Data-driven Targeted Advertising Recommendation System for Outdoor Billboard

In this article, we propose and study a novel data-driven framework for Targeted Outdoor Advertising Recommendation (TOAR) with a special consideration of user profiles and advertisement topics. Given an advertisement query and a set of outdoor billboards with different spatial locations and rental prices, our goal is to find a subset of billboards, such that the total targeted influence is maximum under a limited budget constraint. To achieve this goal, we are facing two challenges: (1) it is difficult to estimate targeted advertising influence in physical world; (2) due to NP hardness, many common search techniques fail to provide a satisfied solution with an acceptable time, especially for large-scale problem settings. Taking into account the exposure strength, advertisement matching degree, and advertising repetition effect, we first build a targeted influence model that can characterize that the advertising influence spreads along with users mobility. Subsequently, based on a divide-and-conquer strategy, we develop two effective approaches, i.e., a master–slave-based sequential optimization method, TOAR-MSS, and a cooperative co-evolution-based optimization method, TOAR-CC, to solve our studied problem. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets clearly validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approaches.

Validity and Reliability of a Smartphone App for Gait and Balance Assessment

Advances in technology provide an opportunity to enhance the accuracy of gait and balance assessment, improving the diagnosis and rehabilitation processes for people with acute or chronic health conditions. This study investigated the validity and reliability of a smartphone-based application to measure postural stability and spatiotemporal aspects of gait during four static balance and two gait tasks. Thirty healthy participants (aged 20–69 years) performed the following tasks: (1) standing on a firm surface with eyes opened, (2) standing on a firm surface with eyes closed, (3) standing on a compliant surface with eyes open, (4) standing on a compliant surface with eyes closed, (5) walking in a straight line, and (6) walking in a straight line while turning their head from side to side. During these tasks, the app quantified the participants’ postural stability and spatiotemporal gait parameters. The concurrent validity of the smartphone app with respect to a 3D motion capture system was evaluated using partial Pearson’s correlations (rp) and limits of the agreement (LoA%). The within-session test–retest reliability over three repeated measures was assessed with the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and the standard error of measurement (SEM). One-way repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were used to evaluate responsiveness to differences across tasks and repetitions. Periodicity index, step length, step time, and walking speed during the gait tasks and postural stability outcomes during the static tasks showed moderate-to-excellent validity (0.55 ≤ rp ≤ 0.98; 3% ≤ LoA% ≤ 12%) and reliability scores (0.52 ≤ ICC ≤ 0.92; 1% ≤ SEM% ≤ 6%) when the repetition effect was removed. Conversely, step variability and asymmetry parameters during both gait tasks generally showed poor validity and reliability except step length asymmetry, which showed moderate reliability (0.53 ≤ ICC ≤ 0.62) in both tasks when the repetition effect was removed. Postural stability and spatiotemporal gait parameters were found responsive (p < 0.05) to differences across tasks and test repetitions. Along with sound clinical judgement, the app can potentially be used in clinical practice to detect gait and balance impairments and track the effectiveness of rehabilitation programs. Further evaluation and refinement of the app in people with significant gait and balance deficits is needed.

Monetary incentives do not reduce the repetition-induced truth effect

People rate and judge repeated information more true than novel information. This truth-by-repetition effect is of relevance for explaining belief in fake news, conspiracy theories, or misinformation effects. To ascertain whether increased motivation could reduce this effect, we tested the influence of monetary incentives on participants’ truth judgments. We used a standard truth paradigm, consisting of a presentation and judgment phase with factually true and false information, and incentivized every truth judgment. Monetary incentives may influence truth judgments in two ways. First, participants may rely more on relevant knowledge, leading to better discrimination between true and false statements. Second, participants may rely less on repetition, leading to a lower bias to respond “true.” We tested these predictions in a preregistered and high-powered experiment. However, incentives did not influence the percentage of “true” judgments or correct responses in general, despite participants’ longer response times in the incentivized conditions and evidence for knowledge about the statements. Our findings show that even monetary consequences do not protect against the truth-by-repetition effect, further substantiating its robustness and relevance and highlighting its potential hazardous effects when used in purposeful misinformation.

Robustness tests provide further support for an ecological account of the truth and fake news by repetition effects

Corneille et al. (2020) found that repetition increases judgments that statements have been used as fake news on social media, a result that is consistent with an ecological theorization. They also found that repetition increases truth judgments and decreases falsehood judgments (i.e., two instantiations of the Truth-by-Repetition effect), which is more compatible with the ecological account than with competing accounts. However, the first author of the present article found unsuspected programming issues in Corneille et al.’s experiments. These programming issues introduced confounds that may have been responsible for the results. To estimate whether Corneille et al.’s results and main claims hold when correcting these issues, the current team agreed on two high-powered preregistered replications of Corneille et al.’s experiments (N total = 540). The findings strongly support Corneille et al.’s predictions, which substantiates and generalizes an ecological account of repetition effects on judgment.

