Real-world size of objects serves as an axis of object space

Our mind can represent various objects from the physical world metaphorically into an abstract and complex high-dimensional object space, with a finite number of orthogonal axes encoding critical object features. However, little is known about what features serve as axes of the object space to critically affect object recognition. Here we asked whether the feature of objects’ real-world size constructed an axis of object space with deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) based on three criteria of sensitivity, independence and necessity that are impractical to be examined altogether with traditional approaches. A principal component analysis on features extracted by the DCNNs showed that objects’ real-world size was encoded by an independent axis, and the removal of this axis significantly impaired DCNN’s performance in recognizing objects. With a mutually-inspired paradigm of computational modeling and biological observation, we found that the shape of objects, rather than retinal size, co-occurrence, task demands and texture features, was necessary to represent the real-world size of objects for DCNNs and humans. In short, our study provided the first evidence supporting the feature of objects’ real-world size as an axis of object space, and devised a novel paradigm for future exploring the structure of object space.

Objectification and Instrumentalization: The Activation of Thanatos in Connection with “Body-Power”; or the Human Body as a Critical Object of Power in the Resent Social Reality

This paper is about the ways in which the human body has been objectified under and through the use of power. The article explains the different aspects and ways of objectification of the body and the hidden nature of human behaviour that results from activation of the inner human instincts - the death drive, called Thanatos (Note 1) and the life drive called Eros as a response to Thanatos. By using the theories of Freud, Nussbaum, Erikson, Fanon and Foucault, the relationship between the human body and external power is examined. Using some recent events (such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the world lockdown and the Black Lives Matter movement) human behaviour is seen to result from activation of the inner drives (Eros (Note 2) and Thanatos), but also to be linked to the psychosexual and psychosocial aspects of human development.

On Addressing Heterogeneity in Federated Learning for Autonomous Vehicles Connected to a Drone Orchestrator

In this paper we envision a federated learning (FL) scenario in service of amending the performance of autonomous road vehicles, through a drone traffic monitor (DTM), that also acts as an orchestrator. Expecting non-IID data distribution, we focus on the issue of accelerating the learning of a particular class of critical object (CO), that may harm the nominal operation of an autonomous vehicle. This can be done through proper allocation of the wireless resources for addressing learner and data heterogeneity. Thus, we propose a reactive method for the allocation of wireless resources, that happens dynamically each FL round, and is based on each learner’s contribution to the general model. In addition to this, we explore the use of static methods that remain constant across all rounds. Since we expect partial work from each learner, we use the FedProx FL algorithm, in the task of computer vision. For testing, we construct a non-IID data distribution of the MNIST and FMNIST datasets among four types of learners, in scenarios that represent the quickly changing environment. The results show that proactive measures are effective and versatile at improving system accuracy, and quickly learning the CO class when underrepresented in the network. Furthermore, the experiments show a tradeoff between FedProx intensity and resource allocation efforts. Nonetheless, a well adjusted FedProx local optimizer allows for an even better overall accuracy, particularly when using deeper neural network (NN) implementations.

Why Are Acquired Search-Guiding Context Memories Resistant to Updating?

Looking for goal-relevant objects in our various environments is one of the most ubiquitous tasks the human visual system has to accomplish (Wolfe, 1998). Visual search is guided by a number of separable selective-attention mechanisms that can be categorized as bottom-up driven – guidance by salient physical properties of the current stimuli – or top-down controlled – guidance by observers' “online” knowledge of search-critical object properties (e.g., Liesefeld and Müller, 2019). In addition, observers' expectations based on past experience also play also a significant role in goal-directed visual selection. Because sensory environments are typically stable, it is beneficial for the visual system to extract and learn the environmental regularities that are predictive of (the location of) the target stimulus. This perspective article is concerned with one of these predictive mechanisms: statistical context learning of consistent spatial patterns of target and distractor items in visual search. We review recent studies on context learning and its adaptability to incorporate consistent changes, with the aim to provide new directions to the study of processes involved in the acquisition of search-guiding context memories and their adaptation to consistent contextual changes – from a three-pronged, psychological, computational, and neurobiological perspective.

Everyday Language Exposure Shapes Prediction of Specific Words in Listening Comprehension: A Visual World Eye-Tracking Study

We investigated the effects of everyday language exposure on the prediction of orthographic and phonological forms of a highly predictable word during listening comprehension. Native Japanese speakers in Tokyo (Experiment 1) and Berlin (Experiment 2) listened to sentences that contained a predictable word and viewed four objects. The critical object represented the target word (e.g., /sakana/; fish), an orthographic competitor (e.g., /tuno/; horn), a phonological competitor (e.g., /sakura/; cherry blossom), or an unrelated word (e.g., /hon/; book). The three other objects were distractors. The Tokyo group fixated the target and the orthographic competitor over the unrelated objects before the target word was mentioned, suggesting that they pre-activated the orthographic form of the target word. The Berlin group showed a weaker bias toward the target than the Tokyo group, and they showed a tendency to fixate the orthographic competitor only when the orthographic similarity was very high. Thus, prediction effects were weaker in the Berlin group than in the Tokyo group. We found no evidence for the prediction of phonological information. The obtained group differences support probabilistic models of prediction, which regard the built-up language experience as a basis of prediction.

