Visual Constructs Research Articles

Visual Constructs of Jerusalem ed. by Bianca Kühnel, Galit Noga-Banai, and Hanna Vorholt (review)

Visual Constructs of Jerusalem ed. by Bianca Kühnel, Galit Noga-Banai, and Hanna Vorholt (review)

IDEOLOGIES UNDERLYING THE USE OF PHOTOGRAPHS IN NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF BERSIH 3.0 RALLY: A SOCIAL SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

BERSIH 3.0 rally that was held on 28th April 2012 has witnessed visual war among the mass media in Malaysia which had caused polarization among the Malaysian society. This study aims to analyze how the mainstream and alternative newspapers transfuse their ideology about the rally through visual depiction of the event. Three dominant newspapers namely Utusan Malaysia, The Star and Harakah were chosen based on their political economic background and their high circulations status. Based on the visual constructions of the two mainstream newspapers; Utusan Malaysia and The Star, it is found that both newspapers were critical towards BERSIH 3.0. Apart from that, both newspapers also embedded their own racial agenda in which it was found that Utusan Malaysia tries to associate the rally with the dark tragedy of 13th May 1969 while The Star tries to neutralize the involvement of the Chinese through positive imagery. In contrast, Harakah celebrated the revival and the unity of the people from all races in their struggle towards social justice as the main theme. At the same time, Harakah visually portrayed PAS as a political party that honoured pluralism, gain acceptance from young people and committed with the PR. The research has proved that photo has the capabilities to be a medium to disseminate ideology.

Human Geography: Semiotics of Landscape in Jhumpa Lahiri's Narratives

Through Jhumpa Lahiri's immigrant stories, we are exposed to unending visual constructions which remind us that geography speaks loud in the art world. This paper seeks to address this point besides revealing the specificity of geographical texture of immigrant communities through studying signs and symbols. It is indicated that cultural signs make human landscape in New England the site of struggle for exclusive inscription of ideological values or the locus for dialog and appropriation of meaning(s) in the space. Diverse cultural landmarks which Indian migrants leave on the soil of America picture the landscape with metaphoric dimensions.

Pre-Service Physical Education Teachers’ Discourses on Learning How to Become a Teacher: [Re]Constructing a Professional Identity Based on Visual Evidence

Identity has been used as an analytical tool to capture how teachers work, learn and develop professionally. This paper takes chiefly Gee’s [1] discursive notion of identity to examine the discourses that pre-service physical education teachers used about themselves and others in discussing their teaching practices in the context of their practicum training in school. More specifically, this study aims to identify and characterize the situations of concern [roles, individuals, groups, events, meanings] to the pre-service teachers when learning to be a physical education teacher and when [re]constructing their professional identity through a dialogic relation between talk and images. Nine preservice teachers from the Faculty of Sport, University of Porto participated in this study. Data were gathered using photo elicitation interview technique: photographs and videos, produced by the participants, were used as prompts for discussion in two focus group sessions [2, 3]. We adopted an inductive approach to thematic analysis based on the Grounded Theory coding principles [4, 5], supplemented by a situational analysis [6] to map visual discourses and construct photo-essays [7] upon them. The images portrayed the participants in situations of classroom practice, learning-to-teach resources, social recognition and teachers’ mission. Their discourses upon those photographs and videos recognized the physical education teacher as a type of teacher who: [i] cares for planning duties, carefully prepares their lesson and complies with institutional roles, as planning and teaching; [ii] constantly searches for professional excellence and updates their knowledge [e.g. transferring pedagogical strategies fromother contexts]; [iii] individually/collectively reflects upon their practice, learns and shares knowledge with their colleagues, is in constant development, and builds their identity in allegiance with others [e.g. class observations and mentoring meetings]; and [iv] extends their school practice beyond the instruction tasks and has the power to project and exercise higher roles [e.g. extracurricular roles].

