performance in the backward counting condition for all measures. These results suggest that the central executive does not control the perceptual filter, corroborating earlier results.

Rethinking the knowledge-attitudes model and introducing belief in human evolution: examining antecedents of public acceptability of human gene editing

In the science communication literature, we can easily notice the persistence of the knowledge-attitudes model (or the deficit model) that attributes the lack of public support to a lack of scientific knowledge. However, there has also been a continuing debate over the roles of scientific knowledge in explaining public attitudes towards specific controversial science and technologies. Using the data from an American nationwide survey, this study examined the variety of antecedents of the public acceptance of human gene editing (HGE), including scientific knowledge, attitudes towards science, risk-benefit perceptions of HGE, and belief in human evolution. Our findings illuminate how scientific knowledge indirectly influenced the public acceptance of HGE through a variety of mediating variables (such as attitudes towards science, risk perceptions of HGE, and benefit perceptions of HGE), though it did not directly influence this acceptance. The findings also reveal some moderating effects of belief in human evolution on the relationships among the above variables, serving as a ‘perceptual filter’ in the case of HGE. These findings revisit and extend the persistent but simplified knowledge-attitudes model and provide new insights into the complicated process of public attitude formation about such controversial technologies as HGE.

Feed for Thought: Factors Predicting Public Support for Funding and Labeling Preferences of Alternative Aquafeed

ABSTRACT Alternative aquafeed is currently being researched as a sustainable and environmentally friendly way to bolster aquaculture production, which plays an integral role in supplying global seafood demand. Guided by the cognitive miser model, this study aims to examine factors predicting public support for funding the development of alternative aquafeed and public preference for labeling fish fed with alternative aquafeed. This study found that heuristics were more influential than knowledge in shaping the dependent variables. This study also investigated how heuristics serve as perceptual filters, interacting with knowledge when influencing public support for funding and preference for labeling. This indicates that dependent on their predispositions and available heuristic cues, individuals might interpret the same information differently. Most importantly, the findings suggest that labels may serve varying roles and can be an effective way for actors in the food industry to communicate to the public.

Gravity-Dependent Animacy Perception in Zebrafish.

Biological motion (BM), depicted by a handful of point lights attached to the major joints, conveys rich animacy information, which is significantly disrupted if BM is shown upside down. This well-known inversion effect in BM perception is conserved in terrestrial vertebrates and is presumably a manifestation of an evolutionarily endowed perceptual filter (i.e., life motion detector) tuned to gravity-compatible BM. However, it remains unknown whether aquatic animals, living in a completely different environment from terrestrial animals, perceive BM in a gravity-dependent manner. Here, taking advantage of their typical shoaling behaviors, we used zebrafish as a model animal to examine the ability of teleosts to discriminate between upright (gravity-compatible) and inverted (gravity-incompatible) BM signals. We recorded their swimming trajectories and quantified their preference based on dwelling time and head orientation. The results obtained from three experiments consistently showed that zebrafish spent significantly more time swimming in proximity to and orienting towards the upright BM relative to the inverted BM or other gravity-incompatible point-light stimuli (i.e., the non-BM). More intriguingly, when the recorded point-light video clips of fish were directly compared with those of human walkers and pigeons, we could identify a unique and consistent pattern of accelerating movements in the vertical (gravity) direction. These findings, to our knowledge, demonstrate for the first time the inversion effect in BM perception in simple aquatic vertebrates and suggest that the evolutionary origin of gravity-dependent BM processing may be traced back to ancient aquatic animals.

Reciprocal processes of sensory perception and social bonding: an integrated social-sensory framework of social behavior.

Organisms filter the complexity of natural stimuli through their individual sensory and perceptual systems. Such perceptual filtering is particularly important for social stimuli. A shared "social umwelt" allows individuals to respond appropriately to the expected diversity of cues and signals during social interactions. In this way, the behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms of sociality and social bonding cannot be disentangled from perceptual mechanisms and sensory processing. While a degree of embeddedness between social and sensory processes is clear, our dominant theoretical frameworks favor treating the social and sensory processes as distinct. An integrated social-sensory framework has the potential to greatly expand our understanding of the mechanisms underlying individual variation in social bonding and sociality more broadly. Here we leverage what is known about sensory processing and pair bonding in two common study systems with significant species differences in their umwelt (rodent chemosensation and avian acoustic communication). We primarily highlight that (1) communication is essential for pair bond formation and maintenance, (2) the neural circuits underlying perception, communication and social bonding are integrated, and (3) candidate neuromodulatory mechanisms that regulate pair bonding also impact communication and perception. Finally, we propose approaches and frameworks that more fully integrate sensory processing, communication, and social bonding across levels of analysis: behavioral, neurobiological, and genomic. This perspective raises two key questions: (1) how is social bonding shaped by differences in sensory processing?, and (2) to what extent is sensory processing and the saliency of signals shaped by social interactions and emerging relationships?

