scholarly journals Learning to silence saccadic suppression

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (6) ◽  
pp. e2012937118
Author(s):  
Chris Scholes ◽  
Paul V. McGraw ◽  
Neil W. Roach

Perceptual stability is facilitated by a decrease in visual sensitivity during rapid eye movements, called saccadic suppression. While a large body of evidence demonstrates that saccadic programming is plastic, little is known about whether the perceptual consequences of saccades can be modified. Here, we demonstrate that saccadic suppression is attenuated during learning on a standard visual detection-in-noise task, to the point that it is effectively silenced. Across a period of 7 days, 44 participants were trained to detect brief, low-contrast stimuli embedded within dynamic noise, while eye position was tracked. Although instructed to fixate, participants regularly made small fixational saccades. Data were accumulated over a large number of trials, allowing us to assess changes in performance as a function of the temporal proximity of stimuli and saccades. This analysis revealed that improvements in sensitivity over the training period were accompanied by a systematic change in the impact of saccades on performance—robust saccadic suppression on day 1 declined gradually over subsequent days until its magnitude became indistinguishable from zero. This silencing of suppression was not explained by learning-related changes in saccade characteristics and generalized to an untrained retinal location and stimulus orientation. Suppression was restored when learned stimulus timing was perturbed, consistent with the operation of a mechanism that temporarily reduces or eliminates saccadic suppression, but only when it is behaviorally advantageous to do so. Our results indicate that learning can circumvent saccadic suppression to improve performance, without compromising its functional benefits in other viewing contexts.

Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay

This chapter examines the post-war efforts of European socialists to reconstitute the Socialist International. Initial efforts to cooperate culminated in an international socialist conference in Berne in February 1919 at which socialists from the two wartime camps met for the first time. In the end, however, it would take four years to reconstitute the International with the creation of the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) in 1923. That it took so long to do so is a testimony to the impact of the Great War and to the Bolshevik revolution. Together, these two seismic events compelled socialists to reconsider the meaning and purpose of socialism. The search for answers sparked prolonged debates between and within the major parties, profoundly reconfiguring the pre-war world of European socialism. One prominent stake in this lengthy process, moreover, was the nature of socialist internationalism—both its content and its functioning.


2020 ◽  
pp. 152483802097968
Author(s):  
Sarah Lockwood ◽  
Carlos A. Cuevas

Traditionally, the literature has sought to understand the impact of racial minority status and trauma as it relates to interpersonal violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault. What has not been as extensively reviewed and summarized is how racially or ethnically motivated hate crimes impact the mental health of minorities—particularly Latinx/Hispanic groups. This review aims to summarize the current body of literature on the intersection of race-motivated hate crime and trauma responses within Latinx community. To do so, the theoretical foundation for this inquiry will build from a race-based trauma perspective. Specifically, this review connects existing frameworks for race and trauma and integrates literature that examines Latinx or Hispanic populations that have experienced discrimination, bias, or hate crime as a result of their identity or perceived identity. The importance of situating bias or hate events within the trauma literature stems from a lack of overall formal evaluation of these events, and how these occurrences are historically overlooked as a traumatic stressor. The findings of this review suggest that (1) experiencing racially motivated victimization can cause adverse mental and physical health outcomes in Latinxs and (2) currently, there is only one study that has examined the impact of hate crime on Latinxs in the United States. This leaves the field with unanswered questions about the impact of hate crime victimization among Latinxs, which is an ever-growing area in need of attention.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soroush Ojagh ◽  
Sara Saeedi ◽  
Steve H. L. Liang

