Salience Of Terms Research Articles

Color blindness and semantic knowledge: Cognition of color terms from elicited lists in dichromats and normal observers

AbstractColor blindness (color vision deficiency) affects ~8% of males and ~ 0.4% females worldwide. Here we use the elicited lists method to investigate their semantic knowledge regarding “basic color terms” and their relationships. Lists were obtained from color vision deficient and normal observers. 32 dichromats (15 protanopes, 17 deuteranopes) and 32 normal trichromats (17 females, 15 males) diagnosed by a battery of color tests (Ishihara, City University Test, anomaloscope) wrote monolexemic lists of colors. Psychological salience of terms (ln(CSI)), adjacency between pairs of terms (ADJ; MDS) and the presence of clusters of terms defined on the basis of the Universals and evolution hypothesis were analyzed. All four groups of participants showed the same semantic memory structure: lists started with the cardinal primaries cluster (blue, red, yellow, green), followed by the achromatic primaries cluster (black and white), or the derived cluster (brown, orange, violet, pink, purple, and gray). After the clusters (cardinals, achromatics, and derived), a highly variable number of non‐basic terms appeared. This number was higher in normal trichromats. Non‐basic terms were not part of any cognitive cluster. The similarity in the lists of trichromats and dichromats suggest that both may acquire similar semantic knowledge about color terms. Several potential explanations are considered.

Portuguese MEPs and religion as a case of ‘dual identity’: Christians at heart, secular at work

ABSTRACT The literature has long acknowledged the role of religion in the linkages between national identity, politics, and Europe. However, little is known about how religion permeates the activity of Portuguese members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and whether this includes a politicisation of religion. This contribution sheds light on the use of religion by Portuguese MEPs during the European term 2019–2024. Drawing on a questionnaire and other quantitative and qualitative data, the contribution shows that religion itself has lost salience in terms of the activity of Portuguese MEPs. Instead, ‘religiously loaded’ themes are used as empty signifiers to reinforce collective and personal identity belongings. We conclude that the use of religion by Portuguese MEPs mirrors a secular transition found in Portugal since 1974 that has led to the privatisation of faith and a clear separation between the Catholic Church and the state. In sum, although Portuguese MEPs remain predominantly Catholic, the place of religion in European politics is a case of ‘dual identity’: they are Christians at heart but secular at work.

The argumentative salience of technology frames of reference: An analysis of argumentative discourse in the development of a health information exchange initiative

This study examines the impact that the argumentative salience of technology frames of references has on the execution of complex IS implementation projects. It employs Toulmin's argument model to develop argument maps that depict the structure of argumentation that took place during the development and implementation of an interorganizational health information exchange initiative (HIE) that took place in southeast USA. Toulmin's argument model faciliated the portrayal of frame salience in terms of three structural properties (i.e., blindness, indifference, and ownership). The study used these properties to show how the breadth, depth and conspicuity of frame structures changed during the course of the project and demonstrated how these changes impacted both the level of contestation observed in the project as well as project outcomes. In addition to lending insights that are specific to this case, our conceptualization of frame structure lends itself to cross-case comparisons and future theory building as the impact of these argument structures can be evaluated in a multitude of different contexts.

Multimodal

Multimodal

Politicization of EU Development Policy: The Role of EU External Perceptions (Case of Ukraine)

AbstractThis article highlights the role of external audiences and their perceptions in analysing the politicization of EU development policy. We analyse how EU foreign assistance is understood in two different intermediary arenas of politicization – elites in different societal sectors and media – within Ukraine, a major recipient of EU aid. By investigating to what extent EU assistance is perceived to be politicized, in terms of salience and polarization we contribute to the debate on outside‐in politicization. Applying a perceptual approach to EU foreign policy studies, we focus on Ukrainian images of Self in its relation to the EU as a development actor and on Ukraine's evaluations of EU assistance. We consult the theory of framing and propose an operationalization of salience in terms of visibility, cultural congruence and emotive charge. We use the typology of cognitive, evaluative and affective images from political psychology to operationalize the notion of polarization.

