Unfamiliar Scenes Research Articles

Familiarity Alters the Bandwidth of Perceptual Awareness.

Results from paradigms like change blindness and inattentional blindness indicate that observers are unaware of numerous aspects of the visual world. However, intuition suggests that perceptual experience is richer than these results indicate. Why does it feel like we see so much when the data suggests we see so little? One possibility stems from the fact that experimental studies always present observers with stimuli that they have never seen before. Meanwhile, when forming intuitions about perceptual experience, observers reflect on their experiences with scenes with which they are highly familiar (e.g., their office). Does prior experience with a scene change the bandwidth of perceptual awareness? Here, we asked if observers were better at noticing alterations to the periphery in familiar scenes compared with unfamiliar scenes. Here, we found that observers noticed changes to the periphery more frequently with familiar stimuli. Signal detection theoretic analyses revealed that when observers are unfamiliar with a stimulus, they are less sensitive at noticing (d') and are more conservative in their response criterion (c). Taken together, these results suggest that prior knowledge expands the bandwidth of perceptual awareness. It should be stressed that these results challenge the widely held idea that prior knowledge fills in perception. Overall, these findings highlight how prior knowledge plays an important role in determining the limits of perceptual experience and is an important factor to consider when attempting to reconcile the tension between empirical observation and personal introspection.

Inter-Domain Invariant Cross-Domain Object Detection Using Style and Content Disentanglement for In-Vehicle Images

The accurate detection of relevant vehicles, pedestrians, and other targets on the road plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety of autonomous driving. In recent years, object detectors based on Transformers or CNNs have achieved excellent performance in the fully supervised paradigm. However, when the trained model is directly applied to unfamiliar scenes where the training data and testing data have different distributions statistically, the model’s performance may decrease dramatically. To address this issue, unsupervised domain adaptive object detection methods have been proposed. However, these methods often exhibit decreasing performance when the gap between the source and target domains increases. Previous works mainly focused on utilizing the style gap to reduce the domain gap while ignoring the content gap. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel method called IDI-SCD that effectively addresses both the style and content gaps simultaneously. Firstly, the domain gap is reduced by disentangling it into the style gap and content gap, generating corresponding intermediate domains in the meanwhile. Secondly, during training, we focus on one single domain gap at a time to achieve inter-domain invariance. That is, the content gap is tackled while maintaining the style gap, and vice versa. In addition, the style-invariant loss is used to narrow down the style gap, and the mean teacher self-training framework is used to narrow down the content gap. Finally, we introduce a multiscale fusion strategy to enhance the quality of pseudo-labels, which mainly focus on enhancing the detection performance for extreme-scale objects (very large or very small objects). We conduct extensive experiments on four mainstream datasets of in-vehicle images. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and its superiority over most of the existing methods.

Some unusual scenes in the tombs of the members of the modern state (1549-1069 BC) in ancient Egypt, on the western bank of Luxor

The ancient Egyptian civilization expressed many noble human values, which were a vivid expression of the reality of life at all levels, whether public life, religious life, or funeral life in accordance with their spiritual and temporal perceptions. This expression was manifested through tomb scenes, especially with regard to The western mainland of the ancient city of Luxor, and in particular in the era of the New Kingdom, in addition to the natural scenes that were included in the walls of these tombs, there were some unfamiliar scenes that were not repeated very often.

