scholarly journals Infants look longer at colours that adults like when colours are highly saturated

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-85
Author(s):  
A. E. Skelton ◽  
A. Franklin

AbstractThe extent to which aesthetic preferences are ‘innate’ has been highly debated (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364–382, 2004). For some types of visual stimuli infants look longer at those that adults prefer. It is unclear whether this is also the case for colour. A lack of relationship in prior studies between how long infants look at different colours and how much adults like those colours might be accounted for by stimulus limitations. For example, stimuli may have been too desaturated for infant vision. In the current study, using saturated colours more suitable for infants, we aim to quantify the relationship between infant looking and adult preference for colour. We take infant looking times at multiple hues from a study of infant colour categorization (Skelton, Catchpole, Abbott, Bosten, & Franklin, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(21), 5545–5550, 2017) and then measure adult preferences and compare these to infant looking. When colours are highly saturated, infants look longer at colours that adults prefer. Both infant looking time and adult preference are greatest for blue hues and are least for green-yellow. Infant looking and adult preference can be partly summarized by activation of the blue-yellow dimension in the early encoding of human colour vision. These findings suggest that colour preference is at least partially rooted in the sensory mechanisms of colour vision, and more broadly that aesthetic judgements may in part be due to underlying sensory biases.

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 556-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brit Shields

This paper seeks to combine studies of émigré scientists, Cold War American science, and cultural histories of mathematical communities by analyzing Richard Courant’s participation in the National Academy of Sciences interacademy exchange program with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Following his dismissal by the Nazi government from his post as Director of the Göttingen Mathematics Institute in 1933, Courant spent a year at the University of Cambridge, and then immigrated to the United States where he developed the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Courant’s participation with the National Academy of Sciences interacademy exchange program at the end of his career highlights his ideologies about the mathematics discipline, the international mathematics community, and the political role mathematicians could play in contributing to international peace through scientific diplomacy. Courant’s Cold War scientific identity emerges from his activities as an émigré mathematician, institution builder, and international “ambassador.”


Author(s):  
Joseph L. Breault

The National Academy of Sciences convened in 1995 for a conference on massive data sets. The presentation on health care noted that “massive applies in several dimensions . . . the data themselves are massive, both in terms of the number of observations and also in terms of the variables . . . there are tens of thousands of indicator variables coded for each patient” (Goodall, 1995, paragraph 18). We multiply this by the number of patients in the United States, which is hundreds of millions.


2004 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-493
Author(s):  
Xiaofang Gao

Hedge is defined as the expression of provisionalness and possibility that makes scientific messages tentative, vague, and imprecise, thereby reducing the force of claims scientists make. Linguistic study of hedges began in the early 1970s in generative semantics. Since then, the focus has shifted from seeking linguistic properties in spoken discourse to analyzing its pragmatic functions in written contextual communication. The purpose of this paper was to analyze hedges in Chinese and English scientific articles from the perspective of contrastive pragmatics. Based on a contextual analysis of 5 Chinese and 5 English scientific articles, selected randomly, from two journals in molecular biology— Science in China and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, there were significant differences between Chinese and English scientific articles in use of hedges.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 239784731769499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward J Calabrese

This commentary summarizes a spate of recent papers that provide historical evidence that the 1956 recommendation of the US National Academy of Sciences Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation I Genetics Panel to switch from a threshold to a linear dose–response model for risk assessment was an ideologically motivated decision based on deliberate falsification and fabrication of the research record. The recommendation by the Genetics Panel had far-reaching influence, affecting cancer risk assessment, risk communication strategies, community public health, and numerous medical practices in the United States and worldwide. This commentary argues that the toxicology, risk assessment, and regulatory communities examine this issue, addressing how these new historical evaluations affect the history and educational practices of these fields as well as carcinogen regulation.


2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHLEEN S. SHORT

Individuals and families may encounter difficulty making ends meet on many dimensions and there are a large number of measures designed to identify this group. In general, there is agreement that all of the approaches capture different pieces of the puzzle, while no single indicator can yield a complete picture. In an attempt to understand this multidimensional aspect of poverty, several measures are examined in this article: the official US poverty measure, a relative poverty measure, an experimental measure following recommendations of the US National Academy of Sciences, an index of material hardship, a measure of household debt, and responses to a question about inability to meet expenses. This study uses the 1996 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The SIPP is a longitudinal survey that allows us to examine all of these various indicators for the same people over the period from 1996 to 1998. The study uses regression analysis to assess the relationship between and among the various indicators of economic hardship.


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