The Many Faces of Wonderful Indonesia: Tourism Brand in 16 Countries Online News Sites

Media portrayal has implications for the position of places in the growing regional and international competition for various resources such as tourism, investments and businesses. Public relations campaigns are one of the instruments to counter negative perception and proactively promote a positive image of a place. This research aims to analyze the image of Indonesian tourism brand ‘Wonderful Indonesia’. It focuses on the news from online mainstream media in 16 countries; namely the main target market of Indonesian tourism. News saliency in terms of visibility and sentiment indicate how the media see the tourism brand ‘Wonderful Indonesia’ and the destinations as well. Content analysis was conducted on 336 news articles posted in 4 (four) months. This research also compared ‘Wonderful Indonesia’ with tourism brands belonging to Malaysian (‘Truly Asia’) and Thailand (‘Amazing Thailand’). Less than half of the online news is relevant with the country’s tourism brand and is concentrated within 3 (three) countries: Singapore, Australia and the United Kingdom. The same tendency was also found in other brands, indicating that news placement and news making was not the game in town when it comes to marketing and PR–ing tourism brand

Understanding Why Behavioral Interventions Pose Challenges - Using Cultural Domain Analysis to Compare Malnutrition Risk Perception in 6 Global Contexts

Abstract Objectives Within formative research to inform behavioral interventions since 2013, we have sought to understand community risk perceptions toward nutrition-related illnesses. This analysis compares findings from 6 countries to 1) describe the extent to which nutrition-related illnesses are salient to community members, and 2) to compare malnutrition risk perception across cultural contexts. Methods We conducted formative research in 6 countries between 2013–2018 to inform preventative nutrition interventions where behavior change was a focus. In both rural and urban sites of each country context, we used two ethnographic methods for cultural domain analysis. Free listing of ‘childhood illnesses’ was conducted in Malawi (n = 64), Mozambique (n = 115), Nigeria (n = 81), Marshall Islands (n = 86), Solomon Islands (n = 89), and Kiribati (n = 84). Smith's statistic (S) was used to assess illness term salience. The most salient terms in each setting were then pile sorted by participants who were asked to sort illness terms by perceived severity/seriousness for young child health. Data were analyzed using ANTHROPAC. Semi-structured interview data contextualized and triangulated findings. Results Across 6 global contexts, community members perceived nutrition-related illnesses to be less serious/severe than other childhood illnesses. Consistently, the most salient child illness terms identified were malaria/fever, flu/cough, and stomachache/diarrhea. Terms referring to malnutrition were mentioned in just half of the country contexts, with iron deficiency anemia (‘loss of blood’) and wasting-related terms the most salient. Local terms referring to the biomedical equivalent of stunting did not exist in most contexts. Most participants categorized nutrition-related illness terms into ‘least serious/severe’ or ‘moderately serious/severe’ rather than ‘most serious/severe’ where other more salient childhood illnesses were placed. Interview data corroborated these findings, revealing an important discrepancy between the priorities of global nutrition practitioners and the communities with whom they work, regardless of cultural or geographic context. Conclusions This study provides insight into why nutrition interventions where behavior change is needed may face challenges achieving desired effectiveness. Funding Sources Not applicable.

From Novelty to Normalization? How Journalists Use the Term “Fake News” in their Reporting

ABSTRACT During recent years, worries about fake news have been a salient aspect of mediated debates. However, the ubiquitous and fuzzy usage of the term in news reporting has led more and more scholars and other public actors to call for its abandonment in public discourse altogether. Given this status as a controversial but arguably effective buzzword in news coverage, we know surprisingly little about exactly how journalists use the term in their reporting. By means of a quantitative content analysis, this study offers empirical evidence on this question. Using the case of Austria, where discussions around fake news have been ubiquitous during recent years, we analyzed all news articles mentioning the term “fake news” in major daily newspapers between 2015 and 2018 (N = 2,967). We find that journalistic reporting on fake news shifts over time from mainly describing the threat of disinformation online, to a more normalized and broad usage of the term in relation to attacks on legacy news media. Furthermore, news reports increasingly use the term in contexts completely unrelated to disinformation or media attacks. In using the term this way, journalists arguably contribute not only to term salience but also to a questionable normalization process.

The Role of Saliency in Learning First Words.

In word learning, one key accomplishment is the reference, that is, the linking of a word to its referent. According to classical theories, the term reference captures a mental event: A person uses a word to mentally recall a concept of an entity (an object or event) in order to bring it into the mental focus of an interaction. The developmental literature proposes different approaches regarding how children accomplish this link. Although researchers agree that multiple processes (within and across phonological, lexical, and semantic areas) are responsible for word learning, recent research has highlighted the role of saliency and perception as crucial factors in the early phases of word learning. Generally speaking, whereas some approaches to solving the reference problem attribute a greater role to the referent’s properties being salient, others emphasize the social context that is needed to select the appropriate referent. In this review, we aim to systematize terminology and propose that the reason why assessments of the impact of saliency on word learning are controversial is that definitions of the term saliency reveal different weightings of the importance that either perceptual or social stimuli have for the learning process. We propose that defining early word learning in terms of paying attention to salient stimuli is too narrow. Instead, we emphasize that a new link between a word and its referent will succeed if a stimulus is relevant for the child.

