Preschoolers’ Emotion Knowledge and the Differential Effects of Harsh Punishment

PubMed Central

Berzenski, Sara R.; Yates, Tuppett M.

2013-01-01

This study examined the influence of caregiver-reported harsh physical and verbal punishment on children’s behavioral and self-system adjustment. Children’s emotion knowledge was evaluated as a heretofore unrecognized moderator of these relations. Two hundred fifty preschool age children (50% female; Mage=49.06 months) from diverse backgrounds (50% Hispanic, 18% African American, 10.4% Caucasian, 21.6% Multiracial/Other) were assessed through teacher, caregiver, self, and observer report in the domains of harsh punishment (Parent Child Conflict Tactics Scale), conduct problems (Teacher Report Form, California Child Q-Sort), self concept (Self Description Questionnaire for Preschoolers, California Child Q-Sort), and emotion knowledge (Kuschè Emotion Inventory). Emotion knowledge moderated the relation between harsh punishment and child adjustment. Harsh physical punishment was associated with conduct problems for children with higher emotion knowledge, especially for boys. Harsh verbal punishment was associated with self concept deficits among children with higher emotion knowledge, especially for girls. These relations were also specifically applicable to non-Hispanic children. These results highlight the importance of investigating hypothesis driven interactive effects and the specificity of experience to understand the psychosocial sequelae of parenting practices broadly, and to clarify the mixed evidence in the punishment literature specifically. Clinical implications point to the salience of emotion processes in parent-child disciplinary interventions for understanding the prevalence and pattern of child behavioral adjustment and self concept, as well as more broadly to the role of individual differences in children’s responses to adversity and subsequent therapeutic needs. PMID:23750528

Neural and cortisol responses during play with human and computer partners in children with autism

PubMed Central

Edmiston, Elliot Kale; Merkle, Kristen

2015-01-01

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit impairment in reciprocal social interactions, including play, which can manifest as failure to show social preference or discrimination between social and nonsocial stimuli. To explore mechanisms underlying these deficits, we collected salivary cortisol from 42 children 8–12 years with ASD or typical development during a playground interaction with a confederate child. Participants underwent functional MRI during a prisoner’s dilemma game requiring cooperation or defection with a human (confederate) or computer partner. Search region of interest analyses were based on previous research (e.g. insula, amygdala, temporal parietal junction—TPJ). There were significant group differences in neural activation based on partner and response pattern. When playing with a human partner, children with ASD showed limited engagement of a social salience brain circuit during defection. Reduced insula activation during defection in the ASD children relative to TD children, regardless of partner type, was also a prominent finding. Insula and TPJ BOLD during defection was also associated with stress responsivity and behavior in the ASD group under playground conditions. Children with ASD engage social salience networks less than TD children during conditions of social salience, supporting a fundamental disturbance of social engagement. PMID:25552572

Neural and cortisol responses during play with human and computer partners in children with autism.

PubMed

Edmiston, Elliot Kale; Merkle, Kristen; Corbett, Blythe A

2015-08-01

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit impairment in reciprocal social interactions, including play, which can manifest as failure to show social preference or discrimination between social and nonsocial stimuli. To explore mechanisms underlying these deficits, we collected salivary cortisol from 42 children 8-12 years with ASD or typical development during a playground interaction with a confederate child. Participants underwent functional MRI during a prisoner's dilemma game requiring cooperation or defection with a human (confederate) or computer partner. Search region of interest analyses were based on previous research (e.g. insula, amygdala, temporal parietal junction-TPJ). There were significant group differences in neural activation based on partner and response pattern. When playing with a human partner, children with ASD showed limited engagement of a social salience brain circuit during defection. Reduced insula activation during defection in the ASD children relative to TD children, regardless of partner type, was also a prominent finding. Insula and TPJ BOLD during defection was also associated with stress responsivity and behavior in the ASD group under playground conditions. Children with ASD engage social salience networks less than TD children during conditions of social salience, supporting a fundamental disturbance of social engagement. © The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Work-family conflict, work- and family-role salience, and women's well-being.

PubMed

Noor, Noraini M

2004-08-01

The author considered both the direct effect and the moderator effect of role salience in the stress-strain relationship. In contrast to previous studies that have examined the effects of salience on well-being within specific social roles, the present study focused on the work-family interface. From a sample of 147 employed English women with children, the present results of the regression analyses showed that both effects are possible, depending on the outcome measures used. The author observed a direct effect of role salience in the prediction of job satisfaction; work salience was positively related to job satisfaction, over and above the main-effect terms of work-interfering-with-family (WIF) conflict and family-interfering-with-work (FIW) conflict. In contrast, the author found a moderator effect of role salience and conflict for symptoms of psychological distress. However, contrary to predictions, the author found that work salience exacerbated the negative impact of WIF conflict, rather than FIW conflict, on well-being. The author discussed these results in relation to the literature on work-family conflict, role salience, and the issue of stress-strain specificity.

Finding the Secret of Image Saliency in the Frequency Domain.

PubMed

Li, Jia; Duan, Ling-Yu; Chen, Xiaowu; Huang, Tiejun; Tian, Yonghong

2015-12-01

There are two sides to every story of visual saliency modeling in the frequency domain. On the one hand, image saliency can be effectively estimated by applying simple operations to the frequency spectrum. On the other hand, it is still unclear which part of the frequency spectrum contributes the most to popping-out targets and suppressing distractors. Toward this end, this paper tentatively explores the secret of image saliency in the frequency domain. From the results obtained in several qualitative and quantitative experiments, we find that the secret of visual saliency may mainly hide in the phases of intermediate frequencies. To explain this finding, we reinterpret the concept of discrete Fourier transform from the perspective of template-based contrast computation and thus develop several principles for designing the saliency detector in the frequency domain. Following these principles, we propose a novel approach to design the saliency detector under the assistance of prior knowledge obtained through both unsupervised and supervised learning processes. Experimental results on a public image benchmark show that the learned saliency detector outperforms 18 state-of-the-art approaches in predicting human fixations.

Fixation and saliency during search of natural scenes: the case of visual agnosia.

PubMed

Foulsham, Tom; Barton, Jason J S; Kingstone, Alan; Dewhurst, Richard; Underwood, Geoffrey

2009-07-01

Models of eye movement control in natural scenes often distinguish between stimulus-driven processes (which guide the eyes to visually salient regions) and those based on task and object knowledge (which depend on expectations or identification of objects and scene gist). In the present investigation, the eye movements of a patient with visual agnosia were recorded while she searched for objects within photographs of natural scenes and compared to those made by students and age-matched controls. Agnosia is assumed to disrupt the top-down knowledge available in this task, and so may increase the reliance on bottom-up cues. The patient's deficit in object recognition was seen in poor search performance and inefficient scanning. The low-level saliency of target objects had an effect on responses in visual agnosia, and the most salient region in the scene was more likely to be fixated by the patient than by controls. An analysis of model-predicted saliency at fixation locations indicated a closer match between fixations and low-level saliency in agnosia than in controls. These findings are discussed in relation to saliency-map models and the balance between high and low-level factors in eye guidance.

Multiresolution saliency map based object segmentation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, Jian; Wang, Xin; Dai, ZhenYou

2015-11-01

Salient objects' detection and segmentation are gaining increasing research interest in recent years. A saliency map can be obtained from different models presented in previous studies. Based on this saliency map, the most salient region (MSR) in an image can be extracted. This MSR, generally a rectangle, can be used as the initial parameters for object segmentation algorithms. However, to our knowledge, all of those saliency maps are represented in a unitary resolution although some models have even introduced multiscale principles in the calculation process. Furthermore, some segmentation methods, such as the well-known GrabCut algorithm, need more iteration time or additional interactions to get more precise results without predefined pixel types. A concept of a multiresolution saliency map is introduced. This saliency map is provided in a multiresolution format, which naturally follows the principle of the human visual mechanism. Moreover, the points in this map can be utilized to initialize parameters for GrabCut segmentation by labeling the feature pixels automatically. Both the computing speed and segmentation precision are evaluated. The results imply that this multiresolution saliency map-based object segmentation method is simple and efficient.

Text Features and Preschool Teachers' Use of Print Referencing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dynia, Jaclyn M.; Justice, Laura M.; Pentimonti, Jill M.; Piasta, Shayne B.; Kaderavek, Joan N.

2013-01-01

Storybook features, such as linguistic richness and print salience, potentially influence how a teacher references print. This study addressed two research questions: (1) to what extent does the linguistic richness and print salience of children's storybooks relate to teachers' use of print referencing? and (2) to what extent is there an interplay…

Motivational salience signal in the basal forebrain is coupled with faster and more precise decision speed.

PubMed

Avila, Irene; Lin, Shih-Chieh

2014-03-01

The survival of animals depends critically on prioritizing responses to motivationally salient stimuli. While it is generally believed that motivational salience increases decision speed, the quantitative relationship between motivational salience and decision speed, measured by reaction time (RT), remains unclear. Here we show that the neural correlate of motivational salience in the basal forebrain (BF), defined independently of RT, is coupled with faster and also more precise decision speed. In rats performing a reward-biased simple RT task, motivational salience was encoded by BF bursting response that occurred before RT. We found that faster RTs were tightly coupled with stronger BF motivational salience signals. Furthermore, the fraction of RT variability reflecting the contribution of intrinsic noise in the decision-making process was actively suppressed in faster RT distributions with stronger BF motivational salience signals. Artificially augmenting the BF motivational salience signal via electrical stimulation led to faster and more precise RTs and supports a causal relationship. Together, these results not only describe for the first time, to our knowledge, the quantitative relationship between motivational salience and faster decision speed, they also reveal the quantitative coupling relationship between motivational salience and more precise RT. Our results further establish the existence of an early and previously unrecognized step in the decision-making process that determines both the RT speed and variability of the entire decision-making process and suggest that this novel decision step is dictated largely by the BF motivational salience signal. Finally, our study raises the hypothesis that the dysregulation of decision speed in conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, and cognitive aging may result from the functional impairment of the motivational salience signal encoded by the poorly understood noncholinergic BF neurons.

Motivational Salience Signal in the Basal Forebrain Is Coupled with Faster and More Precise Decision Speed

PubMed Central

Avila, Irene; Lin, Shih-Chieh

2014-01-01

The survival of animals depends critically on prioritizing responses to motivationally salient stimuli. While it is generally believed that motivational salience increases decision speed, the quantitative relationship between motivational salience and decision speed, measured by reaction time (RT), remains unclear. Here we show that the neural correlate of motivational salience in the basal forebrain (BF), defined independently of RT, is coupled with faster and also more precise decision speed. In rats performing a reward-biased simple RT task, motivational salience was encoded by BF bursting response that occurred before RT. We found that faster RTs were tightly coupled with stronger BF motivational salience signals. Furthermore, the fraction of RT variability reflecting the contribution of intrinsic noise in the decision-making process was actively suppressed in faster RT distributions with stronger BF motivational salience signals. Artificially augmenting the BF motivational salience signal via electrical stimulation led to faster and more precise RTs and supports a causal relationship. Together, these results not only describe for the first time, to our knowledge, the quantitative relationship between motivational salience and faster decision speed, they also reveal the quantitative coupling relationship between motivational salience and more precise RT. Our results further establish the existence of an early and previously unrecognized step in the decision-making process that determines both the RT speed and variability of the entire decision-making process and suggest that this novel decision step is dictated largely by the BF motivational salience signal. Finally, our study raises the hypothesis that the dysregulation of decision speed in conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, and cognitive aging may result from the functional impairment of the motivational salience signal encoded by the poorly understood noncholinergic BF neurons. PMID:24642480

The impact of age, ongoing task difficulty, and cue salience on preschoolers' prospective memory performance: the role of executive function.

PubMed

Mahy, Caitlin E V; Moses, Louis J; Kliegel, Matthias

2014-11-01

The current study examined the impact of age, ongoing task (OT) difficulty, and cue salience on 4- and 5-year-old children's prospective memory (PM) and also explored the relation between individual differences in executive function (working memory, inhibition, and shifting) and PM. OT difficulty and cue salience are predicted to affect the detection of PM cues based on the multiprocess framework, yet neither has been thoroughly investigated in young children. OT difficulty was manipulated by requiring children to sort cards according to the size of pictured items (easy) or by opposite size (difficult), and cue salience was manipulated by placing a red border around half of the target cues (salient) and no border around the other cues (non-salient). The 5-year-olds outperformed the 4-year-olds on the PM task, and salient PM cues resulted in better PM cues compared with non-salient cues. There was no main effect of OT difficulty, and the interaction between cue salience and OT difficulty was not significant. However, a planned comparison revealed that the combination of non-salient cues and a difficult OT resulted in significantly worse PM performance than that in all of the other conditions. Inhibition accounted for significant variance in PM performance for non-salient cues and for marginally significant variance for salient cues. Furthermore, individual differences in inhibition fully mediated the effect of age on PM performance. Results are discussed in the context of the multiprocess framework and with reference to preschoolers' difficulty with the executive demands of dividing attention between the OT and PM task. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Gaze distribution analysis and saliency prediction across age groups.

PubMed

Krishna, Onkar; Helo, Andrea; Rämä, Pia; Aizawa, Kiyoharu

2018-01-01

Knowledge of the human visual system helps to develop better computational models of visual attention. State-of-the-art models have been developed to mimic the visual attention system of young adults that, however, largely ignore the variations that occur with age. In this paper, we investigated how visual scene processing changes with age and we propose an age-adapted framework that helps to develop a computational model that can predict saliency across different age groups. Our analysis uncovers how the explorativeness of an observer varies with age, how well saliency maps of an age group agree with fixation points of observers from the same or different age groups, and how age influences the center bias tendency. We analyzed the eye movement behavior of 82 observers belonging to four age groups while they explored visual scenes. Explorative- ness was quantified in terms of the entropy of a saliency map, and area under the curve (AUC) metrics was used to quantify the agreement analysis and the center bias tendency. Analysis results were used to develop age adapted saliency models. Our results suggest that the proposed age-adapted saliency model outperforms existing saliency models in predicting the regions of interest across age groups.

Thinking about the Weather: How Display Salience and Knowledge Affect Performance in a Graphic Inference Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hegarty, Mary; Canham, Matt S.; Fabrikant, Sara I.

2010-01-01

Three experiments examined how bottom-up and top-down processes interact when people view and make inferences from complex visual displays (weather maps). Bottom-up effects of display design were investigated by manipulating the relative visual salience of task-relevant and task-irrelevant information across different maps. Top-down effects of…

Thinking about the weather: How display salience and knowledge affect performance in a graphic inference task.

PubMed

Hegarty, Mary; Canham, Matt S; Fabrikant, Sara I

2010-01-01

Three experiments examined how bottom-up and top-down processes interact when people view and make inferences from complex visual displays (weather maps). Bottom-up effects of display design were investigated by manipulating the relative visual salience of task-relevant and task-irrelevant information across different maps. Top-down effects of domain knowledge were investigated by examining performance and eye fixations before and after participants learned relevant meteorological principles. Map design and knowledge interacted such that salience had no effect on performance before participants learned the meteorological principles; however, after learning, participants were more accurate if they viewed maps that made task-relevant information more visually salient. Effects of display design on task performance were somewhat dissociated from effects of display design on eye fixations. The results support a model in which eye fixations are directed primarily by top-down factors (task and domain knowledge). They suggest that good display design facilitates performance not just by guiding where viewers look in a complex display but also by facilitating processing of the visual features that represent task-relevant information at a given display location. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

Development of Hot and Cold Executive Function in Boys and Girls With ADHD.

PubMed

Skogli, Erik Winther; Andersen, Per Normann; Hovik, Kjell Tore; Øie, Merete

2017-02-01

To investigate the development of executive function with pronounced emotional salience (hot EF) and less pronounced emotional salience (cold EF) in boys and girls with ADHD relative to typically developing (TD) children. Seventy-five children with ADHD and 47 TD children were assessed with hot and cold EF tests at baseline and after 2 years. Despite considerable maturation, the ADHD group remained impaired on all cold EF tests relative to TD children after 2 years. There was no effect of gender on cold EF test results. Females with ADHD outperformed TD counterparts on hot EF at baseline. Females with ADHD showed deteriorating hot EF performance, while TD counterparts showed improved hot EF performance across time. Enduring cold EF impairments after 2 years may reflect stable phenotypic traits in children with ADHD. Results indicate divergent developmental trajectories of hot EF in girls with ADHD relative to TD counterparts.

Neural Basis of Visual Attentional Orienting in Childhood Autism Spectrum Disorders.

PubMed

Murphy, Eric R; Norr, Megan; Strang, John F; Kenworthy, Lauren; Gaillard, William D; Vaidya, Chandan J

2017-01-01

We examined spontaneous attention orienting to visual salience in stimuli without social significance using a modified Dot-Probe task during functional magnetic resonance imaging in high-functioning preadolescent children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and age- and IQ-matched control children. While the magnitude of attentional bias (faster response to probes in the location of solid color patch) to visually salient stimuli was similar in the groups, activation differences in frontal and temporoparietal regions suggested hyper-sensitivity to visual salience or to sameness in ASD children. Further, activation in a subset of those regions was associated with symptoms of restricted and repetitive behavior. Thus, atypicalities in response to visual properties of stimuli may drive attentional orienting problems associated with ASD.

Exploring the Role of Conventionality in Children's Interpretation of Ironic Remarks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burnett, Debra L.

2015-01-01

Irony comprehension in seven- and eight-year-old children with typically developing language skills was explored under the framework of the graded salience hypothesis. Target ironic remarks, either conventional or novel/situation-specific, were presented following brief story contexts. Children's responses to comprehension questions were used to…

Parietal cortex integrates contextual and saliency signals during the encoding of natural scenes in working memory.

PubMed

Santangelo, Valerio; Di Francesco, Simona Arianna; Mastroberardino, Serena; Macaluso, Emiliano

2015-12-01

The Brief presentation of a complex scene entails that only a few objects can be selected, processed indepth, and stored in memory. Both low-level sensory salience and high-level context-related factors (e.g., the conceptual match/mismatch between objects and scene context) contribute to this selection process, but how the interplay between these factors affects memory encoding is largely unexplored. Here, during fMRI we presented participants with pictures of everyday scenes. After a short retention interval, participants judged the position of a target object extracted from the initial scene. The target object could be either congruent or incongruent with the context of the scene, and could be located in a region of the image with maximal or minimal salience. Behaviourally, we found a reduced impact of saliency on visuospatial working memory performance when the target was out-of-context. Encoding-related fMRI results showed that context-congruent targets activated dorsoparietal regions, while context-incongruent targets de-activated the ventroparietal cortex. Saliency modulated activity both in dorsal and ventral regions, with larger context-related effects for salient targets. These findings demonstrate the joint contribution of knowledge-based and saliency-driven attention for memory encoding, highlighting a dissociation between dorsal and ventral parietal regions. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Gender Question and the Study of Jewish Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Charme, Stuart Z.

2006-01-01

Although some researchers argue that a generation of feminist innovations and changes in American Jewish life has produced an egalitarian generation in which gender differences among Jewish children and adolescents are insignificant, this article argues that the salience of gender differences is a factor of the kinds of questions that children are…

Lexical Tone Variation and Spoken Word Recognition in Preschool Children: Effects of Perceptual Salience

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Singh, Leher; Tan, Aloysia; Wewalaarachchi, Thilanga D.

2017-01-01

Children undergo gradual progression in their ability to differentiate correct and incorrect pronunciations of words, a process that is crucial to establishing a native vocabulary. For the most part, the development of mature phonological representations has been researched by investigating children's sensitivity to consonant and vowel variation,…

Topic-Specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TSPCK) in Redox and Electrochemistry of Experienced Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Brien, Stephanie

2017-01-01

Topic specific pedagogical content knowledge (TSPCK) is the basis by which knowledge of subject matter of a particular topic is conveyed to students. This includes students' prior knowledge, curricular saliency, what makes a topic easy or difficult to teach, representations, and teaching strategies. The goal of this study is to assess the…

Children's Social Categories and the Salience of Race.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vora, Parul; England, Eileen M.

Research has shown that children use physical features to distinguish among people, and that race can be distinguished by certain features such as skin color and the shape of eyes, nose, and lips. However, L. Hirschfeld (1993, 1994) has argued that children must have the concept of race before they form the race social category and that other…

Global Contrast Based Salient Region Detection.

PubMed

Cheng, Ming-Ming; Mitra, Niloy J; Huang, Xiaolei; Torr, Philip H S; Hu, Shi-Min

2015-03-01

Automatic estimation of salient object regions across images, without any prior assumption or knowledge of the contents of the corresponding scenes, enhances many computer vision and computer graphics applications. We introduce a regional contrast based salient object detection algorithm, which simultaneously evaluates global contrast differences and spatial weighted coherence scores. The proposed algorithm is simple, efficient, naturally multi-scale, and produces full-resolution, high-quality saliency maps. These saliency maps are further used to initialize a novel iterative version of GrabCut, namely SaliencyCut, for high quality unsupervised salient object segmentation. We extensively evaluated our algorithm using traditional salient object detection datasets, as well as a more challenging Internet image dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm consistently outperforms 15 existing salient object detection and segmentation methods, yielding higher precision and better recall rates. We also show that our algorithm can be used to efficiently extract salient object masks from Internet images, enabling effective sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) via simple shape comparisons. Despite such noisy internet images, where the saliency regions are ambiguous, our saliency guided image retrieval achieves a superior retrieval rate compared with state-of-the-art SBIR methods, and additionally provides important target object region information.

Context Effects on Children's Memory of Piagetian Concepts.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

King, Mary Ann; Yuille, John C.

This paper is concerned with two questions derived from Piaget and Inhelder's (1973) work on the relationship between memory and the developing intelligence of the child. First, can children retain operatively advanced information through the use of a non-operative mnemonic? Secondly, can the salience of operative versus non-operative information…

Neural Basis of Visual Attentional Orienting in Childhood Autism Spectrum Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Murphy, Eric R.; Norr, Megan; Strang, John F.; Kenworthy, Lauren; Gaillard, William D.; Vaidya, Chandan J.

2017-01-01

We examined spontaneous attention orienting to visual salience in stimuli without social significance using a modified Dot-Probe task during functional magnetic resonance imaging in high-functioning preadolescent children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and age- and IQ-matched control children. While the magnitude of attentional bias (faster…

Prekindergarten teachers' verbal references to print during classroom-based, large-group shared reading.

PubMed

Zucker, Tricia A; Justice, Laura M; Piasta, Shayne B

2009-10-01

The frequency with which adults reference print when reading with preschool-age children is associated with growth in children's print knowledge (e.g., L.M. Justice & H.K. Ezell, 2000, 2002). This study examined whether prekindergarten (pre-K) teachers naturally reference print during classroom shared reading and if verbal print references occur at similar rates across different types of books. The relation between frequency of print referencing and quality of teachers' language instruction was also studied. Seventeen pre-K teachers were randomly assigned to a regular reading condition as part of a larger study, and 92 videos of their large-group, shared-reading sessions were analyzed for print-referencing utterances and quality of language instruction. Teachers' verbal print references were compared across texts that were purposefully sampled to include different levels of print salience. Teachers discussed all domains of print studied; however, their rate of print referencing was relatively low. More verbal print references were observed when the teachers read books exhibiting higher amounts of print-salient features. When reading books, there was no apparent relation between teachers' use of print referencing and their quality of language instruction. It is unclear whether this low rate of explicit, verbal print referencing would impact children's print knowledge. Nonetheless, print-salient books appear to offer a natural context for discussions about print. Implications for educational practice are considered.

Prospective memory in multiple sclerosis: The impact of cue distinctiveness and executive functioning.

PubMed

Dagenais, Emmanuelle; Rouleau, Isabelle; Tremblay, Alexandra; Demers, Mélanie; Roger, Élaine; Jobin, Céline; Duquette, Pierre

2016-11-01

Prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember to do something at the appropriate time in the future, is crucial in everyday life. One way to improve PM performance is to increase the salience of a cue announcing that it is time to act. Multiple sclerosis (MS) patients often report PM failures and there is growing evidence of PM deficits among this population. However, such deficits are poorly characterized and their relation to cognitive status remains unclear. To better understand PM deficits in MS patients, this study investigated the impact of cue salience on PM, and its relation to retrospective memory (RM) and executive deficits. Thirty-nine (39) MS patients were compared to 18 healthy controls on a PM task modulating cue salience during an ongoing general knowledge test. MS patients performed worse than controls on the PM task, regardless of cue salience. MS patients' executive functions contributed significantly to the variance in PM performance, whereas age, education and RM did not. Interestingly, low- and high-executive patients' performance differed when the cue was not salient, but not when it was, suggesting that low-executive MS patients benefited more from cue salience. These findings add to the growing evidence of PM deficits in MS and highlight the contribution of executive functions to certain aspects of PM. In low-executive MS patients, high cue salience improves PM performance by reducing the detection threshold and need for environmental monitoring. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Labeling and Grouping Effects in the Recall of Pictures by Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Furth, Hans G.; Milgram, Norman A.

1973-01-01

Free recall of an array of pictures followed by sequential location recall was observed in children ages 4 to 12. Presentation conditions included arrays of pictures differing in salience of categories versus noncategorical array, and two task conditions, overt labeling versus pointing. Grouping effects on memory were systematically related to…

Modeling Face Identification Processing in Children and Adults.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schwarzer, Gudrun; Massaro, Dominic W.

2001-01-01

Two experiments studied whether and how 5-year-olds integrate single facial features to identify faces. Results indicated that children could evaluate and integrate information from eye and mouth features to identify a face when salience of features was varied. A weighted Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception fit better than a Single Channel Model,…

Value Transmissions between Parents and Children: Gender and Developmental Phase as Transmission Belts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roest, Annette M. C.; Dubas, Judith Semon; Gerris, Jan R. M.

2010-01-01

This study applied the gender role model of socialization theory, the developmental aging theory, and the topic salience perspective to the investigation of parent-child value transmissions. Specifically, we examined whether the bi-directionality and selectivity of value transmissions differed as a function of parents' and children's gender and…

A Study of Young Children's Comprehension of Metaphorical Language.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cerbin, William

A study was conducted to examine some of the cognitive and linguistic factors that influence metaphor comprehension in young children. Presupposing that (1) the similarities between the topic and the vehicle in a metaphor comprise the metaphor's ground, (2) salience is the degree of prominence of a characteristic in relation to a concept, and (3)…

A visual salience map in the primate frontal eye field.

PubMed

Thompson, Kirk G; Bichot, Narcisse P

2005-01-01

Models of attention and saccade target selection propose that within the brain there is a topographic map of visual salience that combines bottom-up and top-down influences to identify locations for further processing. The results of a series of experiments with monkeys performing visual search tasks have identified a population of frontal eye field (FEF) visually responsive neurons that exhibit all of the characteristics of a visual salience map. The activity of these FEF neurons is not sensitive to specific features of visual stimuli; but instead, their activity evolves over time to select the target of the search array. This selective activation reflects both the bottom-up intrinsic conspicuousness of the stimuli and the top-down knowledge and goals of the viewer. The peak response within FEF specifies the target for the overt gaze shift. However, the selective activity in FEF is not in itself a motor command because the magnitude of activation reflects the relative behavioral significance of the different stimuli in the visual scene and occurs even when no saccade is made. Identifying a visual salience map in FEF validates the theoretical concept of a salience map in many models of attention. In addition, it strengthens the emerging view that FEF is not only involved in producing overt gaze shifts, but is also important for directing covert spatial attention.

Autobiographical memory: a candidate latent vulnerability mechanism for psychiatric disorder following childhood maltreatment

PubMed Central

McCrory, Eamon J.; Puetz, Vanessa B.; Maguire, Eleanor A.; Mechelli, Andrea; Palmer, Amy; Gerin, Mattia I.; Kelly, Philip A.; Koutoufa, Iakovina; Viding, Essi

2017-01-01

Background Altered autobiographical memory (ABM) functioning has been implicated in the pathogenesis of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder and may represent one mechanism by which childhood maltreatment elevates psychiatric risk. Aims To investigate the impact of childhood maltreatment on ABM functioning. Method Thirty-four children with documented maltreatment and 33 matched controls recalled specific ABMs in response to emotionally valenced cue words during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Results Children with maltreatment experience showed reduced hippocampal and increased middle temporal and parahippocampal activation during positive ABM recall compared with peers. During negative ABM recall they exhibited increased amygdala activation, and greater amygdala connectivity with the salience network. Conclusions Childhood maltreatment is associated with altered ABM functioning, specifically reduced activation in areas encoding specification of positive memories, and greater activation of the salience network for negative memories. This pattern may confer latent vulnerability to future depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. PMID:28882830

Eye Tracking Reveals Impaired Attentional Disengagement Associated with Sensory Response Patterns in Children with Autism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sabatos-DeVito, Maura; Schipul, Sarah E.; Bulluck, John C.; Belger, Aysenil; Baranek, Grace T.

2016-01-01

This study used a gap-overlap paradigm to examine the impact of distractor salience and temporal overlap on the ability to disengage and orient attention in 50 children (4-13 years) with ASD, DD and TD, and associations between attention and sensory response patterns. Results revealed impaired disengagement and orienting accuracy in ASD.…

The development of intention-based morality: The influence of intention salience and recency, negligence, and outcome on children's and adults' judgments.

PubMed

Nobes, Gavin; Panagiotaki, Georgia; Engelhardt, Paul E

2017-10-01

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influences on 4-8 year-olds' and adults' moral judgments. In both, participants were told stories from previous studies that had indicated that children's judgments are largely outcome-based. Building on recent research in which one change to these studies' methods resulted in substantially more intention-based judgment, in Experiment 1 (N = 75) the salience and recency of intention information were increased, and in Experiment 2 (N = 99) carefulness information (i.e., the absence of negligence) was also added. In both experiments even the youngest children's judgments were primarily intention-based, and in Experiment 2 punishment judgments were similar to adults' from 5-6 years. Comparisons of data across studies and experiments indicated that both changes increased the proportion of intention-based punishment judgments-but not acceptability judgments-across age-groups. These findings challenge and help to explain those of much previous research, according to which children's judgments are primarily outcome-based. However, younger participants continued to judge according to outcome more than older participants. This might indicate that young children are more influenced by outcomes than are adults, but other possible explanations are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Trends in the salience of data collected in a multi user virtual environment: An exploratory study

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tutwiler, M. Shane

In this study, by exploring patterns in the degree of physical salience of the data the students collected, I investigated the relationship between the level of students' tendency to frame explanations in terms of complex patterns and evidence of how they attend to and select data in support of their developing understandings of causal relationships. I accomplished this by analyzing longitudinal data collected as part of a larger study of 143 7th grade students (clustered within 36 teams, 5 teachers, and 2 schools in the same Northeastern school district) as they navigated and collected data in an ecosystems-based multi-user virtual environment curriculum known as the EcoMUVE Pond module (Metcalf, Kamarainen, Tutwiler, Grotzer, Dede, 2011) . Using individual growth modeling (Singer & Willett, 2003) I found no direct link between student pre-intervention tendency to offer explanations containing complex causal components and patterns of physical salience-driven data collection (average physical salience level, number of low physical salience data points collected, and proportion of low physical salience data points collected), though prior science content knowledge did affect the initial status and rate of change of outcomes in the average physical salience level and proportion of low physical salience data collected over time. The findings of this study suggest two issues for consideration about the use of MUVEs to study student data collection behaviors in complex spaces. Firstly, the structure of the curriculum in which the MUVE is embedded might have a direct effect on what types of data students choose to collect. This undercuts our ability to make inferences about student-driven decisions to collect specific types of data, and suggests that a more open-ended curricular model might be better suited to this type of inquiry. Secondly, differences between teachers' choices in how to facilitate the units likely contribute to the variance in student data collection behaviors between students with different teachers. This foreshadows external validity issues in studies that use behaviors of students within a single class to develop "detectors" of student latent traits (e.g., Baker, Corbett, Roll, Koedinger, 2008).

The role of ethnic tourism in the food knowledge tradition of Tyrolean migrants in Treze Tílias, SC, Brazil.

PubMed

Kuhn, Elisabeth; Haselmair, Ruth; Pirker, Heidemarie; Vogl, Christian R

2018-04-06

Food knowledge and consumption in the context of migration is an important topic in ethnobiological research. Little research is done on the process of how external factors impact food knowledge amongst migrants. Taking into account social organisation and power relations of food knowledge transmission and distribution of food knowledge, this study sheds light on how the accessibility of resources, the predominant cuisine in the host country and ethnic tourism influences the food knowledge tradition of Tyrolean migrants and their descendants in Treze Tílias. Field research was conducted in Austria and Brazil in 2008-2009, using free-listing, social network analysis and participatory observation. The collected data was analysed by calculating Smith's Salience index, visualising personal and social networks and qualitative text analysis. Tyroleans in Austria had a different perception and a higher agreement of what Tyrolean food comprises than Tyroleans in Brazil, indicating different developments: Tyrolean migrants adapted their food habits according to available resources and over time in Brazil. Later, ethnic tourism had a strong impact: In Treze Tílias, dishes with the highest Smith's Salience index-forming the core of cultural food knowledge-strongly coincided with Tyrolean food served in ethnic restaurants, whose staff were perceived to be experts in Tyrolean food. Despite most food knowledge in Treze Tílias was transmitted within families, ethnic food prepared in restaurants and hotels determined the shared perception of what Tyrolean food comprises. Perceived as experts, the staff in ethnic restaurants were in a powerful position to transform cultural food knowledge by providing institutionalised and standardised knowledge about Tyrolean food.

Effects of Group Membership, Intergroup Competition and Out-Group Ethnicity on Children's Ratings of In-Group and Out-Group Similarity and Positivity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nesdale, Drew; Griffiths, Judith A.; Durkin, Kevin; Maass, Anne

2007-01-01

Based on self-categorization theory (SCT; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987), this study examined the extent to which 7- and 10-year-old children's perceptions of similarity to, and positivity towards, their in-group would be increased by factors predicted to enhance the salience of in-group-out-group categorizations. In a minimal…

The Development of Intention-Based Morality: The Influence of Intention Salience and Recency, Negligence, and Outcome on Children's and Adults' Judgments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nobes, Gavin; Panagiotaki, Georgia; Engelhardt, Paul E.

2017-01-01

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influences on 4-8 year-olds' and adults' moral judgments. In both, participants were told stories from previous studies that had indicated that children's judgments are largely outcome-based. Building on recent research in which one change to these studies' methods resulted in substantially more…

Exploring dimensionality of effortful control using hot and cool tasks in a sample of preschool children.

PubMed

Allan, Nicholas P; Lonigan, Christopher J

2014-06-01

Effortful control (EC) is an important developmental construct associated with academic performance, socioemotional growth, and psychopathology. EC, defined as the ability to inhibit or delay a prepotent response typically in favor of a subdominant response, undergoes rapid development during children's preschool years. Research involving EC in preschool children can be aided by ensuring that the measured model of EC matches the latent structure of EC. Extant research indicates that EC may be multidimensional, consisting of hot (affectively salient) and cool (affectively neutral) dimensions. However, there are several untested assumptions regarding the defining features of hot EC. Confirmatory factor analysis was used in a sample of 281 preschool children (Mage=55.92months, SD=4.16; 46.6% male and 53.4% female) to compare a multidimensional model composed of hot and cool EC factors with a unidimensional model. Hot tasks were created by adding affective salience to cool tasks so that hot and cool tasks varied only by this aspect of the tasks. Tasks measuring EC were best described by a single factor and not distinct hot and cool factors, indicating that affective salience alone does not differentiate between hot and cool EC. EC shared gender-invariant associations with academic skills and externalizing behavior problems. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Children inhibit global information when the forest is dense and local information when the forest is sparse.

PubMed

Krakowski, Claire-Sara; Borst, Grégoire; Vidal, Julie; Houdé, Olivier; Poirel, Nicolas

2018-09-01

Visual environments are composed of global shapes and local details that compete for attentional resources. In adults, the global level is processed more rapidly than the local level, and global information must be inhibited in order to process local information when the local information and global information are in conflict. Compared with adults, children present less of a bias toward global visual information and appear to be more sensitive to the density of local elements that constitute the global level. The current study aimed, for the first time, to investigate the key role of inhibition during global/local processing in children. By including two different conditions of global saliency during a negative priming procedure, the results showed that when the global level was salient (dense hierarchical figures), 7-year-old children and adults needed to inhibit the global level to process the local information. However, when the global level was less salient (sparse hierarchical figures), only children needed to inhibit the local level to process the global information. These results confirm a weaker global bias and the greater impact of saliency in children than in adults. Moreover, the results indicate that, regardless of age, inhibition of the most salient hierarchical level is systematically required to select the less salient but more relevant level. These findings have important implications for future research in this area. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mindfulness and dynamic functional neural connectivity in children and adolescents.

PubMed

Marusak, Hilary A; Elrahal, Farrah; Peters, Craig A; Kundu, Prantik; Lombardo, Michael V; Calhoun, Vince D; Goldberg, Elimelech K; Cohen, Cindy; Taub, Jeffrey W; Rabinak, Christine A

2018-01-15

Interventions that promote mindfulness consistently show salutary effects on cognition and emotional wellbeing in adults, and more recently, in children and adolescents. However, we lack understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying mindfulness in youth that should allow for more judicious application of these interventions in clinical and educational settings. Using multi-echo multi-band fMRI, we examined dynamic (i.e., time-varying) and conventional static resting-state connectivity between core neurocognitive networks (i.e., salience/emotion, default mode, central executive) in 42 children and adolescents (ages 6-17). We found that trait mindfulness in youth relates to dynamic but not static resting-state connectivity. Specifically, more mindful youth transitioned more between brain states over the course of the scan, spent overall less time in a certain connectivity state, and showed a state-specific reduction in connectivity between salience/emotion and central executive networks. The number of state transitions mediated the link between higher mindfulness and lower anxiety, providing new insights into potential neural mechanisms underlying benefits of mindfulness on psychological health in youth. Our results provide new evidence that mindfulness in youth relates to functional neural dynamics and interactions between neurocognitive networks, over time. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Multiculturalism, Religion, and Disability: Implications for Special Education Practitioners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blanks, A. Brooke; Smith, J. David

2009-01-01

Religious beliefs permeate many aspects of culture. Often, however, educators are reluctant to discuss religious beliefs when working with children with developmental and intellectual disabilities and their families. Ignoring the salience of religious teachings about the nature and meaning of disabilities as they relate to both individuals and…

Learning Disabilities at Twenty-Five: The Early Adulthood of a Maturing Concept.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Levine, Melvin D.

1989-01-01

The keynote speech identifies six categories of problem areas for children with learning disabilities: (1) synchronization, (2) consistency, (3) methodology, (4) cohesion, (5) saliency determination, and (6) tempo. A model of neurodevelopmental functions and performance elements to guide researchers and practitioners is offered. (DB)

Forced to remember: when memory is biased by salient information.

PubMed

Santangelo, Valerio

2015-04-15

The last decades have seen a rapid growing in the attempt to understand the key factors involved in the internal memory representation of the external world. Visual salience have been found to provide a major contribution in predicting the probability for an item/object embedded in a complex setting (i.e., a natural scene) to be encoded and then remembered later on. Here I review the existing literature highlighting the impact of perceptual- (based on low-level sensory features) and semantics-related salience (based on high-level knowledge) on short-term memory representation, along with the neural mechanisms underpinning the interplay between these factors. The available evidence reveal that both perceptual- and semantics-related factors affect attention selection mechanisms during the encoding of natural scenes. Biasing internal memory representation, both perceptual and semantics factors increase the probability to remember high- to the detriment of low-saliency items. The available evidence also highlight an interplay between these factors, with a reduced impact of perceptual-related salience in biasing memory representation as a function of the increasing availability of semantics-related salient information. The neural mechanisms underpinning this interplay involve the activation of different portions of the frontoparietal attention control network. Ventral regions support the assignment of selection/encoding priorities based on high-level semantics, while the involvement of dorsal regions reflects priorities assignment based on low-level sensory features. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A Benchmark Dataset and Saliency-guided Stacked Autoencoders for Video-based Salient Object Detection.

PubMed

Li, Jia; Xia, Changqun; Chen, Xiaowu

2017-10-12

Image-based salient object detection (SOD) has been extensively studied in past decades. However, video-based SOD is much less explored due to the lack of large-scale video datasets within which salient objects are unambiguously defined and annotated. Toward this end, this paper proposes a video-based SOD dataset that consists of 200 videos. In constructing the dataset, we manually annotate all objects and regions over 7,650 uniformly sampled keyframes and collect the eye-tracking data of 23 subjects who free-view all videos. From the user data, we find that salient objects in a video can be defined as objects that consistently pop-out throughout the video, and objects with such attributes can be unambiguously annotated by combining manually annotated object/region masks with eye-tracking data of multiple subjects. To the best of our knowledge, it is currently the largest dataset for videobased salient object detection. Based on this dataset, this paper proposes an unsupervised baseline approach for video-based SOD by using saliencyguided stacked autoencoders. In the proposed approach, multiple spatiotemporal saliency cues are first extracted at the pixel, superpixel and object levels. With these saliency cues, stacked autoencoders are constructed in an unsupervised manner that automatically infers a saliency score for each pixel by progressively encoding the high-dimensional saliency cues gathered from the pixel and its spatiotemporal neighbors. In experiments, the proposed unsupervised approach is compared with 31 state-of-the-art models on the proposed dataset and outperforms 30 of them, including 19 imagebased classic (unsupervised or non-deep learning) models, six image-based deep learning models, and five video-based unsupervised models. Moreover, benchmarking results show that the proposed dataset is very challenging and has the potential to boost the development of video-based SOD.

Video Salient Object Detection via Fully Convolutional Networks.

PubMed

Wang, Wenguan; Shen, Jianbing; Shao, Ling

This paper proposes a deep learning model to efficiently detect salient regions in videos. It addresses two important issues: 1) deep video saliency model training with the absence of sufficiently large and pixel-wise annotated video data and 2) fast video saliency training and detection. The proposed deep video saliency network consists of two modules, for capturing the spatial and temporal saliency information, respectively. The dynamic saliency model, explicitly incorporating saliency estimates from the static saliency model, directly produces spatiotemporal saliency inference without time-consuming optical flow computation. We further propose a novel data augmentation technique that simulates video training data from existing annotated image data sets, which enables our network to learn diverse saliency information and prevents overfitting with the limited number of training videos. Leveraging our synthetic video data (150K video sequences) and real videos, our deep video saliency model successfully learns both spatial and temporal saliency cues, thus producing accurate spatiotemporal saliency estimate. We advance the state-of-the-art on the densely annotated video segmentation data set (MAE of .06) and the Freiburg-Berkeley Motion Segmentation data set (MAE of .07), and do so with much improved speed (2 fps with all steps).This paper proposes a deep learning model to efficiently detect salient regions in videos. It addresses two important issues: 1) deep video saliency model training with the absence of sufficiently large and pixel-wise annotated video data and 2) fast video saliency training and detection. The proposed deep video saliency network consists of two modules, for capturing the spatial and temporal saliency information, respectively. The dynamic saliency model, explicitly incorporating saliency estimates from the static saliency model, directly produces spatiotemporal saliency inference without time-consuming optical flow computation. We further propose a novel data augmentation technique that simulates video training data from existing annotated image data sets, which enables our network to learn diverse saliency information and prevents overfitting with the limited number of training videos. Leveraging our synthetic video data (150K video sequences) and real videos, our deep video saliency model successfully learns both spatial and temporal saliency cues, thus producing accurate spatiotemporal saliency estimate. We advance the state-of-the-art on the densely annotated video segmentation data set (MAE of .06) and the Freiburg-Berkeley Motion Segmentation data set (MAE of .07), and do so with much improved speed (2 fps with all steps).

Are sleep education programs successful? The case for improved and consistent research efforts.

PubMed

Blunden, Sarah L; Chapman, Janine; Rigney, Gabrielle A

2012-08-01

Sleep duration and quality are associated with a range of neuropsychological and psychosocial outcomes in children and adolescents but community awareness of this is low. A small body of literature on sleep education programs in children and adolescents delivered through school-based programs is attempting to address this. A review of the literature found only 8 studies and 4 pilot studies in abstract form. This paper presents these sleep education programs and evaluates their effectiveness. In general, findings suggest that when sleep knowledge was measured it was increased in most programs. However this did not necessarily equate to sleep behaviour change such as increased sleep duration or improved sleep hygiene. Reasons for this are discussed and may include motivation and readiness to change, salience to the individual, delivery, content, time allocation, or methodological underpinnings. This paper attempts to understand this and assess how best to improve future sleep education programs from a theoretical perspective. Specifically, it considers the theory of planned behaviour which may assist in ensuring maximum efficacy for the current and future development of sleep education programs. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

College Students' Attitudes toward Elderly Sexuality: A Two Factor Solution.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hillman, Jennifer L.; Stricker, George

1996-01-01

Factor analysis of scores of 458 college students on the Aging Sexuality Knowledge and Attitude Scale revealed a two-factor structure. Religious affiliation and ethnicity uniquely predicted permissive/restrictive attitudes. Death anxiety and salience of elderly sexuality uniquely predicted empathic/indifferent attitudes. Students of different ages…

Hot Topics in Science Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ediger, Marlow

2018-01-01

There are vital topics in science teaching and learning which are mentioned frequently in the literature. Specialists advocate their importance in the curriculum as well as science teachers stress their saliency. Inservice education might well assist new and veteran teachers in knowledge and skills. The very best science lessons and units of…

A novel visual saliency detection method for infrared video sequences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Xin; Zhang, Yuzhen; Ning, Chen

2017-12-01

Infrared video applications such as target detection and recognition, moving target tracking, and so forth can benefit a lot from visual saliency detection, which is essentially a method to automatically localize the ;important; content in videos. In this paper, a novel visual saliency detection method for infrared video sequences is proposed. Specifically, for infrared video saliency detection, both the spatial saliency and temporal saliency are considered. For spatial saliency, we adopt a mutual consistency-guided spatial cues combination-based method to capture the regions with obvious luminance contrast and contour features. For temporal saliency, a multi-frame symmetric difference approach is proposed to discriminate salient moving regions of interest from background motions. Then, the spatial saliency and temporal saliency are combined to compute the spatiotemporal saliency using an adaptive fusion strategy. Besides, to highlight the spatiotemporal salient regions uniformly, a multi-scale fusion approach is embedded into the spatiotemporal saliency model. Finally, a Gestalt theory-inspired optimization algorithm is designed to further improve the reliability of the final saliency map. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms many state-of-the-art saliency detection approaches for infrared videos under various backgrounds.

"Amor" and Social Stigma: ASD Beliefs among Immigrant Mexican Parents

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cohen, Shana R.; Miguel, Jessica

2018-01-01

This study examined cultural beliefs about ASD and its causes among Mexican-heritage families. In focus group interviews, we asked 25 immigrant parents of children with ASD to identify words they associated with ASD and its causes. Participants free-listed, ranked, and justified their responses. Mixed methods analyses utilized saliency scores to…

Categorizing by Social Dimensions: A Developmental Basis for Stereotyping?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Doyle, Anna-Beth; And Others

The use by 254 Canadian children of the dimensions of gender, language/ethnicity, and body type as bases of categorization was examined. A developmental approach was taken to see whether a sequence exists in the relative predominance of these dimensions; to examine the relation between the salience of these dimensions and cognitive developmental…

Choosing Selves: The Salience of Parental Identity in the School Choice Process

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cucchiara, Maia Bloomfield; Horvat, Erin McNamara

2014-01-01

With the proliferation of choice policies in education, parents are increasingly positioned as "consumers" tasked with choosing the "best" school for their children. Yet a large body of research has shown that the process of selecting a school is far more complicated than policy-makers and researchers often predict. This…

Perceptual Salience and Children's Multidimensional Problem Solving

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Odom, Richard D.; Corbin, David W.

1973-01-01

Uni- and multidimensional processing of 6- to 9-year olds was studied using recall tasks in which an array of stimuli was reconstructed to match a model array. Results indicated that both age groups were able to solve multidimensional problems, but that solution rate was retarded by the unidimensional processing of highly salient dimensions.…

Development of intuitive rules: evaluating the application of the dual-system framework to understanding children's intuitive reasoning.

PubMed

Osman, Magda; Stavy, Ruth

2006-12-01

Theories of adult reasoning propose that reasoning consists of two functionally distinct systems that operate under entirely different mechanisms. This theoretical framework has been used to account for a wide range of phenomena, which now encompasses developmental research on reasoning and problem solving. We begin this review by contrasting three main dual-system theories of adult reasoning (Evans & Over, 1996; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich & West, 2000) with a well-established developmental account that also incorporates a dual-system framework (Brainerd & Reyna, 2001). We use developmental studies of the formation and application of intuitive rules in science and mathematics to evaluate the claims that these theories make. Overall, the evidence reviewed suggests that what is crucial to understanding how children reason is the saliency of the features that are presented within a task. By highlighting the importance of saliency as a way of understanding reasoning, we aim to provide clarity concerning the benefits and limitations of adopting a dual-system framework to account for evidence from developmental studies of intuitive reasoning.

On the distribution of saliency.

PubMed

Berengolts, Alexander; Lindenbaum, Michael

2006-12-01

Detecting salient structures is a basic task in perceptual organization. Saliency algorithms typically mark edge-points with some saliency measure, which grows with the length and smoothness of the curve on which these edge-points lie. Here, we propose a modified saliency estimation mechanism that is based on probabilistically specified grouping cues and on curve length distributions. In this framework, the Shashua and Ullman saliency mechanism may be interpreted as a process for detecting the curve with maximal expected length. Generalized types of saliency naturally follow. We propose several specific generalizations (e.g., gray-level-based saliency) and rigorously derive the limitations on generalized saliency types. We then carry out a probabilistic analysis of expected length saliencies. Using ergodicity and asymptotic analysis, we derive the saliency distributions associated with the main curves and with the rest of the image. We then extend this analysis to finite-length curves. Using the derived distributions, we derive the optimal threshold on the saliency for discriminating between figure and background and bound the saliency-based figure-from-ground performance.

Exploring Dimensionality of Effortful Control Using Hot and Cool Tasks in a Sample of Preschool Children

PubMed Central

Allan, Nicholas P.; Lonigan, Christopher J.

2015-01-01

Effortful control (EC) is an important developmental construct associated with academic performance, socioemotional growth, and psychopathology. EC, defined as the ability to inhibit or delay a prepotent response typically in favor of a subdominant response, undergoes rapid development during children’s preschool years. Research involving EC in preschool children can be aided by ensuring that the measured model of EC matches the latent structure of EC. Extant research indicates that EC may be multidimensional, consisting of hot (affectively salient) and cool (affectively neutral) dimensions. However, there are several untested assumptions regarding the defining features of hot EC. Confirmatory factor analysis was used in a sample of 281 preschool children (Mage = 55.92 - months, SD = 4.16; 46.6% male and 53.4% female) to compare a multidimensional model composed of hot and cool EC factors with a unidimensional model. Hot tasks were created by adding affective salience to cool tasks so that hot and cool tasks varied only by this aspect of the tasks. Tasks measuring EC were best described by a single factor and not distinct hot and cool factors, indicating that affective salience alone does not differentiate between hot and cool EC. EC shared gender-invariant associations with academic skills and externalizing behavior problems. PMID:24518050

Trajectories of attentional development: an exploration with the master activation map model.

PubMed

Michael, George A; Lété, Bernard; Ducrot, Stéphanie

2013-04-01

The developmental trajectories of several attention components, such as orienting, inhibition, and the guidance of selection by relevance (i.e., advance knowledge relevant to the task) were investigated in 498 participants (ages 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 20). The paradigm was based on Michael et al.'s (2006) master activation map model and consisted of 3 visual search tasks presented in an intrasubject Latin square design and differing in terms of the probability with which a salient signal was associated with the target or a distractor. The results suggest that, whereas computations of salience were already proficient at age 7, and the use of advance knowledge was efficient throughout childhood, albeit without reaching adult levels, the integration of salience and relevance reached its asymptotic level at age 8. Although moving and engaging attention was proficient at age 7, disengaging attention started to improve at age 9, reaching its adult level at age 11. As regards inhibition of salient distractors, the authors found no developmental pattern before adulthood, regardless of whether advance knowledge was available about the distractor or not, although all participants were able to use such knowledge to reduce overall interference. Finally, some results suggest that the control of resources for strengthening inhibition becomes efficient between ages 9 and 10. The developmental trajectories were compared with the existing literature and discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Development and validation of the Australian Aboriginal racial identity and self-esteem survey for 8-12 year old children (IRISE_C).

PubMed

Kickett-Tucker, C S; Christensen, D; Lawrence, D; Zubrick, S R; Johnson, D J; Stanley, F

2015-10-24

In Australia, there is little empirical research of the racial identity of Indigenous children and youth as the majority of the current literature focuses on adults. Furthermore, there are no instruments developed with cultural appropriateness when exploring the identity and self-esteem of the Australian Aboriginal population, especially children. The IRISE_C (Racial Identity and Self-Esteem of children) inventory was developed to explore the elements of racial identity and self-esteem of urban, rural and regional Aboriginal children. This paper describes the development and validation of the IRISE_C instrument with over 250 Aboriginal children aged 8 to 12 years. A pilot of the IRISE C instrument was combined with individual interviews and was undertaken with 35 urban Aboriginal children aged 8-12 years. An exploratory factor analysis was performed to refine the survey and reduce redundant items in readiness for the main study. In the main study, the IRISE C was employed to 229 Aboriginal children aged 6-13 years across three sites (rural, regional and urban) in Western Australia. An exploratory factor analysis using Principal axis factoring was used to assess the fit of items and survey structure. A confirmatory factor analysis was then employed using LISREL (diagonally weighted least squares) to assess factor structures across domains. Internal consistency and reliability of subscales were assessed using Cronbach's co-efficient alpha. The pilot testing identified two key concepts - children's knowledge of issues related to their racial identity, and the importance, or salience, that they attach to these issues. In the main study, factor analyses showed two clear factors relating to: Aboriginal culture and traditions; and a sense of belonging to an Aboriginal community. Principal Axis Factoring of the Knowledge items supported a 2-factor solution, which explained 38.7% of variance. Factor One (Aboriginal culture) had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.835; Factor 2 (racial identity) had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.800, thus demonstrating high internal reliability of the scales. The IRISE_C has been shown to be a valid instrument useful of exploring the development of racial identity of Australian Aboriginal children across the 8-12 year old age range and across urban, rural and regional geographical locations.

Monoracial and Biracial Children: Effects of Racial Identity Saliency on Social Learning and Social Preferences

PubMed Central

Gaither, Sarah E.; Chen, Eva E.; Corriveau, Kathleen H.; Harris, Paul L.; Ambady, Nalini; Sommers, Samuel R.

2014-01-01

Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial ingroup but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N=246, 3–8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object after watching adults (White, Black, and Asian) demonstrate its uses. In the social preferences task, participants saw pairs of children (White, Black, and Asian) and chose with whom they most wanted to socially affiliate. Biracial children showed flexibility in racial identification during learning and social tasks. However, minority-primed biracial children were not more likely than monoracial minorities to socially affiliate with primed racial ingroup members, indicating their ingroup preferences are contextually based. PMID:25040708

Saliency detection using mutual consistency-guided spatial cues combination

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Xin; Ning, Chen; Xu, Lizhong

2015-09-01

Saliency detection has received extensive interests due to its remarkable contribution to wide computer vision and pattern recognition applications. However, most existing computational models are designed for detecting saliency in visible images or videos. When applied to infrared images, they may suffer from limitations in saliency detection accuracy and robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to detect visual saliency in infrared images by mutual consistency-guided spatial cues combination. First, based on the luminance contrast and contour characteristics of infrared images, two effective saliency maps, i.e., the luminance contrast saliency map and contour saliency map are constructed, respectively. Afterwards, an adaptive combination scheme guided by mutual consistency is exploited to integrate these two maps to generate the spatial saliency map. This idea is motivated by the observation that different maps are actually related to each other and the fusion scheme should present a logically consistent view of these maps. Finally, an enhancement technique is adopted to incorporate spatial saliency maps at various scales into a unified multi-scale framework to improve the reliability of the final saliency map. Comprehensive evaluations on real-life infrared images and comparisons with many state-of-the-art saliency models demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method for saliency detection in infrared images.

Beyond Naïve Cue Combination: Salience and Social Cues in Early Word Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yurovsky, Daniel; Frank, Michael C.

2017-01-01

Children learn their earliest words through social "interaction," but it is unknown how much they rely on social "information." Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner's target of reference.…

Children Use Salience to Solve Coordination Problems

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grueneisen, Sebastian; Wyman, Emily; Tomasello, Michael

2015-01-01

Humans are routinely required to coordinate with others. When communication is not possible, adults often achieve this by using salient cues in the environment (e.g. going to the Eiffel Tower, as an obvious meeting point). To explore the development of this capacity, we presented dyads of 3-, 5-, and 8-year-olds (N = 144) with a coordination…

The Salience of the Subtle Aspects of Parental Involvement and Encouraging that Involvement: Implications for School-Based Programs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jeynes, William H.

2010-01-01

Background/Context: For many years, educators, parents, and social scientists have conceptualized engaged parents as those who help their children with their homework, frequently attend school functions, and maintain household rules that dictate when their young engage in schoolwork and leisure. Recent meta-analyses on parental involvement confirm…

Electrophysiological Correlates of Semantic Processing during Encoding of Neutral and Emotional Pictures in Patients with ADHD

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Krauel, Kerstin; Duzel, Emrah; Hinrichs, Hermann; Lenz, Daniel; Herrmann, Christoph S.; Santel, Stephanie; Rellum, Thomas; Baving, Lioba

2009-01-01

The current study investigated the relevance of semantic processing and stimulus salience for memory performance in young ADHD patients and healthy control participants. 18 male ADHD patients and 15 healthy control children and adolescents participated in an ERP study during a visual memory paradigm with two different encoding tasks requiring…

Imitative Production of Regular Past Tense -Ed by English-Speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dalal, Rinky Harish; Loeb, Diane Frome

2005-01-01

Background: Language intervention procedures often involve the speech-language pathologist highlighting or making more salient forms that are problematic for the child with a language impairment. According to limited processing accounts of specific language impairment (SLI), one way to increase the saliency of a form is to manipulate its sentence…

Influence of Perceptual Saliency Hierarchy on Learning of Language Structures: An Artificial Language Learning Experiment

PubMed Central

Gong, Tao; Lam, Yau W.; Shuai, Lan

2016-01-01

Psychological experiments have revealed that in normal visual perception of humans, color cues are more salient than shape cues, which are more salient than textural patterns. We carried out an artificial language learning experiment to study whether such perceptual saliency hierarchy (color > shape > texture) influences the learning of orders regulating adjectives of involved visual features in a manner either congruent (expressing a salient feature in a salient part of the form) or incongruent (expressing a salient feature in a less salient part of the form) with that hierarchy. Results showed that within a few rounds of learning participants could learn the compositional segments encoding the visual features and the order between them, generalize the learned knowledge to unseen instances with the same or different orders, and show learning biases for orders that are congruent with the perceptual saliency hierarchy. Although the learning performances for both the biased and unbiased orders became similar given more learning trials, our study confirms that this type of individual perceptual constraint could contribute to the structural configuration of language, and points out that such constraint, as well as other factors, could collectively affect the structural diversity in languages. PMID:28066281

Influence of Perceptual Saliency Hierarchy on Learning of Language Structures: An Artificial Language Learning Experiment.

PubMed

Gong, Tao; Lam, Yau W; Shuai, Lan

2016-01-01

Psychological experiments have revealed that in normal visual perception of humans, color cues are more salient than shape cues, which are more salient than textural patterns. We carried out an artificial language learning experiment to study whether such perceptual saliency hierarchy (color > shape > texture) influences the learning of orders regulating adjectives of involved visual features in a manner either congruent (expressing a salient feature in a salient part of the form) or incongruent (expressing a salient feature in a less salient part of the form) with that hierarchy. Results showed that within a few rounds of learning participants could learn the compositional segments encoding the visual features and the order between them, generalize the learned knowledge to unseen instances with the same or different orders, and show learning biases for orders that are congruent with the perceptual saliency hierarchy. Although the learning performances for both the biased and unbiased orders became similar given more learning trials, our study confirms that this type of individual perceptual constraint could contribute to the structural configuration of language, and points out that such constraint, as well as other factors, could collectively affect the structural diversity in languages.

Automatic Polyp Detection via A Novel Unified Bottom-up and Top-down Saliency Approach.

PubMed

Yuan, Yixuan; Li, Dengwang; Meng, Max Q-H

2017-07-31

In this paper, we propose a novel automatic computer-aided method to detect polyps for colonoscopy videos. To find the perceptually and semantically meaningful salient polyp regions, we first segment images into multilevel superpixels. Each level corresponds to different sizes of superpixels. Rather than adopting hand-designed features to describe these superpixels in images, we employ sparse autoencoder (SAE) to learn discriminative features in an unsupervised way. Then a novel unified bottom-up and top-down saliency method is proposed to detect polyps. In the first stage, we propose a weak bottom-up (WBU) saliency map by fusing the contrast based saliency and object-center based saliency together. The contrast based saliency map highlights image parts that show different appearances compared with surrounding areas while the object-center based saliency map emphasizes the center of the salient object. In the second stage, a strong classifier with Multiple Kernel Boosting (MKB) is learned to calculate the strong top-down (STD) saliency map based on samples directly from the obtained multi-level WBU saliency maps. We finally integrate these two stage saliency maps from all levels together to highlight polyps. Experiment results achieve 0.818 recall for saliency calculation, validating the effectiveness of our method. Extensive experiments on public polyp datasets demonstrate that the proposed saliency algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art saliency methods to detect polyps.

Ensuring Children Eat a Healthy Diet: A Theory-Driven Focus Group Study of Parents’ Perceptions

PubMed Central

Kahlor, LeeAnn; Mackert, Michael; Junker, Dave; Tyler, Diane

2010-01-01

The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) served as a framework for analyzing focus group transcripts (N = 43) focused on parents’ perceptions of the challenges of ensuring their children eat a healthy diet. The results suggest that parents consider their beliefs and behaviors as individuals within a society, within families, within cultures, as inheritors of family traditions, and as parents who influence or fail to influence the attitudes and behaviors of their children. The results showed the particular salience of factors related to the TPB concepts of perceived norms and control. Approaches to building theory-driven nursing interventions are suggested. PMID:21256408

Colorism as a Salient Space for Understanding in Teacher Preparation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McGee, Ebony O.; Alvarez, Adam; Milner, H. Richard

2016-01-01

In this article, we posit the salience of colorism as an important aspect of race in the knowledge construction and preparation of teachers. Although many more teacher education programs across the United States have begun to infuse aspects of race into their curricula, there is sparse literature about the role of colorism in teacher preparation…

Effects of Emotional Experience for Abstract Words in the Stroop Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Siakaluk, Paul D.; Knol, Nathan; Pexman, Penny M.

