spatial representations
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2022 ◽  
pp. 174702182210765
Author(s):  
Simon Lhuillier ◽  
Pascale Piolino ◽  
Serge Nicolas ◽  
Valérie Gyselinck

Grounded views of cognition consider that space perception is shaped by the body and its potential for action. These views are substantiated by observations such as the distance-on-hill effect, described as the overestimation of visually perceived uphill distances. An interpretation of this phenomenon is that slanted distances are overestimated because of the integration of energy expenditure cues. The visual perceptual processes involved are however usually tackled through explicit estimation tasks in passive situations. The goal of this study was to consider instead more ecological active spatial processing. Using immersive virtual reality and an omnidirectional treadmill, we investigated the effect of anticipated implicit physical locomotion cost by comparing spatial learning for uphill and downhill routes, while maintaining actual physical cost and walking speed constant. In the first experiment, participants learnt city layouts by exploring uphill or downhill routes. They were then tested using a landmark positioning task on a map. In the second experiment, the same protocol was used with participants who wore loaded ankle weights. Results from the first experiment showed that walking uphill routes led to a global underestimation of distances compared to downhill routes. This inverted distance-of-hill effect was not observed in the second experiment, where an additional effort was applied. These results suggest that the underestimation of distances observed in experiment one emerged from recalibration processes whose function was to solve the transgression of proprioceptive predictions linked with uphill energy expenditure. Results are discussed in relation to constructivist approaches on spatial representations and predictive coding theories.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sami Ryan Yousif

Mental representations are the essence of cognition. Yet, to understand how the mind works, we must understand not just the content of mental representations (i.e., what information is stored), but also the format of those representations (i.e., how that information is stored). But what does it mean for representations to be formatted? How many formats are there? Is it possible that the mind represents some pieces of information in multiple formats at once? To address these questions, I discuss a ‘case study’ of representational format: the representation of spatial location. I review work (a) across species and across development, (b) across spatial scales, and (c) across levels of analysis (e.g., high-level cognitive format vs. low-level neural format). Along the way, I discuss the possibility that the same information may be organized in multiple formats simultaneously (e.g., that locations may be represented in both Cartesian and polar coordinates). Ultimately, I argue that seemingly ‘redundant’ formats may support the flexible spatial behavior observed in humans, and that we should approach the study of all mental representations with this possibility in mind.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tingcong Lin ◽  
Ping Su

In the second half of the 19th century, Shamian was established and developed as a colonial island enclave in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. Simultaneously, literary and cultural imaginations, depictions, and narrations of the place produced a discourse of Shamian as a utopian island: geographically insular and bounded, environmentally beautiful and peaceful, socially exclusive and harmonious, and technologically progressive and advantageous. This paper examines contemporaneous (predominantly English) literary and cultural representations of Shamian as a colonial utopia and their interrelations with the island’s spatial formation and evolution. These texts (primarily written and pictorial descriptive, non-fictional accounts) reflected the spatial reality but also promoted spatial practices that reinforced the physical utopian island. This process exemplifies the theories of performative geographies in island studies and intertextuality in geocriticism, showing how a place’s spatial representations and reality are mutually constructed. Adopting a conceptual model of intertextual performative geographies, this paper investigates the dynamic interplay of these literary and cultural texts with the spatial reality, arguing that literary and cultural representations of Shamian (re)produced the colonial enclave as a utopian island, both conceptually and practically.


