scholarly journals How visual perceptual grouping influences foot placement

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (7) ◽  
pp. 150151 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Fennell ◽  
Charlotte Goodwin ◽  
Jeremy F. Burn ◽  
Ute Leonards

Everybody would agree that vision guides locomotion; but how does vision influence choice when there are different solutions for possible foot placement? We addressed this question by investigating the impact of perceptual grouping on foot placement in humans. Participants performed a stepping stone task in which pathways consisted of target stones in a spatially regular path of foot falls and visual distractor stones in their proximity. Target and distractor stones differed in shape and colour so that each subset of stones could be easily grouped perceptually. In half of the trials, one target stone swapped shape and colour with a distractor in its close proximity. We show that in these ‘swapped’ conditions, participants chose the perceptually groupable, instead of the spatially regular, stepping location in over 40% of trials, even if the distance between perceptually groupable steps was substantially larger than normal step width/length. This reveals that the existence of a pathway that could be traversed without spatial disruption to periodic stepping is not sufficient to guarantee participants will select it and suggests competition between different types of visual input when choosing foot placement. We propose that a bias in foot placement choice in favour of visual grouping exists as, in nature, sudden changes in visual characteristics of the ground increase the uncertainty for stability.

2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klea Faniko ◽  
Till Burckhardt ◽  
Oriane Sarrasin ◽  
Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi ◽  
Siri Øyslebø Sørensen ◽  
...  

Abstract. Two studies carried out among Albanian public-sector employees examined the impact of different types of affirmative action policies (AAPs) on (counter)stereotypical perceptions of women in decision-making positions. Study 1 (N = 178) revealed that participants – especially women – perceived women in decision-making positions as more masculine (i.e., agentic) than feminine (i.e., communal). Study 2 (N = 239) showed that different types of AA had different effects on the attribution of gender stereotypes to AAP beneficiaries: Women benefiting from a quota policy were perceived as being more communal than agentic, while those benefiting from weak preferential treatment were perceived as being more agentic than communal. Furthermore, we examined how the belief that AAPs threaten men’s access to decision-making positions influenced the attribution of these traits to AAP beneficiaries. The results showed that men who reported high levels of perceived threat, as compared to men who reported low levels of perceived threat, attributed more communal than agentic traits to the beneficiaries of quotas. These findings suggest that AAPs may have created a backlash against its beneficiaries by emphasizing gender-stereotypical or counterstereotypical traits. Thus, the framing of AAPs, for instance, as a matter of enhancing organizational performance, in the process of policy making and implementation, may be a crucial tool to countering potential backlash.


Author(s):  
Anne Nassauer

This book provides an account of how and why routine interactions break down and how such situational breakdowns lead to protest violence and other types of surprising social outcomes. It takes a close-up look at the dynamic processes of how situations unfold and compares their role to that of motivations, strategies, and other contextual factors. The book discusses factors that can draw us into violent situations and describes how and why we make uncommon individual and collective decisions. Covering different types of surprise outcomes from protest marches and uprisings turning violent to robbers failing to rob a store at gunpoint, it shows how unfolding situations can override our motivations and strategies and how emotions and culture, as well as rational thinking, still play a part in these events. The first chapters study protest violence in Germany and the United States from 1960 until 2010, taking a detailed look at what happens between the start of a protest and the eruption of violence or its peaceful conclusion. They compare the impact of such dynamics to the role of police strategies and culture, protesters’ claims and violent motivations, the black bloc and agents provocateurs. The analysis shows how violence is triggered, what determines its intensity, and which measures can avoid its outbreak. The book explores whether we find similar situational patterns leading to surprising outcomes in other types of small- and large-scale events: uprisings turning violent, such as Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015, and failed armed store robberies.


Author(s):  
Amy E. Nivette ◽  
Renee Zahnow ◽  
Raul Aguilar ◽  
Andri Ahven ◽  
Shai Amram ◽  
...  

