Smallholders Perception on Mutation Breeding's Muna Teak Demonstration Plot in Cariu Private Forest

Teak wood is the superior wood for carpentry, and the need for carpentry continues to increase in Indonesia. It has prompted various efforts to increase teak production, both in state forests and non-state forests. One of the efforts to increase teak production is using advanced science and technology, superior teak seedlings from mutation breeding. This study aims to describe smallholder's perception of the demonstration plot of Muna Teak from mutation breeding in the Cariu Private Forest, Bogor Regency. The research used two methods: Focused Group Discussion and semi-structured interviews by questionnaires. For the analysis, the study used the perceptual process framework) to explore the data from the two methods and present it descriptively. The result shows that smallholders had a good perception toward the mutation breeding Muna Teak demonstration plot. Smallholders can carry out intercropping (agroforestry) activities in the demonstration plot and increase their knowledge of forestry plant cultivation, especially teak. The activity provides an opportunity for smallholders to improve their welfare.

Write Clear Research Explanations

Writing clear research explanations for scientific papers and other professional publications means using short, concise “thrifty” words and eliminating unnecessary “padding” words. Choosing precisely the right word will improve your writing, but also seek out the most vivid, compelling word. Structure sentences to communicate an idea clearly: keep the average sentence short to improve comprehension and give ideas punch, write longer sentences for more complex ideas, and place the concept at the beginning or end. Use the active voice to strengthen your explanations and engage the reader. Proofread exhaustively, performing each of the three levels of proofreading separately. Composing readable prose also means writing for the “reading eye,” taking into account the perceptual process of reading by creating layouts that offer visual landmarks such as paragraph indents, white space, drop caps, and pull quotes.

Evaluating the overall impression of concert lighting: An integrated approach

Using experimental data from four electric lighting scenarios at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, we developed an integrated approach to evaluating the overall impression of concert lighting. First, we performed a group analysis based on the aggregated response from the audience, conductor and musician respondents, followed by an overall analysis accounting for all 624 responses. Ordered logistic regression analysis revealed the absence of statistically significant subjective–objective relationships for perceived visual balance, appropriateness, comfort and the overall impression. There were, however, significant results when the variables were correlated with subjective attributes. This suggests that the perceptual process was bi-level. To gain a more complete understanding of the perceived qualities, it is necessary for an approach to consider not only the intercorrelations between the subjective and objective measures, but also the intracorrelations among the subjective attributes. Further analysis of variance showed that increasing the overall lighting intensity was more likely to lead to a lower level of satisfaction. Nevertheless, providing peripheral and directional lights appeared to be the key to improving the overall impression. This paper confirms that combining detailed and generalised approaches to evaluate subjective responses can yield more meaningful interpretations, enabling relations with measures to be established with greater confidence.

Serendipity: an aptitude for perceiving pleasant discoveries on an accidental bases

Serendipity, or serendipitous behaviour, is described as the aptitude for perceiving pleasant discoveries on an accidental basis. While not an incredibly new concept to design and its related process, serendipitous discovery within the perceptual process of design is an incredibly potent catalyst for the concepts being explored within this thesis. As an introspective exercise, observing this serendipitous behaviour allows us to take a step back and apprehend new discoveries as we wade through the many aliases induced through simulated perception.

Serendipity: an aptitude for perceiving pleasant discoveries on an accidental bases

Serendipity, or serendipitous behaviour, is described as the aptitude for perceiving pleasant discoveries on an accidental basis. While not an incredibly new concept to design and its related process, serendipitous discovery within the perceptual process of design is an incredibly potent catalyst for the concepts being explored within this thesis. As an introspective exercise, observing this serendipitous behaviour allows us to take a step back and apprehend new discoveries as we wade through the many aliases induced through simulated perception.

Sensor-Level Wavelet Analysis Reveals EEG Biomarkers of Perceptual Decision-Making

Perceptual decision-making requires transforming sensory information into decisions. An ambiguity of sensory input affects perceptual decisions inducing specific time-frequency patterns on EEG (electroencephalogram) signals. This paper uses a wavelet-based method to analyze how ambiguity affects EEG features during a perceptual decision-making task. We observe that parietal and temporal beta-band wavelet power monotonically increases throughout the perceptual process. Ambiguity induces high frontal beta-band power at 0.3–0.6 s post-stimulus onset. It may reflect the increasing reliance on the top-down mechanisms to facilitate accumulating decision-relevant sensory features. Finally, this study analyzes the perceptual process using mixed within-trial and within-subject design. First, we found significant percept-related changes in each subject and then test their significance at the group level. Thus, observed beta-band biomarkers are pronounced in single EEG trials and may serve as control commands for brain-computer interface (BCI).

