Sense and Sensitivity – Using Spatial Response-Compatibility Effects to Investigate Ambiguous Word Meaning

We investigated sensitivity for the vertical meaning of the German particle ab by means of stimulus–response compatibility effects. In German, the particle ab is ambiguous and can take on a vertical meaning (downward) as in Auf und Ab (engl. up and down), but it can also take on nonvertical or nonspatial meanings as in Ab und An (engl. from time to time). We show that the particle ab only creates a spatial compatibility effect relative to the German particle auf (Experiment 1) but not relative to the particle an (Experiment 2). Furthermore, as participants executed upward versus downward responses in both Experiments 1 and 2, the mere vertical antagonism of the responses was insufficient to instill a verticality-based compatibility effect. In addition, the compatibility effect was restricted to the transparent version of the particle. If a letter sequence corresponding to the particles was presented in a semantically and morphologically opaque way (e.g., the letters ab were embedded in the German word kn ab e, engl. boy), no compatibility effect was found, underlining that the effect was due to word meanings rather than visual features. The results underscore the boundary conditions for using compatibility effects in investigating lexical and semantic spatial processing in humans.

New Literary Genres—An Insight in the Creativity Optimization

<p><em>The theory of literary genres, developed from antiquity to the present day, has been differently approached, more or less convincingly. The philosophical insight of the genders definition appears at Hegel, A.W. Schlegel, Schelling, each of them trying to follow the particularities of each genre depending on the way to report consciousness to reality and to the issue of the time taken as a reference. In the following, we are going to refer to the value and utility of genres for the cultural and social history of humanity, by stopping to the genres characteristic to the postmodern era. In this regard, we intend to follow the impact of the digital epistolary in the context of the media globalization, the advantages and disadvantages of the technological progress, the changes in form and content suffered by the “letter” sequence to this evolution.</em></p><p><em>Another genre that comes to our attention is the comic magazine that can appear to some as an insignificant object, a part of a communist world, invoked in the news debates, only. The original mobility of the comics is situated in its very nature at the intersection of visual and narrative, which gives it the chance to weave bridges over the fields of the folk culture and literature. This may illustrate an alternative, from a cultural insight, where the aesthetic and sociological values coexist. The comics are intellectual challenges for different categories of readers through the new postmodern setting of the values expressed by text and image.</em></p>

Protein Sequence Comparison and DNA-binding Protein Identification with Generalized PseAAC and Graphical Representation

Aim and Objective: The rapid increase in the amount of protein sequence data available leads to an urgent need for novel computational algorithms to analyze and compare these sequences. This study is undertaken to develop an efficient computational approach for timely encoding protein sequences and extracting the hidden information. Methods: Based on two physicochemical properties of amino acids, a protein primary sequence was converted into a three-letter sequence, and then a graph without loops and multiple edges and its geometric line adjacency matrix were obtained. A generalized PseAAC (pseudo amino acid composition) model was thus constructed to characterize a protein sequence numerically. Results: By using the proposed mathematical descriptor of a protein sequence, similarity comparisons among β-globin proteins of 17 species and 72 spike proteins of coronaviruses were made, respectively. The resulting clusters agreed well with the established taxonomic groups. In addition, a generalized PseAAC based SVM (support vector machine) model was developed to identify DNA-binding proteins. Experiment results showed that our method performed better than DNAbinder, DNA-Prot, iDNA-Prot and enDNA-Prot by 3.29-10.44% in terms of ACC, 0.056-0.206 in terms of MCC, and 1.45-15.76% in terms of F1M. When the benchmark dataset was expanded with negative samples, the presented approach outperformed the four previous methods with improvement in the range of 2.49-19.12% in terms of ACC, 0.05-0.32 in terms of MCC, and 3.82- 33.85% in terms of F1M. Conclusion: These results suggested that the generalized PseAAC model was very efficient for comparison and analysis of protein sequences, and very competitive in identifying DNA-binding proteins.