Home and Away: On Visiting and Distanced Vision

Home and Away: On Visiting and Distanced Vision Vanessa Warne (bio) In his 1895 short story “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes,” H. G. Wells dwells on what it means to be physically at home but cognitively away. The story’s protagonist, Sidney Davidson, is injured when lightning strikes the laboratory in London where he works. Unable to see his surroundings, his visual sense relocated to the other side of the world, Davidson watches penguins nesting on an island he has never visited, his viewpoint on this distant and unfamiliar scene shifting as he moves around London. While he knows from the sound of familiar voices and the feel of surfaces that he is still at home, both his vision and attention are far away. More fortunate than Davidson in the matter of laboratory accidents, participants in the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) 2022 online conference were, in our own way, both at home and away, visiting the conference’s virtual spaces at the same time that we were present for the day-to-day of our home lives. As we presented and heard work proposed many months earlier, we also became involved in the goings-on of each other’s homes. People we had met with previously in a series of interchangeable conference rooms spoke with us from their kitchen tables. We opened up temporary windows into our living spaces where, in addition to the predictable piles of books, piles of laundry waited to be folded. Dogs and cats gained conference-celebrity status, and we prefaced papers with apologies for the piano lesson happening in the next room. While we habitually both develop our ideas and write them up at home, the domestic origins of our conference papers tend to be obscured by their presentation in public spaces. This conference was an exception. We did our visiting, talking, and thinking while sitting in our most comfortable chairs and wearing shabby slippers; at least, I did. [End Page 656] It is, of course, to the great credit of our conference hosts, Carolyn Lesjak and Margaret Linley, that we were able to shake off our disappointment at yet another pandemic-necessitated pivot and make the most of the wonderful online event they created. In addition to the unexpected pleasure of visiting one another’s homes and campus offices, albeit virtually, other gains lessened our sense of loss. These included our lowered environmental impact and the reduction of barriers to participation, such as the cost of travel, challenges related to caregiving duties, and disabilities that are too often inadequately accommodated. We also came to a new appreciation of the beings with whom we share our homes, not least of them the housemates who gifted us all the internet bandwidth they could spare. Visiting across many time zones, we were reminded too of just how widely dispersed our homes and home institutions are, with British colleagues at the end of a long day joining West Coasters on their first cup of coffee to share ideas. Invited to suggest papers from the conference for publication, I chose three papers connected by their interest in spaces where people live or meet. While it’s possible I was predisposed to admire these papers by our shared experience of at-home-ness, I deeply appreciate the invitation these papers extend to us both to return to familiar rooms in the Victorian literary canon and to think in new ways about how built spaces either support or limit social connection. In his essay, Jon Rachmani takes up Bleak House (1852–53) and its definitions of home, offering a rich analysis of Phil Squod’s experiences of the city, of selfhood, and of unconventional forms of domestic space. In an essay on Little Dorrit (1855–57), Sarah Mason focuses on sensory experience and social connection, again in the context of the city. Alerting us to the role of London’s Iron Bridge in the novel’s depiction of intimacy, she contrasts the surprising quiet of the bridge with, for example, the Clennam house’s permeability to noise. And, returning us to one of the most readily visualized yet complex domestic spaces in nineteenth-century literature, Summer...

Surrealism in the Hieronymus Bush Paintings

The first chapter of this research deals with the problem that the reseach addresses , its importance, and the need for it. The chapter also included the purpose of the research (the discovery of the mechanism of the work of Surrealism in the drawings of Hieronymus Bosch), within the period (1480-1516). In the relevant sources, the researchers concluded the first chapter by specifying the terms in the title of the research.
 The second chapter includes the theoretical framework and the previous studies. The theoretical framework consists of two sections dealing with the first topic: The Conceptual Dimensions of Surrealism, as well as the Total Concepts on which Surrealism was based.
 While the third chapter included research procedures, including the research community of (49), the nature of the selection of the research sample (4) plates, the procedures that were taken in the preparation of the research tool as well as the analysis of the research sample. The fourth chapter included the results of the research, conclusions, recommendations and proposals, and the results of the research:
 1- Surrealism in Bush (Bush) achieved a large percentage after revealed many approaches in style and indications and content.
 2- Approaches (Bush) in his Surrealist approach of the style (Salvador Dali). Both of them employ real things, simulated or after the change in structure as the composition and variance, as well as the approach to the quality of the subject.
 3- The imagination has an import
 ant role and space in the art of (Bush) because he was able to present subjects in unfamiliar scenes in tangible reality

Submillimeter fMRI reveals an extensive, fine-grained and functionally-relevant scene-processing network in monkeys.