Author(s):  
А.Н. Чугунекова

Статья посвящена выявлению глаголов движения в текстах хакасских героических сказаний. Данное исследование проведено на материале опубликованных текстов «Албынчы», «Алтын Арыг», записанных от популярного народного сказителя Хакасии С. П. Кадышева (1885–1997), и «Ай Хуучин» (сказитель П. В. Курбижеков). Актуальность исследования связана с возрастающим интересом к месту и роли пространственных идей в форме национальной лингвокультуры. Известно, что пространство и время как фундаментальные свойства бытия определяют специфику ментальности этнического коллектива, обусловливают уникальность временных и пространственных планов жизнедеятельности. В каждом языке существуют свои средства выражения и своя система способов выражения пространственных представлений. Одним из них являются глаголы движения. Целью статьи является выявление и описание глаголов движения, функционирующих в текстах героических сказаний хакасов. В задачи исследования входят: выявление глаголов движения, характерных только для текстов героических сказаний; определение семантики и грамматического значения этих глаголов. При решении поставленных задач были привлечены метод сплошной выборки примеров, предусматривающий подбор примеров для анализа и выписывание из текстов героических сказаний подряд всех встречающихся в нём примеров анализируемого типа; описательный метод для выявления глаголов движения и их последовательного описания с точки зрения их структуры и функционирования. Метод дистрибутивного анализа позволил выявить сочетаемостные особенности глаголов движения. Исследование проводилось в рамках антропоцентрической парадигмы знаний, естественной точкой отсчета которой является представление о человеке и о языке в человеке. В результате исследования выявлены и проанализированы глаголы движения, функционирующие в текстах героических сказаний хакасского языка; определены грамматические значения глагольной лексики в героических сказаниях хакасского языка; определены актуальные для языка героического эпоса глаголы со значением движения. Полученные результаты исследования могут найти применение при чтении лекционных курсов по хакасскому и другим тюркским языкам на филологических факультетах вузов, при составлении учебно-методических пособий, словарей, а также при сравнительно-типологических исследованиях. The article is devoted to the identification of verbs of movement in the texts of Khakas heroic legends. This study is based on the published texts Albynchy, Altyn Aryg, recorded from the popular epicteller of Khakasia S. P. Kadyshev (1885–1997) and Ai Huuchin (epicteller P. V. Kurbizhekov). The relevance of the research is related to the growing interest in the place and role of spatial ideas in the form of national linguistic culture. It is known that space and time as fundamental properties of being determine the specifics of the mentality of an ethnic group, determine the uniqueness of the time and spatial plans of life. Each language has its own means of expression and its own system of ways of expressing spatial representations. One of them is the verbs of movement. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the verbs of movement that function in the texts of the heroic legends of the Khakas. The tasks of the research include: identification of verbs of movement that are characteristic only for the texts of heroic tales; determining the semantics and grammatical meaning of these verbs. In solving the tasks set, the method of continuous sampling of examples was recognized (providing for the selection of examples for analysis and writing out from the texts of heroic tales in a row all the examples of the analyzed type found in it), descriptive (for identifying verbs of movement and their consistent description in terms of their structure and functioning) method. The method of distributive analysis made it possible to identify combinable features of verbs of movement. The study was conducted within the framework of the anthropocentric paradigm of knowledge, the natural starting point of which is the idea of a person and of a language in a person. As a result of the research, the verbs of movement functioning in the texts of the Khakas heroic tales were identified and analyzed; the grammatical meanings of the verbal vocabulary in the heroic tales of the Khakas language were determined; the verbs with the meaning of movement that are relevant for the language of the heroic epic were determined. The results of the study can be used in the reading of lecture courses on the Khakas and other Turkic languages at the philological faculties of universities, in the preparation of teaching aids, dictionaries, as well as in comparative typological studies.


Micromachines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Guanghua Xiao ◽  
Huibin Wang ◽  
Jie Shen ◽  
Zhe Chen ◽  
Zhen Zhang ◽  
...  

