Domestic dogs and puppies can use human voice direction referentially

Domestic dogs are particularly skilled at using human visual signals to locate hidden food. This is, to our knowledge, the first series of studies that investigates the ability of dogs to use only auditory communicative acts to locate hidden food. In a first study, from behind a barrier, a human expressed excitement towards a baited box on either the right or left side, while sitting closer to the unbaited box. Dogs were successful in following the human's voice direction and locating the food. In the two following control studies, we excluded the possibility that dogs could locate the box containing food just by relying on smell, and we showed that they would interpret a human's voice direction in a referential manner only when they could locate a possible referent (i.e. one of the boxes) in the environment. Finally, in a fourth study, we tested 8–14-week-old puppies in the main experimental test and found that those with a reasonable amount of human experience performed overall even better than the adult dogs. These results suggest that domestic dogs’ skills in comprehending human communication are not based on visual cues alone, but are instead multi-modal and highly flexible. Moreover, the similarity between young and adult dogs’ performances has important implications for the domestication hypothesis.

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Finding the Right Problems: Some HREM Applications to Interfaces

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100111938 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 42 ◽

pp. 376-379

Author(s):

D. Cherns

Keyword(s):

Grain Boundaries ◽

High Resolution Electron Microscopy ◽

Boundary Structure ◽

Atomic Structures ◽

Grain Boundary Structure ◽

Resolution Electron ◽

Point To Point ◽

The Right ◽

New Generation ◽

Better Than

The use of high resolution electron microscopy (HREM) to determine the atomic structure of grain boundaries and interfaces is a topic of great current interest. Grain boundary structure has been considered for many years as central to an understanding of the mechanical and transport properties of materials. Some more recent attention has focussed on the atomic structures of metalsemiconductor interfaces which are believed to control electrical properties of contacts. The atomic structures of interfaces in semiconductor or metal multilayers is an area of growing interest for understanding the unusual electrical or mechanical properties which these new materials possess. However, although the point-to-point resolutions of currently available HREMs, ∼2-3Å, appear sufficient to solve many of these problems, few atomic models of grain boundaries and interfaces have been derived. Moreover, with a new generation of 300-400kV instruments promising resolutions in the 1.6-2.0 Å range, and resolutions better than 1.5Å expected from specialist instruments, it is an appropriate time to consider the usefulness of HREM for interface studies.

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Biomechanical characteristics of allogeneic cortical bone pins designed for fracture fixation

Veterinary and Comparative Orthopaedics and Traumatology ◽

10.3415/vcot-07-03-0026 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 21 (02) ◽

pp. 140-146

Author(s):

M. R. Edwards ◽

S. P. James ◽

W. S. Dernell ◽

R. J. Scott ◽

A. M. Bachand ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Stainless Steel ◽

Cortical Bone ◽

Fracture Fixation ◽

Impact Testing ◽

Left Tibia ◽

Four Point Bending ◽

And Gender ◽

The Right ◽

Biomechanical Comparison ◽

Better Than

SummaryThe biomechanical characteristics of 1.2 mm diameter allogeneic cortical bone pins harvested from the canine tibia were evaluated and compared to 1.1 mm diameter stainless steel pins and 1.3 mm diameter polydioxanone (PDS) pins using impact testing and four-point bending. The biomechanical performance of allogeneic cortical bone pins using impact testing was uniform with no significant differences between sites, side, and gender. In four-point bending, cortical bone pins harvested from the left tibia (204.8 ± 77.4 N/mm) were significantly stiffer than the right tibia (123.7 ± 54.4 N/mm, P=0.0001). The site of bone pin harvest also had a significant effect on stiffness, but this was dependent on interactions with gender and side. Site C in male dogs had the highest mean stiffness in the left tibia (224.4 ± 40.4 N/mm), but lowest stiffness in the right tibia (84.9 ± 24.2 N/mm). Site A in female dogs had the highest mean stiffness in the left tibia (344.9 ± 117.4 N/mm), but lowest stiffness in the right tibia (60.8 ± 3.7 N/mm). The raw and adjusted bending properties of 1.2 mm cortical bone pins were significantly better than 1.3 mm PDS pins, but significantly worse than 1.1 mm stainless steel pins (P<0.0001). In conclusion, cortical bone pins may be suitable as an implant for fracture fixation based on initial biomechanical comparison to stainless steel and PDS pins used in clinical practice.