Primates are endowed with a dedicated cortical network for processing visual scene information, which is critical for navigation and object retrieval. Previous studies showed that this scene network encompasses three to maximally five cortical regions in humans and monkeys. Using submillimeter resolution fMRI (0.22 mm3 voxels), and two entirely different but carefully controlled stimulus sets, we demonstrate a robust, fine-grained, yet three-fold more extensive scene-processing network in macaques compared to previous studies. The core network, selective for both familiar and unfamiliar scenes, encompasses eleven patches distributed over all cerebral lobes and is surprisingly elaborated in frontal cortex. Five additional non-core scene-selective patches show scene selectivity, but only for places familiar to the monkeys. Notably, resting-state fMRI revealed that the frontal and temporo-parietal scene-selective patches form an intrinsically-connected network, largely segregated from other category-selective networks. Moreover, the strength of the functional connectivity across nodes of the network is a predictor of functional scene responses of nodes belonging to this network. Hence, this scene processing network is functionally-relevant. In summary, the scene-processing system is considerably more complex than previously documented, consisting of functionally interconnected patches throughout all cortical lobes.

Triple-Sigmoid Activation Function for Deep Open-Set Recognition

Traditional models for various machine learning problems such as image classification perform well only under the assumption of a closed set. This implies that inputs must belong to the classes for which the models were trained. Data collected in the real world may not belong to any finite set of classes, and training a model with an infinite number of classes would obviously be impossible. Rather than incorrectly classifying outlier inputs that belong to unknown classes as members of one of the classes on which the model was trained, learning models must recognize and reject such data samples, or request human assistance in labeling them. For example, when a self-driving vehicle detects unfamiliar scenes or objects, it must notify the driver and hand over control. Various models have been proposed to address the open-set problem. However, the existing models are generally complex or use complicated techniques such as generative adversarial networks and auto-encoders, and their efficiency is not proportional to their complexity. In this study, we propose Triple-Sigmoid as a simple activation function comprised of three Sigmoid functions. Using Triple-Sigmoid in the last activation layer of any deep neural network model enables the model to recognize outliers. Although Triple-Sigmoid can be applied to a variety of machine learning problems, including semi-supervised learning, active learning, and incremental learning, we only investigated the open-set recognition problem in this work. The results of numerous experiments are presented to validate that substituting Triple-Sigmoid for conventional activations such as Softmax and Sigmoid not only retained performance in closed-set settings, but also significantly improved performance in open-set configurations. Furthermore, these results demonstrate that Triple-Sigmoid significantly outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods. Source code for the proposed model is available at https://github.com/dinhtuantran/triple-sigmoid.

The challenges of COVID-19 for people with dementia with Lewy bodies and family caregivers.

The challenges of COVID-19 for people with dementia with Lewy bodies and family caregivers.

Travelling for sex, attending gay-specific venues, and HIV-related sexual risk among men who have sex with men in Ontario, Canada

Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM) remain the group most affected by HIV in Canada. Travelling for sex and attendance at specific venues for sex have been linked to elevated HIV risk among GBMSM, but most research on these mobilities and sexual health has focused on GBMSM living in large cities. The purpose of this study was to explore HIV-related sexual risk among GBMSM from mid-sized cities and rural regions who attend gay-specific venues and/or travel for sex. A cross-sectional online survey was completed by a convenience sample of individuals (n = 526) self-identifying as LGBTQ who lived, worked, or studied in Waterloo Region, a mixed urban-rural region in the southwestern part of Ontario, Canada. Analyses for the current study were restricted to those identifying as GBMSM (n = 269). Multinomial logistic regression models were created to explore travelling outside of the Region for sex, as well as recent attendance at gay-specific venues, and their associations with a contextual measure of HIV-related sexual transmission risk. Individuals reporting high HIV risk were significantly more likely to travel outside of Waterloo Region for sex than individuals reporting no HIV risk (OR = 3.08; 95% CI: 1.20, 7.93). The association between travel and risk was strengthened after controlling for education, marital status, sexual orientation, gender modality, and social support (OR = 5.07; 95% CI: 1.73, 14.87). GBMSM who reside outside of large cities may travel farther, enter unfamiliar scenes, or be less privy to information disseminated through current health promotion initiatives for GBMSM in large cities. Due to the dynamic geographic status of GBMSM travelling for sex and attendance at venues, HIV prevention initiatives that target these individuals may benefit from additional conceptualization of health promotion delivery in terms of social and sexual networks, rather than simply by place of residence.

