The efficiency of holistic template matching in the recognition of unconstrained handwritten digits

Summary Psychological evidence suggests that simple visual patterns can be recognized by the use of internal representations as holistic templates, but the efficiency of holistic template matching in the recognition of real-life patterns, such as handwritten characters, has been doubted. To clarify this issue, we measured the efficiency of holistic template matching in machine recognition of totally unconstrained handwritten digits. Our learning and recognition algorithm was simple; no previous knowledge of handwritten digits was presupposed, and preprocessing was limited to Gaussian smoothing and normalization with respect to position, size, and orientation. For patterns presented in a known orientation, recognition rates were .69, .77, and .88, respectively, when about 5, 10, or 50 templates had been learned for each type of digit. For patterns presented in unknown orientations, recognition rates were slightly lower. High levels of reliability could be attained by the discounting of classifications based on weak evidence. Apparently, in high reliability recognition, holistic template matching can be used as a first operation by which recognition is achieved for most of the handwritten digits that are seen in real life.     

Evidence for the persistence of visual guidance information

An earlier study from our laboratory provided initial support for the hypothesis that information facilitating visual guidance persists in the absence of retinal stimulation. The present study supports and extends this hypothesis with three experiments in which visually occluded subjects positioned a point of light at the location of a previously viewed target and also walked in the direction of a previously viewed path. In both tasks, performance was possible following occlusion, and in all cases, performance slowly and significantly decreased with longer durations of occlusion. This decay in performance was gradual and had a “half-life” of greater than 15 sec. Absolute performance was correlated across tasks. The effect of occlusion on absolute error in the localization performance was relatively stable within individuals over a 3-week period. The biological utility of guidance information persistence is discussed along with implications for space constancy, illusions of motion, and problems of disorientation.     

Day-to-Day Physical Symptoms: Individual Differences in the Occurrence, Duration, and Emotional Concomitants of Minor Daily Illnesses

Even minor illnesses represent significant events in the ongoing lives of most people. As such, daily event methodologies could be applied to the study of ongoing health and illness. When daily health is considered as a temporal process, it is possible to expand our formulation of the relation between personality and day-to-day health. We used a daily event approach to model three temporal parameters of day-to-day health: the occurrence rate of symptoms, the duration of symptoms, and the covariation of symptoms and moods over time. We then examine whether these three models of day-to-day health are related to personality variables commonly used in health psychology research. The occurrence of illness related most strongly to neuroticism, the duration of illness related most strongly to the trait of aggressive responding, and Type A behavior related to less unpleasant affect reported during episodes of respiratory infection, aches, and depressive symptoms. Results are discussed in terms of how alternative models of health/illness are made possible by the daily event perspective.     

Primacy and recency effects in nonhuman primates.

The reports of primacy and recency memory effects in nonhuman primates have been criticized because they have all used an initiating response. That is, the presentation of the to-be-remembered list of items was always contingent on a response being initiated by the nonhuman primate. It has been argued that this initiating response improves performance for early items in the list, resulting in the occurrence of the primacy effect, independent of any memory processing mechanism. This criticism was addressed in the present study by not using an initiating response prior to the presentation of the list. Nevertheless, both a primacy and a recency effect were observed in all 6 rhesus monkeys evaluated using a serial probe recognition task. Thus, the results are similar to those for humans, in that both primacy and recency effects can be obtained in nonhuman primates. A brief literature review is included, and it is proposed that the primacy and recency effects observed in humans, nonhuman primates, and infraprimates can be explained within the context of the configural-association theory.     

The concept of general expectancy in various personality dispositions

It is argued that the concept of general expectancy is a central common core of personality dispositions related to achievement areas. This hypothesis of common core was investigated with factor analysis and cluster analysis. 166 advanced teacher students participated, and were scored on the following relevant personality dispositions motive to seek success, motive to avoid failure, global and academic self-esteem, self-efficacy, attributional style, depression, and defensiveness. The hypothesis was supported in that factor analysis gave a general bipolar expectancy factor, and cluster analysis resulted in two clusters, one corresponding to positive expectancy and the other to negative expectancy.     

A Text of Identity: Frances Brooke and the Rhetoric of the Aging Spinster

Frances Brooke, writing in 1755 in London, England, selected the figure of the aging spinster as her alter ego when she wrote and edited a thirty-seven issue periodical, The Old Maid. Analysis of the periodical and the cultural environment in which Brooke wrote explains her choice of persona in terms of the issues she faced as a woman producing writing to be read largely by male contemporaries. This analysis reveals some of the underlying stereotypes of aging and identity in the period as well as the way these stereotypes could be used by a clever writer.     

Imageability and distributional typicality measures of nouns and verbs in contemporary English

Dissociations between noun and verb processing are not uncommon after brain injury; yet, precise psycholinguistic comparisons of nouns and verbs are hampered by the underrepresentation of verbs in published semantic word norms and by the absence of contemporary estimates for part-of-speech usage. We report herein imageability ratings and rating response times (RTs) for 1,197 words previously categorized as pure nouns, pure verbs, or words of balanced noun-verb usage on the basis of the Francis and Ku?era (1982) norms. Nouns and verbs differed in rated imageability, and there was a stronger correspondence between imageability rating and RT for nouns than for verbs. For all word types, the image-rating-RT function implied that subjects employed an image generation process to assign ratings. We also report a new measure of noun-verbtypicality that used the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL; Lund & Burgess, 1996) context vectors (derived from a large sample of Usenet text) to compute the mean context distance between each word and all of thepure nouns andpure verbs. For a subset of the items, the resulting HAL noun-verb difference score was compared with part-of-speech usage in a representative sample of the Usenet corpus. It is concluded that this score can be used to estimate the extent to which a given word occurs in typical noun or verb sentence contexts in informal contemporary English discourse. The item statistics given in Appendix B will enable experimenters to select representative examples of nouns and verbs or to compare typical with atypical nouns (or verbs), while holding constant or covarying rated imageability.     

Size scaling in visual pattern recognition

Human visual recognition on the basis of shape but regardless of size was investigated by reaction time methods. For successive matching of random figures, reaction time increased linearly with the linear size ratio of stimulus pairs. For single-character classification, reaction time increased with divergence between cued size format and stimulus format such that for character nonrepetitions, the increment in latency was approximately proportional to the logarithm of the linear size ratio of the two formats. However, when reactions to character repetitions were faster than those to nonrepetitions, the repetition reaction time function was similar to that for successive matching of random figures. The results suggested two processes of size scaling: mental-image transformation and perceptual-scale transformation. Image transformation accounted for matching performance based on visual short-term memory, whereas scale transformation accounted for size invariance in recognition based on comparison against visual representations in long-term memory.     

Contact,configural coding and the other‐race effect in face recognition

The other‐race effect (ORE) in face recognition describes a well‐established finding of better recognition for own‐race than other‐race faces. Although widely thought to reflect differences in contact between own‐ and other‐race faces, little is known about how different contact levels relate to changes in processing of those faces. This study investigated how contact affects the size of the ORE and the use of expert configural face‐coding mechanisms. Using inversion decrements as an index of configural coding, we predicted that increased self‐reported contact would be associated with greater use of configural‐coding mechanisms. Chinese and Caucasian participants varying in contact with other‐race faces were recruited. The Chinese participants also varied in their length of residence in a Western country. Results showed that higher levels of contact were associated with a reduction in the ORE in both face recognition and configural coding. Importantly, smaller cross‐race differences in configural coding were also associated with a smaller ORE in face recognition.