Landscape, complicity and partitioned zones at South Africa Forest and Lubya in Israel-Palestine

In the historical and ideological contests of settler colonial conquest, the making of “landscape” out of land and territory is a powerful instrument in the visual and discursive constructions of nationalist perspectives. This article examines one such site, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) “South Africa Forest” in the Galilee, Israel-Palestine, cultivated upon Lubya, a destroyed Palestinian village. The article explores the significance of trees in dominant narratives of modern political Zionist discourses and non-Israeli Jewish nationalist discourses, in particular. It examines the modes of complicity to which JNF tree-planting has given rise and argues that a state-aligned seaming of spatial divisions, cognitive boundaries and ideological partitions enables the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe, to be “erased from space and consciousness” (Kadman 2008). The article then turns to the film, The Village under the Forest (2013), which focuses on Lubya and South Africa Forest in order to examine what narrative and visual decisions were made in the film's attempt to address complicity with the erasures and bifurcated spatial imaginaries of Israel-Palestine's landscape.

Dissociation between spatial and temporal integration mechanisms in Vernier fusion.

The visual system constructs a percept of the world across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This raises the questions of whether different scales involve separate integration mechanisms and whether spatial and temporal factors are linked via spatio-temporal reference frames. We investigated this using Vernier fusion, a phenomenon in which the features of two Vernier stimuli presented in close spatio-temporal proximity are fused into a single percept. With increasing spatial offset, perception changes dramatically from a single percept into apparent motion and later, at larger offsets, into two separately perceived stimuli. We tested the link between spatial and temporal integration by presenting two successive Vernier stimuli presented at varying spatial and temporal offsets. The second Vernier either had the same or the opposite offset as the first. We found that the type of percept depended not only on spatial offset, as reported previously, but interacted with the temporal parameter as well. At temporal separations around 30-40 ms the majority of trials were perceived as motion, while above 70 ms predominantly two separate stimuli were reported. The dominance of the second Vernier varied systematically with temporal offset, peaking around 40 ms ISI. Same-offset conditions showed increasing amounts of perceived separation at large ISIs, but little dependence on spatial offset. As subjects did not always completely fuse stimuli, we separated trials by reported percept (single/fusion, motion, double/segregation). We found systematic indications of spatial fusion even on trials in which subjects perceived temporal segregation. These findings imply that spatial integration/fusion may occur even when the stimuli are perceived as temporally separate entities, suggesting that the mechanisms responsible for temporal segregation and spatial integration may not be mutually exclusive.

Breaking Through Complexity: Visual and Conceptual Dimensions in Logo Evaluation across Exposures

This research investigates the effects of visual and conceptual complexity (VC and CC) on brand logo evaluations at single and multiple exposures. Building upon the theoretical distinction between visual and conceptual constructs and on a processing fluency account, it is proposed that the effects of VC and CC on attitude toward the logo change across exposures following opposite patterns, and are driven by the mechanisms of perceptual fluency and conceptual fluency, respectively. The results of a hybrid experimental study suggest that the initially positive effect of VC on attitude toward the logo becomes negative with multiple exposures, whereas the initially negative effect of CC on attitude toward the logo becomes positive as exposures increase. The findings contribute to research on consumer reactions to the visual elements of brands, and offer guidelines to brand managers and logo designers for leveraging on VC and CC, as well as on the number of exposures, in order to raise the attractiveness of logos.

Dissociating temporal and spatial integration windows: the case of Vernier Fusion

-4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 Arcmin Single/Fusion Motion Double / Segregation The visual system constructs a percept of the world across multiple spatial and temporal scales. We investigated this using Vernier Fusion, a phenomenon in which the features of two Vernier stimuli presented in close spatio-temporal proximity are fused into a single percept. With increasing spatial offset, perception changes dramatically from a single percept into apparent motion and later, at larger offsets, into two separately perceived stimuli (Scharnowski et al., 2007). Previous studies exclusively used binary choice to investigate this phenomenon.