Automatic brain tumor classification is a practicable means of accelerating clinical diagnosis. Recently, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) training with MRI datasets has succeeded in computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) systems. To further improve the classification performance of CNNs, there is still a difficult path forward with regards to subtle discriminative details among brain tumors. We note that the existing methods heavily rely on data-driven convolutional models while overlooking what makes a class different from the others. Our study proposes to guide the network to find exact differences among similar tumor classes. We first present a “dual suppression encoding” block tailored to brain tumor MRIs, which diverges two paths from our network to refine global orderless information and local spatial representations. The aim is to use more valuable clues for correct classes by reducing the impact of negative global features and extending the attention of salient local parts. Then we introduce a “factorized bilinear encoding” layer for feature fusion. The aim is to generate compact and discriminative representations. Finally, the synergy between these two components forms a pipeline that learns in an end-to-end way. Extensive experiments exhibited superior classification performance in qualitative and quantitative evaluation on three datasets.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (33/34) ◽  
pp. 476-502
Author(s):  
Ramesh Loganathan ◽  
Shanthini Pillai ◽  
Pramela Krish

PLoS Biology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (11) ◽  
pp. e3001465
Author(s):  
Ambra Ferrari ◽  
Uta Noppeney

To form a percept of the multisensory world, the brain needs to integrate signals from common sources weighted by their reliabilities and segregate those from independent sources. Previously, we have shown that anterior parietal cortices combine sensory signals into representations that take into account the signals’ causal structure (i.e., common versus independent sources) and their sensory reliabilities as predicted by Bayesian causal inference. The current study asks to what extent and how attentional mechanisms can actively control how sensory signals are combined for perceptual inference. In a pre- and postcueing paradigm, we presented observers with audiovisual signals at variable spatial disparities. Observers were precued to attend to auditory or visual modalities prior to stimulus presentation and postcued to report their perceived auditory or visual location. Combining psychophysics, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and Bayesian modelling, we demonstrate that the brain moulds multisensory inference via 2 distinct mechanisms. Prestimulus attention to vision enhances the reliability and influence of visual inputs on spatial representations in visual and posterior parietal cortices. Poststimulus report determines how parietal cortices flexibly combine sensory estimates into spatial representations consistent with Bayesian causal inference. Our results show that distinct neural mechanisms control how signals are combined for perceptual inference at different levels of the cortical hierarchy.


Nature ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raunak Basu ◽  
Robert Gebauer ◽  
Tim Herfurth ◽  
Simon Kolb ◽  
Zahra Golipour ◽  
...  

AbstractAccurate navigation to a desired goal requires consecutive estimates of spatial relationships between the current position and future destination throughout the journey. Although neurons in the hippocampal formation can represent the position of an animal as well as its nearby trajectories1–7, their role in determining the destination of the animal has been questioned8,9. It is, thus, unclear whether the brain can possess a precise estimate of target location during active environmental exploration. Here we describe neurons in the rat orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that form spatial representations persistently pointing to the subsequent goal destination of an animal throughout navigation. This destination coding emerges before the onset of navigation, without direct sensory access to a distal goal, and even predicts the incorrect destination of an animal at the beginning of an error trial. Goal representations in the OFC are maintained by destination-specific neural ensemble dynamics, and their brief perturbation at the onset of a journey led to a navigational error. These findings suggest that the OFC is part of the internal goal map of the brain, enabling animals to navigate precisely to a chosen destination that is beyond the range of sensory perception.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hefei Guan ◽  
Steven J. Middleton ◽  
Takafumi Inoue ◽  
Thomas J. McHugh

AbstractIn the hippocampal circuit CA3 input plays a critical role in the organization of CA1 population activity, both during learning and sleep. While integrated spatial representations have been observed across the two hemispheres of CA1, these regions lack direct connectivity and thus the circuitry responsible remains largely unexplored. Here we investigate the role of CA3 in organizing bilateral CA1 activity by blocking synaptic transmission at CA3 terminals through the inducible transgenic expression of tetanus toxin. Although the properties of single place cells in CA1 were comparable bilaterally, we find a decrease of ripple synchronization between left and right CA1 after silencing CA3. Further, during both exploration and rest, CA1 neuronal ensemble activity is less coordinated across hemispheres. This included degradation of the replay of previously explored spatial paths in CA1 during rest, consistent with the idea that CA3 bilateral projections integrate activity between left and right hemispheres and orchestrate bilateral hippocampal coding.


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