Study Of Perceptions Research Articles

A perceptual study of relationship between emotional intelligence and job performance among higher education sector employees in Saudi Arabia

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to investigate faculties' perceptions of emotional intelligence about job performance (task and contextual performance (TP and CP)) in the higher education sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.Design/methodology/approachThis research employed an explanatory research design method. A quantitative design approach is adopted by implementing a survey-based study. Quantitative data have been collected anonymously from faculty members (n = 277) working in different higher educational institutes in Saudi Arabia.FindingsThe research findings revealed a positive relationship between others' emotions appraisal and use of emotions with CP, whilst all the dimensions of emotional intelligence, namely self-emotions appraisal (SEA), others' emotions appraisal (OEA), use of emotions (UOE) and regulation of emotions (ROE) revealed a significant positive relationship with the TP. Nevertheless, the research supports the argument that emotional intelligence is considered an essential contributor to faculty members' job performance.Practical implicationsThis research study provides empirical support for the argument that emotional intelligence is a direct driver for enhancing job performance through the appraisal, use and regulation of emotions. In terms of practical implications, the research findings will encourage higher education institutions to take specific actions that will help to enhance awareness of and build emotional intelligence skills amongst faculty staff.Originality/valueThis study is the first that has sought to investigate the impact of emotional intelligence on employees' performance in the Saudi Arabian higher education sector. Additionally, this study has developed a new psychometric scale that is useful in the higher education sector.

Material Translation Based on Neural Style Transfer with Ideal Style Image Retrieval.

The field of Neural Style Transfer (NST) has led to interesting applications that enable us to transform reality as human beings perceive it. Particularly, NST for material translation aims to transform the material of an object into that of a target material from a reference image. Since the target material (style) usually comes from a different object, the quality of the synthesized result totally depends on the reference image. In this paper, we propose a material translation method based on NST with automatic style image retrieval. The proposed CNN-feature-based image retrieval aims to find the ideal reference image that best translates the material of an object. An ideal reference image must share semantic information with the original object while containing distinctive characteristics of the desired material (style). Thus, we refine the search by selecting the most-discriminative images from the target material, while focusing on object semantics by removing its style information. To translate materials to object regions, we combine a real-time material segmentation method with NST. In this way, the material of the retrieved style image is transferred to the segmented areas only. We evaluate our proposal with different state-of-the-art NST methods, including conventional and recently proposed approaches. Furthermore, with a human perceptual study applied to 100 participants, we demonstrate that synthesized images of stone, wood, and metal can be perceived as real and even chosen over legitimate photographs of such materials.

A comprehensive benchmark analysis for sand dust image reconstruction

Recently, numerous sand dust removal algorithms have been proposed. To our best knowledge, however, most methods evaluated their performance in a no-reference way using few selected real-world images from the internet. It is unclear how to quantitatively analyze the performance of the algorithms in a supervised way. Moreover, due to the absence of large-scale datasets, there are no well-known sand dust reconstruction report algorithms up till now. To bridge the gaps, we presented a comprehensive perceptual study and analysis of real-world sandstorm images, then constructed a Sand-dust Image Reconstruction Benchmark(SIRB) for training Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) and evaluating the algorithm’s performance. We adopted the existing image transformation neural network trained on SIRB as the baseline to illustrate the generalization of SIRB for training CNNs. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation to demonstrate the performance and limitations of the sandstorm enhancement algorithms, which shed light on future research in sandstorm image reconstruction.

