Behavioral experiments on handmarkings

Author(s):  
John D. Gould ◽  
Josiane Salaun
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Hesling

The modalities of communication are the sum of the expression dimension (linguistics) and the expressivity dimension (prosody), both being equally important in language communication. The expressivity dimension which comes first in the act of speech, is the basis on which phonemes, syllables, words, grammar and morphosyntax, i.e., the expression dimension of speech is superimposed. We will review evidence (1) revealing the importance of prosody in language acquisition and (2) showing that prosody triggers the involvement of specific brain areas dedicated to sentences and word-list processing. To support the first point, we will not only rely on experimental psychology studies conducted in newborns and young children but also on neuroimaging studies that have helped to validate these behavioral experiments. Then, neuroimaging data on adults will allow for concluding that the expressivity dimension of speech modulates both the right hemisphere prosodic areas and the left hemisphere network in charge of the expression dimension


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Nathan Matias ◽  
Kevin Munger ◽  
Marianne Aubin Le Quere ◽  
Charles Ebersole

AbstractThe pursuit of audience attention online has led organizations to conduct thousands of behavioral experiments each year in media, politics, activism, and digital technology. One pioneer of A/B tests was Upworthy.com, a U.S. media publisher that conducted a randomized trial for every article they published. Each experiment tested variations in a headline and image “package,” recording how many randomly-assigned viewers selected each variation. While none of these tests were designed to answer scientific questions, scientists can advance knowledge by meta-analyzing and data-mining the tens of thousands of experiments Upworthy conducted. This archive records the stimuli and outcome for every A/B test fielded by Upworthy between January 24, 2013 and April 30, 2015. In total, the archive includes 32,487 experiments, 150,817 experiment arms, and 538,272,878 participant assignments. The open access dataset is organized to support exploratory and confirmatory research, as well as meta-scientific research on ways that scientists make use of the archive.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 167
Author(s):  
Patricia Wollstadt ◽  
Martina Hasenjäger ◽  
Christiane B. Wiebel-Herboth

Entropy-based measures are an important tool for studying human gaze behavior under various conditions. In particular, gaze transition entropy (GTE) is a popular method to quantify the predictability of a visual scanpath as the entropy of transitions between fixations and has been shown to correlate with changes in task demand or changes in observer state. Measuring scanpath predictability is thus a promising approach to identifying viewers’ cognitive states in behavioral experiments or gaze-based applications. However, GTE does not account for temporal dependencies beyond two consecutive fixations and may thus underestimate the actual predictability of the current fixation given past gaze behavior. Instead, we propose to quantify scanpath predictability by estimating the active information storage (AIS), which can account for dependencies spanning multiple fixations. AIS is calculated as the mutual information between a processes’ multivariate past state and its next value. It is thus able to measure how much information a sequence of past fixations provides about the next fixation, hence covering a longer temporal horizon. Applying the proposed approach, we were able to distinguish between induced observer states based on estimated AIS, providing first evidence that AIS may be used in the inference of user states to improve human–machine interaction.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096032712110085
Author(s):  
L Wu ◽  
Y Hu ◽  
L Jiang ◽  
N Liang ◽  
P Liu ◽  
...  

