Repurchase Intention among Mobile Shoppers with Mediating Effect of Satisfaction on Mobile Shopping

Good continuation of mobile shoppers’ intention could ensure sustainability in mobile shopping, thus the study of consumer behavior including service quality, perceived value, trust and satisfaction is essential in order to understand their needs. The question is whether the mobile shopping in Malaysia has provided sufficient mobile websites or apps facilities to gain the repurchase intention of mobile shoppers. However, there are several issues arise such as bad reviews or comments, lack of communication and fake online sellers that may affect mobile shoppers’ behaviour. This research aims to examine the relationship between service quality (SQ), perceived value (PV) and trust (TR) mediated by mobile shoppers’ satisfaction (CS) with repurchase intention (RI). 427 usable questionnaires were collected from the mobile shoppers around Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. The data was analyzed using SPSS and Structural Equation Modelling in SmartPLS. The results suggested that there is a significant relationship between SQ, PV and TR on CS. Besides, CS mediates the relationship between SQ, PV and TR with RI. The research has extended the body of knowledge in mobile shopping studies. The findings contribute valuable theoretical and managerial implications that can enhance mobile shopping services.

The contribution of shape features and demographic variables to disembedding abilities

Humans typically perceive visual patterns in a global manner, and are remarkably capable of extracting object shapes based on properties such as proximity, closure, symmetry, and good continuation. Notwithstanding people’s attitude toward perceptual grouping, the research highlighted differences in disembedding performance across individuals, summarized by the field dependence/independence dimension. Previous studies revealed that age and educational attainment explain part of this variability, whereas the role of sex is still highly debated. Also, which stimulus features primarily influence inter-individual variations in perceptual grouping has to be fully determined.Building upon these premises, we assessed the role of age, level of education and sex on performance at the Leuven-Embedded Figure Test - a proxy of disembedding abilities - in a sample of 391 cisgender individuals. We also investigated whether stimulus symmetry, closure, complexity, and continuation relate to task accuracy as a function of personal characteristics.Overall, target asymmetry and continuation with the embedding context increase task difficulty, whereas target complexity demonstrates a U-shaped relationship with disembedding performance. Further, results unveil sex differences that have not been reported so far in adults and support the association between age, educational attainment, and disembedding abilities. Male individuals also benefit more from target symmetry and closure and are better at recognizing shapes when the embedding context is challenging. Lastly, highly educated adults better recognize asymmetrical and open targets, as well as shapes embedded in complex contexts. Taken together, our findings show how shape features relate to individual characteristics in explaining field independence.

Sparse deep predictive coding captures contour integration capabilities of the early visual system

Both neurophysiological and psychophysical experiments have pointed out the crucial role of recurrent and feedback connections to process context-dependent information in the early visual cortex. While numerous models have accounted for feedback effects at either neural or representational level, none of them were able to bind those two levels of analysis. Is it possible to describe feedback effects at both levels using the same model? We answer this question by combining Predictive Coding (PC) and Sparse Coding (SC) into a hierarchical and convolutional framework applied to realistic problems. In the Sparse Deep Predictive Coding (SDPC) model, the SC component models the internal recurrent processing within each layer, and the PC component describes the interactions between layers using feedforward and feedback connections. Here, we train a 2-layered SDPC on two different databases of images, and we interpret it as a model of the early visual system (V1 & V2). We first demonstrate that once the training has converged, SDPC exhibits oriented and localized receptive fields in V1 and more complex features in V2. Second, we analyze the effects of feedback on the neural organization beyond the classical receptive field of V1 neurons using interaction maps. These maps are similar to association fields and reflect the Gestalt principle of good continuation. We demonstrate that feedback signals reorganize interaction maps and modulate neural activity to promote contour integration. Third, we demonstrate at the representational level that the SDPC feedback connections are able to overcome noise in input images. Therefore, the SDPC captures the association field principle at the neural level which results in a better reconstruction of blurred images at the representational level.

Immediate postpartum intrauterine contraceptive device insertions in caesarean and vaginal deliveries: a comparative study

Background: Post-partum family planning is prevention of unintended and closely spaced pregnancies during first 12 months following childbirth. Postpartum IUCD is the best method of all as it is the safest, most effective, has no effect on breast feeding, reliable and with minimum complications.Methods: The cross-sectional study was conducted in AIMSR Bathinda on 400 postpartum patients. It was a prospective, observational study of women who received PPIUCD in our region.Results: Out of total 400, 58% had normal vaginal delivery and 42% had cesarean section. PPIUCD was done in all cases after applying exclusion criteria and the females were called for follow up. 53% cases who had cesarean and 47% of normal vaginal delivery turned up for follow up. Acceptance is more in multipara (20.7%) than in primi patients (13.7%). Almost 90% patients had good continuation rate. There were few problems faced by patients like irregular bleeding for first few months, pain lower abdomen, leucorrhea etc. which were removed by good counseling and some treatment like NSAIDs for bleeding.Conclusions: The acceptance of PPIUCD was high in present study in both types of females delivered by normal vaginal delivery or post LSCS but with good counseling efforts. It was safe and effective and had high retention rate when done at good timing by trained service provider that is within 10 minutes of placental delivery. So the need of time is creating awareness of public towards it and removing fear from minds, breaking taboos and myths.