The Corporate Social Responsibility of Ukrainian Agroholdings: the Stakeholder Approach Revisited

The agricultural sector in Ukraine and other transitional and developing countries is distinguished by the prominence of agroholdings, i.e., large-scale industrialized corporations, that offer extensive support to their stakeholders through the corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. The stakeholder approach as a part of business ethics scholarship explains stakeholder salience in terms of the turbulence of the business environment. Drawing on the Luhmannian theory of complex social systems, the present paper shows this turbulence to be a relative concept that makes sense primarily in relation to the limited ability of dominant formal institutions, such as the function systems, to process the complexity of the societal environment. In line with this argument, the Ukrainian agroholdings are shown to direct their CSR efforts to stakeholders whose salience arises out of the transition-specific institutional shortcomings, such as the imperfections of land and labor markets. Paradoxically, the Ukrainian institutional environment has been conducive not only to the rise of agroholdings but also to the emergence of societal expectations which the agroholdings must face. The broader business ethics implication of the argument is the functional equivalence of the discretionary CSR activities and the quality of the dominant formal institutions, such as the function systems.

Exploring the identity of audit committee members of New Zealand listed companies

We focus on the attributes of audit committee members at an individual level through investigating their role‐based identity; this approach represents a departure from the traditional approach of measuring their independence and financial expertise. The data revealed that there is a wide range of backgrounds and attributes identified by New Zealand audit committee members as being helpful in performing their responsibilities. Members’ motivation and justification for serving on the audit committees played a significant role in verifying their identity salience in terms of being an audit committee member. Regulators and other corporate governance stakeholders may benefit from a further understanding of the reciprocal relationship between an audit committee mechanism and its members’ identity salience.

The Impact of Topic Characteristics and Threat on Willingness to Engage with Wikipedia Articles: Insights from Laboratory Experiments.

A growing body of research aims to identify the factors that motivate people to make contributions in Wikipedia. We conducted two laboratory experiments to investigate the connections between topic characteristics, perception of threat, and willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. In Study 1 (N = 83), we examined how topic familiarity, topic controversiality, and mortality salience influenced participants’ willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. We presented the introduction parts of 20 Wikipedia articles and asked participants to rate each article with respect to familiarity and controversiality. In addition, we experimentally manipulated participants’ level of mortality salience in terms of the amount of threat they experienced when reading the article. Participants also indicated their willingness to engage with a particular article. The results revealed that familiar and controversial topics increased the willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. Although mortality salience increased accessibility of death-related thoughts, it did not result in any changes in people’s willingness to work with the articles. The aim of Study 2 (N = 90) was to replicate the effects of topic characteristics by following a similar procedure. We additionally manipulated uncertainty salience by assigning participants to three experimental conditions: uncertainty salience, certainty salience, and non-salience. As expected, familiar and controversial topics were of high interest in terms of willingness to contribute. However, the manipulation of uncertainty salience did not yield any significant results despite the emergence of negative emotional states. In sum, we demonstrated that topic characteristics were factors that substantially influenced people’s willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles whereas perceived threat was not.

A novel application of cultural consensus models to evaluate conservation education programs.

Conservation professionals recognize the need to evaluate education initiatives with a flexible approach that is culturally appropriate. Cultural-consensus theory (CCT) provides a framework for measuring the extent to which beliefs are communally held and has long been applied by social scientists. In a conservation-education context, we applied CCT and used free lists (i.e., a list of items on a topic stated in order of cultural importance) and domain analysis (analysis of how free lists go together within a cultural group) to evaluate a conservation education program in which we used a children's picture book to increase knowledge about and empathy for a critically endangered mammal, the Javan slow loris (Nycticebus javanicus). We extracted free lists of keywords generated by students (n = 580 in 18 schools) from essays they wrote before and after the education program. In 2 classroom sessions conducted approximately 18 weeks apart, we asked students to write an essay about their knowledge of the target species and then presented a book and several activities about slow loris ecology. Prior to the second session, we asked students to write a second essay. We generated free lists from both essays, quantified salience of terms used, and conducted minimal residuals factor analysis to determine presence of cultural domains surrounding slow lorises in each session. Students increased their use of words accurately associated with slow loris ecology and conservation from 43% in initial essays to 76% in final essays. Domain coherence increased from 22% to 47% across schools. Fifteen factors contributed to the domain slow loris. Between the first and second essays, factors that showed the greatest change were feeding ecology and slow loris as a forest protector, which increased 7-fold, and the humancentric factor, which decreased 5-fold. As demonstrated by knowledge retention and creation of unique stories and conservation opinions, children achieved all six levels of Bloom's taxonomy of learning domains. Free from the constraints of questionnaires and surveys, CCT methods provide a promising avenue to evaluate conservation education programs.