(INTER)PERSONAL STATEMENTS: A DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS OF COLLEGE APPLICATION ESSAYS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH BY US AMERICAN AND BRAZILIAN STUDENTS

The field of discourse analysis has produced extensive research on various aspects of genres that permeate everyday life as well as on the specialized discourses of academic and professional communities. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of studies on the personal statement, which, despite being a key genre of the admissions processes to globalized (and English language-dominated) institutions of higher education, remains unexplored in Brazilian educational culture. The present study addresses this gap by examining samples of this unique genre produced by US American and Brazilian students admitted to English-language universities. The analysis principally draws from Dominique Maingueneau’s scholarship on the “scene” of a genre and the Bakhtin Circle’s ideas on the social and generic nature of utterances. The main purpose is to compare and contrast rhetorical appeals to ethos and pathos made by both groups of students engaged in the high-stakes enterprise of writing about their values, beliefs, and goals with unknown readers/evaluators in mind. The results shed light on some of the linguistic and intercultural challenges that Brazilian students face when communicating in English within unfamiliar scenes of writing, the knowledge of which can shed light on ways to facilitate successful intercultural communication.

A Novel Convolutional Neural Network Based Localization System for Monocular Images

The authors present a robust and extendable localization system for monocular images. To have both robustness toward noise factors and extendibility to unfamiliar scenes simultaneously, our system combines traditional content-based image retrieval structure with CNN feature extraction model to localize monocular images. The core model of the system is a deep CNN feature extraction model. The feature extraction model can map an image to a d-dimension space where image pairs in the real word have smaller Euclidean distances. The feature extraction model is achieved using a deep Convnet modified from GoogLeNet. A special way to train the feature extraction model is proposed in the article using localization results from Cambridge Landmarks dataset. Through experiments, it is shown that the system is robust to noise factors supported by high level CNN features. Furthermore, the authors show that the system has a powerful extendibility to other unfamiliar scenes supported by a feature extract model's generic property and structure.

Anterior Paraventricular Thalamus to Nucleus Accumbens Projection Is Involved in Feeding Behavior in a Novel Environment.

Foraging food in a novel environment is essential for survival. Animals coordinate the complex motivated states and decide whether to initiate feeding or escape from unfamiliar scenes. Neurons in the paraventricular thalamic nucleus (PVT) receive multiple inputs from the hypothalamus, forebrain, and caudal brainstem that are known to regulate feeding behavior. The PVT neurons also project to the forebrain regions that are involved in reward and motivation. Notably, the PVT neurons projecting to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) are activated when an incentive stimulus is presented. Optogenetic activation of the PVT-NAc path has been shown to increase the motivation for sucrose-seeking in instrumental tasks. However, how the PVT circuitry regulates the feeding behavior in a novel environment remains largely obscure. In the present study, we found that the activity of glutamatergic neurons in the anterior PVT (aPVT) projecting to the NAc dictates the novelty-suppressed feeding behavior in mice. Optogenetic activation of the aPVT-NAc projection increased the feeding time and food consumption in mice under a moderate food restriction in a novel open field where the food was placed in the central area. The exploratory and anxiety-like behaviors, however, were not altered by the aPVT-NAc activation. Our work reveals that activation of the aPVT-NAc pathway in mice generates a motivation to consume food in a novel environment.

Responses of neurons in the medial temporal lobe during encoding and recognition of face-scene pairs

Associations between co-occurring stimuli are formed in the medial temporal lobe (MTL). Here, we recorded from 508 single and multi-units in the MTL while participants learned and retrieved associations between unfamiliar faces and unfamiliar scenes. Participant's memories for the face-scene pairs were later tested using cued recall and recognition tests. The results show that neurons in the parahippocampal cortex are most likely to respond with changes from baseline firing to these stimuli during both encoding and recognition, and this region showed the greatest proportion of cells showing differential responses depending on the phase of the task. Furthermore, we found that cells in the parahippocampal cortex that responded during both encoding and recognition were more likely to show decreases from baseline firing than cells that were only recruited during recognition, which were more likely to show increases in firing. Since all stimuli shown during recognition were familiar to the patients, these findings suggest that with familiarity, cell responses become more sharply tuned. No neurons in this region, however, were found to be affected by recombining face/scene pairs. Neurons in other MTL regions, particularly the hippocampus, were sensitive to stimulus configurations. Thus, the results support the idea that neurons in the parahippocampal cortex code for features of stimuli and neurons in the hippocampus are more likely to represent their specific configurations.