On the Role of Contrast Polarity: In Response to van der Helm’s Comments

In this work, we discussed and counter-commented van der Helm’s comments on our previous paper (Pinna and Conti, Brain Sci., 2019, 9, 149), where we demonstrated unique and relevant visual properties imparted by contrast polarity in eliciting amodal completion. The main question we addressed was: “What is the role of shape formation and perceptual organization in inducing amodal completion?” To answer this question, novel stimuli were studied through Gestalt experimental phenomenology. The results demonstrated the domination of the contrast polarity against good continuation, T-junctions, and regularity. Moreover, the limiting conditions explored revealed a new kind of junction next to the T- and Y-junctions, respectively responsible for amodal completion and tessellation. We called them I-junctions. The results were theoretically discussed in relation to the previous approaches and in the light of the phenomenal salience imparted by contrast polarity. In counter-commenting van der Helm’s comments we went into detail of his critiques and rejected all of them point-by-point. We proceeded by summarizing hypotheses and discussion of the previous work, then commenting on each critique through old and new phenomena and clarifying the meaning of our previous conclusions.

Responsibility as an Ethical Value

The individual thinking of each of us causes many of us to give up the utopian dreams of the human mastery over living conditions and the exercise of a new responsibility, in accordance with our new powers. Our ethical responsibility and our fateful ontological choice is to do what is necessary to ensure the continued, worldly integrity of mankind and it's continuity in an indefinite future, to ensure a good continuation of life between communities or even in the relations between the states of the world. We point out as a first example the ecological crisis and the moral crisis of transforming ecological behavior into a habit when humanity needs resources to survive. However, it is necessary to give recognition to researchers who claim that traditional systems of ethics do not have the resources to cope with our unprecedented technological powers, and the effort of all to fill the philosophical void but also the real, tangible and practically proven part of ethics with an "ethics of responsibility", it is something other than a simple daily habit.

Do professional musicians perceive numerosity illusions differently?

A large body of experimental evidence suggests that long-term musical training has profound consequences on the functional organization of the brain, leading to an improvement of cognitive abilities that are non-primarily involved in music. Here, we tested the hypothesis stating that long-term musical training has effects in the perceptual laws underlying vision. To achieve our goal, we compared the susceptibility of musicians and non-musicians to the Solitaire illusion, an illusion of numerosity based on the Gestalt law of proximity and good continuation. Both groups were observed in a relative (Experiment 1) and an absolute (Experiment 2) numerosity task: the former required an estimation of which array contained more blue dots; the latter required an estimation of the number of blue dots presented. In both experiments, the illusory pattern was presented as well. In control trials, no difference was found between musicians and non-musicians in the overall performance. The two groups were susceptible to the illusion in both experiments, although the musicians in Experiment 2 varied in their susceptibility to the numerosity misperception, perceiving a smaller illusory ratio compared with non-musicians. Based on these results, we suggest that prolonged music training may alter the perceptual laws in visual modality.

Integration of Contours Defined by Second-Order Contrast-Modulation of Texture

ABSTRACTBoundaries in the visual world can be defined by changes in luminance and texture in the input image. A “contour integration” process joins together local changes into percepts of lines or edges. A previous study tested the integration of contours defined by second-order contrast-modulation. Their contours were placed in a background of random wavelets. Subjects performed near chance. We re-visited second-order contour integration with a different task. Subjects distinguished contours with “good continuation” from distractors. We measured thresholds in different amounts of external orientation or position noise. This gave two noise-masking functions. We also measured thresholds for contours with a baseline curvature to assess performance with more curvy targets. Our subjects were able to discriminate the good continuation of second-order contours. Thresholds were higher than for first-order contours. In our modelling, we found this was due to multiple factors. There was a doubling of equivalent internal noise between first- and second-order contour integration. There was also a reduction in efficiency. The efficiency difference was only significant in our orientation noise condition. For both first- and second-order stimuli, subjects were also able to perform our task with more curved contours. We conclude that humans can integrate second-order contours, even when they are curved. There is however reduced performance compared to first-order contours. We find both an impaired input to the integrating mechanism, and reduced efficiency seem responsible. Second-order contour integration may be more affected by the noise background used in the previous study. Difficulty segregating that background may explain their result.

DESIGN OF ORIENTATION ASSESSMENT FUNCTIONS FOR GESTALT-GROUPING UTILIZING LABELED SAMPLE-DATA

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Psychological evidence is given that perceptual grouping is an important help for various visual tasks. Object recognition and land use classification from remotely sensed imagery is an example. In machine vision, such a grouping process can be implemented by coding Gestalt laws such as proximity, symmetry, or good continuation. Since geometric relations are rarely fulfilled exactly, soft membership functions are utilized called Gestalt assessments. Hierarchical grouping is possible on increasing scales. Such an approach to hierarchical Gestalt grouping is modified in this paper. In its original form, the approach uses rather heuristic default assessment functions, which are a possible choice as long as no labeled example data are given. The assessment functions can be parameterized so as to improve the perceptual grouping, guiding it by the Gestalten salient to human perception. To this end, we use orientation statistics from the publicly available data set given for the ICCV symmetry recognition competition 2017. Also, with a particular recognition task at hand, labeled example data can serve as the desired foreground. Here we use the ground-truth layer for buildings of the Vaihingen benchmark of the ISPRS. A mixture distribution containing two von Mises-distributions and the uniform component for the clutter in the background is fitted using expectation maximization.</p>

Automatic Geological Map Generalization for special geobody – A Case Study on Dyke

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Dykes are always closely coexisting with ore veins in deposit, they are of great significance in the revelation of regional geology evolution, prosperity of ore prospecting. This paper presents a method for the generalization of dykes as part of automated geological map generalization progress. Based on the principle of good continuation, dykes were amalgamated preliminarily. Then the reserve quota was calculated on the basis of radical law for the editing of dykes. Finally, the outer shape and internal construction of dykes were simplified. The experiment results show that the generalization method can avoid discontinuity as a prerequisite to retaining formation lithology and characteristics of geological structure. This method offers a new perspective for dealing with exceptional geographic elements while generalizing a geologic map.</p>