Components loss for neural networks in mask-based speech enhancement

Estimating time-frequency domain masks for single-channel speech enhancement using deep learning methods has recently become a popular research field with promising results. In this paper, we propose a novel components loss (CL) for the training of neural networks for mask-based speech enhancement. During the training process, the proposed CL offers separate control over preservation of the speech component quality, suppression of the noise component, and preservation of a naturally sounding residual noise component. We illustrate the potential of the proposed CL by evaluating a standard convolutional neural network (CNN) for mask-based speech enhancement. The new CL is compared to several baseline losses, comprising the conventional mean squared error (MSE) loss w.r.t. speech spectral amplitudes or w.r.t. an ideal-ratio mask, auditory-related loss functions, such as the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) loss and the perceptual weighting filter loss, and also the recently proposed SNR loss with two masks. Detailed analysis suggests that the proposed CL obtains a better or at least a more balanced performance across all employed instrumental quality metrics, including SNR improvement, speech component quality, enhanced total speech quality, and particularly also delivers a natural sounding residual noise component. For unseen noise types, we excel even perceptually motivated losses by an about 0.2 points higher PESQ score. The recently proposed so-called SNR loss with two masks not only requires a network with more parameters due to the two decoder heads, but also falls behind on PESQ and POLQA and particularly w.r.t. residual noise quality. Note that the proposed CL shows significantly more 1st ranks among the evaluation metrics than any other baseline. It is easy to implement, and code is provided at https://github.com/ifnspaml/Components-Loss.

Why support nuclear energy? The roles of citizen knowledge, trust, media use, and perceptions across five Southeast Asian countries

Public support is important for countries that are at nascent stages of nuclear energy development. This study seeks to examine factors shaping public support for nuclear energy development in five Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Using surveys (with n = 1,000 in each country), results show that the public indicates generally low levels of support for nuclear energy development across the five countries. This reflects the possible lingering impact of the Fukushima nuclear incident on public opinion. We further show that factors, such as trust in various stakeholders, media frames, and risk and benefit perceptions, are associated with public support for nuclear energy. More importantly, people use trust, and risk and benefit perceptions as perceptual filters to interpret the relationship between nuclear knowledge and their support for nuclear energy. The findings imply that policymakers should take these perceptual filters into consideration when communicating messages about nuclear energy development to the public.

Heuristic cues as perceptual filters: Factors influencing public support for nuclear research reactor in Singapore

Nuclear energy is an important consideration for decarbonisation. However, for Singapore – a country at the nascent stage of nuclear energy development – the building of a nuclear research reactor could be a precursor to a full-fledged nuclear energy plan. Guided by the cognitive miser model and the knowledge deficit model, this study examines factors shaping public support for the use of a nuclear research reactor for medical purposes. In particular, we seek to understand how different types of knowledge could affect public support for the use of a nuclear research reactor in an island city-state. Based on the data from a nationally representative door-to-door survey of 1000 adult Singaporeans, we found that the public mainly depend on heuristics, such as religiosity, benefit perception, and trust in relevant authorities, to form attitudes towards the use of a nuclear research reactor, revealing a tendency to employ mental shortcuts for decision making. More importantly, we found that heuristics moderated the effect of contextual nuclear knowledge on public support for the use of a nuclear research reactor. This indicates that individuals might interpret the same information differently, depending on their firmly held beliefs or pre-existing perceptions.

Red Herrings and Perceptual Filters: Problems and Opportunities for Aeschylus’s Supplices

Red Herrings and Perceptual Filters: Problems and Opportunities for Aeschylus’s Supplices

Mechanisms of Spectrotemporal Modulation Detection for Normal- and Hearing-Impaired Listeners.

Spectrotemporal modulations (STM) are essential features of speech signals that make them intelligible. While their encoding has been widely investigated in neurophysiology, we still lack a full understanding of how STMs are processed at the behavioral level and how cochlear hearing loss impacts this processing. Here, we introduce a novel methodological framework based on psychophysical reverse correlation deployed in the modulation space to characterize the mechanisms underlying STM detection in noise. We derive perceptual filters for young normal-hearing and older hearing-impaired individuals performing a detection task of an elementary target STM (a given product of temporal and spectral modulations) embedded in other masking STMs. Analyzed with computational tools, our data show that both groups rely on a comparable linear (band-pass)–nonlinear processing cascade, which can be well accounted for by a temporal modulation filter bank model combined with cross-correlation against the target representation. Our results also suggest that the modulation mistuning observed for the hearing-impaired group results primarily from broader cochlear filters. Yet, we find idiosyncratic behaviors that cannot be captured by cochlear tuning alone, highlighting the need to consider variability originating from additional mechanisms. Overall, this integrated experimental-computational approach offers a principled way to assess suprathreshold processing distortions in each individual and could thus be used to further investigate interindividual differences in speech intelligibility.