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Readers' Liberation

10.1093/oso/9780198723554.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jonathan Rose

Keyword(s):

Cultural History ◽

Freedom Of Information ◽

Human Communication ◽

Human Right ◽

Investigative Journalism ◽

Literary Education ◽

History Of ◽

The Media ◽

The Right ◽

Promotion Campaigns

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. For the Internet and digitial generation, the most basic human right is the freedom to read. The Web has indeed brought about a rapid and far-reaching revolution in reading, making a limitless global pool of literature and information available to anyone with a computer. At the same time, however, the threats of censorship, surveillance, and mass manipulation through the media have grown apace. Some of the most important political battles of the twenty-first century have been fought--and will be fought--over the right to read. Will it be adequately protected by constitutional guarantees and freedom of information laws? Or will it be restricted by very wealthy individuals and very powerful institutions? And given increasingly sophisticated methods of publicity and propaganda, how much of what we read can we believe? This book surveys the history of independent sceptical reading, from antiquity to the present. It tells the stories of heroic efforts at self-education by disadvantaged people in all parts of the world. It analyzes successful reading promotion campaigns throughout history (concluding with Oprah Winfrey) and explains why they succeeded. It also explores some disturbing current trends, such as the reported decay of attentive reading, the disappearance of investigative journalism, 'fake news', the growth of censorship, and the pervasive influence of advertisers and publicists on the media--even on scientific publishing. For anyone who uses libraries and Internet to find out what the hell is going on, this book is a guide, an inspiration, and a warning.

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Reading Beyond the Code

10.1093/oso/9780198794776.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Keyword(s):

Relevance Theory ◽

Literary Studies ◽

The Novel ◽

Human Communication ◽

Communicative Acts ◽

Face To Face ◽

Code Model ◽

Wide Range ◽

Central Claim

This book explores the value for literary studies of relevance theory, an inferential approach to communication in which the expression and recognition of intentions plays a major role. Drawing on a wide range of examples from lyric poetry and the novel, nine of the ten chapters are written by literary specialists and use relevance theory both as an overall framework and as a resource for detailed analysis. The final chapter, written by the co-founder of relevance theory, reviews the issues addressed by the volume and explores their implications for cognitive theories of how communicative acts are interpreted in context. Originally designed to explain how people understand each other in everyday face-to-face exchanges, relevance theory—described in an early review by a literary scholar as ‘the makings of a radically new theory of communication, the first since Aristotle’s’—sheds light on the whole spectrum of human modes of communication, including literature in the broadest sense. Reading Beyond the Code is unique in using relevance theory as a prime resource for literary study, and is also the first to apply the model to a range of phenomena widely seen as supporting an ‘embodied’ conception of cognition and language where sensorimotor processes play a key role. This broadened perspective serves to enhance the value for literary studies of the central claim of relevance theory: that the ‘code model’ is fundamentally inadequate to account for human communication, and in particular for the modes of communication that are proper to literature.

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Skill and strategic control

Synthese ◽

10.1007/s11229-021-03053-3 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Ellen Fridland

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Empirical Evidence ◽

Mental Imagery ◽

Sports Psychology ◽

Mental Practice ◽

Strategic Control ◽

Cognitive Representations ◽

Personal Level ◽

The Right ◽

Better Than

AbstractThis paper provides an account of the strategic control involved in skilled action. When I discuss strategic control, I have in mind the practical goals, plans, and strategies that skilled agents use in order to specify, structure, and organize their skilled actions, which they have learned through practice. The idea is that skilled agents are better than novices not only at implementing the intentions that they have but also at forming the right intentions. More specifically, skilled agents are able formulate and modify, adjust and adapt their practical intentions in ways that are appropriate, effective, and flexible given their overall goals. Further, to specify the kind of action plans that are involved in strategic control, I’ll rely on empirical evidence concerning mental practice and mental imagery from sports psychology as well as evidence highlighting the systematic differences in the cognitive representations of skills between experts and non-experts. I’ll claim that, together, this evidence suggests that the intentions that structure skilled actions are practical and not theoretical, that is, that they are perceptual and motor and not abstract, amodal, or linguistic. Importantly, despite their grounded nature, these plans are still personal-level, deliberate, rational states. That is, the practical intentions used to specify and structure skilled actions are best conceived of as higher-order, motor-modal structures, which can be manipulated and used by the agent for the purpose of reasoning, deliberation, decision-making and, of course, the actual online structuring and organizing of action.

