scholarly journals Evaluative Judgment Across Domains

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Clemente ◽  
Marcus Thomas Pearce ◽  
Martin Skov ◽  
Marcos Nadal
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Information ◽  
Openness To Experience ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Evaluative Judgment ◽  
Evaluative Judgments ◽  
Individual Traits ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Sensory Cortices ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Reward Circuit

Evaluative judgment—i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked—is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain’s sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.

scholarly journals How Senses Work Together: Cross-Modal Interactions between Primary Sensory Cortices

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Teichert ◽  
Jürgen Bolz
Keyword(s):  
Cerebral Cortex ◽  
Current Literature ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Convincing Evidence ◽  
Modal Interactions ◽  
Sensory Inputs ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Sensory Cortices ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
Processing Mechanisms

On our way through a town, the things we see can make us change the way we go. The things that we hear can make us stop or walk on, or the things we feel can cause us to wear a warm jacket or just a t-shirt. All these behaviors are mediated by highly complex processing mechanisms in our brain and reflect responses to many important sensory inputs. The mammalian cerebral cortex, which processes the sensory information, consists of largely specialized sensory areas mainly receiving information from their corresponding sensory modalities. The first cortical regions receiving the input from the outer world are the so called primary sensory cortices. Strikingly, there is convincing evidence that primary sensory cortices do not work in isolation but are substantially affected by other sensory modalities. Here, we will review previous and current literature on this cross-modal interplay.

Using Photovoice to understand physical and social living environment influence on adherence to diabetes

2021 ◽  
pp. 136345932110200
Author(s):  
Alice Scavarda ◽  
Giuseppe Costa ◽  
Franca Beccaria
Keyword(s):  
Blood Sugar ◽  
Diabetes Management ◽  
Lifestyle Changes ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Local Health ◽  
Bonding Social Capital ◽  
Physical Context ◽  
Individual Traits ◽  
Italian City ◽  
The Individual

Within the past several years, a considerable body of research on adherence to diabetes regimen has emerged in public health. However, the focus of the vast majority of these studies has been on the individual traits and attitudes affecting adherence. Still little is known on the role of the social and physical context in supporting or hindering diabetes self-management, particularly from a qualitative standpoint. To address these limitations, this paper presents the findings of a Photovoice study on a sample of 10 type 2 diabetic older adults living in a deprived neighbourhood of an Italian city. The findings reveal that the possibility to engage in diet, exercise and blood sugar monitoring seems to be more affected by physical and social elements of the respondents’ environment than by the interviewees’ beliefs and attitudes. Both environmental barriers and social isolation emerge as barriers to lifestyle changes and self-care activities related to blood sugar monitoring. The predominance of bonding social capital, the scant level of trust and the negative perception of local health services result in a low level of social cohesion, a limited circulation of health information on diabetes management and, consequently, in poor health outcomes.

scholarly journals Autonomous feature type selection based on environment using expectation maximization in self-localization

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 172988141881470
Author(s):  
Nezih Ergin Özkucur ◽  
H Levent Akın
Keyword(s):  
Expectation Maximization ◽  
Autonomous Robots ◽  
Expectation Maximization Algorithm ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Localization Algorithm ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Public Data ◽  
The Individual

Self-localization in autonomous robots is one of the fundamental issues in the development of intelligent robots, and processing of raw sensory information into useful features is an integral part of this problem. In a typical scenario, there are several choices for the feature extraction algorithm, and each has its weaknesses and strengths depending on the characteristics of the environment. In this work, we introduce a localization algorithm that is capable of capturing the quality of a feature type based on the local environment and makes soft selection of feature types throughout different regions. A batch expectation–maximization algorithm is developed for both discrete and Monte Carlo localization models, exploiting the probabilistic pose estimations of the robot without requiring ground truth poses and also considering different observation types as blackbox algorithms. We tested our method in simulations, data collected from an indoor environment with a custom robot platform and a public data set. The results are compared with the individual feature types as well as naive fusion strategy.

scholarly journals Analysis of Spatial Patterns of Phase in Neocortical Gamma EEGs in Rabbit

2000 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 1266-1278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter J. Freeman ◽  
John M. Barrie
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Coherence ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
State Transitions ◽  
Wave Form ◽  
Conditioned Stimuli ◽  
Phase Gradient ◽  
Gamma Range ◽  
Sensory Cortices ◽  
Half Power

