无语境条件下汉语词类歧义词的意义激活

以单字词为实验材料,采用启动命名任务,在孤立词条件下考察了汉语词类歧义词不同意义激活的时间进程特点。实验发现,歧义词的两种意义都能被激活,但主要意义激活得较早,次要意义激活速度较慢;当两种意义都激活之后,次要意义的激活水平降低,而主要意义仍维持在一定激活水平。结果表明,汉语词类歧义词的多重激活过程会受到意义相对频率的影响。     

Happiness Trends Under Democracy: Where Will the New South African

Five years after South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, life satisfaction and happiness still reflect societal divides sowed by apartheid social engineering. The paper reports the indicators: life satisfaction, happiness and expectations for the future, from national surveys conducted between 1983 and 1999 for the South African Quality-of-Life Trends Project. Post-election euphoria, which saw all South Africans happy and satisfied with life for a brief moment in 1994, raises the question where the new set-level of subjective well-being will eventually come to rest. In 1999, in spite of some gains in living conditions, the level of life satisfaction of blacks has not risen above the mid-point and happiness is only slightly above the mid-point. Meanwhile, whites, who have forfeited their political dominance, continue to score above the mid-point on happiness and life satisfaction. The paper draws on the literature, particularly on quality-of-life trends in reunified Germany and paradoxical trends in African-American life satisfaction when discussing the dynamics underlying South African subjective well-being. It is argued that coping mechanisms may play an important role in determining levels of subjective well-being in the complex situation of South Africa.     

The pop out of scene-relative object movement against retinal motion due to self-movement

An object that moves is spotted almost effortlessly; it "pops out". When the observer is stationary, a moving object is uniquely identified by retinal motion. This is not so when the observer is also moving; as the eye travels through space all scene objects change position relative to the eye producing a complicated field of retinal motion. Without the unique identifier of retinal motion an object moving relative to the scene should be difficult to locate. Using a search task, we investigated this proposition. Computer-rendered objects were moved and transformed in a manner consistent with movement of the observer. Despite the complex pattern of retinal motion, objects moving relative to the scene were found to pop out. We suggest the brain uses its sensitivity to optic flow to "stabilise" the scene, allowing the scene-relative movement of an object to be identified.     

Independence of sampling of motion parallax and binocular disparity in discrimination of depth1

Abstract: The sampling strategy of the visual system in binocular disparity and motion parallax to discriminate depth was investigated. Human observers were asked to discriminate between the depths of two surfaces defined by both cues. Gaussian noise was added to the depths represented by each cue, and the correlation in noise was manipulated. Human performance was compared with two types of likelihood models. The first was based on independent sampling, in which data from the two cues were gathered from independent sets of points in the display. The second was based on paired sampling, in which data from these cues were gathered from the same set of points. The former model yielded a better fit with human performance. This suggests that the visual system is more likely to adopt independent sampling.     

Psychoanalytic transformations1

The author describes how Bion took Freud's conception of dreams as a form of thought and used it as the basis of his theory of transformations. Bion developed an expanded theory of ‘dream thought’, understood as a process of selection and transformation of sensory and emotional experiences. In this theory, the work of analysis is in turn conceived as a process not only of deciphering symbols, of revealing already existing unconscious meanings, but also of symbol production‐of a process for generating thoughts and conferring meaning on experiences that have never been conscious and never been repressed because they have never been ‘thought’. Analysis, in its specific operational sense, becomes a system of transformation whereby unconscious somatopsychic processes acquire the conditions for representability and become capable of translation into thoughts, words and interpretations. The rules of transformation applied by the patient in his representations and those applied by the analyst in his interpretations have the same importance for the analytic process as those described by Freud for the process of dreaming. The author discusses the broad categories of transformation adduced by Bion (rigid motion, projective, and in hallucinosis) and introduces some further distinctions within them.     