A Perceptual Study of Communication Effectiveness in Cluttering

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate listener perception of communication effectiveness when listening to samples of speakers who clutter and exhibit excessive revisions as compared to control speakers matched by gender and education level. Method: In this study, 100 undergraduate listeners rated 30-s monologue samples of adults who clutter and whose speech contained excessive revisions. Ratings were collected via a visual analog scale. After marking their ratings, listeners were asked to write down any details they could recall from each monologue. Results: Adults who clutter were rated significantly poorer than controls in the categories of message, conciseness, flow, and organization. There were no significant differences in ratings by class year. Descriptively, listeners also inaccurately identified the main idea of each speaker's message more often when listening to adults with cluttering as compared to controls. Thematic analysis of listener comments emphasized themes of increased speed, difficulty understanding words, and lack of organization and cohesion among adults who clutter. By contrast, listener comments for controls emphasized increased flow and ease in following speakers' messages. Conclusions: This study provides objective data that listeners judged those who clutter with excessive revisions less favorably than controls in terms of their ability to understand the speakers' main point, ability to get to the point, smooth flow of speech, organization of message, and clarity of speech. These judgments occurred despite normal scores on standardized language tests among the participants with cluttering.

Endoscopic treatment of anterior laryngeal web using keel designed from ePTFE followed by voice therapy: a refined technique

BackgroundTreatment of laryngeal web is challenging due to possibility of recurrence and affected voice quality. Optimal treatment of laryngeal web should emphasize on improving both airway and vocal function. We refined the traditional endoscopic method using a new keel designed from expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) membrane. Our objective is to evaluate the voice outcomes following the endoscopic treatment and voice therapy.ResultsTen subjects presented with anterior laryngeal web. Auditory perceptual assessment, stroboscopic examination and acoustic studies were performed pre- and postoperatively. Endoscopic excision of laryngeal web was performed with cold instruments. An individually designed ePTFE keel was fixed by Nylon thread 2–0 at the anterior commissure and tied subcutaneously in the neck. The keel left for 3–5 weeks followed by voice therapy using abdomino-diaphragmatic breathing exercise and relaxation method. Vocal parameters measured were perceptual voice quality using Grade-Roughness-Breathiness-Asthenia-Strain voice scale (GRBAS), stroboscopic score, fundamental frequency (F0), jitter, shimmer, pitch perturbation question (PPQ), amplitude perturbation question (APQ) and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR). Significant decrease in GRBAS (P < 0.001) and significant increase in stroboscopic scores (P < 0.001) were noticed after operation and voice therapy. Also, acoustic voice parameters showed significant improvements. The mean jitter, shimmer, PPQ and APQ showed significant decrease (p = 0.0028, 0.0032, 0.0026, 0.0014, and 0.006 respectively). Overall, 90 % of our subjects have satisfactory voice outcome.ConclusionEndoscopic excision of anterior laryngeal with cold instrument followed by ePTFE keel fixation achieved good long-term voice results. The ePTFE is soft biocompatible material which does not make reaction. The keel should be left in place for sufficient period of time (3–5 weeks). This ensures perfect healing with less or no recurrence. Absence of foreign body reactions in the vocal folds is important for mucosal integrity and good voice outcome. So, the ePTFE could be good alternative for laryngeal keel. Hyperfunctional dysphonia with ventricular hypertrophy may develop in longstanding anterior laryngeal web which needs intensive voice therapy after operation. Our treatment targeted both the organic etiology of dysphonia and the underlying cause of the possible associated functional element of dysphonia.

As-locally-uniform-as-possible reshaping of vector clip-art

Vector clip-art images consist of regions bounded by a network of vector curves. Users often wish to reshape , or rescale, existing clip-art images by changing the locations, proportions, or scales of different image elements. When reshaping images depicting synthetic content they seek to preserve global and local structures. These structures are best preserved when the gradient of the mapping between the original and the reshaped curve networks is locally as close as possible to a uniform scale; mappings that satisfy this property maximally preserve the input curve orientations and minimally change the shape of the input's geometric details, while allowing changes in the relative scales of the different features. The expectation of approximate scale uniformity is local ; while reshaping operations are typically expected to change the relative proportions of a subset of network regions, users expect the change to be minimal away from the directly impacted regions and expect such changes to be gradual and distributed as evenly as possible. Unfortunately, existing methods for editing 2D curve networks do not satisfy these criteria. We propose a targeted As-Locally-Uniform-as-Possible (ALUP) vector clip-art reshaping method that satisfies the properties above. We formulate the computation of the desired output network as the solution of a constrained variational optimization problem. We effectively compute the desired solution by casting this continuous problem as a minimization of a non-linear discrete energy function, and obtain the desired minimizer by using a custom iterative solver. We validate our method via perceptual studies comparing our results to those created via algorithmic alternatives and manually generated ones. Participants preferred our results over the closest alternative by a ratio of 6 to 1.

