Convolutional neural network based Alzheimer’s disease classification from magnetic resonance brain images

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia is a neurodegenerative brain order that has currently no cure for it. Hence, early diagnosis of such disease using computer-aided systems is a subject of great importance and extensive research amongst researchers. Nowadays, deep learning or particularly convolutional neural network (CNN) is getting more attention due to its state-of-the-art performances in variety of computer vision tasks such as visual object classification, detection and segmentation. Several recent studies, that have used brain MRI scans and deep learning have shown promising results for diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. However, most common issue with deep learning architectures such as CNN is that they require large amount of data for training. In this paper, a mathematical model P_FS_EC_TL based on transfer learning is used in which a CNN architecture, VGG-16 trained on ImageNet dataset is used as a feature extractor for the classification task. Experimentation is performed on data collected from Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. The accuracy of the 3-way classification using the described method is 95.73% for the validation set.     

Sexual activity is inversely related to women’s perceptions of the facial attractiveness of unknown men

A study was conducted to assess whether individual differences in sexual activity during the past 30 days, in particular penile–vaginal intercourse (PVI; which is associated with measures of relationship quality), are related to the perception of the facial attractiveness of unknown men. Forty-five women reported the frequency of a variety of sexual behaviors and rated the facial attractiveness and friendliness of 24 men. Women who reported more frequent orgasm from masturbation rated men as less friendly. This finding might be reflective of the more anti-social attitude associated with more frequent masturbation. The results also show that women who engaged more frequently in most kinds of sexual behavior, not only PVI, considered unknown men to be less facially attractive. That is, individuals who engage more frequently in a variety of sexual behaviors with their partner perceived unknown men as less attractive and thereby may be less susceptible to the lure of other (or if the only sexual behavior is masturbation, any) men.     

Person perception by active versus passive perceivers

Person perception research is dominated by studies of passive perceivers who exert no control over the information they receive. In contrast, perceivers in everyday life can often actively choose the type and quantity of information they receive. In this study, active and yoked passive perceivers formed impressions of individuals based on information from Facebook. Compared to active perceivers, passive perceivers reported greater confidence and ease in their judgments. Passive perceivers exhibited greater confidence (though not greater accuracy) with increased information, but active perceivers did not show this effect, placing a boundary condition on past research. Passive perceivers also liked targets more than active perceivers, a finding that is not explained by valence-dependant sampling by active participants, or by misattribution of fluency or greater sensitivity among passive participants. These provocative findings highlight the need to account for active and interactive processes in person perception rather than continuing to focus on passive perceivers.     

Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?

Drawing on and extending prototype theories of creativity and leadership, we theorize that the expression of creative ideas may diminish judgments of leadership potential unless the charismatic leadership prototype is activated in the minds of social perceivers. Study 1 shows that creative idea expression is negatively related to perceptions of leadership potential in a sample of employees working in jobs that required creative problem solving. Study 2 shows that participants randomly instructed to express creative solutions during an interaction are viewed as having lower leadership potential. A third scenario study replicated this finding showing that participants attributed less leadership potential to targets expressing creative ideas, except when the “charismatic” leader prototype was activated. In sum, we show that the negative association between expressing creative ideas and leadership potential is robust and underscores an important but previously unidentified bias against selecting effective leaders.     

La construction de la personne dans les Confessions de Saint-Augustin. Perspectives historique et épistémologique

The psychologists code of ethics specifies that the object of the psychology is the person, without the notion of person seems clearly defined. This study analyses certain aspects envisaged as historic construction, according to the perspectives opened by the psychology of Meyerson which dialectize the connection between the person and its works. In this context, Confessions of Augustin is examined in conformance with the “concern of itself, investigating and working the « folds » of the soul, which contribute to the emergence of the modern person by occurring as work”.     