Unfamiliar Walking Movements Are Detected Early in the Visual Stream: An fMRI Study

Two experiments investigated the network involved in the visual perception of walking. Video clips of forward and backward walk (real walk direction) were shown either as recorded, or reversed in time (rendering). In Experiment 1 (identification task), participants were asked to indicate whether or not the stimulus was time-reversed. In Experiment 2 (free-viewing), participants viewed the video clips passively. Identification accuracy was good with the more familiar scene, that is, when the visual walk was in the direction of the facing orientation, and at chance level in the opposite case. In both experiments, the temporo-occipital junction (TOJ) was activated more strongly by unfamiliar than familiar scenes. Only in Experiment 1 intraparietal, superior temporal, and inferior temporal regions were also activated. TOJ activation signals the detection in unfamiliar scenes of a mismatch between facing orientation and visual movement direction. We argue that TOJ response to a mismatch prevents the further processing of the visual input required to identify temporal inversions. When no mismatch is detected (familiar stimuli), TOJ would, instead, be involved in the kinematic analysis that makes such identification possible. The study demonstrates that unfamiliar walking movements are detected earlier than so far assumed along the visual movement processing stream.

The DIE is cast: The continuing evolution of intercultural communication's favorite classroom exercise

This article reviews the origins and continual evolution of what may be the most widely used exercise in intercultural communication workshops and classes. The popular DIE exercise, developed in the 1970s, was derived from General Semantics exercises presented in the Speech discipline decades before Intercultural Communication emerged as a field in itself. The exercise, which is known by its ominous acronym ‘‘DIE,’’ asks people to observe an unusual object or a photograph of an unfamiliar scene, and then first ‘‘describe’’ what they see, then ‘‘intferpret’’ possible meanings, and finally to ‘‘evaluate’’ by giving their value judgments. While the DIE exercise has been a favorite among teachers and professional trainers in the area of intercultural communication with variations in format and applications for three decades, the ambiguity between interpretation and evaluation and the ominous acronym itself have been problematic. This article proposes a DAE version utilizing a significant Korean word [dae] as a more felicitous acronym: describe, analyze, evaluate. This avoids the negative association of the DIE acronym and the often mentioned ambiguity of the words interpretation and evaluation. In addition, attention to other cultural perspectives is signaled through the use of a non-English word as the name of the exercise.

Abnormal fMRI Adaptation to Unfamiliar Faces in a Case of Developmental Prosopamnesia

In rare cases, damage to the temporal lobe causes a selective impairment in the ability to learn new faces, a condition known as prosopamnesia [1]. Here we present the case of an individual with prosopamnesia in the absence of any acquired structural lesion. "C" shows intact processing of simple and complex nonface objects, but her ability to learn new faces is severely impaired. We used a neural marker of perceptual learning known as repetition suppression to examine functioning within C's fusiform face area (FFA), a region of cortex involved in face perception [2]. For comparison, we examined repetition suppression in the scene-selective parahippocampal place area (PPA) [3]. As expected, normal controls showed significant region-specific attenuation of neural activity across repetitions of each stimulus class. C also showed normal attenuation within the PPA to familiar and unfamiliar scenes, and within the FFA to familiar faces. Critically, however, she failed to show any adaptive change within the FFA for repeated unfamiliar faces, despite a face-specific blood-oxygen-dependent response (BOLD) response in her FFA during viewing of face stimuli. Our findings suggest that in developmental prosopamnesia, the FFA cannot maintain stable representations of new faces for subsequent recall or recognition.