The Role of Spatial Configuration in Multiple Identity Tracking

BackgroundThe simultaneous tracking and identification of multiple moving objects encountered in everyday life requires one to correctly bind identities to objects. In the present study, we investigated the role of spatial configuration made by multiple targets when observers are asked to track multiple moving objects with distinct identities.Methodology/Principal FindingsThe overall spatial configuration made by the targets was manipulated: In the constant condition, the configuration remained as a virtual convex polygon throughout the tracking, and in the collapsed condition, one of the moving targets (critical target) crossed over an edge of the virtual polygon during tracking, destroying it. Identification performance was higher when the configuration remained intact than when it collapsed (Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2). Moreover, destroying the configuration affected the allocation of dynamic attention: the critical target captured more attention than did the other targets. However, observers were worse at identifying the critical target and were more likely to confuse it with the targets that formed the virtual crossed edge (Experiments 3–5). Experiment 6 further showed that the visual system constructs an overall configuration only by using the targets (and not the distractors); identification performance was not affected by whether the distractor violated the spatial configuration.Conclusions/SignificanceIn sum, these results suggest that the visual system may integrate targets (but not distractors) into a spatial configuration during multiple identity tracking, which affects the distribution of dynamic attention and the updating of identity-location binding.

Colonial mythology in twenty-first century Australian film

This article explores the changing nature of representations of the landscape in Australian film. It focuses on how these myths are changing in the recent films Japanese Story and Red Dog. It charts the ways that the two films represent changes to the mythological base of Australian film, as it is outlined by Ross Gibson in his book South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. It also charts the way these films continue the tradition that Gibson outlines. The article criticises analysis of some recent Australian film, claiming that the analysis is too focused on emerging stories that relate to indigenous reconciliation and multicultural integration. It suggests that the methodologies used to examine landscape in Australian film need to examine visual constructions of the landscape in order to fully understand the complex process that goes into its formation in film. The article also engages in a discussion of the development of monolithic ideas of Australian identity in the twentieth century and how mining mythology in the films studied is co-opting elements of this identity. It then discusses the ways in which cultural power interacts with the political and economic spheres suggesting a wider application for work concerning cultural knowledge of society.

Dynamic Scene Stitching Driven by Visual Cognition Model

Dynamic scene stitching still has a great challenge in maintaining the global key information without missing or deforming if multiple motion interferences exist in the image acquisition system. Object clips, motion blurs, or other synthetic defects easily occur in the final stitching image. In our research work, we proceed from human visual cognitive mechanism and construct a hybrid-saliency-based cognitive model to automatically guide the video volume stitching. The model consists of three elements of different visual stimuli, that is, intensity, edge contour, and scene depth saliencies. Combined with the manifold-based mosaicing framework, dynamic scene stitching is formulated as a cut path optimization problem in a constructed space-time graph. The cutting energy function for column width selections is defined according to the proposed visual cognition model. The optimum cut path can minimize the cognitive saliency difference throughout the whole video volume. The experimental results show that it can effectively avoid synthetic defects caused by different motion interferences and summarize the key contents of the scene without loss. The proposed method gives full play to the role of human visual cognitive mechanism for the stitching. It is of high practical value to environmental surveillance and other applications.

Contours can inhibit flash-enhanced simultaneous contrast

A gray test disk looks apparently brighter on a black surround, and apparently darker on a white surround (simultaneous contrast). We have found (Kaneko & Murakami, 2012) that this simultaneous contrast is greatly enhanced by flashing the stimulus up only briefly (“flash-enhanced contrast”). We now report a new effect of an outline circle that suppresses this flash-enhanced contrast. If the preceding or following uniform gray field presents an outline circle, congruent with the test disk, this disk now shows virtually no flashed contrast, but appears to remain mid-gray. Even an Ehrenstein subjective circle, made from several radii occluded by an ‘invisible’ disk, could reduce the flashed contrast. We have two theories: 1, ‘Disk Longevity’: the visual system takes the outline circle as a continuation of the gray disk over time, thus effectively increasing its duration. 2, ‘Masking’ : the outline circle masks or hides the existence of the gray disk. The real outline circle also reduces the visibility of the disk, although the reduction is not perfect and subjects can still detect the disk location very accurately. However an Ehrenstein circle has little or no effect on disk visibility. Therefore we believe that simple masking cannot explain the reduced flashed contrast. We propose that without the circles present, the visual system constructs a light or dark disk from the light/dark edge information available during the brief flash. The real or Ehrenstein circle interferes with this construction process.