Perceptual and decisional contributions to audiovisual interactions in the perception of apparent motion: a signal detection study

Motion information available to different sensory modalities can interact at both perceptual and post-perceptual (i.e., decisional) stages of processing. However, to date, researchers have only been able to demonstrate the influence of one of these components at any given time, hence the relationship between them remains uncertain. We addressed the interplay between the perceptual and post-perceptual components of information processing by assessing their influence on performance within the same experimental paradigm. We used signal detection theory to discriminate changes in perceptual sensitivity (d') from shifts in response criterion (c) in performance on a detection (Experiment 1) and a classification (Experiment 2) task regarding the direction of auditory apparent motion streams presented in noise. In the critical conditions, a visual motion distractor moving either leftward or rightward was presented together with the auditory motion. The results demonstrated a significant decrease in sensitivity to the direction of the auditory targets in the crossmodal conditions as compared to the unimodal baseline conditions that was independent of the relative direction of the visual distractor. In addition, we also observed significant shifts in response criterion, which were dependent on the relative direction of the distractor apparent motion. These results support the view that the perceptual and decisional components involved in audiovisual interactions in motion processing can coexist but are largely independent of one another.     

A Two Dimensional Tense-modal Sortal Logic

We consider a formal language whose logical syntax involves both modal and tense propositional operators, as well as sortal quantifiers, sortal identities and (second order) quantifiers over sortals. We construct an intensional semantics for the language and characterize a formal logical system which we prove to be sound and complete with respect to the semantics. Conceptualism is the philosophical background of the semantic system.     

Empirical evaluation of the uncanny valley hypothesis fails to confirm the predicted effect of motion

The uncanny valley hypothesis states that the acceptability of an artificial character will not increase linearly in relation to its likeness to human form. Instead, after an initial rise in acceptability there will be a pronounced decrease when the character is similar, but not identical to human form (Mori, 1970/2012). Moreover, it has been claimed but never directly tested that movement would accentuate this dip and make moving characters less acceptable. We used a number of full-body animated computer characters along with a parametrically defined motion set to examine the effect of motion quality on the uncanny valley. We found that improving the motion quality systematically improved the acceptability of the characters. In particular, the character classified in the deepest location of the uncanny valley became more acceptable when it was animated. Our results showed that although an uncanny valley was found for static characters, the deepening of the valley with motion, originally predicted by Mori (1970/2012), was not obtained.     

Impact of lumbar spine posture on thoracic spine motion and muscle activation patterns

Complex motion during standing is typical in daily living and requires movement of both the thoracic and lumbar spine; however, the effects of lumbar spine posture on thoracic spine motion patterns remain unclear. Thirteen males moved to six positions involving different lumbar (neutral and flexed) and thoracic (flexed and twisted) posture combinations. The thoracic spine was partitioned into three segments and the range of motion from each posture was calculated. Electromyographical data were collected from eight muscles bilaterally. Results showed that with a flexed lumbar spine, the lower-thoracic region had 14.83° and 15.61° more flexion than the upper- and mid-thoracic regions, respectively. A flexed lumbar spine significantly reduced the mid-thoracic axial twist angle by 5.21° compared to maximum twist in the mid-thoracic region. Functional differences emerged across muscles, as low back musculature was greatest in maintaining flexed lumbar postures, while thoracic erector spinae and abdominals showed bilateral differences with greater activations to the ipsilateral side. Combined postures have been previously identified as potential injury modulators and bilateral muscle patterns can have an effect on loading pathways. Overall, changes in thoracic motion were modified by lumbar spine posture, highlighting the importance of considering a multi-segmented approach when analyzing trunk motion.     

Global dot integration in typically developing children and in Williams Syndrome

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that results in deficits in visuospatial perception and cognition. The dorsal stream vulnerability hypothesis in WS predicts that visual motion processes are more susceptible to damage than visual form processes. We asked WS participants and typically developing children to detect the global structure Glass patterns, under “static” and “dynamic” conditions in order to evaluate this hypothesis. Sequentially presented Glass patterns are coined as dynamic because they induce illusory motion, which is modeled after the interaction between orientation (form) and direction (motion) mechanisms. If the dorsal stream vulnerability holds in WS participants, then they should process real and illusory motion atypically. However, results are consistent with the idea that form and motion integration mechanisms are functionally delayed or attenuated in WS. Form coherence thresholds for both static and dynamic Glass patterns in WS were similar to those of 4–5 year old children, younger than what is predicted by mental age. Dynamic presentation of Glass patterns improved thresholds to the same degree as typical participants. Motion coherence thresholds in WS were similar to those of mental age matches. These data pose constraints on the dorsal vulnerability hypothesis, and refine our understanding of the relationship between form and motion processing in development.