2014-01-01

In this study, we examined the effects of emotional experience, a relatively new dimension of emotional knowledge that gauges the ease with which words evoke emotional experience, on abstract word processing in the Stroop task. In order to test the context-dependency of these effects, we accentuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1A…

The Differential Influences of Parenting and Child Narrative Coherence on the Development of Emotion Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berzenski, Sara R.; Yates, Tuppett M.

2017-01-01

The ability to recognize and label emotions serves as a building block by which children make sense of the world and learn how to interact with social partners. However, the timing and salience of influences on emotion recognition development are not fully understood. Path analyses evaluated the contributions of parenting and child narrative…

The Salience of Family Worldview in Mourning an Elderly Husband and Father

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Black, Helen K.; Santanello, Holly R.

2012-01-01

Objective: The purpose of this study was to qualitatively explore family reaction to the death of the elderly husband and father in the family. Methods: We qualitatively interviewed 34 families (a family included a widow and 2 adult biological children) approximately 6-15 months after the death. In private, one-on-one in-depth interviews, we…

Visual Attention to Print-Salient and Picture-Salient Environmental Print in Young Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Neumann, Michelle M.; Summerfield, Katelyn; Neumann, David L.

2015-01-01

Environmental print is composed of words and contextual cues such as logos and pictures. The salience of the contextual cues may influence attention to words and thus the potential of environmental print in promoting early reading development. The present study explored this by presenting pre-readers (n = 20) and beginning readers (n = 16) with…

Want More? Learn Less: Motivation Affects Adolescents Learning from Negative Feedback.

PubMed

Zhuang, Yun; Feng, Wenfeng; Liao, Yu

2017-01-01

The primary goal of the present study was to investigate how positive and negative feedback may differently facilitate learning throughout development. In addition, the role of motivation as a modulating factor was examined. Participants (children, adolescents, and adults) completed two forms of the guess and application task (GAT). Feedback from the Cool-GAT task has low motivational salience because there are no consequences, while feedback from the Hot-GAT task has high motivational salience as it pertains to receiving a reward. The results indicated that negative feedback leads to a reduction in learning compared to positive feedback. The effect of negative feedback was greater in adolescent participants compared to children and adults in the Hot-GAT task, suggesting an interaction between age and motivation level on learning. Further analysis indicated that greater risk was associated with a greater reduction in learning from negative feedback and again, the reduction was greatest in adolescents. In summary, the current study supports the idea that learning from positive feedback and negative feedback differs throughout development. In a rule-based learning task, when associative learning is primarily in practice, participants learned less from negative feedback. This reduction is amplified during adolescence when task-elicited motivation is high.

Want More? Learn Less: Motivation Affects Adolescents Learning from Negative Feedback

PubMed Central

Zhuang, Yun; Feng, Wenfeng; Liao, Yu

2017-01-01

The primary goal of the present study was to investigate how positive and negative feedback may differently facilitate learning throughout development. In addition, the role of motivation as a modulating factor was examined. Participants (children, adolescents, and adults) completed two forms of the guess and application task (GAT). Feedback from the Cool-GAT task has low motivational salience because there are no consequences, while feedback from the Hot-GAT task has high motivational salience as it pertains to receiving a reward. The results indicated that negative feedback leads to a reduction in learning compared to positive feedback. The effect of negative feedback was greater in adolescent participants compared to children and adults in the Hot-GAT task, suggesting an interaction between age and motivation level on learning. Further analysis indicated that greater risk was associated with a greater reduction in learning from negative feedback and again, the reduction was greatest in adolescents. In summary, the current study supports the idea that learning from positive feedback and negative feedback differs throughout development. In a rule-based learning task, when associative learning is primarily in practice, participants learned less from negative feedback. This reduction is amplified during adolescence when task-elicited motivation is high. PMID:28191003

Saliency detection by conditional generative adversarial network

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cai, Xiaoxu; Yu, Hui

2018-04-01

Detecting salient objects in images has been a fundamental problem in computer vision. In recent years, deep learning has shown its impressive performance in dealing with many kinds of vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a new method to detect salient objects by using Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). This type of network not only learns the mapping from RGB images to salient regions, but also learns a loss function for training the mapping. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that Conditional GAN has been used in salient object detection. We evaluate our saliency detection method on 2 large publicly available datasets with pixel accurate annotations. The experimental results have shown the significant and consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art method on a challenging dataset, and the testing speed is much faster.

Associative Learning Through Acquired Salience

PubMed Central

Treviño, Mario

2016-01-01

Most associative learning studies describe the salience of stimuli as a fixed learning-rate parameter. Presumptive saliency signals, however, have also been linked to motivational and attentional processes. An interesting possibility, therefore, is that discriminative stimuli could also acquire salience as they become powerful predictors of outcomes. To explore this idea, we first characterized and extracted the learning curves from mice trained with discriminative images offering varying degrees of structural similarity. Next, we fitted a linear model of associative learning coupled to a series of mathematical representations for stimulus salience. We found that the best prediction, from the set of tested models, was one in which the visual salience depended on stimulus similarity and a non-linear function of the associative strength. Therefore, these analytic results support the idea that the net salience of a stimulus depends both on the items' effective salience and the motivational state of the subject that learns about it. Moreover, this dual salience model can explain why learning about a stimulus not only depends on the effective salience during acquisition but also on the specific learning trajectory that was used to reach this state. Our mathematical description could be instrumental for understanding aberrant salience acquisition under stressful situations and in neuropsychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and addiction. PMID:26793078

Associative Learning Through Acquired Salience.

PubMed

Treviño, Mario

2015-01-01

Most associative learning studies describe the salience of stimuli as a fixed learning-rate parameter. Presumptive saliency signals, however, have also been linked to motivational and attentional processes. An interesting possibility, therefore, is that discriminative stimuli could also acquire salience as they become powerful predictors of outcomes. To explore this idea, we first characterized and extracted the learning curves from mice trained with discriminative images offering varying degrees of structural similarity. Next, we fitted a linear model of associative learning coupled to a series of mathematical representations for stimulus salience. We found that the best prediction, from the set of tested models, was one in which the visual salience depended on stimulus similarity and a non-linear function of the associative strength. Therefore, these analytic results support the idea that the net salience of a stimulus depends both on the items' effective salience and the motivational state of the subject that learns about it. Moreover, this dual salience model can explain why learning about a stimulus not only depends on the effective salience during acquisition but also on the specific learning trajectory that was used to reach this state. Our mathematical description could be instrumental for understanding aberrant salience acquisition under stressful situations and in neuropsychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and addiction.

Saliency Detection for Stereoscopic 3D Images in the Quaternion Frequency Domain

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cai, Xingyu; Zhou, Wujie; Cen, Gang; Qiu, Weiwei

2018-06-01

Recent studies have shown that a remarkable distinction exists between human binocular and monocular viewing behaviors. Compared with two-dimensional (2D) saliency detection models, stereoscopic three-dimensional (S3D) image saliency detection is a more challenging task. In this paper, we propose a saliency detection model for S3D images. The final saliency map of this model is constructed from the local quaternion Fourier transform (QFT) sparse feature and global QFT log-Gabor feature. More specifically, the local QFT feature measures the saliency map of an S3D image by analyzing the location of a similar patch. The similar patch is chosen using a sparse representation method. The global saliency map is generated by applying the wake edge-enhanced gradient QFT map through a band-pass filter. The results of experiments on two public datasets show that the proposed model outperforms existing computational saliency models for estimating S3D image saliency.

Theory of mind, severity of autistic symptoms and parental correlates in children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome.

PubMed

Nagar Shimoni, Hagit; Weizman, Abraham; Yoran, Roni Hegesh; Raviv, Amiram

2012-05-15

This study addresses the theory of mind (ToM) ability of Asperger's syndrome/high-functioning autism (AS/HFA) children and their parents and the severity of the autistic symptoms. Fifty-three families, each consisting of a mother, father and a child, participated in this study (N=159). The 53 children in the sample included 25 children diagnosed with AS/HFA and 28 typically developing (TD) children. The Social Attribution Task (SAT) and tests assessing autistic symptoms were used. AS/HFA children had lower scores than TD children on three of the SAT indices (Person, ToM Affective, and Salience). Fathers of AS/HFA children did not have lower scores than fathers of TD children on the SAT task, whereas mothers of AS/HFA children had lower scores on the Person index, a pattern similar to seen in their children, suggesting a possible genetic contribution of mothers to ToM deficit in AS/HFA children. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Neural circuits underlying mother's voice perception predict social communication abilities in children.

PubMed

Abrams, Daniel A; Chen, Tianwen; Odriozola, Paola; Cheng, Katherine M; Baker, Amanda E; Padmanabhan, Aarthi; Ryali, Srikanth; Kochalka, John; Feinstein, Carl; Menon, Vinod

2016-05-31

The human voice is a critical social cue, and listeners are extremely sensitive to the voices in their environment. One of the most salient voices in a child's life is mother's voice: Infants discriminate their mother's voice from the first days of life, and this stimulus is associated with guiding emotional and social function during development. Little is known regarding the functional circuits that are selectively engaged in children by biologically salient voices such as mother's voice or whether this brain activity is related to children's social communication abilities. We used functional MRI to measure brain activity in 24 healthy children (mean age, 10.2 y) while they attended to brief (<1 s) nonsense words produced by their biological mother and two female control voices and explored relationships between speech-evoked neural activity and social function. Compared to female control voices, mother's voice elicited greater activity in primary auditory regions in the midbrain and cortex; voice-selective superior temporal sulcus (STS); the amygdala, which is crucial for processing of affect; nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex of the reward circuit; anterior insula and cingulate of the salience network; and a subregion of fusiform gyrus associated with face perception. The strength of brain connectivity between voice-selective STS and reward, affective, salience, memory, and face-processing regions during mother's voice perception predicted social communication skills. Our findings provide a novel neurobiological template for investigation of typical social development as well as clinical disorders, such as autism, in which perception of biologically and socially salient voices may be impaired.

The effects of priming on children's attitudes toward older individuals.

PubMed

Hoe, Sony; Davidson, Denise

2002-01-01

The purpose of the present research was to examine younger (7-years-old) and older (10-years-old) children's attitudes toward older individuals following one type of five primes: positive prime, negative prime, elderly prime, grandparent prime, or neutral prime. Overall, children's attitudes on three tests--Apperception, Semantic Differential, and Attribute Salience--were affected by the type of prime children were given, with positive and grandparent primes resulting in more positive views toward older individuals than negative, elderly, or neutral (control group) primes. The present research provides evidence that priming the most accessible cognitions about an individual can affect even young children's perception of the individual. These results are discussed in terms of category-based and data-driven processing and may explain the disparate findings obtained in previous studies that have shown the children's attitudes toward older individuals are sometimes negative, whereas other studies have shown that children's attitudes are more positive or neutral.

Monoracial and biracial children: effects of racial identity saliency on social learning and social preferences.

PubMed

Gaither, Sarah E; Chen, Eva E; Corriveau, Kathleen H; Harris, Paul L; Ambady, Nalini; Sommers, Samuel R

2014-01-01

Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial in-group but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N = 246, 3-8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object after watching adults (White, Black, and Asian) demonstrate its uses. In the social preferences task, participants saw pairs of children (White, Black, and Asian) and chose with whom they most wanted to socially affiliate. Biracial children showed flexibility in racial identification during learning and social tasks. However, minority-primed biracial children were not more likely than monoracial minorities to socially affiliate with primed racial in-group members, indicating their in-group preferences are contextually based. © 2014 The Authors. Child Development © 2014 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

Salience network response to changes in emotional expressions of others is heightened during early adolescence: relevance for social functioning.

PubMed

Rosen, Maya L; Sheridan, Margaret A; Sambrook, Kelly A; Dennison, Meg J; Jenness, Jessica L; Askren, Mary K; Meltzoff, Andrew N; McLaughlin, Katie A

2018-05-01

Adolescence is a unique developmental period when the salience of social and emotional information becomes particularly pronounced. Although this increased sensitivity to social and emotional information has frequently been considered with respect to risk behaviors and psychopathology, evidence suggests that increased adolescent sensitivity to social and emotional cues may confer advantages. For example, greater sensitivity to shifts in the emotions of others is likely to promote flexible and adaptive social behavior. In this study, a sample of 54 children and adolescents (age 8-19 years) performed a delayed match-to-sample task for emotional faces while undergoing fMRI scanning. Recruitment of the anterior cingulate and anterior insula when the emotion of the probe face did not match the emotion held in memory followed a quadratic developmental pattern that peaked during early adolescence. These findings indicate meaningful developmental variation in the neural mechanisms underlying sensitivity to changes in the emotional expressions. Across all participants, greater activation of this network for changes in emotional expression was associated with less social anxiety and fewer social problems. These results suggest that the heightened salience of social and emotional information during adolescence may confer important advantages for social behavior, providing sensitivity to others' emotions that facilitates flexible social responding. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Auditory salience using natural soundscapes.

PubMed

Huang, Nicholas; Elhilali, Mounya

2017-03-01

Salience describes the phenomenon by which an object stands out from a scene. While its underlying processes are extensively studied in vision, mechanisms of auditory salience remain largely unknown. Previous studies have used well-controlled auditory scenes to shed light on some of the acoustic attributes that drive the salience of sound events. Unfortunately, the use of constrained stimuli in addition to a lack of well-established benchmarks of salience judgments hampers the development of comprehensive theories of sensory-driven auditory attention. The present study explores auditory salience in a set of dynamic natural scenes. A behavioral measure of salience is collected by having human volunteers listen to two concurrent scenes and indicate continuously which one attracts their attention. By using natural scenes, the study takes a data-driven rather than experimenter-driven approach to exploring the parameters of auditory salience. The findings indicate that the space of auditory salience is multidimensional (spanning loudness, pitch, spectral shape, as well as other acoustic attributes), nonlinear and highly context-dependent. Importantly, the results indicate that contextual information about the entire scene over both short and long scales needs to be considered in order to properly account for perceptual judgments of salience.

The effect of linguistic and visual salience in visual world studies.

PubMed

Cavicchio, Federica; Melcher, David; Poesio, Massimo

2014-01-01

Research using the visual world paradigm has demonstrated that visual input has a rapid effect on language interpretation tasks such as reference resolution and, conversely, that linguistic material-including verbs, prepositions and adjectives-can influence fixations to potential referents. More recent research has started to explore how this effect of linguistic input on fixations is mediated by properties of the visual stimulus, in particular by visual salience. In the present study we further explored the role of salience in the visual world paradigm manipulating language-driven salience and visual salience. Specifically, we tested how linguistic salience (i.e., the greater accessibility of linguistically introduced entities) and visual salience (bottom-up attention grabbing visual aspects) interact. We recorded participants' eye-movements during a MapTask, asking them to look from landmark to landmark displayed upon a map while hearing direction-giving instructions. The landmarks were of comparable size and color, except in the Visual Salience condition, in which one landmark had been made more visually salient. In the Linguistic Salience conditions, the instructions included references to an object not on the map. Response times and fixations were recorded. Visual Salience influenced the time course of fixations at both the beginning and the end of the trial but did not show a significant effect on response times. Linguistic Salience reduced response times and increased fixations to landmarks when they were associated to a Linguistic Salient entity not present itself on the map. When the target landmark was both visually and linguistically salient, it was fixated longer, but fixations were quicker when the target item was linguistically salient only. Our results suggest that the two types of salience work in parallel and that linguistic salience affects fixations even when the entity is not visually present.

How Yellow Is Your Banana? Toddlers' Language-Mediated Visual Search in Referent-Present Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mani, Nivedita; Johnson, Elizabeth; McQueen, James M.; Huettig, Falk

2013-01-01

What is the relative salience of different aspects of word meaning in the developing lexicon? The current study examines the time-course of retrieval of semantic and color knowledge associated with words during toddler word recognition: At what point do toddlers orient toward an image of a yellow cup upon hearing color-matching words such as…

What Would He Say? Harold O. Rugg and Contemporary Issues in Social Studies Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Boyle-Baise, Marilynne; Goodman, Jesse

2009-01-01

The purpose of this paper is to consider the continued saliency of the ideas of Harold O. Rugg, particularly for social studies education. Given the conservative political times in which we work, and the current educational emphases on academic standards, high-stakes standardized testing, and mastery of specified knowledge, and the impact of these…

Endangered edible orchids and vulnerable gatherers in the context of HIV/AIDS in the southern highlands of Tanzania.

PubMed

Challe, Joyce F X; Price, Lisa Leimar

2009-12-18

Tanzania is a wild orchid biodiversity hotspot and has a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. The wild orchids in the study are endemic and protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Every year, however, between 2.2 and 4.1 million orchid plants consumed in Zambia are estimated as originating from Tanzania. This research examines the differences between HIV/AIDS wild edible orchid gatherers and non-HIV/AIDS gatherers with regards to the frequency of gathering, salience in naming the various orchids, gathering knowledge acquisition and perceptions regarding the current state of abundance of the edible species. Data was collected through interviews with 224 individuals in the Makete District of Tanzania close to the boarder of Zambia. Free-listings were conducted and Sutrup's Cultural Significance Index (CSI) constructed. The independent t-test was used to compare the differences in gathering frequencies between affected and non-affected gatherers. A multiple comparison of the 4 subgroups (affected adults and children, and non-affected adults and children) in gathering frequencies was done with a one way ANOVA test and its post hoc test. To examine the difference between affected and non-affected gatherers difference in source of gathering knowledge, a chi square test was run. Forty two vernacular names of gathered orchid species were mentioned corresponding to 7 botanical species belongs to genera Disa, Satyrium, Habenaria, Eulophia and Roeperocharis. Ninety-seven percent of HIV/AIDS affected households state that orchid gathering is their primary economic activity compared to non-HIV/AIDS affected households at 9.7 percent. The HIV/AIDS affected gathered significantly more often than the non-affected. AIDS orphans, however, gathered most frequently. Gatherers perceive a decreasing trend of abundance of 6 of the 7 species. Gathering activities were mainly performed in age based peer groups. The results revealed a significant difference between affected and non-affected individuals in terms of their source of gathering knowledge. HIV/AIDS is related to increased reliance on the natural environment. This appears even more so for the most vulnerable, the AIDS orphaned children followed by HIV/AIDS widows.

Children Induce an Enhanced Attentional Blink in Child Molesters

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beech, Anthony R.; Kalmus, Ellis; Tipper, Steven P.; Baudouin, Jean-Yves; Flak, Vanja; Humphreys, Glyn W.

2008-01-01

The attentional blink (AB) is a robust phenomenon that has been consistently reported in the cognitive literature. The AB is found when two target images (T1, T2) are presented within 500 ms of each other and errors are induced on the perceptual report of T2. The AB may increase when T1 has some salience to the viewer. This study examined the…

A Child Effects Explanation for the Association between Family Risk and Involvement in an Antisocial Lifestyle

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beaver, Kevin M.; Wright, John Paul

2007-01-01

Most dominant theories of crime and criminality underscore the saliency of the family in the etiology of offending behaviors. Recently, a small pool of research has suggested that elements of the family, especially parents, do not have a lasting impact on children. This line of inquiry argues that once the effects that the child has on the family…

Altered Insula Connectivity under MDMA.

PubMed

Walpola, Ishan C; Nest, Timothy; Roseman, Leor; Erritzoe, David; Feilding, Amanda; Nutt, David J; Carhart-Harris, Robin L

2017-10-01

Recent work with noninvasive human brain imaging has started to investigate the effects of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) on large-scale patterns of brain activity. MDMA, a potent monoamine-releaser with particularly pronounced serotonin- releasing properties, has unique subjective effects that include: marked positive mood, pleasant/unusual bodily sensations and pro-social, empathic feelings. However, the neurobiological basis for these effects is not properly understood, and the present analysis sought to address this knowledge gap. To do this, we administered MDMA-HCl (100 mg p.o.) and, separately, placebo (ascorbic acid) in a randomized, double-blind, repeated-measures design with twenty-five healthy volunteers undergoing fMRI scanning. We then employed a measure of global resting-state functional brain connectivity and follow-up seed-to-voxel analysis to the fMRI data we acquired. Results revealed decreased right insula/salience network functional connectivity under MDMA. Furthermore, these decreases in right insula/salience network connectivity correlated with baseline trait anxiety and acute experiences of altered bodily sensations under MDMA. The present findings highlight insular disintegration (ie, compromised salience network membership) as a neurobiological signature of the MDMA experience, and relate this brain effect to trait anxiety and acutely altered bodily sensations-both of which are known to be associated with insular functioning.

Region of interest extraction based on multiscale visual saliency analysis for remote sensing images

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Yinggang; Zhang, Libao; Yu, Xianchuan

2015-01-01

Region of interest (ROI) extraction is an important component of remote sensing image processing. However, traditional ROI extraction methods are usually prior knowledge-based and depend on classification, segmentation, and a global searching solution, which are time-consuming and computationally complex. We propose a more efficient ROI extraction model for remote sensing images based on multiscale visual saliency analysis (MVS), implemented in the CIE L*a*b* color space, which is similar to visual perception of the human eye. We first extract the intensity, orientation, and color feature of the image using different methods: the visual attention mechanism is used to eliminate the intensity feature using a difference of Gaussian template; the integer wavelet transform is used to extract the orientation feature; and color information content analysis is used to obtain the color feature. Then, a new feature-competition method is proposed that addresses the different contributions of each feature map to calculate the weight of each feature image for combining them into the final saliency map. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results of the MVS model as compared with those of other models show that it is more effective and provides more accurate ROI extraction results with fewer holes inside the ROI.

Whales, dolphins or fishes? The ethnotaxonomy of cetaceans in São Sebastião, Brazil

PubMed Central

Souza, Shirley P; Begossi, Alpina

2007-01-01

The local knowledge of human populations about the natural world has been addressed through ethnobiological studies, especially concerning resources uses and their management. Several criteria, such as morphology, ecology, behavior, utility and salience, have been used by local communities to classify plants and animals. Studies regarding fishers' knowledge on cetaceans in the world, especially in Brazil, began in the last decade. Our objective is to investigate the folk classification by fishers concerning cetaceans, and the contribution of fishers' local knowledge to the conservation of that group. In particular, we aim to record fishers' knowledge in relation to cetaceans, with emphasis on folk taxonomy. The studied area is São Sebastião, located in the southeastern coast of Brazil, where 70 fishers from 14 communities were selected according to their fishing experience and interviewed through questionnaires about classification, nomenclature and ecological aspects of local cetaceans' species. Our results indicated that most fishers classified cetaceans as belonging to the life-form 'fish'. Fishers' citations for the nomenclature of the 11 biological species (10 biological genera), resulted in 14 folk species (3 generic names). Fishers' taxonomy was influenced mostly by the phenotypic and cultural salience of the studied cetaceans. Cultural transmission, vertical and horizontal, was intimately linked to fishers' classification process. The most salient species, therefore well recognized and named, were those most often caught by gillnets, in addition to the biggest ones and those most exposed by media, through TV programs, which were watched and mentioned by fishers. Our results showed that fishers' ecological knowledge could be a valuable contribution to cetaceans' conservation, helping to determine areas and periods for their protection, indicating priority topics for research and participating in alternative management related to the gillnet fisheries. PMID:17311681

Prefrontal Norepinephrine Determines Attribution of “High” Motivational Salience

PubMed Central

Ventura, Rossella; Latagliata, Emanuele Claudio; Morrone, Cristina; La Mela, Immacolata; Puglisi-Allegra, Stefano

2008-01-01

Intense motivational salience attribution is considered to have a major role in the development of different psychopathologies. Numerous brain areas are involved in “normal” motivational salience attribution processes; however, it is not clear whether common or different neural mechanisms also underlie intense motivational salience attribution. To elucidate this a brain area and a neural system had to be envisaged that were involved only in motivational salience attribution to highly salient stimuli. Using intracerebral microdialysis, we found that natural stimuli induced an increase in norepinephrine release in the medial prefrontal cortex of mice proportional to their salience, and that selective prefrontal norepinephrine depletion abolished the increase of norepinephrine release in the medial prefrontal cortex induced by exposure to appetitive (palatable food) or aversive (light) stimuli independently of salience. However, selective norepinephrine depletion in the medial prefrontal cortex impaired the place conditioning induced exclusively by highly salient stimuli, thus indicating that prefrontal noradrenergic transmission determines approach or avoidance responses to both reward- and aversion-related natural stimuli only when the salience of the unconditioned natural stimulus is high enough to induce sustained norepinephrine outflow. This affirms that prefrontal noradrenergic transmission determines motivational salience attribution selectively when intense motivational salience is processed, as in conditions that characterize psychopathological outcomes. PMID:18725944

The role of ethnic identity, self-concept, and aberrant salience in psychotic-like experiences.

PubMed

Cicero, David C; Cohn, Jonathan R

2018-01-01

Social-cognitive models of psychosis suggest that aberrant salience and self-concept clarity are related to the development and maintenance of psychoticlike experiences (PLEs). People with high aberrant salience but low self-concept clarity tend to have the highest levels of PLEs. Ethnic identity may also be related to PLEs. The current research aimed to (a) replicate the interaction between aberrant salience and self-concept clarity in their association with PLEs in an ethnically diverse sample, (b) examine whether ethnic identity and aberrant salience interact in their association with PLEs, and (c) determine if self-concept clarity and ethnic identity independently interact with aberrant salience in their association with PLEs. An ethnically diverse group of undergraduates (n = 663) completed self-report measures of aberrant salience, self-concept clarity, ethnic identity, and PLEs. There was an interaction between aberrant salience and self-concept clarity such that people with high levels of aberrant salience and low levels of self-concept clarity had the highest levels of PLEs. Similarly, there was an interaction between aberrant salience and ethnic identity such that people with high aberrant salience but low ethnic identity had the highest PLEs. These interactions independently contributed to explaining variance in PLEs. This interaction was present for the Exploration but not Commitment subscales of ethnic identity. These results suggest that, in addition to low self-concept clarity, low ethnic identity may be a risk factor for the development of psychosis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

HCFA and the states: politics and intergovernmental leverage.

PubMed

Gormley, W T; Boccuti, C

2001-06-01

In this article, we seek to explain variations in the Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA) relationship to state governments. After reviewing several alternative models of the policy-making process, we argue that the utility of each model depends on certain issue characteristics, especially salience and conflict. We further argue that HCFA's choice of intergovernmental tools, rooted in a political setting, depends on the same issue characteristics. We illustrate our arguments by examining HCFA's behavior during the Clinton administration and by focusing on four cases: HMO performance measurement, nursing home regulation, lead screening for children, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

Children's use of comparison and function in novel object categorization.

PubMed

Kimura, Katherine; Hunley, Samuel B; Namy, Laura L

2018-06-01

Although young children often rely on salient perceptual cues, such as shape, when categorizing novel objects, children eventually shift towards deeper relational reasoning about category membership. This study investigates what information young children use to classify novel instances of familiar categories. Specifically, we investigated two sources of information that have the potential to facilitate the classification of novel exemplars: (1) comparison of familiar category instances, and (2) attention to function information that might direct children's attention to functionally relevant perceptual features. Across two experiments, we found that comparing two perceptually similar category members-particularly when function information was also highlighted-led children to discover non-obvious relational features that supported their categorization of novel category instances. Together, these findings demonstrate that comparison may aid in novel object categorization by heightening the salience of less obvious, yet functionally relevant, relational structures that support conceptual reasoning. Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Perceptual salience affects the contents of working memory during free-recollection of objects from natural scenes

PubMed Central

Pedale, Tiziana; Santangelo, Valerio

2015-01-01

One of the most important issues in the study of cognition is to understand which are the factors determining internal representation of the external world. Previous literature has started to highlight the impact of low-level sensory features (indexed by saliency-maps) in driving attention selection, hence increasing the probability for objects presented in complex and natural scenes to be successfully encoded into working memory (WM) and then correctly remembered. Here we asked whether the probability of retrieving high-saliency objects modulates the overall contents of WM, by decreasing the probability of retrieving other, lower-saliency objects. We presented pictures of natural scenes for 4 s. After a retention period of 8 s, we asked participants to verbally report as many objects/details as possible of the previous scenes. We then computed how many times the objects located at either the peak of maximal or minimal saliency in the scene (as indexed by a saliency-map; Itti et al., 1998) were recollected by participants. Results showed that maximal-saliency objects were recollected more often and earlier in the stream of successfully reported items than minimal-saliency objects. This indicates that bottom-up sensory salience increases the recollection probability and facilitates the access to memory representation at retrieval, respectively. Moreover, recollection of the maximal- (but not the minimal-) saliency objects predicted the overall amount of successfully recollected objects: The higher the probability of having successfully reported the most-salient object in the scene, the lower the amount of recollected objects. These findings highlight that bottom-up sensory saliency modulates the current contents of WM during recollection of objects from natural scenes, most likely by reducing available resources to encode and then retrieve other (lower saliency) objects. PMID:25741266

Do visually salient stimuli reduce children's risky decisions?

PubMed

Schwebel, David C; Lucas, Elizabeth K; Pearson, Alana

2009-09-01

Children tend to overestimate their physical abilities, and that tendency is related to risk for unintentional injury. This study tested whether or not children estimate their physical ability differently when exposed to stimuli that were highly visually salient due to fluorescent coloring. Sixty-nine 6-year-olds judged physical ability to complete laboratory-based physical tasks. Half judged ability using tasks that were painted black; the other half judged the same tasks, but the stimuli were striped black and fluorescent lime-green. Results suggest the two groups judged similarly, but children took longer to judge perceptually ambiguous tasks when those tasks were visually salient. In other words, visual salience increased decision-making time but not accuracy of judgment. These findings held true after controlling for demographic and temperament characteristics.

Multitask saliency detection model for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image and its application in SAR and optical image fusion

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Chunhui; Zhang, Duona; Zhao, Xintao

2018-03-01

Saliency detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a difficult problem. This paper proposed a multitask saliency detection (MSD) model for the saliency detection task of SAR images. We extract four features of the SAR image, which include the intensity, orientation, uniqueness, and global contrast, as the input of the MSD model. The saliency map is generated by the multitask sparsity pursuit, which integrates the multiple features collaboratively. Detection of different scale features is also taken into consideration. Subjective and objective evaluation of the MSD model verifies its effectiveness. Based on the saliency maps obtained by the MSD model, we apply the saliency map of the SAR image to the SAR and color optical image fusion. The experimental results of real data show that the saliency map obtained by the MSD model helps to improve the fusion effect, and the salient areas in the SAR image can be highlighted in the fusion results.

Why does Existential Threat Promote Intergroup Violence? Examining the Role of Retributive Justice and Cost-Benefit Utility Motivations.

PubMed

Hirschberger, Gilad; Pyszczynski, Tom; Ein-Dor, Tsachi

2015-01-01

The current research examined the role of retributive justice and cost-benefit utility motivations in the process through which mortality salience increases support for violent responses to intergroup conflict. Specifically, previous research has shown that mortality salience often encourages political violence, especially when perceptions of retributive justice are activated. The current research examined whether mortality salience directly activates a justice mindset over a cost-benefit utility mindset, and whether this justice mindset is associated with support for political violence. In Study 1 (N = 209), mortality salience was manipulated among Israeli participants who then read about a Hamas attack on Israel with either no casualties or many casualties, after which justice and utility motivations for retribution were assessed. Study 2 (N = 112), examined whether the link between death primes and support for an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities is mediated by justice or cost-benefit utility considerations. Results of both studies revealed that primes of death increased justice-related motivations, and these motives, rather than utility motives, were associated with support for violence. Findings suggest that existential concerns often fuel violent intergroup conflict because they increase desire for retributive justice, rather than increase belief that violence is an effective strategy. These findings expand our knowledge on the motivations for intergroup violence, and shed experimental light on real-life eruptions of violent conflict indicating that when existential concerns are salient, as they often are during violent conflict, the decision to engage in violence often disregards the utility of violence, and leads to the preference for violent solutions to political problems - even when these solutions make little practical sense.

Why does Existential Threat Promote Intergroup Violence? Examining the Role of Retributive Justice and Cost-Benefit Utility Motivations

PubMed Central

Hirschberger, Gilad; Pyszczynski, Tom; Ein-Dor, Tsachi

2015-01-01

The current research examined the role of retributive justice and cost-benefit utility motivations in the process through which mortality salience increases support for violent responses to intergroup conflict. Specifically, previous research has shown that mortality salience often encourages political violence, especially when perceptions of retributive justice are activated. The current research examined whether mortality salience directly activates a justice mindset over a cost-benefit utility mindset, and whether this justice mindset is associated with support for political violence. In Study 1 (N = 209), mortality salience was manipulated among Israeli participants who then read about a Hamas attack on Israel with either no casualties or many casualties, after which justice and utility motivations for retribution were assessed. Study 2 (N = 112), examined whether the link between death primes and support for an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is mediated by justice or cost-benefit utility considerations. Results of both studies revealed that primes of death increased justice-related motivations, and these motives, rather than utility motives, were associated with support for violence. Findings suggest that existential concerns often fuel violent intergroup conflict because they increase desire for retributive justice, rather than increase belief that violence is an effective strategy. These findings expand our knowledge on the motivations for intergroup violence, and shed experimental light on real-life eruptions of violent conflict indicating that when existential concerns are salient, as they often are during violent conflict, the decision to engage in violence often disregards the utility of violence, and leads to the preference for violent solutions to political problems – even when these solutions make little practical sense. PMID:26635671

Looking is buying. How visual attention and choice are affected by consumer preferences and properties of the supermarket shelf.

PubMed

Gidlöf, Kerstin; Anikin, Andrey; Lingonblad, Martin; Wallin, Annika

2017-09-01

There is a battle in the supermarket isle, a battle between what the consumer wants and what the retailer and others want her to see, and subsequently to buy. Product packages and displays contain a number of features and attributes tailored to catch consumers' attention. These are what we call external factors comprising the visual saliency, the number of facings, and the placement of each product. But a consumer also brings with her a number of goals and interests related to the products and their attributes. These are important internal factors, including brand preferences, price sensitivity, and dietary inclinations. We fit mobile eye trackers to consumers visiting real-life supermarkets in order to investigate to what extent external and internal factors affect consumers' visual attention and purchases. Both external and internal factors influenced what products consumers looked at, with a strong positive interaction between visual saliency and consumer preferences. Consumers appear to take advantage of visual saliency in their decision making, using their knowledge about products' appearance to guide their visual attention towards those that fit their preferences. When it comes to actual purchases, however, visual attention was by far the most important predictor, even after controlling for all other internal and external factors. In other words, the very act of looking longer or repeatedly at a package, for any reason, makes it more likely that this product will be bought. Visual attention is thus crucial for understanding consumer behaviour, even in the cluttered supermarket environment, but it cannot be captured by measurements of visual saliency alone. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Effect of Dimensional Salience and Salience of Variability on Problem Solving: A Developmental Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zelniker, Tamar; And Others

1975-01-01

A matching task was presented to 120 subjects from 6 to 20 years of age to investigate the relative influence of dimensional salience and salience of variability on problem solving. The task included four dimensions: form, color, number, and position. (LLK)

Inside the Agenda-Setting Process: How Political Advertising and TV News Prime Viewers Think about Issues and Candidates.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schleuder, Joan; And Others

A study of the agenda-setting influence of the mass media on adult viewers explored (in a series of five experiments) how political knowledge stored in long term memory can be activated by the media, leading to decisions about issue salience. Spreading activation theory formed the basis for the study, and priming--the concept that the activation…

Negative Arousal Amplifies the Effects of Saliency in Short-Term Memory

PubMed Central

Sutherland, Matthew R.; Mather, Mara

2013-01-01

Evidence from two experiments suggests that negative arousal increases biases in attention that result from differences in visual salience. Participants were exposed to negative arousing or neutral sounds before briefly viewing an array of letters. They reported as many of the letters as they could, and attention was biased to certain letters by increasing salience through visual contrast. Regardless of the type of sound heard, participants were more likely to recall high-salience letters than low-salience letters. However, on arousing trials recall of high-salience letters increased, while recall of low-salience letters did not. These findings indicate that negative emotional arousal increases the selectivity of attention, and provides evidence for arousal-biased competition (ABC) theory (Mather & Sutherland, 2011), which predicts that emotional arousal enhances representations of stimuli that have priority. PMID:22642352

Novelty seeking and reward dependence-related large-scale brain networks functional connectivity variation during salience expectancy.

PubMed

Li, Shijia; Demenescu, Liliana Ramona; Sweeney-Reed, Catherine M; Krause, Anna Linda; Metzger, Coraline D; Walter, Martin

2017-08-01

A salience network (SN) anchored in the anterior insula (AI) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) plays a key role in switching between brain networks during salience detection and attention regulation. Previous fMRI studies have associated expectancy behaviors and SN activation with novelty seeking (NS) and reward dependence (RD) personality traits. To address the question of how functional connectivity (FC) in the SN is modulated by internal (expectancy-related) salience assignment and different personality traits, 68 healthy participants performed a salience expectancy task using functional magnetic resonance imaging, and psychophysiological interaction analysis (PPI) was conducted to determine salience-related connectivity changes during these anticipation periods. Correlation was then evaluated between PPI and personality traits, assessed using the temperament and character inventory of 32 male participants. During high salience expectancy, SN-seed regions showed reduced FC to visual areas and parts of the default mode network, but increased FC to the central executive network. With increasing NS, participants showed significantly increasing disconnection between right AI and middle cingulate cortex when expecting high-salience pictures as compared to low-salience pictures, while increased RD also predicted decreased right dACC and caudate FC for high salience expectancy. Our findings suggest a direct link between personality traits and internal salience processing mediated by differential network integration of the SN. SN activity and coordination may therefore be moderated by novelty seeking and reward dependency personality traits, which are associated with risk of addiction. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4064-4077, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Simultaneous modeling of visual saliency and value computation improves predictions of economic choice.

PubMed

Towal, R Blythe; Mormann, Milica; Koch, Christof

2013-10-01

Many decisions we make require visually identifying and evaluating numerous alternatives quickly. These usually vary in reward, or value, and in low-level visual properties, such as saliency. Both saliency and value influence the final decision. In particular, saliency affects fixation locations and durations, which are predictive of choices. However, it is unknown how saliency propagates to the final decision. Moreover, the relative influence of saliency and value is unclear. Here we address these questions with an integrated model that combines a perceptual decision process about where and when to look with an economic decision process about what to choose. The perceptual decision process is modeled as a drift-diffusion model (DDM) process for each alternative. Using psychophysical data from a multiple-alternative, forced-choice task, in which subjects have to pick one food item from a crowded display via eye movements, we test four models where each DDM process is driven by (i) saliency or (ii) value alone or (iii) an additive or (iv) a multiplicative combination of both. We find that models including both saliency and value weighted in a one-third to two-thirds ratio (saliency-to-value) significantly outperform models based on either quantity alone. These eye fixation patterns modulate an economic decision process, also described as a DDM process driven by value. Our combined model quantitatively explains fixation patterns and choices with similar or better accuracy than previous models, suggesting that visual saliency has a smaller, but significant, influence than value and that saliency affects choices indirectly through perceptual decisions that modulate economic decisions.

Simultaneous modeling of visual saliency and value computation improves predictions of economic choice

PubMed Central

Towal, R. Blythe; Mormann, Milica; Koch, Christof

2013-01-01

Many decisions we make require visually identifying and evaluating numerous alternatives quickly. These usually vary in reward, or value, and in low-level visual properties, such as saliency. Both saliency and value influence the final decision. In particular, saliency affects fixation locations and durations, which are predictive of choices. However, it is unknown how saliency propagates to the final decision. Moreover, the relative influence of saliency and value is unclear. Here we address these questions with an integrated model that combines a perceptual decision process about where and when to look with an economic decision process about what to choose. The perceptual decision process is modeled as a drift–diffusion model (DDM) process for each alternative. Using psychophysical data from a multiple-alternative, forced-choice task, in which subjects have to pick one food item from a crowded display via eye movements, we test four models where each DDM process is driven by (i) saliency or (ii) value alone or (iii) an additive or (iv) a multiplicative combination of both. We find that models including both saliency and value weighted in a one-third to two-thirds ratio (saliency-to-value) significantly outperform models based on either quantity alone. These eye fixation patterns modulate an economic decision process, also described as a DDM process driven by value. Our combined model quantitatively explains fixation patterns and choices with similar or better accuracy than previous models, suggesting that visual saliency has a smaller, but significant, influence than value and that saliency affects choices indirectly through perceptual decisions that modulate economic decisions. PMID:24019496

The development of prospective memory in young schoolchildren: the impact of ongoing task absorption, cue salience, and cue centrality.

PubMed

Kliegel, Matthias; Mahy, Caitlin E V; Voigt, Babett; Henry, Julie D; Rendell, Peter G; Aberle, Ingo

2013-12-01

This study presents evidence that 9- and 10-year-old children outperform 6- and 7-year-old children on a measure of event-based prospective memory and that retrieval-based factors systematically influence performance and age differences. All experiments revealed significant age effects in prospective memory even after controlling for ongoing task performance. In addition, the provision of a less absorbing ongoing task (Experiment 1), higher cue salience (Experiment 2), and cues appearing in the center of attention (Experiment 3) were each associated with better performance. Of particular developmental importance was an age by cue centrality (in or outside of the center of attention) interaction that emerged in Experiment 3. Thus, age effects were restricted to prospective memory cues appearing outside of the center of attention, suggesting that the development of prospective memory across early school years may be modulated by whether a cue requires overt monitoring beyond the immediate attentional context. Because whether a cue is in or outside of the center of attention might determine the amount of executive control needed in a prospective memory task, findings suggest that developing executive control resources may drive prospective memory development across primary school age. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Superior colliculus neurons encode a visual saliency map during free viewing of natural dynamic video

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

White, Brian J.; Berg, David J.; Kan, Janis Y.; Marino, Robert A.; Itti, Laurent; Munoz, Douglas P.

2017-01-01

Models of visual attention postulate the existence of a saliency map whose function is to guide attention and gaze to the most conspicuous regions in a visual scene. Although cortical representations of saliency have been reported, there is mounting evidence for a subcortical saliency mechanism, which pre-dates the evolution of neocortex. Here, we conduct a strong test of the saliency hypothesis by comparing the output of a well-established computational saliency model with the activation of neurons in the primate superior colliculus (SC), a midbrain structure associated with attention and gaze, while monkeys watched video of natural scenes. We find that the activity of SC superficial visual-layer neurons (SCs), specifically, is well-predicted by the model. This saliency representation is unlikely to be inherited from fronto-parietal cortices, which do not project to SCs, but may be computed in SCs and relayed to other areas via tectothalamic pathways.

Infrared and visible image fusion method based on saliency detection in sparse domain

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, C. H.; Qi, Y.; Ding, W. R.

2017-06-01

Infrared and visible image fusion is a key problem in the field of multi-sensor image fusion. To better preserve the significant information of the infrared and visible images in the final fused image, the saliency maps of the source images is introduced into the fusion procedure. Firstly, under the framework of the joint sparse representation (JSR) model, the global and local saliency maps of the source images are obtained based on sparse coefficients. Then, a saliency detection model is proposed, which combines the global and local saliency maps to generate an integrated saliency map. Finally, a weighted fusion algorithm based on the integrated saliency map is developed to achieve the fusion progress. The experimental results show that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of several universal quality evaluation indexes, as well as in the visual quality.

Negative arousal amplifies the effects of saliency in short-term memory.

PubMed

Sutherland, Matthew R; Mather, Mara

2012-12-01

Evidence from 2 experiments suggests that negative arousal increases biases in attention that result from differences in visual salience. Participants were exposed to negative arousing or neutral sounds before briefly viewing an array of letters. They reported as many of the letters as they could, and attention was biased to certain letters by increasing salience through visual contrast. Regardless of the type of sound heard, participants were more likely to recall high-salience letters than low-salience letters. However, on arousing trials recall of high-salience letters increased, while recall of low-salience letters did not. These findings indicate that negative emotional arousal increases the selectivity of attention, and provides evidence for arousal-biased competition theory (Mather & Sutherland, 2011), which predicts that emotional arousal enhances representations of stimuli that have priority. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved.

Decision-theoretic saliency: computational principles, biological plausibility, and implications for neurophysiology and psychophysics.

PubMed

Gao, Dashan; Vasconcelos, Nuno

2009-01-01

A decision-theoretic formulation of visual saliency, first proposed for top-down processing (object recognition) (Gao & Vasconcelos, 2005a), is extended to the problem of bottom-up saliency. Under this formulation, optimality is defined in the minimum probability of error sense, under a constraint of computational parsimony. The saliency of the visual features at a given location of the visual field is defined as the power of those features to discriminate between the stimulus at the location and a null hypothesis. For bottom-up saliency, this is the set of visual features that surround the location under consideration. Discrimination is defined in an information-theoretic sense and the optimal saliency detector derived for a class of stimuli that complies with known statistical properties of natural images. It is shown that under the assumption that saliency is driven by linear filtering, the optimal detector consists of what is usually referred to as the standard architecture of V1: a cascade of linear filtering, divisive normalization, rectification, and spatial pooling. The optimal detector is also shown to replicate the fundamental properties of the psychophysics of saliency: stimulus pop-out, saliency asymmetries for stimulus presence versus absence, disregard of feature conjunctions, and Weber's law. Finally, it is shown that the optimal saliency architecture can be applied to the solution of generic inference problems. In particular, for the class of stimuli studied, it performs the three fundamental operations of statistical inference: assessment of probabilities, implementation of Bayes decision rule, and feature selection.

Salience attribution and its relationship to cannabis-induced psychotic symptoms.

PubMed

Bloomfield, M A P; Mouchlianitis, E; Morgan, C J A; Freeman, T P; Curran, H V; Roiser, J P; Howes, O D

2016-12-01

Cannabis is a widely used drug associated with increased risk for psychosis. The dopamine hypothesis of psychosis postulates that altered salience processing leads to psychosis. We therefore tested the hypothesis that cannabis users exhibit aberrant salience and explored the relationship between aberrant salience and dopamine synthesis capacity. We tested 17 cannabis users and 17 age- and sex-matched non-user controls using the Salience Attribution Test, a probabilistic reward-learning task. Within users, cannabis-induced psychotic symptoms were measured with the Psychotomimetic States Inventory. Dopamine synthesis capacity, indexed as the influx rate constant K i cer , was measured in 10 users and six controls with 3,4-dihydroxy-6-[18F]fluoro-l-phenylalanine positron emission tomography. There was no significant difference in aberrant salience between the groups [F 1,32 = 1.12, p = 0.30 (implicit); F 1,32 = 1.09, p = 0.30 (explicit)]. Within users there was a significant positive relationship between cannabis-induced psychotic symptom severity and explicit aberrant salience scores (r = 0.61, p = 0.04) and there was a significant association between cannabis dependency/abuse status and high implicit aberrant salience scores (F 1,15 = 5.8, p = 0.03). Within controls, implicit aberrant salience was inversely correlated with whole striatal dopamine synthesis capacity (r = -0.91, p = 0.01), whereas this relationship was non-significant within users (difference between correlations: Z = -2.05, p = 0.04). Aberrant salience is positively associated with cannabis-induced psychotic symptom severity, but is not seen in cannabis users overall. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the link between cannabis use and psychosis involves alterations in salience processing. Longitudinal studies are needed to determine whether these cognitive abnormalities are pre-existing or caused by long-term cannabis use.

A parallel spatiotemporal saliency and discriminative online learning method for visual target tracking in aerial videos.

PubMed

Aghamohammadi, Amirhossein; Ang, Mei Choo; A Sundararajan, Elankovan; Weng, Ng Kok; Mogharrebi, Marzieh; Banihashem, Seyed Yashar

2018-01-01

Visual tracking in aerial videos is a challenging task in computer vision and remote sensing technologies due to appearance variation difficulties. Appearance variations are caused by camera and target motion, low resolution noisy images, scale changes, and pose variations. Various approaches have been proposed to deal with appearance variation difficulties in aerial videos, and amongst these methods, the spatiotemporal saliency detection approach reported promising results in the context of moving target detection. However, it is not accurate for moving target detection when visual tracking is performed under appearance variations. In this study, a visual tracking method is proposed based on spatiotemporal saliency and discriminative online learning methods to deal with appearance variations difficulties. Temporal saliency is used to represent moving target regions, and it was extracted based on the frame difference with Sauvola local adaptive thresholding algorithms. The spatial saliency is used to represent the target appearance details in candidate moving regions. SLIC superpixel segmentation, color, and moment features can be used to compute feature uniqueness and spatial compactness of saliency measurements to detect spatial saliency. It is a time consuming process, which prompted the development of a parallel algorithm to optimize and distribute the saliency detection processes that are loaded into the multi-processors. Spatiotemporal saliency is then obtained by combining the temporal and spatial saliencies to represent moving targets. Finally, a discriminative online learning algorithm was applied to generate a sample model based on spatiotemporal saliency. This sample model is then incrementally updated to detect the target in appearance variation conditions. Experiments conducted on the VIVID dataset demonstrated that the proposed visual tracking method is effective and is computationally efficient compared to state-of-the-art methods.

A parallel spatiotemporal saliency and discriminative online learning method for visual target tracking in aerial videos

PubMed Central

2018-01-01

Visual tracking in aerial videos is a challenging task in computer vision and remote sensing technologies due to appearance variation difficulties. Appearance variations are caused by camera and target motion, low resolution noisy images, scale changes, and pose variations. Various approaches have been proposed to deal with appearance variation difficulties in aerial videos, and amongst these methods, the spatiotemporal saliency detection approach reported promising results in the context of moving target detection. However, it is not accurate for moving target detection when visual tracking is performed under appearance variations. In this study, a visual tracking method is proposed based on spatiotemporal saliency and discriminative online learning methods to deal with appearance variations difficulties. Temporal saliency is used to represent moving target regions, and it was extracted based on the frame difference with Sauvola local adaptive thresholding algorithms. The spatial saliency is used to represent the target appearance details in candidate moving regions. SLIC superpixel segmentation, color, and moment features can be used to compute feature uniqueness and spatial compactness of saliency measurements to detect spatial saliency. It is a time consuming process, which prompted the development of a parallel algorithm to optimize and distribute the saliency detection processes that are loaded into the multi-processors. Spatiotemporal saliency is then obtained by combining the temporal and spatial saliencies to represent moving targets. Finally, a discriminative online learning algorithm was applied to generate a sample model based on spatiotemporal saliency. This sample model is then incrementally updated to detect the target in appearance variation conditions. Experiments conducted on the VIVID dataset demonstrated that the proposed visual tracking method is effective and is computationally efficient compared to state-of-the-art methods. PMID:29438421

The politics of EPSDT policy in the 1990s: policy entrepreneurs, political streams, and children's health benefits.

PubMed

Sardell, A; Johnson, K

1998-01-01

The Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment (EPSDT) program, which was designed to ensure that Medicaid-eligible children receive comprehensive health services, is the only national attempt to provide a right to these services. The political factors that have shaped national EPSDT policy during the past decade are described, based on a conceptual framework developed by John W. Kingdon. The analysis focuses on the roles of two distinct sets of policy entrepreneurs: child health advocates and fiscally conservative governors. Their activities are described in relation to the larger political environment, or "political stream," from the period of the expansion of Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women and children in the late 1980s to the enactment of a new State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997. The relative saliency of eligibility and benefit issues in children's health policies had a major influence on the politics and outcomes.

Regional Principal Color Based Saliency Detection

PubMed Central

Lou, Jing; Ren, Mingwu; Wang, Huan

2014-01-01

Saliency detection is widely used in many visual applications like image segmentation, object recognition and classification. In this paper, we will introduce a new method to detect salient objects in natural images. The approach is based on a regional principal color contrast modal, which incorporates low-level and medium-level visual cues. The method allows a simple computation of color features and two categories of spatial relationships to a saliency map, achieving higher F-measure rates. At the same time, we present an interpolation approach to evaluate resulting curves, and analyze parameters selection. Our method enables the effective computation of arbitrary resolution images. Experimental results on a saliency database show that our approach produces high quality saliency maps and performs favorably against ten saliency detection algorithms. PMID:25379960

Culture, category salience, and inductive reasoning.

PubMed

Choi, I; Nisbett, R E; Smith, E E

1997-12-01

The role of category salience in category-based induction was demonstrated in two ways: (i) temporarily increasing category salience facilitated category-based induction, and (ii) this effect was moderated by cultural differences that we predicted would be related to chronic category salience. Subjects for whom categories were presumed to be more accessible (Americans) were not as much influenced by manipulations to increase category salience as subjects who were presumed to have lower chronic accessibility of categories (Koreans). However, as anticipated, this pattern was reversed for inferences about behavioral properties of social categories. Due to the 'interdependent' nature of their culture, Koreans presumably have relatively higher chronic accessibility for social categories than do relatively 'independent' Americans, and hence were not influenced as much by increasing category salience.

Race Essentialism and Social Contextual Differences in Children's Racial Stereotyping.

PubMed

Pauker, Kristin; Xu, Yiyuan; Williams, Amanda; Biddle, Ashley M

2016-09-01

The authors explored the differential emergence and correlates of racial stereotyping in 136 children ages 4-11 years across two broad social contexts: Hawai'i and Massachusetts. Children completed measures assessing race salience, race essentialism, and in-group and out-group stereotyping. Results indicated that the type of racial stereotypes emerging with age was context dependent. In both contexts in-group stereotyping increased with age. In contrast, there was only an age-related increase in out-group stereotyping in Massachusetts. Older children in Massachusetts reported more essentialist thinking (i.e., believing that race cannot change) than their counterparts in Hawai'i, which explained their higher out-group stereotyping. These results provide insight into the factors that may shape contextual differences in racial stereotyping. © 2016 The Authors. Child Development © 2016 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

The acceptability of care delegation in skill-mix: the salience of trust.

PubMed

Dyer, Thomas Anthony; Owens, Janine; Robinson, Peter Glenn

2014-08-01

The aim of this research was to explore the acceptability of care delegation in skill-mix, using the views and experiences of patients and parents of children treated by dental therapists as a case study. A purposive sample of 15 adults whose care, or that of their children, had been delegated to dental therapists in English dental practices was interviewed using narrative and ethnographic techniques (July 2011 - May 2012). Experiences were overwhelmingly positive with the need for trust in clinicians and the health system emerging as a key factor in its acceptability. Perceptions of general and dental health services ranged from them being a collectivist public service to a more consumerist marketised service, with the former seemingly associated with notions of dentistry as a trusted system working for the social good. Interpersonal trust appeared built, sustained (and undermined) by the affective behaviour, perceived competence, and continuity of care with clinicians providing care, and contributed to trust in the system. It also appeared to compensate for gaps in knowledge needed for patient decision-making. Overall, where trust existed, delegation of care was acceptable. An increasingly marketised health system, and emphasis on the patient as a consumer, may challenge trust and acceptability of delegation, and undermine the notion of patient-centred health care. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Children's questions: a mechanism for cognitive development.

PubMed

Chouinard, Michael M

2007-01-01

Preschoolers' questions may play an important role in cognitive development. When children encounter a problem with their current knowledge state (a gap in their knowledge, some ambiguity they do not know how to resolve, some inconsistency they have detected), asking a question allows them to get targeted information exactly when they need it. This information is available to them when they are particularly receptive to it, and because it comes as the result of their own disequilibrium, it may have depth of processing benefits. In that questions allow children to get information they need to move their knowledge structures closer to adult-like states, the ability to ask questions to gather needed information constitutes an efficient mechanism for cognitive development (referred to in this paper as the Information Requesting Mechanism [IRM]; this term is used because it includes question-asking and other information recruiting behaviors such as gestures, expressions, and vocalizations). However, the role of children's questions in their cognitive development has been largely overlooked. If questions are a force in cognitive development, the following must be true: (1) children must actually ask questions that gather information; (2) children must receive informative answers to their questions if they are able to be of use to cognitive development; (3) children must be motivated to get the information they request, rather than asking questions for other purposes such as attention; (4) the questions children ask must be relevant and of potential use to their cognitive development; (5) we must see evidence that children's questions help them in some way-that is, that they can ask questions for a purpose, and use the information they receive purposefully to successfully achieve some change of knowledge state. This monograph reports data on these points. Study 1 analyzed questions taken from four children's transcripts in the CHILDES database (age 1;2-5;1). This methodology allowed detailed, veridical analysis of every question asked by the children during their recording sessions. Results indicate that children ask many information-seeking questions and get informative answers. When they do not get an informative response, they keep asking; attention is not enough. Results also indicate that the content of children's questions parallel their conceptual advances, and shift within an exchange and over the course of development to reflect the learning process. So, these data suggest that the components of the IRM are in place and are used by children from very early in development, and the information they seek changes with time. Study 2 asked whether preverbal children who are not yet asking linguistic questions can recruit information via gestures, expressions, and vocalizations, in addition to further investigating the linguistic questions of older children. This study analyzed questions from a cross-sectional diary study, kept by 68 parents of their children's questions (aged 1;0-5;0). Also, this methodology allowed for data collection over a large number of children, a large range of situational contexts, and allows for the collection of low frequency, high-salience events. Results from Study 2 suggest that all of the components of the IRM are in place, and extends these findings down to younger, preverbal children who recruit information using gesture and vocalizations. Study 3 investigated the questions asked in one specific domain, biological knowledge, and examined the impact that different stimulus types have on children's questions. This study gathered data from 112 parent/child dyads (children aged 2, 3, and 4 years) walking through one of three zoos (one with real animals, one with drawings of animals, and one with three-dimensional replicas of animals), looking at the animals together. Results from this study also suggest that all of the components of the IRM are in place from the earliest age, further supporting the findings from Studies 1 and 2. In addition, while children still ask many nonbiological questions about the animals ("what is its name?"), biological information ("how do babies grow their bees?") is requested with much greater frequency in this study, although this need not necessarily be the case. Further, the nature of these questions suggests they may support the building of conceptual structures within the domain of biological knowledge, at a time just before the age when children make important conceptual changes in this area. Further, the type of stimulus materials used has an impact on the questions children ask; children are less likely to ask deep conceptual questions when looking at drawings or replicas of objects than when looking at the real thing. Finally, Study 4 examines the causal relation between children's questions and change in knowledge state by investigating whether or not children can ask questions in order to gain information that allows them to solve a problem. Sixty-seven 4-year-olds were asked to figure out which of two items were hidden in a box. Half of the children were allowed to ask questions to help them figure this out. Despite many ways in which they could fail to use questions correctly, children who were allowed to ask questions were significantly more likely to identify the object hidden in the box, an overt indication of their change in knowledge state. Further, children relied on their existing conceptual information about the objects to help generate disambiguating questions; even though they had a faster "dumb" method of disambiguating the objects via nonconceptual perceptual information ("is it purple?"), they were just as likely to generate questions that tapped into nonvisible conceptual information ("does it purr?"). These results suggest that children are capable of using their existing knowledge structures to generate questions that change their knowledge state in a way that allows them to productively solve a problem; they further suggest that tapping into existing conceptual knowledge to help process a current situation, and use that knowledge to generate appropriate questions, is an integral part of question asking. Together, the results of these four studies support the existence of the IRM as a way for children to learn about the world. Children ask information-seeking questions that are related in topic and structure to their cognitive development. Parents give answers to these questions, but when they do not, the children persist in asking for the information, suggesting that the goal of this behavior is to recruit needed information. The content of these questions shifts within exchanges and over the course of development in ways that reflect concept building. Finally, children generate questions efficiently in order to gather needed information, and then are able to use this information productively; they tap into their existing conceptual knowledge in order to do this. Thus, the ability to ask questions is a powerful tool that allows children to gather information they need in order to learn about the world and solve problems in it. Implications of this model for cognitive development are discussed.

Salience and Attention in Surprisal-Based Accounts of Language Processing.

PubMed

Zarcone, Alessandra; van Schijndel, Marten; Vogels, Jorrig; Demberg, Vera

2016-01-01

The notion of salience has been singled out as the explanatory factor for a diverse range of linguistic phenomena. In particular, perceptual salience (e.g., visual salience of objects in the world, acoustic prominence of linguistic sounds) and semantic-pragmatic salience (e.g., prominence of recently mentioned or topical referents) have been shown to influence language comprehension and production. A different line of research has sought to account for behavioral correlates of cognitive load during comprehension as well as for certain patterns in language usage using information-theoretic notions, such as surprisal. Surprisal and salience both affect language processing at different levels, but the relationship between the two has not been adequately elucidated, and the question of whether salience can be reduced to surprisal / predictability is still open. Our review identifies two main challenges in addressing this question: terminological inconsistency and lack of integration between high and low levels of representations in salience-based accounts and surprisal-based accounts. We capitalize upon work in visual cognition in order to orient ourselves in surveying the different facets of the notion of salience in linguistics and their relation with models of surprisal. We find that work on salience highlights aspects of linguistic communication that models of surprisal tend to overlook, namely the role of attention and relevance to current goals, and we argue that the Predictive Coding framework provides a unified view which can account for the role played by attention and predictability at different levels of processing and which can clarify the interplay between low and high levels of processes and between predictability-driven expectation and attention-driven focus.

Novelty seeking, incentive salience and acquisition of cocaine self-administration in the rat

PubMed Central

Beckmann, Joshua S.; Marusich, Julie A.; Gipson, Cassandra D.; Bardo, Michael T.

2010-01-01

It has been suggested that incentive salience plays a major role in drug abuse and the development of addiction. Additionally, novelty seeking has been identified as a significant risk factor for drug abuse. However, how differences in the readiness to attribute incentive salience relate to novelty seeking and drug abuse vulnerability has not been explored. The present experiments examined how individual differences in incentive salience attribution relate to novelty seeking and acquisition of cocaine self-administration in a preclinical model. Rats were first assessed in an inescapable novelty task and a novelty place preference task (measures of novelty seeking), followed by a Pavlovian conditioned approach task for food (a measure of incentive salience attribution). Rats then were trained to self-administer cocaine (0.3 or 1.0 mg/kg/infusion) using an autoshaping procedure. The results demonstrate that animals that attributed incentive salience to a food-associated cue were higher novelty seekers and acquired cocaine self-administration more quickly at the lower dose. The results suggest that novelty-seeking behavior may be a mediator of incentive salience attribution and that incentive salience magnitude may be an indicator of drug reward. PMID:20655954

A novel visual saliency analysis model based on dynamic multiple feature combination strategy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lv, Jing; Ye, Qi; Lv, Wen; Zhang, Libao

2017-06-01

The human visual system can quickly focus on a small number of salient objects. This process was known as visual saliency analysis and these salient objects are called focus of attention (FOA). The visual saliency analysis mechanism can be used to extract the salient regions and analyze saliency of object in an image, which is time-saving and can avoid unnecessary costs of computing resources. In this paper, a novel visual saliency analysis model based on dynamic multiple feature combination strategy is introduced. In the proposed model, we first generate multi-scale feature maps of intensity, color and orientation features using Gaussian pyramids and the center-surround difference. Then, we evaluate the contribution of all feature maps to the saliency map according to the area of salient regions and their average intensity, and attach different weights to different features according to their importance. Finally, we choose the largest salient region generated by the region growing method to perform the evaluation. Experimental results show that the proposed model cannot only achieve higher accuracy in saliency map computation compared with other traditional saliency analysis models, but also extract salient regions with arbitrary shapes, which is of great value for the image analysis and understanding.