PRELIMINARY SEISMIC HAZARD ASSESSMENT OF THE SAKHALIN-MAINLAND AREA FOR A CRITICAL LINEAR STRUCTURE

The article presents the findings of seismic hazard zoning of the submerged crossing of the pipeline in the Nevelskoy Strait, between the village Lazarev of the Nikolaevsky district, Khabarovsky Krai, and the Cape Pogibi near the Pogibi village, Sakhalin Oblast. Along the water area, this section of the submerged crossing is limited by the zone which is 500 m wide by 11 km long. It follows from the stock of geological documents of the Geophysical Service of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the OSP-2015 map that the highest seismic activity in the Okhotsk region is observed in the area of the Kuril Islands, and the central seismically prone zone of northern Sakhalin is closest to the construction site. Large earthquakes are recorded by a number of seismological stations in the immediate vicinity of the construction site. The foci of nearby earthquakes occur east of the construction site and are mostly confined to the systems of deep faults resulting from the juncture between the West Sakhalin synclinorium and the Sikhote-Alin volcanic belt. The main purpose of the research is related to the development of a methodology for prognosticating seismic effects for the strong earthquake prone areas. In this context, an approach is proposed for the specific structure, which is based on the construction of a set of seismic models to reach the reference bedrock, setting of the pickup signal corresponding to the initial seismicity of the area, calculating the main parameters of seismic effects for them, and then, in a first approximation, the implementation of the technology for constructing engineering-seismological cross-section along the pipeline construction site. The proposed approaches to prognosticating seismic events for that part of the pipeline submerged crossing in the Nevelskoy Strait are based on certain constraints that made it possible to obtain a set of parameters of seismic effects for prognosticated strong earthquakes necessary for designing and constructing an earthquake-resistant linear structure. Given improved calculation methods and critical object monitoring, the advantage of this approach is the ability to recalculate seismic effects to the structure using the constructed seismic ground motion models.

Object-Aware Multi-Branch Relation Networks for Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

Spatio-temporal video grounding aims to retrieve the spatio-temporal tube of a queried object according to the given sentence. Currently, most existing grounding methods are restricted to well-aligned segment-sentence pairs. In this paper, we explore spatio-temporal video grounding on unaligned data and multi-form sentences. This challenging task requires to capture critical object relations to identify the queried target. However, existing approaches cannot distinguish notable objects and remain in ineffective relation modeling between unnecessary objects. Thus, we propose a novel object-aware multi-branch relation network for object-aware relation discovery. Concretely, we first devise multiple branches to develop object-aware region modeling, where each branch focuses on a crucial object mentioned in the sentence. We then propose multi-branch relation reasoning to capture critical object relationships between the main branch and auxiliary branches. Moreover, we apply a diversity loss to make each branch only pay attention to its corresponding object and boost multi-branch learning. The extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Guessing right: Preconscious processing in inattentional blindness

Much research has been conducted on the determinants of inattentional blindness—the failure to miss an unexpected but salient stimulus in plain view. Far less research has been concerned with the fate of those objects that go unnoticed in such a setting. The available evidence suggests that objects that are not consciously noticed due to inattentional blindness are still processed to a certain degree. The present study substantiated and generalised this limited evidence by reanalysing 16 datasets in regard to participants’ guessing accuracy in multiple-choice questions concerning the unexpected object: Participants who did not notice the critical object showed guessing accuracy that lay significantly above chance. Thus, stimuli that are not consciously noticed (i.e., cannot be reported) can nevertheless exert an influence on seemingly random choices. Modality of the primary task as well as performance in the primary task and in a divided-attention trial were evaluated as potential moderators. Methodological limitations such as the design and implementation of the multiple-choice questions and the generalisability of our findings are discussed, and promises of the present approach for future studies are presented.

Being In-between: Poetry for Children and Its Formal Method

This introduction to the archive bloсk on poetry for children as a critical object attempts to place the development of poetic literature aimed for children within a larger context of literary debates that were taking place at the same time. Throughout the 1920s, such formalist scholars as Yuri Tynianov and Boris Eikhenbaum persistently emphasized in their work that literature should be seen (and judged) as an autonomous field of creative activity. A similar trend could be easily traced in the field of poetic literature for children, too. In this case, the claim to artistic sovereignty was realized as a desire to develop a distinctive set of literary tools, specific for children’s poetry. As many critics maintained at the time, poetry for children should be distinguished not by its themes, but by the ways it organizes the poetic material. New, purposefully created methods of structuring the word mass were perceived as the key feature which could distinguish poetry for children from the rest of the Soviet literature. As a result, by the middle of the 1930s, the Soviet poetry for children gradually developed its own characteristic features: this poetry was playful, lyrical, and humorous. Poems created by K. Chukovsky and S. Marshak delineated the lyric-and-ludic pole of Soviet poetry for children, while poems by V. Mayakovsky and A. Barto would become the classical examples of the “didactic” poetry, in which satire and scorns would function as pedagogical tools. Consequently, the [position of the poet for children would evolve, too: lonely outsiders (like Chukovsky) would be overshadowed by “revolutionary poets” (like Mayakovsky), systemic “fellow-travelers” (like Marshak) and “class-conscious” Soviet children’s writers (like Barto).

Extra-foveal Processing of Object Semantics Guides Early Overt Attention During Visual Search

Eye-tracking studies using arrays of objects have demonstrated that some high-level processing of object semantics can occur in extra-foveal vision, but its role on the allocation of early overt attention is still unclear. This eye-tracking visual search study contributes novel findings by examining the role of object-to-object semantic relatedness and visual saliency on search responses and eye-movement behaviour across arrays of increasing size (3, 5, 7). Our data show that a critical object was looked at earlier and for longer when it was semantically unrelated than related to the other objects in the display, both when it was the search target (target-present trials) and when it was a target’s semantically related competitor (target-absent trials). Semantic relatedness effects manifested already during the very first fixation after array onset, were consistently found for increasing set sizes, and were independent of low-level visual saliency, which did not play any role. We conclude that object semantics can be extracted early in extra-foveal vision and capture overt attention from the very first fixation. These findings pose a challenge to models of visual attention which assume that overt attention is guided by the visual appearance of stimuli, rather than by their semantics.