Family firms and the interests of non‐family stakeholders: The influence of family managers' affective commitment and family salience in terms of power

The goal of this research is to analyze the heterogeneity of family firms in the normative attention to their non‐family stakeholders. With this aim, we suggest that the psychological process of top family managers in terms of individual affective commitment to their firms is a key variable to explain that heterogeneity. However, we also suggest a moderator effect of the family stakeholder salience in the relationship between the managers' affective commitment to the firm and the establishment of firm goals toward non‐family stakeholders. The results of a hierarchical regression analysis on data obtained from 207 family executives show a significant positive influence of managers' affective commitment on the establishment of goals related both to internal (employees) and external (customers and community) non‐family stakeholders. In addition, we can observe a negative moderator effect of the family utilitarian power—as an indicator of the family stakeholder salience—on the relationship between the family managers' affective commitment and the goals related to non‐family employees.

Unsupervised ensemble ranking of terms in electronic health record notes based on their importance to patients

BackgroundAllowing patients to access their own electronic health record (EHR) notes through online patient portals has the potential to improve patient-centered care. However, EHR notes contain abundant medical jargon that can be difficult for patients to comprehend. One way to help patients is to reduce information overload and help them focus on medical terms that matter most to them. Targeted education can then be developed to improve patient EHR comprehension and the quality of care. ObjectiveThe aim of this work was to develop FIT (Finding Important Terms for patients), an unsupervised natural language processing (NLP) system that ranks medical terms in EHR notes based on their importance to patients. MethodsWe built FIT on a new unsupervised ensemble ranking model derived from the biased random walk algorithm to combine heterogeneous information resources for ranking candidate terms from each EHR note. Specifically, FIT integrates four single views (rankers) for term importance: patient use of medical concepts, document-level term salience, word co-occurrence based term relatedness, and topic coherence. It also incorporates partial information of term importance as conveyed by terms’ unfamiliarity levels and semantic types. We evaluated FIT on 90 expert-annotated EHR notes and used the four single-view rankers as baselines. In addition, we implemented three benchmark unsupervised ensemble ranking methods as strong baselines. ResultsFIT achieved 0.885 AUC-ROC for ranking candidate terms from EHR notes to identify important terms. When including term identification, the performance of FIT for identifying important terms from EHR notes was 0.813 AUC-ROC. Both performance scores significantly exceeded the corresponding scores from the four single rankers (P<0.001). FIT also outperformed the three ensemble rankers for most metrics. Its performance is relatively insensitive to its parameter. ConclusionsFIT can automatically identify EHR terms important to patients. It may help develop future interventions to improve quality of care. By using unsupervised learning as well as a robust and flexible framework for information fusion, FIT can be readily applied to other domains and applications.

How Much is this Clause? Debt Managers on Pricing Bond Contract Terms

Whether bond contract terms are priced is a classic question at the intersection of law and finance. One contract provision, the Collective Action Clause or CAC in sovereign bonds, has been the subject of extensive analysis in an effort to answer this question. The research, much of it quantitative, has yielded seemingly contradictory results. In this article, we come at the pricing question from a different perspective: we ask government officials responsible for executing their countries’ bond issuance strategies, how and why they choose particular contract terms in their bonds, and specifically about the relevance of pricing information to their choices. Contrary to the theories behind the empirical studies—which hold that contract terms such as CACs should affect governments’ borrowing costs, and that governments should choose terms to minimize these costs—debt managers report that they and the investors who buy their debt normally prefer contracts designed to minimize any impact of terms such as CACs on bond prices. In other words, contracts are deliberately designed to reduce the salience of terms described as “legal” (as distinct from “financial”), and to make it difficult to detect their impact on price in any given issue. The implication is that this approach would allow for the development of optimal contracts over time, without detracting from a government’s long-term debt management strategy.

Toward a Unified Socio-Cognitive Framework for Salience in Language.

