Time discounting (delta) and pain anticipation: Experimental evidence

To be published in: Revista Internacional de Sociología (2011), Special Issue on Experimental and Behavioral Economics.

Time transcendence, metadata and future utilization in 3D models of point clouds for heritage elements

Contributed to: Virtual Retrospect 2007 (Pessac, France, Nov 14-16, 2007)

Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection ALBAYZIN 2012 evaluation: overview, systems, results, and discussion

Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection (QbE STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech data repository given an acoustic query containing the term of interest as input. Nowadays, it has been receiving much interest due to the high volume of information stored in audio or audiovisual format. QbE STD differs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and keyword spotting (KWS)/spoken term detection (STD) since ASR is interested in all the terms/words that appear in the speech signal and KWS/STD relies on a textual transcription of the search term to retrieve the speech data. This paper presents the systems submitted to the ALBAYZIN 2012 QbE STD evaluation held as a part of ALBAYZIN 2012 evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2012 Conference(a). The evaluation consists of retrieving the speech files that contain the input queries, indicating their start and end timestamps within the appropriate speech file. Evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database containing a set of talks from MAVIR workshops(b), which amount at about 7 h of speech in total. We present the database metric systems submitted along with all results and some discussion. Four different research groups took part in the evaluation. Evaluation results show the difficulty of this task and the limited performance indicates there is still a lot of room for improvement. The best result is achieved by a dynamic time warping-based search over Gaussian posteriorgrams/posterior phoneme probabilities. This paper also compares the systems aiming at establishing the best technique dealing with that difficult task and looking for defining promising directions for this relatively novel task.

Incidental Memory of Younger and Older Adults for Objects Encountered in a Real World Context

Effects of context on the perception of, and incidental memory for, real-world objects have predominantly been investigated in younger individuals, under conditions involving a single static viewpoint. We examined the effects of prior object context and object familiarity on both older and younger adults' incidental memory for real objects encountered while they traversed a conference room. Recognition memory for context-typical and context-atypical objects was compared with a third group of unfamiliar objects that were not readily named and that had no strongly associated context. Both older and younger adults demonstrated a typicality effect, showing significantly lower 2-alternative-forced-choice recognition of context-typical than context-atypical objects; for these objects, the recognition of older adults either significantly exceeded, or numerically surpassed, that of younger adults. Testing-awareness elevated recognition but did not interact with age or with object type. Older adults showed significantly higher recognition for context-atypical objects than for unfamiliar objects that had no prior strongly associated context. The observation of a typicality effect in both age groups is consistent with preserved semantic schemata processing in aging. The incidental recognition advantage of older over younger adults for the context-typical and context-atypical objects may reflect aging-related differences in goal-related processing, with older adults under comparatively more novel circumstances being more likely to direct their attention to the external environment, or age-related differences in top-down effortful distraction regulation, with older individuals' attention more readily captured by salient objects in the environment. Older adults' reduced recognition of unfamiliar objects compared to context-atypical objects may reflect possible age differences in contextually driven expectancy violations. The latter finding underscores the theoretical and methodological value of including a third type of objects-that are comparatively neutral with respect to their contextual associations-to help differentiate between contextual integration effects (for schema-consistent objects) and expectancy violations (for schema-inconsistent objects).