Intensity and Compactness Enabled Saliency Estimation for Leakage Detection in Diabetic and Malarial Retinopathy.

PubMed

Zhao, Yitian; Zheng, Yalin; Liu, Yonghuai; Yang, Jian; Zhao, Yifan; Chen, Duanduan; Wang, Yongtian

2017-01-01

Leakage in retinal angiography currently is a key feature for confirming the activities of lesions in the management of a wide range of retinal diseases, such as diabetic maculopathy and paediatric malarial retinopathy. This paper proposes a new saliency-based method for the detection of leakage in fluorescein angiography. A superpixel approach is firstly employed to divide the image into meaningful patches (or superpixels) at different levels. Two saliency cues, intensity and compactness, are then proposed for the estimation of the saliency map of each individual superpixel at each level. The saliency maps at different levels over the same cues are fused using an averaging operator. The two saliency maps over different cues are fused using a pixel-wise multiplication operator. Leaking regions are finally detected by thresholding the saliency map followed by a graph-cut segmentation. The proposed method has been validated using the only two publicly available datasets: one for malarial retinopathy and the other for diabetic retinopathy. The experimental results show that it outperforms one of the latest competitors and performs as well as a human expert for leakage detection and outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for saliency detection.

Discounting input from older adults: the role of age salience on partner age effects in the social contagion of memory.

PubMed

Meade, Michelle L; McNabb, Jaimie C; Lindeman, Meghan I H; Smith, Jessi L

2017-05-01

Three experiments examined the impact of partner age on the magnitude of socially suggested false memories. Young participants recalled household scenes in collaboration with an implied young or older adult partner who intentionally recalled false items. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with only the age of their partner (low age-salience context); in Experiment 2, participants were presented with the age of their partner along with a photograph and biographical information about their partner (high age-salience context); in Experiment 3, age salience was varied within the same experiment. Across experiments, participants in both the low age-salience and high age-salience contexts incorporated their partners' misleading suggestions into their own subsequent recall and recognition reports, thus demonstrating social contagion with implied partners. Importantly, the effect of partner age differed across conditions. Participants in the high age-salience context were less likely to incorporate misleading suggestions from older adult partners than from young adult partners, but participants in the low age-salience context were equally likely to incorporate suggestions from young and older adult partners. Participants discount the memory of older adult partners only when age is highly salient.

Prefrontal/accumbal catecholamine system processes high motivational salience

PubMed Central

Puglisi-Allegra, Stefano; Ventura, Rossella

2012-01-01

Motivational salience regulates the strength of goal seeking, the amount of risk taken, and the energy invested from mild to extreme. Highly motivational experiences promote highly persistent memories. Although this phenomenon is adaptive in normal conditions, experiences with extremely high levels of motivational salience can promote development of memories that can be re-experienced intrusively for long time resulting in maladaptive outcomes. Neural mechanisms mediating motivational salience attribution are, therefore, very important for individual and species survival and for well-being. However, these neural mechanisms could be implicated in attribution of abnormal motivational salience to different stimuli leading to maladaptive compulsive seeking or avoidance. We have offered the first evidence that prefrontal cortical norepinephrine (NE) transmission is a necessary condition for motivational salience attribution to highly salient stimuli, through modulation of dopamine (DA) in the nucleus accumbens (NAc), a brain area involved in all motivated behaviors. Moreover, we have shown that prefrontal-accumbal catecholamine (CA) system determines approach or avoidance responses to both reward- and aversion-related stimuli only when the salience of the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) is high enough to induce sustained CA activation, thus affirming that this system processes motivational salience attribution selectively to highly salient events. PMID:22754514

Achieving conservation science that bridges the knowledge-action boundary.

PubMed

Cook, Carly N; Mascia, Michael B; Schwartz, Mark W; Possingham, Hugh P; Fuller, Richard A

2013-08-01

There are many barriers to using science to inform conservation policy and practice. Conservation scientists wishing to produce management-relevant science must balance this goal with the imperative of demonstrating novelty and rigor in their science. Decision makers seeking to make evidence-based decisions must balance a desire for knowledge with the need to act despite uncertainty. Generating science that will effectively inform management decisions requires that the production of information (the components of knowledge) be salient (relevant and timely), credible (authoritative, believable, and trusted), and legitimate (developed via a process that considers the values and perspectives of all relevant actors) in the eyes of both researchers and decision makers. We perceive 3 key challenges for those hoping to generate conservation science that achieves all 3 of these information characteristics. First, scientific and management audiences can have contrasting perceptions about the salience of research. Second, the pursuit of scientific credibility can come at the cost of salience and legitimacy in the eyes of decision makers, and, third, different actors can have conflicting views about what constitutes legitimate information. We highlight 4 institutional frameworks that can facilitate science that will inform management: boundary organizations (environmental organizations that span the boundary between science and management), research scientists embedded in resource management agencies, formal links between decision makers and scientists at research-focused institutions, and training programs for conservation professionals. Although these are not the only approaches to generating boundary-spanning science, nor are they mutually exclusive, they provide mechanisms for promoting communication, translation, and mediation across the knowledge-action boundary. We believe that despite the challenges, conservation science should strive to be a boundary science, which both advances scientific understanding and contributes to decision making. © 2013 Society for Conservation Biology.

The Motivational Salience of Faces Is Related to Both Their Valence and Dominance.

PubMed

Wang, Hongyi; Hahn, Amanda C; DeBruine, Lisa M; Jones, Benedict C

2016-01-01

Both behavioral and neural measures of the motivational salience of faces are positively correlated with their physical attractiveness. Whether physical characteristics other than attractiveness contribute to the motivational salience of faces is not known, however. Research with male macaques recently showed that more dominant macaques' faces hold greater motivational salience. Here we investigated whether dominance also contributes to the motivational salience of faces in human participants. Principal component analysis of third-party ratings of faces for multiple traits revealed two orthogonal components. The first component ("valence") was highly correlated with rated trustworthiness and attractiveness. The second component ("dominance") was highly correlated with rated dominance and aggressiveness. Importantly, both components were positively and independently related to the motivational salience of faces, as assessed from responses on a standard key-press task. These results show that at least two dissociable components underpin the motivational salience of faces in humans and present new evidence for similarities in how humans and non-human primates respond to facial cues of dominance.

Aberrant Salience, Self-Concept Clarity, and Interview-Rated Psychotic-Like Experiences

PubMed Central

Cicero, David C.; Docherty, Anna R.; Becker, Theresa M.; Martin, Elizabeth A.; Kerns, John G.

2014-01-01

Many social-cognitive models of psychotic-like symptoms posit a role for self-concept and aberrant salience. Previous work has shown that the interaction between aberrant salience and self-concept clarity is associated with self-reported psychotic-like experiences. In the current research with two structured interviews, the interaction between aberrant salience and self-concept clarity was found to be associated withinterview-rated psychotic-like experiences. The interaction was associated withpsychotic-like experiences composite scores, delusional ideation, grandiosity, and perceptual anomalies. In all cases, self-concept clarity was negatively associated with psychotic-like experiences at high levels of aberrant salience, but unassociated with psychotic-like experiences at low levels of aberrant salience. The interaction was specific to positive psychotic-like experiences and not present for negative or disorganized ratings. The interaction was not mediated by self-esteem levels. These results provide further evidence that aberrant salience and self-concept clarity play an important role in the generation of psychotic-like experiences. PMID:25102085

Texture segmentation: do the processing units on the saliency map increase with eccentricity?

PubMed

Schade, Ursula; Meinecke, Cristina

2011-01-01

The saliency map is a computational model and has been constructed for simulating human saliency processing, e.g. pop-out target detection (e.g. Itti & Koch, 2000). In this study the spatial structure on the saliency map was investigated. It is proposed that the saliency map is structured into processing units whose size is increasing with retinal eccentricity. In two experiments the distance between a target in the stimulus and an irrelevant structure in the mask was varied systematically. Our findings had two main points. Firstly, in texture segmentation tasks the saliency signals from two texture irregularities interfere, when these irregularities appear within a critical spatial distance. Second, the critical distances increase with target eccentricity. The eccentricity-dependent critical distances can be interpreted as crowding effects. It is assumed that additionally to the target eccentricity, also the strength of a saliency signal can determine the spatial area of its impairing influence. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Validation of the mothers object relations scales in 2–4 year old children and comparison with the child–parent relationship scale

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background The quality of the parent–child relationship has an important effect on a wide range of child outcomes. The evaluation of interventions to promote healthy parenting and family relationships is dependent on outcome measures which can quantify the quality of parent–child relationships. Between the Mothers’ Object Relations – Short Form (MORS-SF) scale for babies and the Child–parent Relationship Scale (C-PRS) there is an age gap where no validated scales are available. We report the development and testing of an adaptation of the MORS-SF; the MORS (Child) scale and its use in children from the age of 2 years to 4 years. This scale aims to capture the nature of the parent–child relationship in a form which is short enough to be used in population surveys and intervention evaluations. Methods Construct and criterion validity, item salience and internal consistency were assessed in a sample of 166 parents of children aged 2–4 years old and compared with that of the C-PRS. The performance of the MORS (Child) as part of a composite measure with the HOME inventory was compared with that of the C-PRS using data collected in a randomised controlled trial and the national evaluation of Sure Start. Results MORS (Child) performed well in children aged 2–4 with high construct and criterion validity, item salience and internal consistency. One item in the C-PRS failed to load on either subscale and parents found this scale slightly more difficult to complete than the MORS (Child). The two measures performed very similarly in a factor analysis with the HOME inventory producing almost identical loadings. Conclusions Adapting the MORS-SF for children aged 2–4 years old produces a scale to assess parent–child relationships that is easy to use and outperforms the more commonly used C-PRS in several respects. PMID:23518176

The Salience and Severity of Relationship Problems among Low-Income Couples

PubMed Central

Jackson, Grace L.; Trail, Thomas E.; Kennedy, David P.; Williamson, Hannah C.; Bradbury, Thomas N.; Karney, Benjamin R.

2015-01-01

Developing programs to support low-income married couples requires an accurate understanding of the challenges they face. To address this question, we assessed the salience and severity of relationship problems by asking 862 Black, White, and Latino newlywed spouses (N=431 couples) living in low-income neighborhoods to (a) free list their three biggest sources of disagreement in the marriage, and (b) rate the severity of the problems appearing on a standard relationship problem inventory. Comparing the two sources of information revealed that, although relational problems (e.g., communication and moods) were rated as severe on the inventory, challenges external to the relationship (e.g., children) were more salient in the free listing task. The pattern of results is robust across couples of varying race/ethnicity, parental status, and income levels. We conclude that efforts to strengthen marriages among low-income couples may be more effective if they address not only relational problems, but also couples’ external stresses by providing assistance with childcare, finances, or job training. PMID:26571196

Neural circuits underlying mother’s voice perception predict social communication abilities in children

PubMed Central

Abrams, Daniel A.; Chen, Tianwen; Odriozola, Paola; Cheng, Katherine M.; Baker, Amanda E.; Padmanabhan, Aarthi; Ryali, Srikanth; Kochalka, John; Feinstein, Carl; Menon, Vinod

2016-01-01

The human voice is a critical social cue, and listeners are extremely sensitive to the voices in their environment. One of the most salient voices in a child’s life is mother's voice: Infants discriminate their mother’s voice from the first days of life, and this stimulus is associated with guiding emotional and social function during development. Little is known regarding the functional circuits that are selectively engaged in children by biologically salient voices such as mother’s voice or whether this brain activity is related to children’s social communication abilities. We used functional MRI to measure brain activity in 24 healthy children (mean age, 10.2 y) while they attended to brief (<1 s) nonsense words produced by their biological mother and two female control voices and explored relationships between speech-evoked neural activity and social function. Compared to female control voices, mother’s voice elicited greater activity in primary auditory regions in the midbrain and cortex; voice-selective superior temporal sulcus (STS); the amygdala, which is crucial for processing of affect; nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex of the reward circuit; anterior insula and cingulate of the salience network; and a subregion of fusiform gyrus associated with face perception. The strength of brain connectivity between voice-selective STS and reward, affective, salience, memory, and face-processing regions during mother’s voice perception predicted social communication skills. Our findings provide a novel neurobiological template for investigation of typical social development as well as clinical disorders, such as autism, in which perception of biologically and socially salient voices may be impaired. PMID:27185915

Object recognition with hierarchical discriminant saliency networks.

PubMed

Han, Sunhyoung; Vasconcelos, Nuno

2014-01-01

The benefits of integrating attention and object recognition are investigated. While attention is frequently modeled as a pre-processor for recognition, we investigate the hypothesis that attention is an intrinsic component of recognition and vice-versa. This hypothesis is tested with a recognition model, the hierarchical discriminant saliency network (HDSN), whose layers are top-down saliency detectors, tuned for a visual class according to the principles of discriminant saliency. As a model of neural computation, the HDSN has two possible implementations. In a biologically plausible implementation, all layers comply with the standard neurophysiological model of visual cortex, with sub-layers of simple and complex units that implement a combination of filtering, divisive normalization, pooling, and non-linearities. In a convolutional neural network implementation, all layers are convolutional and implement a combination of filtering, rectification, and pooling. The rectification is performed with a parametric extension of the now popular rectified linear units (ReLUs), whose parameters can be tuned for the detection of target object classes. This enables a number of functional enhancements over neural network models that lack a connection to saliency, including optimal feature denoising mechanisms for recognition, modulation of saliency responses by the discriminant power of the underlying features, and the ability to detect both feature presence and absence. In either implementation, each layer has a precise statistical interpretation, and all parameters are tuned by statistical learning. Each saliency detection layer learns more discriminant saliency templates than its predecessors and higher layers have larger pooling fields. This enables the HDSN to simultaneously achieve high selectivity to target object classes and invariance. The performance of the network in saliency and object recognition tasks is compared to those of models from the biological and computer vision literatures. This demonstrates benefits for all the functional enhancements of the HDSN, the class tuning inherent to discriminant saliency, and saliency layers based on templates of increasing target selectivity and invariance. Altogether, these experiments suggest that there are non-trivial benefits in integrating attention and recognition.

Object detection system based on multimodel saliency maps

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Guo, Ya'nan; Luo, Chongfan; Ma, Yide

2017-03-01

Detection of visually salient image regions is extensively applied in computer vision and computer graphics, such as object detection, adaptive compression, and object recognition, but any single model always has its limitations to various images, so in our work, we establish a method based on multimodel saliency maps to detect the object, which intelligently absorbs the merits of various individual saliency detection models to achieve promising results. The method can be roughly divided into three steps: in the first step, we propose a decision-making system to evaluate saliency maps obtained by seven competitive methods and merely select the three most valuable saliency maps; in the second step, we introduce heterogeneous PCNN algorithm to obtain three prime foregrounds; and then a self-designed nonlinear fusion method is proposed to merge these saliency maps; at last, the adaptive improved and simplified PCNN model is used to detect the object. Our proposed method can constitute an object detection system for different occasions, which requires no training, is simple, and highly efficient. The proposed saliency fusion technique shows better performance over a broad range of images and enriches the applicability range by fusing different individual saliency models, this proposed system is worthy enough to be called a strong model. Moreover, the proposed adaptive improved SPCNN model is stemmed from the Eckhorn's neuron model, which is skilled in image segmentation because of its biological background, and in which all the parameters are adaptive to image information. We extensively appraise our algorithm on classical salient object detection database, and the experimental results demonstrate that the aggregation of saliency maps outperforms the best saliency model in all cases, yielding highest precision of 89.90%, better recall rates of 98.20%, greatest F-measure of 91.20%, and lowest mean absolute error value of 0.057, the value of proposed saliency evaluation EHA reaches to 215.287. We deem our method can be wielded to diverse applications in the future.

Salience and Attention in Surprisal-Based Accounts of Language Processing

PubMed Central

Zarcone, Alessandra; van Schijndel, Marten; Vogels, Jorrig; Demberg, Vera

2016-01-01

The notion of salience has been singled out as the explanatory factor for a diverse range of linguistic phenomena. In particular, perceptual salience (e.g., visual salience of objects in the world, acoustic prominence of linguistic sounds) and semantic-pragmatic salience (e.g., prominence of recently mentioned or topical referents) have been shown to influence language comprehension and production. A different line of research has sought to account for behavioral correlates of cognitive load during comprehension as well as for certain patterns in language usage using information-theoretic notions, such as surprisal. Surprisal and salience both affect language processing at different levels, but the relationship between the two has not been adequately elucidated, and the question of whether salience can be reduced to surprisal / predictability is still open. Our review identifies two main challenges in addressing this question: terminological inconsistency and lack of integration between high and low levels of representations in salience-based accounts and surprisal-based accounts. We capitalize upon work in visual cognition in order to orient ourselves in surveying the different facets of the notion of salience in linguistics and their relation with models of surprisal. We find that work on salience highlights aspects of linguistic communication that models of surprisal tend to overlook, namely the role of attention and relevance to current goals, and we argue that the Predictive Coding framework provides a unified view which can account for the role played by attention and predictability at different levels of processing and which can clarify the interplay between low and high levels of processes and between predictability-driven expectation and attention-driven focus. PMID:27375525

Learning to predict where human gaze is using quaternion DCT based regional saliency detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Ting; Xu, Yi; Zhang, Chongyang

2014-09-01

Many current visual attention approaches used semantic features to accurately capture human gaze. However, these approaches demand high computational cost and can hardly be applied to daily use. Recently, some quaternion-based saliency detection models, such as PQFT (phase spectrum of Quaternion Fourier Transform), QDCT (Quaternion Discrete Cosine Transform), have been proposed to meet real-time requirement of human gaze tracking tasks. However, current saliency detection methods used global PQFT and QDCT to locate jump edges of the input, which can hardly detect the object boundaries accurately. To address the problem, we improved QDCT-based saliency detection model by introducing superpixel-wised regional saliency detection mechanism. The local smoothness of saliency value distribution is emphasized to distinguish noises of background from salient regions. Our algorithm called saliency confidence can distinguish the patches belonging to the salient object and those of the background. It decides whether the image patches belong to the same region. When an image patch belongs to a region consisting of other salient patches, this patch should be salient as well. Therefore, we use saliency confidence map to get background weight and foreground weight to do the optimization on saliency map obtained by QDCT. The optimization is accomplished by least square method. The optimization approach we proposed unifies local and global saliency by combination of QDCT and measuring the similarity between each image superpixel. We evaluate our model on four commonly-used datasets (Toronto, MIT, OSIE and ASD) using standard precision-recall curves (PR curves), the mean absolute error (MAE) and area under curve (AUC) measures. In comparison with most state-of-art models, our approach can achieve higher consistency with human perception without training. It can get accurate human gaze even in cluttered background. Furthermore, it achieves better compromise between speed and accuracy.

Saliency Detection on Light Field.

PubMed

Li, Nianyi; Ye, Jinwei; Ji, Yu; Ling, Haibin; Yu, Jingyi

2017-08-01

Existing saliency detection approaches use images as inputs and are sensitive to foreground/background similarities, complex background textures, and occlusions. We explore the problem of using light fields as input for saliency detection. Our technique is enabled by the availability of commercial plenoptic cameras that capture the light field of a scene in a single shot. We show that the unique refocusing capability of light fields provides useful focusness, depths, and objectness cues. We further develop a new saliency detection algorithm tailored for light fields. To validate our approach, we acquire a light field database of a range of indoor and outdoor scenes and generate the ground truth saliency map. Experiments show that our saliency detection scheme can robustly handle challenging scenarios such as similar foreground and background, cluttered background, complex occlusions, etc., and achieve high accuracy and robustness.

Data Visualization Saliency Model: A Tool for Evaluating Abstract Data Visualizations

DOE PAGES

Matzen, Laura E.; Haass, Michael J.; Divis, Kristin M.; ...

2017-08-29

Evaluating the effectiveness of data visualizations is a challenging undertaking and often relies on one-off studies that test a visualization in the context of one specific task. Researchers across the fields of data science, visualization, and human-computer interaction are calling for foundational tools and principles that could be applied to assessing the effectiveness of data visualizations in a more rapid and generalizable manner. One possibility for such a tool is a model of visual saliency for data visualizations. Visual saliency models are typically based on the properties of the human visual cortex and predict which areas of a scene havemore » visual features (e.g. color, luminance, edges) that are likely to draw a viewer's attention. While these models can accurately predict where viewers will look in a natural scene, they typically do not perform well for abstract data visualizations. In this paper, we discuss the reasons for the poor performance of existing saliency models when applied to data visualizations. We introduce the Data Visualization Saliency (DVS) model, a saliency model tailored to address some of these weaknesses, and we test the performance of the DVS model and existing saliency models by comparing the saliency maps produced by the models to eye tracking data obtained from human viewers. In conclusion, we describe how modified saliency models could be used as general tools for assessing the effectiveness of visualizations, including the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.« less

The role of aberrant salience and self-concept clarity in psychotic-like experiences.

PubMed

Cicero, David C; Becker, Theresa M; Martin, Elizabeth A; Docherty, Anna R; Kerns, John G

2013-01-01

Most theories of psychotic-like experiences posit the involvement of cognitive mechanisms. The current research examined the relations between psychotic-like experiences and two cognitive mechanisms, high aberrant salience and low self-concept clarity. In particular, we examined whether aberrant salience, or the incorrect assignment of importance to neutral stimuli, and low self-concept clarity interacted to predict psychotic-like experiences. The current research included three large samples (n = 667, 724, 744) of participants and oversampled for increased schizotypal personality traits. In all three studies, an interaction between aberrant salience and self-concept clarity was found such that participants with high aberrant salience and low self-concept clarity had the highest levels of psychotic-like experiences. In addition, aberrant salience and self-concept clarity interacted to predict a supplemental measure of delusions in Study 2. In Study 3, in contrast to low self-concept clarity, neuroticism did not interact with aberrant salience to predict psychotic-like experiences, suggesting that the relation between low self-concept clarity and psychosis may not be a result of neuroticism. Additionally, aberrant salience and self-concept clarity did not interact to predict two other SPD criteria, social anhedonia or trait paranoia, which suggests the interaction is specific to psychotic-like experiences. Overall, our results are consistent with several cognitive models of psychosis suggesting that aberrant salience and self-concept clarity might be important mechanisms in the occurrence of psychotic-like symptoms.

Data Visualization Saliency Model: A Tool for Evaluating Abstract Data Visualizations

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Matzen, Laura E.; Haass, Michael J.; Divis, Kristin M.

Evaluating the effectiveness of data visualizations is a challenging undertaking and often relies on one-off studies that test a visualization in the context of one specific task. Researchers across the fields of data science, visualization, and human-computer interaction are calling for foundational tools and principles that could be applied to assessing the effectiveness of data visualizations in a more rapid and generalizable manner. One possibility for such a tool is a model of visual saliency for data visualizations. Visual saliency models are typically based on the properties of the human visual cortex and predict which areas of a scene havemore » visual features (e.g. color, luminance, edges) that are likely to draw a viewer's attention. While these models can accurately predict where viewers will look in a natural scene, they typically do not perform well for abstract data visualizations. In this paper, we discuss the reasons for the poor performance of existing saliency models when applied to data visualizations. We introduce the Data Visualization Saliency (DVS) model, a saliency model tailored to address some of these weaknesses, and we test the performance of the DVS model and existing saliency models by comparing the saliency maps produced by the models to eye tracking data obtained from human viewers. In conclusion, we describe how modified saliency models could be used as general tools for assessing the effectiveness of visualizations, including the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.« less

The Role of Aberrant Salience and Self-Concept Clarity in Psychotic-Like Experiences

PubMed Central

Cicero, David C.; Becker, Theresa M.; Martin, Elizabeth A.; Docherty, Anna R.; Kerns, John G.

2013-01-01

Most theories of psychotic-like experiences posit the involvement of social-cognitive mechanisms. The current research examined the relations between psychotic-like experiences and two social-cognitive mechanisms, high aberrant salience and low self-concept clarity. In particular, we examined whether aberrant salience, or the incorrect assignment of importance to neutral stimuli, and low self-concept clarity interacted to predict psychotic-like experiences. The current research included three large samples (n = 667, 724, 744) of participants and over-sampled for increased schizotypal personality traits. In all three studies, an interaction between aberrant salience and self-concept clarity was found such that participants with high aberrant salience and low self-concept clarity had the highest levels of psychotic-like experiences. In addition, aberrant salience and self-concept clarity interacted to predict a supplemental measure of delusions in Study 2. In Study 3, in contrast to low self-concept clarity, neuroticism did not interact with aberrant salience to predict psychotic-like experiences, suggesting that the relation between low self-concept clarity and psychosis may not be due to neuroticism. Additionally, aberrant salience and self-concept clarity did not interact to predict to other schizotypal personality disorder criteria, social anhedonia or trait paranoia, which suggests the interaction is specific to psychotic-like experiences. Overall, our results are consistent with several social-cognitive models of psychosis suggesting that aberrant salience and self-concept clarity might be important mechanisms in the occurrence of psychotic-like symptoms. PMID:22452775

Race Essentialism and Social Contextual Differences in Children’s Racial Stereotyping

PubMed Central

Pauker, Kristin; Xu, Yiyuan; Williams, Amanda; Biddle, Ashley Morris

2016-01-01

The authors explored the differential emergence and correlates of racial stereotyping in 136 children ages 4–11 years across two broad social contexts: Hawai‘i and Massachusetts. Children completed measures assessing race salience, race essentialism, and in-group and out-group stereotyping. Results indicated that the type of racial stereotypes emerging with age was context dependent. In both contexts in-group stereotyping increased with age. By contrast, there was only an age-related increase in out-group stereotyping in Massachusetts. Older children in Massachusetts reported more essentialist thinking (i.e., believing that race cannot change) than their counterparts in Hawai’i, which explained their higher out-group stereotyping. These results provide insight into the factors that may shape contextual differences in racial stereotyping. PMID:27684395

Saliency Detection of Stereoscopic 3D Images with Application to Visual Discomfort Prediction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Hong; Luo, Ting; Xu, Haiyong

2017-06-01

Visual saliency detection is potentially useful for a wide range of applications in image processing and computer vision fields. This paper proposes a novel bottom-up saliency detection approach for stereoscopic 3D (S3D) images based on regional covariance matrix. As for S3D saliency detection, besides the traditional 2D low-level visual features, additional 3D depth features should also be considered. However, only limited efforts have been made to investigate how different features (e.g. 2D and 3D features) contribute to the overall saliency of S3D images. The main contribution of this paper is that we introduce a nonlinear feature integration descriptor, i.e., regional covariance matrix, to fuse both 2D and 3D features for S3D saliency detection. The regional covariance matrix is shown to be effective for nonlinear feature integration by modelling the inter-correlation of different feature dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms several existing relevant models including 2D extended and pure 3D saliency models. In addition, we also experimentally verified that the proposed S3D saliency map can significantly improve the prediction accuracy of experienced visual discomfort when viewing S3D images.

Categorisation salience and ingroup bias: the buffering role of a multicultural ideology.

PubMed

Costa-Lopes, Rui; Pereira, Cícero Roberto; Judd, Charles M

2014-12-01

The current work sought to test the moderating role of a multicultural ideology on the relationship between categorisation salience and ingroup bias. Accordingly, in one experimental study, we manipulated categorisation salience and the accessibility of a multicultural ideology, and measured intergroup attitudes. Results show that categorisation salience only leads to ingroup bias when a multiculturalism (MC) ideology is not made salient. Thus, MC ideology attenuates the negative effects of categorisation salience on ingroup bias. These results pertain to social psychology in general showing that the cognitive processes should be construed within the framework of ideological contexts. © 2014 International Union of Psychological Science.

Evoked Death-Related Thoughts in the Aftermath of Terror Attack: The Associations Between Mortality Salience Effect and Adjustment Disorder.

PubMed

Ring, Lia; Lavenda, Osnat; Hamama-Raz, Yaira; Ben-Ezra, Menachem; Pitcho-Prelorentzos, Shani; David, Udi Y; Zaken, Adi; Mahat-Shamir, Michal

2018-01-01

ICD-11 has provided a revised definition for adjustment disorder (AjD). The current study examined whether mortality salience effect, a possible consequence of a terror attack, may serve as a significant predictor associated with each of the AjD subscales. Using an online survey, 379 adult participants were recruited and filled out self-reported questionnaires dealing with adjustment disorder symptoms as well as mortality salience effect. Findings revealed that mortality salience effect was a significant predictor of all AjD subscales. The importance of mortality salience effect for AjD is discussed in light of terror management theory.

A saliency-based approach to detection of infrared target

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Yanfei; Sang, Nong; Dan, Zhiping

2013-10-01

Automatic target detection in infrared images is a hot research field of national defense technology. We propose a new saliency-based infrared target detection model in this paper, which is based on the fact that human focus of attention is directed towards the relevant target to interpret the most promising information. For a given image, the convolution of the image log amplitude spectrum with a low-pass Gaussian kernel of an appropriate scale is equivalent to an image saliency detector in the frequency domain. At the same time, orientation and shape features extracted are combined into a saliency map in the spatial domain. Our proposed model decides salient targets based on a final saliency map, which is generated by integration of the saliency maps in the frequency and spatial domain. At last, the size of each salient target is obtained by maximizing entropy of the final saliency map. Experimental results show that the proposed model can highlight both small and large salient regions in infrared image, as well as inhibit repeated distractors in cluttered image. In addition, its detecting efficiency has improved significantly.

Spectral saliency via automatic adaptive amplitude spectrum analysis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Xiaodong; Dai, Jialun; Zhu, Yafei; Zheng, Haiyong; Qiao, Xiaoyan

2016-03-01

Suppressing nonsalient patterns by smoothing the amplitude spectrum at an appropriate scale has been shown to effectively detect the visual saliency in the frequency domain. Different filter scales are required for different types of salient objects. We observe that the optimal scale for smoothing amplitude spectrum shares a specific relation with the size of the salient region. Based on this observation and the bottom-up saliency detection characterized by spectrum scale-space analysis for natural images, we propose to detect visual saliency, especially with salient objects of different sizes and locations via automatic adaptive amplitude spectrum analysis. We not only provide a new criterion for automatic optimal scale selection but also reserve the saliency maps corresponding to different salient objects with meaningful saliency information by adaptive weighted combination. The performance of quantitative and qualitative comparisons is evaluated by three different kinds of metrics on the four most widely used datasets and one up-to-date large-scale dataset. The experimental results validate that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art saliency models for predicting human eye fixations in terms of accuracy and robustness.

Tensor-based spatiotemporal saliency detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dou, Hao; Li, Bin; Deng, Qianqian; Zhang, LiRui; Pan, Zhihong; Tian, Jinwen

2018-03-01

This paper proposes an effective tensor-based spatiotemporal saliency computation model for saliency detection in videos. First, we construct the tensor representation of video frames. Then, the spatiotemporal saliency can be directly computed by the tensor distance between different tensors, which can preserve the complete temporal and spatial structure information of object in the spatiotemporal domain. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve encouraging performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.

Measuring and modeling salience with the theory of visual attention.

PubMed

Krüger, Alexander; Tünnermann, Jan; Scharlau, Ingrid

2017-08-01

For almost three decades, the theory of visual attention (TVA) has been successful in mathematically describing and explaining a wide variety of phenomena in visual selection and recognition with high quantitative precision. Interestingly, the influence of feature contrast on attention has been included in TVA only recently, although it has been extensively studied outside the TVA framework. The present approach further develops this extension of TVA's scope by measuring and modeling salience. An empirical measure of salience is achieved by linking different (orientation and luminance) contrasts to a TVA parameter. In the modeling part, the function relating feature contrasts to salience is described mathematically and tested against alternatives by Bayesian model comparison. This model comparison reveals that the power function is an appropriate model of salience growth in the dimensions of orientation and luminance contrast. Furthermore, if contrasts from the two dimensions are combined, salience adds up additively.

Feature saliency and feedback information interactively impact visual category learning

PubMed Central

Hammer, Rubi; Sloutsky, Vladimir; Grill-Spector, Kalanit

2015-01-01

Visual category learning (VCL) involves detecting which features are most relevant for categorization. VCL relies on attentional learning, which enables effectively redirecting attention to object’s features most relevant for categorization, while ‘filtering out’ irrelevant features. When features relevant for categorization are not salient, VCL relies also on perceptual learning, which enables becoming more sensitive to subtle yet important differences between objects. Little is known about how attentional learning and perceptual learning interact when VCL relies on both processes at the same time. Here we tested this interaction. Participants performed VCL tasks in which they learned to categorize novel stimuli by detecting the feature dimension relevant for categorization. Tasks varied both in feature saliency (low-saliency tasks that required perceptual learning vs. high-saliency tasks), and in feedback information (tasks with mid-information, moderately ambiguous feedback that increased attentional load, vs. tasks with high-information non-ambiguous feedback). We found that mid-information and high-information feedback were similarly effective for VCL in high-saliency tasks. This suggests that an increased attentional load, associated with the processing of moderately ambiguous feedback, has little effect on VCL when features are salient. In low-saliency tasks, VCL relied on slower perceptual learning; but when the feedback was highly informative participants were able to ultimately attain the same performance as during the high-saliency VCL tasks. However, VCL was significantly compromised in the low-saliency mid-information feedback task. We suggest that such low-saliency mid-information learning scenarios are characterized by a ‘cognitive loop paradox’ where two interdependent learning processes have to take place simultaneously. PMID:25745404

Salience-Based Selection: Attentional Capture by Distractors Less Salient Than the Target

PubMed Central

Goschy, Harriet; Müller, Hermann Joseph

2013-01-01

Current accounts of attentional capture predict the most salient stimulus to be invariably selected first. However, existing salience and visual search models assume noise in the map computation or selection process. Consequently, they predict the first selection to be stochastically dependent on salience, implying that attention could even be captured first by the second most salient (instead of the most salient) stimulus in the field. Yet, capture by less salient distractors has not been reported and salience-based selection accounts claim that the distractor has to be more salient in order to capture attention. We tested this prediction using an empirical and modeling approach of the visual search distractor paradigm. For the empirical part, we manipulated salience of target and distractor parametrically and measured reaction time interference when a distractor was present compared to absent. Reaction time interference was strongly correlated with distractor salience relative to the target. Moreover, even distractors less salient than the target captured attention, as measured by reaction time interference and oculomotor capture. In the modeling part, we simulated first selection in the distractor paradigm using behavioral measures of salience and considering the time course of selection including noise. We were able to replicate the result pattern we obtained in the empirical part. We conclude that each salience value follows a specific selection time distribution and attentional capture occurs when the selection time distributions of target and distractor overlap. Hence, selection is stochastic in nature and attentional capture occurs with a certain probability depending on relative salience. PMID:23382820

Investigation of methods to search for the boundaries on the image and their use on lung hardware of methods finding saliency map

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Semenishchev, E. A.; Marchuk, V. I.; Fedosov, V. P.; Stradanchenko, S. G.; Ruslyakov, D. V.

2015-05-01

This work aimed to study computationally simple method of saliency map calculation. Research in this field received increasing interest for the use of complex techniques in portable devices. A saliency map allows increasing the speed of many subsequent algorithms and reducing the computational complexity. The proposed method of saliency map detection based on both image and frequency space analysis. Several examples of test image from the Kodak dataset with different detalisation considered in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We present experiments which show that the proposed method providing better results than the framework Salience Toolbox in terms of accuracy and speed.

The Role of Oxytocin in Parenting and as Augmentative Pharmacotherapy: Critical Issues and Bold Conjectures.

PubMed

van IJzendoorn, M H; Bakermans-Kranenburg, M J

2016-08-01

Despite the sometimes heated debate about the validity of human oxytocin studies, experimental oxytocin research with intranasal administration is a growing field with promising preliminary findings. The effects of intranasally administered oxytocin compared to placebo on brain neural activity have been supported in animal studies and in human studies of neural resting state. In several studies, oxytocin sniffs have been shown to lead to down-regulation of amygdala activation in response to infant attachment vocalisations. Meta-analytic evidence shows that oxytocin enhances the salience of (emotional) stimuli, lowers stress and arousal, and elevates empathic concern and tender care, in particular for offspring and in-group members. Less firm evidence points at the amnestic effects of oxytocin. We also note that the average effect sizes of oxytocin experiments are small to modest, and that most studies include a small number of subjects and thus are seriously underpowered, which implies a high risk for publication bias and nonreplicability. Nevertheless, we argue that the power of within-subjects experiments with oxytocin has been underestimated. Much more work is needed, however, to create a firm knowledge base of the neural and behavioural effects of oxytocin. Human oxytocin research is still taking place in the context of discovery, in which bold conjectures are being generated. In the context of justification, these conjectures should subsequently be subjected to stringent attempts at refutations before we jump to theoretical or clinical conclusions. For this context of justification, we propose a multisite multiple replications project on the social stimuli salience enhancing effect of oxytocin. Clinical application of oxytocin is premature. Meta-analytically, the use of oxytocin in clinical groups tends to show only effectiveness in changing symptomatology in individuals with autism spectrum disorders but, even then, it is not yet a validated therapy and its use is premature because safety and long-term side-effects have not been sufficiently studied, in particular in children. © 2015 British Society for Neuroendocrinology.

Collinear masking effect in visual search is independent of perceptual salience.

PubMed

Jingling, Li; Lu, Yi-Hui; Cheng, Miao; Tseng, Chia-Huei

2017-07-01

Searching for a target in a salient region should be easier than looking for one in a nonsalient region. However, we previously discovered a contradictory phenomenon in which a local target in a salient structure was more difficult to find than one in the background. The salient structure was constructed of orientation singletons aligned to each other to form a collinear structure. In the present study, we undertake to determine whether such a masking effect was a result of salience competition between a global structure and the local target. In the first 3 experiments, we increased the salience value of the local target with the hope of adding to its competitive advantage and eventually eliminating the masking effect; nevertheless, the masking effect persisted. In an additional 2 experiments, we reduced salience of the global collinear structure by altering the orientation of the background bars and the masking effect still emerged. Our salience manipulations were validated by a controlled condition in which the global structure was grouped noncollinearly. In this case, local target salience increase (e.g., onset) or global distractor salience reduction (e.g., randomized flanking orientations) effectively removed the facilitation effect of the noncollinear structure. Our data suggest that salience competition is unlikely to explain the collinear masking effect, and other mechanisms such as contour integration, border formation, or the crowding effect may be prospective candidates for further investigation.

Prospective memory failures in aviation: effects of cue salience, workload, and individual differences.

PubMed

Van Benthem, Kathleen D; Herdman, Chris M; Tolton, Rani G; LeFevre, Jo-Anne

2015-04-01

Prospective memory allows people to complete intended tasks in the future. Prospective memory failures, such as pilots forgetting to inform pattern traffic of their locations, can have fatal consequences. The present research examined the impact of system factors (memory cue salience and workload) and individual differences (pilot age, cognitive health, and expertise) on prospective memory for communication tasks in the cockpit. Pilots (N = 101) flew a Cessna 172 simulator at a non-towered aerodrome while maintaining communication with traffic and attending to flight parameters. Memory cue salience (the prominence of cues that signal an intended action) and workload were manipulated. Prospective memory was measured as radio call completion rates. Pilots' prospective memory was adversely affected by low-salience cues and high workload. An interaction of cue salience, pilots' age, and cognitive health reflected the effects of system and individual difference factors on prospective memory failures. For example, younger pilots with low levels of cognitive health completed 78% of the radio calls associated with low-salience memory cues, whereas older pilots with low cognitive health scores completed just 61% of similar radio calls. Our findings suggest that technologies designed to signal intended future tasks should target those tasks with inherently low-salience memory cues. In addition, increasing the salience of memory cues is most likely to benefit pilots with lower levels of cognitive health in high-workload conditions.

How is visual salience computed in the brain? Insights from behaviour, neurobiology and modelling

PubMed Central

Veale, Richard; Hafed, Ziad M.

2017-01-01

Inherent in visual scene analysis is a bottleneck associated with the need to sequentially sample locations with foveating eye movements. The concept of a ‘saliency map’ topographically encoding stimulus conspicuity over the visual scene has proven to be an efficient predictor of eye movements. Our work reviews insights into the neurobiological implementation of visual salience computation. We start by summarizing the role that different visual brain areas play in salience computation, whether at the level of feature analysis for bottom-up salience or at the level of goal-directed priority maps for output behaviour. We then delve into how a subcortical structure, the superior colliculus (SC), participates in salience computation. The SC represents a visual saliency map via a centre-surround inhibition mechanism in the superficial layers, which feeds into priority selection mechanisms in the deeper layers, thereby affecting saccadic and microsaccadic eye movements. Lateral interactions in the local SC circuit are particularly important for controlling active populations of neurons. This, in turn, might help explain long-range effects, such as those of peripheral cues on tiny microsaccades. Finally, we show how a combination of in vitro neurophysiology and large-scale computational modelling is able to clarify how salience computation is implemented in the local circuit of the SC. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Auditory and visual scene analysis’. PMID:28044023

Art Expertise Reduces Influence of Visual Salience on Fixation in Viewing Abstract-Paintings

PubMed Central

Koide, Naoko; Kubo, Takatomi; Nishida, Satoshi; Shibata, Tomohiro; Ikeda, Kazushi

2015-01-01

When viewing a painting, artists perceive more information from the painting on the basis of their experience and knowledge than art novices do. This difference can be reflected in eye scan paths during viewing of paintings. Distributions of scan paths of artists are different from those of novices even when the paintings contain no figurative object (i.e. abstract paintings). There are two possible explanations for this difference of scan paths. One is that artists have high sensitivity to high-level features such as textures and composition of colors and therefore their fixations are more driven by such features compared with novices. The other is that fixations of artists are more attracted by salient features than those of novices and the fixations are driven by low-level features. To test these, we measured eye fixations of artists and novices during the free viewing of various abstract paintings and compared the distribution of their fixations for each painting with a topological attentional map that quantifies the conspicuity of low-level features in the painting (i.e. saliency map). We found that the fixation distribution of artists was more distinguishable from the saliency map than that of novices. This difference indicates that fixations of artists are less driven by low-level features than those of novices. Our result suggests that artists may extract visual information from paintings based on high-level features. This ability of artists may be associated with artists’ deep aesthetic appreciation of paintings. PMID:25658327

Sociopolitical development, work salience, and vocational expectations among low socioeconomic status African American, Latin American, and Asian American youth.

PubMed

Diemer, Matthew A; Wang, Qiu; Moore, Traymanesha; Gregory, Shannon R; Hatcher, Keisha M; Voight, Adam M

2010-05-01

Structural barriers constrain marginalized youths' development of work salience and vocational expectations. Sociopolitical development (SPD), the consciousness of, and motivation to reduce, sociopolitical inequality, may facilitate the negotiation of structural constraints. A structural model of SPD's impact on work salience and vocational expectations was proposed and its generalizability tested among samples of low-socioeconomic-status African American, Latin American, and Asian American youth, with Educational Longitudinal Study data. Measurement and temporal invariance of these constructs was first established before testing the proposed model across the samples. Across the three samples, 10th-grade SPD had significant effects on 10th-grade work salience and vocational expectations; 12th-grade SPD had a significant effect on 12th-grade work salience. Tenth-grade SPD had significant indirect effects on 12th-grade work salience and on 12th-grade vocational expectations for all three samples. These results suggest that SPD facilitates the agentic negotiation of constraints on the development of work salience and vocational expectations. Given the impact of adolescent career development on adult occupational attainment, SPD may also foster social mobility among youth constrained by an inequitable opportunity structure. 2010 APA, all rights reserved

Disentangling neural representations of value and salience in the human brain

PubMed Central

Kahnt, Thorsten; Park, Soyoung Q; Haynes, John-Dylan; Tobler, Philippe N.

2014-01-01

A large body of evidence has implicated the posterior parietal and orbitofrontal cortex in the processing of value. However, value correlates perfectly with salience when appetitive stimuli are investigated in isolation. Accordingly, considerable uncertainty has remained about the precise nature of the previously identified signals. In particular, recent evidence suggests that neurons in the primate parietal cortex signal salience instead of value. To investigate neural signatures of value and salience, here we apply multivariate (pattern-based) analyses to human functional MRI data acquired during a noninstrumental outcome-prediction task involving appetitive and aversive outcomes. Reaction time data indicated additive and independent effects of value and salience. Critically, we show that multivoxel ensemble activity in the posterior parietal cortex encodes predicted value and salience in superior and inferior compartments, respectively. These findings reinforce the earlier reports of parietal value signals and reconcile them with the recent salience report. Moreover, we find that multivoxel patterns in the orbitofrontal cortex correlate with value. Importantly, the patterns coding for the predicted value of appetitive and aversive outcomes are similar, indicating a common neural scale for appetite and aversive values in the orbitofrontal cortex. Thus orbitofrontal activity patterns satisfy a basic requirement for a neural value signal. PMID:24639493

Characterization of electroencephalography signals for estimating saliency features in videos.

PubMed

Liang, Zhen; Hamada, Yasuyuki; Oba, Shigeyuki; Ishii, Shin

2018-05-12

Understanding the functions of the visual system has been one of the major targets in neuroscience formany years. However, the relation between spontaneous brain activities and visual saliency in natural stimuli has yet to be elucidated. In this study, we developed an optimized machine learning-based decoding model to explore the possible relationships between the electroencephalography (EEG) characteristics and visual saliency. The optimal features were extracted from the EEG signals and saliency map which was computed according to an unsupervised saliency model ( Tavakoli and Laaksonen, 2017). Subsequently, various unsupervised feature selection/extraction techniques were examined using different supervised regression models. The robustness of the presented model was fully verified by means of ten-fold or nested cross validation procedure, and promising results were achieved in the reconstruction of saliency features based on the selected EEG characteristics. Through the successful demonstration of using EEG characteristics to predict the real-time saliency distribution in natural videos, we suggest the feasibility of quantifying visual content through measuring brain activities (EEG signals) in real environments, which would facilitate the understanding of cortical involvement in the processing of natural visual stimuli and application developments motivated by human visual processing. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Saliency predicts change detection in pictures of natural scenes.

PubMed

Wright, Michael J

2005-01-01

It has been proposed that the visual system encodes the salience of objects in the visual field in an explicit two-dimensional map that guides visual selective attention. Experiments were conducted to determine whether salience measurements applied to regions of pictures of outdoor scenes could predict the detection of changes in those regions. To obtain a quantitative measure of change detection, observers located changes in pairs of colour pictures presented across an interstimulus interval (ISI). Salience measurements were then obtained from different observers for image change regions using three independent methods, and all were positively correlated with change detection. Factor analysis extracted a single saliency factor that accounted for 62% of the variance contained in the four measures. Finally, estimates of the magnitude of the image change in each picture pair were obtained, using nine separate visual filters representing low-level vision features (luminance, colour, spatial frequency, orientation, edge density). None of the feature outputs was significantly associated with change detection or saliency. On the other hand it was shown that high-level (structural) properties of the changed region were related to saliency and to change detection: objects were more salient than shadows and more detectable when changed.

Learned saliency transformations for gaze guidance

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vig, Eleonora; Dorr, Michael; Barth, Erhardt

2011-03-01

The saliency of an image or video region indicates how likely it is that the viewer of the image or video fixates that region due to its conspicuity. An intriguing question is how we can change the video region to make it more or less salient. Here, we address this problem by using a machine learning framework to learn from a large set of eye movements collected on real-world dynamic scenes how to alter the saliency level of the video locally. We derive saliency transformation rules by performing spatio-temporal contrast manipulations (on a spatio-temporal Laplacian pyramid) on the particular video region. Our goal is to improve visual communication by designing gaze-contingent interactive displays that change, in real time, the saliency distribution of the scene.

Dopaminergic dysfunction in schizophrenia: salience attribution revisited.

PubMed

Heinz, Andreas; Schlagenhauf, Florian

2010-05-01

A dysregulation of the mesolimbic dopamine system in schizophrenia patients may lead to aberrant attribution of incentive salience and contribute to the emergence of psychopathological symptoms like delusions. The dopaminergic signal has been conceptualized to represent a prediction error that indicates the difference between received and predicted reward. The incentive salience hypothesis states that dopamine mediates the attribution of "incentive salience" to conditioned cues that predict reward. This hypothesis was initially applied in the context of drug addiction and then transferred to schizophrenic psychosis. It was hypothesized that increased firing (chaotic or stress associated) of dopaminergic neurons in the striatum of schizophrenia patients attributes incentive salience to otherwise irrelevant stimuli. Here, we review recent neuroimaging studies directly addressing this hypothesis. They suggest that neuronal functions associated with dopaminergic signaling, such as the attribution of salience to reward-predicting stimuli and the computation of prediction errors, are indeed altered in schizophrenia patients and that this impairment appears to contribute to delusion formation.

Exploring different explanations for performance on a theory of mind task in Williams syndrome and autism using eye movements.

PubMed

Van Herwegen, Jo; Smith, Tim J; Dimitriou, Dagmara

2015-01-01

The current study explored the looking behaviours of young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), Williams syndrome (WS), and typically developing (TD) children while they were administered a low-verbal Theory of Mind (ToM) task. Although ToM performance in both clinical groups was impaired, only participants with WS showed small differences in looking behaviour at the start of the video. Furthermore, while TD children who passed the ToM task looked longer at the original hiding place there was no such contrast in the clinical groups. This shows that looking behaviour in ASD and WS is not necessarily atypical when saliency aspects such as language, background, and colour are removed and that differences in looking behaviour cannot explain ToM performance. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Modeling eye movements in visual agnosia with a saliency map approach: bottom-up guidance or top-down strategy?

PubMed

Foulsham, Tom; Barton, Jason J S; Kingstone, Alan; Dewhurst, Richard; Underwood, Geoffrey

2011-08-01

Two recent papers (Foulsham, Barton, Kingstone, Dewhurst, & Underwood, 2009; Mannan, Kennard, & Husain, 2009) report that neuropsychological patients with a profound object recognition problem (visual agnosic subjects) show differences from healthy observers in the way their eye movements are controlled when looking at images. The interpretation of these papers is that eye movements can be modeled as the selection of points on a saliency map, and that agnosic subjects show an increased reliance on visual saliency, i.e., brightness and contrast in low-level stimulus features. Here we review this approach and present new data from our own experiments with an agnosic patient that quantifies the relationship between saliency and fixation location. In addition, we consider whether the perceptual difficulties of individual patients might be modeled by selectively weighting the different features involved in a saliency map. Our data indicate that saliency is not always a good predictor of fixation in agnosia: even for our agnosic subject, as for normal observers, the saliency-fixation relationship varied as a function of the task. This means that top-down processes still have a significant effect on the earliest stages of scanning in the setting of visual agnosia, indicating severe limitations for the saliency map model. Top-down, active strategies-which are the hallmark of our human visual system-play a vital role in eye movement control, whether we know what we are looking at or not. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Overt attention in natural scenes: objects dominate features.

PubMed

Stoll, Josef; Thrun, Michael; Nuthmann, Antje; Einhäuser, Wolfgang

2015-02-01

Whether overt attention in natural scenes is guided by object content or by low-level stimulus features has become a matter of intense debate. Experimental evidence seemed to indicate that once object locations in a scene are known, salience models provide little extra explanatory power. This approach has recently been criticized for using inadequate models of early salience; and indeed, state-of-the-art salience models outperform trivial object-based models that assume a uniform distribution of fixations on objects. Here we propose to use object-based models that take a preferred viewing location (PVL) close to the centre of objects into account. In experiment 1, we demonstrate that, when including this comparably subtle modification, object-based models again are at par with state-of-the-art salience models in predicting fixations in natural scenes. One possible interpretation of these results is that objects rather than early salience dominate attentional guidance. In this view, early-salience models predict fixations through the correlation of their features with object locations. To test this hypothesis directly, in two additional experiments we reduced low-level salience in image areas of high object content. For these modified stimuli, the object-based model predicted fixations significantly better than early salience. This finding held in an object-naming task (experiment 2) and a free-viewing task (experiment 3). These results provide further evidence for object-based fixation selection--and by inference object-based attentional guidance--in natural scenes. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Effects of disease salience and xenophobia on support for humanitarian aid.

PubMed

Peterson, Johnathan C; Gonzalez, Frank J; Schneider, Stephen P

2017-01-01

This article examines how disease salience influences attitudes toward two types of humanitarian aid: sending foreign aid and housing refugees. Some have argued that disease salience increases levels of out-group prejudice through what is referred to as the behavioral immune system (BIS), and this increase in out-group prejudice works to shape policy attitudes. However, an alternative mechanism that may explain the effects of disease salience is contamination fear, which would suggest there is no group bias in the effects of disease threat. Existing work largely interprets opposition to policies that assist out-groups as evidence of out-group prejudice. We suggest it is necessary to separate measures of out-group animosity from opinions toward specific policies to determine whether increased out-group prejudice rather than fear of contamination is the mechanism by which disease salience impacts policy attitudes. Across two experiments, disease salience is shown to significantly decrease support for humanitarian aid, but only in the form of refugee support. Furthermore, there is converging evidence to suggest that any influence of disease salience on aid attitudes is not caused by a corresponding increase in xenophobia. We suggest that the mechanism by which disease threat influences policy attitudes is a general fear of contamination rather than xenophobia. These findings go against an important hypothesized mechanism of the BIS and have critical implications for the relationship between disease salience and attitudes toward transnational policies involving humanitarian aid.

Topic-Specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TSPCK) in Redox and Electrochemistry of Experienced Teachers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

O'Brien, Stephanie

Topic specific pedagogical content knowledge (TSPCK) is the basis by which knowledge of subject matter of a particular topic is conveyed to students. This includes students' prior knowledge, curricular saliency, what makes a topic easy or difficult to teach, representations, and teaching strategies. The goal of this study is to assess the pedagogical content knowledge of chemistry teachers in a professional learning community in the areas of redox and electrochemistry, as this has been regarded in previous literature as conceptually challenging for students to learn. By acquiring information regarding the PCK development of experienced chemistry teachers, the education and practice of all science teachers can be advanced. This study builds upon previous research that developed validated instruments to evaluate TSPCK. The research questions sought to determine which components of TSPCK were evidenced by the instructional design decisions teachers made, what shared patterns and trends were evident, and how TSPCK related to student learning outcomes. To answer the research questions subjects completed a background questionnaire, a TSPCK assessment, and interview tasks to elicit information about pedagogical decision making and processes that influenced student learning in their classrooms. The TSPCK exam and interview responses were coded to align with thematic constructs. To determine the effect of TSPCK on student learning gains, pre/post-assessment data on redox and electrochemistry were compared to teachers' TSPCK. The chemistry teachers displayed varying levels of TSPCK in redox and electrochemistry, as evidenced by their knowledge of student learning obstacles, curricular saliency, and teaching methodologies. There was evidence of experienced teachers lacking in certain areas of TSPCK, such as the ability to identify student misconceptions, suggesting the need for programmatic improvements in pre-service and in-service training to address the needs of current and future chemistry teachers. While the current educational system requires teachers to complete separate exams in pedagogy and content, this research provides a rationale for changing the means by which teachers are evaluated through the completion of TSPCK assessments. In-service teacher TSPCK training is limited yet desired by the teachers. To facilitate TSPCK development, new methods need to be explored to connect chemistry education research to practice.

Knowledge systems for sustainable development

PubMed Central

Cash, David W.; Clark, William C.; Alcock, Frank; Dickson, Nancy M.; Eckley, Noelle; Guston, David H.; Jäger, Jill; Mitchell, Ronald B.

2003-01-01

The challenge of meeting human development needs while protecting the earth's life support systems confronts scientists, technologists, policy makers, and communities from local to global levels. Many believe that science and technology (S&T) must play a more central role in sustainable development, yet little systematic scholarship exists on how to create institutions that effectively harness S&T for sustainability. This study suggests that efforts to mobilize S&T for sustainability are more likely to be effective when they manage boundaries between knowledge and action in ways that simultaneously enhance the salience, credibility, and legitimacy of the information they produce. Effective systems apply a variety of institutional mechanisms that facilitate communication, translation and mediation across boundaries. PMID:12777623

Career Concerns, Values, and Role Salience in Employed Men.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Duarte, M. Eduarda

1995-01-01

Tests Super's model of career adaptability by examining the relationship between career development concerns, values, and role salience among cement factory workers (n=881). They responded to the Adult Career Concerns Inventory, the Values Inventory, and the Salience Inventory. Results supported both Super's model of career adaptation and his…

The Social Perceptual Salience Effect

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Inderbitzin, Martin P.; Betella, Alberto; Lanata, Antonio; Scilingo, Enzo P.; Bernardet, Ulysses; Verschure, Paul F. M. J.

2013-01-01

Affective processes appraise the salience of external stimuli preparing the agent for action. So far, the relationship between stimuli, affect, and action has been mainly studied in highly controlled laboratory conditions. In order to find the generalization of this relationship to social interaction, we assess the influence of the salience of…

Resting connectivity between salience nodes predicts recognition memory.

PubMed

Andreano, Joseph M; Touroutoglou, Alexandra; Dickerson, Bradford C; Barrett, Lisa F

2017-06-01

The resting connectivity of the brain's salience network, particularly the ventral subsystem of the salience network, has been previously associated with various measures of affective reactivity. Numerous studies have demonstrated that increased affective arousal leads to enhanced consolidation of memory. This suggests that individuals with greater ventral salience network connectivity will exhibit greater responses to affective experience, leading to a greater enhancement of memory by affect. To test this hypothesis, resting ventral salience connectivity was measured in 41 young adults, who were then exposed to neutral and negative affect inductions during a paired associate memory test. Memory performance for material learned under both negative and neutral induction was tested for correlation with resting connectivity between major ventral salience nodes. The results showed a significant interaction between mood induction (negative vs neutral) and connectivity between ventral anterior insula and pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, indicating that salience node connectivity predicted memory for material encoded under negative, but not neutral induction. These findings suggest that the network state of the perceiver, measured prior to affective experience, meaningfully influences the extent to which affect modulates memory. Implications of these findings for individuals with affective disorder, who show alterations in both connectivity and memory, are considered. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press.

Visual Saliency Detection Based on Multiscale Deep CNN Features.

PubMed

Guanbin Li; Yizhou Yu

2016-11-01

Visual saliency is a fundamental problem in both cognitive and computational sciences, including computer vision. In this paper, we discover that a high-quality visual saliency model can be learned from multiscale features extracted using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have had many successes in visual recognition tasks. For learning such saliency models, we introduce a neural network architecture, which has fully connected layers on top of CNNs responsible for feature extraction at three different scales. The penultimate layer of our neural network has been confirmed to be a discriminative high-level feature vector for saliency detection, which we call deep contrast feature. To generate a more robust feature, we integrate handcrafted low-level features with our deep contrast feature. To promote further research and evaluation of visual saliency models, we also construct a new large database of 4447 challenging images and their pixelwise saliency annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is capable of achieving the state-of-the-art performance on all public benchmarks, improving the F-measure by 6.12% and 10%, respectively, on the DUT-OMRON data set and our new data set (HKU-IS), and lowering the mean absolute error by 9% and 35.3%, respectively, on these two data sets.

A novel application of cultural consensus models to evaluate conservation education programs.

PubMed

Nekaris, K A I; McCabe, Sharon; Spaan, Denise; Ali, Muhammad Imron; Nijman, Vincent

2018-04-01

Conservation professionals recognize the need to evaluate education initiatives with a flexible approach that is culturally appropriate. Cultural-consensus theory (CCT) provides a framework for measuring the extent to which beliefs are communally held and has long been applied by social scientists. In a conservation-education context, we applied CCT and used free lists (i.e., a list of items on a topic stated in order of cultural importance) and domain analysis (analysis of how free lists go together within a cultural group) to evaluate a conservation education program in which we used a children's picture book to increase knowledge about and empathy for a critically endangered mammal, the Javan slow loris (Nycticebus javanicus). We extracted free lists of keywords generated by students (n = 580 in 18 schools) from essays they wrote before and after the education program. In 2 classroom sessions conducted approximately 18 weeks apart, we asked students to write an essay about their knowledge of the target species and then presented a book and several activities about slow loris ecology. Prior to the second session, we asked students to write a second essay. We generated free lists from both essays, quantified salience of terms used, and conducted minimal residuals factor analysis to determine presence of cultural domains surrounding slow lorises in each session. Students increased their use of words accurately associated with slow loris ecology and conservation from 43% in initial essays to 76% in final essays. Domain coherence increased from 22% to 47% across schools. Fifteen factors contributed to the domain slow loris. Between the first and second essays, factors that showed the greatest change were feeding ecology and slow loris as a forest protector, which increased 7-fold, and the humancentric factor, which decreased 5-fold. As demonstrated by knowledge retention and creation of unique stories and conservation opinions, children achieved all six levels of Bloom's taxonomy of learning domains. Free from the constraints of questionnaires and surveys, CCT methods provide a promising avenue to evaluate conservation education programs. © 2017 Society for Conservation Biology.

Intrinsic brain networks normalize with treatment in pediatric complex regional pain syndrome

PubMed Central

Becerra, Lino; Sava, Simona; Simons, Laura E.; Drosos, Athena M.; Sethna, Navil; Berde, Charles; Lebel, Alyssa A.; Borsook, David

2014-01-01

Pediatric complex regional pain syndrome (P-CRPS) offers a unique model of chronic neuropathic pain as it either resolves spontaneously or through therapeutic interventions in most patients. Here we evaluated brain changes in well-characterized children and adolescents with P-CRPS by measuring resting state networks before and following a brief (median = 3 weeks) but intensive physical and psychological treatment program, and compared them to matched healthy controls. Differences in intrinsic brain networks were observed in P-CRPS compared to controls before treatment (disease state) with the most prominent differences in the fronto-parietal, salience, default mode, central executive, and sensorimotor networks. Following treatment, behavioral measures demonstrated a reduction of symptoms and improvement of physical state (pain levels and motor functioning). Correlation of network connectivities with spontaneous pain measures pre- and post-treatment indicated concomitant reductions in connectivity in salience, central executive, default mode and sensorimotor networks (treatment effects). These results suggest a rapid alteration in global brain networks with treatment and provide a venue to assess brain changes in CRPS pre- and post-treatment, and to evaluate therapeutic effects. PMID:25379449

The Impact of Topic Characteristics and Threat on Willingness to Engage with Wikipedia Articles: Insights from Laboratory Experiments

PubMed Central

Yenikent, Seren; Holtz, Peter; Kimmerle, Joachim

2017-01-01

A growing body of research aims to identify the factors that motivate people to make contributions in Wikipedia. We conducted two laboratory experiments to investigate the connections between topic characteristics, perception of threat, and willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. In Study 1 (N = 83), we examined how topic familiarity, topic controversiality, and mortality salience influenced participants’ willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. We presented the introduction parts of 20 Wikipedia articles and asked participants to rate each article with respect to familiarity and controversiality. In addition, we experimentally manipulated participants’ level of mortality salience in terms of the amount of threat they experienced when reading the article. Participants also indicated their willingness to engage with a particular article. The results revealed that familiar and controversial topics increased the willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. Although mortality salience increased accessibility of death-related thoughts, it did not result in any changes in people’s willingness to work with the articles. The aim of Study 2 (N = 90) was to replicate the effects of topic characteristics by following a similar procedure. We additionally manipulated uncertainty salience by assigning participants to three experimental conditions: uncertainty salience, certainty salience, and non-salience. As expected, familiar and controversial topics were of high interest in terms of willingness to contribute. However, the manipulation of uncertainty salience did not yield any significant results despite the emergence of negative emotional states. In sum, we demonstrated that topic characteristics were factors that substantially influenced people’s willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles whereas perceived threat was not. PMID:29163323

Language-experience plasticity in neural representation of changes in pitch salience

PubMed Central

Krishnan, Ananthanarayan; Gandour, Jackson T.; Suresh, Chandan H.