Arrays of 64 electrodes (8 × 8, 7 × 7 mm) were implanted epidurally on the surface of the visual, auditory or somatosensory cortex of rabbits trained to discriminate conditioned stimuli in the corresponding modality. The 64 electroencephalographic (EEG) traces at all times displayed a high degree of spatial coherence in wave form, averaging >90% of the variance in the largest principal components analysis component. The EEGs were decomposed with the fast Fourier transform (FFT) to give the spatial distributions of amplitude and phase modulation (AM and PM) in segments 128 ms in duration. Spatial (2-dimensional) and temporal (1-dimensional) filters were designed to optimize classification of the spatial AM patterns in the gamma range (20–80 Hz) with respect to discriminative conditioned stimuli. No evidence was found for stimulus-dependent classification of the spatial PM patterns. Instead some spatial PM distributions conformed to the pattern of a cone. The location and sign (maximal lead or lag) of the conic apex varied randomly with each recurrence. The slope of the phase gradient varied in a range corresponding to that of the conduction velocities reported of axons to extend parallel to the cortical surfaces. The durations and times of recurrence of the phase cones corresponded to those of the optimally classified spatial AM patterns. The interpretation is advanced that the phase cones are manifestations of state transitions in the mesoscopic dynamics of sensory cortices by which the intermittent AM patterns are formed. The phase cones show that the gamma EEG spatial coherence is not due to volume conduction from a single deep-lying dipole generator nor to activity at the site of the reference lead on monopolar recording. The random variation of the apical sign shows that gamma AM patterns are self-organized and are not imposed by thalamic pacemakers. The half-power radius of the phase gradient provides a useful measure of the soft boundary condition for the formation and read-out of cooperative cortical domains responsible for binding sensory information into the context of prior experience in the process of perception.

scholarly journals Self-esteem, social comparison, and Facebook use

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 831-845 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Bergagna ◽  
Stefano Tartaglia
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Comparison ◽  
Technology Use ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Structural Equation Models ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Individual Traits ◽  
Facebook Use ◽  
The Individual

Facebook use is very popular among young people, but many open issues remain regarding the individual traits that are antecedents of different behaviours enacted online. This study aimed to investigate whether the relationship between self-esteem and the amount of time on Facebook could be mediated by a tendency towards social comparison. Moreover, three different modalities of Facebook use were distinguished, i.e., social interaction, simulation, and search for relations. Because of gender differences in technology use and social comparison, the mediation models were tested separately for males and females. Data were collected by means of a self-report questionnaire with a sample of 250 undergraduate and graduate Italian students (mean age: 22.18 years). The relations were examined empirically by means of four structural equation models. The results revealed the role of orientation to social comparison in mediating the relations between low self-esteem and some indicators of Facebook use, i.e., daily hours on Facebook and the use of Facebook for simulation. For females, the use of Facebook for social interaction was directly influenced by high self-esteem and indirectly influenced by low self-esteem. Globally, the dimension of social comparison on Facebook emerged as more important for females than for males.

scholarly journals Nonlinear visuoauditory integration in the mouse superior colliculus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinya Ito ◽  
Yufei Si ◽  
Alan M. Litke ◽  
David A. Feldheim
Keyword(s):  
Superior Colliculus ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Object Identification ◽  
Response Properties ◽  
The Individual

AbstractSensory information from different modalities is processed in parallel, and then integrated in associative brain areas to improve object identification and the interpretation of sensory experiences. The Superior Colliculus (SC) is a midbrain structure that plays a critical role in integrating visual, auditory, and somatosensory input to assess saliency and promote action. Although the response properties of the individual SC neurons to visuoauditory stimuli have been characterized, little is known about the spatial and temporal dynamics of the integration at the population level. Here we recorded the response properties of SC neurons to spatially restricted visual and auditory stimuli using large-scale electrophysiology. We then created a general, population-level model that explains the spatial, temporal, and intensity requirements of stimuli needed for sensory integration. We found that the mouse SC contains topographically organized visual and auditory neurons that exhibit nonlinear multisensory integration. We show that nonlinear integration depends on properties of auditory but not visual stimuli. We also find that a heuristically derived nonlinear modulation function reveals conditions required for sensory integration that are consistent with previously proposed models of sensory integration such as spatial matching and the principle of inverse effectiveness.

scholarly journals INDIVIDUAL AND PERSONAL ASPECTS OF STANCETAKING IN THE ENGLISH INTERNET BLOG

2021 ◽  
pp. 123-126
Author(s):  
Shkamarda O.A.
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Conversational Analysis ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
Individual Traits ◽  
Methodological Principles ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Physical Features