The Hebb repetition effect in complex span tasks: Evidence for a shared learning mechanism with simple span tasks

The Hebb repetition effect on serial-recall task refers to the improvement in the accuracy of recall of a repeated list (e.g., repeated in every 3 trials) over random non-repeated lists. Previous research has shown that both temporal position and neighboring items need to be the same on each repetition list for the Hebb repetition effect to occur, suggesting chunking as one of its underlying mechanisms. Accordingly, one can expect absence of the Hebb repetition effect in a complex span task, given that the sequence is interrupted by distractors. Nevertheless, one study by Oberauer, Jones, and Lewandowsky (2015, Memory & Cognition, 43[6], 852–865) showed evidence of the Hebb repetition effect in a complex span task. Throughout four experiments, we confirmed the Hebb repetition effect in complex span tasks, even when we included distractors in both encoding and recall phases to avoid any resemblance to a simple span task and minimized the possibility of chunking. Results showed that the Hebb repetition effect was not affected by the distractors during encoding and recall. A transfer cycle analysis showed that the long-term knowledge acquired in the complex span task can be transferred to a simple span task. These findings provide the first insights on the mechanism behind the Hebb repetition effect in complex span tasks; it is at least partially based on the same mechanism that improves recall performance by repetition in simple span tasks.

Intraspeaker Priming across the New Zealand English Short Front Vowel Shift

A growing body of research in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics shows that we have a strong tendency to repeat linguistic material that we have recently produced, seen, or heard. The present paper investigates whether priming effects manifest in continuous phonetic variation the way it has been reported in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation. We analyzed nearly 60,000 tokens of vowels involved in the New Zealand English short front vowel shift (SFVS), a change in progress in which trap/dress move in the opposite direction to kit, from a topic-controlled corpus of monologues (166 speakers), to test for effects that are characteristic of priming phenomena: repetition, decay, and lexical boost. Our analysis found evidence for all three effects. Tokens that were relatively high and front tended to be followed by tokens that were also high and front; the repetition effect weakened with greater time between the prime and target; and the repetition effect was stronger if the prime and target belonged to (different tokens of) the same word. Contrary to our expectations, however, the cross-vowel effects suggest that the repetition effect responded not to the direction of vowel changes within the SFVS, but rather the peripherality of the tokens. We also found an interaction between priming behavior and gender, with stronger repetition effects among men than women. While these findings both indicate that priming manifests in continuous phonetic variation and provide further evidence that priming is among the factors providing structure to intraspeaker variation, they also challenge unitary accounts of priming phenomena.

Infants’ Implicit Rhyme Perception in Child Songs and Its Relationship With Vocabulary

Rhyme perception is an important predictor for future literacy. Assessing rhyme abilities, however, commonly requires children to make explicit rhyme judgements on single words. Here we explored whether infants already implicitly process rhymes in natural rhyming contexts (child songs) and whether this response correlates with later vocabulary size. In a passive listening ERP study, 10.5 month-old Dutch infants were exposed to rhyming and non-rhyming child songs. Two types of rhyme effects were analysed: (1) ERPs elicited by the first rhyme occurring in each song (rhyme sensitivity) and (2) ERPs elicited by rhymes repeating after the first rhyme in each song (rhyme repetition). Only for the latter a tentative negativity for rhymes from 0 to 200 ms after the onset of the rhyme word was found. This rhyme repetition effect correlated with productive vocabulary at 18 months-old, but not with any other vocabulary measure (perception at 10.5 or 18 months-old). While awaiting future replication, the study indicates precursors of phonological awareness already during infancy and with ecologically valid linguistic stimuli.

Is long-term memory used in a visuo-spatial change-detection paradigm?

In tests of working memory with verbal or spatial materials, repeating the same memory sets across trials leads to improved memory performance. This well-established “Hebb repetition effect” could not be shown for visual materials in previous research. The absence of the Hebb effect can be explained in two ways: Either persons fail to acquire a long-term memory representation of the repeated memory sets, or they acquire such long-term memory representations, but fail to use them during the working memory task. In two experiments (N1 = 18 and N2 = 30), we aimed to decide between these two possibilities by manipulating the long-term memory knowledge of some of the memory sets used in a change-detection task. Before the change-detection test, participants learned three arrays of colors to criterion. The subsequent change-detection test contained both previously learned and new color arrays. Change detection performance was better on previously learned compared with new arrays, showing that long-term memory is used in change detection.