2016-01-01

Neural representation of pitch-relevant information at the brainstem and cortical levels of processing is influenced by language experience. A well-known attribute of pitch is its salience. Brainstem frequency following responses and cortical pitch specific responses, recorded concurrently, were elicited by a pitch salience continuum spanning weak to strong pitch of a dynamic, iterated rippled noise pitch contour—homolog of a Mandarin tone. Our aims were to assess how language experience (Chinese, English) affects i) enhancement of neural activity associated with pitch salience at brainstem and cortical levels, ii) the presence of asymmetry in cortical pitch representation, and iii) patterns of relative changes in magnitude along the pitch salience continuum. Peak latency (Fz: Na, Pb, Nb) was shorter in the Chinese than the English group across the continuum. Peak-to-peak amplitude (Fz: Na-Pb, Pb-Nb) of the Chinese group grew larger with increasing pitch salience, but an experience-dependent advantage was limited to the Na-Pb component. At temporal sites (T7/T8), the larger amplitude of the Chinese group across the continuum was both limited to the Na-Pb component and the right temporal site. At the brainstem level, F0 magnitude gets larger as you increase pitch salience, and it too reveals Chinese superiority. A direct comparison of cortical and brainstem responses for the Chinese group reveals different patterns of relative changes in magnitude along the pitch salience continuum. Such differences may point to a transformation in pitch processing at the cortical level presumably mediated by local sensory and/or extrasensory influence overlaid on the brainstem output. PMID:26903418

The Impact of Topic Characteristics and Threat on Willingness to Engage with Wikipedia Articles: Insights from Laboratory Experiments.

PubMed

Yenikent, Seren; Holtz, Peter; Kimmerle, Joachim

2017-01-01

A growing body of research aims to identify the factors that motivate people to make contributions in Wikipedia. We conducted two laboratory experiments to investigate the connections between topic characteristics, perception of threat, and willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. In Study 1 ( N = 83), we examined how topic familiarity, topic controversiality, and mortality salience influenced participants' willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. We presented the introduction parts of 20 Wikipedia articles and asked participants to rate each article with respect to familiarity and controversiality. In addition, we experimentally manipulated participants' level of mortality salience in terms of the amount of threat they experienced when reading the article. Participants also indicated their willingness to engage with a particular article. The results revealed that familiar and controversial topics increased the willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. Although mortality salience increased accessibility of death-related thoughts, it did not result in any changes in people's willingness to work with the articles. The aim of Study 2 ( N = 90) was to replicate the effects of topic characteristics by following a similar procedure. We additionally manipulated uncertainty salience by assigning participants to three experimental conditions: uncertainty salience, certainty salience, and non-salience. As expected, familiar and controversial topics were of high interest in terms of willingness to contribute. However, the manipulation of uncertainty salience did not yield any significant results despite the emergence of negative emotional states. In sum, we demonstrated that topic characteristics were factors that substantially influenced people's willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles whereas perceived threat was not.

Industry Television Ratings for Violence, Sex, and Substance Use

PubMed Central

Gabrielli, Joy; Traore, Aminata; Stoolmiller, Mike; Bergamini, Elaina

2016-01-01

OBJECTIVE: To examine whether the industry-run television (TV) Parental Guidelines discriminate on violence, sexual behavior, alcohol use, and smoking in TV shows, to assess their usefulness for parents. METHODS: Seventeen TV shows (323 episodes and 9214 episode minutes) across several TV show rating categories (TVY7, TVPG, TV14, and TVMA) were evaluated. We content-coded the episodes, recording seconds of each risk behavior, and we rated the salience of violence in each one. Multilevel models were used to test for associations between TV rating categories and prevalence of risk behaviors across and within episodes or salience of violence. RESULTS: Every show had at least 1 risk behavior. Violence was pervasive, occurring in 70% of episodes overall and for 2.3 seconds per episode minute. Alcohol was also common (58% of shows, 2.3 seconds per minute), followed by sex (53% of episodes, 0.26 seconds per minute), and smoking (31% of shows, 0.54 seconds per minute). TV Parental Guidelines did not discriminate prevalence estimates of TV episode violence. Although TV-Y7 shows had significantly less substance use, other categories were poor at discriminating substance use, which was as common in TV-14 as TV-MA shows. Sex and gory violence were the only behaviors demonstrating a graded increase in prevalence and salience for older-child rating categories. CONCLUSIONS: TV Parental Guidelines ratings were ineffective in discriminating shows for 3 out of 4 behaviors studied. Even in shows rated for children as young as 7 years, violence was prevalent, prominent, and salient. TV ratings were most effective for identification of sexual behavior and gory violence. PMID:27550985

An Experiment on Salience as a Function of the Discriminatory Power of an Attribute.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Finn, Michael S.

Carter's model of affective relations (1965) and Chaffee's research on cognitive discrepancies and communication (1959) are used to test the hypotheses that increasing an attribute's discriminatory power will increase attribute salience and that increasing the exclusiveness of an object's attributes will increase objective salience. The current…

Topic Transition in Educational Videos Using Visually Salient Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gandhi, Ankit; Biswas, Arijit; Deshmukh, Om

2015-01-01

In this paper, we propose a visual saliency algorithm for automatically finding the topic transition points in an educational video. First, we propose a method for assigning a saliency score to each word extracted from an educational video. We design several mid-level features that are indicative of visual saliency. The optimal feature combination…

Salience Is Only Briefly Represented: Evidence from Probe-Detection Performance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Donk, Mieke; Soesman, Leroy

2010-01-01

Salient objects in the visual field tend to capture attention. The present study aimed to examine the time-course of salience effects using a probe-detection task. Eight experiments investigated how the salience of different orientation singletons affected probe reaction time as a function of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the…

Transverse Compounding in the Discriminative Learning of Moderately and Mildly Mentally Retarded Adolescents.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Barnes, T. R.; Zeaman, D.

1983-01-01

Results of a study with 10 moderately retarded adolescents on the salience of transverse compound stimuli (combinations of positive and negative cues) were interpreted as an instance of developmental changes in unlearned stimulus salience hierarchies. The low saliency of transverse compounds was suggested to be related to reading difficulties.…

Saliency in VR: How Do People Explore Virtual Environments?

PubMed

Sitzmann, Vincent; Serrano, Ana; Pavel, Amy; Agrawala, Maneesh; Gutierrez, Diego; Masia, Belen; Wetzstein, Gordon

2018-04-01

Understanding how people explore immersive virtual environments is crucial for many applications, such as designing virtual reality (VR) content, developing new compression algorithms, or learning computational models of saliency or visual attention. Whereas a body of recent work has focused on modeling saliency in desktop viewing conditions, VR is very different from these conditions in that viewing behavior is governed by stereoscopic vision and by the complex interaction of head orientation, gaze, and other kinematic constraints. To further our understanding of viewing behavior and saliency in VR, we capture and analyze gaze and head orientation data of 169 users exploring stereoscopic, static omni-directional panoramas, for a total of 1980 head and gaze trajectories for three different viewing conditions. We provide a thorough analysis of our data, which leads to several important insights, such as the existence of a particular fixation bias, which we then use to adapt existing saliency predictors to immersive VR conditions. In addition, we explore other applications of our data and analysis, including automatic alignment of VR video cuts, panorama thumbnails, panorama video synopsis, and saliency-basedcompression.

Debiasing the disposition effect by reducing the saliency of information about a stock’s purchase priceα

PubMed Central

Rangel, Antonio

2015-01-01

The disposition effect refers to the empirical fact that investors have a higher propensity to sell risky assets with capital gains compared to risky assets with capital losses, and it has been associated with low trading performance. We use a stock trading laboratory experiment to investigate if it is possible to reduce subjects’ tendency to exhibit a disposition effect by making information about a stock’s purchase price, and thus about capital gains and losses, less salient. We compare two experimental conditions: a high-saliency condition in which the purchase price of a stock is prominently displayed by the trading software, and a low-saliency condition in which it is not displayed at all. We find that individuals exhibit a disposition effect in the high-saliency condition, and that the effect is 25% smaller in the low-saliency condition. This suggests that it is possible to debias the disposition effect by reducing the saliency with which information about a stock’s purchase price is displayed on financial statements and online trading platforms. PMID:25774069

Debiasing the disposition effect by reducing the saliency of information about a stock's purchase price.

PubMed

Frydman, Cary; Rangel, Antonio

2014-11-01

The disposition effect refers to the empirical fact that investors have a higher propensity to sell risky assets with capital gains compared to risky assets with capital losses, and it has been associated with low trading performance. We use a stock trading laboratory experiment to investigate if it is possible to reduce subjects' tendency to exhibit a disposition effect by making information about a stock's purchase price, and thus about capital gains and losses, less salient. We compare two experimental conditions: a high-saliency condition in which the purchase price of a stock is prominently displayed by the trading software, and a low-saliency condition in which it is not displayed at all. We find that individuals exhibit a disposition effect in the high-saliency condition, and that the effect is 25% smaller in the low-saliency condition. This suggests that it is possible to debias the disposition effect by reducing the saliency with which information about a stock's purchase price is displayed on financial statements and online trading platforms.

Salience Network Connectivity Modulates Skin Conductance Responses in Predicting Arousal Experience

PubMed Central

Xia, Chenjie; Touroutoglou, Alexandra; Quigley, Karen S.; Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Dickerson, Bradford C.

2017-01-01

Individual differences in arousal experience have been linked to differences in resting-state salience network connectivity strength. In this study, we investigated how adding task-related skin conductance responses (SCR), a measure of sympathetic autonomic nervous system activity, can predict additional variance in arousal experience. Thirty-nine young adults rated their subjective experience of arousal to emotionally evocative images while SCRs were measured. They also underwent a separate resting-state fMRI scan. Greater SCR reactivity (an increased number of task-related SCRs) to emotional images and stronger intrinsic salience network connectivity independently predicted more intense experiences of arousal. Salience network connectivity further moderated the effect of SCR reactivity: In individuals with weak salience network connectivity, SCR reactivity more significantly predicted arousal experience, whereas in those with strong salience network connectivity, SCR reactivity played little role in predicting arousal experience. This interaction illustrates the degeneracy in neural mechanisms driving individual differences in arousal experience and highlights the intricate interplay between connectivity in central visceromotor neural circuitry and peripherally expressed autonomic responses in shaping arousal experience. PMID:27991182

Women's hormone levels modulate the motivational salience of facial attractiveness and sexual dimorphism.

PubMed

Wang, Hongyi; Hahn, Amanda C; Fisher, Claire I; DeBruine, Lisa M; Jones, Benedict C

2014-12-01

The physical attractiveness of faces is positively correlated with both behavioral and neural measures of their motivational salience. Although previous work suggests that hormone levels modulate women's perceptions of others' facial attractiveness, studies have not yet investigated whether hormone levels also modulate the motivational salience of facial characteristics. To address this issue, we investigated the relationships between within-subject changes in women's salivary hormone levels (estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, and estradiol-to-progesterone ratio) and within-subject changes in the motivational salience of attractiveness and sexual dimorphism in male and female faces. The motivational salience of physically attractive faces in general and feminine female faces, but not masculine male faces, was greater in test sessions where women had high testosterone levels. Additionally, the reward value of sexually dimorphic faces in general and attractive female faces, but not attractive male faces, was greater in test sessions where women had high estradiol-to-progesterone ratios. These results provide the first evidence that the motivational salience of facial attractiveness and sexual dimorphism is modulated by within-woman changes in hormone levels. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Infrared small target enhancement: grey level mapping based on improved sigmoid transformation and saliency histogram

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wan, Minjie; Gu, Guohua; Qian, Weixian; Ren, Kan; Chen, Qian

2018-06-01

Infrared (IR) small target enhancement plays a significant role in modern infrared search and track (IRST) systems and is the basic technique of target detection and tracking. In this paper, a coarse-to-fine grey level mapping method using improved sigmoid transformation and saliency histogram is designed to enhance IR small targets under different backgrounds. For the stage of rough enhancement, the intensity histogram is modified via an improved sigmoid function so as to narrow the regular intensity range of background as much as possible. For the part of further enhancement, a linear transformation is accomplished based on a saliency histogram constructed by averaging the cumulative saliency values provided by a saliency map. Compared with other typical methods, the presented method can achieve both better visual performances and quantitative evaluations.

Mortality salience increases personal relevance of the norm of reciprocity.

PubMed

Schindler, Simon; Reinhard, Marc-André; Stahlberg, Dagmar

2012-10-01

Research on terror management theory found evidence that people under mortality salience strive to live up to salient cultural norms and values, like egalitarianism, pacifism, or helpfulness. A basic, strongly internalized norm in most human societies is the norm of reciprocity: people should support those who supported them (i.e., positive reciprocity), and people should injure those who injured them (i.e., negative reciprocity), respectively. In an experiment (N = 98; 47 women, 51 men), mortality salience overall significantly increased personal relevance of the norm of reciprocity (M = 4.45, SD = 0.65) compared to a control condition (M = 4.19, SD = 0.59). Specifically, under mortality salience there was higher motivation to punish those who treated them unfavourably (negative norm of reciprocity). Unexpectedly, relevance of the norm of positive reciprocity remained unaffected by mortality salience. Implications and limitations are discussed.

Diversification of visual media retrieval results using saliency detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Muratov, Oleg; Boato, Giulia; De Natale, Franesco G. B.

2013-03-01

Diversification of retrieval results allows for better and faster search. Recently there has been proposed different methods for diversification of image retrieval results mainly utilizing text information and techniques imported from natural language processing domain. However, images contain visual information that is impossible to describe in text and the use of visual features is inevitable. Visual saliency is information about the main object of an image implicitly included by humans while creating visual content. For this reason it is naturally to exploit this information for the task of diversification of the content. In this work we study whether visual saliency can be used for the task of diversification and propose a method for re-ranking image retrieval results using saliency. The evaluation has shown that the use of saliency information results in higher diversity of retrieval results.

Predictors of Nurses' Intentions to Administer As-Needed Opioid Analgesics for Pain Relief to Postoperative Orthopaedic Patients in the Acute Care Setting.

PubMed

Taylor, Colleen Y; Sheu, Jiunn-Jye; Chen, Huey-Shys; Glassman, Tavis; Dake, Joseph

Patients undergoing orthopaedic surgery experience severe postoperative pain that is frequently undertreated. No study was found that examined the predictors of nurses' intentions to administer as needed (PRN) opioid analgesics for postoperative pain relief. The purpose of this study was to determine what constructs from the Integrated Behavioral Model (IBM) can predict nurses' intentions to administer PRN opioid analgesics for pain relief to hospitalized postoperative orthopaedic patients. A nonexperimental, cross-sectional quantitative format was used. The sample consisted of 800 nurses. Data collection was done by survey. Path analysis revealed the significant predictors of nurses' intention to administer opioid analgesics to be self-efficacy (β= 0.15), normative beliefs (β= 0.21), and salience (importance) of the behavior (β= 0.25). The study showed that the IBM constructs are useful for predicting intentions toward performance of a professional behavior. The inclusion of self-efficacy, underlying beliefs, and salience of the behavior was new and unique contributions to the existing body of knowledge.

Magnetoencephalographic Signals Identify Stages in Real-Life Decision Processes

PubMed Central

Braeutigam, Sven; Stins, John F.; Rose, Steven P. R.; Swithenby, Stephen J.; Ambler, Tim

2001-01-01

We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to study the dynamics of neural responses in eight subjects engaged in shopping for day-to-day items from supermarket shelves. This behavior not only has personal and economic importance but also provides an example of an experience that is both personal and shared between individuals. The shopping experience enables the exploration of neural mechanisms underlying choice based on complex memories. Choosing among different brands of closely related products activated a robust sequence of signals within the first second after the presentation of the choice images. This sequence engaged first the visual cortex (80-100 ms), then as the images were analyzed, predominantly the left temporal regions (310-340 ms). At longer latency, characteristic neural activetion was found in motor speech areas (500-520 ms) for images requiring low salience choices with respect to previous (brand) memory, and in right parietal cortex for high salience choices (850-920 ms). We argue that the neural processes associated with the particular brand-choice stimulus can be separated into identifiable stages through observation of MEG responses and knowledge of functional anatomy. PMID:12018772

MPEG-4 AVC saliency map computation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ammar, M.; Mitrea, M.; Hasnaoui, M.

2014-02-01

A saliency map provides information about the regions inside some visual content (image, video, ...) at which a human observer will spontaneously look at. For saliency maps computation, current research studies consider the uncompressed (pixel) representation of the visual content and extract various types of information (intensity, color, orientation, motion energy) which are then fusioned. This paper goes one step further and computes the saliency map directly from the MPEG-4 AVC stream syntax elements with minimal decoding operations. In this respect, an a-priori in-depth study on the MPEG-4 AVC syntax elements is first carried out so as to identify the entities appealing the visual attention. Secondly, the MPEG-4 AVC reference software is completed with software tools allowing the parsing of these elements and their subsequent usage in objective benchmarking experiments. This way, it is demonstrated that an MPEG-4 saliency map can be given by a combination of static saliency and motion maps. This saliency map is experimentally validated under a robust watermarking framework. When included in an m-QIM (multiple symbols Quantization Index Modulation) insertion method, PSNR average gains of 2.43 dB, 2.15dB, and 2.37 dB are obtained for data payload of 10, 20 and 30 watermarked blocks per I frame, i.e. about 30, 60, and 90 bits/second, respectively. These quantitative results are obtained out of processing 2 hours of heterogeneous video content.

Manipulation, salience, and nudges.

PubMed

Noggle, Robert

2018-03-01

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler recommend helping people make better decisions by employing 'nudges', which they define as noncoercive methods of influencing choice for the better. Not surprisingly, healthcare practitioners and public policy professionals have become interested in whether nudges might be a promising method of improving health-related behaviors without resorting to heavy-handed methods such as coercion, deception, or government regulation. Many nudges seem unobjectionable as they merely improve the quality and quantity available for the decision-maker. However, other nudges influence decision-making in ways that do not involve providing more and better information. Nudges of this sort raise concerns about manipulation. This paper will focus on noninformational nudges that operate by changing the salience of various options. It will survey two approaches to understanding manipulation, one which sees manipulation as a kind of pressure, and one that sees it as a kind of trickery. On the pressure view, salience nudges do not appear to be manipulative. However, on the trickery view (which the author favors), salience nudges will be manipulative if they increase the salience so that it is disproportionate to that fact's true relevance and importance for the decision at hand. By contrast, salience nudges will not be manipulative if they merely highlight some fact that is true and important for the decision at hand. The paper concludes by providing examples of both manipulative and nonmanipulative salience nudges. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Visual saliency detection based on in-depth analysis of sparse representation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Xin; Shen, Siqiu; Ning, Chen

2018-03-01

Visual saliency detection has been receiving great attention in recent years since it can facilitate a wide range of applications in computer vision. A variety of saliency models have been proposed based on different assumptions within which saliency detection via sparse representation is one of the newly arisen approaches. However, most existing sparse representation-based saliency detection methods utilize partial characteristics of sparse representation, lacking of in-depth analysis. Thus, they may have limited detection performance. Motivated by this, this paper proposes an algorithm for detecting visual saliency based on in-depth analysis of sparse representation. A number of discriminative dictionaries are first learned with randomly sampled image patches by means of inner product-based dictionary atom classification. Then, the input image is partitioned into many image patches, and these patches are classified into salient and nonsalient ones based on the in-depth analysis of sparse coding coefficients. Afterward, sparse reconstruction errors are calculated for the salient and nonsalient patch sets. By investigating the sparse reconstruction errors, the most salient atoms, which tend to be from the most salient region, are screened out and taken away from the discriminative dictionaries. Finally, an effective method is exploited for saliency map generation with the reduced dictionaries. Comprehensive evaluations on publicly available datasets and comparisons with some state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Dose-dependent social-cognitive effects of intranasal oxytocin delivered with novel Breath Powered device in adults with autism spectrum disorder: a randomized placebo-controlled double-blind crossover trial

PubMed Central

Quintana, D S; Westlye, L T; Hope, S; Nærland, T; Elvsåshagen, T; Dørum, E; Rustan, Ø; Valstad, M; Rezvaya, L; Lishaugen, H; Stensønes, E; Yaqub, S; Smerud, K T; Mahmoud, R A; Djupesland, P G; Andreassen, O A

2017-01-01

The neuropeptide oxytocin has shown promise as a treatment for symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, clinical research progress has been hampered by a poor understanding of oxytocin’s dose–response and sub-optimal intranasal delivery methods. We examined two doses of oxytocin delivered using a novel Breath Powered intranasal delivery device designed to improve direct nose-to-brain activity in a double-blind, crossover, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. In a randomized sequence of single-dose sessions, 17 male adults with ASD received 8 international units (IU) oxytocin, 24IU oxytocin or placebo followed by four social-cognitive tasks. We observed an omnibus main effect of treatment on the primary outcome measure of overt emotion salience as measured by emotional ratings of faces (η2=0.18). Compared to placebo, 8IU treatment increased overt emotion salience (P=0.02, d=0.63). There was no statistically significant increase after 24IU treatment (P=0.12, d=0.4). The effects after 8IU oxytocin were observed despite no significant increase in peripheral blood plasma oxytocin concentrations. We found no significant effects for reading the mind in the eyes task performance or secondary outcome social-cognitive tasks (emotional dot probe and face-morphing). To our knowledge, this is the first trial to assess the dose-dependent effects of a single oxytocin administration in autism, with results indicating that a low dose of oxytocin can significantly modulate overt emotion salience despite minimal systemic exposure. PMID:28534875

Dose-dependent social-cognitive effects of intranasal oxytocin delivered with novel Breath Powered device in adults with autism spectrum disorder: a randomized placebo-controlled double-blind crossover trial.

PubMed

Quintana, D S; Westlye, L T; Hope, S; Nærland, T; Elvsåshagen, T; Dørum, E; Rustan, Ø; Valstad, M; Rezvaya, L; Lishaugen, H; Stensønes, E; Yaqub, S; Smerud, K T; Mahmoud, R A; Djupesland, P G; Andreassen, O A

2017-05-23

The neuropeptide oxytocin has shown promise as a treatment for symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, clinical research progress has been hampered by a poor understanding of oxytocin's dose-response and sub-optimal intranasal delivery methods. We examined two doses of oxytocin delivered using a novel Breath Powered intranasal delivery device designed to improve direct nose-to-brain activity in a double-blind, crossover, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. In a randomized sequence of single-dose sessions, 17 male adults with ASD received 8 international units (IU) oxytocin, 24IU oxytocin or placebo followed by four social-cognitive tasks. We observed an omnibus main effect of treatment on the primary outcome measure of overt emotion salience as measured by emotional ratings of faces (η 2 =0.18). Compared to placebo, 8IU treatment increased overt emotion salience (P=0.02, d=0.63). There was no statistically significant increase after 24IU treatment (P=0.12, d=0.4). The effects after 8IU oxytocin were observed despite no significant increase in peripheral blood plasma oxytocin concentrations. We found no significant effects for reading the mind in the eyes task performance or secondary outcome social-cognitive tasks (emotional dot probe and face-morphing). To our knowledge, this is the first trial to assess the dose-dependent effects of a single oxytocin administration in autism, with results indicating that a low dose of oxytocin can significantly modulate overt emotion salience despite minimal systemic exposure.

Stepchildren, community disadvantage, and physical injury in a child abuse incident: a preliminary investigation.

PubMed

D'Alessio, Stewart J; Stolzenberg, Lisa

2012-01-01

It is proffered that stepchildren are more likely than genetic children to be physically abused because they are unable to ensure the genetic survival of their adoptive parents. This abuse is theorized to be more pronounced in communities where social and economic resources are scarce. The salience of this cross-level interaction hinges on the assumption that the limited resources of a family are first allocated to genetic offspring because these children, unlike their nongenetic siblings, carry the genes of their parents. A multilevel analysis of child abuse incidents reported to police in 133 U.S. cities during 2005 shows that in cities with a high level of community disadvantage, stepchildren are much more apt than are genetic children to suffer a physical injury in a child abuse incident. Such a finding buttresses the position articulated by proponents of sociobiology.

Why do children pay more attention to grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences?

PubMed

Sundara, Megha

2018-05-01

Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for the salience of grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences. We measured 22-month-olds' listening times to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with third person singular -s. Crucially, by cross-splicing the speech stimuli, acoustic enhancement and sensory and recall advantages were fully crossed. Only children presented with the verb in sentence-final position, a position with sensory and recall advantages, distinguished between the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Thus, sensory and recall advantages alone were necessary and sufficient to make grammatical morphemes at ends of sentences salient. These general processing constraints privilege ends of sentences over middles, regardless of the acoustic enhancement.

Effects of grammatical categories on children's visual language processing: Evidence from event-related brain potentials.

PubMed

Weber-Fox, Christine; Hart, Laura J; Spruill, John E

2006-07-01

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and frequency. The categories included nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and articles. The findings indicate that by the age of 9-10 years, children exhibit robust neural indicators differentiating grammatical categories; however, it is also evident that development of language processing is not yet adult-like at this age. The current findings are consistent with the hypothesis that for beginning readers a variety of cues and characteristics interact to affect processing of different grammatical categories and indicate the need to take into account linguistic functions, prosodic salience, and grammatical complexity as they relate to the development of language abilities.

The visual attention saliency map for movie retrospection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rogalska, Anna; Napieralski, Piotr

2018-04-01

The visual saliency map is becoming important and challenging for many scientific disciplines (robotic systems, psychophysics, cognitive neuroscience and computer science). Map created by the model indicates possible salient regions by taking into consideration face presence and motion which is essential in motion pictures. By combining we can obtain credible saliency map with a low computational cost.

The Effects of Dimensional Salience, Pretraining Task, and Developmental Level Upon Bidimensional Processing in a Matching Task.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Katsuyama, Ronald M.; Reid, Amy

Purposes of this study are to determine the effects of (1) preassessed dimensional salience upon performance in a bi-dimensional matching task, and (2) pretraining conditions expected to facilitate bi-dimensional processing. An additional aim was to elucidate a model of development involving changing salience hierarchies by comparing the effects…

The Role of Ethnic School Segregation for Adolescents' Religious Salience

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Van der Bracht, Koen; D'hondt, Fanny; Van Houtte, Mieke; Van de Putte, Bart; Stevens, Peter A. J.

2016-01-01

Public concerns over the possible effects of school segregation on immigrant and ethnic majority religiosity have been on the rise over the last few years. In this paper we focus on (1) the association between ethnic school composition and religious salience, (2) intergenerational differences in religious salience and (3) the role of ethnic school…

How does legal status matter for oral health care among Mexican-origin children in California?

PubMed

Oropesa, R S; Landale, Nancy S; Hillemeier, Marianne M

2017-12-01

This research examines the relationship between legal status and oral health care among Mexican-origin children. Using the 2001-2014 California Health Interview Surveys, the objectives are: (1) to demonstrate population-level changes in the legal statuses of parents, the legal statuses of children, and the likelihood of receiving dental care; (2) to reveal how the roles of legal status boundaries in dental care are changing; and (3) to determine whether the salience of these boundaries is attributable to legal status per se. The results reveal increases in the native-born share and dental care utilization for the total Mexican-origin population. Although dental care was primarily linked to parental citizenship early in this period, parental legal statuses are no longer a unique source of variation in utilization (despite the greater likelihood of insurance among citizens). These results imply that future gains in utilization among Mexican-origin children will mainly come from overcoming barriers to care among the native born.

Oxytocin enhances brain function in children with autism.

PubMed

Gordon, Ilanit; Vander Wyk, Brent C; Bennett, Randi H; Cordeaux, Cara; Lucas, Molly V; Eilbott, Jeffrey A; Zagoory-Sharon, Orna; Leckman, James F; Feldman, Ruth; Pelphrey, Kevin A

2013-12-24

Following intranasal administration of oxytocin (OT), we measured, via functional MRI, changes in brain activity during judgments of socially (Eyes) and nonsocially (Vehicles) meaningful pictures in 17 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD). OT increased activity in the striatum, the middle frontal gyrus, the medial prefrontal cortex, the right orbitofrontal cortex, and the left superior temporal sulcus. In the striatum, nucleus accumbens, left posterior superior temporal sulcus, and left premotor cortex, OT increased activity during social judgments and decreased activity during nonsocial judgments. Changes in salivary OT concentrations from baseline to 30 min postadministration were positively associated with increased activity in the right amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex during social vs. nonsocial judgments. OT may thus selectively have an impact on salience and hedonic evaluations of socially meaningful stimuli in children with ASD, and thereby facilitate social attunement. These findings further the development of a neurophysiological systems-level understanding of mechanisms by which OT may enhance social functioning in children with ASD.

Interactions of the Salience Network and Its Subsystems with the Default-Mode and the Central-Executive Networks in Normal Aging and Mild Cognitive Impairment.

PubMed

Chand, Ganesh B; Wu, Junjie; Hajjar, Ihab; Qiu, Deqiang

2017-09-01

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigations suggest that the intrinsically organized large-scale networks and the interaction between them might be crucial for cognitive activities. A triple network model, which consists of the default-mode network, salience network, and central-executive network, has been recently used to understand the connectivity patterns of the cognitively normal brains versus the brains with disorders. This model suggests that the salience network dynamically controls the default-mode and central-executive networks in healthy young individuals. However, the patterns of interactions have remained largely unknown in healthy aging or those with cognitive decline. In this study, we assess the patterns of interactions between the three networks using dynamical causal modeling in resting state fMRI data and compare them between subjects with normal cognition and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In healthy elderly subjects, our analysis showed that the salience network, especially its dorsal subnetwork, modulates the interaction between the default-mode network and the central-executive network (Mann-Whitney U test; p < 0.05), which was consistent with the pattern of interaction reported in young adults. In contrast, this pattern of modulation by salience network was disrupted in MCI (p < 0.05). Furthermore, the degree of disruption in salience network control correlated significantly with lower overall cognitive performance measured by Montreal Cognitive Assessment (r = 0.295; p < 0.05). This study suggests that a disruption of the salience network control, especially the dorsal salience network, over other networks provides a neuronal basis for cognitive decline and may be a candidate neuroimaging biomarker of cognitive impairment.

A Neural Computational Model of Incentive Salience

PubMed Central

Zhang, Jun; Berridge, Kent C.; Tindell, Amy J.; Smith, Kyle S.; Aldridge, J. Wayne

2009-01-01

Incentive salience is a motivational property with ‘magnet-like’ qualities. When attributed to reward-predicting stimuli (cues), incentive salience triggers a pulse of ‘wanting’ and an individual is pulled toward the cues and reward. A key computational question is how incentive salience is generated during a cue re-encounter, which combines both learning and the state of limbic brain mechanisms. Learning processes, such as temporal-difference models, provide one way for stimuli to acquire cached predictive values of rewards. However, empirical data show that subsequent incentive values are also modulated on the fly by dynamic fluctuation in physiological states, altering cached values in ways requiring additional motivation mechanisms. Dynamic modulation of incentive salience for a Pavlovian conditioned stimulus (CS or cue) occurs during certain states, without necessarily requiring (re)learning about the cue. In some cases, dynamic modulation of cue value occurs during states that are quite novel, never having been experienced before, and even prior to experience of the associated unconditioned reward in the new state. Such cases can include novel drug-induced mesolimbic activation and addictive incentive-sensitization, as well as natural appetite states such as salt appetite. Dynamic enhancement specifically raises the incentive salience of an appropriate CS, without necessarily changing that of other CSs. Here we suggest a new computational model that modulates incentive salience by integrating changing physiological states with prior learning. We support the model with behavioral and neurobiological data from empirical tests that demonstrate dynamic elevations in cue-triggered motivation (involving natural salt appetite, and drug-induced intoxication and sensitization). Our data call for a dynamic model of incentive salience, such as presented here. Computational models can adequately capture fluctuations in cue-triggered ‘wanting’ only by incorporating modulation of previously learned values by natural appetite and addiction-related states. PMID:19609350

An existentialist view on mortality salience effects: personal hardiness, death-thought accessibility, and cultural worldview defence.

PubMed

Florian, V; Mikulincer, M; Hirschberger, G

2001-09-01

Two studies examined the possible moderating role of hardiness on reactions to mortality salience inductions. A sample of 240 Israeli undergraduate students completed a hardiness scale, were exposed to a mortality salience or control induction, and then either rated the severity and punishment of 10 social transgressions (Study 1, N = 120) or performed a word-stem completion task, which tapped the accessibility of death-related thoughts (Study 2, N = 120). Results indicated that a mortality salience induction led to more severe judgments of social transgressions as well as to more severe punishments than a control induction only among participants scoring low in the hardiness scale. However, a mortality salience induction led to a higher cognitive accessibility of death-related thoughts than a control condition regardless of participants' hardiness scores. The discussion emphasizes the importance of considering inner resources when examining reactions to mortality reminders.

Mortality salience and morality: thinking about death makes people less utilitarian.

PubMed

Trémolière, Bastien; Neys, Wim De; Bonnefon, Jean-François

2012-09-01

According to the dual-process model of moral judgment, utilitarian responses to moral conflict draw on limited cognitive resources. Terror Management Theory, in parallel, postulates that mortality salience mobilizes these resources to suppress thoughts of death out of focal attention. Consequently, we predicted that individuals under mortality salience would be less likely to give utilitarian responses to moral conflicts. Two experiments corroborated this hypothesis. Experiment 1 showed that utilitarian responses to non-lethal harm conflicts were less frequent when participants were reminded of their mortality. Experiment 2 showed that the detrimental effect of mortality salience on utilitarian conflict judgments was comparable to that of an extreme concurrent cognitive load. These findings raise the question of whether private judgment and public debate about controversial moral issues might be shaped by mortality salience effects, since these issues (e.g., assisted suicide) often involve matters of life and death. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Ideological and personal zeal reactions to threat among people with high self-esteem: motivated promotion focus.

PubMed

McGregor, Ian; Gailliot, Matthew T; Vasquez, Noelia A; Nash, Kyle A

2007-11-01

After a mortality salience manipulation, participants completed measures of either ideological zeal (Study 1) or personal project zeal (Study 3). Mortality salience increased both kinds of zeal but only among participants with high self-esteem. High self-esteem was positively correlated with dispositional tendencies toward promotion focus, action orientation, and behavioral activation; it was negatively correlated with behavioral inhibition and rumination (Study 2). These findings clarify the role of dispositional self-esteem in mortality salience research and confirm that, as has been found with various other threats, zealous reactions to mortality salience are most pronounced among participants with high self-esteem. Results support a regulatory focus perspective on zealous reactions to threat. Ideological and personal zeal reflect motivated promotion focus reactions that are rewarding because they decrease the motivational relevance, regulatory fit, and subjective salience of threats.

University-Affiliated Alcohol Marketing Enhances the Incentive Salience of Alcohol Cues.

PubMed

Bartholow, Bruce D; Loersch, Chris; Ito, Tiffany A; Levsen, Meredith P; Volpert-Esmond, Hannah I; Fleming, Kimberly A; Bolls, Paul; Carter, Brooke K

2018-01-01

We tested whether affiliating beer brands with universities enhances the incentive salience of those brands for underage drinkers. In Study 1, 128 undergraduates viewed beer cues while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Results showed that beer cues paired with in-group backgrounds (logos for students' universities) evoked an enhanced P3 ERP component, a neural index of incentive salience. This effect varied according to students' levels of identification with their university, and the amplitude of the P3 response prospectively predicted alcohol use over 1 month. In Study 2 ( N = 104), we used a naturalistic advertisement exposure to experimentally create in-group brand associations and found that this manipulation caused an increase in the incentive salience of the beer brand. These data provide the first evidence that marketing beer via affiliating it with students' universities enhances the incentive salience of the brand for underage students and that this effect has implications for their alcohol involvement.

Greed, death, and values: from terror management to transcendence management theory.

PubMed

Cozzolino, Philip J; Staples, Angela D; Meyers, Lawrence S; Samboceti, Jamie

2004-03-01

Research supporting terror management theory has shown that participants facing their death (via mortality salience) exhibit more greed than do control participants. The present research attempts to distinguish mortality salience from other forms of mortality awareness. Specifically, the authors look to reports of near-death experiences and posttraumatic growth which reveal that many people who nearly die come to view seeking wealth and possession as empty and meaningless. Guided by these reports, a manipulation called death reflection was generated. In Study 1, highly extrinsic participants who experienced death reflection exhibited intrinsic behavior. In Study 2, the manipulation was validated, and in Study 3, death reflection and mortality salience manipulations were compared. Results showed that mortality salience led highly extrinsic participants to manifest greed, whereas death reflection again generated intrinsic, unselfish behavior. The construct of value orientation is discussed along with the contrast between death reflection manipulation and mortality salience.

The research and application of visual saliency and adaptive support vector machine in target tracking field.

PubMed

Chen, Yuantao; Xu, Weihong; Kuang, Fangjun; Gao, Shangbing

2013-01-01

The efficient target tracking algorithm researches have become current research focus of intelligent robots. The main problems of target tracking process in mobile robot face environmental uncertainty. They are very difficult to estimate the target states, illumination change, target shape changes, complex backgrounds, and other factors and all affect the occlusion in tracking robustness. To further improve the target tracking's accuracy and reliability, we present a novel target tracking algorithm to use visual saliency and adaptive support vector machine (ASVM). Furthermore, the paper's algorithm has been based on the mixture saliency of image features. These features include color, brightness, and sport feature. The execution process used visual saliency features and those common characteristics have been expressed as the target's saliency. Numerous experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and timeliness of the proposed target tracking algorithm in video sequences where the target objects undergo large changes in pose, scale, and illumination.

The Causal Ordering of Prominence and Salience in Identity Theory: An Empirical Examination

PubMed Central

Brenner, Philip S.; Serpe, Richard T.; Stryker, Sheldon

2016-01-01

Identity theory invokes two distinct but related concepts, identity salience and prominence, to explain how the organization of identities that make up the self impacts the probability that a given identity is situationally enacted. However, much extant research has failed to clearly distinguish between salience and prominence, and their empirical relationship has not been adequately investigated, impeding a solid understanding of the significance and role of each in a general theory of the self. This study examines their causal ordering using three waves of panel data from 48 universities focusing on respondents’ identities as science students. Analyses strongly support a causal ordering from prominence to salience. We provide theoretical and empirical grounds to justify this ordering while acknowledging potential variation in its strength across identities. Finally, we offer recommendations about the use of prominence and salience when measures of one or both are available or when analyses use cross-sectional data. PMID:27284212

Dual Low-Rank Pursuit: Learning Salient Features for Saliency Detection.

PubMed

Lang, Congyan; Feng, Jiashi; Feng, Songhe; Wang, Jingdong; Yan, Shuicheng

2016-06-01

Saliency detection is an important procedure for machines to understand visual world as humans do. In this paper, we consider a specific saliency detection problem of predicting human eye fixations when they freely view natural images, and propose a novel dual low-rank pursuit (DLRP) method. DLRP learns saliency-aware feature transformations by utilizing available supervision information and constructs discriminative bases for effectively detecting human fixation points under the popular low-rank and sparsity-pursuit framework. Benefiting from the embedded high-level information in the supervised learning process, DLRP is able to predict fixations accurately without performing the expensive object segmentation as in the previous works. Comprehensive experiments clearly show the superiority of the proposed DLRP method over the established state-of-the-art methods. We also empirically demonstrate that DLRP provides stronger generalization performance across different data sets and inherits the advantages of both the bottom-up- and top-down-based saliency detection methods.

Policy impacts of ecosystem services knowledge

PubMed Central

Posner, Stephen M.; McKenzie, Emily; Ricketts, Taylor H.

2016-01-01

Research about ecosystem services (ES) often aims to generate knowledge that influences policies and institutions for conservation and human development. However, we have limited understanding of how decision-makers use ES knowledge or what factors facilitate use. Here we address this gap and report on, to our knowledge, the first quantitative analysis of the factors and conditions that explain the policy impact of ES knowledge. We analyze a global sample of cases where similar ES knowledge was generated and applied to decision-making. We first test whether attributes of ES knowledge themselves predict different measures of impact on decisions. We find that legitimacy of knowledge is more often associated with impact than either the credibility or salience of the knowledge. We also examine whether predictor variables related to the science-to-policy process and the contextual conditions of a case are significant in predicting impact. Our findings indicate that, although many factors are important, attributes of the knowledge and aspects of the science-to-policy process that enhance legitimacy best explain the impact of ES science on decision-making. Our results are consistent with both theory and previous qualitative assessments in suggesting that the attributes and perceptions of scientific knowledge and process within which knowledge is coproduced are important determinants of whether that knowledge leads to action. PMID:26831101

Transitioning between Work and Family Roles as a Function of Boundary Flexibility and Role Salience

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Winkel, Doan E.; Clayton, Russell W.

2010-01-01

This study investigates the manner in which people separate their work and family roles and how they manage the boundaries of these two important roles. Specifically, we focus on how role flexibility and salience influence transitions between roles. Results indicate that the ability and willingness to flex a role boundary and role salience are…

A New Method for Calibrating Perceptual Salience across Dimensions in Infants: The Case of Color vs. Luminance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaldy, Zsuzsa; Blaser, Erik A.; Leslie, Alan M.

2006-01-01

We report a new method for calibrating differences in perceptual salience across feature dimensions, in infants. The problem of inter-dimensional salience arises in many areas of infant studies, but a general method for addressing the problem has not previously been described. Our method is based on a preferential looking paradigm, adapted to…

Testing Saliency Parameters for Automatic Target Recognition

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Pandya, Sagar

2012-01-01

A bottom-up visual attention model (the saliency model) is tested to enhance the performance of Automated Target Recognition (ATR). JPL has developed an ATR system that identifies regions of interest (ROI) using a trained OT-MACH filter, and then classifies potential targets as true- or false-positives using machine-learning techniques. In this project, saliency is used as a pre-processing step to reduce the space for performing OT-MACH filtering. Saliency parameters, such as output level and orientation weight, are tuned to detect known target features. Preliminary results are promising and future work entails a rigrous and parameter-based search to gain maximum insight about this method.

Relative saliency in change signals affects perceptual comparison and decision processes in change detection.

PubMed

Yang, Cheng-Ta

2011-12-01

Change detection requires perceptual comparison and decision processes on different features of multiattribute objects. How relative salience between two feature-changes influences the processes has not been addressed. This study used the systems factorial technology to investigate the processes when detecting changes in a Gabor patch with visual inputs from orientation and spatial frequency channels. Two feature-changes were equally salient in Experiment 1, but a frequency-change was more salient than an orientation-change in Experiment 2. Results showed that all four observers adopted parallel self-terminating processing with limited- to unlimited-capacity processing in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, one observer used parallel self-terminating processing with unlimited-capacity processing, and the others adopted serial self-terminating processing with limited- to unlimited-capacity processing to detect changes. Postexperimental interview revealed that subjective utility of feature information underlay the adoption of a decision strategy. These results highlight that observers alter decision strategies in change detection depending on the relative saliency in change signals, with relative saliency being determined by both physical salience and subjective weight of feature information. When relative salience exists, individual differences in the process characteristics emerge.

On understanding idiomatic language: The salience hypothesis assessed by ERPs.

PubMed

Laurent, Jean-Paul; Denhières, Guy; Passerieux, Christine; Iakimova, Galina; Hardy-Baylé, Marie-Christine

2006-01-12

Giora's [Giora, R., 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: the Graded Salience Hypothesis. Cogn. Linguist. 7 (1), 183-206; Giora, R., 2003. On Our Mind: Salience Context and Figurative Language. Oxford Univ. Press, New York] Graded Salience Hypothesis states that more salient meanings-coded meanings foremost on our mind due to conventionality, frequency, familiarity, or prototypicality-are accessed faster than and reach sufficient levels of activation before less salient ones. This research addresses predictions derived from this model by examining the salience of familiar and predictable idioms, presented out of context. ERPs recorded from 30 subjects involved in reading and lexical decision tasks to (strongly/weakly) salient idioms and (figurative/literal) targets indicate that N400 amplitude was smaller for the last word of the strongly salient idioms than for the weakly salient idioms. Moreover, N400 amplitude of probes related to the salient meaning of strongly salient idioms was smaller than those of the 3 other conditions. In addition, response times to salient interpretations (the idiomatic meanings of highly salient idioms and the literal interpretations of less salient idioms) were shorter compared to the other conditions. These findings support Giora's Graded Salience Hypothesis. They show that salient meanings are accessed automatically, regardless of figurativity.

Visual saliency in MPEG-4 AVC video stream

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ammar, M.; Mitrea, M.; Hasnaoui, M.; Le Callet, P.

2015-03-01

Visual saliency maps already proved their efficiency in a large variety of image/video communication application fields, covering from selective compression and channel coding to watermarking. Such saliency maps are generally based on different visual characteristics (like color, intensity, orientation, motion,…) computed from the pixel representation of the visual content. This paper resumes and extends our previous work devoted to the definition of a saliency map solely extracted from the MPEG-4 AVC stream syntax elements. The MPEG-4 AVC saliency map thus defined is a fusion of static and dynamic map. The static saliency map is in its turn a combination of intensity, color and orientation features maps. Despite the particular way in which all these elementary maps are computed, the fusion techniques allowing their combination plays a critical role in the final result and makes the object of the proposed study. A total of 48 fusion formulas (6 for combining static features and, for each of them, 8 to combine static to dynamic features) are investigated. The performances of the obtained maps are evaluated on a public database organized at IRCCyN, by computing two objective metrics: the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the area under curve.

The grammatical morpheme deficit in moderate hearing impairment.

PubMed

McGuckian, Maria; Henry, Alison

2007-03-01

Much remains unknown about grammatical morpheme (GM) acquisition by children with moderate hearing impairment (HI) acquiring spoken English. To investigate how moderate HI impacts on the use of GMs in speech and to provide an explanation for the pattern of findings. Elicited and spontaneous speech data were collected from children with moderate HI (n = 10; mean age = 7;4 years) and a control group of typically developing children (n = 10; mean age = 3;2 years) with equivalent mean length of utterance (MLU). The data were analysed to determine the use of ten GMs of English. Comparisons were made between the groups for rates of correct GM production, for types and rates of GM errors, and for order of GM accuracy. The findings revealed significant differences between the HI group and the control group for correct production of five GMs. The differences were not all in the same direction. The HI group produced possessive -s and plural -s significantly less frequently than the controls (this is not simply explained by the perceptual saliency of -s) and produced progressive -ing, articles and irregular past tense significantly more frequently than the controls. Moreover, the order of GM accuracy for the HI group did not correlate with that observed for the control group. Various factors were analysed in an attempt to explain order of GM accuracy for the HI group (i.e. perceptual saliency, syntactic category, semantics and frequency of GMs in input). Frequency of GMs in input was the most successful explanation for the overall pattern of GM accuracy. Interestingly, the order of GM accuracy for the HI group (acquiring spoken English as a first language) was characteristic of that reported for individuals learning English as a second language. An explanation for the findings is drawn from a factor that connects these different groups of language learners, i.e. limited access to spoken English input. It is argued that, because of hearing factors, the children with HI are below a threshold for intake of spoken language input (a threshold easily reached by the controls). Thus, the children with HI are more input-dependent at the point in development studied and as such are more sensitive to input frequency effects. The findings suggest that optimizing or indeed increasing auditory input of GMs may have a positive impact on GM development for children with moderate HI.

Explaining Gender-Based Language Use: Effects of Gender Identity Salience on References to Emotion and Tentative Language in Intra- and Intergroup Contexts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Palomares, Nicholas A.

2008-01-01

An experiment tested hypotheses derived from self-categorization theory's explanation for gender-based language use. Under high or low conditions of gender salience, men and women sent e-mail to an ostensible male or female recipient yielding either an intra- or an intergroup setting. Gender salience was manipulated so that the stereotypically…

Multi-scale Computational Electromagnetics for Phenomenology and Saliency Characterization in Remote Sensing

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-07-15

AFRL-AFOSR-JP-TR-2016-0068 Multi-scale Computational Electromagnetics for Phenomenology and Saliency Characterization in Remote Sensing Hean-Teik...SUBTITLE Multi-scale Computational Electromagnetics for Phenomenology and Saliency Characterization in Remote Sensing 5a.  CONTRACT NUMBER 5b.  GRANT NUMBER... electromagnetics to the application in microwave remote sensing as well as extension of modelling capability with computational flexibility to study

Multi-scale Computational Electromagnetics for Phenomenology and Saliency Characterization in Remote Sensing

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-07-15

AFRL-AFOSR-JP-TR-2016-0068 Multi-scale Computational Electromagnetics for Phenomenology and Saliency Characterization in Remote Sensing Hean-Teik...SUBTITLE Multi-scale Computational Electromagnetics for Phenomenology and Saliency Characterization in Remote Sensing 5a.  CONTRACT NUMBER 5b.  GRANT NUMBER...electromagnetics to the application in microwave remote sensing as well as extension of modelling capability with computational flexibility to study

Characterizing the effects of feature salience and top-down attention in the early visual system.

PubMed

Poltoratski, Sonia; Ling, Sam; McCormack, Devin; Tong, Frank

2017-07-01

The visual system employs a sophisticated balance of attentional mechanisms: salient stimuli are prioritized for visual processing, yet observers can also ignore such stimuli when their goals require directing attention elsewhere. A powerful determinant of visual salience is local feature contrast: if a local region differs from its immediate surround along one or more feature dimensions, it will appear more salient. We used high-resolution functional MRI (fMRI) at 7T to characterize the modulatory effects of bottom-up salience and top-down voluntary attention within multiple sites along the early visual pathway, including visual areas V1-V4 and the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). Observers viewed arrays of spatially distributed gratings, where one of the gratings immediately to the left or right of fixation differed from all other items in orientation or motion direction, making it salient. To investigate the effects of directed attention, observers were cued to attend to the grating to the left or right of fixation, which was either salient or nonsalient. Results revealed reliable additive effects of top-down attention and stimulus-driven salience throughout visual areas V1-hV4. In comparison, the LGN exhibited significant attentional enhancement but was not reliably modulated by orientation- or motion-defined salience. Our findings indicate that top-down effects of spatial attention can influence visual processing at the earliest possible site along the visual pathway, including the LGN, whereas the processing of orientation- and motion-driven salience primarily involves feature-selective interactions that take place in early cortical visual areas. NEW & NOTEWORTHY While spatial attention allows for specific, goal-driven enhancement of stimuli, salient items outside of the current focus of attention must also be prioritized. We used 7T fMRI to compare salience and spatial attentional enhancement along the early visual hierarchy. We report additive effects of attention and bottom-up salience in early visual areas, suggesting that salience enhancement is not contingent on the observer's attentional state. Copyright © 2017 the American Physiological Society.

Multi-scale image segmentation method with visual saliency constraints and its application

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Yan; Yu, Jie; Sun, Kaimin

2018-03-01

Object-based image analysis method has many advantages over pixel-based methods, so it is one of the current research hotspots. It is very important to get the image objects by multi-scale image segmentation in order to carry out object-based image analysis. The current popular image segmentation methods mainly share the bottom-up segmentation principle, which is simple to realize and the object boundaries obtained are accurate. However, the macro statistical characteristics of the image areas are difficult to be taken into account, and fragmented segmentation (or over-segmentation) results are difficult to avoid. In addition, when it comes to information extraction, target recognition and other applications, image targets are not equally important, i.e., some specific targets or target groups with particular features worth more attention than the others. To avoid the problem of over-segmentation and highlight the targets of interest, this paper proposes a multi-scale image segmentation method with visually saliency graph constraints. Visual saliency theory and the typical feature extraction method are adopted to obtain the visual saliency information, especially the macroscopic information to be analyzed. The visual saliency information is used as a distribution map of homogeneity weight, where each pixel is given a weight. This weight acts as one of the merging constraints in the multi- scale image segmentation. As a result, pixels that macroscopically belong to the same object but are locally different can be more likely assigned to one same object. In addition, due to the constraint of visual saliency model, the constraint ability over local-macroscopic characteristics can be well controlled during the segmentation process based on different objects. These controls will improve the completeness of visually saliency areas in the segmentation results while diluting the controlling effect for non- saliency background areas. Experiments show that this method works better for texture image segmentation than traditional multi-scale image segmentation methods, and can enable us to give priority control to the saliency objects of interest. This method has been used in image quality evaluation, scattered residential area extraction, sparse forest extraction and other applications to verify its validation. All applications showed good results.

Enhancing health knowledge, health beliefs, and health behavior in Poland through a health promoting television program series.

PubMed

Chew, Fiona; Palmer, Sushma; Slonska, Zofia; Subbiah, Kalyani

2002-01-01

This study examined the impact of a health promoting television program series on health knowledge and the key factors of the health belief model (HBM) that have led people to engage in healthy behavior (exercising, losing weight, changing eating habits, and not smoking/quitting smoking). Using data from a posttest comparison field study with 15) viewers and 146 nonviewers in Poland, we found that hierarchical regression analysis showed stronger support for the HBM factors of efficacy, susceptibility, seriousness, and salience in their contribution toward health behavior among television viewers compared with nonviewers. Cues to action variables (including television viewing) and health knowledge boosted efficacy among viewers. Without the advantage of receiving health information from the television series, nonviewers relied on their basic disease fears on one hand, and interest in good health on the other to take steps toward becoming healthier. A health promoting television series can increase health knowledge and enhance health beliefs, which in turn contribute to healthy behaviors.

Ethnic Identity in Everyday Life: The Influence of Identity Development Status

PubMed Central

Yip, Tiffany

2013-01-01

The current study explores the intersection of ethnic identity development and significance in a sample of 354 diverse adolescents (mean age 14). Adolescents completed surveys 5 times a day for 1 week. Cluster analyses revealed 4 identity clusters: diffused, foreclosed, moratorium, achieved. Achieved adolescents reported the highest levels of identity salience across situations, followed by moratorium adolescents. Achieved and moratorium adolescents also reported a positive association between identity salience and private regard. For foreclosed and achieved adolescents reporting low levels of centrality, identity salience was associated with lower private regard. For foreclosed and achieved adolescents reporting high levels of centrality, identity salience was associated with higher private regard. PMID:23581701

Influence of semantic consistency and perceptual features on visual attention during scene viewing in toddlers.

PubMed

Helo, Andrea; van Ommen, Sandrien; Pannasch, Sebastian; Danteny-Dordoigne, Lucile; Rämä, Pia

2017-11-01

Conceptual representations of everyday scenes are built in interaction with visual environment and these representations guide our visual attention. Perceptual features and object-scene semantic consistency have been found to attract our attention during scene exploration. The present study examined how visual attention in 24-month-old toddlers is attracted by semantic violations and how perceptual features (i. e. saliency, centre distance, clutter and object size) and linguistic properties (i. e. object label frequency and label length) affect gaze distribution. We compared eye movements of 24-month-old toddlers and adults while exploring everyday scenes which either contained an inconsistent (e.g., soap on a breakfast table) or consistent (e.g., soap in a bathroom) object. Perceptual features such as saliency, centre distance and clutter of the scene affected looking times in the toddler group during the whole viewing time whereas looking times in adults were affected only by centre distance during the early viewing time. Adults looked longer to inconsistent than consistent objects either if the objects had a high or a low saliency. In contrast, toddlers presented semantic consistency effect only when objects were highly salient. Additionally, toddlers with lower vocabulary skills looked longer to inconsistent objects while toddlers with higher vocabulary skills look equally long to both consistent and inconsistent objects. Our results indicate that 24-month-old children use scene context to guide visual attention when exploring the visual environment. However, perceptual features have a stronger influence in eye movement guidance in toddlers than in adults. Our results also indicate that language skills influence cognitive but not perceptual guidance of eye movements during scene perception in toddlers. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Industry Television Ratings for Violence, Sex, and Substance Use.

PubMed

Gabrielli, Joy; Traore, Aminata; Stoolmiller, Mike; Bergamini, Elaina; Sargent, James D

2016-09-01

To examine whether the industry-run television (TV) Parental Guidelines discriminate on violence, sexual behavior, alcohol use, and smoking in TV shows, to assess their usefulness for parents. Seventeen TV shows (323 episodes and 9214 episode minutes) across several TV show rating categories (TVY7, TVPG, TV14, and TVMA) were evaluated. We content-coded the episodes, recording seconds of each risk behavior, and we rated the salience of violence in each one. Multilevel models were used to test for associations between TV rating categories and prevalence of risk behaviors across and within episodes or salience of violence. Every show had at least 1 risk behavior. Violence was pervasive, occurring in 70% of episodes overall and for 2.3 seconds per episode minute. Alcohol was also common (58% of shows, 2.3 seconds per minute), followed by sex (53% of episodes, 0.26 seconds per minute), and smoking (31% of shows, 0.54 seconds per minute). TV Parental Guidelines did not discriminate prevalence estimates of TV episode violence. Although TV-Y7 shows had significantly less substance use, other categories were poor at discriminating substance use, which was as common in TV-14 as TV-MA shows. Sex and gory violence were the only behaviors demonstrating a graded increase in prevalence and salience for older-child rating categories. TV Parental Guidelines ratings were ineffective in discriminating shows for 3 out of 4 behaviors studied. Even in shows rated for children as young as 7 years, violence was prevalent, prominent, and salient. TV ratings were most effective for identification of sexual behavior and gory violence. Copyright © 2016 by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Oculomotor Evidence for Top-Down Control following the Initial Saccade

PubMed Central

Siebold, Alisha; van Zoest, Wieske; Donk, Mieke

2011-01-01

The goal of the current study was to investigate how salience-driven and goal-driven processes unfold during visual search over multiple eye movements. Eye movements were recorded while observers searched for a target, which was located on (Experiment 1) or defined as (Experiment 2) a specific orientation singleton. This singleton could either be the most, medium, or least salient element in the display. Results were analyzed as a function of response time separately for initial and second eye movements. Irrespective of the search task, initial saccades elicited shortly after the onset of the search display were primarily salience-driven whereas initial saccades elicited after approximately 250 ms were completely unaffected by salience. Initial saccades were increasingly guided in line with task requirements with increasing response times. Second saccades were completely unaffected by salience and were consistently goal-driven, irrespective of response time. These results suggest that stimulus-salience affects the visual system only briefly after a visual image enters the brain and has no effect thereafter. PMID:21931603

Top-Down Visual Saliency via Joint CRF and Dictionary Learning.

PubMed

Yang, Jimei; Yang, Ming-Hsuan

2017-03-01

Top-down visual saliency is an important module of visual attention. In this work, we propose a novel top-down saliency model that jointly learns a Conditional Random Field (CRF) and a visual dictionary. The proposed model incorporates a layered structure from top to bottom: CRF, sparse coding and image patches. With sparse coding as an intermediate layer, CRF is learned in a feature-adaptive manner; meanwhile with CRF as the output layer, the dictionary is learned under structured supervision. For efficient and effective joint learning, we develop a max-margin approach via a stochastic gradient descent algorithm. Experimental results on the Graz-02 and PASCAL VOC datasets show that our model performs favorably against state-of-the-art top-down saliency methods for target object localization. In addition, the dictionary update significantly improves the performance of our model. We demonstrate the merits of the proposed top-down saliency model by applying it to prioritizing object proposals for detection and predicting human fixations.

Relationship of negative self-schemas and attachment styles with appearance schemas.

PubMed

Ledoux, Tracey; Winterowd, Carrie; Richardson, Tamara; Clark, Julie Dorton

2010-06-01

The purpose was to test, among women, the relationship between negative self-schemas and styles of attachment with men and women and two types of appearance investment (Self-evaluative and Motivational Salience). Predominantly Caucasian undergraduate women (N=194) completed a modified version of the Relationship Questionnaire, the Young Schema Questionnaire-Short Form, and the Appearance Schemas Inventory-Revised. Linear multiple regression analyses were conducted with Motivational Salience and Self-evaluative Salience of appearance serving as dependent variables and relevant demographic variables, negative self-schemas, and styles of attachment to men serving as independent variables. Styles of attachment to women were not entered into these regression models because Pearson correlations indicated they were not related to either dependent variable. Self-evaluative Salience of appearance was related to impaired autonomy and performance negative self-schema and the preoccupation style of attachment with men, while Motivational Salience of appearance was related only to the preoccupation style of attachment with men. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Effective leadership in salient groups: revisiting leader-member exchange theory from the perspective of the social identity theory of leadership.

PubMed

Hogg, Michael A; Martin, Robin; Epitropaki, Olga; Mankad, Aditi; Svensson, Alicia; Weeden, Karen

2005-07-01

Two studies compared leader-member exchange (LMX) theory and the social identity theory of leadership. Study 1 surveyed 439 employees of organizations in Wales, measuring work group salience, leader-member relations, and perceived leadership effectiveness. Study 2 surveyed 128 members of organizations in India, measuring identification not salience and also individualism/collectivism. Both studies provided good support for social identity predictions. Depersonalized leader-member relations were associated with greater leadership effectiveness among high-than low-salient groups (Study 1) and among high than low identifiers (Study 2). Personalized leadership effectiveness was less affected by salience (Study 1) and unaffected by identification (Study 2). Low-salience groups preferred personalized leadership more than did high-salience groups (Study 1). Low identifiers showed no preference but high identifiers preferred depersonalized leadership (Study 2). In Study 2, collectivists did not prefer depersonalized as opposed to personalized leadership, whereas individualists did, probably because collectivists focus more on the relational self.

Neuroimaging Impaired Response Inhibition and Salience Attribution in Human Drug Addiction: A Systematic Review.

PubMed

Zilverstand, Anna; Huang, Anna S; Alia-Klein, Nelly; Goldstein, Rita Z

2018-06-06

The impaired response inhibition and salience attribution (iRISA) model proposes that impaired response inhibition and salience attribution underlie drug seeking and taking. To update this model, we systematically reviewed 105 task-related neuroimaging studies (n > 15/group) published since 2010. Results demonstrate specific impairments within six large-scale brain networks (reward, habit, salience, executive, memory, and self-directed networks) during drug cue exposure, decision making, inhibitory control, and social-emotional processing. Addicted individuals demonstrated increased recruitment of these networks during drug-related processing but a blunted response during non-drug-related processing, with the same networks also being implicated during resting state. Associations with real-life drug use, relapse, therapeutic interventions, and the relevance to initiation of drug use during adolescence support the clinical relevance of the results. Whereas the salience and executive networks showed impairments throughout the addiction cycle, the reward network was dysregulated at later stages of abuse. Effects were similar in alcohol, cannabis, and stimulant addiction. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A view not to be missed: Salient scene content interferes with cognitive restoration

PubMed Central

Van der Jagt, Alexander P. N.; Craig, Tony; Brewer, Mark J.; Pearson, David G.