Is the Third‐Person Effect Real? A Critical Examination of Rationales,Testing Methods,and Previous Findings of the Third‐Person Effect on Censorship Attitudes

Regarding the effect of the third‐person perception on censorship attitudes, the present study first highlighted logical weaknesses of previously proposed rationales and limitations of previously used statistical models to test the effect. This study reanalyzed data from past research on the effect of the third‐person perception. In Study 1, the average effects of the other‐self perceptual gap in the media influence on censorship attitudes were estimated based on reports from 13 previous studies (total N = 6,414). Study 2 reanalyzed Schmierbach, Boyle, Xu, and McLeod's (2011) correlational data (N = 692). The results of these two studies showed that the presumed effect on others is a stronger predictor of censorship attitudes than the other‐self differential in perceived media effect.     

Stereotypes and stereotyping: What's the brain got to do with it?

Influential social-psychological models suggest that perceivers frequently use information-processing strategies that result in the stereotype-based construal and treatment of other people. To elucidate in greater detail when, why, and how social encounters elicit stereotyping, researchers have begun to incorporate neuroscientific tools into their repertoire of investigative methods. The current article reviews these studies and considers their significance in light of existing theories of person perception, knowledge representation, and impression formation. Finally, using the concrete example of stereotyping, benefits and pitfalls of adopting a social neuroscience approach are discussed.     

Access to semantic and episodic information from faces and voices: Does distinctiveness matter?

This study was aimed at investigating the role of stimulus distinctiveness on the retrieval of semantic and episodic information from familiar faces and voices. Distinctiveness of famous faces and voices was manipulated in order to assess its role as a potential underlying factor of face superiority. In line with previous findings, more semantic and episodic information was retrieved from faces than from voices. Semantic information was better retrieved from distinctive than from typical stimuli. Nevertheless, distinctiveness seemed to impact less than stimulus domain on the recall of semantic details. Indeed, more semantic information was retrieved from typical faces than from distinctive voices. The consistency of these results with current models of person recognition is discussed.     

Conceptual and pedagogical challenges in understanding the whole person

The article introduces the special issues addressing Eric Johnson's account of Form Psychology, which provides a conceptual method to scientifically study the whole person. Form Psychology is presented as a theoretically significant proposal that integrates multiple conceptualizations of the whole person. The pedagogical value of such an understanding is also emphasized as undergraduate psychology students hold strong intuitions that the person is an integrated whole rather than a set of distinct systems.     

Female sexual orientation and menstrual influences on person perception

Heterosexual women have previously been shown to display enhanced sensitivity to information that is both reproductively- and sexually-relevant (e.g., sexually mature male faces) during phases of high fertility. In the present study, homosexual women who maintained a regular menstrual cycle and did not use hormonal contraceptives completed a sex-categorization task at periods of high and low fertility within their menstrual cycle. For homosexual women there is a separation between reproductively-relevant (i.e., sexually mature males) and sexually-relevant (i.e., sexually mature females) targets. Our participants showed enhanced sensitivity to sexually-relevant information (i.e., female faces) at high fertility but showed no fluctuation in sensitivity to reproductively-relevant information (i.e., male faces) across testing sessions. These findings are considered in terms of adaptive person perception and the impact of sexual desire on mate preferences.     

How extending your middle finger affects your perception of others: Learned movements influence concept accessibility

Body movements both express and influence how people feel and think. Conceptualizations of this bidirectional influence assume that movement-concept associations can be innate or learned, although evidence for learned associations remained ambiguous. Providing a conservative test of learned movement-concept associations, two studies investigate the influence of culture-specific body movements, which involve an arbitrary relationship between movements and associated concepts. Paralleling the influence of hostility primes, extending the middle finger influenced the interpretation of ambiguously aggressive behaviors as hostile, but did not influence unrelated trait judgments (Study 1). Paralleling the effects of global evaluative primes, upward extension of the thumb resulted in more positive evaluations of the same target along all trait dimensions and higher liking of the target (Study 2).