AbstractThe stay-at-home restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 led to unparalleled sudden change in daily life, but it is unclear how they affected urban crime globally. We collected data on daily counts of crime in 27 cities across 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We conducted interrupted time series analyses to assess the impact of stay-at-home restrictions on different types of crime in each city. Our findings show that the stay-at-home policies were associated with a considerable drop in urban crime, but with substantial variation across cities and types of crime. Meta-regression results showed that more stringent restrictions over movement in public space were predictive of larger declines in crime.


2021 ◽  
pp. 193896552110335
Author(s):  
John W. O’Neill ◽  
Jihwan Yeon

In recent years, short-term rental platforms in the lodging sector, including Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway, have received extensive attention and emerged as potentially alternative suppliers of services traditionally provided by established commercial accommodation providers, that is, hotels. Short-term rentals have dramatically increased the available supply of rooms for visitors to multiple international destinations, potentially siphoning demand away from hotels to short-term rental businesses. In a competitive market, an increase in supply with constant demand would negatively influence incumbent service providers. In this article, we examine the substitution effects of short-term rental supply on hotel performance in different cities around the world. Specifically, we comprehensively investigate the substitution effects of short-term rental supply on hotel performance based on hotel class, location type, and region. Furthermore, we segment the short-term rental supply based on its types of accommodations, that is, shared rooms, private rooms, and entire homes, and both examine and quantify the differential effects of these types of short-term rentals on different types of hotels. This study offers a comprehensive analysis regarding the impact of multiple short-term rental platforms on hotel performance and offers both conceptual and practical insights regarding the nature and extent of the effects that were identified.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026975802110106
Author(s):  
Raoul Notté ◽  
E.R. Leukfeldt ◽  
Marijke Malsch

This article explores the impact of online crime victimisation. A literature review and 41 interviews – 19 with victims and 22 with experts – were carried out to gain insight into this. The interviews show that most impacts of online offences correspond to the impacts of traditional offline offences. There are also differences with offline crime victimisation. Several forms of impact seem to be specific to victims of online crime: the substantial scale and visibility of victimhood, victimisation that does not stop in time, the interwovenness of online and offline, and victim blaming. Victims suffer from double, triple or even quadruple hits; it is the accumulation of different types of impact, enforced by the limitlessness in time and space, which makes online crime victimisation so extremely invasive. Furthermore, the characteristics of online crime victimisation greatly complicate the fight against and prevention of online crime. Finally, the high prevalence of cybercrime victimisation combined with the severe impact of these crimes seems contradictory with public opinion – and associated moral judgments – on victims. Further research into the dominant public discourse on victimisation and how this affects the functioning of the police and victim support would be valuable.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7637
Author(s):  
Taekyoung Lee ◽  
Jieun Cha ◽  
Sohyun Sung

Trees’ ability to capture atmospheric Particular Matter (PM) is related to morphological traits (shape, size, and micro-morphology) of the leaves. The objectives of this study were (1) to find out whether cluster pattern of the leaves is also a parameter that affects trees’ PM capturing performance and (2) to apply the cluster patterns of the leaves on architectural surfaces to confirm its impact on PM capturing performance. Two series of chamber experiments were designed to observe the impact of cluster patterns on PM capturing performance whilst other influential variables were controlled. First, we exposed synthetic leaf structures of different cluster patterns (a large and sparsely arranged cluster pattern and a small and densely arranged cluster pattern) to artificially generated PM in a chamber for 60 min and recorded the changing levels of PM2.5 and PM10 every minute. The results confirmed that the small and densely arranged cluster pattern has more significant effect on reducing PM2.5 and PM10 than the large and sparsely arranged cluster pattern. Secondly, we created three different types of architectural surfaces mimicking the cluster patterns of the leaves: a base surface, a folded surface, and a folded and porous surface. The surfaces were also exposed to artificially generated PM in the chamber and the levels of PM2.5 and PM10 were recorded. The results confirmed that the folded and porous surface has a more significant effect on reducing PM2.5 and PM10 than other surfaces. The study has confirmed that the PM capturing performance of architectural surfaces can be improved by mimicking cluster pattern of the leaves.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Davide Vittori