2017-01-01

Attention Restoration Theory (ART) states that built scenes place greater load on attentional resources than natural scenes. This is explained in terms of "hard" and "soft" fascination of built and natural scenes. Given a lack of direct empirical evidence for this assumption we propose that perceptual saliency of scene content can function as an empirically derived indicator of fascination. Saliency levels were established by measuring speed of scene category detection using a Go/No-Go detection paradigm. Experiment 1 shows that built scenes are more salient than natural scenes. Experiment 2 replicates these findings using greyscale images, ruling out a colour-based response strategy, and additionally shows that built objects in natural scenes affect saliency to a greater extent than the reverse. Experiment 3 demonstrates that the saliency of scene content is directly linked to cognitive restoration using an established restoration paradigm. Overall, these findings demonstrate an important link between the saliency of scene content and related cognitive restoration. PMID:28723975

[Effects of finitude salience and social value intention on emotional responses of "kandoh" (the state of being emotionally moved) associated with sadness].

PubMed

Kato, Juri; Murata, Koji

2013-06-01

Two experiments investigated whether emotional responses of "kandoh" (the state of being emotionally moved) associated with sadness were facilitated by the factors of "finitude salience" and "social value intention". We predicted that participants who strongly intended social value would be more strongly moved by movies that portrayed social values than participants who weakly intended social value. Furthermore we predicted that this difference would increase in the finitude salience condition. In both experiments, participants assigned to the finitude salience condition subtracted the years of the person's birth from death. In the control condition, participants performed the same task in the form of simple numerical calculations. Then all participants watched a movie that portrayed family love and death in Experiment 1 (N = 88). We used another movie that described friendship and separation in Experiment 2 (N = 82). The results supported the two hypotheses that social value intention facilitated emotional responses of "kandoh" and this effect increased under finitude salience.

A view not to be missed: Salient scene content interferes with cognitive restoration.

PubMed

Van der Jagt, Alexander P N; Craig, Tony; Brewer, Mark J; Pearson, David G

2017-01-01

Attention Restoration Theory (ART) states that built scenes place greater load on attentional resources than natural scenes. This is explained in terms of "hard" and "soft" fascination of built and natural scenes. Given a lack of direct empirical evidence for this assumption we propose that perceptual saliency of scene content can function as an empirically derived indicator of fascination. Saliency levels were established by measuring speed of scene category detection using a Go/No-Go detection paradigm. Experiment 1 shows that built scenes are more salient than natural scenes. Experiment 2 replicates these findings using greyscale images, ruling out a colour-based response strategy, and additionally shows that built objects in natural scenes affect saliency to a greater extent than the reverse. Experiment 3 demonstrates that the saliency of scene content is directly linked to cognitive restoration using an established restoration paradigm. Overall, these findings demonstrate an important link between the saliency of scene content and related cognitive restoration.

Functional network connectivity underlying food processing: disturbed salience and visual processing in overweight and obese adults.

PubMed

Kullmann, Stephanie; Pape, Anna-Antonia; Heni, Martin; Ketterer, Caroline; Schick, Fritz; Häring, Hans-Ulrich; Fritsche, Andreas; Preissl, Hubert; Veit, Ralf

2013-05-01

In order to adequately explore the neurobiological basis of eating behavior of humans and their changes with body weight, interactions between brain areas or networks need to be investigated. In the current functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we examined the modulating effects of stimulus category (food vs. nonfood), caloric content of food, and body weight on the time course and functional connectivity of 5 brain networks by means of independent component analysis in healthy lean and overweight/obese adults. These functional networks included motor sensory, default-mode, extrastriate visual, temporal visual association, and salience networks. We found an extensive modulation elicited by food stimuli in the 2 visual and salience networks, with a dissociable pattern in the time course and functional connectivity between lean and overweight/obese subjects. Specifically, only in lean subjects, the temporal visual association network was modulated by the stimulus category and the salience network by caloric content, whereas overweight and obese subjects showed a generalized augmented response in the salience network. Furthermore, overweight/obese subjects showed changes in functional connectivity in networks important for object recognition, motivational salience, and executive control. These alterations could potentially lead to top-down deficiencies driving the overconsumption of food in the obese population.

Saliency Detection via Absorbing Markov Chain With Learnt Transition Probability.

PubMed

Lihe Zhang; Jianwu Ai; Bowen Jiang; Huchuan Lu; Xiukui Li

2018-02-01

In this paper, we propose a bottom-up saliency model based on absorbing Markov chain (AMC). First, a sparsely connected graph is constructed to capture the local context information of each node. All image boundary nodes and other nodes are, respectively, treated as the absorbing nodes and transient nodes in the absorbing Markov chain. Then, the expected number of times from each transient node to all other transient nodes can be used to represent the saliency value of this node. The absorbed time depends on the weights on the path and their spatial coordinates, which are completely encoded in the transition probability matrix. Considering the importance of this matrix, we adopt different hierarchies of deep features extracted from fully convolutional networks and learn a transition probability matrix, which is called learnt transition probability matrix. Although the performance is significantly promoted, salient objects are not uniformly highlighted very well. To solve this problem, an angular embedding technique is investigated to refine the saliency results. Based on pairwise local orderings, which are produced by the saliency maps of AMC and boundary maps, we rearrange the global orderings (saliency value) of all nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on six publicly available benchmark data sets.

Robust online tracking via adaptive samples selection with saliency detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yan, Jia; Chen, Xi; Zhu, QiuPing

2013-12-01

Online tracking has shown to be successful in tracking of previously unknown objects. However, there are two important factors which lead to drift problem of online tracking, the one is how to select the exact labeled samples even when the target locations are inaccurate, and the other is how to handle the confusors which have similar features with the target. In this article, we propose a robust online tracking algorithm with adaptive samples selection based on saliency detection to overcome the drift problem. To deal with the problem of degrading the classifiers using mis-aligned samples, we introduce the saliency detection method to our tracking problem. Saliency maps and the strong classifiers are combined to extract the most correct positive samples. Our approach employs a simple yet saliency detection algorithm based on image spectral residual analysis. Furthermore, instead of using the random patches as the negative samples, we propose a reasonable selection criterion, in which both the saliency confidence and similarity are considered with the benefits that confusors in the surrounding background are incorporated into the classifiers update process before the drift occurs. The tracking task is formulated as a binary classification via online boosting framework. Experiment results in several challenging video sequences demonstrate the accuracy and stability of our tracker.

The electrophysiological correlate of saliency: evidence from a figure-detection task.

PubMed

Straube, Sirko; Fahle, Manfred

2010-01-11

Although figure-ground segregation in a natural environment usually relies on multiple cues, we experience a coherent figure without usually noticing the individual single cues. It is still unclear how various cues interact to achieve this unified percept and whether this interaction depends on task demands. Studies investigating the effect of cue combination on the human EEG are still lacking. In the present study, we combined psychophysics, ERP and time-frequency analysis to investigate the interaction of orientation and spatial frequency as visual cues in a figure detection task. The figure was embedded in a matrix of Gabor elements, and we systematically varied figure saliency by changing the underlying cue configuration. We found a strong correlation between the posterior P2 amplitude and the perceived saliency of the figure: the P2 amplitude decreased with increasing saliency. Analogously, the power of the theta-band decreased for more salient figures. At longer latencies, the posterior P3 component was modulated in amplitude and latency, possibly reflecting increased decision confidence at higher saliencies. In conclusion, when the cue composition (e.g. one or two cues) or cue strength is changed in a figure detection task, first differences in the electrophysiological response reflect the perceived saliency and not directly the underlying cue configuration.

The Everyday Implications of Ethnic-Racial Identity Processes: Exploring Variability in Ethnic-Racial Identity Salience Across Situations.

PubMed

Douglass, Sara; Wang, Yijie; Yip, Tiffany

2016-07-01

Given the social and developmental relevance of ethnicity-race during adolescence, it is important to understand the meaning of ethnic-racial identity in adolescents' everyday lives. The current study considered how individual differences in ethnic-racial identity exploration (i.e., the extent to which individuals have explored their ethnicity-race), and commitment (i.e., the extent which they have a clear sense of what it means to them) influenced variability versus stability in the awareness of ethnicity-race in a given situation (i.e., salience), and how this variability is related to mood in that situation. Within an ethnic/racially diverse sample of 395 adolescents (M age = 15; 63 % female; 12 % Black, 26 % Latino, 34 % Asian, 23 % White), results indicated that ethnic-racial identity exploration was unrelated to variability in salience, while commitment promoted stability in salience across situations. Further, among adolescents who were generally very aware of their ethnicity-race, increases in situational salience were related to decreased negative and anxious mood. Among adolescents who were generally not aware of their ethnicity-race, increases in situational salience were related to increased positive and decreased negative mood. Implications for understanding the developmental and everyday experiences of ethnic-racial identity are discussed.

Two-stage sparse coding of region covariance via Log-Euclidean kernels to detect saliency.

PubMed

Zhang, Ying-Ying; Yang, Cai; Zhang, Ping

2017-05-01

In this paper, we present a novel bottom-up saliency detection algorithm from the perspective of covariance matrices on a Riemannian manifold. Each superpixel is described by a region covariance matrix on Riemannian Manifolds. We carry out a two-stage sparse coding scheme via Log-Euclidean kernels to extract salient objects efficiently. In the first stage, given background dictionary on image borders, sparse coding of each region covariance via Log-Euclidean kernels is performed. The reconstruction error on the background dictionary is regarded as the initial saliency of each superpixel. In the second stage, an improvement of the initial result is achieved by calculating reconstruction errors of the superpixels on foreground dictionary, which is extracted from the first stage saliency map. The sparse coding in the second stage is similar to the first stage, but is able to effectively highlight the salient objects uniformly from the background. Finally, three post-processing methods-highlight-inhibition function, context-based saliency weighting, and the graph cut-are adopted to further refine the saliency map. Experiments on four public benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, recall and mean absolute error, and demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Altered intrinsic organisation of brain networks implicated in attentional processes in adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a resting-state study of attention, default mode and salience network connectivity.

PubMed

Sidlauskaite, Justina; Sonuga-Barke, Edmund; Roeyers, Herbert; Wiersema, Jan R

2016-06-01

Deficits in task-related attentional engagement in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been hypothesised to be due to altered interrelationships between attention, default mode and salience networks. We examined the intrinsic connectivity during rest within and between these networks. Six-minute resting-state scans were obtained. Using a network-based approach, connectivity within and between the dorsal and ventral attention, the default mode and the salience networks was compared between the ADHD and control group. The ADHD group displayed hyperconnectivity between the two attention networks and within the default mode and ventral attention network. The salience network was hypoconnected to the dorsal attention network. There were trends towards hyperconnectivity within the dorsal attention network and between the salience and ventral attention network in ADHD. Connectivity within and between other networks was unrelated to ADHD. Our findings highlight the altered connectivity within and between attention networks, and between them and the salience network in ADHD. One hypothesis to be tested in future studies is that individuals with ADHD are affected by an imbalance between ventral and dorsal attention systems with the former playing a dominant role during task engagement, making individuals with ADHD highly susceptible to distraction by salient task-irrelevant stimuli.

Characteristics of Print in Books for Preschool Children.

PubMed

Treiman, Rebecca; Rosales, Nicole; Kessler, Brett

Children begin to learn about the characteristics of print well before formal literacy instruction begins. Reading to children can expose them to print and help them learn about its characteristics. This may be especially true if the print is visually salient, for studies suggest that prereaders pay more attention to such print than to print that is visually less salient. To shed light on the characteristics of the print that US children see in books, especially those characteristics that may contribute to visual salience, we report a quantitative analysis of 73 books that were chosen to be representative of those seen by preschoolers. We found that print that is visually salient due to color, variation, and other features tends to be more common on the covers of books than in the interiors. It also tends to be more common in recently published books than in older books. Even in recent books, however, the print is much less visually salient than the accompanying pictures. Many studies have examined the behavior of adults and children during shared reading, but little research has examined the characteristics of books themselves. Our results provide quantitative information about this topic for one set of characteristics in books for young US children.

Characteristics of Print in Books for Preschool Children

PubMed Central

Treiman, Rebecca; Rosales, Nicole; Kessler, Brett

2015-01-01

Children begin to learn about the characteristics of print well before formal literacy instruction begins. Reading to children can expose them to print and help them learn about its characteristics. This may be especially true if the print is visually salient, for studies suggest that prereaders pay more attention to such print than to print that is visually less salient. To shed light on the characteristics of the print that US children see in books, especially those characteristics that may contribute to visual salience, we report a quantitative analysis of 73 books that were chosen to be representative of those seen by preschoolers. We found that print that is visually salient due to color, variation, and other features tends to be more common on the covers of books than in the interiors. It also tends to be more common in recently published books than in older books. Even in recent books, however, the print is much less visually salient than the accompanying pictures. Many studies have examined the behavior of adults and children during shared reading, but little research has examined the characteristics of books themselves. Our results provide quantitative information about this topic for one set of characteristics in books for young US children. PMID:27239231

Excessive coupling of the salience network with intrinsic neurocognitive brain networks during rectal distension in adolescents with irritable bowel syndrome: a preliminary report

PubMed Central

Liu, Xiaolin; Silverman, Alan; Kern, Mark; Ward, B. Douglas; Li, Shi-Jiang; Shaker, Reza; Sood, Manu R.

2015-01-01

Background The neural network mechanisms underlying visceral hypersensitivity in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) are incompletely understood. It has been proposed that an intrinsic salience network plays an important role in chronic pain and IBS symptoms. Using neuroimaging, we examined brain responses to rectal distension in adolescent IBS patients, focusing on determining the alteration of salience network integrity in IBS and its functional implications in current theoretical frameworks. We hypothesized that (1) brain responses to visceral stimulation in adolescents are similar to those in adults, and (2) IBS is associated with an altered salience network interaction with other neurocognitive networks, particularly the default mode network (DMN) and executive control network (ECN), as predicted by the theoretical models. Methods IBS patients and controls received subliminal and liminal rectal distension during imaging. Stimulus-induced brain activations were determined. Salience network integrity was evaluated by functional connectivity of its seed regions activated by rectal distension in the insular and cingulate cortices. Key Results Compared with controls, IBS patients demonstrated greater activation to rectal distension in neural structures of the homeostatic afferent and emotional arousal networks, especially the anterior cingulate and insular cortices. Greater brain responses to liminal vs. subliminal distension were observed in both groups. Particularly, IBS is uniquely associated with an excessive coupling of the salience network with the DMN and ECN in their key frontal and parietal node areas. Conclusions & Inferences Our study provided consistent evidence supporting the theoretical predictions of altered salience network functioning as a neuropathological mechanism of IBS symptoms. PMID:26467966

Salience and Default Mode Network Coupling Predicts Cognition in Aging and Parkinson's Disease.

PubMed

Putcha, Deepti; Ross, Robert S; Cronin-Golomb, Alice; Janes, Amy C; Stern, Chantal E

2016-02-01

Cognitive impairment is common in Parkinson's disease (PD). Three neurocognitive networks support efficient cognition: the salience network, the default mode network, and the central executive network. The salience network is thought to switch between activating and deactivating the default mode and central executive networks. Anti-correlated interactions between the salience and default mode networks in particular are necessary for efficient cognition. Our previous work demonstrated altered functional coupling between the neurocognitive networks in non-demented individuals with PD compared to age-matched control participants. Here, we aim to identify associations between cognition and functional coupling between these neurocognitive networks in the same group of participants. We investigated the extent to which intrinsic functional coupling among these neurocognitive networks is related to cognitive performance across three neuropsychological domains: executive functioning, psychomotor speed, and verbal memory. Twenty-four non-demented individuals with mild to moderate PD and 20 control participants were scanned at rest and evaluated on three neuropsychological domains. PD participants were impaired on tests from all three domains compared to control participants. Our imaging results demonstrated that successful cognition across healthy aging and Parkinson's disease participants was related to anti-correlated coupling between the salience and default mode networks. Individuals with poorer performance scores across groups demonstrated more positive salience network/default-mode network coupling. Successful cognition relies on healthy coupling between the salience and default mode networks, which may become dysfunctional in PD. These results can help inform non-pharmacological interventions (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) targeting these specific networks before they become vulnerable in early stages of Parkinson's disease.

The moderating role of peer norms in the associations of social withdrawal and aggression with peer victimization.

PubMed

Guimond, Fanny-Alexandra; Brendgen, Mara; Correia, Stephanie; Turgeon, Lyse; Vitaro, Frank

2018-06-21

This study examined the moderating role of classroom injunctive norms salience regarding social withdrawal and regarding aggression in the longitudinal association between these behaviors and peer victimization. A total of 1,769 fourth through sixth graders (895 girls, M = 10.25 years, SD = 1.03) from 23 schools (67 classrooms) completed a peer nomination inventory in the fall (T1) and spring (T2) of the same academic year. Participants circled the name of each student who fit the description provided for social withdrawal, aggression, and peer victimization at T1 and T2. The salience of injunctive norms was sex-specific and operationalized by the extent to which children displaying the behavior were socially rewarded or sanctioned by their classmates. Generalized estimation equations (GEE) showed that the association between social withdrawal at T1 and peer victimization at T2 was moderated by injunctive norms. Social withdrawal at T1 was positively associated with peer victimization at T2 in classrooms where injunctive norms for this behavior were salient and unfavorable, as well as in classrooms where injunctive norms for aggression were salient and favorable, albeit for girls only. The association between aggression at T1 and peer victimization at T2 was also moderated by the injunctive norms regarding this behavior. Aggressive children were less likely to be victimized in classrooms where this behavior was rewarded. These results support bullying interventions that target factors related to the larger peer context, including social norms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Regulation of emotion in ADHD: can children with ADHD override the natural tendency to approach positive and avoid negative pictures?

PubMed

Van Cauwenberge, Valerie; Sonuga-Barke, Edmund J S; Hoppenbrouwers, Karel; Van Leeuwen, Karla; Wiersema, Jan R

2017-03-01

Studies have demonstrated inefficient use of antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategies in children with ADHD attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In the current study we tested for the first time if ADHD is also associated with difficulties in response-focused strategies by measuring the ability to override action tendencies induced by emotional information. Performance data on a computer-based approach-avoidance paradigm of 28 children with ADHD and 38 typically developing children between 8 and 15 years of age were analyzed, by comparing a congruent condition in which they were instructed to approach positive and avoid negative pictures and an incongruent condition where they had to override these automatic reactions and approach negative and avoid positive pictures. Children also rated the valence and salience of the pictures. Children with ADHD and typically developing children rated the emotional valence of the pictures appropriately and similarly, while positive pictures were rated as more arousing by children with ADHD. Solid congruency effects were found indicating that the task measured response-focused emotion regulation; however groups did not differ in this respect. Our findings do not support a deficit in emotion regulation in ADHD in terms of the ability to override natural tendencies to approach positive and avoid negative pictures.

Social perception in children with intellectual disabilities: the interpretation of benign and hostile intentions.

PubMed

Leffert, J S; Siperstein, G N; Widaman, K F

2010-02-01

A key aspect of social perception is the interpretation of others' intentions. Children with intellectual disabilities (IDs) have difficulty interpreting benign intentions when a negative event occurs. From a cognitive processing perspective, interpreting benign intentions can be challenging because it requires integration of conflicting information, as the social cues accompanying the negative event convey non-hostile intentions. The present study examined how children with ID process conflicting social information in a more diverse set of situational circumstances than was investigated previously, including situations involving hostile intentions. We hypothesised that when conflicting information in a social situation consists of mixed social cues that convey insincere benign intentions (a type of hostile intentions), children with ID would have difficulty arriving at an accurate interpretation, just as they do when a negative event is accompanied by cues that convey benign intentions. We also hypothesised that when a negative event is accompanied by cues that convey benign intentions, the presence of a highly salient negative event would pose added interpretation difficulty for these children. Methods Participants (58 children with ID and 189 children without ID in grades 2-6) viewed 13 videotaped vignettes. In each vignette, social cues that accompanied a negative event provided information about the intentions of the character that caused the event. After presenting each vignette, we asked the child questions designed to assess aspects of social perception, including his/her interpretation of intentions. Vignettes represented three types of situations that pose conflicting information: (1) a conflict between a negative event and social cues, which conveyed benign intentions (five items); (2) the presence of conflicting social cues that conveyed insincere benign intentions (four items); and (3) additional items designed to examine the effect of the salience of negative event and cues on accurate interpretation of benign intentions (four items). Teachers completed rating scales of social behaviour, enabling us to examine whether the ability to interpret intentions when conflicting information is present is related to children's social behaviour. Results Children with ID had lower interpretation accuracy than children without ID for all three social situations that presented conflicting information. Children with ID appeared to have particular difficulty interpreting benign intentions when a negative event (but not the social cue) was made salient. For children with ID, interpretation accuracy and teacher-rated social behaviour were related. Conclusions Results demonstrated that the presence of conflicting information poses cognitive processing challenges in a variety of social situations, making it difficult for children with ID to arrive at accurate interpretations. Children with ID were less likely than children without ID to interpret intentions accurately, not just when the social cues conveyed benign intentions, but also when mixed social cues conveyed hostile intentions. In addition, when social cues accompanying a negative event convey benign intentions, the relative salience of the negative event and the cues can affect interpretation accuracy for children with ID. Discussion focuses on implications for understanding the cognitive component of the social domain of adaptive behaviour, for explaining gullibility in children with ID and for instructional practices.

Data Prospecting with CORPRAL: Pre-attentive Vision Model at Work

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Galkin, I. A.; Reinisch, B. W.; Khmyrov, G. M.; Kozlov, A. V.; Grinstein, J.; Fung, S. F.

2005-12-01

The Cognitive Online Rpi Plasmagram Rating Algorithm (CORPRAL) is the automated data prospecting tool developed to find interesting examples of signal propagation in the 1.2 million plasmagram image archive from the Radio Plasma Imager (RPI) onboard the IMAGE spacecraft. The RPI instrument is a spaceborne radar whose transmitted radio waves may reflect from important magnetospheric structures, such as the plasmapause and the magnetopause, and return to the spacecraft location to be detected. The CORPRAL prospector draws attention of the human analysts to the RPI plasmagrams that contain traces of remote reflections (~18% of all images), thus helping to relieve the search efforts in the otherwise overwhelming RPI data repository. To find the echo traces in plasmagrams, CORPRAL employs a pre-attentive vision model that replicates human ability to identify important objects in the field of view without willful concentration of attention. The importance of such objects is determined by their `saliency', the ability to stand out against the background. The saliency evaluation is done subconsciously, without a priori concepts of the object shape. The RPI imagery dataset providesd an excellent testbed for studies of the model performance on low saliency objects immersed in irregular background noise. The paper discusses results of statistical evaluation of the CORPRAL performance on a collection of ~25,000 plasmagram images interpreted manually. Overall accuracy of plasmagram interpretation varies depending on the applied measuring program but remains in the mid-90% range. As the prevalence of plasmagrams that contain traces goes below 10%, we do observe lower positive predicted values (PPV) of the CORPRAL analysis (~50%), indicating that automatically selected plasmagrams are interesting only with 50% chance. We will discuss future development efforts and provide examples and scenarios where RPI data prospecting is instrumental in knowledge discovery.

The Salience of the Self: Self-referential Processing and Internalizing Problems in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder

PubMed Central

Burrows, Catherine A.; Usher, Lauren V.; Mundy, Peter C.; Henderson, Heather A.

2016-01-01

Scientific Abstract Children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate atypical processing of, and memory for, self-referenced information, which may contribute to the heightened rates of co-occurring internalizing problems. We assessed affective and cognitive aspects of self-referential processing in verbally-fluent children with ASD (N=79), and an age-matched comparison sample (COM, N=73) of children without an autism diagnosis. We examined group differences in these two aspects of the self-system, and their joint contributions to individual differnces in internalizing problems. Using a self-referenced memory (SRM) task, participants indicated whether a series of positive and negative trait adjectives described themselves and a well-known fictional character. Participants were then surprised with a recognition memory test on the same adjectives. Overall, individuals with ASD showed a reduction in the extent to which they preferentially endorsed positive over negative trait adjectives about themselves, and a reduction in their preferential memory for self- over other-referenced information. Across the full sample, these two aspects of self-referential processing jointly predicted self-reported internalizing problems. Specifically, self-evaluations were strongly and inversely associated with internalizing problems but only for children with relatively high self-referenced memory. These findings suggest that the salience of the self influences the extent to which affective self-evaluations impact emotional functioning for youth both with and without ASD. Implications for basic (e.g., developmental) and translational (e.g., intervention) research are discussed. Lay Abstract Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) think about themselves differently than typically developing children do. Specifically, children with ASD think less positively of themselves than is typical, which can lead to anxiety and depression. Their system for remembering information about themselves is also altered. Usually, individuals relate new information to things they know about themselves to aid memory. However, individuals with ASD do not show better memory when they think about themselves, compared to when they think about another person, which is called preferential self-referenced memory (SRM). We examined what children with ASD (N=79), and an age-matched comparison sample (COM, N=73) think of themselves, and how well they remember information about themselves. Participants answered whether trait adjectives described themselves, and later were surprised with a memory test on those same adjectives. Overall, youth with ASD viewed themselves less positively than COM participants. Children with ASD also remembered fewer self-relevant relative to other-relevant adjectives. For all children, having strong memory for self-referenced information meant that positive self-evaluations were highly protective against symptoms of anxiety and depression. Self-referenced memory might tell us how much an individual focuses on what they think of themselves, for better or for worse. These differences could influence social skills and mental health in children with ASD. Differences in how individuals with ASD think about themselves may be important to address in treatment. PMID:27868365

Young children's racial awareness and affect and their perceptions about mothers' racial affect in a multiracial context.

PubMed

Lam, Virginia; Guerrero, Silvia; Damree, Natasha; Enesco, Ileana

2011-11-01

There is a substantial literature documenting pre-schoolers' racial awareness and affect from multiracial societies in North America and a fast-growing body of work from societies that are or were once more racially homogeneous. However, studies in Britain, a racially diverse society, on this developmental period have been curiously rare. This study examined racial awareness and affect of 125 White, Black, and Asian 3--to 5-year-olds in London. Children were tested on cognitive level, person description and classification, race labelling and matching, self-categorization and asked about their racial preference and rejection and inferences about their mothers' preference and rejection. Children were least likely to use race versus other categorical cues to spontaneously describe or classify others, even though the majority correctly sorted others by race labels, matched them to drawings, and categorized themselves by race. With age and increasing cognitive level, children described and categorized others by race more and improved in race matching. White children from age 4 preferred White peers and inferred that their mothers would prefer White children at age 5. Children's own preference and inference about mothers are related. Children did not show race-based rejection, but boys inferred that their mothers would prefer White children and reject Black children. The findings are discussed in relation to racial salience between contexts, previous research, and theories. ©2010 The British Psychological Society.

Toward isolating the role of dopamine in the acquisition of incentive salience attribution.

PubMed

Chow, Jonathan J; Nickell, Justin R; Darna, Mahesh; Beckmann, Joshua S

2016-10-01

Stimulus-reward learning has been heavily linked to the reward-prediction error learning hypothesis and dopaminergic function. However, some evidence suggests dopaminergic function may not strictly underlie reward-prediction error learning, but may be specific to incentive salience attribution. Utilizing a Pavlovian conditioned approach procedure consisting of two stimuli that were equally reward-predictive (both undergoing reward-prediction error learning) but functionally distinct in regard to incentive salience (levers that elicited sign-tracking and tones that elicited goal-tracking), we tested the differential role of D1 and D2 dopamine receptors and nucleus accumbens dopamine in the acquisition of sign- and goal-tracking behavior and their associated conditioned reinforcing value within individuals. Overall, the results revealed that both D1 and D2 inhibition disrupted performance of sign- and goal-tracking. However, D1 inhibition specifically prevented the acquisition of sign-tracking to a lever, instead promoting goal-tracking and decreasing its conditioned reinforcing value, while neither D1 nor D2 signaling was required for goal-tracking in response to a tone. Likewise, nucleus accumbens dopaminergic lesions disrupted acquisition of sign-tracking to a lever, while leaving goal-tracking in response to a tone unaffected. Collectively, these results are the first evidence of an intraindividual dissociation of dopaminergic function in incentive salience attribution from reward-prediction error learning, indicating that incentive salience, reward-prediction error, and their associated dopaminergic signaling exist within individuals and are stimulus-specific. Thus, individual differences in incentive salience attribution may be reflective of a differential balance in dopaminergic function that may bias toward the attribution of incentive salience, relative to reward-prediction error learning only. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The habenula governs the attribution of incentive salience to reward predictive cues

PubMed Central

Danna, Carey L.; Shepard, Paul D.; Elmer, Greg I.

2013-01-01

The attribution of incentive salience to reward associated cues is critical for motivation and the pursuit of rewards. Disruptions in the integrity of the neural systems controlling these processes can lead to avolition and anhedonia, symptoms that cross the diagnostic boundaries of many neuropsychiatric illnesses. Here, we consider whether the habenula (Hb), a region recently demonstrated to encode negatively valenced events, also modulates the attribution of incentive salience to a neutral cue predicting a food reward. The Pavlovian autoshaping paradigm was used in the rat as an investigative tool to dissociate Pavlovian learning processes imparting strictly predictive value from learning that attributes incentive motivational value. Electrolytic lesions of the fasciculus retroflexus (fr), the sole pathway through which descending Hb efferents are conveyed, significantly increased incentive salience as measured by conditioned approaches to a cue light predictive of reward. Conversely, generation of a fictive Hb signal via fr stimulation during CS+ presentation significantly decreased the incentive salience of the predictive cue. Neither manipulation altered the reward predictive value of the cue as measured by conditioned approach to the food. Our results provide new evidence supporting a significant role for the Hb in governing the attribution of incentive motivational salience to reward predictive cues and further imply that pathological changes in Hb activity could contribute to the aberrant pursuit of debilitating goals or avolition and depression-like symptoms. PMID:24368898

Landmark Detection in Orbital Images Using Salience Histograms

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wagstaff, Kiri L.; Panetta, Julian; Schorghofer, Norbert; Greeley, Ronald; PendletonHoffer, Mary; bunte, Melissa

2010-01-01

NASA's planetary missions have collected, and continue to collect, massive volumes of orbital imagery. The volume is such that it is difficult to manually review all of the data and determine its significance. As a result, images are indexed and searchable by location and date but generally not by their content. A new automated method analyzes images and identifies "landmarks," or visually salient features such as gullies, craters, dust devil tracks, and the like. This technique uses a statistical measure of salience derived from information theory, so it is not associated with any specific landmark type. It identifies regions that are unusual or that stand out from their surroundings, so the resulting landmarks are context-sensitive areas that can be used to recognize the same area when it is encountered again. A machine learning classifier is used to identify the type of each discovered landmark. Using a specified window size, an intensity histogram is computed for each such window within the larger image (sliding the window across the image). Next, a salience map is computed that specifies, for each pixel, the salience of the window centered at that pixel. The salience map is thresholded to identify landmark contours (polygons) using the upper quartile of salience values. Descriptive attributes are extracted for each landmark polygon: size, perimeter, mean intensity, standard deviation of intensity, and shape features derived from an ellipse fit.

Learning-based saliency model with depth information.

PubMed

Ma, Chih-Yao; Hang, Hsueh-Ming

2015-01-01

Most previous studies on visual saliency focused on two-dimensional (2D) scenes. Due to the rapidly growing three-dimensional (3D) video applications, it is very desirable to know how depth information affects human visual attention. In this study, we first conducted eye-fixation experiments on 3D images. Our fixation data set comprises 475 3D images and 16 subjects. We used a Tobii TX300 eye tracker (Tobii, Stockholm, Sweden) to track the eye movement of each subject. In addition, this database contains 475 computed depth maps. Due to the scarcity of public-domain 3D fixation data, this data set should be useful to the 3D visual attention research community. Then, a learning-based visual attention model was designed to predict human attention. In addition to the popular 2D features, we included the depth map and its derived features. The results indicate that the extra depth information can enhance the saliency estimation accuracy specifically for close-up objects hidden in a complex-texture background. In addition, we examined the effectiveness of various low-, mid-, and high-level features on saliency prediction. Compared with both 2D and 3D state-of-the-art saliency estimation models, our methods show better performance on the 3D test images. The eye-tracking database and the MATLAB source codes for the proposed saliency model and evaluation methods are available on our website.

Reprint of "Two-stage sparse coding of region covariance via Log-Euclidean kernels to detect saliency".

PubMed

Zhang, Ying-Ying; Yang, Cai; Zhang, Ping

2017-08-01

In this paper, we present a novel bottom-up saliency detection algorithm from the perspective of covariance matrices on a Riemannian manifold. Each superpixel is described by a region covariance matrix on Riemannian Manifolds. We carry out a two-stage sparse coding scheme via Log-Euclidean kernels to extract salient objects efficiently. In the first stage, given background dictionary on image borders, sparse coding of each region covariance via Log-Euclidean kernels is performed. The reconstruction error on the background dictionary is regarded as the initial saliency of each superpixel. In the second stage, an improvement of the initial result is achieved by calculating reconstruction errors of the superpixels on foreground dictionary, which is extracted from the first stage saliency map. The sparse coding in the second stage is similar to the first stage, but is able to effectively highlight the salient objects uniformly from the background. Finally, three post-processing methods-highlight-inhibition function, context-based saliency weighting, and the graph cut-are adopted to further refine the saliency map. Experiments on four public benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, recall and mean absolute error, and demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed method. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Quantifying individual variation in the propensity to attribute incentive salience to reward cues.

PubMed

Meyer, Paul J; Lovic, Vedran; Saunders, Benjamin T; Yager, Lindsay M; Flagel, Shelly B; Morrow, Jonathan D; Robinson, Terry E

2012-01-01

If reward-associated cues acquire the properties of incentive stimuli they can come to powerfully control behavior, and potentially promote maladaptive behavior. Pavlovian incentive stimuli are defined as stimuli that have three fundamental properties: they are attractive, they are themselves desired, and they can spur instrumental actions. We have found, however, that there is considerable individual variation in the extent to which animals attribute Pavlovian incentive motivational properties ("incentive salience") to reward cues. The purpose of this paper was to develop criteria for identifying and classifying individuals based on their propensity to attribute incentive salience to reward cues. To do this, we conducted a meta-analysis of a large sample of rats (N = 1,878) subjected to a classic Pavlovian conditioning procedure. We then used the propensity of animals to approach a cue predictive of reward (one index of the extent to which the cue was attributed with incentive salience), to characterize two behavioral phenotypes in this population: animals that approached the cue ("sign-trackers") vs. others that approached the location of reward delivery ("goal-trackers"). This variation in Pavlovian approach behavior predicted other behavioral indices of the propensity to attribute incentive salience to reward cues. Thus, the procedures reported here should be useful for making comparisons across studies and for assessing individual variation in incentive salience attribution in small samples of the population, or even for classifying single animals.

Assistive lesion-emphasis system: an assistive system for fundus image readers

PubMed Central

Rangrej, Samrudhdhi B.; Sivaswamy, Jayanthi

2017-01-01

Abstract. Computer-assisted diagnostic (CAD) tools are of interest as they enable efficient decision-making in clinics and the screening of diseases. The traditional approach to CAD algorithm design focuses on the automated detection of abnormalities independent of the end-user, who can be an image reader or an expert. We propose a reader-centric system design wherein a reader’s attention is drawn to abnormal regions in a least-obtrusive yet effective manner, using saliency-based emphasis of abnormalities and without altering the appearance of the background tissues. We present an assistive lesion-emphasis system (ALES) based on the above idea, for fundus image-based diabetic retinopathy diagnosis. Lesion-saliency is learnt using a convolutional neural network (CNN), inspired by the saliency model of Itti and Koch. The CNN is used to fine-tune standard low-level filters and learn high-level filters for deriving a lesion-saliency map, which is then used to perform lesion-emphasis via a spatially variant version of gamma correction. The proposed system has been evaluated on public datasets and benchmarked against other saliency models. It was found to outperform other saliency models by 6% to 30% and boost the contrast-to-noise ratio of lesions by more than 30%. Results of a perceptual study also underscore the effectiveness and, hence, the potential of ALES as an assistive tool for readers. PMID:28560245

Detection and Monitoring of Oil Spills Using Moderate/High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images.

PubMed

Li, Ying; Cui, Can; Liu, Zexi; Liu, Bingxin; Xu, Jin; Zhu, Xueyuan; Hou, Yongchao

2017-07-01

Current marine oil spill detection and monitoring methods using high-resolution remote sensing imagery are quite limited. This study presented a new bottom-up and top-down visual saliency model. We used Landsat 8, GF-1, MAMS, HJ-1 oil spill imagery as dataset. A simplified, graph-based visual saliency model was used to extract bottom-up saliency. It could identify the regions with high visual saliency object in the ocean. A spectral similarity match model was used to obtain top-down saliency. It could distinguish oil regions and exclude the other salient interference by spectrums. The regions of interest containing oil spills were integrated using these complementary saliency detection steps. Then, the genetic neural network was used to complete the image classification. These steps increased the speed of analysis. For the test dataset, the average running time of the entire process to detect regions of interest was 204.56 s. During image segmentation, the oil spill was extracted using a genetic neural network. The classification results showed that the method had a low false-alarm rate (high accuracy of 91.42%) and was able to increase the speed of the detection process (fast runtime of 19.88 s). The test image dataset was composed of different types of features over large areas in complicated imaging conditions. The proposed model was proved to be robust in complex sea conditions.

Emotion displays in media: a comparison between American, Romanian, and Turkish children's storybooks

PubMed Central

Wege, Briana Vander; Sánchez González, Mayra L.; Friedlmeier, Wolfgang; Mihalca, Linda M.; Goodrich, Erica; Corapci, Feyza

2014-01-01

Children's books may provide an important resource of culturally appropriate emotions. This study investigates emotion displays in children's storybooks for preschoolers from Romania, Turkey, and the US in order to analyze cultural norms of emotions. We derived some hypotheses by referring to cross-cultural studies about emotion and emotion socialization. For such media analyses, the frequency rate of certain emotion displays can be seen as an indicator for the salience of the specific emotion. We expected that all children's storybooks would highlight dominantly positive emotions and that US children's storybooks would display negative powerful emotions (e.g., anger) more often and negative powerless emotions (e.g., sadness) less often than Turkish and Romanian storybooks. We also predicted that the positive and negative powerful emotion expressions would be more intense in the US storybooks compared to the other storybooks. Finally, we expected that social context (ingroup/outgroup) may affect the intensity emotion displays more in Turkish and Romanian storybooks compared to US storybooks. Illustrations in 30 popular children's storybooks (10 for each cultural group) were coded. Results mostly confirmed the hypotheses but also pointed to differences between Romanian and Turkish storybooks. Overall, the study supports the conclusion that culture-specific emotion norms are reflected in media to which young children are exposed. PMID:24987384

Emotion displays in media: a comparison between American, Romanian, and Turkish children's storybooks.

PubMed

Wege, Briana Vander; Sánchez González, Mayra L; Friedlmeier, Wolfgang; Mihalca, Linda M; Goodrich, Erica; Corapci, Feyza

2014-01-01

Children's books may provide an important resource of culturally appropriate emotions. This study investigates emotion displays in children's storybooks for preschoolers from Romania, Turkey, and the US in order to analyze cultural norms of emotions. We derived some hypotheses by referring to cross-cultural studies about emotion and emotion socialization. For such media analyses, the frequency rate of certain emotion displays can be seen as an indicator for the salience of the specific emotion. We expected that all children's storybooks would highlight dominantly positive emotions and that US children's storybooks would display negative powerful emotions (e.g., anger) more often and negative powerless emotions (e.g., sadness) less often than Turkish and Romanian storybooks. We also predicted that the positive and negative powerful emotion expressions would be more intense in the US storybooks compared to the other storybooks. Finally, we expected that social context (ingroup/outgroup) may affect the intensity emotion displays more in Turkish and Romanian storybooks compared to US storybooks. Illustrations in 30 popular children's storybooks (10 for each cultural group) were coded. Results mostly confirmed the hypotheses but also pointed to differences between Romanian and Turkish storybooks. Overall, the study supports the conclusion that culture-specific emotion norms are reflected in media to which young children are exposed.

Objects predict fixations better than early saliency.

PubMed

Einhäuser, Wolfgang; Spain, Merrielle; Perona, Pietro

2008-11-20

Humans move their eyes while looking at scenes and pictures. Eye movements correlate with shifts in attention and are thought to be a consequence of optimal resource allocation for high-level tasks such as visual recognition. Models of attention, such as "saliency maps," are often built on the assumption that "early" features (color, contrast, orientation, motion, and so forth) drive attention directly. We explore an alternative hypothesis: Observers attend to "interesting" objects. To test this hypothesis, we measure the eye position of human observers while they inspect photographs of common natural scenes. Our observers perform different tasks: artistic evaluation, analysis of content, and search. Immediately after each presentation, our observers are asked to name objects they saw. Weighted with recall frequency, these objects predict fixations in individual images better than early saliency, irrespective of task. Also, saliency combined with object positions predicts which objects are frequently named. This suggests that early saliency has only an indirect effect on attention, acting through recognized objects. Consequently, rather than treating attention as mere preprocessing step for object recognition, models of both need to be integrated.

Binaural beat salience

PubMed Central

Grose, John H.; Buss, Emily; Hall, Joseph W.

2012-01-01

Previous studies of binaural beats have noted individual variability and response lability, but little attention has been paid to the salience of the binaural beat percept. The purpose of this study was to gauge the strength of the binaural beat percept by matching its salience to that of sinusoidal amplitude modulation (SAM), and to then compare rate discrimination for the two types of fluctuation. Rate discrimination was measured for standard rates of 4, 8, 16, and 32 Hz – all in the 500-Hz carrier region. Twelve normal-hearing adults participated in this study. The results indicated that discrimination acuity for binaural beats is similar to that for SAM tones whose depths of modulation have been adjusted to provide equivalent modulation salience. The matched-salience SAM tones had relatively shallow depths of modulation, suggesting that the perceptual strength of binaural beats is relatively weak, although all listeners perceived them. The Weber fraction for detection of an increase in binaural beat rate is roughly constant across beat rates, at least for rates above 4 Hz, as is rate discrimination for SAM tones. PMID:22326292

Binaural beat salience.

PubMed

Grose, John H; Buss, Emily; Hall, Joseph W

2012-03-01

Previous studies of binaural beats have noted individual variability and response lability, but little attention has been paid to the salience of the binaural beat percept. The purpose of this study was to gauge the strength of the binaural beat percept by matching its salience to that of sinusoidal amplitude modulation (SAM), and to then compare rate discrimination for the two types of fluctuation. Rate discrimination was measured for standard rates of 4, 8, 16, and 32 Hz - all in the 500-Hz carrier region. Twelve normal-hearing adults participated in this study. The results indicated that discrimination acuity for binaural beats is similar to that for SAM tones whose depths of modulation have been adjusted to provide equivalent modulation salience. The matched-salience SAM tones had relatively shallow depths of modulation, suggesting that the perceptual strength of binaural beats is relatively weak, although all listeners perceived them. The Weber fraction for detection of an increase in binaural beat rate is roughly constant across beat rates, at least for rates above 4 Hz, as is rate discrimination for SAM tones. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Uncertainty, God, and scrupulosity: Uncertainty salience and priming God concepts interact to cause greater fears of sin.

PubMed

Fergus, Thomas A; Rowatt, Wade C

2015-03-01

Difficulties tolerating uncertainty are considered central to scrupulosity, a moral/religious presentation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). We examined whether uncertainty salience (i.e., exposure to a state of uncertainty) caused fears of sin and fears of God, as well as whether priming God concepts affected the impact of uncertainty salience on those fears. An internet sample of community adults (N = 120) who endorsed holding a belief in God or a higher power were randomly assigned to an experimental manipulation of (1) salience (uncertainty or insecurity) and (2) prime (God concepts or neutral). As predicted, participants who received the uncertainty salience and God concept priming reported the greatest fears of sin. There were no mean-level differences in the other conditions. The effect was not attributable to religiosity and the manipulations did not cause negative affect. We used a nonclinical sample recruited from the internet. These results support cognitive-behavioral models suggesting that religious uncertainty is important to scrupulosity. Implications of these results for future research are discussed. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Visual Attention Modeling for Stereoscopic Video: A Benchmark and Computational Model.

PubMed

Fang, Yuming; Zhang, Chi; Li, Jing; Lei, Jianjun; Perreira Da Silva, Matthieu; Le Callet, Patrick

2017-10-01

In this paper, we investigate the visual attention modeling for stereoscopic video from the following two aspects. First, we build one large-scale eye tracking database as the benchmark of visual attention modeling for stereoscopic video. The database includes 47 video sequences and their corresponding eye fixation data. Second, we propose a novel computational model of visual attention for stereoscopic video based on Gestalt theory. In the proposed model, we extract the low-level features, including luminance, color, texture, and depth, from discrete cosine transform coefficients, which are used to calculate feature contrast for the spatial saliency computation. The temporal saliency is calculated by the motion contrast from the planar and depth motion features in the stereoscopic video sequences. The final saliency is estimated by fusing the spatial and temporal saliency with uncertainty weighting, which is estimated by the laws of proximity, continuity, and common fate in Gestalt theory. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art stereoscopic video saliency detection models on our built large-scale eye tracking database and one other database (DML-ITRACK-3D).

Gender differences in the incentive salience of adult and infant faces.

PubMed

Hahn, Amanda C; Xiao, Dengke; Sprengelmeyer, Reiner; Perrett, David I

2013-01-01

Facial appearance can motivate behaviour and elicit activation of brain circuits putatively involved in reward. Gender differences have been observed for motivation to view beauty in adult faces--heterosexual women are motivated by beauty in general, while heterosexual men are motivated to view opposite-sex beauty alone. Although gender differences have been observed in sensitivity to infant cuteness, infant faces appear to hold equal incentive salience among men and women. In the present study, we investigated the incentive salience of attractiveness and cuteness in adult and infant faces, respectively. We predicted that, given alternative viewing options, gender differences would emerge for motivation to view infant faces. Heterosexual participants completed a "pay-per-view" key-press task, which allowed them to control stimulus duration. Gender differences were found such that infants held greater incentive salience among women, although both sexes differentiated infant faces based on cuteness. Among adult faces, men exerted more effort than women to view opposite-sex faces. These findings suggest that, contrary to previous reports, gender differences do exist in the incentive salience of infant faces as well as opposite-sex faces.

Aircraft Detection in High-Resolution SAR Images Based on a Gradient Textural Saliency Map.

PubMed

Tan, Yihua; Li, Qingyun; Li, Yansheng; Tian, Jinwen

2015-09-11

This paper proposes a new automatic and adaptive aircraft target detection algorithm in high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of airport. The proposed method is based on gradient textural saliency map under the contextual cues of apron area. Firstly, the candidate regions with the possible existence of airport are detected from the apron area. Secondly, directional local gradient distribution detector is used to obtain a gradient textural saliency map in the favor of the candidate regions. In addition, the final targets will be detected by segmenting the saliency map using CFAR-type algorithm. The real high-resolution airborne SAR image data is used to verify the proposed algorithm. The results demonstrate that this algorithm can detect aircraft targets quickly and accurately, and decrease the false alarm rate.

When death is not a problem: Regulating implicit negative affect under mortality salience.

PubMed

Lüdecke, Christina; Baumann, Nicola

2015-12-01

Terror management theory assumes that death arouses existential anxiety in humans which is suppressed in focal attention. Whereas most studies provide indirect evidence for negative affect under mortality salience by showing cultural worldview defenses and self-esteem strivings, there is only little direct evidence for implicit negative affect under mortality salience. In the present study, we assume that this implicit affective reaction towards death depends on people's ability to self-regulate negative affect as assessed by the personality dimension of action versus state orientation. Consistent with our expectations, action-oriented participants judged artificial words to express less negative affect under mortality salience compared to control conditions whereas state-oriented participants showed the reversed pattern. © 2015 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The Politics of EPSDT Policy in the 1990s: Policy Entrepreneurs, Political Streams, and Children's Health Benefits

PubMed Central

Sardell, Alice; Johnson, Kay

1998-01-01

The Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment (EPSDT) program, which was designed to ensure that Medicaid-eligible children receive comprehensive health services, is the only national attempt to provide a right to these services. The political factors that have shaped national EPSDT policy during the past decade are described, based on a conceptual framework developed by John W. Kingdon. The analysis focuses on the roles of two distinct sets of policy entrepreneurs: child health advocates and fiscally conservative governors. Their activities are described in relation to the larger political environment, or “political stream,” from the period of the expansion of Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women and children in the late 1980s to the enactment of a new State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997. The relative saliency of eligibility and benefit issues in children’s health policies had a major influence on the politics and outcomes. PMID:9614420

Children use salience to solve coordination problems.

PubMed

Grueneisen, Sebastian; Wyman, Emily; Tomasello, Michael

2015-05-01

Humans are routinely required to coordinate with others. When communication is not possible, adults often achieve this by using salient cues in the environment (e.g. going to the Eiffel Tower, as an obvious meeting point). To explore the development of this capacity, we presented dyads of 3-, 5-, and 8-year-olds (N = 144) with a coordination problem: Two balls had to be inserted into the same of four boxes to obtain a reward. Identical pictures were attached to three boxes whereas a unique--and thus salient--picture was attached to the fourth. Children either received one ball each, and so had to choose the same box (experimental condition), or they received both balls and could get the reward independently (control condition). In all cases, children could neither communicate nor see each other's choices. Children were significantly more likely to choose the salient option in the experimental condition than in the control condition. However, only the two older age groups chose the salient box above chance levels. This study is the first to show that children from at least age 5 can solve coordination problems by converging on a salient solution. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The impact of digital media on health: children's perspectives.

PubMed

Smahel, David; Wright, Michelle F; Cernikova, Martina

2015-02-01

Previous research has mainly focused on the effects of excessive digital media use or overuse on the health of children, primarily utilizing quantitative designs. More research should be conducted on general populations of children, rather than focusing exclusively on excessive technology users. This qualitative study describes technology's impact on physical and mental health from children's perspectives. Focus groups and interviews were conducted with children between the ages of 9 and 16 in 9 European countries (N = 368). During focus groups and interviews, researchers asked what children perceive as being potentially negative or problematic while using the internet and technology. In this study, children reported several physical and mental health problems without indicating internet addiction or overuse. Physical health symptoms included eye problems, headaches, not eating, and tiredness. For mental health symptoms, children reported cognitive salience of online events, aggression, and sleeping problems. Sometimes they reported these problems within 30 min of technology usage. This suggests that even shorter time usage can cause self-reported health problems for some children. Qualitative methodology helps to understand what children's perspectives are concerning the impact of digital media on health. We recommend future studies focused on average technology users and low technology users to determine whether average levels of technology usage relate to health problems of children. Parents and teachers should also be informed about the possible physical and mental health issues associated with children's average usage of technology.

The dark side of dopaminergic therapies in Parkinson's disease: shedding light on aberrant salience.

PubMed

Poletti, Michele

2017-03-07

Psychotic subjects and patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) "on" dopaminergic drugs, especially on dopamine agonists, present a hyperdopaminergic state that interferes with learning processing. These clinical populations present with distinct alterations of learning that share an increased potential motivational significance of stimuli: psychotic subjects may attribute salience to neutral stimuli, while medicated PD patients may overvalue rewards. Herein is discussed the speculative hypothesis that the hyperdopaminergic state induced by dopaminergic treatments, especially with dopamine agonists, may also facilitate the attribution of salience to neutral stimuli in PD patients, altering the physiological attribution of salience. Preliminary empirical evidence is in agreement with this speculative hypothesis, which needs further empirical investigation. The clinical implications of this hypothesis are discussed in relation to behavioral addictions, psychosis proneness, and enhanced creativity in medicated PD patients.

Saliency image of feature building for image quality assessment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ju, Xinuo; Sun, Jiyin; Wang, Peng

2011-11-01

The purpose and method of image quality assessment are quite different for automatic target recognition (ATR) and traditional application. Local invariant feature detectors, mainly including corner detectors, blob detectors and region detectors etc., are widely applied for ATR. A saliency model of feature was proposed to evaluate feasibility of ATR in this paper. The first step consisted of computing the first-order derivatives on horizontal orientation and vertical orientation, and computing DoG maps in different scales respectively. Next, saliency images of feature were built based auto-correlation matrix in different scale. Then, saliency images of feature of different scales amalgamated. Experiment were performed on a large test set, including infrared images and optical images, and the result showed that the salient regions computed by this model were consistent with real feature regions computed by mostly local invariant feature extraction algorithms.

Aircraft Detection in High-Resolution SAR Images Based on a Gradient Textural Saliency Map

PubMed Central

Tan, Yihua; Li, Qingyun; Li, Yansheng; Tian, Jinwen

2015-01-01

This paper proposes a new automatic and adaptive aircraft target detection algorithm in high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of airport. The proposed method is based on gradient textural saliency map under the contextual cues of apron area. Firstly, the candidate regions with the possible existence of airport are detected from the apron area. Secondly, directional local gradient distribution detector is used to obtain a gradient textural saliency map in the favor of the candidate regions. In addition, the final targets will be detected by segmenting the saliency map using CFAR-type algorithm. The real high-resolution airborne SAR image data is used to verify the proposed algorithm. The results demonstrate that this algorithm can detect aircraft targets quickly and accurately, and decrease the false alarm rate. PMID:26378543

Abnormal salience signaling in schizophrenia: The role of integrative beta oscillations.

PubMed

Liddle, Elizabeth B; Price, Darren; Palaniyappan, Lena; Brookes, Matthew J; Robson, Siân E; Hall, Emma L; Morris, Peter G; Liddle, Peter F

2016-04-01

Aberrant salience attribution and cerebral dysconnectivity both have strong evidential support as core dysfunctions in schizophrenia. Aberrant salience arising from an excess of dopamine activity has been implicated in delusions and hallucinations, exaggerating the significance of everyday occurrences and thus leading to perceptual distortions and delusional causal inferences. Meanwhile, abnormalities in key nodes of a salience brain network have been implicated in other characteristic symptoms, including the disorganization and impoverishment of mental activity. A substantial body of literature reports disruption to brain network connectivity in schizophrenia. Electrical oscillations likely play a key role in the coordination of brain activity at spatially remote sites, and evidence implicates beta band oscillations in long-range integrative processes. We used magnetoencephalography and a task designed to disambiguate responses to relevant from irrelevant stimuli to investigate beta oscillations in nodes of a network implicated in salience detection and previously shown to be structurally and functionally abnormal in schizophrenia. Healthy participants, as expected, produced an enhanced beta synchronization to behaviorally relevant, as compared to irrelevant, stimuli, while patients with schizophrenia showed the reverse pattern: a greater beta synchronization in response to irrelevant than to relevant stimuli. These findings not only support both the aberrant salience and disconnectivity hypotheses, but indicate a common mechanism that allows us to integrate them into a single framework for understanding schizophrenia in terms of disrupted recruitment of contextually appropriate brain networks. © 2016 The Authors Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Abnormal salience signaling in schizophrenia: The role of integrative beta oscillations

PubMed Central

Liddle, Elizabeth B.; Price, Darren; Palaniyappan, Lena; Brookes, Matthew J.; Robson, Siân E.; Hall, Emma L.; Morris, Peter G.

2016-01-01

Abstract Aberrant salience attribution and cerebral dysconnectivity both have strong evidential support as core dysfunctions in schizophrenia. Aberrant salience arising from an excess of dopamine activity has been implicated in delusions and hallucinations, exaggerating the significance of everyday occurrences and thus leading to perceptual distortions and delusional causal inferences. Meanwhile, abnormalities in key nodes of a salience brain network have been implicated in other characteristic symptoms, including the disorganization and impoverishment of mental activity. A substantial body of literature reports disruption to brain network connectivity in schizophrenia. Electrical oscillations likely play a key role in the coordination of brain activity at spatially remote sites, and evidence implicates beta band oscillations in long‐range integrative processes. We used magnetoencephalography and a task designed to disambiguate responses to relevant from irrelevant stimuli to investigate beta oscillations in nodes of a network implicated in salience detection and previously shown to be structurally and functionally abnormal in schizophrenia. Healthy participants, as expected, produced an enhanced beta synchronization to behaviorally relevant, as compared to irrelevant, stimuli, while patients with schizophrenia showed the reverse pattern: a greater beta synchronization in response to irrelevant than to relevant stimuli. These findings not only support both the aberrant salience and disconnectivity hypotheses, but indicate a common mechanism that allows us to integrate them into a single framework for understanding schizophrenia in terms of disrupted recruitment of contextually appropriate brain networks. Hum Brain Mapp 37:1361‐1374, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. PMID:26853904

The social perceptual salience effect.

PubMed

Inderbitzin, Martin P; Betella, Alberto; Lanatá, Antonio; Scilingo, Enzo P; Bernardet, Ulysses; Verschure, Paul F M J

2013-02-01

Affective processes appraise the salience of external stimuli preparing the agent for action. So far, the relationship between stimuli, affect, and action has been mainly studied in highly controlled laboratory conditions. In order to find the generalization of this relationship to social interaction, we assess the influence of the salience of social stimuli on human interaction. We constructed reality ball game in a mixed reality space where pairs of people collaborated in order to compete with an opposing team. We coupled the players with team members with varying social salience by using both physical and virtual representations of remote players (i.e., avatars). We observe that, irrespective of the team composition, winners and losers display significantly different inter- and intrateam spatial behaviors. We show that subjects regulate their interpersonal distance to both virtual and physical team members in similar ways, but in proportion to the vividness of the stimulus. As an independent validation of this social salience effect, we show that this behavioral effect is also displayed in physiological correlates of arousal. In addition, we found a strong correlation between performance, physiology, and the subjective reports of the subjects. Our results show that proxemics is consistent with affective responses, confirming the existence of a social salience effect. This provides further support for the so-called law of apparent reality, and it generalizes it to the social realm, where it can be used to design more efficient social artifacts. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Ecological Origins of Object Salience: Reward, Uncertainty, Aversiveness, and Novelty

PubMed Central

Ghazizadeh, Ali; Griggs, Whitney; Hikosaka, Okihide

2016-01-01

Among many objects around us, some are more salient than others (i.e., attract our attention automatically). Some objects may be inherently salient (e.g., brighter), while others may become salient by virtue of their ecological relevance through experience. However, the role of ecological experience in automatic attention has not been studied systematically. To address this question, we let subjects (macaque monkeys) view a large number of complex objects (>300), each experienced repeatedly (>5 days) with rewarding, aversive or no outcome association (mere-perceptual exposure). Test of salience was done on separate days using free viewing with no outcome. We found that gaze was biased among the objects from the outset, affecting saccades to objects or fixations within objects. When the outcome was rewarding, gaze preference was stronger (i.e., positive) for objects with larger or equal but uncertain rewards. The effects of aversive outcomes were variable. Gaze preference was positive for some outcome associations (e.g., airpuff), but negative for others (e.g., time-out), possibly due to differences in threat levels. Finally, novel objects attracted gaze, but mere perceptual exposure of objects reduced their salience (learned negative salience). Our results show that, in primates, object salience is strongly influenced by previous ecological experience and is supported by a large memory capacity. Owing to such high capacity for learned salience, the ability to rapidly choose important objects can grow during the entire life to promote biological fitness. PMID:27594825

Prospective memory function and cue salience in mild cognitive impairment: Findings from the Sydney Memory and Ageing Study.

PubMed

Thompson, Claire L; Henry, Julie D; Rendell, Peter G; Withall, Adrienne; Kochan, Nicole A; Sachdev, Perminder; Brodaty, Henry

2017-12-01

Prospective memory (PM) is crucial to the maintenance of functional independence in late adulthood and is consistently impaired in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). There remains a need for brief but valid measures of this construct that can be used as part of a comprehensive clinical assessment of cognition. Since the distinctiveness of PM cues is argued to determine the degree of strategic, controlled demands of PM paradigms, two variants of a brief measure were developed, one of which presented low-salience and the other high-salience PM cues. A large cohort of older adults with normal cognition or MCI was assessed with one of the two variants of our brief, novel measure of PM. Participants were asked to remember to execute PM tasks where the target cue was either high or low in salience, while concurrently engaged in an ongoing task of olfactory assessment. The task was able to discriminate between groups of participants with MCI or no cognitive impairment, albeit with a small effect size. The high-salience cue improved performance on the PM task; however, there was no interaction of cue salience with group. These results suggest that the temporal reliability and construct validity of very brief measures of the type used in this study need further exploration to determine their potential to provide meaningful insights into PM function. This measure may have utility as a brief screening tool, with identified deficits being followed up with a more comprehensive PM assessment.

A Locally Weighted Fixation Density-Based Metric for Assessing the Quality of Visual Saliency Predictions

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gide, Milind S.; Karam, Lina J.

2016-08-01

With the increased focus on visual attention (VA) in the last decade, a large number of computational visual saliency methods have been developed over the past few years. These models are traditionally evaluated by using performance evaluation metrics that quantify the match between predicted saliency and fixation data obtained from eye-tracking experiments on human observers. Though a considerable number of such metrics have been proposed in the literature, there are notable problems in them. In this work, we discuss shortcomings in existing metrics through illustrative examples and propose a new metric that uses local weights based on fixation density which overcomes these flaws. To compare the performance of our proposed metric at assessing the quality of saliency prediction with other existing metrics, we construct a ground-truth subjective database in which saliency maps obtained from 17 different VA models are evaluated by 16 human observers on a 5-point categorical scale in terms of their visual resemblance with corresponding ground-truth fixation density maps obtained from eye-tracking data. The metrics are evaluated by correlating metric scores with the human subjective ratings. The correlation results show that the proposed evaluation metric outperforms all other popular existing metrics. Additionally, the constructed database and corresponding subjective ratings provide an insight into which of the existing metrics and future metrics are better at estimating the quality of saliency prediction and can be used as a benchmark.

Comparing the Effects of Bupropion and Escitalopram on Excessive Internet Game Play in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder.