La actualidad de la distinción entre fenómeno y cosa en sí para la fenomenología. Los diferences significados de la cosa en sí en Kant y Husserl.

Kant’s and Husserl’s philosophies both ground on the distinction between the things in themselves and the phenomenon. While for Kant, this distinction rests in the respective faculties and the mediating function of imagination, for Husserl it is a function of the perceptual process itself. Concerning the thing in itself, its main sense for Kant is that of noumenon or intelligible being, while for Husserl it is mainly the ideal of the adequate givenness of a particular reality of the thing. This contribution aims at developping Husserl’s critical reformulation of Kant’s thing in itself by analysing its different senses and interpretations at both authors.

Defining “active sensing” through an analysis of sensing energetics: homeoactive and alloactive sensing

The term “active sensing” has been defined in multiple ways. Most strictly, the term refers to sensing that uses self-generated energy to sample the environment (e.g., echolocation). More broadly, the definition includes all sensing that occurs when the sensor is moving (e.g., tactile stimuli obtained by an immobile versus moving fingertip) and, broader still, includes all sensing guided by attention or intent (e.g., purposeful eye movements). The present work offers a framework to help disambiguate aspects of the “active sensing” terminology and reveals properties of tactile sensing unique among all modalities. The framework begins with the well-described “sensorimotor loop,” which expresses the perceptual process as a cycle involving four subsystems: environment, sensor, nervous system, and actuator. Using system dynamics, we examine how information flows through the loop. This “sensory-energetic loop” reveals two distinct sensing mechanisms that subdivide active sensing into homeoactive and alloactive sensing. In homeoactive sensing, the animal can change the state of the environment, while in alloactive sensing the animal can alter only the sensor’s configurational parameters and thus the mapping between input and output. Given these new definitions, examination of the sensory-energetic loop helps identify two unique characteristics of tactile sensing: 1) in tactile systems, alloactive and homeoactive sensing merge to a mutually controlled sensing mechanism, and 2) tactile sensing may require fundamentally different predictions to anticipate reafferent input. We expect this framework may help resolve ambiguities in the active sensing community and form a basis for future theoretical and experimental work regarding alloactive and homeoactive sensing.

Prior expectations of motion direction modulate early sensory processing

Perception is a process of inference, integrating sensory inputs with prior expectations. However, little is known regarding the temporal dynamics of this integration. It has been proposed that expectation plays a role early in the perceptual process, by biasing early sensory processing. Alternatively, others suggest that expectations are integrated only at later, post-perceptual decision-making stages. The current study aimed to dissociate between these hypotheses. We exposed male and female human participants (N=24) to auditory cues predicting the likely direction of upcoming noisy moving dot patterns, while recording millisecond-resolved neural activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG). First, we found that participants’ reports of the moving dot directions were biased towards the direction predicted by the auditory cues. To investigate when expectations affected sensory representations, we used inverted encoding models to decode the direction represented in early sensory signals. Strikingly, the auditory cues modulated the direction represented in the MEG signal as early as 150ms after visual stimulus onset. This early neural modulation was related to perceptual effects of expectation: participants with a stronger perceptual bias towards the predicted direction also revealed a stronger reflection of the predicted direction in the MEG signal. For participants with this perceptual bias, a trial-by-trial correlation between decoded and perceived direction already emerged prior to visual stimulus onset (∼-150ms), suggesting that the pre-stimulus state of the visual cortex influences sensory processing. Together, these results suggest that prior expectations can influence perception by biasing early sensory processing, making expectation a fundamental component of the neural computations underlying perception.Significance statementPerception can be thought of as an inferential process in which our brains integrate sensory inputs with prior expectations to make sense of the world. This study investigated whether this integration occurs early or late in the process of perception. We exposed human participants to auditory cues which predicted the likely direction of visual moving dots, while recording neural activity with millisecond resolution using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Participants’ perceptual reports of the direction of the moving dots were biased towards the predicted direction. Additionally, the predicted direction modulated the neural representation of the moving dots just 150 ms after they appeared. This suggests that prior expectations affected sensory processing at very early stages, playing an integral role in the perceptual process.