scholarly journals Visual mode switching learned through experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanjun Li ◽  
Katherine EM. Tregillus ◽  
Qiongsha Luo ◽  
Stephen A. Engel

AbstractWhen the environment changes, vision adapts to maintain accurate perception. For repeatedly encountered environments, learning to switch immediately to prior adaptive states would be beneficial, but past work remains inconclusive. We tested if the visual system can learn such visual mode switching for a strongly tinted environment, where adaptation causes the dominant hue to fade over time. Eleven observers wore red glasses for five one-hour periods per day, for five days. Color adaptation was measured by asking observers to identify “unique yellow”, appearing neither reddish nor greenish. As expected, the world appeared less and less reddish during the one-hour periods of glasses wear. Critically, across days the world also appeared significantly less reddish immediately after donning the glasses. This indicates that the visual system learned to shift rapidly to a partially adapted state, switching modes to stabilize color vision. Mode switching likely provides a general strategy to optimize perceptual processes.

eLife ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanjun Li ◽  
Katherine EM Tregillus ◽  
Qiongsha Luo ◽  
Stephen A Engel

When the environment changes, vision adapts to maintain accurate perception. For repeatedly encountered environments, learning to adjust more rapidly would be beneficial, but past work remains inconclusive. We tested if the visual system can learn such visual mode switching for a strongly color-tinted environment, where adaptation causes the dominant hue to fade over time. Eleven observers wore bright red glasses for five 1-hr periods per day, for 5 days. Color adaptation was measured by asking observers to identify ‘unique yellow’, appearing neither reddish nor greenish. As expected, the world appeared less and less reddish during the 1-hr periods of glasses wear. Critically, across days the world also appeared significantly less reddish immediately upon donning the glasses. These results indicate that the visual system learned to rapidly adjust to the reddish environment, switching modes to stabilize color vision. Mode switching likely provides a general strategy to optimize perceptual processes.


Author(s):  
G. E. R. Lloyd

A sense of the difference between right and wrong and a corresponding recognition of a concept of morality can be widely, maybe even universally, attested, as has been suggested for the Golden Rule (treat others as you would have them treat you). But how far does the great variety of explicit codified legal systems that can be attested across the world and over time undermine any possibility of treating law or even ‘custom’ as a robust cross-cultural category? This chapter investigates the similarities and differences in those systems in ancient societies (Greece, China) and in modern ones (e.g. Papua New Guinea) to throw light on the one hand on the importance of law for social order but on the other on the difficulties facing any programme to secure lasting justice.


Author(s):  
Gary Smith

Back in the 1980s, I talked to an economics professor who made forecasts for a large bank based on simple correlations like the one in Figure 1. If he wanted to forecast consumer spending, he made a scatter plot of income and spending and used a transparent ruler to draw a line that seemed to fit the data. If the scatter looked like Figure 1, then when income went up, he predicted that spending would go up. The problem with his simple scatter plots is that the world is not simple. Income affects spending, but so does wealth. What if this professor happened to draw his scatter plot using data from a historical period in which income rose (increasing spending) but the stock market crashed (reducing spending) and the wealth effect was more powerful than the income effect, so that spending declined, as in Figure 2? The professor’s scatter plot of spending and income will indicate that an increase in income reduces spending. Then, when he tries to forecast spending for a period when income and wealth both increase, his prediction of a decline in spending will be disastrously wrong. Multiple regression to the rescue. Multiple regression models have multiple explanatory variables. For example, a model of consumer spending might be: C = a + bY + cW where C is consumer spending, Y is household income, and W is wealth. The order in which the explanatory variables are listed does not matter. What does matter is which variables are included in the model and which are left out. A large part of the art of regression analysis is choosing explanatory variables that are important and ignoring those that are unimportant. The coefficient b measures the effect on spending of an increase in income, holding wealth constant, and c measures the effect on spending of an increase in wealth, holding income constant. The math for estimating these coefficients is complicated but the principle is simple: choose the estimates that give the best predictions of consumer spending for the data used to estimate the model. In Chapter 4, we saw that spurious correlations can appear when we compare variables like spending, income, and wealth that all tend to increase over time.


The production of this book has been made possible by the collaboration of a number of scholars and the generosity of the Arezzo Provincial Authority. It provides detailed descriptions of the contents of precious botanical collections amassed by natives of Arezzo, or simply conserved in institutions situated within the territory. The book provides an overview of both herbals of dried plants and painted herbals from the sixteenth century up to the present, starting from the one created in 1563 by the Arezzo doctor Andrea Cesalpino. The first herbal in the world to be organised through systematic criteria, this collection is now in the Botanical Section of the Florence University Museum of Natural History, together with another small eighteenth-century herbal produced by a pharmacist from Cortona, Agostino Coltellini. Conserved in Cortona itself is another eighteenth-century herbal, this one painted by Mattia Moneti, while in Castiglion Fiorentino and Poppi respectively are the intriguing collections of the Hortus siccus pisanus (18th century) and of the Biblioteca Rilliana (late 17th century). Also described in the book is a herbal from the Convent of La Verna (18th century) and the Egyptian herbal of Jacob Corinaldi (19th century), conserved in Montevarchi. Finally there are also the modern herbals, illustrating the continuity over time of a practice that is the foundation of all systematic study. The book is in fact rounded off by an anastatic reprint of the description of the Cesalpino herbal published in 1858, which is still a seminal work for studies such as those contained in this collection.