PubMed

Nam, Beomwoo; Bae, Sujin; Kim, Sun Mi; Hong, Ji Seon; Han, Doug Hyun

2017-11-30

Several studies have suggested the efficacy of bupropion and escitalopram on reducing the excessive internet game play. We hypothesized that both bupropion and escitalopram would be effective on reducing the severity of depressive symptoms and internet gaming disorder (IGD) symptoms in patients with both major depressive disorder and IGD. However, the changes in brain connectivity between the default mode network (DMN) and the salience network were different between bupropion and escitalopram due to their different pharmacodynamics. This study was designed as a 12-week double blind prospective trial. Thirty patients were recruited for this research (15 bupropion group+15 escitalopram group). To assess the differential functional connectivity (FC) between the hubs of the DMN and the salience network, we selected 12 regions from the automated anatomical labeling in PickAtals software. After drug treatment, the depressive symptoms and IGD symptoms in both groups were improved. Impulsivity and attentional symptoms in the bupropion group were significantly decreased, compared to the escitalopram group. After treatment, FC within only the DMN in escitalopram decreased while FC between DMN and salience network in bupropion group decreased. Bupropion was associated with significantly decreased FC within the salience network and between the salience network and the DMN, compared to escitalopram. Bupropion showed greater effects than escitalopram on reducing impulsivity and attentional symptoms. Decreased brain connectivity between the salience network and the DMN appears to be associated with improved excessive IGD symptoms and impulsivity in MDD patients with IGD.

Social medicine, feminism and the politics of population: From transnational knowledge networks to national social movements in Brazil and Mexico.

PubMed

de la Dehesa, Rafael

2018-02-28

This article examines the role of national actors articulated with an explicitly counter-hegemonic transnational knowledge network (TKN) mobilising around social medicine in policy debates on population control and family planning. It focuses primarily on Brazil, using Mexico as a shadow case to highlight salient points of contrast. In doing so, it makes two contributions to larger debates about TKNs. First, it highlights the plural and contested nature of the knowledge production they enact, underscoring contestation around a global reproductive regime that consolidated around family planning. Second, it underscores how the position and relative influence of actors articulated with TKNs is shaped by political and institutional contexts at the national level, producing variable opportunities for the mobilisation of applied knowledge. Reflecting its advocates' embeddedness in larger opposition movements to authoritarian states, social medicine had a greater influence on these debates in Brazil, where synergies with a resurgent feminist movement reinforced a shared insistence on comprehensive women's healthcare and increased the salience of sterilisation abuse on the political agenda.

Autonomous mental development with selective attention, object perception, and knowledge representation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ban, Sang-Woo; Lee, Minho

2008-04-01

Knowledge-based clustering and autonomous mental development remains a high priority research topic, among which the learning techniques of neural networks are used to achieve optimal performance. In this paper, we present a new framework that can automatically generate a relevance map from sensory data that can represent knowledge regarding objects and infer new knowledge about novel objects. The proposed model is based on understating of the visual what pathway in our brain. A stereo saliency map model can selectively decide salient object areas by additionally considering local symmetry feature. The incremental object perception model makes clusters for the construction of an ontology map in the color and form domains in order to perceive an arbitrary object, which is implemented by the growing fuzzy topology adaptive resonant theory (GFTART) network. Log-polar transformed color and form features for a selected object are used as inputs of the GFTART. The clustered information is relevant to describe specific objects, and the proposed model can automatically infer an unknown object by using the learned information. Experimental results with real data have demonstrated the validity of this approach.

The protective effects of religiosity on maladjustment among maltreated and nonmaltreated children.

PubMed

Kim, Jungmeen

2008-07-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of child religiosity in the development of maladaptation among maltreated children. Data were collected on 188 maltreated and 196 nonmaltreated children from low-income families (ages 6-12 years). Children were assessed on religiosity and depressive symptoms, and were evaluated by camp counselors on internalizing symptomatology and externalizing symptomatology. Significant interactions indicated protective effects of religiosity. Child reports of the importance of faith were related to lower levels of internalizing symptomatology among maltreated girls (t=-2.81, p<.05). Child reports of attendance at religious services were associated with lower levels of externalizing symptomatology among nonmaltreated boys (t=1.94, p=.05). These results suggest that child religiosity may largely contribute to stress coping process among maltreated and nonmaltreated children from low-income families. The results also indicate that the protective roles of religiosity varied by risk status and gender. The results indicate that a range of child religiosity behaviors and practices can be assessed in translational prevention research. It is recommended that healthcare professionals, psychologists, and social workers working with maltreated children and their families assess for salience of religiosity and may encourage them to consider the role religiosity plays in the development of prevention and intervention programs to alleviate distress and enhance stress coping.

The distinctive sequelae of children's coping with interparental conflict: Testing the reformulated emotional security theory.

PubMed

Davies, Patrick T; Martin, Meredith J; Sturge-Apple, Melissa L; Ripple, Michael T; Cicchetti, Dante

2016-10-01

Two studies tested hypotheses about the distinctive psychological consequences of children's patterns of responding to interparental conflict. In Study 1, 174 preschool children (M = 4.0 years) and their mothers participated in a cross-sectional design. In Study 2, 243 preschool children (M = 4.6 years) and their parents participated in 2 annual measurement occasions. Across both studies, multiple informants assessed children's psychological functioning. Guided by the reformulated version of emotional security theory, behavioral observations of children's coping with interparental conflict assessed their tendencies to exhibit 4 patterns based on their function in defusing threat: secure (i.e., efficiently address direct instances of threat), mobilizing (i.e., react to potential threat and social opportunities), dominant (i.e., directly defeat threat), and demobilizing (i.e., reduce salience as a target of hostility). As hypothesized, each profile predicted unique patterns of adjustment. Greater security was associated with lower levels of internalizing and externalizing symptoms and greater social competence, whereas higher dominance was associated with externalizing problems and extraversion. In contrast, mobilizing patterns of reactivity predicted more problems with self-regulation, internalizing symptoms, externalizing difficulties, but also greater extraversion. Finally, higher levels of demobilizing reactivity were linked with greater internalizing problems and lower extraversion but also better self-regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

ERPs associated with monitoring and evaluation of monetary reward and punishment in children with ADHD.

PubMed

van Meel, Catharina S; Heslenfeld, Dirk J; Oosterlaan, Jaap; Luman, Marjolein; Sergeant, Joseph A

2011-09-01

Several models of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) propose abnormalities in the response to behavioural contingencies. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study investigated the monitoring and subsequent evaluation of performance feedback resulting in either reward or punishment in children with ADHD (N = 18) and normal controls (N = 18) aged 8 to 12 years. Children performed a time production task, in which visual performance feedback was given after each response. To manipulate its motivational salience, feedback was coupled with monetary gains, losses or no incentives. Performance feedback signalling omitted gains as well as omitted losses evoked a feedback-related negativity (FRN) in control children. The FRN, however, was entirely absent in children with ADHD in all conditions. Moreover, while losses elicited enhanced amplitudes of the late positive potential (LPP) in controls, omitted rewards had this effect in ADHD. The lack of modulation of the FRN by contingencies in ADHD suggests deficient detection of environmental cues as a function of their motivational significance. LPP findings suggest diminished response to punishment, but oversensitivity to the loss of desired rewards. These findings suggest that children with ADHD have problems assigning relative motivational significance to outcomes of their actions. © 2011 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry © 2011 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

Deep Visual Attention Prediction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Wenguan; Shen, Jianbing

2018-05-01

In this work, we aim to predict human eye fixation with view-free scenes based on an end-to-end deep learning architecture. Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have made substantial improvement on human attention prediction, it is still needed to improve CNN based attention models by efficiently leveraging multi-scale features. Our visual attention network is proposed to capture hierarchical saliency information from deep, coarse layers with global saliency information to shallow, fine layers with local saliency response. Our model is based on a skip-layer network structure, which predicts human attention from multiple convolutional layers with various reception fields. Final saliency prediction is achieved via the cooperation of those global and local predictions. Our model is learned in a deep supervision manner, where supervision is directly fed into multi-level layers, instead of previous approaches of providing supervision only at the output layer and propagating this supervision back to earlier layers. Our model thus incorporates multi-level saliency predictions within a single network, which significantly decreases the redundancy of previous approaches of learning multiple network streams with different input scales. Extensive experimental analysis on various challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate our method yields state-of-the-art performance with competitive inference time.

Additional-singleton interference in efficient visual search: a common salience route for detection and compound tasks.

PubMed

Zehetleitner, Michael; Proulx, Michael J; Müller, Hermann J

2009-11-01

In efficient search for feature singleton targets, additional singletons (ASs) defined in a nontarget dimension are frequently found to interfere with performance. All search tasks that are processed via a spatial saliency map of the display would be predicted to be subject to such AS interference. In contrast, dual-route models, such as feature integration theory, assume that singletons are detected not via a saliency map, but via a nonspatial route that is immune to interference from cross-dimensional ASs. Consistent with this, a number of studies have reported absent interference effects in detection tasks. However, recent work suggests that the failure to find such effects may be due to the particular frequencies at which ASs were presented, as well as to their relative saliency. These two factors were examined in the present study. In contrast to previous reports, cross-dimensional ASs were found to slow detection (target-present and target-absent) responses, modulated by both their frequency of occurrence and saliency (relative to the target). These findings challenge dual-route models and support single-route models, such as dimension weighting and guided search.

Salient object detection based on discriminative boundary and multiple cues integration

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Jiang, Qingzhu; Wu, Zemin; Tian, Chang; Liu, Tao; Zeng, Mingyong; Hu, Lei

2016-01-01

In recent years, many saliency models have achieved good performance by taking the image boundary as the background prior. However, if all boundaries of an image are equally and artificially selected as background, misjudgment may happen when the object touches the boundary. We propose an algorithm called weighted contrast optimization based on discriminative boundary (wCODB). First, a background estimation model is reliably constructed through discriminating each boundary via Hausdorff distance. Second, the background-only weighted contrast is improved by fore-background weighted contrast, which is optimized through weight-adjustable optimization framework. Then to objectively estimate the quality of a saliency map, a simple but effective metric called spatial distribution of saliency map and mean saliency in covered window ratio (MSR) is designed. Finally, in order to further promote the detection result using MSR as the weight, we propose a saliency fusion framework to integrate three other cues-uniqueness, distribution, and coherence from three representative methods into our wCODB model. Extensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that our wCODB performs favorably against most of the methods based on boundary, and the integrated result outperforms all state-of-the-art methods.

Familiarity breeds content: assessing bird species popularity with culturomics

PubMed Central

Jepson, Paul R.; Malhado, Ana C. M.; Ladle, Richard J.

2016-01-01

Understanding public perceptions of biodiversity is essential to ensure continued support for conservation efforts. Despite this, insights remain scarce at broader spatial scales, mostly due to a lack of adequate methods for their assessment. The emergence of new technologies with global reach and high levels of participation provide exciting new opportunities to study the public visibility of biodiversity and the factors that drive it. Here, we use a measure of internet saliency to assess the national and international visibility of species within four taxa of Brazilian birds (toucans, hummingbirds, parrots and woodpeckers), and evaluate how much of this visibility can be explained by factors associated with familiarity, aesthetic appeal and conservation interest. Our results strongly indicate that familiarity (human population within the range of a species) is the most important factor driving internet saliency within Brazil, while aesthetic appeal (body size) best explains variation in international saliency. Endemism and conservation status of a species had small, but often negative, effects on either metric of internet saliency. While further studies are needed to evaluate the relationship between internet content and the cultural visibility of different species, our results strongly indicate that internet saliency can be considered as a broad proxy of cultural interest. PMID:26966663

Fusion of infrared and visible images based on saliency scale-space in frequency domain

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Yanfei; Sang, Nong; Dan, Zhiping

2015-12-01

A fusion algorithm of infrared and visible images based on saliency scale-space in the frequency domain was proposed. Focus of human attention is directed towards the salient targets which interpret the most important information in the image. For the given registered infrared and visible images, firstly, visual features are extracted to obtain the input hypercomplex matrix. Secondly, the Hypercomplex Fourier Transform (HFT) is used to obtain the salient regions of the infrared and visible images respectively, the convolution of the input hypercomplex matrix amplitude spectrum with a low-pass Gaussian kernel of an appropriate scale which is equivalent to an image saliency detector are done. The saliency maps are obtained by reconstructing the 2D signal using the original phase and the amplitude spectrum, filtered at a scale selected by minimizing saliency map entropy. Thirdly, the salient regions are fused with the adoptive weighting fusion rules, and the nonsalient regions are fused with the rule based on region energy (RE) and region sharpness (RS), then the fused image is obtained. Experimental results show that the presented algorithm can hold high spectrum information of the visual image, and effectively get the thermal targets information at different scales of the infrared image.

Parents' and children's knowledge of oral health: a qualitative study of children with cleft palate.

PubMed

Davies, Karen; Lin, Yin-Ling; Callery, Peter

2017-07-01

Children with cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) are prone to poorer oral health outcomes than their peers, with serious implications for treatment. Little is known of the knowledge and practice of children with CLP in caring for teeth and how these contribute to oral health. To investigate (i) parents' and children's knowledge of oral health, (ii) how knowledge is acquired, and (iii) how knowledge is implemented. A qualitative design was used to investigate knowledge, beliefs, and practices reported by parents and children, age 5-11 years with CLP. Data were collected from 22 parents and 16 children and analysed using thematic analysis. Four themes were derived as follows: (i) implicit knowledge: children express simple knowledge underpinned by basic rationales, (ii) situated knowledge: children gain skills as part of everyday childhood routines, (iii) maintaining good practice in oral health: parents take a lead role in motivating, monitoring, and maintaining children's toothbrushing, and (iv) learning opportunities: pivotal moments provide opportunities for children to extend their knowledge. Developers of oral health education interventions should take account of children's implicit knowledge and the transmission of beliefs between generations that influence toothbrushing behaviours. This could enhance interventions to support parents and children's practice. © 2016 BSPD, IAPD and John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Evolution of attention mechanisms for early visual processing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Müller, Thomas; Knoll, Alois

2011-03-01

Early visual processing as a method to speed up computations on visual input data has long been discussed in the computer vision community. The general target of a such approaches is to filter nonrelevant information from the costly higher-level visual processing algorithms. By insertion of this additional filter layer the overall approach can be speeded up without actually changing the visual processing methodology. Being inspired by the layered architecture of the human visual processing apparatus, several approaches for early visual processing have been recently proposed. Most promising in this field is the extraction of a saliency map to determine regions of current attention in the visual field. Such saliency can be computed in a bottom-up manner, i.e. the theory claims that static regions of attention emerge from a certain color footprint, and dynamic regions of attention emerge from connected blobs of textures moving in a uniform way in the visual field. Top-down saliency effects are either unconscious through inherent mechanisms like inhibition-of-return, i.e. within a period of time the attention level paid to a certain region automatically decreases if the properties of that region do not change, or volitional through cognitive feedback, e.g. if an object moves consistently in the visual field. These bottom-up and top-down saliency effects have been implemented and evaluated in a previous computer vision system for the project JAST. In this paper an extension applying evolutionary processes is proposed. The prior vision system utilized multiple threads to analyze the regions of attention delivered from the early processing mechanism. Here, in addition, multiple saliency units are used to produce these regions of attention. All of these saliency units have different parameter-sets. The idea is to let the population of saliency units create regions of attention, then evaluate the results with cognitive feedback and finally apply the genetic mechanism: mutation and cloning of the best performers and extinction of the worst performers considering computation of regions of attention. A fitness function can be derived by evaluating, whether relevant objects are found in the regions created. It can be seen from various experiments, that the approach significantly speeds up visual processing, especially regarding robust ealtime object recognition, compared to an approach not using saliency based preprocessing. Furthermore, the evolutionary algorithm improves the overall performance of the preprocessing system in terms of quality, as the system automatically and autonomously tunes the saliency parameters. The computational overhead produced by periodical clone/delete/mutation operations can be handled well within the realtime constraints of the experimental computer vision system. Nevertheless, limitations apply whenever the visual field does not contain any significant saliency information for some time, but the population still tries to tune the parameters - overfitting avoids generalization in this case and the evolutionary process may be reset by manual intervention.

Measuring the amplification of attention

PubMed Central

Blaser, Erik; Sperling, George; Lu, Zhong-Lin

1999-01-01

An ambiguous motion paradigm, in which the direction of apparent motion is determined by salience (i.e., the extent to which an area is perceived as figure versus ground), is used to assay the amplification of color by attention to color. In the red–green colored gratings used in these experiments, without attention instructions, salience depends on the chromaticity difference between colored stripes embedded in the motion sequence and the yellow background. Selective attention to red (or to green) alters the perceived direction of motion and is found to be equivalent to increasing the physical redness (or greenness) by 25–117%, depending on the observer and color. Whereas attention to a color drastically alters the salience of that color, it leaves color appearance unchanged. A computational model, which embodies separate, parallel pathways for object perception and for salience, accounts for 99% of the variance of the experimental data. PMID:10500237

Measuring the amplification of attention.

PubMed

Blaser, E; Sperling, G; Lu, Z L

1999-09-28

An ambiguous motion paradigm, in which the direction of apparent motion is determined by salience (i.e., the extent to which an area is perceived as figure versus ground), is used to assay the amplification of color by attention to color. In the red-green colored gratings used in these experiments, without attention instructions, salience depends on the chromaticity difference between colored stripes embedded in the motion sequence and the yellow background. Selective attention to red (or to green) alters the perceived direction of motion and is found to be equivalent to increasing the physical redness (or greenness) by 25-117%, depending on the observer and color. Whereas attention to a color drastically alters the salience of that color, it leaves color appearance unchanged. A computational model, which embodies separate, parallel pathways for object perception and for salience, accounts for 99% of the variance of the experimental data.

Toward statistical modeling of saccadic eye-movement and visual saliency.

PubMed

Sun, Xiaoshuai; Yao, Hongxun; Ji, Rongrong; Liu, Xian-Ming

2014-11-01

In this paper, we present a unified statistical framework for modeling both saccadic eye movements and visual saliency. By analyzing the statistical properties of human eye fixations on natural images, we found that human attention is sparsely distributed and usually deployed to locations with abundant structural information. This observations inspired us to model saccadic behavior and visual saliency based on super-Gaussian component (SGC) analysis. Our model sequentially obtains SGC using projection pursuit, and generates eye movements by selecting the location with maximum SGC response. Besides human saccadic behavior simulation, we also demonstrated our superior effectiveness and robustness over state-of-the-arts by carrying out dense experiments on synthetic patterns and human eye fixation benchmarks. Multiple key issues in saliency modeling research, such as individual differences, the effects of scale and blur, are explored in this paper. Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results, we show promising potentials of statistical approaches for human behavior research.

Scene analysis for effective visual search in rough three-dimensional-modeling scenes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Qi; Hu, Xiaopeng

2016-11-01

Visual search is a fundamental technology in the computer vision community. It is difficult to find an object in complex scenes when there exist similar distracters in the background. We propose a target search method in rough three-dimensional-modeling scenes based on a vision salience theory and camera imaging model. We give the definition of salience of objects (or features) and explain the way that salience measurements of objects are calculated. Also, we present one type of search path that guides to the target through salience objects. Along the search path, when the previous objects are localized, the search region of each subsequent object decreases, which is calculated through imaging model and an optimization method. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is capable of resolving the ambiguities resulting from distracters containing similar visual features with the target, leading to an improvement of search speed by over 50%.

Modern anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli attitudes.

PubMed

Cohen, Florette; Jussim, Lee; Harber, Kent D; Bhasin, Gautam

2009-08-01

Anti-Semitism is resurgent throughout much of the world. A new theoretical model of anti-Semitism is presented and tested in 3 experiments. The model proposes that mortality salience increases anti-Semitism and that anti-Semitism often manifests as hostility toward Israel. Study 1 showed that mortality salience led to greater levels of anti-Semitism and lowered support for Israel. This effect occurred only in a bogus pipeline condition, indicating that social desirability masks hostility toward Jews and Israel. Study 2 showed that mortality salience caused Israel, but no other country, to perceptually loom large. Study 3 showed that mortality salience increased punitiveness toward Israel's human rights violations more than it increased hostility toward the identical human rights violations committed by Russia or India. Collectively, results suggest that Jews constitute a unique cultural threat to many people's worldviews, that anti-Semitism causes hostility to Israel, and that hostility to Israel may feed back to increase anti-Semitism.

Terror management theory and self-esteem revisited: the roles of implicit and explicit self-esteem in mortality salience effects.

PubMed

Schmeichel, Brandon J; Gailliot, Matthew T; Filardo, Emily-Ana; McGregor, Ian; Gitter, Seth; Baumeister, Roy F

2009-05-01

Three studies tested the roles of implicit and/or explicit self-esteem in reactions to mortality salience. In Study 1, writing about death versus a control topic increased worldview defense among participants low in implicit self-esteem but not among those high in implicit self-esteem. In Study 2, a manipulation to boost implicit self-esteem reduced the effect of mortality salience on worldview defense. In Study 3, mortality salience increased the endorsement of positive personality descriptions but only among participants with the combination of low implicit and high explicit self-esteem. These findings indicate that high implicit self-esteem confers resilience against the psychological threat of death, and therefore the findings provide direct support for a fundamental tenet of terror management theory regarding the anxiety-buffering role of self-esteem. Copyright (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

Parenthood as a Terror Management Mechanism: The Moderating Role of Attachment Orientations.

PubMed

Yaakobi, Erez; Mikulincer, Mario; Shaver, Phillip R

2014-06-01

Six studies examined the hypothesis that parenthood serves a terror management function, with effects that are moderated by attachment orientations. In Studies 1 and 2, mortality salience, as compared with control conditions, increased the self-reported vividness and implicit accessibility of parenthood-related cognitions. In Studies 3 and 4, activating parenthood-related thoughts reduced death-thought accessibility and romantic intimacy following mortality salience. In Study 5, heightening the salience of parenthood-related obstacles increased death-thought accessibility. Across the five studies, the effects were significant mainly among participants who scored relatively low on avoidant attachment. In Study 6, avoidant people also reacted to mortality salience with more positive parenthood-related cognitions following an experimental manipulation that made parenthood compatible with their core strivings. Overall, the findings suggest that parenthood can have an anxiety-buffering effect that is moderated by attachment-related avoidance. © 2014 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Mortality salience, martyrdom, and military might: the great satan versus the axis of evil.

PubMed

Pyszczynski, Tom; Abdollahi, Abdolhossein; Solomon, Sheldon; Greenberg, Jeff; Cohen, Florette; Weise, David

2006-04-01

Study 1 investigated the effect of mortality salience on support for martyrdom attacks among Iranian college students. Participants were randomly assigned to answer questions about either their own death or an aversive topic unrelated to death and then evaluated materials from fellow students who either supported or opposed martyrdom attacks against the United States. Whereas control participants preferred the student who opposed martyrdom, participants reminded of death preferred the student who supported martyrdom and indicated they were more likely to consider such activities themselves. Study 2 investigated the effect of mortality salience on American college students' support for extreme military interventions by American forces that could kill thousands of civilians. Mortality salience increased support for such measures among politically conservative but not politically liberal students. The roles of existential fear, cultural worldviews, and construing one's nation as pursing a heroic battle against evil in advocacy of violence were discussed.

Discriminative region extraction and feature selection based on the combination of SURF and saliency

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Deng, Li; Wang, Chunhong; Rao, Changhui

2011-08-01

The objective of this paper is to provide a possible optimization on salient region algorithm, which is extensively used in recognizing and learning object categories. Salient region algorithm owns the superiority of intra-class tolerance, global score of features and automatically prominent scale selection under certain range. However, the major limitation behaves on performance, and that is what we attempt to improve. By reducing the number of pixels involved in saliency calculation, it can be accelerated. We use interest points detected by fast-Hessian, the detector of SURF, as the candidate feature for saliency operation, rather than the whole set in image. This implementation is thereby called Saliency based Optimization over SURF (SOSU for short). Experiment shows that bringing in of such a fast detector significantly speeds up the algorithm. Meanwhile, Robustness of intra-class diversity ensures object recognition accuracy.

Reconstruction of the subjective temporal distance of past interpersonal experiences after mortality salience.

PubMed

Wakimoto, Ryutaro

2011-05-01

The present article examines the effect of mortality salience on the subjective temporal distance of past experiences with close friends. Since mortality salience motivates relational strivings, it should also affect the perception of past interpersonal experiences that influence the anticipation of future closeness and continuity of the friendship. Three studies were conducted with a total of 428 Japanese college students. Study 1 revealed that a smaller temporal distance of an experience of positive conduct from a friend was associated with greater satisfaction with the friendship. Study 2 found that the temporal distance of such an experience was perceived as smaller in the mortality salience than in the control condition. Study 3 found equivalent results with respect to the temporal distance of the participants' positive conduct toward a close friend. These results suggest that people cope with existential concerns through reconstructing autobiographical memories in the interpersonal domain.

Emotion Knowledge in Young Neglected Children

PubMed Central

Sullivan, Margaret W.; Bennett, David S.; Carpenter, Kim; Lewis, Michael

2013-01-01

Young neglected children may be at risk for emotion knowledge deficits. Children with histories of neglect or with no maltreatment were initially seen at age 4 and again 1 year later to assess their emotion knowledge. Higher IQ was associated with better emotion knowledge, but neglected children had consistently poorer emotion knowledge over time compared to non-neglected children after controlling for IQ. Because both neglected status and IQ may contribute to deficits in emotional knowledge, both should be assessed when evaluating these children to appropriately design and pace emotion knowledge interventions. PMID:18299632

Emotion knowledge in young neglected children.

PubMed

Sullivan, Margaret W; Bennett, David S; Carpenter, Kim; Lewis, Michael

2008-08-01

Young neglected children may be at risk for emotion knowledge deficits. Children with histories of neglect or with no maltreatment were initially seen at age 4 and again 1 year later to assess their emotion knowledge. Higher IQ was associated with better emotion knowledge, but neglected children had consistently poorer emotion knowledge over time compared to non-neglected children after controlling for IQ. Because both neglected status and IQ may contribute to deficits in emotional knowledge, both should be assessed when evaluating these children to appropriately design and pace emotion knowledge interventions.

Polymorphisms of the OXTR gene explain why sales professionals love to help customers

PubMed Central

Verbeke, Willem; Bagozzi, Richard P.; van den Berg, Wouter E.; Lemmens, Aurelie

2013-01-01

Polymorphisms of the OXTR gene affect people's social interaction styles in various social encounters: carriers of the OXTR GG, compared to the OXTR AA/AG in general, are more motivated to interact socially and detect social salience. We focus on sales professionals operating in knowledge intensive organizations. Study 1, with a sample of 141 sales people, shows that carriers of the OXTR GG allele, compared to the OXTR AA/AG allele, are more motivated to help customers than to manipulatively impose goods/services on them. Study 2, using genomic functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on a sample of 21 sales professionals processing facial pictures with different emotional valences, investigates key nuclei of social brain regions (SBRs). Compared to OXTR AA/AG carriers, OXTR GG carriers experience greater effective connectivity between SBRs of interest measured by Granger causality tests using univariate Haugh tests. In addition, the multivariate El-Himdi and Roy tests demonstrate that the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and pars opercularis (inferior frontal gyrus) play key roles when processing emotional expressions. The bilateral amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) show significantly greater clout—influence on other brain regions—for GG allele carriers than non-carriers; likewise, the bilateral pars opercularis, left amygdala, and left mPFC are more receptive to activity in other brain regions among GG allele carriers than AG/AA allele carriers are. Thus, carriers of the OXTR GG allele are more sensitive to changes in emotional cues, enhancing social salience. To our knowledge, this is the first study on how insights from imaging genetics help understanding of the social motivation of people operating in a professional setting. PMID:24348351

Polymorphisms of the OXTR gene explain why sales professionals love to help customers.

PubMed

Verbeke, Willem; Bagozzi, Richard P; van den Berg, Wouter E; Lemmens, Aurelie

2013-01-01

Polymorphisms of the OXTR gene affect people's social interaction styles in various social encounters: carriers of the OXTR GG, compared to the OXTR AA/AG in general, are more motivated to interact socially and detect social salience. We focus on sales professionals operating in knowledge intensive organizations. Study 1, with a sample of 141 sales people, shows that carriers of the OXTR GG allele, compared to the OXTR AA/AG allele, are more motivated to help customers than to manipulatively impose goods/services on them. Study 2, using genomic functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on a sample of 21 sales professionals processing facial pictures with different emotional valences, investigates key nuclei of social brain regions (SBRs). Compared to OXTR AA/AG carriers, OXTR GG carriers experience greater effective connectivity between SBRs of interest measured by Granger causality tests using univariate Haugh tests. In addition, the multivariate El-Himdi and Roy tests demonstrate that the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and pars opercularis (inferior frontal gyrus) play key roles when processing emotional expressions. The bilateral amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) show significantly greater clout-influence on other brain regions-for GG allele carriers than non-carriers; likewise, the bilateral pars opercularis, left amygdala, and left mPFC are more receptive to activity in other brain regions among GG allele carriers than AG/AA allele carriers are. Thus, carriers of the OXTR GG allele are more sensitive to changes in emotional cues, enhancing social salience. To our knowledge, this is the first study on how insights from imaging genetics help understanding of the social motivation of people operating in a professional setting.

Top-down attention based on object representation and incremental memory for knowledge building and inference.

PubMed

Kim, Bumhwi; Ban, Sang-Woo; Lee, Minho

2013-10-01

Humans can efficiently perceive arbitrary visual objects based on an incremental learning mechanism with selective attention. This paper proposes a new task specific top-down attention model to locate a target object based on its form and color representation along with a bottom-up saliency based on relativity of primitive visual features and some memory modules. In the proposed model top-down bias signals corresponding to the target form and color features are generated, which draw the preferential attention to the desired object by the proposed selective attention model in concomitance with the bottom-up saliency process. The object form and color representation and memory modules have an incremental learning mechanism together with a proper object feature representation scheme. The proposed model includes a Growing Fuzzy Topology Adaptive Resonance Theory (GFTART) network which plays two important roles in object color and form biased attention; one is to incrementally learn and memorize color and form features of various objects, and the other is to generate a top-down bias signal to localize a target object by focusing on the candidate local areas. Moreover, the GFTART network can be utilized for knowledge inference which enables the perception of new unknown objects on the basis of the object form and color features stored in the memory during training. Experimental results show that the proposed model is successful in focusing on the specified target objects, in addition to the incremental representation and memorization of various objects in natural scenes. In addition, the proposed model properly infers new unknown objects based on the form and color features of previously trained objects. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Intervention to improve follow-up for abnormal Papanicolaou tests: a randomized clinical trial.

PubMed

Breitkopf, Carmen Radecki; Dawson, Lauren; Grady, James J; Breitkopf, Daniel M; Nelson-Becker, Carolyn; Snyder, Russell R

2014-04-01

To evaluate the effect of a theory-based, culturally targeted intervention on adherence to follow-up among low-income and minority women who experience an abnormal Pap test. 5,049 women were enrolled and underwent Pap testing. Of these, 378 had an abnormal result and 341 (90%) were randomized to one of three groups to receive their results: Intervention (I): culturally targeted behavioral and normative beliefs + knowledge/skills + salience + environmental constraints/barriers counseling; Active Control (AC): nontargeted behavioral and normative beliefs + knowledge/skills + salience + environmental constraints/barriers counseling; or Standard Care Only (SCO). The primary outcome was attendance at the initial follow-up appointment. Secondary outcomes included delay in care, completion of care at 18 months, state anxiety (STAI Y-6), depressive symptoms (CES-D), and distress (CDDQ). Anxiety was assessed at enrollment, notification of results, and 7-14 days later with the CDDQ and CES-D. 299 women were included in intent-to-treat analyses. Adherence rates were 60% (I), 54% (AC), and 58% (SCO), p = .73. Completion rates were 39% (I) and 35% in the AC and SCO groups, p = .77. Delay in care (in days) was (M ± SD): 58 ± 75 (I), 69 ± 72 (AC), and 54 ± 75 (SCO), p = .75. Adherence was associated with higher anxiety at notification, p < .01 and delay < 90 days (vs. 90+) was associated with greater perceived personal responsibility, p < .05. Women not completing their care (vs. those who did) had higher CES-D scores at enrollment, p < .05. A theory-based, culturally targeted message was not more effective than a nontargeted message or standard care in improving behavior.

Image Processing Strategies Based on a Visual Saliency Model for Object Recognition Under Simulated Prosthetic Vision.

PubMed

Wang, Jing; Li, Heng; Fu, Weizhen; Chen, Yao; Li, Liming; Lyu, Qing; Han, Tingting; Chai, Xinyu

2016-01-01

Retinal prostheses have the potential to restore partial vision. Object recognition in scenes of daily life is one of the essential tasks for implant wearers. Still limited by the low-resolution visual percepts provided by retinal prostheses, it is important to investigate and apply image processing methods to convey more useful visual information to the wearers. We proposed two image processing strategies based on Itti's visual saliency map, region of interest (ROI) extraction, and image segmentation. Itti's saliency model generated a saliency map from the original image, in which salient regions were grouped into ROI by the fuzzy c-means clustering. Then Grabcut generated a proto-object from the ROI labeled image which was recombined with background and enhanced in two ways--8-4 separated pixelization (8-4 SP) and background edge extraction (BEE). Results showed that both 8-4 SP and BEE had significantly higher recognition accuracy in comparison with direct pixelization (DP). Each saliency-based image processing strategy was subject to the performance of image segmentation. Under good and perfect segmentation conditions, BEE and 8-4 SP obtained noticeably higher recognition accuracy than DP, and under bad segmentation condition, only BEE boosted the performance. The application of saliency-based image processing strategies was verified to be beneficial to object recognition in daily scenes under simulated prosthetic vision. They are hoped to help the development of the image processing module for future retinal prostheses, and thus provide more benefit for the patients. Copyright © 2015 International Center for Artificial Organs and Transplantation and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Cue-elicited increases in incentive salience for marijuana: Craving, demand, and attentional bias.

PubMed

Metrik, Jane; Aston, Elizabeth R; Kahler, Christopher W; Rohsenow, Damaris J; McGeary, John E; Knopik, Valerie S; MacKillop, James

2016-10-01

Incentive salience is a multidimensional construct that includes craving, drug value relative to other reinforcers, and implicit motivation such as attentional bias to drug cues. Laboratory cue reactivity (CR) paradigms have been used to evaluate marijuana incentive salience with measures of craving, but not with behavioral economic measures of marijuana demand or implicit attentional processing tasks. This within-subjects study used a new CR paradigm to examine multiple dimensions of marijuana's incentive salience and to compare CR-induced increases in craving and demand. Frequent marijuana users (N=93, 34% female) underwent exposure to neutral cues then to lit marijuana cigarettes. Craving, marijuana demand via a marijuana purchase task, and heart rate were assessed after each cue set. A modified Stroop task with cannabis and control words was completed after the marijuana cues as a measure of attentional bias. Relative to neutral cues, marijuana cues significantly increased subjective craving and demand indices of intensity (i.e., drug consumed at $0) and Omax (i.e., peak drug expenditure). Elasticity significantly decreased following marijuana cues, reflecting sustained purchase despite price increases. Craving was correlated with demand indices (r's: 0.23-0.30). Marijuana users displayed significant attentional bias for cannabis-related words after marijuana cues. Cue-elicited increases in intensity were associated with greater attentional bias for marijuana words. Greater incentive salience indexed by subjective, behavioral economic, and implicit measures was observed after marijuana versus neutral cues, supporting multidimensional assessment. The study highlights the utility of a behavioral economic approach in detecting cue-elicited changes in marijuana incentive salience. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.

Ethnic identity salience improves recognition memory in Tibetan students via priming.

PubMed

Li, Hongxia; Wang, Echo Xue; Jin, Shenghua; Wu, Song

2016-04-01

Social identity salience affects group-reference effect in memory. However, limited studies have examined the influence of ethnic identity salience on group-reference effect among minority group people in conditions where the minority group dominates. In the present research, we aim to investigate, in a Tibetan-dominant context, whether the salience of ethnic identity among Tibetan students could display an influence on their group-reference effect via priming method. We recruited 50 Tibetan and 62 Han Chinese students from Tibetan University in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet Autonomous Region, where Tibetans were the majority. A month before the experiment, we tested the baseline of ethnic identity salience of both Tibetan and Han Chinese students using the Twenty Statements Test. In the formal experiment, we assessed the effectiveness of priming method first and then conducted a recognition memory test 2 week later via priming approach. The results showed that the ethnic identity both of Tibetan and Han Chinese participants was not salient in the baseline assessment. However, it was successfully induced via priming among Tibetan students. Tibetan students showed a significant group-reference effect in recognition memory task when their ethnic identity was induced via priming. On the contrary, Han Chinese students did not show increased ethnic awareness and superiority of ethnic in-group reference memory after being primed. Current research provides new evidence for the influence of salience of ethnic identity on group-reference effect, contributing to the application and extension of social identity theory among minority group people. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

The Penefit of Salience: Salient Accented, but Not Unaccented Words Reveal Accent Adaptation Effects.

PubMed

Grohe, Ann-Kathrin; Weber, Andrea

2016-01-01

In two eye-tracking experiments, the effects of salience in accent training and speech accentedness on spoken-word recognition were investigated. Salience was expected to increase a stimulus' prominence and therefore promote learning. A training-test paradigm was used on native German participants utilizing an artificial German accent. Salience was elicited by two different criteria: production and listening training as a subjective criterion and accented (Experiment 1) and canonical test words (Experiment 2) as an objective criterion. During training in Experiment 1, participants either read single German words out loud and deliberately devoiced initial voiced stop consonants (e.g., Balken-"beam" pronounced as (*) Palken), or they listened to pre-recorded words with the same accent. In a subsequent eye-tracking experiment, looks to auditorily presented target words with the accent were analyzed. Participants from both training conditions fixated accented target words more often than a control group without training. Training was identical in Experiment 2, but during test, canonical German words that overlapped in onset with the accented words from training were presented as target words (e.g., Palme-"palm tree" overlapped in onset with the training word (*) Palken) rather than accented words. This time, no training effect was observed; recognition of canonical word forms was not affected by having learned the accent. Therefore, accent learning was only visible when the accented test tokens in Experiment 1, which were not included in the test of Experiment 2, possessed sufficient salience based on the objective criterion "accent." These effects were not modified by the subjective criterion of salience from the training modality.

Novelty enhances visual salience independently of reward in the parietal lobe.

PubMed

Foley, Nicholas C; Jangraw, David C; Peck, Christopher; Gottlieb, Jacqueline

2014-06-04

Novelty modulates sensory and reward processes, but it remains unknown how these effects interact, i.e., how the visual effects of novelty are related to its motivational effects. A widespread hypothesis, based on findings that novelty activates reward-related structures, is that all the effects of novelty are explained in terms of reward. According to this idea, a novel stimulus is by default assigned high reward value and hence high salience, but this salience rapidly decreases if the stimulus signals a negative outcome. Here we show that, contrary to this idea, novelty affects visual salience in the monkey lateral intraparietal area (LIP) in ways that are independent of expected reward. Monkeys viewed peripheral visual cues that were novel or familiar (received few or many exposures) and predicted whether the trial will have a positive or a negative outcome--i.e., end in a reward or a lack of reward. We used a saccade-based assay to detect whether the cues automatically attracted or repelled attention from their visual field location. We show that salience--measured in saccades and LIP responses--was enhanced by both novelty and positive reward associations, but these factors were dissociable and habituated on different timescales. The monkeys rapidly recognized that a novel stimulus signaled a negative outcome (and withheld anticipatory licking within the first few presentations), but the salience of that stimulus remained high for multiple subsequent presentations. Therefore, novelty can provide an intrinsic bonus for attention that extends beyond the first presentation and is independent of physical rewards. Copyright © 2014 the authors 0270-6474/14/347947-11$15.00/0.

Attention in natural scenes: Affective-motivational factors guide gaze independently of visual salience.

PubMed

Schomaker, Judith; Walper, Daniel; Wittmann, Bianca C; Einhäuser, Wolfgang

2017-04-01

In addition to low-level stimulus characteristics and current goals, our previous experience with stimuli can also guide attentional deployment. It remains unclear, however, if such effects act independently or whether they interact in guiding attention. In the current study, we presented natural scenes including every-day objects that differed in affective-motivational impact. In the first free-viewing experiment, we presented visually-matched triads of scenes in which one critical object was replaced that varied mainly in terms of motivational value, but also in terms of valence and arousal, as confirmed by ratings by a large set of observers. Treating motivation as a categorical factor, we found that it affected gaze. A linear-effect model showed that arousal, valence, and motivation predicted fixations above and beyond visual characteristics, like object size, eccentricity, or visual salience. In a second experiment, we experimentally investigated whether the effects of emotion and motivation could be modulated by visual salience. In a medium-salience condition, we presented the same unmodified scenes as in the first experiment. In a high-salience condition, we retained the saturation of the critical object in the scene, and decreased the saturation of the background, and in a low-salience condition, we desaturated the critical object while retaining the original saturation of the background. We found that highly salient objects guided gaze, but still found additional additive effects of arousal, valence and motivation, confirming that higher-level factors can also guide attention, as measured by fixations towards objects in natural scenes. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cue-Elicited Increases in Incentive Salience for Marijuana: Craving, Demand, and Attentional Bias

PubMed Central

Metrik, Jane; Aston, Elizabeth R.; Kahler, Christopher W.; Rohsenow, Damaris J.; McGeary, John E.; Knopik, Valerie S.; MacKillop, James

2016-01-01

Background Incentive salience is a multidimensional construct that includes craving, drug value relative to other reinforcers, and implicit motivation such as attentional bias to drug cues. Laboratory cue reactivity (CR) paradigms have been used to evaluate marijuana incentive salience with measures of craving, but not with behavioral economic measures of marijuana demand or implicit attentional processing tasks. Methods This within-subjects study used a new CR paradigm to examine multiple dimensions of marijuana’s incentive salience and to compare CR-induced increases in craving and demand. Frequent marijuana users (N=93, 34% female) underwent exposure to neutral cues then to lit marijuana cigarettes. Craving, marijuana demand via a marijuana purchase task, and heart rate were assessed after each cue set. A modified Stroop task with cannabis and control words was completed after the marijuana cues as a measure of attentional bias. Results Relative to neutral cues, marijuana cues significantly increased subjective craving and demand indices of intensity (i.e., drug consumed at $0) and Omax (i.e., peak drug expenditure). Elasticity significantly decreased following marijuana cues, reflecting sustained purchase despite price increases. Craving was correlated with demand indices (r’s: 0.23–0.30). Marijuana users displayed significant attentional bias for cannabis-related words after marijuana cues. Cue-elicited increases in intensity were associated with greater attentional bias for marijuana words. Conclusions Greater incentive salience indexed by subjective, behavioral economic, and implicit measures was observed after marijuana versus neutral cues, supporting multidimensional assessment. The study highlights the utility of a behavioral economic approach in detecting cue-elicited changes in marijuana incentive salience. PMID:27515723

The mothering of conduct problem and normal children in Spain and the USA: authoritarian and permissive asynchrony.

PubMed

Wahler, Robert G; Cerezo, M Angeles

2005-11-01

Ninety-two clinic-referred and nonclinical mother-child dyads in Spain and the USA were observed in their home settings under naturalistic conditions for a total of 477 hours. Children in the clinic-referred dyads were considered troubled because of conduct problems. The observations were aimed at assessing two forms of mother-child asynchrony, either of which was expected to differentiate clinic referred from nonclinical dyads. Authoritarian asynchrony was defined as a mother's indiscriminate use of aversive reactions to her child, whereas the permissive form entailed indiscriminate positive reactions. Results showed the American mothers to generate more permissive asynchrony, whereas the Spanish mothers were inclined in the authoritarian direction. Only authoritarian asynchrony differentiated the clinical versus nonclinical dyads in each country. Discussion was centered on the greater salience of aversive as opposed to positive maternal attention, and cultural differences between countries that might have accounted for the different parenting styles.

Children's religious knowledge: implications for understanding satanic ritual abuse allegations.

PubMed

Goodman, G S; Quas, J A; Bottoms, B L; Qin, J; Shaver, P R; Orcutt, H; Shapiro, C

1997-11-01

The goals of the present study were to examine the extent of children's religious, especially satanic, knowledge and to understand the influence of children's age, religious training, family, and media exposure on that knowledge. Using a structured interview, 48 3- to 16-year-old children were questioned about their knowledge of: (a) religion and religious worship; (b) religion-related symbols and pictures; and (c) movies, music, and television shows with religious and horror themes. Although few children evinced direct knowledge of ritual abuse, many revealed general knowledge of satanism and satanic worship. With age, children's religious knowledge increased and became more sophisticated. Increased exposure to nonsatanic horror media was associated with more nonreligious knowledge that could be considered precursory to satanic knowledge, and increased exposure to satanic media was associated with more knowledge related to satanism. Our results suggest that children do not generally possess sufficient knowledge of satanic ritual abuse to make up false allegations on their own. However, many children have knowledge of satanism as well as nonreligious knowledge of violence, death, and illegal activities. It is possible that such knowledge could prompt an investigation of satanic ritual abuse or possibly serve as a starting point from which an allegation is erected.

Through their eyes: The influence of social models on attention and memory in capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella).

PubMed

Howard, Lauren H; Festa, Cassandra; Lonsdorf, Elizabeth V

2018-05-01

The ability to learn socially is of critical importance across a wide variety of species, as it allows knowledge to be passed quickly among individuals without the need of time-consuming trial-and-error learning. Among primates, social learning research has been particularly focused on foraging tasks, including transmission dynamics and the demonstration characteristics that appear to support social learning. Less work has focused on the attentional salience of the information being viewed, especially in New World monkeys. We used a noninvasive eye-tracking paradigm previously used in human infants and great apes to examine the salience of social modeling for memory in capuchin monkeys. Like human infants and apes, capuchins were significantly more likely to remember an event that included a social model as opposed to a nonsocial model. This article provides some of the first evidence that capuchin memory is altered by the presence of a social model and presents a novel method for assessing cognitive capabilities in this species. Whether this "social memory bias" is shared across the primate order, or is present only in taxa that regularly rely on social information, is an important avenue for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Media use and HIV/AIDS knowledge: a knowledge gap perspective.

PubMed

Bekalu, Mesfin Awoke; Eggermont, Steven

2014-12-01

Despite the widespread utilization of the mass media in HIV/AIDS prevention, little is known about the knowledge gap that results from disparities in mass media use. This study examined the relationship between HIV/AIDS-related mass media use and HIV/AIDS-related knowledge among urban and rural residents of northwestern Ethiopia. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that HIV/AIDS-related mass media use has both sequestering and mainstreaming effects in certain segments of the study population, although it was not a significant predictor of HIV/AIDS-related knowledge in the total population. The knowledge gaps between individuals with high and low education and between individuals who experience high and low levels of interpersonal communication about HIV/AIDS narrowed as HIV/AIDS-related media use increased, but the gap between urban and rural residents widened. The widening gap could be explained by differences in perceptions of information salience and several theoretical assumptions. Current mass media information campaigns, which are often prepared and broadcast from urban centers, may not only fail to improve the HIV/AIDS knowledge of the rural populace but also put rural populations at a disadvantage relative to their urban counterparts. Communication interventions informed by socioecological models might be helpful to redress and/or narrow the widening knowledge gap between urban and rural residents. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Parental nutrition knowledge and attitudes as predictors of 5-6-year-old children's healthy food knowledge.

PubMed

Zarnowiecki, Dorota; Sinn, Natalie; Petkov, John; Dollman, James

2012-07-01

Young children's knowledge about healthy food may influence the formation of their eating behaviours, and parents have a major influence on the development of children's knowledge in the early years. We investigated the extent to which parental nutrition knowledge and attitudes around food predicted young children's knowledge of healthy foods, controlling for other influences such as socio-economic status (SES) and parent education levels in a cross-sectional research design. Children were given a healthy food knowledge activity and parents completed questionnaires. Twenty primary schools in Adelaide, Australia, stratified by SES. We recruited 192 children aged 5-6 years and their parents. Structural equation modelling showed that parent nutrition knowledge predicted children's nutrition knowledge (r = 0·30, P < 0·001) independently of attitudes, SES and education level. Nutrition education for parents, targeted at low-SES areas at higher risk for obesity, may contribute to the development of healthy food knowledge in young children.

Priming mortality salience: supraliminal, subliminal and "double-death" priming techniques.

PubMed

Mahoney, Melissa B; Saunders, Benjamin A; Cain, Nicole M

2014-01-01

The study examined whether successively presented subliminal and supraliminal morality salience primes ("double death" prime) would have a stronger influence on death thought accessibility than subliminal or supraliminal primes alone. A between-subjects 2 (subliminal prime/control) × 2 (supraliminal prime/control) design was used. The supraliminal prime prompted participants to answer questions about death. For the subliminal prime, the word death was presented outside of awareness. Both priming techniques differed significantly from a control in ability to elicit mortality salience. There was an interactive influence of both primes. Implications for unconscious neutral networks relating to death are discussed.

Saliency affects feedforward more than feedback processing in early visual cortex.

PubMed

Emmanouil, Tatiana Aloi; Avigan, Philip; Persuh, Marjan; Ro, Tony

2013-07-01

Early visual cortex activity is influenced by both bottom-up and top-down factors. To investigate the influences of bottom-up (saliency) and top-down (task) factors on different stages of visual processing, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of areas V1/V2 to induce visual suppression at varying temporal intervals. Subjects were asked to detect and discriminate the color or the orientation of briefly-presented small lines that varied on color saliency based on color contrast with the surround. Regardless of task, color saliency modulated the magnitude of TMS-induced visual suppression, especially at earlier temporal processing intervals that reflect the feedforward stage of visual processing in V1/V2. In a second experiment we found that our color saliency effects were also influenced by an inherent advantage of the color red relative to other hues and that color discrimination difficulty did not affect visual suppression. These results support the notion that early visual processing is stimulus driven and that feedforward and feedback processing encode different types of information about visual scenes. They further suggest that certain hues can be prioritized over others within our visual systems by being more robustly represented during early temporal processing intervals. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Salience network engagement with the detection of morally laden information

PubMed Central

Gurvit, Hakan; Spreng, R. Nathan

2017-01-01

Abstract Moral cognition is associated with activation of the default network, regions implicated in mentalizing about one’s own actions or the intentions of others. Yet little is known about the initial detection of moral information. We examined the neural correlates of moral processing during a narrative completion task, which included an implicit moral salience manipulation. During fMRI scanning, participants read a brief vignette and selected the most semantically congruent sentence from two options to complete the narrative. The options were immoral, moral or neutral statements. RT was fastest for the selection of neutral statements and slowest for immoral statements. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that responses involving morally laden content engaged default and executive control network brain regions including medial and rostral prefrontal cortex, and core regions of the salience network, including anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate. Immoral vs moral conditions additionally engaged the salience network. These results implicate the salience network in the detection of moral information, which may modulate downstream default and frontal control network interactions in the service of complex moral reasoning and decision-making processes. These findings suggest that moral cognition involves both bottom-up and top-down attentional processes, mediated by discrete large-scale brain networks and their interactions. PMID:28338944

Inflammatory modulation of exercise salience: using hormesis to return to a healthy lifestyle

PubMed Central

2010-01-01

Most of the human population in the western world has access to unlimited calories and leads an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. The propensity to undertake voluntary exercise or indulge in spontaneous physical exercise, which might be termed "exercise salience", is drawing increased scientific attention. Despite its genetic aspects, this complex behaviour is clearly modulated by the environment and influenced by physiological states. Inflammation is often overlooked as one of these conditions even though it is known to induce a state of reduced mobility. Chronic subclinical inflammation is associated with the metabolic syndrome; a largely lifestyle-induced disease which can lead to decreased exercise salience. The result is a vicious cycle that increases oxidative stress and reduces metabolic flexibility and perpetuates the disease state. In contrast, hormetic stimuli can induce an anti-inflammatory phenotype, thereby enhancing exercise salience, leading to greater biological fitness and improved functional longevity. One general consequence of hormesis is upregulation of mitochondrial function and resistance to oxidative stress. Examples of hormetic factors include calorie restriction, extreme environmental temperatures, physical activity and polyphenols. The hormetic modulation of inflammation, and thus, exercise salience, may help to explain the highly heterogeneous expression of voluntary exercise behaviour and therefore body composition phenotypes of humans living in similar obesogenic environments. PMID:21143891

Perceiving and Confronting Sexism: The Causal Role of Gender Identity Salience.

PubMed

Wang, Katie; Dovidio, John F

2017-03-01

Although many researchers have explored the relations among gender identification, discriminatory attributions, and intentions to challenge discrimination, few have examined the causal impact of gender identity salience on women's actual responses to a sexist encounter. In the current study, we addressed this question by experimentally manipulating the salience of gender identity and assessing its impact on women's decision to confront a sexist comment in a simulated online interaction. Female participants ( N = 114) were randomly assigned to complete a short measure of either personal or collective self-esteem, which was designed to increase the salience of personal versus gender identity. They were then given the opportunity to confront a male interaction partner who expressed sexist views. Compared to those who were primed to focus on their personal identity, participants who were primed to focus on their gender identity perceived the interaction partner's remarks as more sexist and were more likely to engage in confrontation. By highlighting the powerful role of subtle contextual cues in shaping women's perceptions of, and responses to, sexism, our findings have important implications for the understanding of gender identity salience as an antecedent of prejudice confrontation. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/pwq/suppl/index.

Suboptimal choice in rats: incentive salience attribution promotes maladaptive decision-making

PubMed Central

Chow, Jonathan J; Smith, Aaron P; Wilson, A George; Zentall, Thomas R; Beckmann, Joshua S

2016-01-01

Stimuli that are more predictive of subsequent reward also function as better conditioned reinforcers. Moreover, stimuli attributed with incentive salience function as more robust conditioned reinforcers. Some theories have suggested that conditioned reinforcement plays an important role in promoting suboptimal choice behavior, like gambling. The present experiments examined how different stimuli, those attributed with incentive salience versus those without, can function in tandem with stimulus-reward predictive utility to promote maladaptive decision-making in rats. One group of rats had lights associated with goal-tracking as the reward-predictive stimuli and another had levers associated with sign-tracking as the reward-predictive stimuli. All rats were first trained on a choice procedure in which the expected value across both alternatives was equivalent but differed in their stimulus-reward predictive utility. Next, the expected value across both alternatives was systematically changed so that the alternative with greater stimulus-reward predictive utility was suboptimal in regard to primary reinforcement. The results demonstrate that in order to obtain suboptimal choice behavior, incentive salience alongside strong stimulus-reward predictive utility may be necessary; thus, maladaptive decision-making can be driven more by the value attributed to stimuli imbued with incentive salience that reliably predict a reward rather than the reward itself. PMID:27993692

Suboptimal choice in rats: Incentive salience attribution promotes maladaptive decision-making.

PubMed

Chow, Jonathan J; Smith, Aaron P; Wilson, A George; Zentall, Thomas R; Beckmann, Joshua S

2017-03-01

Stimuli that are more predictive of subsequent reward also function as better conditioned reinforcers. Moreover, stimuli attributed with incentive salience function as more robust conditioned reinforcers. Some theories have suggested that conditioned reinforcement plays an important role in promoting suboptimal choice behavior, like gambling. The present experiments examined how different stimuli, those attributed with incentive salience versus those without, can function in tandem with stimulus-reward predictive utility to promote maladaptive decision-making in rats. One group of rats had lights associated with goal-tracking as the reward-predictive stimuli and another had levers associated with sign-tracking as the reward-predictive stimuli. All rats were first trained on a choice procedure in which the expected value across both alternatives was equivalent but differed in their stimulus-reward predictive utility. Next, the expected value across both alternatives was systematically changed so that the alternative with greater stimulus-reward predictive utility was suboptimal in regard to primary reinforcement. The results demonstrate that in order to obtain suboptimal choice behavior, incentive salience alongside strong stimulus-reward predictive utility may be necessary; thus, maladaptive decision-making can be driven more by the value attributed to stimuli imbued with incentive salience that reliably predict a reward rather than the reward itself. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Brain State Differentiation and Behavioral Inflexibility in Autism†

PubMed Central

Uddin, Lucina Q.; Supekar, Kaustubh; Lynch, Charles J.; Cheng, Katherine M.; Odriozola, Paola; Barth, Maria E.; Phillips, Jennifer; Feinstein, Carl; Abrams, Daniel A.; Menon, Vinod

2015-01-01

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by social impairments alongside cognitive and behavioral inflexibility. While social deficits in ASDs have extensively been characterized, the neurobiological basis of inflexibility and its relation to core clinical symptoms of the disorder are unknown. We acquired functional neuroimaging data from 2 cohorts, each consisting of 17 children with ASDs and 17 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children, during stimulus-evoked brain states involving performance of social attention and numerical problem solving tasks, as well as during intrinsic, resting brain states. Effective connectivity between key nodes of the salience network, default mode network, and central executive network was used to obtain indices of functional organization across evoked and intrinsic brain states. In both cohorts examined, a machine learning algorithm was able to discriminate intrinsic (resting) and evoked (task) functional brain network configurations more accurately in TD children than in children with ASD. Brain state discriminability was related to severity of restricted and repetitive behaviors, indicating that weak modulation of brain states may contribute to behavioral inflexibility in ASD. These findings provide novel evidence for a potential link between neurophysiological inflexibility and core symptoms of this complex neurodevelopmental disorder. PMID:25073720

A developmental intergroup theory of social stereotypes and prejudice.

PubMed

Bigler, Rebecca S; Liben, Lynn S

2006-01-01

Developmental intergroup theory specifies the mechanisms and rules that govern the processes by which children single out groups as targets of stereotyping and prejudice, and by which children learn and construct both the characteristics (i.e., stereotypes) and affective responses (i.e., prejudices) that are associated with these groups in their culture. Specifically, we argue that children have a drive to understand their world, and that this drive is manifested in their tendency to classify natural and non-natural stimuli into categories, and to search the environment for cues about which of the great number of potential bases for categorization are important. The first step in the process of stereotype and prejudice formation is, therefore, the establishment of the psychological salience of some particular set of dimensions. Four factors are hypothesized to affect the establishment of the psychological salience of person attributes: (1) perceptual discriminability of social groups, (2) proportional group size, (3) explicit labeling and use of social groups, and (4) implicit use of social groups. We argue that person characteristics that are perceptually discriminable are more likely than other characteristics to become the basis of stereotyping, but that perceptual discriminability alone is insufficient to trigger psychological salience. Thus, for example, young children's ability to detect race or gender does not mean that these distinctions will inevitably become the bases of stereotypes and prejudice. Instead, for perceptually salient groups to become psychologically salient, one or more additional circumstances must hold, including being characterized by minority status, by adults' use of different labels for different groups, by adults using group divisions functionally, or by segregation. After a particular characteristic that may be used to differentiate among individuals becomes salient, we propose that children who have the ability to sort consistently will then categorize newly encountered individuals along this dimension. The act of categorization then triggers the process of social stereotyping and prejudice formation. Four factors are hypothesized to have an impact on the processes of forming stereotypes and prejudice. These include: (1) essentialism, (2) ingroup bias, (3) explicit attributions to social groups, and (4) group-attribute covariation. As noted throughout this chapter, there has been relatively little developmental work on many of the processes outlined here. Although findings from our own programs of research are consistent with the role of factors we have identified in the theory (e.g., the role of minority status, segregation, labeling and functional use of groups have all been shown to influence children's evaluations and beliefs about social groups), far more extensive research is needed. In addition to testing the reliability and generalizability of past findings to other samples, other research laboratories, and other experimentally manipulated groups, future work must move these theoretical models into the laboratory of the real world. If the tenets of developmental intergroup theory are correct, there would be many implications for social, educational, and legal policies related to social groups. We noted, for example, ways in which race and gender are made psychologically salient (e.g., the use of labels; segregated conditions). Importantly, factors such as these are largely under societal control. That is, institutions and individuals can choose to routinely label and use some particular category within children's environments or not. It is a violation of federal law, for example, for public school teachers to ask the children in their classrooms to line up at the door by race. In contrast, no federal or state law prohibits teachers from organizing their classrooms by sex. Should such laws be enacted? There can also be social controls on various forms of social segregation. Is it within individual children's rights to affiliate only with same-sex or same-race individuals? Is it acceptable for children and adolescents to exclude peers from their games, play, study groups, or other cliques on the basis of gender, race, age, or ethnicity? Finally, social institutions such as schools offer potential opportunities for intervention programs. What, if any, programs should be offered or required? Should curricula explicitly discuss social stereotyping and prejudice? Should children be taught negative information about people with whom they share some characteristic to reduce ingroup favoritism? Our hope is that developmental intergroup theory will ultimately prove valuable not only for understanding the development of social stereotypes and prejudices in children, but also for guiding social interventions that can ultimately prevent the development of stereotypes and prejudices in individuals and society.

Subjective and Objective Parameters Determining "Salience" in Long-Term Dialect Accommodation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Auer, Peter; Barden, Birgit; Grosskopf, Beate

1998-01-01

Presents results of a longitudinal study on long-term dialect accommodation in a German dialect setting. An important model of explaining which linguistic structures undergo such convergence and which do not makes use of the notion of "salience." (Author/VWL)

Career Salience of Institutionalized Adolescent Offenders.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Munson, Wayne W.; Strauss, Christine F.

1993-01-01

Investigated self-esteem and career salience of institutionalized male adolescent offenders (n=185) in context of Super's lifespan career development theory. Results indicated that participation, commitment, and values expectations in home-family roles contributed significantly to self-esteem in adolescent offenders. Adolescent offenders differed…

Research on Relationship Among Internet-Addiction, Personality Traits and Mental Health of Urban Left-Behind Children

PubMed Central

Ge, Ying; Se, Jun; Zhang, Jingfu

2015-01-01

Aim: In this research, we attempted at exploring the relationships among urban left-behind children’s internet-addiction, personality traits and mental health. Methods: In the form of three relevant questionnaires (Adolescent Pathological Internet Use Scale, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, Children’s Edition in Chinese and Mental Health Test), 796 urban left-behind children in China were investigated, concerning internet-addiction, personality traits and mental health. Results: (1) The internet-addiction rate of urban left-behind children in China reached10.8%—a relatively high figure, with the rate among males higher than that among females. In terms of internet-addition salience, the figure of urban left-behind children was obviously higher than that of non-left-behind children. (2) In China, the personality deviation rate of the overall left-behind children was 15.36%; while the personality deviation rate of the internet-addicted urban left-behind children was 38.88%, a figure prominently higher than that of the non-addicted urban left-behind children group, with the rate among females higher than that among males. (3) The mental health problem rate of the overall urban left-behind children in China was 8.43%; while the rate of the internet-addicted urban left-behind children was 27.77%, a figure significantly higher than that of the non-addicted urban left-behind children. (4) There were significant relationships among internet-addiction, personality traits and mental health. The total score of internet-addiction and its related dimensions can serve as indicators of personality neuroticism, psychoticism and the total scores of mental health. PMID:25946911

Beyond naïve cue combination: salience and social cues in early word learning.