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Algorithmic and human prediction of success in human collaboration from visual features

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-81145-3 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Martin Saveski ◽

Edmond Awad ◽

Iyad Rahwan ◽

Manuel Cebrian

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Visual Cues ◽

Success Factors ◽

Group Performance ◽

Learning Algorithms ◽

Machine Learning Algorithms ◽

Adventure Game ◽

Group Success ◽

The Relationship ◽

Better Than

AbstractAs groups are increasingly taking over individual experts in many tasks, it is ever more important to understand the determinants of group success. In this paper, we study the patterns of group success in Escape The Room, a physical adventure game in which a group is tasked with escaping a maze by collectively solving a series of puzzles. We investigate (1) the characteristics of successful groups, and (2) how accurately humans and machines can spot them from a group photo. The relationship between these two questions is based on the hypothesis that the characteristics of successful groups are encoded by features that can be spotted in their photo. We analyze >43K group photos (one photo per group) taken after groups have completed the game—from which all explicit performance-signaling information has been removed. First, we find that groups that are larger, older and more gender but less age diverse are significantly more likely to escape. Second, we compare humans and off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms at predicting whether a group escaped or not based on the completion photo. We find that individual guesses by humans achieve 58.3% accuracy, better than random, but worse than machines which display 71.6% accuracy. When humans are trained to guess by observing only four labeled photos, their accuracy increases to 64%. However, training humans on more labeled examples (eight or twelve) leads to a slight, but statistically insignificant improvement in accuracy (67.4%). Humans in the best training condition perform on par with two, but worse than three out of the five machine learning algorithms we evaluated. Our work illustrates the potentials and the limitations of machine learning systems in evaluating group performance and identifying success factors based on sparse visual cues.

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The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision

International Security ◽

10.1162/isec_a_00033 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 35 (4) ◽

pp. 87-125 ◽

Cited By ~ 37

Author(s):

Peter D. Feaver

Keyword(s):

Hybrid Approach ◽

Interesting Case ◽

Civil Military Relations ◽

Military Commanders ◽

The Right ◽

Military Relations ◽

The Military ◽

President Bush ◽

Primary Problem ◽

Better Than

President George W. Bush's Iraq surge decision in late 2006 is an interesting case for civil-military relations theory, in particular, the debate between professional supremacists and civilian supremacists over how much to defer to the military on decisions during war. The professional supremacists argue that the primary problem for civil-military relations during war is ensuring the military an adequate voice and keeping civilians from micromanaging and mismanaging matters. Civilian supremacists, in contrast, argue that the primary problem is ensuring that well-informed civilian strategic guidance is authoritatively directing key decisions, even when the military disagrees with that direction. A close reading of the available evidence—both in published accounts and in new, not-for-attribution interviews with the key players—shows that the surge decision vindicates neither camp. If President Bush had followed the professional supremacists, there would have been no surge because his key military commanders were recommending against that option. If Bush had followed the civilian supremacists to the letter, however, there might have been a revolt of the generals, causing the domestic political props under the surge to collapse. Instead, Bush's hybrid approach worked better than either ideal type would have.

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When brain damage “improves” perception: neglect patients can localize motion-shifted probes better than controls

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00757.2015 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 114 (6) ◽

pp. 3351-3358 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Stefania de Vito ◽

Marine Lunven ◽

Clémence Bourlon ◽

Christophe Duret ◽

Patrick Cavanagh ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Right Hemisphere ◽

Visual Fields ◽

Critical Factor ◽

Significant Shift ◽

Stimulus Motion ◽

Attentional Processes ◽

Position Shift ◽

The Right ◽

High Level ◽

Better Than

When we look at bars flashed against a moving background, we see them displaced in the direction of the upcoming motion (flash-grab illusion). It is still debated whether these motion-induced position shifts are low-level, reflexive consequences of stimulus motion or high-level compensation engaged only when the stimulus is tracked with attention. To investigate whether attention is a causal factor for this striking illusory position shift, we evaluated the flash-grab illusion in six patients with damaged attentional networks in the right hemisphere and signs of left visual neglect and six age-matched controls. With stimuli in the top, right, and bottom visual fields, neglect patients experienced the same amount of illusion as controls. However, patients showed no significant shift when the test was presented in their left hemifield, despite having equally precise judgments. Thus, paradoxically, neglect patients perceived the position of the flash more veridically in their neglected hemifield. These results suggest that impaired attentional processes can reduce the interaction between a moving background and a superimposed stationary flash, and indicate that attention is a critical factor in generating the illusory motion-induced shifts of location.