Some traditional Chinese decoctions, such as Zhuyu Annao, exert favorable therapeutic effects on acute cerebral hemorrhage, hemorrhagic stroke, and other neurological diseases, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study aimed to determine whether Zhuyu Annao decoction (ZYAND) protects the injured brain by promoting angiogenesis following intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) and elucidate its specific mechanism. The effect of ZYAND on the nervous system of mice after ICH was explored through behavioral experiments, such as the Morris water maze and Rotarod tests, and its effects on oxidative stress were explored by detecting several oxidative stress markers, including malondialdehyde, nitric oxide, glutathione peroxidase, and superoxide dismutase. Real-time quantitative RT-PCR and WB were used to detect the effects of ZYAND on the levels of prolyl hydroxylase domain 3 (PHD3), hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α), and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in the brain tissues of mice. The effect of ZYAND on the NF-κB signaling pathway was detected using a luciferase reporter gene. A human umbilical cord vascular endothelial cell angiogenesis experiment was performed to determine whether ZYAND promotes angiogenesis. The Morris water maze test and other behavioral experiments verified that ZYAND improved the neurobehavior of mice after ICH. ZYAND activated the PHD3/HIF-1α signaling pathway, inhibiting the oxidative damage caused by ICH. In angiogenesis experiments, it was found that ZYAND promoted VEGF-induced angiogenesis by upregulating the expression of HIF-1α, and NF-κB signaling regulated the expression of HIF-1α by inhibiting PHD3. ZYAND exerts a reparative effect on brain tissue damaged after ICH through the NF-κB/ PHD3/HIF-1α/VEGF signaling axis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chang Zhao ◽  
Yves F. Widmer ◽  
Sören Diegelmann ◽  
Mihai A. Petrovici ◽  
Simon G. Sprecher ◽  
...  

AbstractOlfactory learning and conditioning in the fruit fly is typically modelled by correlation-based associative synaptic plasticity. It was shown that the conditioning of an odor-evoked response by a shock depends on the connections from Kenyon cells (KC) to mushroom body output neurons (MBONs). Although on the behavioral level conditioning is recognized to be predictive, it remains unclear how MBONs form predictions of aversive or appetitive values (valences) of odors on the circuit level. We present behavioral experiments that are not well explained by associative plasticity between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli, and we suggest two alternative models for how predictions can be formed. In error-driven predictive plasticity, dopaminergic neurons (DANs) represent the error between the predictive odor value and the shock strength. In target-driven predictive plasticity, the DANs represent the target for the predictive MBON activity. Predictive plasticity in KC-to-MBON synapses can also explain trace-conditioning, the valence-dependent sign switch in plasticity, and the observed novelty-familiarity representation. The model offers a framework to dissect MBON circuits and interpret DAN activity during olfactory learning.


2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan E. Carlin ◽  
Gregory J. Love

How does democratic politics inform the interdisciplinary debate on the evolution of human co-operation and the social preferences (for example, trust, altruism and reciprocity) that support it? This article advances a theory of partisan trust discrimination in electoral democracies based on social identity, cognitive heuristics and interparty competition. Evidence from behavioral experiments in eight democracies show ‘trust gaps’ between co- and rival partisans are ubiquitous, and larger than trust gaps based on the social identities that undergird the party system. A natural experiment found that partisan trust gaps in the United States disappeared immediately following the killing of Osama bin Laden. But observational data indicate that partisan trust gaps track with perceptions of party polarization in all eight cases. Finally, the effects of partisanship on trust outstrip minimal group treatments, yet minimal-group effects are on par with the effects of most treatments for ascriptive characteristics in the literature. In sum, these findings suggest political competition dramatically shapes the salience of partisanship in interpersonal trust, the foundation of co-operation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mina Marmpena ◽  
Angelica Lim ◽  
Torbjørn S. Dahl

Abstract Human-robot interaction in social robotics applications could be greatly enhanced by robotic behaviors that incorporate emotional body language. Using as our starting point a set of pre-designed, emotion conveying animations that have been created by professional animators for the Pepper robot, we seek to explore how humans perceive their affect content, and to increase their usability by annotating them with reliable labels of valence and arousal, in a continuous interval space. We conducted an experiment with 20 participants who were presented with the animations and rated them in the two-dimensional affect space. An inter-rater reliability analysis was applied to support the aggregation of the ratings for deriving the final labels. The set of emotional body language animations with the labels of valence and arousal is available and can potentially be useful to other researchers as a ground truth for behavioral experiments on robotic expression of emotion, or for the automatic selection of robotic emotional behaviors with respect to valence and arousal. To further utilize the data we collected, we analyzed it with an exploratory approach and we present some interesting trends with regard to the human perception of Pepper’s emotional body language, that might be worth further investigation.


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