Author(s):  
Gary Gerstle

Any examination of American nationalism must contend with its contradictory character. On the one hand, this nationalism harbors a civic creed promising all Americans equal rights irrespective of race, religion, sex, or national origin. On the other hand, certain religious and racial traditions within American nationalism have defined the United States in exclusionary ways. Thus, while America proclaimed itself an open society, it also saw itself as a Protestant nation with a mission to save the world from Catholicism and other false faiths; and while it proclaimed that all men are created equal, it aspired, for much of its history, to be a white republic. This chapter analyzes the balance between American nationalism’s inclusive and exclusionary traditions during different periods of American history, and how and why the balance between the civic, religious, and racial traditions has changed over time.


2020 ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
Oscar Amaro-Del Real ◽  
Luz María Cejas-Leyva / O ◽  
Maura Antonia Lazcano-Franco ◽  
Mario Gilberto García-Medina

Objective: to publicize the emotional state of people in pandemic situations over time, through a compilation of readings carried out with the purpose of elaborating a semblance of the emotional conditions experienced throughout history, during the different pandemic outbreaks that have emerged, such as COVID-19. Methodology: the methodology used in this research process is based on the qualitative paradigm, because it sought to understand and elucidate what has emerged to date on the emotional state of people, due to the different pandemics experienced through over time such as that caused by COVID 19; through the systematization, organization and categorization of the information selected for presentation, both in the theoretical framework and in the results and conclusions of this article. To achieve the above, an inductive analysis procedure of the theory was followed, which played the role of guiding instrument by investigating the interaction of the subjects with the various diseases that have spread throughout the world through time. Contribution: a recapitulation of the emotional state of people in pandemic situations is presented, providing the reader with an overview of the emotional consequences that have been experienced in these situations at different times in history, such as the one currently being experienced in the face of COVID-19.


2015 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 130-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inés Pérez ◽  
Santiago Canevaro

AbstractThis article analyzes household workers’ discursive strategies before the Tribunal of Domestic Work (TDW) between 1956 and 2013. The TDW is an institution created in 1956 to arbitrate labor relations within domestic service in Buenos Aires. This article shows that workers’ strategies use alternatively a language of rationality and labor relations on the one hand, and of affection and family-like bonds on the other. The overlap of languages of rationality and affection persisted during the entire period under analysis. However, it did not have the same significance over time. Specific articulations of affect or rationality legitimated workers’ rights at different moments in relation to particular labor relations. Based on a close reading of more than 800 case records, the article shows that, despite the particularities of any individual cases, patterns of argument emerged, connected to changes in the world of labor and transformations in the dynamics of domestic service.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1054-1061
Author(s):  
Cristina Camúñez Díaz ◽  
◽  
Consuelo Borrero Gallego ◽  
Ana Soltero Díaz ◽  
◽  
...  

The hypothesis test, as today we understand, are born in the first decades of the twentieth century, with the work of Fisher, on the one hand, and Neyman and Pearson, on the other, which were developed from antagonistic philosophical positions, which they have been maintained over time. But for two centuries before there were attempts to endorse assumptions made from reality with the available data. Thus, from the accounts mortality weekly published the City of London, John Graunt (1662) he believed prove that “the unhealthiest years are less fertile” (exists in time a negative correlation between the annual number of burials and the birth), while John Arbuthnott (paper read in 1711 and published in 1712), gave “Arguments for Divine Providence” and sGravesande a mathematical proof that “God directs what happens in the world”, in both cases, from the regular rate of births of men and women. Although the theoretical foundations of these works are of dubious rigor, proposals are ingenious and nearby, in some respects, what we do today when we perform a hypothesis test. This paper analyzes in detail the early contributions of these three authors by looking at what it looks like now and pointing out the mistakes made by them.


1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fouad A-L.H. Abou-Hatab

This paper presents the case of psychology from a perspective not widely recognized by the West, namely, the Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic perspective. It discusses the introduction and development of psychology in this part of the world. Whenever such efforts are evaluated, six problems become apparent: (1) the one-way interaction with Western psychology; (2) the intellectual dependency; (3) the remote relationship with national heritage; (4) its irrelevance to cultural and social realities; (5) the inhibition of creativity; and (6) the loss of professional identity. Nevertheless, some major achievements are emphasized, and a four-facet look into the 21st century is proposed.


2001 ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
Serhii Viktorovych Svystunov

In the 21st century, the world became a sign of globalization: global conflicts, global disasters, global economy, global Internet, etc. The Polish researcher Casimir Zhigulsky defines globalization as a kind of process, that is, the target set of characteristic changes that develop over time and occur in the modern world. These changes in general are reduced to mutual rapprochement, reduction of distances, the rapid appearance of a large number of different connections, contacts, exchanges, and to increase the dependence of society in almost all spheres of his life from what is happening in other, often very remote regions of the world.


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