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Neural Processing of Gravito-Inertial Cues in Humans. IV. Influence of Visual Rotational Cues During Roll Optokinetic Stimuli

Journal of Neurophysiology ◽

10.1152/jn.00513.2001 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 89 (1) ◽

pp. 390-400 ◽

Cited By ~ 40

Author(s):

L. H. Zupan ◽

D. M. Merfeld

Keyword(s):

Visual Cues ◽

Gravitational Force ◽

Sensory Information ◽

Inertial Force ◽

Linear Acceleration ◽

Otolith Organs ◽

Optokinetic Stimulation ◽

The Difference ◽

The Right ◽

Roll Tilt

Sensory systems often provide ambiguous information. For example, otolith organs measure gravito-inertial force (GIF), the sum of gravitational force and inertial force due to linear acceleration. However, according to Einstein's equivalence principle, a change in gravitational force due to tilt is indistinguishable from a change in inertial force due to translation. Therefore the central nervous system (CNS) must use other sensory cues to distinguish tilt from translation. For example, the CNS might use dynamic visual cues indicating rotation to help determine the orientation of gravity (tilt). This, in turn, might influence the neural processes that estimate linear acceleration, since the CNS might estimate gravity and linear acceleration such that the difference between these estimates matches the measured GIF. Depending on specific sensory information inflow, inaccurate estimates of gravity and linear acceleration can occur. Specifically, we predict that illusory tilt caused by roll optokinetic cues should lead to a horizontal vestibuloocular reflex compensatory for an interaural estimate of linear acceleration, even in the absence of actual linear acceleration. To investigate these predictions, we measured eye movements binocularly using infrared video methods in 17 subjects during and after optokinetic stimulation about the subject's nasooccipital (roll) axis (60°/s, clockwise or counterclockwise). The optokinetic stimulation was applied for 60 s followed by 30 s in darkness. We simultaneously measured subjective roll tilt using a somatosensory bar. Each subject was tested in three different orientations: upright, pitched forward 10°, and pitched backward 10°. Five subjects reported significant subjective roll tilt (>10°) in directions consistent with the direction of the optokinetic stimulation. In addition to torsional optokinetic nystagmus and afternystagmus, we measured a horizontal nystagmus to the right during and following clockwise (CW) stimulation and to the left during and following counterclockwise (CCW) stimulation. These measurements match predictions that subjective tilt in the absence of real tilt should induce a nonzero estimate of interaural linear acceleration and, therefore, a horizontal eye response. Furthermore, as predicted, the horizontal response in the dark was larger for Tilters ( n = 5) than for Non-Tilters ( n= 12).

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Language beyond the language system: dorsal visuospatial pathways support processing of demonstratives and spatial language during naturalistic fast fMRI

10.1101/651257 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Roberta Rocca ◽

Kenny R. Coventry ◽

Kristian Tylén ◽

Marlene Staib ◽

Torben E. Lund ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Language Processing ◽

Information Integration ◽

Visual Cues ◽

Reference Frames ◽

Finite Impulse Response ◽

Angular Gyrus ◽

Attentional Orienting ◽

Word Level ◽

Pragmatic Inference ◽

The Right

AbstractSpatial demonstratives are powerful linguistic tools used to establish joint attention. Identifying the meaning of semantically underspecified expressions like “this one” hinges on the integration of linguistic and visual cues, attentional orienting and pragmatic inference. This synergy between language and extralinguistic cognition is pivotal to language comprehension in general, but especially prominent in demonstratives.In this study, we aimed to elucidate which neural architectures enable this intertwining between language and extralinguistic cognition using a naturalistic fMRI paradigm. In our experiment, 28 participants listened to a specially crafted dialogical narrative with a controlled number of spatial demonstratives. A fast multiband-EPI acquisition sequence (TR = 388ms) combined with finite impulse response (FIR) modelling of the hemodynamic response was used to capture signal changes at word-level resolution.We found that spatial demonstratives bilaterally engage a network of parietal areas, including the supramarginal gyrus, the angular gyrus, and precuneus, implicated in information integration and visuospatial processing. Moreover, demonstratives recruit frontal regions, including the right FEF, implicated in attentional orienting and reference frames shifts. Finally, using multivariate similarity analyses, we provide evidence for a general involvement of the dorsal (“where”) stream in the processing of spatial expressions, as opposed to ventral pathways encoding object semantics.Overall, our results suggest that language processing relies on a distributed architecture, recruiting neural resources for perception, attention, and extra-linguistic aspects of cognition in a dynamic and context-dependent fashion.

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