Study on Driver Gaze Characteristics in Sight Distance Limited Section of Mountain Highway Based on Visual Information

In order to study the gaze behavior characteristics of drivers in mountainous road sections with limited sight distance, the real vehicle test is carried out by using Smart Eye Pro 5.7 noninvasive eye tracker. Combined with the sight distance change rate theory, 6 typical test representative mountainous sections are selected to study the gaze distribution law and gaze duration of drivers in different mountainous sections. The research shows that when the driver drives on the test section with the most unfavorable sight distance of 44 m, 50 m, and 56 m, the fixation characteristics of “from far to near” are significant, and the long fixation duration accounts for a large proportion of the driver. When the driver drives on the section with the most unfavorable sight distance of more than 70 m, i.e., the sight distance change rate of less than 1.33, the fixation characteristics of “from far to near” disappear. The driver’s fixation stability increases, the fixation freedom increases, and the proportion of medium and long fixation duration decreases. The data analysis provides a theoretical basis for drivers to pass safely in mountainous sections.

Exemplar learning reveals the representational origins of expert category perception

Irrespective of whether one has substantial perceptual expertise for a class of stimuli, an observer invariably encounters novel exemplars from this class. To understand how novel exemplars are represented, we examined the extent to which previous experience with a category constrains the acquisition and nature of representation of subsequent exemplars from that category. Participants completed a perceptual training paradigm with either novel other-race faces (category of experience) or novel computer-generated objects (YUFOs) that included pairwise similarity ratings at the beginning, middle, and end of training, and a 20-d visual search training task on a subset of category exemplars. Analyses of pairwise similarity ratings revealed multiple dissociations between the representational spaces for those learning faces and those learning YUFOs. First, representational distance changes were more selective for faces than YUFOs; trained faces exhibited greater magnitude in representational distance change relative to untrained faces, whereas this trained–untrained distance change was much smaller for YUFOs. Second, there was a difference in where the representational distance changes were observed; for faces, representations that were closer together before training exhibited a greater distance change relative to those that were farther apart before training. For YUFOs, however, the distance changes occurred more uniformly across representational space. Last, there was a decrease in dimensionality of the representational space after training on YUFOs, but not after training on faces. Together, these findings demonstrate how previous category experience governs representational patterns of exemplar learning as well as the underlying dimensionality of the representational space.

A mobile approach-avoidance task

Approach and avoidance tendencies have helped explain phenomena as diverse as addiction (Mogg, Field, & Bradley, 2005), phobia (Rinck & Becker, 2007), and intergroup discrimination (Bianchi, Carnaghi, & Shamloo, 2018; Degner, Essien, & Reichardt, 2016). When the original approach-avoidance task (AAT; Solarz, 1960) that measures these tendencies was redesigned to run on regular desktop computers, it made the task much more flexible but also sacrificed some important behavioral properties of the original task—most notably its reliance on physical distance change (Chen & Bargh, 1999). Here, we present a new, mobile version of the AAT that runs entirely on smartphones and combines the flexibility of modern tasks with the behavioral properties of the original AAT. In addition, it can easily be deployed in the field and, next to traditional reaction time measurements, includes the novel measurement of response force. In two studies, we demonstrate that the mobile AAT can reliably measure known approach-avoidance tendencies toward happy and angry faces both in the laboratory and in the field.

Male meiotic spindle features that efficiently segregate paired and lagging chromosomes

Chromosome segregation during male meiosis is tailored to rapidly generate multitudes of sperm. Little is known about mechanisms that efficiently partition chromosomes to produce sperm. Using live imaging and tomographic reconstructions of spermatocyte meiotic spindles in Caenorhabditis elegans, we find the lagging X chromosome, a distinctive feature of anaphase I in C. elegans males, is due to lack of chromosome pairing. The unpaired chromosome remains tethered to centrosomes by lengthening kinetochore microtubules, which are under tension, suggesting that a ‘tug of war’ reliably resolves lagging. We find spermatocytes exhibit simultaneous pole-to-chromosome shortening (anaphase A) and pole-to-pole elongation (anaphase B). Electron tomography unexpectedly revealed spermatocyte anaphase A does not stem solely from kinetochore microtubule shortening. Instead, movement of autosomes is largely driven by distance change between chromosomes, microtubules, and centrosomes upon tension release during anaphase. Overall, we define novel features that segregate both lagging and paired chromosomes for optimal sperm production.