Dissociable Contribution of Extrastriate Responses to Representational Enhancement of Gaze Targets

Before saccadic eye movements, our perception of the saccade targets is enhanced. Changes in the visual representation of saccade targets, which presumably underlie this perceptual benefit, emerge even before the eye begins to move. This perisaccadic enhancement has been shown to involve changes in the response magnitude, selectivity, and reliability of visual neurons. In this study, we quantified multiple aspects of perisaccadic changes in the neural response, including gain, feature tuning, contrast response function, reliability, and correlated activity between neurons. We then assessed the contributions of these various perisaccadic modulations to the population's enhanced perisaccadic representation of saccade targets. We found a partial dissociation between the motor information, carried entirely by gain changes, and visual information, which depended on all three types of modulation. These findings expand our understanding of the perisaccadic enhancement of visual representations and further support the existence of multiple sources of motor modulation and visual enhancement within extrastriate visual cortex.

Photographic Misrepresentation on Instagram After Facial Cosmetic Surgery: Is Increased Photography Bias Associated With Greater User Engagement?

Background Before and after images are commonly used on Instagram to advertise aesthetic surgical treatments and are a powerful means of prospective patient engagement. Consistency between before and after images accurately demonstrating the postoperative result on Instagram, however, has not been systematically assessed. Objectives Our aim was to systematically assess facial cosmetic surgery before and after photography bias on Instagram. Methods The authors queried 19 Instagram facial aesthetic surgery-related hashtags on 3 dates in May 2020. The “top” 9 posts associated with each hashtag (291 posts) were analyzed by 3 plastic surgeons using 5-item rubric quantifying photographic discrepancies between preoperative and postoperative images. Duplicate posts and those that did not include before and after images after facial aesthetic surgery procedures were excluded. Results A total of 3,477,178 posts were queried. Photography conditions were observed to favor visual enhancement of the post-operative result in 282/291 analyzed top posts, with an average bias score of 1.71/5 (± 1.01). Plastic surgeons accounted for only 27.5% of top posts. Physicians practicing outside their scope of practice accounted for 2.8% of top posts including a general surgeon, dermatologist, dentist, ophthalmologist, and maxillofacial surgeon. Accounts with a greater number of followers (p = 0.017) and posts originating from Asia (p = 0.013) were significantly associated with a higher post-operative photography bias score. Conclusions Photographic misrepresentation, with photography conditions biased towards enhancing the appearance of the postoperative result, is pervasive on Instagram. This pattern was observed across all physician specialties and raises significant concerns. Accounts with a greater number of followers demonstrated significantly greater postoperative photography bias, suggesting photographic misrepresentation is awarded by greater user engagement.

Exploring the Complexity of the L2 Intonation System: An Acoustic and Eye-Tracking Study

Phonological research has demonstrated that English intonation, variably referred to as prosody, is a multidimensional and multilayered system situated at the interface of information structure, morphosyntactic structure, phonological phenomena, and pragmatic functions. The structural and functional complexity of the intonational system, however, is largely under-addressed in L2 pronunciation teaching, leading to a lack of spontaneous use of intonation despite successful imitation in classrooms. Focusing on contrastive and implicational sentence stress, this study explored the complexity of the English intonation system by investigating how L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers use multiple acoustic features (i.e., pitch range, pitch level, duration, and intensity) in signaling contrastive and implicational information and how one acoustic feature (maximum pitch level) is affected by information structure (contrast), morphosyntactic structure (phrasal boundary), and a phonological phenomenon (declination) in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' speech. Using eye-tracking technology, we also investigated (1) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' real-time processing of lexical items that carry information structure (i.e., contrast) and typically receive stress in L1 speakers' speech; (2) the influence of visual enhancement (italics and bold) on L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive information; and (3) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of pictures with contrastive information. Statistical analysis using linear mixed-effects models showed that L1 English speakers and Mandarin-English L2 speakers differed in their use of acoustic cues in signaling contrastive and implicational information. They also differed in the use of maximum pitch level in signaling sentence stress influenced by contrast, phrasal boundary, and declination. We did not find differences in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive and implicational information at the sentence level, but the two groups of participants differ in their processing of contrastive information in passages and pictures. These results suggest that processing limitations may be the reason why L2 speakers did not use English intonation spontaneously. The findings of this study also suggest that Complexity Theory (CT), which emphasizes the complex and dynamic nature of intonation, is a theoretical framework that has the potential of bridging the gap between L2 phonology and L2 pronunciation teaching.

Anti-Forensics of Image Contrast Enhancement Based on Generative Adversarial Network

In the multimedia forensics community, anti-forensics of contrast enhancement (CE) in digital images is an important topic to understand the vulnerability of the corresponding CE forensic method. Some traditional CE anti-forensic methods have demonstrated their effective forging ability to erase forensic fingerprints of the contrast-enhanced image in histogram and even gray level cooccurrence matrix (GLCM), while they ignore the problem that their ways of pixel value changes can expose them in the pixel domain. In this paper, we focus on the study of CE anti-forensics based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to handle the problem mentioned above. Firstly, we exploit GAN to process the contrast-enhanced image and make it indistinguishable from the unaltered one in the pixel domain. Secondly, we introduce a specially designed histogram-based loss to enhance the attack effectiveness in the histogram domain and the GLCM domain. Thirdly, we use a pixel-wise loss to keep the visual enhancement effect of the processed image. The experimental results show that our method achieves high anti-forensic attack performance against CE detectors in the pixel domain, the histogram domain, and the GLCM domain, respectively, and maintains the highest image quality compared with traditional CE anti-forensic methods.

Exploratory Study of Visual Enhancement to Display Smart Apps on Android Phones for Selasar Imaji Library

The attractive appearance of the system applications on the Android phone is quite important. There is an initial premise that the "Imaji Library" application that the Selasar Imaji Library owns is less attractive to users because it is not attractive. This study aims to explore an attractive appearance based on studies that are filtered to application users. Through Research and Development (R&D) activities, by 1) capturing questionnaire results from users to find out what is less attractive from the application display; 2) study of the search for the preferred visual appearance; 3) designing applications; and 4) application testing to librarians. The results of the exploration activities are in the form of (1) a new prototype design of the "Imaji Library" application display, (2) the development of application features in terms of procurement, processing, tracking, and member and circulation management activities. The implication of this research is helpful for librarians' convenience in managing libraries.