Production of Vowel /ə/ in Sundanese by Japanese Native Speakers in First Exposure

The research described native Japanese speakers’ perception of Sundanese vowel /ə/ after the first exposure to a controlled naturalistic input of conversation. The research worked in respect of Brown’s model of L2 speech perception and L1 feature geometry, which sought to relate theories of segmental phonology to L2 speech perception and the first exposure treatment. Some Sundanese native speakers conducted a conversation that contained the /ə/ vowel in front of five Japanese native speakers with no prior exposure to Sundanese. Therefore, the researchers had collected speech data from five L1 Japanese native speakers (three males, two females, Mage = 22, SD = 2,1). The Japanese were asked to listen to the short conversation and imitate vowel /ə/, which did not exist in the Japanese language vowel inventory. The observation confirmed Brown’s hypothesis that L2 perception of /ə/ vowel was constrained by the L1 feature geometry. L1 Japanese language phonological properties worked as a perceptual filter to Sundanese L2 input, causing the Japanese L2 learners to perceive only the vowel discriminated by phonological features presented in Sundanese. The data show that the Japanese native speakers are able to overcome the perceptual filters so they can produce various frequencies of vowel /ə/, which are statistically similar to the frequency produced by Sundanese native speakers. The research implies that the possibility of learning new sounds from an entirely new language is wide open when the learner is able to pass through the L1 perceptual filter.

Employability reforms in Tunisian higher education: a path-dependence perspective

ABSTRACT The article investigates the impact of inherited cultural memes on employability policies in Tunisia, where the 2006 Bologna-inspired reforms were touted as a remedy for the critical problem of graduate unemployment. Mainstreaming vocational tracks, introducing transversal courses and involving employers in the design of curricula and training of students were promised to enhance graduates’ ‘job-readiness’. Yet a decade on, graduate unemployment has only exacerbated and fuelled a revolution that toppled the Ben Ali autocratic regime in 2011. Using the lens of path dependence theory, the article probes the way cultural vestiges may impinge on the outcome of the reform policy. The findings reported are mainly based on a doctoral dissertation conducted by the author and also on other relevant empirical studies. It concludes that ‘policy legacies’ and inherited ‘perceptual filters’ continued to shape stakeholders’ perceptions of the traditional mission of universities, while ‘nested rules’ diluted the impact of the new measures and impeded the institutionalisation of the new path of reforms.

Political and personality predispositions and topical contexts matter: Effects of uncivil comments on science news engagement intentions

Building on existing theoretical frameworks for the study of incivility, interactivity, and negativity bias, this study contributes to the growing body of literature on the impact of incivility in online comments. Specifically, it tests incivility’s impact on news engagement intentions; investigates political and personality predispositions’ roles as perceptual filters; and extends this scholarship to the context of multiple scientific news topics. It found that, when dealing with news about two of the more politically divisive technologies—fracking and synthetic biology—ideology moderated the effects of incivility, with uncivil comments encouraging engagement among conservatives but not among liberals. However, in the less politically divisive context of nanotechnology, self-monitoring played a significant role in moderating incivility’s effects: with high self-monitors being more motivated, and low self-monitors less motivated, to share nanotech news after exposure to uncivil comments. These results imply that individual predispositions and topic-specific factors both underlie the impact of incivility on news engagement intentions.

Fashion’s Measure: Preaching, Chronicle-Writing, and the New Look of the 1340s

The clothes sported by young Italian men in the 1340s—tunics cropped at the pelvis, slouchy hoods, large bags hanging from metallic belts—were as daring as their emergence was sudden and mysterious. Scholars have generally associated their appearance with Italy’s rampant mercantilism and even regarded them as the first occurrence of fashion; yet, as this essay notices, their descriptions mostly draw from the language of size, thus encouraging the exploration of fashion as a metric construct. Reading chronicles of late medieval tailoring through measuring practices help us identify the “new look” of the 1340s as a product of the communes, the governments of the Italian city-states, which carefully controlled both the production of clothes and the application of standards. By inserting tailoring within the cities' disciplinary procedures and discourses, this essay reveals the overlooked activism of the preaching orders who, in their roles as chroniclers, moral arbiters, advisors to law-makers and, especially, measurement checkers, established size as the perceptual filter for determining the respectability of clothing.