Detecting viewer-perceived intended vector sketch connectivity

Many sketch processing applications target precise vector drawings with accurately specified stroke intersections, yet free-form artist drawn sketches are typically inexact: strokes that are intended to intersect often stop short of doing so. While human observers easily perceive the artist intended stroke connectivity, manually, or even semi-manually, correcting drawings to generate correctly connected outputs is tedious and highly time consuming. We propose a novel, robust algorithm that extracts viewer-perceived stroke connectivity from inexact free-form vector drawings by leveraging observations about local and global factors that impact human perception of inter-stroke connectivity. We employ the identified local cues to train classifiers that assess the likelihood that pairs of strokes are perceived as forming end-to-end or T- junctions based on local context. We then use these classifiers within an incremental framework that combines classifier provided likelihoods with a more global, contextual and closure-based, analysis. We demonstrate our method on over 95 diversely sourced inputs, and validate it via a series of perceptual studies; participants prefer our outputs over the closest alternative by a factor of 9 to 1.

WallPlan

Floorplan generation has drawn widespread interest in the community. Recent learning-based methods for generating realistic floorplans have made significant progress while a complex heuristic post-processing is still necessary to obtain desired results. In this paper, we propose a novel wall-oriented method, called WallPlan , for automatically and efficiently generating plausible floorplans from various design constraints. We pioneer the representation of the floorplan as a wall graph with room labels and consider the floorplan generation as a graph generation. Given the boundary as input, we first initialize the boundary with windows predicted by WinNet. Then a graph generation network GraphNet and semantics prediction network LabelNet are coupled to generate the wall graph progressively by imitating graph traversal. WallPlan can be applied for practical architectural designs, especially the wall-based constraints. We conduct ablation experiments, qualitative evaluations, quantitative comparisons, and perceptual studies to evaluate our method's feasibility, efficacy, and versatility. Intensive experiments demonstrate our method requires no post-processing, producing higher quality floorplans than state-of-the-art techniques.

Vowel Perception and Production in Native ki-Swahili Speaking Children Acquiring English as a Foreign Language

Abstract This study investigated the perception and production of English unrounded vowel minimal pairs /ɑ/ – /ɜ/; /æ/ – /ɑ/ and /i/ – /ɪ/, by a group of twenty native ki-Swahili speaking children averaging 9.9 years of age, who learned English through classroom instruction. The study was conducted in a typical foreign language acquisition (FLA) context. All the children participated in vowel perception and production tests. The findings revealed that the participants relied on their first language (L1) phonetic contrast knowledge when encoding vowel contrast. Moreover, factors that contributed to this problem of vowel contrast encoding included the size of the speakers’ vowel inventory, their limited exposure to spheres for interacting with the language outside the classroom environment and their social setting. Although the participants in this study demonstrated better ability in their vowel production than in their vowel perception, the results confirm those challenges that have been associated with FLA perceptual studies and how a young speaker’s first language significantly influences the child’s acquisition of English.