To begin with, consider the following four statements, one by one: The word seemed salient because it was the first word that came to my mind. The word seemed salient because it was the first word that came to my mind in this context. The word seemed salient because I had not expected to hear it in this context. The word seemed salient because I had never heard it before. It is not unlikely that all four statements seem plausible, although 1 and 2 are actually opposed to 4 and 3 respectively. Apparently, then, words can be considered salient because they are… highly familiar and strongly entrenched, highly expected in a given context, highly unexpected in a given context, or totally unfamiliar. Surprisingly, linguists have actually relied on at least three of these four scenarios for defining the notion of salience (see also Bowman et al., 2013, for a psychological perspective). Scenario (1) lies at the heart of Giora's idea of salience as what is “foremost on one's mind […] stored and coded in the mental lexicon” (Giora, 2003, p. 15). Scenario (2) accords with Geeraerts' view of onomasiological salience in terms of “the relative frequency with which a signifiant is associated with a given signifie” (Geeraerts, forthcoming), i.e., the frequency with which a word is used to denote a given piece of experience. Scenario (3) corresponds to understanding salience in terms of surprisal, as, e.g., proposed by Racz: “A segment is cognitively salient if it has a large surprisal value when compared to an array of language input” (Racz, 2013, p. 37; see also Friston, 2010; Clark, 2013; Fine et al., 2013; Divjak, 2016). Scenario (4) represents an extreme variant of type (3) which builds on memory-based novelty rather than context-based surprise (see Barto et al., 2013, for this distinction). The four scenarios can be summarized systematically by a cross-tabulation of two types of sources of expectations, viz. long-term memory and current context, with two types of mechanisms of salience, viz. confirmation and violation of expectations: Salience by context-free entrenchment: confirmation of expectations based on knowledge stored in long-term memory. Salience by contexual entrenchment: confirmation of expectations derived from the probability of occurrence in the current context. Salience by surprisal: violation of expectations derived from the probability of occurrence in the current context. Salience by novelty: violation of expectations based on lack of stored knowledge. In this paper we propose a unified framework for salience which reconciles these opposing conceptions by showing that they focus on different aspects of the interaction between knowledge, context, expectation, and external input.

Augmenting basic colour terms in english

AbstractIn an unconstrained colour naming experiment conducted over the web, 330 participants named 600 colour samples in English. The 30 most frequent monolexemic colour terms were analyzed with regards to frequency, consensus among genders, response times, consistency of use, denotative volume in the Munsell and OSA colour spaces and inter‐experimental agreement. Each of these measures served for ranking colour term salience; rankings were then combined to give a composite index of basicness. The results support the extension of English inventory from the 11 basic colour terms of Berlin and Kay to 13 terms by the addition of lilac and turquoise. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 41, 32–42, 2016

Social relevance drives viewing behavior independent of low-level salience in rhesus macaques.

Quantifying attention to social stimuli during the viewing of complex social scenes with eye tracking has proven to be a sensitive method in the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders years before average clinical diagnosis. Rhesus macaques provide an ideal model for understanding the mechanisms underlying social viewing behavior, but to date no comparable behavioral task has been developed for use in monkeys. Using a novel scene-viewing task, we monitored the gaze of three rhesus macaques while they freely viewed well-controlled composed social scenes and analyzed the time spent viewing objects and monkeys. In each of six behavioral sessions, monkeys viewed a set of 90 images (540 unique scenes) with each image presented twice. In two-thirds of the repeated scenes, either a monkey or an object was replaced with a novel item (manipulated scenes). When viewing a repeated scene, monkeys made longer fixations and shorter saccades, shifting from a rapid orienting to global scene contents to a more local analysis of fewer items. In addition to this repetition effect, in manipulated scenes, monkeys demonstrated robust memory by spending more time viewing the replaced items. By analyzing attention to specific scene content, we found that monkeys strongly preferred to view conspecifics and that this was not related to their salience in terms of low-level image features. A model-free analysis of viewing statistics found that monkeys that were viewed earlier and longer had direct gaze and redder sex skin around their face and rump, two important visual social cues. These data provide a quantification of viewing strategy, memory and social preferences in rhesus macaques viewing complex social scenes, and they provide an important baseline with which to compare to the effects of therapeutics aimed at enhancing social cognition.

Calculating Saliency Using the Dihedral Group &lt;italic&gt;D&lt;/italic&gt;&lt;sub&gt;4&lt;/sub&gt;

A salient image region is a part of the scene that stands out relative to neighboring regions. By that we mean that a human observer would experience a salient region as being more prominent. It is, however, important to quantify saliency in terms of a mathematical quantity that lends itself to measurements. Different metrics have been shown to correlate with human fixation data. These include contrast, brightness, and orienting gradients calculated at different image scales. In this paper, we show that saliency can be measured by the transformations pertaining to the dihedral group D4, which is the symmetry group of the square image grid. Our results show that salient features can be defined as the image features that are most asymmetric in their surroundings.