‘Weightless?’: disrupting relations of power in/through photographic imagery of persons with intellectual disabilities

Missing in discussions of visual representations of people with intellectual disabilities are their own perspectives. Rooted in Derrida’s concern with the ‘right of inspection’ over visual representations, participatory arts-informed methodologies were used in research with people with intellectual disabilities. They critiqued and then used Photoshop to transform public photographs of labeled people. Responding to visual constructions of labeled persons as ‘weightless’/powerless, they revealed personal experiences of being denied control over their lives and representations. Yet their critiques and transformations reveal possibilities for their re-conceptualization as powerful, subverting stereotypes of labeled people and disrupting relations of power in disability imagery.

Spatial Position Information Accumulates Steadily over Time

One of the more enduring mysteries of neuroscience is how the visual system constructs robust maps of the world that remain stable in the face of frequent eye movements. Here we show that encoding the position of objects in external space is a relatively slow process, building up over hundreds of milliseconds. We display targets to which human subjects saccade after a variable preview duration. As they saccade, the target is displaced leftwards or rightwards, and subjects report the displacement direction. When subjects saccade to targets without delay, sensitivity is poor; but if the target is viewed for 300-500 ms before saccading, sensitivity is similar to that during fixation with a strong visual mask to dampen transients. These results suggest that the poor displacement thresholds usually observed in the "saccadic suppression of displacement" paradigm are a result of the fact that the target has had insufficient time to be encoded in memory, and not a result of the action of special mechanisms conferring saccadic stability. Under more natural conditions, trans-saccadic displacement detection is as good as in fixation, when the displacement transients are masked.

Lying Eyes: The Truth about NLP Eye Patterns and Their Relationship with Academic Performance in Business and Management Studies (MBA)

This article looks at the relationship between eye patterns (i.e., how eyes move according to what the person isthinking or feeling) according to Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and students’ achievement in a course inan MBA program in Abu Dhabi University, United Arab Emirates. Participants for the study (N = 33) graduatestudents from the course. All participants were right-handed. Results show that, except for visual recall, lessthan half of the respondents exhibited the remaining eye patterns (i.e., visual construct, verbal recall, verbalconstruct, kinaesthetic and auditory digital), posited by the founders of NLP. Put in another way, respondents onaverage exhibited about two out of the six posited eye patterns. Correlations between eye patterns and examresults reveal that students who displayed eye patterns corresponding with verbal recall and kinaesthetic feelings,tend to do better in the exams. This paper discusses the possible benefit of training students to conform to verbalrecall and kinaesthetic eye patterns, and teaching courses that emphasise on verbal recall and kinaestheticfeelings.

Rapid volitional control of apparent motion during percept generation

How rapidly can one voluntarily influence percept generation? The time course of voluntary visual-spatial attention is well studied, but the time course of intentional control over percept generation is relatively unknown. We investigated the latter question using "one-shot" apparent motion. When a vertical or horizontal pair of squares is replaced by its 90º-rotated version, the bottom-up signal is ambiguous. From this ambiguous signal, it is known that people can intentionally generate a percept of rotation in a desired direction (clockwise or counterclockwise). To determine the time course of this intentional control, we instructed participants to voluntarily induce rotation in a precued direction (clockwise rotation when a high-pitched tone was heard, and counterclockwise rotation when a low-pitched tone was heard), and then to report the direction of rotation that was actually perceived. We varied the delay between the instructional cue and the rotated frame (cue-lead time) from 0 to 1,067ms. Intentional control became more effective with longer cue-lead times (asymptotically effective at 533ms). Notably, intentional control was reliable even with a zero cue-lead time; control experiments ruled out response bias and the development of an auditory-visual association as explanations. This demonstrates that people can interpret an auditory cue and intentionally generate a desired motion percept surprisingly rapidly, entirely within the subjectively instantaneous moment in which the visual system constructs a percept of apparent motion.