Color influence on the use satisfaction of kitchen utensils: An ergonomic and perceptual study

Different areas of science that study visual perception suggest the influence of color on human behavior and well-being. However, we know very little about the chromatic effect on satisfaction. The study aimed to assess color influence associated with individuals' age on the product's satisfaction of use. A total of 120 female participants (18–29 and 30–55 years old) evaluated a garlic peeler (Experiment I) and a potato masher (Experiment II) in green, red, and gray/silver colors. The methodology used the System Usability Scale Questionnaire, Emotional responses - FaceReader™ software, and a Preference Scale. We noticed no significant difference between age groups regarding the SUS scores in both experiments. However, the gray product received a higher SUS score (p < 0.05) than the other colors, and the Preference Scale rated gray as the worst. On the other hand, in Experiment I, the emotional responses showed that the main variable was the color, and in Experiment II, it was the participants' age (p < 0.05). Based on the present study, we suggest that color is an important variable on the satisfaction of use. The present research presented laboratory experiments that shed light on the importance of color and age variables on the satisfaction of use with kitchen utensils. Relevance to industryColor and age driven-knowledge can change how professionals and project teams create their products and user interaction, breaking superficial preconceptions. The present study is part of a research project contributing to the Color and Ergonomics in the Design Industrial field.

SWAYAM Platform of Distance Learning: A Perceptual Study

Education has a prime importance in the economic growth and in the form of a constructive education; SWAYAM platform which is one of the largest platforms for MOOCs in India is giving a lifelong learning opportunity through distance mode. Government of India has tried to provide an interactive open education interface. Though SWYAM is very near to the heart of government but what actual users perceive about it should be known. In this context, it becomes important to know what perception teachers and students have regarding SWAYAM. Taking a sample of teachers and students, core dimensions for the perception of teachers and students for the SWAYAM Platform of learning is found using a self-designed questionnaire. More than 70% of the respondents are spending time for SWAYAM courses and they are agreed that it help to gain knowledge. Different determinants forming the perception of teachers and students are found in the study. Results indicated that though Swayam courses are considered as flexible, innovative, interactive, and easy tool but it do not lead to employability and may be difficult to use. The study will act as the guideline for preparing policies taking into account the perceptual factors of both teachers and students on the favorable use of SWAYAM. Further, practical implications and recommendations are presented for higher education ministry for making SWAYAM MOOCs as the fruitful one.

PTRM: Perceived Terrain Realism Metric

Terrains are visually prominent and commonly needed objects in many computer graphics applications. While there are many algorithms for synthetic terrain generation, it is rather difficult to assess the realism of a generated output. This article presents a first step toward the direction of perceptual evaluation for terrain models. We gathered and categorized several classes of real terrains, and we generated synthetic terrain models using computer graphics methods. The terrain geometries were rendered by using the same texturing, lighting, and camera position. Two studies on these image sets were conducted, ranking the terrains perceptually, and showing that the synthetic terrains are perceived as lacking realism compared to the real ones. We provide insight into the features that affect the perceived realism by a quantitative evaluation based on localized geomorphology-based landform features (geomorphons) that categorize terrain structures such as valleys, ridges, hollows, and so forth. We show that the presence or absence of certain features has a significant perceptual effect. The importance and presence of the terrain features were confirmed by using a generative deep neural network that transferred the features between the geometric models of the real terrains and the synthetic ones. The feature transfer was followed by another perceptual experiment that further showed their importance and effect on perceived realism. We then introduce Perceived Terrain Realism Metrics (PTRM), which estimates human-perceived realism of a terrain represented as a digital elevation map by relating the distribution of terrain features with their perceived realism. This metric can be used on a synthetic terrain, and it will output an estimated level of perceived realism. We validated the proposed metrics on real and synthetic data and compared them to the perceptual studies.