PubMed

Yurovsky, Daniel; Frank, Michael C

2017-03-01

Children learn their earliest words through social interaction, but it is unknown how much they rely on social information. Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner's target of reference. In contrast, other theories argue that early word learning is largely a perceptual process in which young children map words onto salient objects. One way of unifying these accounts is to model word learning as weighted cue combination, in which children attend to many potential cues to reference, but only gradually learn the correct weight to assign each cue. We tested four predictions of this kind of naïve cue combination account, using an eye-tracking paradigm that combines social word teaching and two-alternative forced-choice testing. None of the predictions were supported. We thus propose an alternative unifying account: children are sensitive to social information early, but their ability to gather and deploy this information is constrained by domain-general cognitive processes. Developmental changes in children's use of social cues emerge not from learning the predictive power of social cues, but from the gradual development of attention, memory, and speed of information processing. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Local ecological knowledge among Baka children: a case of “children's culture” ?

PubMed Central

Gallois, Sandrine; Duda, Romain; Reyes-García, Victoria

2016-01-01

Childhood is an extensive life period specific to the human species and a key stage for development. Considering the importance of childhood for cultural transmission, we test the existence of a 'children's culture', or child-specific knowledge and practices not necessarily shared with adults, among the Baka in Southeast Cameroon. Using structured questionnaires, we collected data among 69 children and 175 adults to assess the ability to name, identify, and conceptualize animals and wild edibles. We found that some of the ecological knowledge related to little mammals and birds reported by Baka children was not reported by adults. We also found similarities between children’s and adult’s knowledge, both regarding the content of knowledge and how knowledge is distributed. Thus, middle childhood children hold similar knowledge than adults, especially related to wild edibles. Moreover, as children age, they start shedding child-specific knowledge and holding more adult’s knowledge. Additionally and echoing the gendered knowledge distribution present in adulthood, since middle childhood there are differences in the knowledge hold by boys and girls. We discuss our results highlighting the existence of specific ecological knowledge held by Baka children, the overlap between children’s and adults’ knowledge, and the changes in children’s ecological knowledge as they move into adulthood. PMID:28386157

Mechanisms underlying the influence of saliency on value-based decisions

PubMed Central

Chen, Xiaomo; Mihalas, Stefan; Niebur, Ernst; Stuphorn, Veit

2013-01-01

Objects in the environment differ in their low-level perceptual properties (e.g., how easily a fruit can be recognized) as well as in their subjective value (how tasty it is). We studied the influence of visual salience on value-based decisions using a two alternative forced choice task, in which human subjects rapidly chose items from a visual display. All targets were equally easy to detect. Nevertheless, both value and salience strongly affected choices made and reaction times. We analyzed the neuronal mechanisms underlying these behavioral effects using stochastic accumulator models, allowing us to characterize not only the averages of reaction times but their full distributions. Independent models without interaction between the possible choices failed to reproduce the observed choice behavior, while models with mutual inhibition between alternative choices produced much better results. Mutual inhibition thus is an important feature of the decision mechanism. Value influenced the amount of accumulation in all models. In contrast, increased salience could either lead to an earlier start (onset model) or to a higher rate (speed model) of accumulation. Both models explained the data from the choice trials equally well. However, salience also affected reaction times in no-choice trials in which only one item was present, as well as error trials. Only the onset model could explain the observed reaction time distributions of error trials and no-choice trials. In contrast, the speed model could not, irrespective of whether the rate increase resulted from more frequent accumulated quanta or from larger quanta. Visual salience thus likely provides an advantage in the onset, not in the processing speed, of value-based decision making. PMID:24167161

How Well Can Saliency Models Predict Fixation Selection in Scenes Beyond Central Bias? A New Approach to Model Evaluation Using Generalized Linear Mixed Models.

PubMed

Nuthmann, Antje; Einhäuser, Wolfgang; Schütz, Immo

2017-01-01

Since the turn of the millennium, a large number of computational models of visual salience have been put forward. How best to evaluate a given model's ability to predict where human observers fixate in images of real-world scenes remains an open research question. Assessing the role of spatial biases is a challenging issue; this is particularly true when we consider the tendency for high-salience items to appear in the image center, combined with a tendency to look straight ahead ("central bias"). This problem is further exacerbated in the context of model comparisons, because some-but not all-models implicitly or explicitly incorporate a center preference to improve performance. To address this and other issues, we propose to combine a-priori parcellation of scenes with generalized linear mixed models (GLMM), building upon previous work. With this method, we can explicitly model the central bias of fixation by including a central-bias predictor in the GLMM. A second predictor captures how well the saliency model predicts human fixations, above and beyond the central bias. By-subject and by-item random effects account for individual differences and differences across scene items, respectively. Moreover, we can directly assess whether a given saliency model performs significantly better than others. In this article, we describe the data processing steps required by our analysis approach. In addition, we demonstrate the GLMM analyses by evaluating the performance of different saliency models on a new eye-tracking corpus. To facilitate the application of our method, we make the open-source Python toolbox "GridFix" available.

Salience Assignment for Multiple-Instance Data and Its Application to Crop Yield Prediction

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wagstaff, Kiri L.; Lane, Terran

2010-01-01

An algorithm was developed to generate crop yield predictions from orbital remote sensing observations, by analyzing thousands of pixels per county and the associated historical crop yield data for those counties. The algorithm determines which pixels contain which crop. Since each known yield value is associated with thousands of individual pixels, this is a multiple instance learning problem. Because individual crop growth is related to the resulting yield, this relationship has been leveraged to identify pixels that are individually related to corn, wheat, cotton, and soybean yield. Those that have the strongest relationship to a given crop s yield values are most likely to contain fields with that crop. Remote sensing time series data (a new observation every 8 days) was examined for each pixel, which contains information for that pixel s growth curve, peak greenness, and other relevant features. An alternating-projection (AP) technique was used to first estimate the "salience" of each pixel, with respect to the given target (crop yield), and then those estimates were used to build a regression model that relates input data (remote sensing observations) to the target. This is achieved by constructing an exemplar for each crop in each county that is a weighted average of all the pixels within the county; the pixels are weighted according to the salience values. The new regression model estimate then informs the next estimate of the salience values. By iterating between these two steps, the algorithm converges to a stable estimate of both the salience of each pixel and the regression model. The salience values indicate which pixels are most relevant to each crop under consideration.

Experts' saliency ratings of speech-language dimensions associated with cluttering.

PubMed

Myers, Florence L; Bakker, Klaas

2014-12-01

The study aimed to investigate how cluttering specialists rated degree of prominence or saliency of various communication dimensions as contributing to the overall cluttering severity. Using a 9-point Likert type scoring system 31 cluttering specialists (with an average of 19 years of experience with cluttering) rated the relative importance of eight speech and language dimensions often associated with cluttering from '1' ('not important') at the low end to a '9' ('very important') at the high saliency end. Though the salience ratings differed the values in most cases were toward the high end of the rating scale. Additionally correlational analyses revealed several patterns of inter-correlation among the dimensions indicating that contribution of each communication dimension to overall cluttering severity may not be the same for all. Rather, it suggested that these dimensions may speak to cluttering severity through differential perceptual pathways that characterized the thinking of the experts who participated. Greater understanding of the various communication behaviors contributing to cluttering, severity is needed for theoretical research and clinical purposes. To the extent that the dimensions studied are thought to be relevant for cluttering, the results strengthen the notion that these dimensions (and perhaps others) should be included if we are to capture a comprehensive picture of cluttering severity. (a) describe the multidimensionality of cluttering; (b) discuss the perceptual saliency of speech-language dimensions associated with cluttering; (c) describe the interrelatedness of various speech-language dimensions associated with cluttering; (d) discuss how experts in cluttering rate the saliency of speech and language dimensions associated with cluttering when provided a list of these dimensions. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Penefit of Salience: Salient Accented, but Not Unaccented Words Reveal Accent Adaptation Effects

PubMed Central

Grohe, Ann-Kathrin; Weber, Andrea

2016-01-01

In two eye-tracking experiments, the effects of salience in accent training and speech accentedness on spoken-word recognition were investigated. Salience was expected to increase a stimulus' prominence and therefore promote learning. A training-test paradigm was used on native German participants utilizing an artificial German accent. Salience was elicited by two different criteria: production and listening training as a subjective criterion and accented (Experiment 1) and canonical test words (Experiment 2) as an objective criterion. During training in Experiment 1, participants either read single German words out loud and deliberately devoiced initial voiced stop consonants (e.g., Balken—“beam” pronounced as *Palken), or they listened to pre-recorded words with the same accent. In a subsequent eye-tracking experiment, looks to auditorily presented target words with the accent were analyzed. Participants from both training conditions fixated accented target words more often than a control group without training. Training was identical in Experiment 2, but during test, canonical German words that overlapped in onset with the accented words from training were presented as target words (e.g., Palme—“palm tree” overlapped in onset with the training word *Palken) rather than accented words. This time, no training effect was observed; recognition of canonical word forms was not affected by having learned the accent. Therefore, accent learning was only visible when the accented test tokens in Experiment 1, which were not included in the test of Experiment 2, possessed sufficient salience based on the objective criterion “accent.” These effects were not modified by the subjective criterion of salience from the training modality. PMID:27375540

A Computer-Aided Diagnosis System for Measuring Carotid Artery Intima-Media Thickness (IMT) Using Quaternion Vectors.

PubMed

Kutbay, Uğurhan; Hardalaç, Fırat; Akbulut, Mehmet; Akaslan, Ünsal; Serhatlıoğlu, Selami

2016-06-01

This study aims investigating adjustable distant fuzzy c-means segmentation on carotid Doppler images, as well as quaternion-based convolution filters and saliency mapping procedures. We developed imaging software that will simplify the measurement of carotid artery intima-media thickness (IMT) on saliency mapping images. Additionally, specialists evaluated the present images and compared them with saliency mapping images. In the present research, we conducted imaging studies of 25 carotid Doppler images obtained by the Department of Cardiology at Fırat University. After implementing fuzzy c-means segmentation and quaternion-based convolution on all Doppler images, we obtained a model that can be analyzed easily by the doctors using a bottom-up saliency model. These methods were applied to 25 carotid Doppler images and then interpreted by specialists. In the present study, we used color-filtering methods to obtain carotid color images. Saliency mapping was performed on the obtained images, and the carotid artery IMT was detected and interpreted on the obtained images from both methods and the raw images are shown in Results. Also these results were investigated by using Mean Square Error (MSE) for the raw IMT images and the method which gives the best performance is the Quaternion Based Saliency Mapping (QBSM). 0,0014 and 0,000191 mm(2) MSEs were obtained for artery lumen diameters and plaque diameters in carotid arteries respectively. We found that computer-based image processing methods used on carotid Doppler could aid doctors' in their decision-making process. We developed software that could ease the process of measuring carotid IMT for cardiologists and help them to evaluate their findings.

On the advancement of therapeutic penality: therapeutic authority, personality science and the therapeutic community.

PubMed

McBride, Ruari-Santiago

2017-09-01

In this article I examine the advancement of therapeutic penality in the UK, a penal philosophy that reimagines prison policy, practices and environments utilising psychological knowledge. Adopting a historical approach, I show how modern therapeutic penality is linked to the emergence of personality science in the nineteenth century and the development of the democratic therapeutic community (DTC) model in the twentieth century. I outline how at the turn of the twenty-first century a catalytic event generated a moral panic that led the British government to mobilise psychological knowledge and technologies in an attempt to manage dangerous people with severe personality disorder. Tracing subsequent developments, I argue psychological ways of talking, thinking and acting have obtained unparalleled salience in domains of penality and, in turn, radically transformed the conditions of imprisonment. © 2017 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness.

Oxytocin and Parent-Child Interaction in the Development of Empathy among Children at Risk for Autism

PubMed Central

McDonald, Nicole M.; Baker, Jason K.; Messinger, Daniel S.

2016-01-01

This longitudinal study investigated whether variation in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) and early parent-child interactions predicted later empathic behavior in 84 toddlers at high or low familial risk for ASD. Two well-studied OXTR single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), rs53576 and rs2254298, were examined. Parent-child interaction was measured at 15 and 18 months of age during free play sessions. Empathy was measured at 24 and 30 months using a response to parental distress paradigm. While there was no direct association between parent-child interaction quality or OXTR and empathy, rs53576 moderated the relation between interaction quality and empathy. Results suggest that the interplay between OXTR and early parent-child interactions predicts individual differences in empathy in children at varying risk for atypical social development. Findings are consonant with a differential susceptibility model in which an OXTR variant may increase the social salience of interaction processes for specific allele carriers. These results increase our understanding of predictors of empathy development in young children with a wide range of social outcomes. PMID:26998571

Anatomical and functional organization of the human substantia nigra and its connections

PubMed Central

Zhang, Yu; Larcher, Kevin Michel-Herve; Misic, Bratislav

2017-01-01

We investigated the anatomical and functional organization of the human substantia nigra (SN) using diffusion and functional MRI data from the Human Connectome Project. We identified a tripartite connectivity-based parcellation of SN with a limbic, cognitive, motor arrangement. The medial SN connects with limbic striatal and cortical regions and encodes value (greater response to monetary wins than losses during fMRI), while the ventral SN connects with associative regions of cortex and striatum and encodes salience (equal response to wins and losses). The lateral SN connects with somatomotor regions of striatum and cortex and also encodes salience. Behavioral measures from delay discounting and flanker tasks supported a role for the value-coding medial SN network in decisional impulsivity, while the salience-coding ventral SN network was associated with motor impulsivity. In sum, there is anatomical and functional heterogeneity of human SN, which underpins value versus salience coding, and impulsive choice versus impulsive action. PMID:28826495

Terror management and tolerance: does mortality salience always intensify negative reactions to others who threaten one's worldview?

PubMed

Greenberg, J; Simon, L; Pyszczynski, T; Solomon, S; Chatel, D

1992-08-01

Terror management research has shown that reminding Ss of their mortality leads to intolerance. The present research assessed whether mortality salience would lead to increased intolerance when the value of tolerance is highly accessible. In Study 1, given that liberals value tolerance more than conservatives, it was hypothesized that with mortality salience, dislike of dissimilar others would increase among conservatives but decrease among liberals. Liberal and conservative Ss were induced to think about their own mortality or a neutral topic and then were asked to evaluate 2 target persons, 1 liberal, the other conservative. Ss' evaluations of the targets supported these hypotheses. In Study 2, the value of tolerance was primed for half the Ss and, under mortality-salient or control conditions, Ss evaluated a target person who criticized the United States. Mortality salience did not lead to negative reactions to the critic when the value of tolerance was highly accessible.

Structured terror: further exploring the effects of mortality salience and personal need for structure on worldview defense.

PubMed

Juhl, Jacob; Routledge, Clay

2010-06-01

Previous research indicates that people respond to heightened death-related cognition with increased defense of predominant cultural beliefs (cultural worldview defense). However, recent research indicates that individual differences in personal need for structure (PNS) impact responses to threatening thoughts of death such that those high, but not low, in PNS respond to death thoughts by seeking a highly structured, clear, and coherent view of the world. Research has yet to fully consider the extent to which PNS affects the cultural worldview defenses typically exhibited after death is rendered salient. The current 3 studies examine the potential for PNS to determine the extent to which people respond to mortality salience with increased worldview defense. In all three studies PNS was measured and mortality salience induced. Subsequently, university-related (Study 1) or religious (Studies 2 and 3) worldview defense was assessed. Only individuals high in PNS responded to mortality salience with increased worldview defense.

Smoking Is So Ew!: College Smokers' Reactions to Health- Versus Social-Focused Antismoking Threat Messages.

PubMed

Wong, Norman C H; Nisbett, Gwendelyn S; Harvell, Lindsey A

2017-04-01

This study utilizes Terror Management Theory (TMT) to examine differences between eliciting social death and physical death anxiety related to smoking, smoking attitudes, and quitting intent among college students. Moreover, an important TMT variable-self-esteem-was used as a moderator. A 2 × 3 between-subjects factorial design crossed smoking-based self-esteem (low, high) with mortality salience manipulation (health-focused, social-focused, control). Results suggest while both making health-focused salient and making social-focused mortality salient were effective at getting smokers to quit, there was less effect for health-focused mortality salience on those whose self-esteem is strongly tied to smoking. Effect of social-focused mortality salience was more pronounced among participants who highly linked self-esteem with smoking. For smokers with low smoking-based self-esteem, both health-focused and social-focused mortality salience were effective at motivating attitude change toward smoking and quitting intentions. Implications for smoking cessation ad design and TMT are discussed.

When the dissolution of perceived body boundaries elicits happiness: The effect of selflessness induced by a body scan meditation.

PubMed

Dambrun, Michaël

2016-11-01

Drawing on the Self-centeredness/Selflessness Happiness Model (SSHM), we hypothesized that a reduction in the salience of perceived body boundaries would lead to increase optimal emotional experience. These constructs were assessed by means of self-report measures. Participants (n=53) were randomly assigned to either the selflessness (induced by a body scan meditation) condition or the control condition. As expected, the reduction in perceived body salience was greater in the body scan meditation condition than in the control condition. The change in perceived body salience was accompanied by a change in happiness and anxiety. Participants in the body-scan meditation condition reported greater happiness and less anxiety than participants in the control condition. Happiness increased when the salience of body boundaries decreased. Mediation analyses reveal that the change in happiness was mediated by the change in perceived body boundaries, which suggests that selflessness elicits happiness via dissolution of perceived body boundaries. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mortality Salience, System Justification, and Candidate Evaluations in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election.

PubMed

Sterling, Joanna; Jost, John T; Shrout, Patrick E

2016-01-01

Experiments conducted during the 2004 and 2008 U.S. presidential elections suggested that mortality salience primes increased support for President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, respectively. Some interpreted these results as reflecting "conservative shift" following exposure to threat, whereas others emphasized preferences for "charismatic" leadership following exposure to death primes. To assess both hypotheses in the context of a new election cycle featuring a liberal incumbent who was considered to be charismatic, we conducted four experiments shortly before the 2012 election involving President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. Contrary to earlier studies, there was little evidence that mortality salience, either by itself or in interaction with political orientation, affected overall candidate ratings or voting intentions. However, a significant interaction between mortality salience and system justification in some studies indicated a more circumscribed effect. The failure to "replicate" previous results in the context of this election may be attributable to disagreement among participants as to which of the candidates better represented the societal status quo.

Saliency Changes Appearance

PubMed Central

Kerzel, Dirk; Schönhammer, Josef; Burra, Nicolas; Born, Sabine; Souto, David

2011-01-01

Numerous studies have suggested that the deployment of attention is linked to saliency. In contrast, very little is known about how salient objects are perceived. To probe the perception of salient elements, observers compared two horizontally aligned stimuli in an array of eight elements. One of them was salient because of its orientation or direction of motion. We observed that the perceived luminance contrast or color saturation of the salient element increased: the salient stimulus looked even more salient. We explored the possibility that changes in appearance were caused by attention. We chose an event-related potential indexing attentional selection, the N2pc, to answer this question. The absence of an N2pc to the salient object provides preliminary evidence against involuntary attentional capture by the salient element. We suggest that signals from a master saliency map flow back into individual feature maps. These signals boost the perceived feature contrast of salient objects, even on perceptual dimensions different from the one that initially defined saliency. PMID:22162760

Dysmorphic concern is related to delusional proneness and negative affect in a community sample.

PubMed

Keating, Charlotte; Thomas, Neil; Stephens, Jessie; Castle, David J; Rossell, Susan L

2016-06-30

Body image concerns are common in the general population and in some mental illnesses reach pathological levels. We investigated whether dysmorphic concern with appearance (a preoccupation with minor or imagined defects in appearance) is explained by psychotic processes in a community sample. In a cross-sectional design, two hundred and twenty six participants completed an online survey battery including: The Dysmorphic Concern Questionnaire; the Peters Delusional inventory; the Aberrant Salience Inventory; and the Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scale. Participants were native English speakers residing in Australia. Dysmorphic concern was positively correlated with delusional proneness, aberrant salience and negative emotion. Regression established that negative emotion and delusional proneness predicted dysmorphic concern, whereas, aberrant salience did not. Although delusional proneness was related to body dysmorphia, there was no evidence that it was related to aberrant salience. Understanding the contribution of other psychosis processes, and other health related variables to the severity of dysmorphic concern will be a focus of future research. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

DeepFix: A Fully Convolutional Neural Network for Predicting Human Eye Fixations.

PubMed

Kruthiventi, Srinivas S S; Ayush, Kumar; Babu, R Venkatesh

2017-09-01

Understanding and predicting the human visual attention mechanism is an active area of research in the fields of neuroscience and computer vision. In this paper, we propose DeepFix, a fully convolutional neural network, which models the bottom-up mechanism of visual attention via saliency prediction. Unlike classical works, which characterize the saliency map using various hand-crafted features, our model automatically learns features in a hierarchical fashion and predicts the saliency map in an end-to-end manner. DeepFix is designed to capture semantics at multiple scales while taking global context into account, by using network layers with very large receptive fields. Generally, fully convolutional nets are spatially invariant-this prevents them from modeling location-dependent patterns (e.g., centre-bias). Our network handles this by incorporating a novel location-biased convolutional layer. We evaluate our model on multiple challenging saliency data sets and show that it achieves the state-of-the-art results.

Finding an emotional face in a crowd: emotional and perceptual stimulus factors influence visual search efficiency.

PubMed

Lundqvist, Daniel; Bruce, Neil; Öhman, Arne

2015-01-01

In this article, we examine how emotional and perceptual stimulus factors influence visual search efficiency. In an initial task, we run a visual search task, using a large number of target/distractor emotion combinations. In two subsequent tasks, we then assess measures of perceptual (rated and computational distances) and emotional (rated valence, arousal and potency) stimulus properties. In a series of regression analyses, we then explore the degree to which target salience (the size of target/distractor dissimilarities) on these emotional and perceptual measures predict the outcome on search efficiency measures (response times and accuracy) from the visual search task. The results show that both emotional and perceptual stimulus salience contribute to visual search efficiency. The results show that among the emotional measures, salience on arousal measures was more influential than valence salience. The importance of the arousal factor may be a contributing factor to contradictory history of results within this field.

Salience of the lambs: a test of the saliency map hypothesis with pictures of emotive objects.

PubMed

Humphrey, Katherine; Underwood, Geoffrey; Lambert, Tony

2012-01-25

Humans have an ability to rapidly detect emotive stimuli. However, many emotional objects in a scene are also highly visually salient, which raises the question of how dependent the effects of emotionality are on visual saliency and whether the presence of an emotional object changes the power of a more visually salient object in attracting attention. Participants were shown a set of positive, negative, and neutral pictures and completed recall and recognition memory tests. Eye movement data revealed that visual saliency does influence eye movements, but the effect is reliably reduced when an emotional object is present. Pictures containing negative objects were recognized more accurately and recalled in greater detail, and participants fixated more on negative objects than positive or neutral ones. Initial fixations were more likely to be on emotional objects than more visually salient neutral ones, suggesting that the processing of emotional features occurs at a very early stage of perception.

Salience and conflict of work and family roles among employed men and women.

PubMed

Knežević, Irena; Gregov, Ljiljana; Šimunić, Ana

2016-06-01

The aim of this research was to determine the salience of work and family roles and to study the connection between role salience and the interference of different types of roles among working men and women. Self-assessment measurement scales were applied. The research involved 206 participants; 103 employed married couples from different regions of Croatia. The results show that roles closely connected to family are considered the most salient. However, men are mostly dedicated behaviourally to the role of a worker. Women dedicate more time and energy to the roles of a spouse, a parent, and a family member whereas men are more oriented towards the leisurite role. The highest level of conflict was perceived when it comes to work disturbing leisure. Gender differences appeared only for work-to-marriage conflict, with men reporting higher conflict than women. The research found proof of only some low correlations between the salience of different types of roles and work-family conflict.

Impact of feature saliency on visual category learning.

PubMed

Hammer, Rubi

2015-01-01

People have to sort numerous objects into a large number of meaningful categories while operating in varying contexts. This requires identifying the visual features that best predict the 'essence' of objects (e.g., edibility), rather than categorizing objects based on the most salient features in a given context. To gain this capacity, visual category learning (VCL) relies on multiple cognitive processes. These may include unsupervised statistical learning, that requires observing multiple objects for learning the statistics of their features. Other learning processes enable incorporating different sources of supervisory information, alongside the visual features of the categorized objects, from which the categorical relations between few objects can be deduced. These deductions enable inferring that objects from the same category may differ from one another in some high-saliency feature dimensions, whereas lower-saliency feature dimensions can best differentiate objects from distinct categories. Here I illustrate how feature saliency affects VCL, by also discussing kinds of supervisory information enabling reflective categorization. Arguably, principles debated here are often being ignored in categorization studies.

Impact of feature saliency on visual category learning

PubMed Central

Hammer, Rubi

2015-01-01

People have to sort numerous objects into a large number of meaningful categories while operating in varying contexts. This requires identifying the visual features that best predict the ‘essence’ of objects (e.g., edibility), rather than categorizing objects based on the most salient features in a given context. To gain this capacity, visual category learning (VCL) relies on multiple cognitive processes. These may include unsupervised statistical learning, that requires observing multiple objects for learning the statistics of their features. Other learning processes enable incorporating different sources of supervisory information, alongside the visual features of the categorized objects, from which the categorical relations between few objects can be deduced. These deductions enable inferring that objects from the same category may differ from one another in some high-saliency feature dimensions, whereas lower-saliency feature dimensions can best differentiate objects from distinct categories. Here I illustrate how feature saliency affects VCL, by also discussing kinds of supervisory information enabling reflective categorization. Arguably, principles debated here are often being ignored in categorization studies. PMID:25954220

A Schema of Denial: The Influence of Rape Myth Acceptance on Beliefs, Attitudes, and Processing of Affirmative Consent Campaign Messages.

PubMed

Silver, Nathan; Hovick, Shelly R

2018-05-29

This study aims to examine the influence of rape myth acceptance (RMA) and the perceived salience of sexual violence on the cognitive processing of an affirmative consent campaign active on the campus where research was conducted. As part of a midcourse evaluation of the Consent is Sexy (CIS) campaign (N = 285), a subsample of participants who reported prior exposure to campaign posters (N = 182) was asked to review four campaign posters and indicate the extent to which they processed the message in the posters systematically. Robust gender differences in perceived salience of sexual violence, supportive attitudes, and perceived behavioral control (PBC) toward establishing consent were mediated by RMA. Moreover, robust gender differences in the systematic processing of the campaign were mediated by RMA and perceived salience in serial. Implications of the influence of rape myths and perceived salience on the cognitive processing of affirmed consent campaigns are discussed with respect to both campaign message design and implementation.

Predictors of emotional problems and physical aggression among children of Hong Kong Chinese, Mainland Chinese and Filipino immigrants to Canada.

PubMed

Beiser, Morton; Hamilton, Hayley; Rummens, Joanna Anneke; Oxman-Martinez, Jacqueline; Ogilvie, Linda; Humphrey, Chuck; Armstrong, Robert

2010-10-01

Data from the New Canadian Children and Youth Study (NCCYS), a national study of immigrant children and youth in Canada, are used to examine the mental health salience of putatively universal determinants, as well as of immigration-specific factors. Universal factors (UF) include age, gender, family and neighbourhood characteristics. Migration-specific (MS) factors include ethnic background, acculturative stress, prejudice, and the impact of region of resettlement within Canada. In a sample of children from Hong Kong, the Philippines and Mainland China, the study examined the determinants of emotional problems (EP), and physical aggression (PA). A two-step regression analysis entered UF on step 1, and MS variables on step 2. Universal factors accounted for 12.1% of EP variance. Addition of MS variables increased explained variance to 15.6%. Significant UF predictors: parental depression, family dysfunction, and parent's education. Significant MS variables: country of origin, region of resettlement, resettlement stress, prejudice, and limited linguistic fluency. UF accounted for 6.3% of variance in PA scores. Adding migration-specific variables increased variance explained to 9.1%. UF: age, gender, parent's depression, family dysfunction. MS: country of origin, region of resettlement, resettlement stress, and parent's perception of prejudice. Net of the effect of factors affecting the mental health of most, if not all children, migration-specific variables contribute to understanding immigrant children's mental health.

Impaired development of intrinsic connectivity networks in children with medically intractable localization-related epilepsy.

PubMed

Ibrahim, George M; Morgan, Benjamin R; Lee, Wayne; Smith, Mary Lou; Donner, Elizabeth J; Wang, Frank; Beers, Craig A; Federico, Paolo; Taylor, Margot J; Doesburg, Sam M; Rutka, James T; Snead, O Carter

2014-11-01

Typical childhood development is characterized by the emergence of intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) by way of internetwork segregation and intranetwork integration. The impact of childhood epilepsy on the maturation of ICNs is, however, poorly understood. The developmental trajectory of ICNs in 26 children (8-17 years) with localization-related epilepsy and 28 propensity-score matched controls was evaluated using graph theoretical analysis of whole brain connectomes from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Children with epilepsy demonstrated impaired development of regional hubs in nodes of the salience and default mode networks (DMN). Seed-based connectivity and hierarchical clustering analysis revealed significantly decreased intranetwork connections, and greater internetwork connectivity in children with epilepsy compared to controls. Significant interactions were identified between epilepsy duration and the expected developmental trajectory of ICNs, indicating that prolonged epilepsy may cause progressive alternations in large-scale networks throughout childhood. DMN integration was also associated with better working memory, whereas internetwork segregation was associated with higher full-scale intelligence quotient scores. Furthermore, subgroup analyses revealed the thalamus, hippocampus, and caudate were weaker hubs in children with secondarily generalized seizures, relative to other patient subgroups. Our findings underscore that epilepsy interferes with the developmental trajectory of brain networks underlying cognition, providing evidence supporting the early treatment of affected children. Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Electrophysiological correlates of figure-ground segregation directly reflect perceptual saliency.

PubMed

Straube, Sirko; Grimsen, Cathleen; Fahle, Manfred

2010-03-05

In a figure identification task, we investigated the influence of different visual cue configurations (spatial frequency, orientation or a combination of both) on the human EEG. Combining psychophysics with ERP and time-frequency analysis, we show that the neural response at about 200ms reflects perceptual saliency rather than physical cue contrast. Increasing saliency caused (i) a negative shift of the posterior P2 coinciding with a power decrease in the posterior theta-band and (ii) an amplitude and latency increase of the posterior P3. We demonstrate that visual cues interact for a percept that is non-linearly related to the physical figure-ground properties.

Ebola salience, death-thought accessibility, and worldview defense: A terror management theory perspective.

PubMed

Arrowood, Robert B; Cox, Cathy R; Kersten, Michael; Routledge, Clay; Shelton, Jill Talley; Hood, Ralph W

2017-10-01

According to terror management theory, individuals defend their cultural beliefs following mortality salience. The current research examined whether naturally occurring instances of death (i.e., Ebola) correspond to results found in laboratory studies. The results of two experiments demonstrated that participants experienced a greater accessibility of death-related thoughts in response to an Ebola prime during a regional outbreak. Study 2 also showed that increased mortality awareness following an Ebola manipulation was associated with greater worldview defense (i.e., religious fundamentalism). Together, these results suggest that reminders of death in the form of a disease threat operate similarly to a mortality salience manipulation.

Materialism moderates the impact of mortality salience on impulsive tendencies toward luxury brands.

PubMed

Audrin, Catherine; Cheval, Boris; Chanal, Julien

2018-02-01

Luxury goods have been shown to help individuals coping with death-related anxiety. However, the extent to which the symbolic value allocated to possessions (i.e., materialism) moderates this effect is still unclear. Here, we investigated the impact of materialism on impulsive approach tendencies toward luxury clothing brands in a context of mortality salience. Results showed that the impact of mortality salience was moderated by materialism with lower impulsive approach tendencies toward luxury clothing brands observed in non-materialistic participants. These findings highlight how materialism values may impact luxury consumption through impulsive pathways in a situation of death-related anxiety.

Impacts of parent-implemented early-literacy intervention for Spanish-speaking children with language impairment.

PubMed

Pratt, Amy S; Justice, Laura M; Perez, Ashanty; Duran, Lillian K

2015-01-01

Children with language impairment (LI) often have lags in development of print knowledge, an important early-literacy skill. This study explores impacts of a print-focused intervention for Spanish-speaking children with LI in Southeastern Mexico. Aims were twofold. First, we sought to describe the print knowledge (print-concept knowledge, alphabet knowledge) of Spanish-speaking children with LI. Second, we determined the extent to which print-referencing intervention delivered by children's parents could improve print knowledge. Using a pre-test-post-test delayed treatment research design, 13 parent-child dyads were assigned to an intervention (n = 8) versus control (n = 5) condition. Children were drawn from a speech-language clinic and all were receiving services for LI. Caregivers in the intervention group implemented an 8-week home-reading programme following a systematic scope and sequence for improving children's print knowledge. Children showed individual differences in their print knowledge based on three baseline measures examining print-concept knowledge, alphabet knowledge and letter-sound knowledge. Those whose caregivers implemented the 8-week programme showed statistically and practically significant gains on two of the three measures over the intervention period. The results presented here may stimulate future research on the print knowledge of Spanish-speaking children with LI. Sources of individual differences are important to determine. Caregivers may use the intervention presented here as a potential avenue for improving children's print knowledge. © 2015 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Amygdala task-evoked activity and task-free connectivity independently contribute to feelings of arousal.

PubMed

Touroutoglou, Alexandra; Bickart, Kevin C; Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Dickerson, Bradford C

2014-10-01

Individual differences in the intensity of feelings of arousal while viewing emotional pictures have been associated with the magnitude of task-evoked blood-oxygen dependent (BOLD) response in the amygdala. Recently, we reported that individual differences in feelings of arousal are associated with task-free (resting state) connectivity within the salience network. There has not yet been an investigation of whether these two types of functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures are redundant or independent in their relationships to behavior. Here we tested the hypothesis that a combination of task-evoked amygdala activation and task-free amygdala connectivity within the salience network relate to individual differences in feelings of arousal while viewing of negatively potent images. In 25 young adults, results revealed that greater task-evoked amygdala activation and stronger task-free amygdala connectivity within the salience network each contributed independently to feelings of arousal, predicting a total of 45% of its variance. Individuals who had both increased task-evoked amygdala activation and stronger task-free amygdala connectivity within the salience network had the most heightened levels of arousal. Task-evoked amygdala activation and task-free amygdala connectivity within the salience network were not related to each other, suggesting that resting-state and task-evoked dynamic brain imaging measures may provide independent and complementary information about affective experience, and likely other kinds of behaviors as well. Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Perceiving and Confronting Sexism: The Causal Role of Gender Identity Salience

PubMed Central

Wang, Katie; Dovidio, John F.

2017-01-01

Although many researchers have explored the relations among gender identification, discriminatory attributions, and intentions to challenge discrimination, few have examined the causal impact of gender identity salience on women’s actual responses to a sexist encounter. In the current study, we addressed this question by experimentally manipulating the salience of gender identity and assessing its impact on women’s decision to confront a sexist comment in a simulated online interaction. Female participants (N = 114) were randomly assigned to complete a short measure of either personal or collective self-esteem, which was designed to increase the salience of personal versus gender identity. They were then given the opportunity to confront a male interaction partner who expressed sexist views. Compared to those who were primed to focus on their personal identity, participants who were primed to focus on their gender identity perceived the interaction partner’s remarks as more sexist and were more likely to engage in confrontation. By highlighting the powerful role of subtle contextual cues in shaping women’s perceptions of, and responses to, sexism, our findings have important implications for the understanding of gender identity salience as an antecedent of prejudice confrontation. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ’s website at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/pwq/suppl/index. PMID:29051685

Visual saliency detection based on modeling the spatial Gaussianity

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ju, Hongbin

2015-04-01

In this paper, a novel salient object detection method based on modeling the spatial anomalies is presented. The proposed framework is inspired by the biological mechanism that human eyes are sensitive to the unusual and anomalous objects among complex background. It is supposed that a natural image can be seen as a combination of some similar or dissimilar basic patches, and there is a direct relationship between its saliency and anomaly. Some patches share high degree of similarity and have a vast number of quantity. They usually make up the background of an image. On the other hand, some patches present strong rarity and specificity. We name these patches "anomalies". Generally, anomalous patch is a reflection of the edge or some special colors and textures in an image, and these pattern cannot be well "explained" by their surroundings. Human eyes show great interests in these anomalous patterns, and will automatically pick out the anomalous parts of an image as the salient regions. To better evaluate the anomaly degree of the basic patches and exploit their nonlinear statistical characteristics, a multivariate Gaussian distribution saliency evaluation model is proposed. In this way, objects with anomalous patterns usually appear as the outliers in the Gaussian distribution, and we identify these anomalous objects as salient ones. Experiments are conducted on the well-known MSRA saliency detection dataset. Compared with other recent developed visual saliency detection methods, our method suggests significant advantages.

Theoretical explanations for preschoolers' lowercase alphabet knowledge.

PubMed

Pence Turnbull, Khara L; Bowles, Ryan P; Skibbe, Lori E; Justice, Laura M; Wiggins, Alice K

2010-12-01

Letter knowledge is a key aspect of children's language development, yet relatively little research has aimed to understand the nature of lowercase letter knowledge. We considered 4 hypotheses about children's lowercase letter knowledge simultaneously--uppercase familiarity, uppercase-lowercase similarity, own-name advantage, and frequency in printed English--as well as 3 interactions. Participants were 461 children ranging in age from 3 to 5 years, all of whom attended public preschool programs serving primarily children from low-income homes, who completed a letter naming task. Uppercase familiarity was the strongest predictor of children's lowercase alphabet knowledge; children were more than 16 times more likely to know a lowercase letter if they knew the corresponding uppercase letter. Uppercase-lowercase similarity and frequency in printed English also predicted children's lowercase letter knowledge, as did the interaction between uppercase familiarity and own-name advantage and the interaction between uppercase familiarity and uppercase-lowercase similarity. Findings suggest that transference from uppercase letter knowledge may be a primary mechanism for lowercase letter knowledge and that young children's knowledge of the lowercase alphabet letters is multiply determined.

Salience of the Nuclear Threat: Operationalization through Spontaneous Concern.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mayton, Daniel M., II

An indirect/nonreactive technique of assessing spontaneous concern should be used to examine the salience of the threat of nuclear war. Direct/reactive techniques may produce inconsistent results and inadvertently enhance a false consensus. The procedures for the administration, scoring, and interpretation of a spontaneous concern measure along…

Evolutionary Trends and the Salience Bias (with Apologies to Oil Tankers, Karl Marx, and Others).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McShea, Daniel W.

1994-01-01

Examines evolutionary trends, specifically trends in size, complexity, and fitness. Notes that documentation of these trends consists of either long lists of cases, or descriptions of a small number of salient cases. Proposes the use of random samples to avoid this "saliency bias." (SR)

Referent Salience Affects Second Language Article Use

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Trenkic, Danijela; Pongpairoj, Nattama

2013-01-01

The effect of referent salience on second language (L2) article production in real time was explored. Thai (-articles) and French (+articles) learners of English described dynamic events involving two referents, one visually cued to be more salient at the point of utterance formulation. Definiteness marking was made communicatively redundant with…

Active Teaching Strategies for a Sense of Salience: End-of-Life Communication

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kopp, Mary L.

2013-01-01

This study compared active teaching strategies with passive lecture by evaluating cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning outcomes, while highlighting end-of-life communication in nursing education. The problem addressed was twofold: First, passive lecture prevents transfer to situational decision-making, or a sense of salience (Benner,…

Mortality Salience and Morality: Thinking about Death Makes People Less Utilitarian

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tremoliere, Bastien; De Neys, Wim; Bonnefon, Jean-Francois

2012-01-01

According to the dual-process model of moral judgment, utilitarian responses to moral conflict draw on limited cognitive resources. Terror Management Theory, in parallel, postulates that mortality salience mobilizes these resources to suppress thoughts of death out of focal attention. Consequently, we predicted that individuals under mortality…

Generation and Gender Differences in Causal Attributions of Parenting Performance.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McBride, Angela Barron; Austin, Joan Kessner

The social psychology literature largely ignores attribution patterns made by both sexes of differing generations on an activity with salience for both sexes. "Parenting" is an activity with such salience. In estimating parental success for stimulus situations involving parent-child interactions, undergraduates and their parents were virtually…

Isolating the Incentive Salience of Reward-Associated Stimuli: Value, Choice, and Persistence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beckmann, Joshua S.; Chow, Jonathan J.

2015-01-01

Sign- and goal-tracking are differentially associated with drug abuse-related behavior. Recently, it has been hypothesized that sign- and goal-tracking behavior are mediated by different neurobehavioral valuation systems, including differential incentive salience attribution. Herein, we used different conditioned stimuli to preferentially elicit…

Exploring Preschool Children's Science Content Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Guo, Ying; Piasta, Shayne B.; Bowles, Ryan P.

2015-01-01

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to describe children's science content knowledge and examine the early predictors of science content knowledge in a sample of 194 typically developing preschool children. Children's science content knowledge was assessed in the fall (Time 1) and spring (Time 2) of the preschool year. Results showed…

Development of a structured observational method for the systematic assessment of school food-choice architecture.

PubMed

Ozturk, Orgul D; McInnes, Melayne M; Blake, Christine E; Frongillo, Edward A; Jones, Sonya J

2016-01-01

The objective of this study is to develop a structured observational method for the systematic assessment of the food-choice architecture that can be used to identify key points for behavioral economic intervention intended to improve the health quality of children's diets. We use an ethnographic approach with observations at twelve elementary schools to construct our survey instrument. Elements of the structured observational method include decision environment, salience, accessibility/convenience, defaults/verbal prompts, number of choices, serving ware/method/packaging, and social/physical eating environment. Our survey reveals important "nudgeable" components of the elementary school food-choice architecture, including precommitment and default options on the lunch line.

Home Health Nurse Collaboration in the Medical Neighborhood of Children with Medical Complexity.

PubMed

Nageswaran, Savithri; Golden, Shannon L

2016-10-01

The objectives of this study were to describe how home healthcare nurses collaborate with other clinicians caring for children with medical complexity, and identify barriers to collaboration within the medical neighborhood. Using qualitative data obtained from 20 semistructured interviews (15 English, 5 Spanish) with primary caregivers of children with medical complexity and 18 home healthcare nurses, researchers inquired about experiences with home healthcare nursing services for these children. During an iterative analysis process, recurrent themes were identified by their prevalence and salience in the data. Home healthcare nurses collaborate with many providers within the medical neighborhood of children with medical complexity and perform many different collaborative tasks. This collaboration is valued by caregivers and nurses, but is inconsistent. Home healthcare nurses' communication with other clinicians is important to the delivery of good-quality care to children with medical complexity at home, but is not always present. Home healthcare nurses reported inability to share clinical information with other clinicians, not receiving child-specific information, and lack of support for clinical problem-solving as concerns. Barriers for optimal collaboration included lack of preparedness of parents, availability of physicians for clinical support, reimbursement for collaborative tasks, variability in home healthcare nurses' tasks, and problems at nursing agency level. Home healthcare nurses' collaboration with other clinicians is important, but problems exist in the current system of care. Optimizing collaboration between home healthcare nurses and other clinicians will likely have a positive impact on these children and their families.

Food advertising, children's food choices and obesity: interplay of cognitive defences and product evaluation: an experimental study.

PubMed

Tarabashkina, L; Quester, P; Crouch, R

2016-04-01

To investigate the role of product evaluations, nutritional and persuasion knowledge on children's food choices conducted because of limited evidence about the role of product evaluations on consumer choices in conjunction with cognitive defences. A randomised controlled 2 × 2 factorial experiment with an exposure to a food and a control (toy) advertisement conducted in a non-laboratory setting at an annual event traditionally visited by families. Children aged 7-13 years with biometric/weight data representative of the general Australian population. Height and weight (converted into body mass index z-scores) measured in addition to children's nutritional and persuasion knowledge, product evaluations, age and gender. The factors that undermine children's cognitive defences relate to taste, social appeal of foods and low nutritional and persuasion knowledge. An interplay between the above-mentioned factors was also observed, identifying four groups among young consumers, alluding to a complex and at times impulsive nature of children's decisions: (1) knowledgeable children with less positive product evaluations choosing a healthy snack; (2) knowledgeable but hedonism-oriented children seeking peer conformity choosing an advertised product; (3) knowledgeable children who chose a snack belonging to the same product category; and (4) less knowledgeable children with positive product evaluations and low nutritional knowledge choosing snacks from the advertised product category. Obese children were more likely to belong to a cluster of less knowledgeable and hedonism-oriented children. The problem of consumption of less healthy foods is complex and multiple factors need to be considered by health practitioners, social marketers and parents to address the issue of childhood obesity. Nutritional knowledge alone is not sufficient to ensure children make healthier food choices and emphasis should also be placed on persuasion knowledge education, targeting of peer norms, self-efficacy and stricter regulation of advertising aimed at children.

Children's Religious Knowledge: Implications for Understanding Satanic Ritual Abuse Allegations.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goodman, Gail S.; Quas, Jodi A.; Bottoms, Bette L.; Qin, Jianjian; Shaver, Phillip R.

1997-01-01

Using a structured interview, 48 3- to 16-year-old children were questioned about their knowledge of religious and satanic concepts. Although few children evinced direct knowledge of ritual abuse, many revealed general knowledge of satanism and satanic worship. Results suggest that most children probably do not generally possess sufficient…

Wild leafy vegetable use and knowledge across multiple sites in Morocco: a case study for transmission of local knowledge?

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Background There are few publications on the use and diversity of wild leafy vegetables (WLVs) in Morocco. In order to address this gap, we conducted ethnobotanical field work in Taounate, Azilal and El House regions. Methods Ethnobotanical collections, free listing, qualitative interviews and a 7 day food frequency questionnaire. Results More than 30 species in 23 genera of WLV were identified. Of these 4 had not previously recorded as WLVs used in Morocco in the literature. WLVs were used by 84% of households surveyed in Taounate (N = 61, in March 2005), and were used up to 4 times a week. Qualitative data revealed both positive and negative perceptions of WLVs and detailed knowledge about preparation among women. The greatest diversity of WLV knowledge and use was in the Rif Mountains (Taounate). There was significant variation in nomenclature and salience of WLVs, not only between regions, but also between villages in the same region. Within the same region (or even village) different local names were used for a given species or genus, and different species were identified by the same local name (including species from different botanical families). Data showed greater overlap in knowledge among villages using the same market. Conclusion We believe the results suggest that markets are important sites for WLV knowledge transmission. PMID:24708730

Salience Effects: L2 Sentence Production as a Window on L1 Speech Planning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Antón-Méndez, Inés; Gerfen, Chip; Ramos, Miguel

2016-01-01

Salience influences grammatical structure during production in a language-dependent manner because different languages afford different options to satisfy preferences. During production, speakers may always try to satisfy all syntactic encoding preferences (e.g., salient entities to be mentioned early, themes to be assigned the syntactic function…

Anticipated Work-Family Conflict: Effects of Role Salience and Self-Efficacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cinamon, Rachel Gali

2010-01-01

The current study investigated how male and female university students' self-efficacy and their role salience contributed to the variance in their anticipated work-family conflict (WFC). Participants comprised 387 unmarried students (mean age 24 years). Cluster analysis yielded four profiles of participants who differed in their attributions of…

Career Assessment with Native Americans: Role Salience and Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brown, Chris; Lavish, Lea A.

2006-01-01

One hundred thirty-seven Native American college students currently attending a tribal college were surveyed regarding their life-role salience and career decision-making self-efficacy. Also included was an examination of students reason for attending college. Findings revealed that although participation, commitment, and value expectations for…

Relative Saliency in Change Signals Affects Perceptual Comparison and Decision Processes in Change Detection

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Cheng-Ta

2011-01-01

Change detection requires perceptual comparison and decision processes on different features of multiattribute objects. How relative salience between two feature-changes influences the processes has not been addressed. This study used the systems factorial technology to investigate the processes when detecting changes in a Gabor patch with visual…

A Comparison between Element Salience versus Context as Item Difficulty Factors in Raven's Matrices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Perez-Salas, Claudia P.; Streiner, David L.; Roberts, Maxwell J.

2012-01-01

The nature of contextual facilitation effects for items derived from Raven's Progressive Matrices was investigated in two experiments. For these, the original matrices were modified, creating either abstract versions with high element salience, or versions which comprised realistic entities set in familiar contexts. In order to replicate and…

Mortality Salience, System Justification, and Candidate Evaluations in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election

PubMed Central

Sterling, Joanna; Jost, John T.; Shrout, Patrick E.

2016-01-01

Experiments conducted during the 2004 and 2008 U.S. presidential elections suggested that mortality salience primes increased support for President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, respectively. Some interpreted these results as reflecting “conservative shift” following exposure to threat, whereas others emphasized preferences for “charismatic” leadership following exposure to death primes. To assess both hypotheses in the context of a new election cycle featuring a liberal incumbent who was considered to be charismatic, we conducted four experiments shortly before the 2012 election involving President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. Contrary to earlier studies, there was little evidence that mortality salience, either by itself or in interaction with political orientation, affected overall candidate ratings or voting intentions. However, a significant interaction between mortality salience and system justification in some studies indicated a more circumscribed effect. The failure to “replicate” previous results in the context of this election may be attributable to disagreement among participants as to which of the candidates better represented the societal status quo. PMID:26982197

How a terror attack affects right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and their relationship to torture attitudes.

PubMed

Lindén, Magnus; Björklund, Fredrik; Bäckström, Martin

2018-06-29

Self-reported level of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), the two facets of social dominance orientation (SDO-Dominance and SDO-Egalitarianism) and pro-torture attitudes were measured both in the immediate aftermath (terror salience, N = 152) of the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels and when terrorism was not salient. Results showed that RWA and pro-torture attitudes, but not SDO-Dominance and SDO-Egalitarianism, were significantly higher immediately after (non-salience, N = 140). Furthermore, RWA and SDO both predicted pro-torture attitudes more strongly under terror salience. We argue that the reason why RWA is higher under terror salience is a response to external threat, and that SDO-Dominance may be more clearly related to acceptance of torture and other human-rights violations, across context. Future research on the effects of terror-related events on sociopolitical and pro-torture attitudes should focus on person-situation interactions and also attempt to discriminate between trait and state aspects of authoritarianism. © 2018 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Focus theory of normative conduct and terror-management theory: the interactive impact of mortality salience and norm salience on social judgment.

PubMed

Jonas, Eva; Martens, Andy; Kayser, Daniela Niesta; Fritsche, Immo; Sullivan, Daniel; Greenberg, Jeff

2008-12-01

Research on terror-management theory has shown that after mortality salience (MS) people attempt to live up to cultural values. But cultures often value very different and sometimes even contradictory standards, leading to difficulties in predicting behavior as a consequence of terror-management needs. The authors report 4 studies to demonstrate that the effect of MS on people's social judgments depends on the salience of norms. In Study 1, making salient opposite norms (prosocial vs. proself) led to reactions consistent with the activated norms following MS compared with the control condition. Study 2 showed that, in combination with a pacifism prime, MS increased pacifistic attitudes. In Study 3, making salient a conservatism/security prime led people to recommend harsher bonds for an illegal prostitute when they were reminded of death, whereas a benevolence prime counteracted this effect. In Study 4 a help prime, combined with MS, increased people's helpfulness. Discussion focuses briefly on how these findings inform both terror-management theory and the focus theory of normative conduct.

Selecting salient frames for spatiotemporal video modeling and segmentation.

PubMed

Song, Xiaomu; Fan, Guoliang

2007-12-01

We propose a new statistical generative model for spatiotemporal video segmentation. The objective is to partition a video sequence into homogeneous segments that can be used as "building blocks" for semantic video segmentation. The baseline framework is a Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based video modeling approach that involves a six-dimensional spatiotemporal feature space. Specifically, we introduce the concept of frame saliency to quantify the relevancy of a video frame to the GMM-based spatiotemporal video modeling. This helps us use a small set of salient frames to facilitate the model training by reducing data redundancy and irrelevance. A modified expectation maximization algorithm is developed for simultaneous GMM training and frame saliency estimation, and the frames with the highest saliency values are extracted to refine the GMM estimation for video segmentation. Moreover, it is interesting to find that frame saliency can imply some object behaviors. This makes the proposed method also applicable to other frame-related video analysis tasks, such as key-frame extraction, video skimming, etc. Experiments on real videos demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Environmental cue saliency influences the vividness of a remote spatial memory in rats.

PubMed

Lopez, Joëlle; de Vasconcelos, Anne Pereira; Cassel, Jean-Christophe

2008-07-01

The Morris water maze is frequently used to evaluate the acquisition and retrieval of spatial memories. Few experiments, however, have investigated the effects of environmental cue saliency on the strength or persistence of such memories after a short vs. long post-acquisition interval. Using a Morris water maze, we therefore tested in rats the effect of the saliency of distal cues on the vividness of a recent (5 days) vs. remote (25 days) memory. Rats trained in a cue-enriched vs. a cue-impoverished context showed a better overall level of performance during acquisition. Furthermore, the probe trials revealed that the rats trained and tested in the cue-impoverished context (1) spent less time in the target quadrant at the 25-day delay, and (2) swam shorter distances in the target area, with fewer crossings at both 5- and 25-day delays, as compared to their counterparts trained and tested in the cue-enriched context. Thus, the memory trace formed in the cue-enriched context shows better resistance to time, suggesting an implication of cue saliency in the vividness of a spatial memory.

Salience network dynamics underlying successful resistance of temptation

PubMed Central

Nomi, Jason S; Calhoun, Vince D; Stelzel, Christine; Paschke, Lena M; Gaschler, Robert; Goschke, Thomas; Walter, Henrik; Uddin, Lucina Q

2017-01-01

Abstract Self-control and the ability to resist temptation are critical for successful completion of long-term goals. Contemporary models in cognitive neuroscience emphasize the primary role of prefrontal cognitive control networks in aligning behavior with such goals. Here, we use gaze pattern analysis and dynamic functional connectivity fMRI data to explore how individual differences in the ability to resist temptation are related to intrinsic brain dynamics of the cognitive control and salience networks. Behaviorally, individuals exhibit greater gaze distance from target location (e.g. higher distractibility) during presentation of tempting erotic images compared with neutral images. Individuals whose intrinsic dynamic functional connectivity patterns gravitate toward configurations in which salience detection systems are less strongly coupled with visual systems resist tempting distractors more effectively. The ability to resist tempting distractors was not significantly related to intrinsic dynamics of the cognitive control network. These results suggest that susceptibility to temptation is governed in part by individual differences in salience network dynamics and provide novel evidence for involvement of brain systems outside canonical cognitive control networks in contributing to individual differences in self-control. PMID:29048582

Hopelessly mortal: The role of mortality salience, immortality and trait self-esteem in personal hope.

PubMed

Wisman, Arnaud; Heflick, Nathan A

2016-08-01

Do people lose hope when thinking about death? Based on Terror Management Theory, we predicted that thoughts of death (i.e., mortality salience) would reduce personal hope for people low, but not high, in self-esteem, and that this reduction in hope would be ameliorated by promises of immortality. In Studies 1 and 2, mortality salience reduced personal hope for people low in self-esteem, but not for people high in self-esteem. In Study 3, mortality salience reduced hope for people low in self-esteem when they read an argument that there is no afterlife, but not when they read "evidence" supporting life after death. In Study 4, this effect was replicated with an essay affirming scientific medical advances that promise immortality. Together, these findings uniquely demonstrate that thoughts of mortality interact with trait self-esteem to cause changes in personal hope, and that literal immortality beliefs can aid psychological adjustment when thinking about death. Implications for understanding personal hope, trait self-esteem, afterlife beliefs and terror management are discussed.

Odourant dominance in olfactory mixture processing: what makes a strong odourant?

PubMed Central

Schubert, Marco; Sandoz, Jean-Christophe; Galizia, Giovanni; Giurfa, Martin

2015-01-01

The question of how animals process stimulus mixtures remains controversial as opposing views propose that mixtures are processed analytically, as the sum of their elements, or holistically, as unique entities different from their elements. Overshadowing is a widespread phenomenon that can help decide between these alternatives. In overshadowing, an individual trained with a binary mixture learns one element better at the expense of the other. Although element salience (learning success) has been suggested as a main explanation for overshadowing, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain unclear. We studied olfactory overshadowing in honeybees to uncover the mechanisms underlying olfactory-mixture processing. We provide, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive dataset on overshadowing to date based on 90 experimental groups involving more than 2700 bees trained either with six odourants or with their resulting 15 binary mixtures. We found that bees process olfactory mixtures analytically and that salience alone cannot predict overshadowing. After normalizing learning success, we found that an unexpected feature, the generalization profile of an odourant, was determinant for overshadowing. Odourants that induced less generalization enhanced their distinctiveness and became dominant in the mixture. Our study thus uncovers features that determine odourant dominance within olfactory mixtures and allows the referring of this phenomenon to differences in neural activity both at the receptor and the central level in the insect nervous system. PMID:25652840

Quantifying Individual Variation in the Propensity to Attribute Incentive Salience to Reward Cues

PubMed Central

Meyer, Paul J.; Lovic, Vedran; Saunders, Benjamin T.; Yager, Lindsay M.; Flagel, Shelly B.; Morrow, Jonathan D.; Robinson, Terry E.

2012-01-01

If reward-associated cues acquire the properties of incentive stimuli they can come to powerfully control behavior, and potentially promote maladaptive behavior. Pavlovian incentive stimuli are defined as stimuli that have three fundamental properties: they are attractive, they are themselves desired, and they can spur instrumental actions. We have found, however, that there is considerable individual variation in the extent to which animals attribute Pavlovian incentive motivational properties (“incentive salience”) to reward cues. The purpose of this paper was to develop criteria for identifying and classifying individuals based on their propensity to attribute incentive salience to reward cues. To do this, we conducted a meta-analysis of a large sample of rats (N = 1,878) subjected to a classic Pavlovian conditioning procedure. We then used the propensity of animals to approach a cue predictive of reward (one index of the extent to which the cue was attributed with incentive salience), to characterize two behavioral phenotypes in this population: animals that approached the cue (“sign-trackers”) vs. others that approached the location of reward delivery (“goal-trackers”). This variation in Pavlovian approach behavior predicted other behavioral indices of the propensity to attribute incentive salience to reward cues. Thus, the procedures reported here should be useful for making comparisons across studies and for assessing individual variation in incentive salience attribution in small samples of the population, or even for classifying single animals. PMID:22761718

From prediction error to incentive salience: mesolimbic computation of reward motivation

PubMed Central

Berridge, Kent C.

2011-01-01

Reward contains separable psychological components of learning, incentive motivation and pleasure. Most computational models have focused only on the learning component of reward, but the motivational component is equally important in reward circuitry, and even more directly controls behavior. Modeling the motivational component requires recognition of additional control factors besides learning. Here I will discuss how mesocorticolimbic mechanisms generate the motivation component of incentive salience. Incentive salience takes Pavlovian learning and memory as one input and as an equally important input takes neurobiological state factors (e.g., drug states, appetite states, satiety states) that can vary independently of learning. Neurobiological state changes can produce unlearned fluctuations or even reversals in the ability of a previously-learned reward cue to trigger motivation. Such fluctuations in cue-triggered motivation can dramatically depart from all previously learned values about the associated reward outcome. Thus a consequence of the difference between incentive salience and learning can be to decouple cue-triggered motivation of the moment from previously learned values of how good the associated reward has been in the past. Another consequence can be to produce irrationally strong motivation urges that are not justified by any memories of previous reward values (and without distorting associative predictions of future reward value). Such irrationally strong motivation may be especially problematic in addiction. To comprehend these phenomena, future models of mesocorticolimbic reward function should address the neurobiological state factors that participate to control generation of incentive salience. PMID:22487042

Changing the Name of Schizophrenia: Patient Perspectives and Implications for DSM-V

PubMed Central

Tranulis, Constantin; Lecomte, Tania; El-Khoury, Bassam; Lavarenne, Anaïs; Brodeur-Côté, Daniel

2013-01-01

Introduction The diagnosis of schizophrenia is increasingly contested by researchers, clinicians, patients and family members. Preeminent researchers proposed its replacement with the salience syndrome concept, arguing for increased validity and less stigmatizing potential. This is the first study exploring the effects on stigma of this nosological proposal. Methods Two studies were conducted: one with 161 undergraduate students regarding their stigmatizing attitudes linked to the label of schizophrenia or salience syndrome, the other involved in-depth qualitative interviews with 19 participants treated in a first episode psychosis program. The interviews explored the subjective validity, acceptability and effects on stigma of a diagnosis of schizophrenia or salience syndrome. Results Overall, no significant differences were found between labels in study 1. For study 2, the majority of participants preferred a diagnosis of salience syndrome, considering it less stigmatizing mostly because of its novelty and the concealing potential of the new diagnostic entity, though many found it hard to relate to and somewhat difficult to understand. Discussion Our results suggest that the label change does not impact the stigmatizing potential for individuals who are not familiar with mental illness - they appear to base their attitudes on descriptions rather than the label alone. For those suffering from mental illness, a name change for schizophrenia to “salience syndrome” might offer only a temporary relief from stigma. Claims of de-stigmatizing effects should be grounded in sound scientific models of stigma and ideally in empirical data. PMID:23457490

Dynamics of Intersubject Brain Networks during Anxious Anticipation

PubMed Central

Najafi, Mahshid; Kinnison, Joshua; Pessoa, Luiz

2017-01-01

How do large-scale brain networks reorganize during the waxing and waning of anxious anticipation? Here, threat was dynamically modulated during human functional MRI as two circles slowly meandered on the screen; if they touched, an unpleasant shock was delivered. We employed intersubject correlation analysis, which allowed the investigation of network-level functional connectivity across brains, and sought to determine how network connectivity changed during periods of approach (circles moving closer) and periods of retreat (circles moving apart). Analysis of positive connection weights revealed that dynamic threat altered connectivity within and between the salience, executive, and task-negative networks. For example, dynamic functional connectivity increased within the salience network during approach and decreased during retreat. The opposite pattern was found for the functional connectivity between the salience and task-negative networks: decreases during approach and increases during approach. Functional connections between subcortical regions and the salience network also changed dynamically during approach and retreat periods. Subcortical regions exhibiting such changes included the putative periaqueductal gray, putative habenula, and putative bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Additional analysis of negative functional connections revealed dynamic changes, too. For example, negative weights within the salience network decreased during approach and increased during retreat, opposite what was found for positive weights. Together, our findings unraveled dynamic features of functional connectivity of large-scale networks and subcortical regions across participants while threat levels varied continuously, and demonstrate the potential of characterizing emotional processing at the level of dynamic networks. PMID:29209184

Children's Knowledge of Astronomy and Its Change in the Course of Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hannust, Triin; Kikas, Eve

2007-01-01

This study examined the nature of 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children's (n=113) knowledge of astronomy and the process of knowledge change during learning. Children's pre-existing knowledge was assessed by questions and drawing tasks. About half of the children were taught elementary concepts of astronomy in small groups and afterwards all…

Impulsive Internet Game Play Is Associated With Increased Functional Connectivity Between the Default Mode and Salience Networks in Depressed Patients With Short Allele of Serotonin Transporter Gene.