El ícono femenino en el arte contemporáneo, el estereotipo de la virgen-madre, la prostituta-femme fatale y el concepto de víctima

Los estereotipos perpetúan los roles que la sociedad ha conferido a las mujeres por ejemplo: vírgenes, madres, diosas, prostitutas, mujeres fatales y víctimas. En el caso del arte, tampoco ha sido ajeno a estas construcciones. A través del arte y sus construcciones visuales, el hombre ha tenido el poder de crear a la mujer imaginada, por tanto, concebir una femineidad que es la imagen de sus deseos más íntimos y sus temores más ocultos. Tal omnipresencia se encuentra en nuestra cultura, y su representación artística va desde la imagen gráfica, hasta el video, pasando antes por el cine narrativo, el cual expone su expresión más compleja y su circulación más amplia.

Shifting Selection May Control Apparent Motion

Shifting Selection May Control Apparent Motion

The venetian-blind effect: a preference for zero disparity or zero slant?

When periodic stimuli such as vertical sinewave gratings are presented to the two eyes, the initial stage of disparity estimation yields multiple solutions at multiple depths. The solutions are all frontoparallel when the sinewaves have the same spatial frequency; they are all slanted when the sinewaves have quite different frequencies. Despite multiple solutions, humans perceive only one depth in each visual direction: a single frontoparallel plane when the frequencies are the same and a series of small slanted planes—Venetian blinds—when the frequencies are quite different. These percepts are consistent with a preference for solutions that minimize absolute disparity or overall slant. The preference for minimum disparity and minimum slant are identical for gaze at zero eccentricity; we dissociated the predictions of the two by measuring the occurrence of Venetian blinds when the stimuli were viewed in eccentric gaze. The results were generally quite consistent with a zero-disparity preference (Experiment 1), but we also observed a shift toward a zero-slant preference when the edges of the stimulus had zero slant (Experiment 2). These observations provide useful insights into how the visual system constructs depth percepts from a multitude of possible depths.

Are Motor-free Visual Perception Skill Constructs Predictive of Visual-motor Integration Skill Constructs?

Background Theoretical perspectives vary in considering whether visual perceptual skills and visual-motor integration (VMI) skills are related, interdependent skill sets, or two discrete skill constructs. Objective This study investigated whether motor-reduced/free visual perceptual skill constructs were predictive of motor-enhanced VMI skill constructs. Method A total of 45 typically developing children aged 6–12 years completed the Developmental Test of Visual Perception-Second Edition (DTVP-2) and the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills-Third Edition (TVPS-3). Four multiple linear regression analyses were completed with the four DTVP-2 motor-enhanced VMI subscales being the dependent (criterion) variables and the seven TVPS-3 motor-reduced subscales being the independent variables. Results The total variance accounted for in the four DTVP-2 VMI skill constructs by all the seven TVPS-3 skill constructs ranged from 29.3% to 60.10%. In the first regression analysis, the TVPS-3 Visual Sequential Memory and TVPS-3 Visual FigureGround constructs explained 5.40% and 4.90%, respectively, of the variance in the DTVP-2 Eye Hand Coordination construct. In the second regression, the TVPS-3 Visual Sequential Memory and TVPS-3 Visual Figure–Ground constructs accounted for 5.60% and 3.10%, respectively, of the DTVP-2 Copying construct's variance. The third analysis revealed that the TVPS-3 Visual Memory and TVPS-3 Visual Form Constancy constructs represented 6.20% and 7.90%, respectively, of the DTVP-2 Spatial Relations construct's variance. In the fourth and final regression analysis, the TVPS-3 Visual Sequential Memory and TVPS-3 Visual Figure–Ground construct explained 14.60% and 4.90%, respectively, of the variance in the DTVP-2 Visual-Motor Speed construct. Conclusion In the four regression analyses, specific types of motor-reduced visual perception constructs were predictive of the four specific types of motor-enhanced VMI constructs. Visual Sequential Memory and Visual FigureGround, specific types of motor-reduced visual perceptual constructs, were frequent and significant predictors of VMI skill constructs in children. It would appear that motor-reduced visual perceptual skills and motor-enhanced VMI skills as theoretical constructs are related and dependent on one another.