Purpose. The purpose of the research is to analyze the speech behaviour of the participants of interaction in the Internet blog and to single out different lexical and stylistic resources of the personal positioning module realization in the global network.Methods. The material of the study is based on the written online messages taken from the personal blog “In Pursuit of Happiness” of the popular American writer and TED conference (a conference devoted to spreading ideas connected with technology, entertainment, and design) speaker Britt Reints. The presented article is grounded in the methodological principles of the communicative and user-based approaches to language and speech, which have been actively developing in linguistics in recent years. The applied methods of discourse analysis, conversational analysis, linguistic, and stylistic analysis revealed personal aspects of subjective positioning in the discourse of a personal Internet blog.Results. The article summarizes the data of modern scientific research on the interpretation of the stancetaking phenomenon and defines the stance concept. It has been established that stances are based on the personal characteristics of a discourse participant, his / her individual traits, beliefs, preferences, judgments and assessments of the events of the actual reality. Thus, the study proves that stance is a social phenomenon, which embraces two main interdependent and interrelated modules: personal and interactional. The first one (personal) manifests individual characteristics of the subjects of discursive activity, such as physical features, personal mindsets, cognition, specific needs and interests, spiritual and moral-volitional qualities; the second one (interactional) provides the coherent cooperation between the sender of the message and its recipient, synchronizing their linguistic world view with the aim of the correct perception and interpretation of each other's stances.Conclusions. The article traces stable correlations between the individual and personal characteristics of the speaker / author of the written message and his / her positions in the discourse of the English Internet blog. Different lexical and stylistic resources activating the personal module of stancetaking in the global network have been singled out on the basis of the analysis of the speech behavior of the participants of communication in the blogosphere.Key words: position of the subject of discursive activity, stance, personality, subject of discursive activity, personal module of stancetaking. Мета. Мета наукової розвідки – проаналізувати мовленнєву поведінку учасників інтеракції в інтернет-блозі та виявити засоби актуалізації індивідуально-особистісного модуля позиціювання у глобальній мережі.Методи. Матеріалом для нашого дослідження послугували фрагменти інтернет-повідомлень, вилучені з популярного англомовного авторського блогу “In Pursuit of Happiness” («У пошуку щастя»), авторкою якого є американська письменниця та спікерка конфереції TED (від англ. Technology, Entertainment, Design – Технології, Розваги, Дизайн, конференція, присвяче-на «ідеям вартим поширення») Бріт Рейнтс. Представлена праця ґрунтується на методологічних засадах комунікативно-діяль-нісного підходу до мови й мовлення, який активно розвивається у лінгвістиці останніх років. Застосовані методи дискурс-аналізу, конверсаційного та лінгвостилістичного аналізу дали змогу виявити та описати індивідуально-особистісні аспекти суб’єктного позиціювання в дискурсі персонального інтернет-блогу.Результати. У статті узагальнено дані сучасних наукових розвідок щодо трактування феномену позиціювання та визна-чено поняття «станс». Установлено, що позиція суб’єкта дискурсивної діяльності базується на ознаках учасника дискурсу як особистості, його / її індивідуальних характеристиках, особистих переконаннях, уподобаннях, судженнях та оцінках подій навколишньої дійсності. Таким чином, дослідження засвідчує, що станс – це явище публічне, яке має два основних взаємоза-лежні і взаємопов’язані модулі: 1) індивідуально-особистісний, в якому проявляються особистісні характеристики суб’єктів дискурсивної діяльності, а саме фізичні дані, особливості світосприйняття та мислення, специфічні потреби та інтереси, духо-вні та морально-вольові якості та 2) інтеракційний, який забезпечує органічну взаємодію адресанта й адресата, синхронізуючи їхні мовні картини світу для сприйняття та інтерпретації позицій один одного.Висновки. У статті простежено стійкі кореляції між індивідуально-особистісними характеристиками мовця / автора пись-мового повідомлення та його / її позиціями у дискурсі англомовного інтернет-блогу. На основі аналізу мовленнєвої поведінки учасників комунікативної взаємодії у блогосфері виокремлено лексико-стилістичні ресурси активізації особистісного модуля позиціювання в мережі інтернет.Ключові слова: позиція суб’єкта дискурсивної діяльності, станс, особистість, суб’єкт дискурсивної діяльності, особис-тісний модуль позиціювання.

scholarly journals Selective enhancement of object representations through multisensory integration