Evaluation of text-to-gesture generation model using convolutional neural network

Conversational gestures have a crucial role in realizing natural interactions with virtual agents and robots. Data-driven approaches, such as deep learning and machine learning, are promising in constructing the gesture generation model, which automatically provides the gesture motion for speech or spoken texts. This study experimentally analyzes a deep learning-based gesture generation model from spoken text using a convolutional neural network. The proposed model takes a sequence of spoken words as the input and outputs a sequence of 2D joint coordinates representing the conversational gesture motion. We prepare a dataset consisting of gesture motions and spoken texts by adding text information to an existing dataset and train the models using specific speaker’s data. The quality of the generated gestures is compared with those from an existing speech-to-gesture generation model through a user perceptual study. The subjective evaluation shows that the model performance is comparable or superior to those by the existing speech-to-gesture generation model. In addition, we investigate the importance of data cleansing and loss function selection in the text-to-gesture generation model. We further examine the model transferability between speakers. The experimental results demonstrate successful model transferability of the proposed model. Finally, we show that the text-to-gesture generation model can produce good quality gestures even when using a transformer architecture.

Editorial: An Integrated Model of the Olfactory System Through Phylogenetic, Evolutionary, and Clinical Aspects: From Invertebrates to Humans, Through Sensory, Perceptual, and Cognitive Olfactometry Studies

Editorial: An Integrated Model of the Olfactory System Through Phylogenetic, Evolutionary, and Clinical Aspects: From Invertebrates to Humans, Through Sensory, Perceptual, and Cognitive Olfactometry Studies

Protected Areas and Rural Depopulation in Spain: A Multi-Stakeholder Perceptual Study

Protected areas (PAs) are thought by some to contribute to local wellbeing and socioeconomic development, whereas for others PAs remain a regulatory burden that hampers rural development. Here, we sought to ascertain the perceived causes of rural depopulation and the potential impact of four Natura 2000 sites on the wellbeing and depopulation figures of four protected rural municipalities in Spain that were selected as extreme case studies. We used phone surveys to elicit experts’ views (n = 19) on the topic and convened eight in-person workshops to garner local residents’ insights (n = 40) using structured questionnaires. We complemented perceived wellbeing data from PAs with surveys to residents in neighbouring unprotected municipalities (n = 28). Both experts and workshops’ attendees from protected municipalities overwhelmingly attributed depopulation figures to structural causes linked to transport accessibility, basic service provision and the existence of job opportunities, which they perceived to be unrelated to the PAs’ regulations or management. Local residents did generally not perceive any impact on their collective or individual wellbeing from those PAs, and most who did, expressed a negative impact chiefly due to socioeconomic restrictions. Four-fifths of the experts and half of the workshops’ attendees from protected municipalities, however, expressed that PAs’ administrations could help improve depopulation figures in their towns mainly through promoting tourism and greater compatibility of land uses, including housing and infrastructure development. While the assessed Natura 2000 sites certainly have scope for tourism promotion, their lenient legal regimes make it largely unfeasible to broaden land use compatibility without damaging protected features.

Are We at their Mercy? A Perceptual Study of Journalists on the Ethical Implications of Citizen Journalism

This study examined what could be the perception of Imo State based mainstream journalists on citizen journalism.The democratic-participant media theory was used as the theoretical foundation. The survey research approach was employed in the study. 180 registered journalists in Owerri formed the population and due to the manageable size of the population the census principle was adopted. The questionnaire was used to gather data. The instrument was face validated. The analysis was done using percentages and the hypothesis was done using SPSS statistical tool. Findings revealed that at an average of 59 percent respondents perceived citizen journalism as not reliable when it comes to source of information for news; citizen journalists are not well dispose to carry out journalism job properly and that citizen journalists do not consider truth, fact etc before publishing. Also on the average 54.4 percent result confirmed that among professional journalists citizen journalism is nothing to write home about and hence they do not accept it in carrying out their own job of journalism. It was recommended that citizen journalists should be trained on the journalistic ethical guidelines so that they will know the implications of flouting journalistic guiding principles and that professional journalists should endeavour to keep maintaining their practice of scrutinizing news coming from citizen journalism so that their integrity will not be under question.