Abstract Scholars have long debated whether populism harms or improves the quality of democracy. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on the impact of populist parties in government. In particular, it inquires: (1) whether populists in government are more likely than non-populists to negatively affect the quality of democracies; (2) whether the role of populists in government matters; and (3) which type of populism is expected to negatively affect the quality of liberal-democratic regimes. The results find strong evidence that the role of populists in government affects several qualities of democracy. While robust, the findings related to (2) are less clear-cut than those pertaining to (1). Finally, regardless of their role in government, different types of populism have different impacts on the qualities of democracy. The results show that exclusionary populist parties in government tend to have more of a negative impact than other forms of populism.


Author(s):  
Gaojian Huang ◽  
Christine Petersen ◽  
Brandon J. Pitts

Semi-autonomous vehicles still require drivers to occasionally resume manual control. However, drivers of these vehicles may have different mental states. For example, drivers may be engaged in non-driving related tasks or may exhibit mind wandering behavior. Also, monitoring monotonous driving environments can result in passive fatigue. Given the potential for different types of mental states to negatively affect takeover performance, it will be critical to highlight how mental states affect semi-autonomous takeover. A systematic review was conducted to synthesize the literature on mental states (such as distraction, fatigue, emotion) and takeover performance. This review focuses specifically on five fatigue studies. Overall, studies were too few to observe consistent findings, but some suggest that response times to takeover alerts and post-takeover performance may be affected by fatigue. Ultimately, this review may help researchers improve and develop real-time mental states monitoring systems for a wide range of application domains.


Author(s):  
Luca Giommoni ◽  
Giulia Berlusconi ◽  
Alberto Aziani

AbstractThere is a relative dearth of literature on both the effects of cross-border interdictions and the impact of different types of interventions on international drug trafficking. This study identifies the main trafficking routes for cocaine and heroin, along with comparing the disruptive effects induced by targeted and non-coordinated interventions. It adopts a social network approach to identify the routes along which cocaine and heroin are trafficked, and then simulates the impact of different interdiction strategies on these two trafficking networks. The findings indicate that targeting countries based on their respective positions in the networks, as opposed to on the basis of the quantity of drugs exchanged, is more likely to disrupt drug flows. More specifically, concentrating law enforcement resources on countries with several incoming or outgoing trafficking connections, or those countries that mediate between producer, transit and consumer countries, would appear to be particularly effective in this regard. Interventions focused on specific trafficking routes are also likely to be effective if these routes have high edge betweenness centrality scores. This study contributes to extant understanding on the vulnerability of cocaine and heroin international trafficking networks, and, moreover, demonstrates that empirically-driven strategies are potentially more effective at interdicting international trafficking than non-strategic and non-coordinated interventions.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (15) ◽  
pp. 4648
Author(s):  
Zhipeng Tang ◽  
Ziao Mei ◽  
Jialing Zou

The carbon intensity of China’s resource-based cities (RBCs) is much higher than the national average due to their relatively intensive mode of development. Low carbon transformation of RBCs is an important way to achieve the goal of reaching the carbon emissions peak in 2030. Based on the panel data from 116 RBCs in China from 2003 to 2018, this study takes the opening of high-speed railway (HSR) lines as a quasi-experiment, using a time-varying difference-in-difference (DID) model to empirically evaluate the impact of an HSR line on reducing the carbon intensity of RBCs. The results show that the opening of an HSR line can reduce the carbon intensity of RBCs, and this was still true after considering the possibility of problems with endogenous selection bias and after applying the relevant robustness tests. The opening of an HSR line is found to have a significant reducing effect on the carbon intensity of different types of RBC, and the decline in the carbon intensity of coal-based cities is found to be the greatest. Promoting migration of RBCs with HSR lines is found to be an effective intermediary way of reducing their carbon intensity.


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