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Tovar ◽  
Micah M. Murray ◽  
Mark T. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Multisensory Integration ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Stimulus Presentation ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Object Representations ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Living Objects ◽  
Selective Enhancement ◽  
The Brain

AbstractObjects are the fundamental building blocks of how we create a representation of the external world. One major distinction amongst objects is between those that are animate versus inanimate. Many objects are specified by more than a single sense, yet the nature by which multisensory objects are represented by the brain remains poorly understood. Using representational similarity analysis of human EEG signals, we show enhanced encoding of audiovisual objects when compared to their corresponding visual and auditory objects. Surprisingly, we discovered the often-found processing advantages for animate objects was not evident in a multisensory context due to greater neural enhancement of inanimate objects—the more weakly encoded objects under unisensory conditions. Further analysis showed that the selective enhancement of inanimate audiovisual objects corresponded with an increase in shared representations across brain areas, suggesting that neural enhancement was mediated by multisensory integration. Moreover, a distance-to-bound analysis provided critical links between neural findings and behavior. Improvements in neural decoding at the individual exemplar level for audiovisual inanimate objects predicted reaction time differences between multisensory and unisensory presentations during a go/no-go animate categorization task. Interestingly, links between neural activity and behavioral measures were most prominent 100 to 200ms and 350 to 500ms after stimulus presentation, corresponding to time periods associated with sensory evidence accumulation and decision-making, respectively. Collectively, these findings provide key insights into a fundamental process the brain uses to maximize information it captures across sensory systems to perform object recognition.Significance StatementOur world is filled with an ever-changing milieu of sensory information that we are able to seamlessly transform into meaningful perceptual experience. We accomplish this feat by combining different features from our senses to construct objects. However, despite the fact that our senses do not work in isolation but rather in concert with each other, little is known about how the brain combines the senses together to form object representations. Here, we used EEG and machine learning to study how the brain processes auditory, visual, and audiovisual objects. Surprisingly, we found that non-living objects, the objects which were more difficult to process with one sense alone, benefited the most from engaging multiple senses.

scholarly journals Assessment of Impact of Capital Acquisitions on the Economic Situation of Consolidated Entities in the Czech Republic

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 1335-1345
Author(s):  
Jaroslava Rajchlová ◽  
Anna Fedorová ◽  
Kristina Somerlíková ◽  
Libor Grega
Keyword(s):  
Czech Republic ◽  
Synergistic Effects ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Consolidated Financial Statements ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Individual Assessment ◽  
Research Level ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Parent Companies

Business acquisition constitutes a fundamental aspect of business environment formation. Our research has focused on assessment of impact of capital acquisition on the economic condition of the company. Therefore, the second research level has been initiated, focusing on the individual assessment of the single companies to identify allocation of synergy between consolidated units and parent companies in the Czech Republic. For our research, taking into consideration availability of data and subsequent explanatory value of the results, we will consider synergistic effect as presented in the Ansoff’s concept. Consolidated financial statements of totally 719 groups of accounting entities – business concerns in the Czech Republic has been studied in the research. A composite indicator, as the modern tool for comparison and evaluation of development of entities, has been selected to compare individual economic indicators of parent companies and group of their companies. We believe that developed arguments allow us to formulate conclusion that capital acquisitions, resulting in the years 2008–2013 in the obligation to compile consolidated financial statement, have brought positive financial synergistic effects in majority of cases, and we can rank them among successful business activities.

Sensory Substitution Devices as Advanced Sensory Tools

2018 ◽  
pp. 188-204
Author(s):  
Thomas D. Wright ◽  
Jamie Ward
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Sensory Substitution ◽  
Considerable Effort ◽  
Conceptual Space ◽  
System P ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Magnetic Sense ◽  
Definition Of

There has been considerable effort devoted towards understanding sensory substitution devices in terms of their relationship to canonical sensory modalities. The approach taken in this essay is rather different, although complementary, in that we seek to define a broad conceptual space of ‘sensory tools’ in which sensory substitution devices can be situated. Such devices range from telescopes, to cochlear implants, to attempts to create a magnetic sense. One feature of these devices is that they operate at the level of ‘raw’ sensory information. As such, systems such as Braille which operate at a symbolic/conceptual level do not count as a sensory tool (or a sensory substitution device) and nor would a device such as CCTV which, although capturing raw sensory information, would not meet a conventional definition of a tool. With this approach, we hope to avoid the circularity inherent in previous attempts at defining sensory substitution and provide a better starting point to explore the effects of sensory tools, more generally, on the functioning of the nervous system.

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