A Perceptual Study on the Causal Relationship Between Human Capital and Organizational Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises

Small and medium enterprises play a predominant role in the economic development of any country, and also they are the first to respond to the basic needs of the society. Government is very concerned about the performance of SMEs as they are not showing the expected results. In this study, an attempt has been made by the researcher to investigate the role of human capital in the financial and operational performance of small and medium enterprises. Findings of this study will be helpful in making strategic planning that will enhance the performance of the small and medium enterprises.

A perceptual study of language chunking in Estonian

AbstractTwo studies investigate the production and perception of speech chunks in Estonian. A corpus study examines to what degree the boundaries of syntactic constituents and frequent collocations influence the distribution of prosodic information in spontaneously spoken utterances. A perception experiment tests to what degree prosodic information, constituent structure, and collocation frequencies interact in the perception of speech chunks. Two groups of native Estonian speakers rated spontaneously spoken utterances for the presence of disjunctures, whilst listening to these utterances (N=47N=47) or reading them (N=40N=40). The results of the corpus study reveal a rather weak correspondence between the distribution of prosodic information and boundaries of the syntactic constituents and collocations. The results of the perception experiments demonstrate a strong influence of clause boundaries on the perception of prosodic discontinuities as prosodic breaks. Thus, the results indicate that there is no direct relationship between the semantico-syntactic characteristics of utterances and the distribution of prosodic information. The percept of a prosodic break relies on the rapid recognition of constituent structure, i.e. structural information.

Comparative analysis of CycleGAN and AttentionGAN on face aging application

Recently, there is incredible progress in the arena of machine learning with generative adversarial network (GAN) methods. These methods tend to synthesize new data from input images that are highly realistic at the output. One of its applications in the image-to-image transformation way is the face aging task. In the face aging process, new face images are synthesized with the help of the input images and desired target images. Face aging can be beneficial in several domains such as in biometric systems for face recognition with age progression, in forensics for helping to find the missing children, in entertainment, and many more. Nowadays, several GANs are available for face aging applications and this paper focuses on the insight comparison among the frequently used image-to-image translation GANs which are CycleGAN (Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Network) and AttentionGAN (Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Network). The first model (CycleGAN) comprises two generators, two discriminators, and converting an image from one domain to another without the need for paired images dataset. The second is AttentionGAN, which consists of attention masks and content masks multiplied with the generated output in one domain to generate a highly realistic image in another domain. For comparison, these two are trained on two dataset which is CelebA-HQ (CelebFaces Attributes high-quality dataset) and FFHQ (Flickr Faces HQ). Efficacy is evaluated quantitatively with identity preservation, five image quality assessment metrics, and qualitatively with a perceptual study on synthesized images, face aging signs, and robustness. It has been concluded that overall CycleGAN has better performance than AttentionGAN. In the future, a more critical comparison can be performed on the number of GANs for face aging applications.

Secretion Bubbling as the Sound Mechanism for Nasal Rustle: A Perceptual Study.

Secretion bubbling on the superior aspect of the velopharyngeal (VP) valve typically occurs with a small VP opening during production of oral pressure consonants. The use of high-speed nasopharyngoscopy has shown correlation between the bubbling frequency and the acoustics captured with the nasal microphone of the nasometer. The purpose of this study was to investigate if the sound generated by the bubbling process is perceived as nasal rustle (also known as nasal turbulence). Speech samples were extracted from the data of patients who were diagnosed with nasal rustle (five boys and five girls, ranging in age from 5 to 10 years old). A customized filter was used to remove the sound generated by the secretion bubbling. Six experienced listeners were asked to rate the perception of nasal rustle in each speech stimuli before and after the filtering process. Rating values for the perception of nasal rustle were overall reduced in all cases after the filtering process. Furthermore, the perception of nasal rustle was eliminated in 40% of the cases. Rating reliability was excellent before the filtering process and moderate to good after filtering. Reducing the perception of nasal rustle using spectral filtering based on the bubbling frequencies supports the hypothesis that undesired sound in the nasal cavity is generated from the interaction of the turbulent airflow with the secretion bubbling. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19111544.