Neural mechanisms of auditory species recognition in birds.

Auditory communication in humans and other animals frequently takes place in noisy environments with many co-occurring signallers. Receivers are thus challenged to rapidly recognize salient auditory signals and filter out irrelevant sounds. Most bird species produce a variety of complex vocalizations that function to communicate with other members of their own species and behavioural evidence broadly supports preferences for conspecific over heterospecific sounds (auditory species recognition). However, it remains unclear whether such auditory signals are categorically recognized by the sensory and central nervous system. Here, we review 53 published studies that compare avian neural responses between conspecific versus heterospecific vocalizations. Irrespective of the techniques used to characterize neural activity, distinct nuclei of the auditory forebrain are consistently shown to be repeatedly conspecific selective across taxa, even in response to unfamiliar individuals with distinct acoustic properties. Yet, species-specific neural discrimination is not a stereotyped auditory response, but is modulated according to its salience depending, for example, on ontogenetic exposure to conspecific versus heterospecific stimuli. Neuromodulators, in particular norepinephrine, may mediate species recognition by regulating the accuracy of neuronal coding for salient conspecific stimuli. Our review lends strong support for neural structures that categorically recognize conspecific signals despite the highly variable physical properties of the stimulus. The available data are in support of a 'perceptual filter'-based mechanism to determine the saliency of the signal, in that species identity and social experience combine to influence the neural processing of species-specific auditory stimuli. Finally, we present hypotheses and their testable predictions, to propose next steps in species-recognition research into the emerging model of the neural conceptual construct in avian auditory recognition.

Compensating for perceptual filters in weak signal assessments

The effect of ambiguous and non-salient information on the managerial interpretive process is rarely investigated, although this information is considered to be the basis for strategic decision-making and requires a different process due to its ill-defined nature. This paper explores the process that outperforming managers used to detect and interpret weak signals. Interviews with 13 top-managers were analyzed using a grounded theory approach to allow the process to emerge. The findings confirmed earlier conclusions on perceptual filters that reduce the number and type of signals assessed. Contrary to earlier findings, the process was significantly altered to compensate for this loss in two ways. First, managers deliberately postponed their assessment of a weak signal by discussing it with people with distinct and second, some managers deliberately searched for signals that were unfamiliar and not fitting their mental model. The sample consisted of outperforming top managers, which raised questions about the generalizability of the findings in specific directions: are the alterations in the weak signal process exemplary for outperformers only, and how does its success compare to formal foresight methods. Finally, the findings have managerial relevance since they indicate how to detect and bring weak signals into the company before impact.

How Values Shape Program Perceptions: The “Organic Ethos” and Producers’ Assessments of U.S. Organic Policy Impacts

AbstractAmong the more recognizable programs related to natural and sustainable food is the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program. Although the robustness of the organic food market is difficult to contest, many debate the extent to which U.S. organic policy outcomes adequately serve consumers and the organic agriculture producers they rely on. This paper engages the debate from the perspective of certified organic producers. Drawing on the results of a nationwide survey of USDA‐certified producers, we first provide a snapshot of how producers assess the environmental, consumer, and market impacts of U.S. organic food policy. We then examine the extent to which organic producers’ policy impact perceptions are associated with their alignment with an “organic ethos”—understood as producers’ commitment to core organic principles and the organic movement. The paper highlights producers’ values as perceptual filters and cognitive mechanisms that help shape producers’ policy impacts perceptions, illustrating a contributing factor to the enduring nature of organic policy debates.

“It doesn’t mean I’m useless”: how do young people experiencing psychosis contribute to their families and why are contributions sometimes overlooked?

Purpose: Psychosis is often seen as a “burden” on families and affected individuals frequently hold a negative view of themselves. This study explored the ways in which young adults who have experienced first-episode psychosis make a positive contribution within their families. Methods: Fifteen participants (seven young people with experience of psychosis and eight relatives) were interviewed separately. Their accounts were analysed using grounded theory methodology. Results: For many individuals, their experience had led to a catastrophic redefinition of their identity. However, they continued to contribute significantly both within their families and within their wider communities. The redefinition of identity sometimes appeared to create a “perceptual filter” whereby both the person themselves and family members overlooked or minimised their contribution, focusing instead on being alert to signs of psychosis or illness. Conclusions: Shame and a focus on symptoms rather than achievements and contributions can significantly limit opportunities, expectations and movement beyond an illness identity. It is important for clinicians to be aware of this and to help young people and their families to notice and value positive contribution, and so promote recovery, well-being and post-traumatic growth.