With the wide availability of low-cost proximity sensors, a large body of research focuses on digital person-to-person contact tracing applications that use proximity sensors. In most contact tracing applications, the impact of SARS-CoV-2 spread through touching contaminated surfaces in enclosed places is overlooked. This study is focused on tracing human contact within indoor places using the open OGC IndoorGML standard. This paper proposes a graph-based data model that considers the semantics of indoor locations, time, and users’ contexts in a hierarchical structure. The functionality of the proposed data model is evaluated for a COVID-19 contact tracing application with scalable system architecture. Indoor trajectory preprocessing is enabled by spatial topology to detect and remove semantically invalid real-world trajectory points. Results show that 91.18% percent of semantically invalid indoor trajectory data points are filtered out. Moreover, indoor trajectory data analysis is innovatively empowered by semantic user contexts (e.g., disinfecting activities) extracted from user profiles. In an enhanced contact tracing scenario, considering the disinfecting activities and sequential order of visiting common places outperformed contact tracing results by filtering out unnecessary potential contacts by 44.98 percent. However, the average execution time of person-to-place contact tracing is increased by 58.3%.


Processes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 1271
Author(s):  
Humberto. J. Prado-Galiñanes ◽  
Rosario Domingo

Industries are nowadays not only expected to produce goods and provide services, but also to do this sustainably. What qualifies a company as sustainable implies that its activities must be defined according to the social and ecological responsibilities that are meant to protect the society and the environment in which they operate. From now on, it will be necessary to consider and measure the impact of industrial activities on the environment, and to do so, one key parameter is the carbon footprint. This paper demonstrates the utility of the LCI as a tool for immediate application in industries. Its application shall facilitate decision making in industries while choosing amongst different scenarios to industrialize a certain product with the lowest environmental impact possible. To achieve this, the carbon footprint of a given product was calculated by applying the LCI method to several scenarios that differed from each other only in the supply-chain model. As a result of this LCI calculation, the impact of the globalization of a good’s production was quantified not only financially, but also environmentally. Finally, it was concluded that the LCI/LCA methodology can be considered as a fundamental factor in the new decision-making strategy that sustainable companies must implement while deciding on the business and industrial plan for their new products and services.


2001 ◽  
Vol 38 (04) ◽  
pp. 1033-1054 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liudas Giraitis ◽  
Piotr Kokoszka ◽  
Remigijus Leipus

The paper studies the impact of a broadly understood trend, which includes a change point in mean and monotonic trends studied by Bhattacharyaet al.(1983), on the asymptotic behaviour of a class of tests designed to detect long memory in a stationary sequence. Our results pertain to a family of tests which are similar to Lo's (1991) modifiedR/Stest. We show that both long memory and nonstationarity (presence of trend or change points) can lead to rejection of the null hypothesis of short memory, so that further testing is needed to discriminate between long memory and some forms of nonstationarity. We provide quantitative description of trends which do or do not fool theR/S-type long memory tests. We show, in particular, that a shift in mean of a magnitude larger thanN-½, whereNis the sample size, affects the asymptotic size of the tests, whereas smaller shifts do not do so.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104398622110016
Author(s):  
Sinchul Back ◽  
Rob T. Guerette

Criminologists and crime prevention practitioners recognize the importance of geographical places to crime activities and the role that place managers might play in effectively preventing crime. Indeed, over the past several decades, a large body of work has highlighted the tendency for crime to concentrate across an assortment of geographic areas, where place management tends to be absent or weak. Nevertheless, there has been a paucity of research evaluating place management strategies and cybercrime within the virtual domain. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of place management techniques on reducing cybercrime incidents in an online setting. Using data derived from the information technology division of a large urban research university in the United States, this study evaluated the impact of an anti-phishing training program delivered to employees that sought to increase awareness and understanding of methods to better protect their “virtual places” from cybercrimes. Findings are discussed within the context of the broader crime and place literature.


Minerals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 499
Author(s):  
Duong Huu Hoang ◽  
Doreen Ebert ◽  
Robert Möckel ◽  
Martin Rudolph