Behavioural Lateralisation of the Tetrapod Type in the Zebrafish ( Brachydanio Rerio)

MIKLÓSKI, A., R. J. ANDREW AND H. SAVAGE. Behavioural lateralisation of the tetrapod type in the zebrafish (Brachydanio rerio ). PHYSIOL BEHAV 63(1) 127–135, 1998.—Visual lateralisation resembling that found in a bird (domestic chick) is here demonstrated in a teleost (zebrafish, Brachydanio rerio). Zebrafish predominantly view objects with the body axis close to facing the object (0-20° on either side of facing). Strange objects were viewed at first exposure chiefly with the right frontal field; so was a complex and unfamiliar scene made up of familiar components. In a second trial, using the same stimulus or scene, left frontal viewing tended to be used instead. A familiar partner (a fish of another species) was viewed left frontally. The domestic chick also uses the left eye to view familiar stimuli, shifting to the right when it has to decide what response is appropriate to the object at which it is looking. An empty scene in which nothing could be concealed (and so no response was called for) was viewed by zebrafish with the left eye from the start. In zebrafish and the chick, the right eye is used when it is necessary to inhibit premature response, in order to sustain viewing until a decision is reached, and the left is used when it is necessary to keep an eye on a familiar or clearly empty scene. The findings suggest homology of cerebral lateralisation in teleost fish and tetrapods.

Strategies for Sensor-based Terrain Acquisition by a Mobile Robot

The problem of terrain acquisition presents a special case of robot motion planning. In it, a mobile robot is requested to perform a complete, in some sense, exploration of an unfamiliar scene populated with obstacles (objects) of unknown shapes and dimensions, using some sort of sensory feedback (e.g., vision) and generating as short a path during the operation as possible. The result of such exploration can be, for example, a map of the scene. Algorithms considered so far in literature make strong assumptions about the obstacles - e.g., that they are polygonal- and measure the algorithm performance in terms of the number of constraints describing obstacles, such as the Number of obstacle vertices. In this paper, two formulations of the terrain acquisition problem are considered, differing in what the "complete exploration" means; both assume continuous (on-line) motion planning and obstacles of arbitrary shape. Accordingly, two algorithms are described for acquiring planar terrains, and estimates of the algorithm performance are derived as upper bounds on the lengths of generated paths.

Profiles of the future The revolution in the securities markets

If one of the young gunslingers who manage mutual funds were to do a Rip Van Winkle for about twenty years and then take a walk down Wall Street, he might ffnd the scene as strange as did Rip himself when he came down from the Catskills. This late twentieth century sleeper probably could not find the Stock Exchange in 1990, or at least not recognize it. He would find an unfamiliar scene in the offices of a broker-dealer firm: fewer people, a variety of electronic data processing equipment, and men sitting in front o f cathode ray display screens. He would be struck on all sides by evidence of a revolution in the markets. This revolution has been going on since mid-century, but it has barely begun. The next two decades will almost surely bring about greater change in the structure and operation of the than have all the years of the twentieth century up to 1970. The term securities markets refers to the for trading in o f governmental bodies and corporations that have been publicly distributed. Investors own them, but sometimes they want to sell what they own and buy something else. It is the function of the to do the buying and selling for investors. There are two kinds of markets. One is the organized exchanges, such as the New Y o r k S t o c k Exchange and the American Stock Exchange, which are essentially associations of individuals that provide facilities for trading in and establish rules for trading. among themselves. The other is t he ill-named over-the-counter market, an amorphous group of broker-dealer firms that buy and sell among themselves and with the investing public. The history of the in the United States may be traced back to about the last decade of the eighteenth century. The organized exchanges were formed as private associations with a limited number of members; the over-the-counter

The Coronation of Elizabeth I

The coronation of Edward VII at the beginning of this century was an unfamiliar scene in Westminster Abbey after the long rule of Victoria, and it elicited a spate of scholarly investigations into those ancient ceremonies. As one of the minor fruits of this renewed interest, a controversy was carried on concerning the ceremonial of the coronation of Elizabeth I on 15 January 1559. Three questions occupied the centre of the stage: Who celebrated the mass: Owen Oglethorpe, the bishop who anointed and crowned her, or George Carew, the priest whom she had made dean of the Chapel Royal? Were the consecrated elements elevated during the canon of the mass? Did Elizabeth withdraw during the consecration to the chapel of St. Edward behind the high altar?