PubMed

Hong, Ji Sun; Kim, Sun Mi; Bae, Sujin; Han, Doug Hyun

2018-01-01

Problematic Internet game play is often accompanied by major depressive disorder (MDD). Depression seems to be closely related to altered functional connectivity (FC) within (and between) the default mode network (DMN) and salience network. In addition, serotonergic neurotransmission may regulate the symptoms of depression, including impulsivity, potentially by modulating the DMN. We hypothesized that altered connectivity between the DMN and salience network could mediate an association between the 5HTTLPR genotype and impulsivity in patients with depression. A total of 54 participants with problematic Internet game play and MDD completed the research protocol. We genotyped for 5HTTLPR and assessed the DMN FC using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. The severity of Internet game play, depressive symptoms, anxiety, attention and impulsivity, and behavioral inhibition and activation were assessed using the Young Internet Addiction Scale (YIAS), Beck Depressive Inventory, Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Korean Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder scale, and the Behavioral Inhibition and Activation Scales (BIS-BAS), respectively. The SS allele was associated with increased FC within the DMN, including the middle prefrontal cortex (MPFC) to the posterior cingulate cortex, and within the salience network, including the right supramarginal gyrus (SMG) to the right rostral prefrontal cortex (RPFC), right anterior insular (AInsular) to right SMG, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to left RPFC, and left AInsular to right RPFC, and between the DMN and salience network, including the MPFC to the ACC. In addition, the FC from the MPFC to ACC positively correlated with the BIS and YIAS scores in the SS allele group. The SS allele of 5HTTLPR might modulate the FC within and between the DMN and salience network, which may ultimately be a risk factor for impulsive Internet game play in patients with MDD.

Brain and effort: brain activation and effort-related working memory in healthy participants and patients with working memory deficits.

PubMed

Engström, Maria; Landtblom, Anne-Marie; Karlsson, Thomas

2013-01-01

Despite the interest in the neuroimaging of working memory, little is still known about the neurobiology of complex working memory in tasks that require simultaneous manipulation and storage of information. In addition to the central executive network, we assumed that the recently described salience network [involving the anterior insular cortex (AIC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)] might be of particular importance to working memory tasks that require complex, effortful processing. Healthy participants (n = 26) and participants suffering from working memory problems related to the Kleine-Levin syndrome (KLS) (a specific form of periodic idiopathic hypersomnia; n = 18) participated in the study. Participants were further divided into a high- and low-capacity group, according to performance on a working memory task (listening span). In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants were administered the reading span complex working memory task tapping cognitive effort. The fMRI-derived blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal was modulated by (1) effort in both the central executive and the salience network and (2) capacity in the salience network in that high performers evidenced a weaker BOLD signal than low performers. In the salience network there was a dichotomy between the left and the right hemisphere; the right hemisphere elicited a steeper increase of the BOLD signal as a function of increasing effort. There was also a stronger functional connectivity within the central executive network because of increased task difficulty. The ability to allocate cognitive effort in complex working memory is contingent upon focused resources in the executive and in particular the salience network. Individual capacity during the complex working memory task is related to activity in the salience (but not the executive) network so that high-capacity participants evidence a lower signal and possibly hence a larger dynamic response.

Brain and effort: brain activation and effort-related working memory in healthy participants and patients with working memory deficits

PubMed Central

Engström, Maria; Landtblom, Anne-Marie; Karlsson, Thomas

2013-01-01

Despite the interest in the neuroimaging of working memory, little is still known about the neurobiology of complex working memory in tasks that require simultaneous manipulation and storage of information. In addition to the central executive network, we assumed that the recently described salience network [involving the anterior insular cortex (AIC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)] might be of particular importance to working memory tasks that require complex, effortful processing. Method: Healthy participants (n = 26) and participants suffering from working memory problems related to the Kleine–Levin syndrome (KLS) (a specific form of periodic idiopathic hypersomnia; n = 18) participated in the study. Participants were further divided into a high- and low-capacity group, according to performance on a working memory task (listening span). In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants were administered the reading span complex working memory task tapping cognitive effort. Principal findings: The fMRI-derived blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal was modulated by (1) effort in both the central executive and the salience network and (2) capacity in the salience network in that high performers evidenced a weaker BOLD signal than low performers. In the salience network there was a dichotomy between the left and the right hemisphere; the right hemisphere elicited a steeper increase of the BOLD signal as a function of increasing effort. There was also a stronger functional connectivity within the central executive network because of increased task difficulty. Conclusion: The ability to allocate cognitive effort in complex working memory is contingent upon focused resources in the executive and in particular the salience network. Individual capacity during the complex working memory task is related to activity in the salience (but not the executive) network so that high-capacity participants evidence a lower signal and possibly hence a larger dynamic response. PMID:23616756

Individual differences in the attribution of incentive salience to reward-related cues: Implications for addiction.

PubMed

Flagel, Shelly B; Akil, Huda; Robinson, Terry E

2009-01-01

Drugs of abuse acquire different degrees of control over thoughts and actions based not only on the effects of drugs themselves, but also on predispositions of the individual. Those individuals who become addicted are unable to shift their thoughts and actions away from drugs and drug-associated stimuli. Thus in addicts, exposure to places or things (cues) that has been previously associated with drug-taking often instigates renewed drug-taking. We and others have postulated that drug-associated cues acquire the ability to maintain and instigate drug-taking behavior in part because they acquire incentive motivational properties through Pavlovian (stimulus-stimulus) learning. In the case of compulsive behavioral disorders, including addiction, such cues may be attributed with pathological incentive value ("incentive salience"). For this reason, we have recently begun to explore individual differences in the tendency to attribute incentive salience to cues that predict rewards. When discrete cues are associated with the non-contingent delivery of food or drug rewards some animals come to quickly approach and engage the cue even if it is located at a distance from where the reward will be delivered. In these animals the reward-predictive cue itself becomes attractive, eliciting approach towards it, presumably because it is attributed with incentive salience. Animals that develop this type of conditional response are called "sign-trackers". Other animals, "goal-trackers", do not approach the reward-predictive cue, but upon cue presentation they immediately go to the location where food will be delivered (the "goal"). For goal-trackers the reward-predictive cue is not attractive, presumably because it is not attributed with incentive salience. We review here preliminary data suggesting that these individual differences in the tendency to attribute incentive salience to cues predictive of reward may confer vulnerability or resistance to compulsive behavioral disorders, including addiction. It will be important, therefore, to study how environmental, neurobiological and genetic interactions determine the extent to which individuals attribute incentive value to reward-predictive stimuli.

Children's knowledge of the earth: a new methodological and statistical approach.

PubMed

Straatemeier, Marthe; van der Maas, Han L J; Jansen, Brenda R J

2008-08-01

In the field of children's knowledge of the earth, much debate has concerned the question of whether children's naive knowledge-that is, their knowledge before they acquire the standard scientific theory-is coherent (i.e., theory-like) or fragmented. We conducted two studies with large samples (N=328 and N=381) using a new paper-and-pencil test, denoted the EARTH (EArth Representation Test for cHildren), to discriminate between these two alternatives. We performed latent class analyses on the responses to the EARTH to test mental models associated with these alternatives. The naive mental models, as formulated by Vosniadou and Brewer, were not supported by the results. The results indicated that children's knowledge of the earth becomes more consistent as children grow older. These findings support the view that children's naive knowledge is fragmented.

The salience network causally influences default mode network activity during moral reasoning

PubMed Central

Wilson, Stephen M.; D’Esposito, Mark; Kayser, Andrew S.; Grossman, Scott N.; Poorzand, Pardis; Seeley, William W.; Miller, Bruce L.; Rankin, Katherine P.

2013-01-01

Large-scale brain networks are integral to the coordination of human behaviour, and their anatomy provides insights into the clinical presentation and progression of neurodegenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease, which targets the default mode network, and behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, which targets a more anterior salience network. Although the default mode network is recruited when healthy subjects deliberate about ‘personal’ moral dilemmas, patients with Alzheimer’s disease give normal responses to these dilemmas whereas patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia give abnormal responses to these dilemmas. We hypothesized that this apparent discrepancy between activation- and patient-based studies of moral reasoning might reflect a modulatory role for the salience network in regulating default mode network activation. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to characterize network activity of patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia and healthy control subjects, we present four converging lines of evidence supporting a causal influence from the salience network to the default mode network during moral reasoning. First, as previously reported, the default mode network is recruited when healthy subjects deliberate about ‘personal’ moral dilemmas, but patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia producing atrophy in the salience network give abnormally utilitarian responses to these dilemmas. Second, patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia have reduced recruitment of the default mode network compared with healthy control subjects when deliberating about these dilemmas. Third, a Granger causality analysis of functional neuroimaging data from healthy control subjects demonstrates directed functional connectivity from nodes of the salience network to nodes of the default mode network during moral reasoning. Fourth, this Granger causal influence is diminished in patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia. These findings are consistent with a broader model in which the salience network modulates the activity of other large-scale networks, and suggest a revision to a previously proposed ‘dual-process’ account of moral reasoning. These findings also characterize network interactions underlying abnormal moral reasoning in frontotemporal dementia, which may serve as a model for the aberrant judgement and interpersonal behaviour observed in this disease and in other disorders of social function. More broadly, these findings link recent work on the dynamic interrelationships between large-scale brain networks to observable impairments in dementia syndromes, which may shed light on how diseases that target one network also alter the function of interrelated networks. PMID:23576128

Volumetric brain tumour detection from MRI using visual saliency.

PubMed

Mitra, Somosmita; Banerjee, Subhashis; Hayashi, Yoichi

2017-01-01

Medical image processing has become a major player in the world of automatic tumour region detection and is tantamount to the incipient stages of computer aided design. Saliency detection is a crucial application of medical image processing, and serves in its potential aid to medical practitioners by making the affected area stand out in the foreground from the rest of the background image. The algorithm developed here is a new approach to the detection of saliency in a three dimensional multi channel MR image sequence for the glioblastoma multiforme (a form of malignant brain tumour). First we enhance the three channels, FLAIR (Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery), T2 and T1C (contrast enhanced with gadolinium) to generate a pseudo coloured RGB image. This is then converted to the CIE L*a*b* color space. Processing on cubes of sizes k = 4, 8, 16, the L*a*b* 3D image is then compressed into volumetric units; each representing the neighbourhood information of the surrounding 64 voxels for k = 4, 512 voxels for k = 8 and 4096 voxels for k = 16, respectively. The spatial distance of these voxels are then compared along the three major axes to generate the novel 3D saliency map of a 3D image, which unambiguously highlights the tumour region. The algorithm operates along the three major axes to maximise the computation efficiency while minimising loss of valuable 3D information. Thus the 3D multichannel MR image saliency detection algorithm is useful in generating a uniform and logistically correct 3D saliency map with pragmatic applicability in Computer Aided Detection (CADe). Assignment of uniform importance to all three axes proves to be an important factor in volumetric processing, which helps in noise reduction and reduces the possibility of compromising essential information. The effectiveness of the algorithm was evaluated over the BRATS MICCAI 2015 dataset having 274 glioma cases, consisting both of high grade and low grade GBM. The results were compared with that of the 2D saliency detection algorithm taken over the entire sequence of brain data. For all comparisons, the Area Under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) Curve (AUC) has been found to be more than 0.99 ± 0.01 over various tumour types, structures and locations.

Learning, knowing and being in the world: postformalism, Einstein, and lessons from a kid named Larry

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Steinberg, Shirley R.

2009-09-01

I describe how Joe Kincheloe experienced learning from a peer during his pre-school life only to see how his friend was unable to succeed at school. Joe's commitment to empowered cognition was grounded first, by his friend, Larry's mentorship—teaching him the environmental nuances of the mountains in rural Tennessee, and secondly, the contradiction of schooling being unable to afford learning for Larry. This article discusses how Kincheloe became a scholar, the salience of Einstein's work with his own, and the evolution of his research and scholarship. Examples of Kincheloe's work addressed are: postformalism, bricolage, critical theory, and alternative knowledges, and how this work has contributed to science education.

Fractions Learning in Children With Mathematics Difficulties.

PubMed

Tian, Jing; Siegler, Robert S

Learning fractions is difficult for children in general and especially difficult for children with mathematics difficulties (MD). Recent research on developmental and individual differences in fraction knowledge of children with MD and typically achieving (TA) children has demonstrated that U.S. children with MD start middle school behind their TA peers in fraction understanding and fall further behind during middle school. In contrast, Chinese children, who like the MD children in the United States score in the bottom one third of the distribution in their country, possess reasonably good fraction understanding. We interpret these findings within the framework of the integrated theory of numerical development. By emphasizing the importance of fraction magnitude knowledge for numerical understanding in general, the theory proved useful for understanding differences in fraction knowledge between MD and TA children and for understanding how knowledge can be improved. Several interventions demonstrated the possibility of improving fraction magnitude knowledge and producing benefits that generalize to fraction arithmetic learning among children with MD. The reasonably good fraction understanding of Chinese children with MD and several successful interventions with U.S. students provide hope for the improvement of fraction knowledge among American children with MD.

Does a peer model's task proficiency influence children's solution choice and innovation?

PubMed

Wood, Lara A; Kendal, Rachel L; Flynn, Emma G

2015-11-01

The current study investigated whether 4- to 6-year-old children's task solution choice was influenced by the past proficiency of familiar peer models and the children's personal prior task experience. Peer past proficiency was established through behavioral assessments of interactions with novel tasks alongside peer and teacher predictions of each child's proficiency. Based on these assessments, one peer model with high past proficiency and one age-, sex-, dominance-, and popularity-matched peer model with lower past proficiency were trained to remove a capsule using alternative solutions from a three-solution artificial fruit task. Video demonstrations of the models were shown to children after they had either a personal successful interaction or no interaction with the task. In general, there was not a strong bias toward the high past-proficiency model, perhaps due to a motivation to acquire multiple methods and the salience of other transmission biases. However, there was some evidence of a model-based past-proficiency bias; when the high past-proficiency peer matched the participants' original solution, there was increased use of that solution, whereas if the high past-proficiency peer demonstrated an alternative solution, there was increased use of the alternative social solution and novel solutions. Thus, model proficiency influenced innovation. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

No differences in emotion recognition strategies in children with autism spectrum disorder: evidence from hybrid faces.

PubMed

Evers, Kris; Kerkhof, Inneke; Steyaert, Jean; Noens, Ilse; Wagemans, Johan

2014-01-01

Emotion recognition problems are frequently reported in individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, this research area is characterized by inconsistent findings, with atypical emotion processing strategies possibly contributing to existing contradictions. In addition, an attenuated saliency of the eyes region is often demonstrated in ASD during face identity processing. We wanted to compare reliance on mouth versus eyes information in children with and without ASD, using hybrid facial expressions. A group of six-to-eight-year-old boys with ASD and an age- and intelligence-matched typically developing (TD) group without intellectual disability performed an emotion labelling task with hybrid facial expressions. Five static expressions were used: one neutral expression and four emotional expressions, namely, anger, fear, happiness, and sadness. Hybrid faces were created, consisting of an emotional face half (upper or lower face region) with the other face half showing a neutral expression. Results showed no emotion recognition problem in ASD. Moreover, we provided evidence for the existence of top- and bottom-emotions in children: correct identification of expressions mainly depends on information in the eyes (so-called top-emotions: happiness) or in the mouth region (so-called bottom-emotions: sadness, anger, and fear). No stronger reliance on mouth information was found in children with ASD.

Abnormal amygdala activation profile in pedophilia.

PubMed

Sartorius, Alexander; Ruf, Matthias; Kief, Christine; Demirakca, Traute; Bailer, Josef; Ende, Gabriele; Henn, Fritz A; Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreas; Dressing, Harald

2008-08-01

Despite considerable public interest research in neurobiological correlates of pedophilia is scarce. Since amygdala activation is central for emotional valuation, arousal, and salience, we investigated the activation profile of this structure in 10 male subjects with pedophilia (exclusively attracted to boys), all convicted sex-offenders and sentenced to forensic psychiatric treatment along with ten male heterosexual matched controls. We used a sexually non-explicit functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) paradigm with images of men, women, boys or girls randomly embedded in neutral target/non-target geometrical symbols. We applied statistical parametric mapping (SPM2) and SPSS 14 for image processing and analysis. While controls activated significantly less to pictures of children compared to adults, the activation profile was reversed in subjects with pedophilia, who exhibited significantly more activation to children than adults. The highest activation was observed for boys in the patient group, and for women in control participants. Our data show enhanced activation to children's pictures even in an incidental context and suggest the provocative hypothesis that a normally present mechanism for reduced emotional arousal for children relative to adults is reversed in pedophilia, suggesting a neural substrate associated with deviant sexual preference in this condition. More extensive research in this field would be of benefit for both the victims and the offenders.

Beyond Naïve Cue Combination: Salience and Social Cues in Early Word Learning

PubMed Central

Yurovsky, Daniel

2015-01-01

Children learn their earliest words through social interaction, but it is unknown how much they rely on social information. Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner’s target of reference. In contrast, other theories argue that early word learning is largely a perceptual process in which young children map words onto salient objects. One way of unifying these accounts is to model word learning as weighted cue-combination, in which children attend to many potential cues to reference, but only gradually learn the correct weight to assign each cue. We tested four predictions of this kind of naïve cue-combination account, using an eye-tracking paradigm that combines social word-teaching and two-alternative forced-choice testing. None of the predictions were supported. We thus propose an alternative unifying account: children are sensitive to social information early, but their ability to gather and deploy this information is constrained by domain-general cognitive processes. Developmental changes in children’s use of social cues emerge not from learning the predictive power of social cues, but from the gradual development of attention, memory, and speed of information processing. PMID:26575408

Poor Brain Growth in Extremely Preterm Neonates Long Before the Onset of Autism Spectrum Disorder Symptoms.

PubMed

Padilla, Nelly; Eklöf, Eva; Mårtensson, Gustaf E; Bölte, Sven; Lagercrantz, Hugo; Ådén, Ulrika

2017-02-01

Preterm infants face an increased risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The relationship between autism during childhood and early brain development remains unexplored. We studied 84 preterm children born at <27 weeks of gestation, who underwent neonatal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at term and were screened for ASD at 6.5 years. Full-scale intelligence quotient was measured and neonatal morbidities were recorded. Structural brain morphometric studies were performed in 33 infants with high-quality MRI and no evidence of focal brain lesions. Twenty-three (27.4%) of the children tested ASD positive and 61 (72.6%) tested ASD negative. The ASD-positive group had a significantly higher frequency of neonatal complications than the ASD-negative group. In the subgroup of 33 children, the ASD infants had reduced volumes in the temporal, occipital, insular, and limbic regions and in the brain areas involved in social/behavior and salience integration. This study shows that the neonatal MRI scans of extremely preterm children, subsequently diagnosed with ASD at 6.5 years, showed brain structural alterations, localized in the regions that play a key role in the core features of autism. Early detection of these structural alterations may allow the early identification and intervention of children at risk of ASD. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Teachers' Knowledge of Children's Exposure to Family Risk Factors: Accuracy and Usefulness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dwyer, Sarah B.; Nicholson, Jan M.; Battistutta, Diana; Oldenburg, Brian

2005-01-01

Teachers' knowledge of children's exposure to family risk factors was examined using the Family Risk Factor Checklist-Teacher. Data collected for 756 children indicated that teachers had accurate knowledge of children's exposure to factors such as adverse life events and family socioeconomic status, which predicted children's mental health…

Intergenerational Transmission of Maladaptive Parenting Strategies in Families of Adolescent Mothers: Effects from Grandmothers to Young Children

PubMed Central

Seay, Danielle M.; Jahromi, Laudan B.; Umaña-Taylor, Adriana J.; Updegraff, Kimberly A.

2015-01-01

The current longitudinal study examined the effect of the transmission of maladaptive parenting strategies from grandmothers to adolescent mothers on children’s subsequent development. Mexican-origin adolescent mothers (N = 204) participated in home interviews when the adolescent’s child (89 boys, 60 girls) was 2, 3, 4, and 5 years old. Grandmothers’ psychological control toward the adolescent mother was positively related to adolescents’ potential for abuse 1 year later, which was subsequently positively related to adolescents’ punitive discipline toward their young child. In addition, adolescent mothers’ punitive discipline subsequently predicted greater externalizing problems and less committed compliance among their children. Adolescent mothers’ potential for abuse and punitive discipline mediated the effects of grandmothers’ psychological control on children’s externalizing problems. Finally, adolescent mothers’ potential for abuse mediated the effect of grandmothers’ psychological control on adolescent mothers’ punitive discipline. Results highlight the salience of long-term intergenerational effects of maladaptive parenting on children’s behavior. PMID:26521948

Role Salience, Social Support, and Work-Family Conflict among Jewish and Arab Female Teachers in Israel

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cinamon, Rachel Gali

2009-01-01

Conceptualizing career development in a cultural and contextual framework, this study examined within-gender differences in role salience and work-family conflict (WFC) among 101 Jewish and 99 Arab female teachers (aged 23-64 years) from central Israel. The contribution of social support to women's conflict was also examined. Results highlighted…

Who Are the Best-Known National and Foreign Creators--A Comparative Study among Undergraduates in China and Germany

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yue, Xiao Dong; Bender, Michael; Cheung, Chau-Kiu

2011-01-01

Separate studies of Chinese and Western individuals have suggested that there are cultural differences in perceptions of creativity, particularly in an emphasis on meritorious salience versus aesthetic salience as bases for creativity, but cross-cultural studies are needed to substantiate that difference. In this study, undergraduates from Giessen…

Identification with and Saliency of Violent Media Models: A Comparison between Canadian and American Subjects.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gutenko, Gregory

A study examined the responses of Canadian and American subjects in their approval of, and attraction to, specific television and film characters exhibiting aggressive behavior, and in their evaluation of the realism and saliency of the characters and situations observed. Subjects, undergraduate students at the University of Windsor in Windsor,…

Blatant Stereotype Threat and Women's Math Performance: Self-Handicapping as a Strategic Means To Cope with Obtrusive Negative Performance Expectations.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Keller, Johannes

2002-01-01

Examined the impact of increased salience of negative stereotypic expectations on math performance among high school students. Results indicated that female students in the condition of heightened salience of negative stereotypic expectations underperformed in comparison to their control group counterparts. The effect of blatant stereotype threat…

The Lexico-Syntactic Marking of Chronological Order: Insights from Vietnamese Learners of ESL.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tickoo, Asha

1998-01-01

This study of the use of "then"/"after that" by Vietnamese English-as-a-Second-Language learners suggests that the temporal adverbial poses a significant learning challenge similar to morphological means of temporal reference. Learner usage is monitored by a looser notion of salience, which emerges from the transference of a salience-marking…

Comparison of Perimeters: Improving Students' Performance by Increasing the Salience of the Relevant Variable

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Babai, Reuven; Nattiv, Laura; Stavy, Ruth

2016-01-01

Students' difficulties in mathematics and science may stem from interference of irrelevant salient variables. We focus on the comparison of perimeters task, in which area is the irrelevant salient variable. A previous fMRI brain-imaging study related to the comparison of perimeters task suggested that increasing the level of salience of the…

Researcher Effects on Mortality Salience Research: A Meta-Analytic Moderator Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yen, Chih-Long; Cheng, Chung-Ping

2013-01-01

A recent meta-analysis of 164 terror management theory (TMT) papers indicated that mortality salience (MS) yields substantial effects (r = 0.35) on worldview and self-esteem-related dependent variables (B. L. Burke, A. Martens, & E. H. Faucher, 2010). This study reanalyzed the data to explore the researcher effects of TMT. By cluster-analyzing…

Longer Term Impact of Cigarette Package Warnings in Australia Compared with the United Kingdom and Canada

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Li, Lin; Borland, Ron; Yong, Hua; Cummings, Kenneth M.; Thrasher, James F.; Hitchman, Sara C.; Fong, Geoffrey T.; Hammond, David; Bansal-Travers, Maansi

2015-01-01

This study examines the effects of different cigarette package warnings in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom up to 5 years post-implementation. The data came from the International Tobacco Control Surveys. Measures included salience of warnings, cognitive responses, forgoing cigarettes and avoiding warnings. Although salience of the UK…

Enacting Effective Climate Policy Advice: Institutional Strategies to Foster Saliency, Credibility and Legitimacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bauer, Anja; Pregernig, Michael; Reinecke, Sabine

2016-01-01

This article asks how scientific advisory institutions (SAIs) in climate policy strive towards effectiveness. Our analysis is grounded on the assumption that effectiveness is not passively experienced but is deliberately enacted by SAIs. We draw on a widely used set of criteria, namely saliency, credibility and legitimacy (SCL). Based on an…

Hemispheric Asymmetries in Processing L1 and L2 Idioms: Effects of Salience and Context

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cieslicka, Anna B.; Heredia, Roberto R.

2011-01-01

This study investigates the contribution of the left and right hemispheres to the comprehension of bilingual figurative language and the joint effects of salience and context on the differential cerebral involvement in idiom processing. The divided visual field and the lexical decision priming paradigms were employed to examine the activation of…

Relative Salience of Gender and Class in a Situation of Multiple Competing Norms.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cravens, Thomas D.; Giannelli, Luciano

1995-01-01

Examines the social parameters of acceptance and spread of intervocalic spirantization of "/p/,/t/,/k/" in Tuscany to test the salience of gender and class. This sociolinguistic analysis of the interaction of three options provides a more precise understanding of the significance of gender and class as (co)-conditioners of variation and…

Life Role Salience Dimensions and Mental Health Outcomes among Female Expatriate Spouses in Turkey

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bikos, Lynette H.; Kocheleva, Julia

2013-01-01

Using life role salience theory, we investigated the extent to which occupational, parental, marital, and home care roles explained mental health outcomes among female expatriate spouses. Participants (N = 86) were from English-speaking Northern American or Western European countries; the average age was 38. Results of a two-way within-subject…

Defensive or Existential Religious Orientations and Mortality Salience Hypothesis: Using Conservatism as a Dependent Measure

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Koca-Atabey, Mujde; Oner-Ozkan, Bengi

2011-01-01

The study examined the relationship between the defensive versus existential religious orientation and mortality salience hypothesis in a country where the predominant type of religion is Islam. It was predicted that the mortality reactions of participants would not differ in accordance with their religious orientations within a Muslim sample. The…

Longitudinal Relations between Ethnic/Racial Identity Process and Content: Exploration, Commitment, and Salience among Diverse Adolescents

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Yijie; Douglass, Sara; Yip, Tiffany

2017-01-01

The present study bridges the process and content perspectives of ethnic/racial identity (ERI) by examining the longitudinal links between identity process (i.e., exploration, commitment) and a component of identity content, salience. Data were drawn from a 4-wave longitudinal study of 405 ethnically/racially diverse adolescents (63% female) from…

Fused methods for visual saliency estimation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Danko, Amanda S.; Lyu, Siwei

2015-02-01

In this work, we present a new model of visual saliency by combing results from existing methods, improving upon their performance and accuracy. By fusing pre-attentive and context-aware methods, we highlight the abilities of state-of-the-art models while compensating for their deficiencies. We put this theory to the test in a series of experiments, comparatively evaluating the visual saliency maps and employing them for content-based image retrieval and thumbnail generation. We find that on average our model yields definitive improvements upon recall and f-measure metrics with comparable precisions. In addition, we find that all image searches using our fused method return more correct images and additionally rank them higher than the searches using the original methods alone.

Japanese and Canadian Children’s Beliefs about Child and Adult Knowledge: A Case for Developmental Equifinality?

PubMed Central

Fitneva, Stanka A.; Pile Ho, Elizabeth; Hatayama, Misako

2016-01-01

Children do not know everything that adults know, nor do adults know everything that children know. The present research examined the universality of beliefs about child and adult knowledge and their development with 4- and 7-year-old Canadian and Japanese children (N = 96). In both countries, all children were able to identify adult-specific knowledge and only older children displayed beliefs about child-specific knowledge. However, Japanese and Canadian children differed in whether they used their own knowledge in deciding whether a person who knew an item was a child or an adult. In addition, parental and child beliefs were related in Japan but not in Canada. These findings indicate that children growing up in different cultures may take different paths in developing beliefs about age-related knowledge. Implications for theories of socio-cognitive development and learning are discussed. PMID:27632387

Crossing Science-Policy-Societal Boundaries to Reduce Scientific and Institutional Uncertainty in Small-Scale Fisheries.

PubMed

Sutton, Abigail M; Rudd, Murray A

2016-10-01

The governance of small-scale fisheries (SSF) is challenging due to the uncertainty, complexity, and interconnectedness of social, political, ecological, and economical processes. Conventional SSF management has focused on a centralized and top-down approach. A major criticism of conventional management is the over-reliance on 'expert science' to guide decision-making and poor consideration of fishers' contextually rich knowledge. That is thought to exacerbate the already low governance potential of SSF. Integrating scientific knowledge with fishers' knowledge is increasingly popular and is often assumed to help reduce levels of biophysical and institutional uncertainties. Many projects aimed at encouraging knowledge integration have, however, been unsuccessful. Our objective in this research was to assess factors that influence knowledge integration and the uptake of integrated knowledge into policy-making. We report results from 54 semi-structured interviews with SSF researchers and practitioners from around the globe. Our analysis is framed in terms of scientific credibility, societal legitimacy, and policy saliency, and we discuss cases that have been partially or fully successful in reducing uncertainty via push-and-pull-oriented boundary crossing initiatives. Our findings suggest that two important factors affect the science-policy-societal boundary: a lack of consensus among stakeholders about what constitutes credible knowledge and institutional uncertainty resulting from shifting policies and leadership change. A lack of training for scientific leaders and an apparent 'shelf-life' for community organizations highlight the importance of ongoing institutional support for knowledge integration projects. Institutional support may be enhanced through such investments, such as capacity building and specialized platforms for knowledge integration.

Crossing Science-Policy-Societal Boundaries to Reduce Scientific and Institutional Uncertainty in Small-Scale Fisheries

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sutton, Abigail M.; Rudd, Murray A.

2016-10-01

The governance of small-scale fisheries (SSF) is challenging due to the uncertainty, complexity, and interconnectedness of social, political, ecological, and economical processes. Conventional SSF management has focused on a centralized and top-down approach. A major criticism of conventional management is the over-reliance on `expert science' to guide decision-making and poor consideration of fishers' contextually rich knowledge. That is thought to exacerbate the already low governance potential of SSF. Integrating scientific knowledge with fishers' knowledge is increasingly popular and is often assumed to help reduce levels of biophysical and institutional uncertainties. Many projects aimed at encouraging knowledge integration have, however, been unsuccessful. Our objective in this research was to assess factors that influence knowledge integration and the uptake of integrated knowledge into policy-making. We report results from 54 semi-structured interviews with SSF researchers and practitioners from around the globe. Our analysis is framed in terms of scientific credibility, societal legitimacy, and policy saliency, and we discuss cases that have been partially or fully successful in reducing uncertainty via push-and-pull-oriented boundary crossing initiatives. Our findings suggest that two important factors affect the science-policy-societal boundary: a lack of consensus among stakeholders about what constitutes credible knowledge and institutional uncertainty resulting from shifting policies and leadership change. A lack of training for scientific leaders and an apparent `shelf-life' for community organizations highlight the importance of ongoing institutional support for knowledge integration projects. Institutional support may be enhanced through such investments, such as capacity building and specialized platforms for knowledge integration.

Comparing Children with ASD and Their Peers' Growth in Print Knowledge.

PubMed

Dynia, Jaclyn M; Brock, Matthew E; Logan, Jessica A R; Justice, Laura M; Kaderavek, Joan N

2016-07-01

Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) struggle with reading. An increased focus on emergent literacy skills-particularly print knowledge-might improve later reading outcomes. We analyzed longitudinal measures of print knowledge (i.e., alphabet knowledge and print-concept knowledge) for 35 preschoolers with ASD relative to a sample of 35 typically developing peers. Through multilevel growth curve analysis, we found that relative to their peers, children with ASD had comparable alphabet knowledge, lower print-concept knowledge, and acquired both skills at a similar rate. These findings suggest that children with ASD are unlikely to acquire print-concept knowledge commensurate to their peers without an increased emphasis on high-quality instruction that targets this skill.

Does colour preference have a role in colour term acquisition?

PubMed

Pitchford, Nicola J; Davis, Emma E; Scerif, Gaia

2009-11-01

A developmental association exists between colour preference and emerging colour term acquisition in young children. Colour preference might influence colour term acquisition by directing attention towards or away from a particular colour, making it more or less memorable. To investigate the role that colour preference may have in the acquisition of colour terms, experimental tasks of colour preference, discrimination, attention, memory, and new colour term learning, were given to three groups of participants (preschool children; primary school children; and adults). Each task utilized the same colour stimuli, which were four computer-simulated colours, matched perceptually to four different Munsell chips, drawn from the same colour category. Three colours varied systematically from an anchor colour (10PB 4/8) only in saturation (10PB 4/4), luminance (10PB 6/8), or hue (5P 4/8). Results showed that within-category colour preferences emerged with age, and that when established within individuals, most preferred colours were named significantly more accurately than least preferred colours, although this association did not appear to be mediated directly by attention or memory. Rather, perceptual saliency was shown to have a mediating role, to some extent, in determining the relationship between colour preference and the cognitive processing of colour.

Dead tired and bone weary: Grandmothers as caregivers in drug affected inner city households✩

PubMed Central

Dunlap, Eloise; Tourigny, Sylvie C.; Johnson, Bruce D.

2009-01-01

At a time of unprecedented growth in the numbers of custodial grandparents, this case study of Emma’s household articulates the stresses inherent to the lives of many grandparents whose own children’s lives are governed by drug use and addiction. We contrast normative expectations traditionally integral to the culture of extended families with the counternormative demands that drug use imposes on households. This highlights the untenable nature of caregiving for Emma and countless others of her generation. Compelled by tradition and sentiment to help their own children, they are thus allowing drug use driven norms, values and beliefs to permeate the lives of the grandchildren in their care. Yet, they are also trying to protect those children from drugs and from the violence and conflict that drugs bring into the household. Emma’s own life illustrates the salience of norms of kinship, reciprocity and respect, and the trauma in her household demonstrates how their absence does, indeed, intensify demands and erode resources. We conclude that the imperatives of raising the next generation may necessitate a counternormative willingness on the part of grandparents to exclude their adult drug using children from their households. PMID:20011671

Assessment of disease-specific knowledge in Australian children with inflammatory bowel disease and their parents.

PubMed

Day, Andrew S; Mylvaganam, Gaithri; Shalloo, Nollaig; Clarkson, Cathy; Leach, Steven T; Lemberg, Daniel A

2017-08-01

Disease-specific knowledge may influence disease outcome and quality of life in children with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). This prospective study aimed to define IBD-related knowledge in a group of Australian children with IBD and their parents using a validated measure of disease-specific knowledge, the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Knowledge Inventory Device (IBD-KID). Children (less than 18 years) diagnosed with IBD who were members of the Australian patient support organisation were identified. Each family was sent copies of the IBD-KID. Children aged 10-18 years and all parents were asked to complete the IBD-KID and to also provide demographic details and disease characteristics. Replies were received from 196 families: 262 parents and 128 children completed questionnaires. Most children had a diagnosis of Crohn disease (65%) and 51% were male. Children diagnosed in the preceding 6 years scored higher than those with longer time since diagnosis. Parents had better scores in the IBD-KID than the children (P < 0.0001). Overall, parents and children had poor understanding of key management issues for IBD (such as side effects of steroids), important outcomes (e.g. growth) and the use of complementary therapies. Consistent patterns of IBD-related knowledge were noted in this large group of Australian children with IBD and their parents. Measurement of disease-related knowledge with the IBD-KID can identify gaps in understanding, thereby permitting focused educational activities. Although these knowledge gaps may impact upon outcomes, further prospective studies are now required to elucidate the relationships between enhanced knowledge and specific outcomes. © 2017 Paediatrics and Child Health Division (The Royal Australasian College of Physicians).

Brain network dysregulation, emotion, and complaints after mild traumatic brain injury.

PubMed

van der Horn, Harm J; Liemburg, Edith J; Scheenen, Myrthe E; de Koning, Myrthe E; Marsman, Jan-Bernard C; Spikman, Jacoba M; van der Naalt, Joukje

2016-04-01

To assess the role of brain networks in emotion regulation and post-traumatic complaints in the sub-acute phase after non-complicated mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Fifty-four patients with mTBI (34 with and 20 without complaints) and 20 healthy controls (group-matched for age, sex, education, and handedness) were included. Resting-state fMRI was performed at four weeks post-injury. Static and dynamic functional connectivity were studied within and between the default mode, executive (frontoparietal and bilateral frontal network), and salience network. The hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS) was used to measure anxiety (HADS-A) and depression (HADS-D). Regarding within-network functional connectivity, none of the selected brain networks were different between groups. Regarding between-network interactions, patients with complaints exhibited lower functional connectivity between the bilateral frontal and salience network compared to patients without complaints. In the total patient group, higher HADS-D scores were related to lower functional connectivity between the bilateral frontal network and both the right frontoparietal and salience network, and to higher connectivity between the right frontoparietal and salience network. Furthermore, whereas higher HADS-D scores were associated with lower connectivity within the parietal midline areas of the bilateral frontal network, higher HADS-A scores were related to lower connectivity within medial prefrontal areas of the bilateral frontal network. Functional interactions of the executive and salience networks were related to emotion regulation and complaints after mTBI, with a key role for the bilateral frontal network. These findings may have implications for future studies on the effect of psychological interventions. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Do different salience cues compete for dominance in memory over a daytime nap?

PubMed

Alger, Sara E; Chen, Shirley; Payne, Jessica D

2018-06-12

Information that is the most salient and important for future use is preferentially preserved through active processing during sleep. Emotional salience is a biologically adaptive cue that influences episodic memory processing through interactions between amygdalar and hippocampal activity. However, other cues that influence the importance of information, such as the explicit direction to remember or forget, interact with the inherent salience of information to determine its fate in memory. It is unknown how sleep-based processes selectively consolidate this complex information. The current study examined the development of memory for emotional and neutral information that was either cued to-be-remembered (TBR) or to-be-forgotten (TBF) across a daytime period including either napping or wakefulness. Baseline memory revealed dominance of the TBR cue, regardless of emotional salience. As anticipated, napping was found to preserve memory overall significantly better than remaining awake. Furthermore, we observed a trending interaction indicating that napping specifically enhanced the discrimination between the most salient information (negative TBR items) over other information. We found that memory for negative items was positively associated with the percentage of SWS obtained during a nap. Furthermore, the magnitude of the difference in memory between negative TBR items and negative TBF items increased with greater sleep spindle activity. Taken together, our results suggest that although the cue to actively remember or intentionally forget initially wins out, active processes during sleep facilitate the competition between salience cues to promote the most salient information in memory. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Novelty Enhances Visual Salience Independently of Reward in the Parietal Lobe

PubMed Central

Foley, Nicholas C.; Jangraw, David C.; Peck, Christopher

2014-01-01

Novelty modulates sensory and reward processes, but it remains unknown how these effects interact, i.e., how the visual effects of novelty are related to its motivational effects. A widespread hypothesis, based on findings that novelty activates reward-related structures, is that all the effects of novelty are explained in terms of reward. According to this idea, a novel stimulus is by default assigned high reward value and hence high salience, but this salience rapidly decreases if the stimulus signals a negative outcome. Here we show that, contrary to this idea, novelty affects visual salience in the monkey lateral intraparietal area (LIP) in ways that are independent of expected reward. Monkeys viewed peripheral visual cues that were novel or familiar (received few or many exposures) and predicted whether the trial will have a positive or a negative outcome—i.e., end in a reward or a lack of reward. We used a saccade-based assay to detect whether the cues automatically attracted or repelled attention from their visual field location. We show that salience—measured in saccades and LIP responses—was enhanced by both novelty and positive reward associations, but these factors were dissociable and habituated on different timescales. The monkeys rapidly recognized that a novel stimulus signaled a negative outcome (and withheld anticipatory licking within the first few presentations), but the salience of that stimulus remained high for multiple subsequent presentations. Therefore, novelty can provide an intrinsic bonus for attention that extends beyond the first presentation and is independent of physical rewards. PMID:24899716

From prediction error to incentive salience: mesolimbic computation of reward motivation.

PubMed

Berridge, Kent C

2012-04-01

Reward contains separable psychological components of learning, incentive motivation and pleasure. Most computational models have focused only on the learning component of reward, but the motivational component is equally important in reward circuitry, and even more directly controls behavior. Modeling the motivational component requires recognition of additional control factors besides learning. Here I discuss how mesocorticolimbic mechanisms generate the motivation component of incentive salience. Incentive salience takes Pavlovian learning and memory as one input and as an equally important input takes neurobiological state factors (e.g. drug states, appetite states, satiety states) that can vary independently of learning. Neurobiological state changes can produce unlearned fluctuations or even reversals in the ability of a previously learned reward cue to trigger motivation. Such fluctuations in cue-triggered motivation can dramatically depart from all previously learned values about the associated reward outcome. Thus, one consequence of the difference between incentive salience and learning can be to decouple cue-triggered motivation of the moment from previously learned values of how good the associated reward has been in the past. Another consequence can be to produce irrationally strong motivation urges that are not justified by any memories of previous reward values (and without distorting associative predictions of future reward value). Such irrationally strong motivation may be especially problematic in addiction. To understand these phenomena, future models of mesocorticolimbic reward function should address the neurobiological state factors that participate to control generation of incentive salience. © 2012 The Author. European Journal of Neuroscience © 2012 Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Dynamic Encoding of Incentive Salience in the Ventral Pallidum: Dependence on the Form of the Reward Cue.

PubMed

Ahrens, Allison M; Ferguson, Lindsay M; Robinson, Terry E; Aldridge, J Wayne

2018-01-01

Some rats are especially prone to attribute incentive salience to a cue (conditioned stimulus, CS) paired with food reward (sign-trackers, STs), but the extent they do so varies as a function of the form of the CS. Other rats respond primarily to the predictive value of a cue (goal-trackers, GTs), regardless of its form. Sign-tracking is associated with greater cue-induced activation of mesolimbic structures than goal-tracking; however, it is unclear how the form of the CS itself influences activity in neural systems involved in incentive salience attribution. Thus, our goal was to determine how different cue modalities affect neural activity in the ventral pallidum (VP), which is known to encode incentive salience attribution, as rats performed a two-CS Pavlovian conditioned approach task in which both a lever-CS and a tone-CS predicted identical food reward. The lever-CS elicited sign-tracking in some rats (STs) and goal-tracking in others (GTs), whereas the tone-CS elicited only goal-tracking in all rats. The lever-CS elicited robust changes in neural activity (sustained tonic increases or decreases in firing) throughout the VP in STs, relative to GTs. These changes were not seen when STs were exposed to the tone-CS, and in GTs there were no differences in firing between the lever-CS and tone-CS. We conclude that neural activity throughout the VP encodes incentive signals and is especially responsive when a cue is of a form that promotes the attribution of incentive salience to it, especially in predisposed individuals.

N-Acetylcysteine reduces cocaine-cue attentional bias and differentially alters cocaine self-administration based on dosing order.

PubMed

Levi Bolin, B; Alcorn, Joseph L; Lile, Joshua A; Rush, Craig R; Rayapati, Abner O; Hays, Lon R; Stoops, William W

2017-09-01

Disrupted glutamate homeostasis is thought to contribute to cocaine-use disorder, in particular, by enhancing the incentive salience of cocaine stimuli. n-Acetylcysteine might be useful in cocaine-use disorder by normalizing glutamate function. In prior studies, n-acetylcysteine blocked the reinstatement of cocaine seeking in laboratory animals and reduced the salience of cocaine stimuli and delayed relapse in humans. The present study determined the ability of maintenance on n-acetylcysteine (0 or 2400mg/day, counterbalanced) to reduce the incentive salience of cocaine stimuli, as measured by an attentional bias task, and attenuate intranasal cocaine self-administration (0, 30, and 60mg). Fourteen individuals (N=14) who met criteria for cocaine abuse or dependence completed this within-subjects, double-blind, crossover-design study. Cocaine-cue attentional bias was greatest following administration of 0mg cocaine during placebo maintenance, and was attenuated by n-acetylcysteine. Cocaine maintained responding during placebo and n-acetylcysteine maintenance, but the reinforcing effects of cocaine were significantly attenuated across both maintenance conditions in participants maintained on n-acetylcysteine first compared to participants maintained on placebo first. These results collectively suggest that a reduction in the incentive salience of cocaine-related stimuli during n-acetylcysteine maintenance may be accompanied by reductions in cocaine self-administration. These results are in agreement with, and link, prior preclinical and clinical trial results suggesting that n-acetylcysteine might be useful for preventing cocaine relapse by attenuating the incentive salience of cocaine cues. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Rare, but obviously there: effects of target frequency and salience on visual search accuracy.

PubMed

Biggs, Adam T; Adamo, Stephen H; Mitroff, Stephen R

2014-10-01

Accuracy can be extremely important for many visual search tasks. However, numerous factors work to undermine successful search. Several negative influences on search have been well studied, yet one potentially influential factor has gone almost entirely unexplored-namely, how is search performance affected by the likelihood that a specific target might appear? A recent study demonstrated that when specific targets appear infrequently (i.e., once in every thousand trials) they were, on average, not often found. Even so, some infrequently appearing targets were actually found quite often, suggesting that the targets' frequency is not the only factor at play. Here, we investigated whether salience (i.e., the extent to which an item stands out during search) could explain why some infrequent targets are easily found whereas others are almost never found. Using the mobile application Airport Scanner, we assessed how individual target frequency and salience interacted in a visual search task that included a wide array of targets and millions of trials. Target frequency and salience were both significant predictors of search accuracy, although target frequency explained more of the accuracy variance. Further, when examining only the rarest target items (those that appeared on less than 0.15% of all trials), there was a significant relationship between salience and accuracy such that less salient items were less likely to be found. Beyond implications for search theory, these data suggest significant vulnerability for real-world searches that involve targets that are both infrequent and hard-to-spot. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Cannabinoid Modulation of Functional Connectivity within Regions Processing Attentional Salience

PubMed Central

Bhattacharyya, Sagnik; Falkenberg, Irina; Martin-Santos, Rocio; Atakan, Zerrin; Crippa, Jose A; Giampietro, Vincent; Brammer, Mick; McGuire, Philip

2015-01-01

There is now considerable evidence to support the hypothesis that psychotic symptoms are the result of abnormal salience attribution, and that the attribution of salience is largely mediated through the prefrontal cortex, the striatum, and the hippocampus. Although these areas show differential activation under the influence of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (delta-9-THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), the two major derivatives of cannabis sativa, little is known about the effects of these cannabinoids on the functional connectivity between these regions. We investigated this in healthy occasional cannabis users by employing event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) following oral administration of delta-9-THC, CBD, or a placebo capsule. Employing a seed cluster-based functional connectivity analysis that involved using the average time series from each seed cluster for a whole-brain correlational analysis, we investigated the effect of drug condition on functional connectivity between the seed clusters and the rest of the brain during an oddball salience processing task. Relative to the placebo condition, delta-9-THC and CBD had opposite effects on the functional connectivity between the dorsal striatum, the prefrontal cortex, and the hippocampus. Delta-9-THC reduced fronto-striatal connectivity, which was related to its effect on task performance, whereas this connection was enhanced by CBD. Conversely, mediotemporal-prefrontal connectivity was enhanced by delta-9-THC and reduced by CBD. Our results suggest that the functional integration of brain regions involved in salience processing is differentially modulated by single doses of delta-9-THC and CBD and that this relates to the processing of salient stimuli. PMID:25249057

Salience Network and Parahippocampal Dopamine Dysfunction in Memory-Impaired Parkinson Disease

PubMed Central

Christopher, Leigh; Duff-Canning, Sarah; Koshimori, Yuko; Segura, Barbara; Boileau, Isabelle; Chen, Robert; Lang, Anthony E.; Houle, Sylvain; Rusjan, Pablo; Strafella, Antonio P.

2016-01-01

Objective Patients with Parkinson disease (PD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are vulnerable to dementia and frequently experience memory deficits. This could be the result of dopamine dysfunction in corticostriatal networks (salience, central executive networks, and striatum) and/or the medial temporal lobe. Our aim was to investigate whether dopamine dysfunction in these regions contributes to memory impairment in PD. Methods We used positron emission tomography imaging to compare D2 receptor availability in the cortex and striatal (limbic and associative) dopamine neuron integrity in 4 groups: memory-impaired PD (amnestic MCI; n=9), PD with nonamnestic MCI (n=10), PD without MCI (n=11), and healthy controls (n=14). Subjects were administered a full neuropsychological test battery for cognitive performance. Results Memory-impaired patients demonstrated more significant reductions in D2 receptor binding in the salience network (insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex [ACC] and the right parahippocampal gyrus [PHG]) compared to healthy controls and patients with no MCI. They also presented reductions in the right insula and right ACC compared to nonamnestic MCI patients. D2 levels were correlated with memory performance in the right PHG and left insula of amnestic patients and with executive performance in the bilateral insula and left ACC of all MCI patients. Associative striatal dopamine denervation was significant in all PD patients. Interpretation Dopaminergic differences in the salience network and the medial temporal lobe contribute to memory impairment in PD. Furthermore, these findings indicate the vulnerability of the salience network in PD and its potential role in memory and executive dysfunction. PMID:25448687

Cannabinoid modulation of functional connectivity within regions processing attentional salience.

PubMed

Bhattacharyya, Sagnik; Falkenberg, Irina; Martin-Santos, Rocio; Atakan, Zerrin; Crippa, Jose A; Giampietro, Vincent; Brammer, Mick; McGuire, Philip

2015-05-01

There is now considerable evidence to support the hypothesis that psychotic symptoms are the result of abnormal salience attribution, and that the attribution of salience is largely mediated through the prefrontal cortex, the striatum, and the hippocampus. Although these areas show differential activation under the influence of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (delta-9-THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), the two major derivatives of cannabis sativa, little is known about the effects of these cannabinoids on the functional connectivity between these regions. We investigated this in healthy occasional cannabis users by employing event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) following oral administration of delta-9-THC, CBD, or a placebo capsule. Employing a seed cluster-based functional connectivity analysis that involved using the average time series from each seed cluster for a whole-brain correlational analysis, we investigated the effect of drug condition on functional connectivity between the seed clusters and the rest of the brain during an oddball salience processing task. Relative to the placebo condition, delta-9-THC and CBD had opposite effects on the functional connectivity between the dorsal striatum, the prefrontal cortex, and the hippocampus. Delta-9-THC reduced fronto-striatal connectivity, which was related to its effect on task performance, whereas this connection was enhanced by CBD. Conversely, mediotemporal-prefrontal connectivity was enhanced by delta-9-THC and reduced by CBD. Our results suggest that the functional integration of brain regions involved in salience processing is differentially modulated by single doses of delta-9-THC and CBD and that this relates to the processing of salient stimuli.

Negative arousal increases the effects of stimulus salience in older adults.

PubMed

Sutherland, Matthew R; Mather, Mara

2015-01-01

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Stimuli compete for mental representation, with salient stimuli attracting more attention than less salient stimuli. In a recent study, we found that presenting an emotionally negative arousing sound before briefly showing an array of letters with different levels of salience increased the reporting of the more salient letters but decreased reporting of the less salient letters (Sutherland & Mather, 2012, Emotion, 12, 1367-1372). In the current study we examined whether negative arousal produces similar effects on attention in older adults. Data from 55 older adults (61-80 years; M = 70.7, SD = 5.1) were compared with those from 110 younger adults (18-29 years; M = 20.3, SD = 2.3) from Sutherland and Mather (2012). Neutral or negative arousing sound clips were played before a brief presentation of eight letters, three of which were presented in a darker font than the others to create a group of high- and low-salience targets. Next, participants recalled as many of the letters as they could. At the end of the study, participants rated the emotional arousal and the valence of the sounds. Higher ratings of emotional arousal for the sounds predicted a greater advantage for high-salience letters in recall. This influence of arousal did not significantly differ by age. The effects of negative arousal on subsequent attention were similar in older adults as in younger adults. Moreover, the results support arousal-biased competition theory (Mather & Sutherland, 2011, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 114-133), which predicts that emotional arousal amplifies the effects of stimulus salience in attention and memory.

A critical eye: praise directed toward traits increases children's eye fixations on errors and decreases motivation.

PubMed

Zentall, Shannon R; Morris, Bradley J

2012-12-01

Although there is evidence that praise of different types (i.e., generic vs. nongeneric) influences motivation, it is unclear how this occurs. Generic praise (e.g., "You are smart") conveys that a child possesses a trait responsible for their performance, whereas nongeneric praise (e.g., "You worked hard") conveys that performance is effort-based. Because praise conveys the basis for success, praise may change the interpretation and salience of errors. Specifically, generic praise may highlight the threatening nature of error (i.e., the child does not possess this trait). Because attention is drawn to threats in the environment, we expected generic praise to increase attention to error. We used eyetracking to measure implicit responses to errors (i.e., visual attention: fixation counts and durations) in order to determine the relation between visual attention and verbal reports of motivation (persistence and self-evaluations) in 30 four- to seven-year-old children. Children first saw pictures attributed to them, for which they received either generic or nongeneric praise. The children then saw pictures attributed to them that contained errors--that is, missing features. As a pretest and posttest, the children saw pictures that were "drawn by other children," half of which contained errors. The results indicated that children who received generic praise ("you are a good drawer") produced more and longer fixations on errors, both their "own" and on "other children's," than did children who received nongeneric praise ("you did a good job drawing"). More fixations on errors were related to lower persistence and lower self-evaluations. These results suggest that generic praise increases attention to errors because error threatens the possession of a positive trait.

Metacognitive Knowledge in Children at Early Elementary School

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haberkorn, Kerstin; Lockl, Kathrin; Pohl, Steffi; Ebert, Susanne; Weinert, Sabine

2014-01-01

In metacognition research, many studies focused on metacognitive knowledge of preschoolers or children at the end of elementary school or secondary school, but investigations of children starting elementary school are quite limited. The present study, thus, took a closer look at children's knowledge about mental processes and strategies in…

Children's Prosociality and Metacognitive Knowledge of Effective Helping.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nakazawa, Jun

Two studies examined the relationship between metacognitive knowledge and performance among Japanese children. It was predicted that highly prosocial children would have more appropriate knowledge of helping than would children who were low in prosocial behavior. The first study involved 109 third graders and 129 fifth graders and examined the…

Measuring Young Children's Alphabet Knowledge: Development and Validation of Brief Letter-Sound Knowledge Assessments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Piasta, Shayne B.; Phillips, Beth M.; Williams, Jeffrey M.; Bowles, Ryan P.; Anthony, Jason L.

2016-01-01

Early childhood teachers are increasingly encouraged to support children's development of letter-sound abilities. Assessment of letter-sound knowledge is key in planning for effective instruction, yet the letter-sound knowledge assessments currently available and suitable for preschool-age children demonstrate significant limitations. The purpose…

The Roles of Feature-Specific Task Set and Bottom-Up Salience in Attentional Capture: An ERP Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eimer, Martin; Kiss, Monika; Press, Clare; Sauter, Disa

2009-01-01

We investigated the roles of top-down task set and bottom-up stimulus salience for feature-specific attentional capture. Spatially nonpredictive cues preceded search arrays that included a color-defined target. For target-color singleton cues, behavioral spatial cueing effects were accompanied by cue-induced N2pc components, indicative of…

Understanding the Impact of Lottery Incentives on Web Survey Participation and Response Quality: A Leverage-Salience Theory Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhang, Chan; Lonn, Steven; Teasley, Stephanie D.

2017-01-01

Cumulative evidence is mixed regarding the effect of lottery incentives on survey participation; little is known about why this strategy sometimes works and other times fails. We examined two factors that can influence the effectiveness of lottery incentives as suggested by leverage-salience theory: emphasis of survey attributes in invitations and…

Multiple Identities of Jewish Immigrant Adolescents from the Former Soviet Union: An Exploration of Salience and Impact of Ethnic Identity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Birman, Dina; Persky, Irena; Chan, Wing Yi

2010-01-01

The current paper explores the salience and impact of ethnic and national identities for immigrants that are negotiating more than two cultures. Specifically, we were interested in the ways in which Jewish immigrant adolescents from the former Soviet Union integrate their Russian, Jewish, and American identities, and to what extent identification…

The Development of Visual Search in Infancy: Attention to Faces versus Salience

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kwon, Mee-Kyoung; Setoodehnia, Mielle; Baek, Jongsoo; Luck, Steven J.; Oakes, Lisa M.

2016-01-01

Four experiments examined how faces compete with physically salient stimuli for the control of attention in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants (N = 117 total). Three computational models were used to quantify physical salience. We presented infants with visual search arrays containing a face and familiar object(s), such as shoes and flowers. Six- and…

The Effects of Work Demands and Resources on Work-to-family Conflict and Facilitation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Voydanoff, Patricia

2004-01-01

This article uses a differential salience-comparable salience approach to examine the effects of work demands and resources on work-to-family conflict and facilitation. The analysis is based on data from 1,938 employed adults living with a family member who were interviewed for the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce. The results support…

Mortality Salience and Positive Affect Influence Adolescents' Attitudes toward Peers with Physical Disabilities: Terror Management and Broaden and Build Theories

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Taubman-Ben-Ari, Orit; Eherenfreund-Hager, Ahinoam; Findler, Liora

2011-01-01

Attitudes toward teenagers with and without physical disabilities, and their social acceptance, were examined from the perspective of terror management theory and the broaden and build theory. Participants (n = 390, aged 13-17) were divided into 3 experimental conditions: positive emotions, mortality salience, and control. Then, they were shown…

Managerial Cognitive Moral Development and the Firm's Owners' Salience: Empirical Evidence

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martynov, Aleksey; Logachev, Sergey

2016-01-01

In this paper, we study the agency relationship between the firm's owners and managers. We apply the theory of Cognitive Moral Development (CMD) to answer the question: What factors affect salience of the interests of the firm's owners to the managers? Using a sample of Russian managers, we found that higher levels of CMD weaken the relationship…

An Improved Measure of Cognitive Salience in Free Listing Tasks: A Marshallese Example

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robbins, Michael C.; Nolan, Justin M.; Chen, Diana

2017-01-01

A new free-list measure of cognitive salience, B', is presented, which includes both list position and list frequency. It surpasses other extant measures by being normed to vary between a maximum of 1 and a minimum of 0, thereby making it useful for comparisons irrespective of list length or number of respondents. An illustration of its…

Contour sensitive saliency and depth application in image retargeting

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lu, Hongju; Yue, Pengfei; Zhao, Yanhui; Liu, Rui; Fu, Yuanbin; Zheng, Yuanjie; Cui, Jia

2018-04-01

Image retargeting technique requires important information preservation and less edge distortion during increasing/decreasing image size. The major existed content-aware methods perform well. However, there are two problems should be improved: the slight distortion appeared at the object edges and the structure distortion in the nonsalient area. According to psychological theories, people evaluate image quality based on multi-level judgments and comparison between different areas, both image content and image structure. The paper proposes a new standard: the structure preserving in non-salient area. After observation and image analysis, blur (slight blur) is generally existed at the edge of objects. The blur feature is used to estimate the depth cue, named blur depth descriptor. It can be used in the process of saliency computation for balanced image retargeting result. In order to keep the structure information in nonsalient area, the salient edge map is presented in Seam Carving process, instead of field-based saliency computation. The derivative saliency from x- and y-direction can avoid the redundant energy seam around salient objects causing structure distortion. After the comparison experiments between classical approaches and ours, the feasibility of our algorithm is proved.

The salience network and human personality: Integrity of white matter tracts within anterior and posterior salience network relates to the self-directedness character trait.

PubMed

Prillwitz, Conrad; Rüber, Theodor; Reuter, Martin; Montag, Christian; Weber, Bernd; Elger, Christian E; Markett, Sebastian

2018-04-28

A prevailing topic in personality neuroscience is the question how personality traits are reflected in the brain. Functional and structural networks have been examined by functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging, however, the structural correlates of functionally defined networks have not been investigated in a personality context. By using the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), the present study assesses in a sample of 116 healthy participants how personality traits proposed in the framework of the biopsychosocial theory on personality relate to white matter pathways delineated by functional network imaging. We show that the character trait self-directedness relates to the overall microstructural integrity of white matter tracts constituting the salience network as indicated by DTI-derived measures. Self-directedness has been proposed as the executive control component of personality and describes the tendency to stay focused on the attainment of long-term goals. The present finding corroborates the view of the salience network as an executive control network that serves maintenance of rules and task-sets to guide ongoing behavior. Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Detection of emotional faces: salient physical features guide effective visual search.

PubMed

Calvo, Manuel G; Nummenmaa, Lauri

2008-08-01

In this study, the authors investigated how salient visual features capture attention and facilitate detection of emotional facial expressions. In a visual search task, a target emotional face (happy, disgusted, fearful, angry, sad, or surprised) was presented in an array of neutral faces. Faster detection of happy and, to a lesser extent, surprised and disgusted faces was found both under upright and inverted display conditions. Inversion slowed down the detection of these faces less than that of others (fearful, angry, and sad). Accordingly, the detection advantage involves processing of featural rather than configural information. The facial features responsible for the detection advantage are located in the mouth rather than the eye region. Computationally modeled visual saliency predicted both attentional orienting and detection. Saliency was greatest for the faces (happy) and regions (mouth) that were fixated earlier and detected faster, and there was close correspondence between the onset of the modeled saliency peak and the time at which observers initially fixated the faces. The authors conclude that visual saliency of specific facial features--especially the smiling mouth--is responsible for facilitated initial orienting, which thus shortens detection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).

Altered attentional control over the salience network in complex regional pain syndrome.

PubMed

Kim, Jungyoon; Kang, Ilhyang; Chung, Yong-An; Kim, Tae-Suk; Namgung, Eun; Lee, Suji; Oh, Jin Kyoung; Jeong, Hyeonseok S; Cho, Hanbyul; Kim, Myeong Ju; Kim, Tammy D; Choi, Soo Hyun; Lim, Soo Mee; Lyoo, In Kyoon; Yoon, Sujung

2018-05-10

The degree and salience of pain have been known to be constantly monitored and modulated by the brain. In the case of maladaptive neural responses as reported in centralized pain conditions such as complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), the perception of pain is amplified and remains elevated even without sustained peripheral pain inputs. Given that the attentional state of the brain greatly influences the perception and interpretation of pain, we investigated the role of the attention network and its dynamic interactions with other pain-related networks of the brain in CRPS. We examined alterations in the intra- and inter-network functional connectivities in 21 individuals with CRPS and 49 controls. CRPS-related reduction in intra-network functional connectivity was found in the attention network. Individuals with CRPS had greater inter-network connectivities between the attention and salience networks as compared with healthy controls. Furthermore, individuals within the CRPS group with high levels of pain catastrophizing showed greater inter-network connectivities between the attention and salience networks. Taken together, the current findings suggest that these altered connectivities may be potentially associated with the maladaptive pain coping as found in CRPS patients.