The depletion of ore deposits, the increasing demand for raw materials, the need to process low-grade, complex and finely disseminated ores, and the reprocessing of tailings are challenges especially for froth flotation separation technologies. Even though they are capable of handling relatively fine grain sizes, the flotation separation of very fine and ultrafine particles faces many problems still. Further, the flotation of low-contrast semi-soluble salt-type minerals with very similar surface properties, many complex interactions between minerals, reagents and dissolved species often result in poor selectivity. This study investigates the flotation beneficiation of ultrafine magnesite rich in dolomite from desliming, currently reported to the tailings. The paper especially focuses on the impact of the depressant sodium hexametaphosphate (SHMP) on the following: (i) the froth properties using dynamic froth analysis (DFA), (ii) the separation between magnesite and dolomite/calcite, and (iii) its effect on the entrainment. As a depressant/dispersant, SHMP has a beneficial impact on the flotation separation between magnesite and dolomite. However, there is a trade-off between grade and recovery, and as well as the dewatering process which needs to be considered. When the SHMP increases from 200 g/t to 700 g/t, the magnesite grade increases from 67% to 77%, while recovery decreases massively, from 80% to 40%. The open circuit with four cleaning stages obtained a concentrate assaying 77.5% magnesite at a recovery of 45.5%. The dolomite content in the concentrate is about 20%, where 80% of dolomite was removed and importantly 98% of the quartz was removed, with only 0.3% of the quartz in the final concentrate. Furthermore, the application of 1-hydroxyethylene-1,1-diphosphonic acid (HEDP) as a more environmentally friendly and low-cost alternative to SHMP is presented and discussed. Using only 350 g/t of HEDP can achieve a similar grade (76.3%), like 700 g/t of SHMP (76.9%), while obtaining a 17% higher magnesite recovery as compared to 700 g/t of SHMP. Interestingly, the proportion of hydrophilic quartz minerals ending up in the concentrate is lower for HEDP, with only 1.9% quartz at a recovery of 21.5% compared to the 2.7% of quartz at a recovery of 24.9% when using SHMP. The paper contributes in general to understanding the complexity of the depressant responses in froth flotation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (9) ◽  
pp. 44-49
Author(s):  
S.S. Uskova

The evaluation issues on the aggregate’s extraction on the ecosystem of bodies of water has been considered. The dredgers' impact of various capacities on bodies of water of different capacities have been compared, as well as on food supply change of bodies of water for benthos eater. The research findings have showed the dragger's impact of a higher capacity is bigger on a large body of water than this of a lower capacity on a small body of water. The impact manifests itself in decreasing the number and biomass of macrozoobenthos in the area used for the oil and lubricants extraction and the downstream flow. It has been found that the complete destruction of macrozoobenthos at the site of hydraulic engineering activities has not been detected either in small rivers or in large reservoirs.


Modern China ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 504-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nimrod Baranovitch

Since the early 1990s, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has been one of the most restive areas in China, and in recent years, following the July 2009 Urumchi riots, it has experienced frequent incidents of severe ethnic violence. A large body of scholarship has attempted to explain the sources of Uyghur discontent and pointed to various factors, including cultural and religious repression, unemployment, discrimination, and the mass migration of Han Chinese settlers into the region. This article proposes that environmental degradation, a factor that so far has received little attention in the research that focuses on ethnic tension in Xinjiang, is another important contributing factor. Focusing on air and water pollution in Xinjiang, but also addressing other types of environmental degradation, the article examines the attitudes of Uyghurs toward the phenomenon and shows how their perceptions have affected and been affected by their tense relationship with the Chinese government and the Han Chinese settlers in the region.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin E. Oxburgh ◽  
Coral J. Dando

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss two distinct but interrelated areas, namely witness/victim and suspect interviewing, and to argue that both must continue to evolve, suggest how they might do so, and that this process must be driven by emergent theory and contemporary empirical research.Design/methodology/approachThe paper outlines the impact of psychological theory and empirical research to investigative interviewing in recent decades.FindingsIt is argued that in order to stay ahead of the game, the field of investigative interviewing (suspect and witness) must continue to evolve in such a manner that not only protects and fosters the important practitioner/academic relationship, but also ensures that future directions are driven by empirical research, with recourse to emergent theory.Originality/valueThe paper outlines the impact of psychological theory and empirical research on investigative interviewing and the consequent enhancement of the interviewing of both suspected offenders and witnesses. The paper demonstrates that working closely together academic research can make a difference, and influence law, policy decisions and training guidelines in order to improve practice.


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