Maternal label and gesture use affects acquisition of specific object names

Ten mothers were observed prospectively, interacting with their infants aged 0 ; 10 in two contexts (picture description and noun description). Maternal communicative behaviours were coded for volubility, gestural production and labelling style. Verbal labelling events were categorized into three exclusive categories: label only; label plus deictic gesture; label plus iconic gesture. We evaluated the predictive relations between maternal communicative style and children's subsequent acquisition of ten target nouns. Strong relations were observed between maternal communicative style and children's acquisition of the target nouns. Further, even controlling for maternal volubility and maternal labelling, maternal use of iconic gestures predicted the timing of acquisition of nouns in comprehension. These results support the proposition that maternal gestural input facilitates linguistic development, and suggest that such facilitation may be a function of gesture type.

Case study: object and ground point separation on a river bank using airborne based LIDAR data

In the past decade, airborne based LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) has been recognised by both the commercial and public sectors as a reliable and accurate source for land surveying in environmental, engineering and civil applications. Commonly, the first task to investigate LIDAR point clouds is to separate ground and object points. Skewness Balancing has been proven to be an efficient non-parametric unsupervised classification algorithm to address this challenge. Initially developed for moderate terrain, this algorithm needs to be adapted to handle sloped terrain. This paper addresses the difficulty of object and ground point separation in LIDAR data in hilly terrain. A case study on a diverse LIDAR data set in terms of data provider, resolution and LIDAR echo has been carried out. Several sites in urban and rural areas with man-made structure and vegetation in moderate and hilly terrain have been investigated and three categories have been identified. A deeper investigation on an urban scene with a river bank has been selected to extend the existing algorithm. The results show that an iterative use of Skewness Balancing is suitable for sloped terrain.

Interaction between grammatical categories and cognition in bilinguals: The role of proficiency, cultural immersion, and language of instruction

Previous studies have demonstrated that there is a tight link between grammatical concepts and cognitive preferences in monolingual speakers (Lucy 1992, Lucy & Gaskins 2003, Imai & Gentner 1997, Imai & Mazuka 2003). Recent research has also shown that bilinguals with languages that differ in their concepts may shift their cognitive preferences as a function of their proficiency (Athanasopoulos, 2006) or cultural immersion (Cook, Bassetti, Kasai, Sasaki, & Takahashi, 2006). The current short paper assesses the relative impact of each of these variables, and furthermore asks whether bilinguals alternate between two distinct cognitive representations of language-specific concepts depending on the language used in the experiment. Results from an object classification task showed that Japanese–English bilinguals shifted their behaviour towards the second language (L2) pattern primarily as a function of their L2 proficiency, while cultural immersion and language of instruction played a minimal role. These findings suggest that acquisition of novel grammatical categories leads to cognitive restructuring in the bilingual mind and have implications for the relationship between language and cognitive processing.

Visual Object Recognition Using Deformable Models of Vehicles

This workshop paper reports recent developments to a vision system for traffic interpretation which relies extensively on the use of geometrical and scene context. Firstly, a new approach to pose refinement is reported, based on forces derived from prominent image derivatives found close to an initial hypothesis. Secondly, a parameterised vehicle model is reported, able to represent different vehicle classes. This general vehicle model has been fitted to sample data, and subjected to a Principal Component Analysis to create a deformable model of common car types having 6 parameters. We show that the new pose recovery technique is also able to operate on the PCA model, to allow the structure of an initial vehicle hypothesis to be adapted to fit the prevailing context. We report initial experiments with the model, which demonstrate significant improvements to pose recovery.

Biologically motivated model for object detection and identification in real-world scenes

The classical computer vision methods can only weakly emulate some of the multi-level parallelisms in signal processing and information sharing that takes place in different parts of the primates’ visual system thus enabling it to accomplish many diverse functions of visual perception. One of the main functions of the primates’ vision is to detect and recognise objects in natural scenes despite all the linear and non-linear variations of the objects and their environment. The superior performance of the primates’ visual system compared to what machine vision systems have been able to achieve to date, motivates scientists and researchers to further explore this area in pursuit of more efficient vision systems inspired by natural models. In this paper building blocks for a hierarchical efficient object recognition model are proposed. Incorporating the attention-based processing would lead to a system that will process the visual data in a non-linear way focusing only on the regions of interest and hence reducing the time to achieve real-time performance. Further, it is suggested to modify the visual cortex model for recognizing objects by adding non-linearities in the ventral path consistent with earlier discoveries as reported by researchers in the neuro-physiology of vision.

Object displays and control of dynamic systems

Recent work has suggested that for some tasks, graphical displays which visually integrate information from more than one source offer an advantage over more traditional displays which present the same information in a separated format. Three experiments are described which investigate this claim using a task which requires subjects to control a dynamic system. In the first experiment, the integrated display is compared to two separated displays, one an animated mimic diagram, the other an alphanumeric display. The integrated display is shown to support better performance in a control task, but experiment 2 shows that part of this advantage may be due to its analogue nature. Experiment 3 considers performance on a fault detection task, and shows no difference between the integrated and separated displays. The paper concludes that previous claims made for integrated displays may not generalize from monitoring to control tasks.

Categories of GM risk-benefit perceptions and their antecedents

The stated benefits and perceived risks of genetic modification (GM) cover very diverse issues, such as food safety, world food security, and the environment, that may differentially affect consumer acceptance. In this research, we hypothesize that consumers perceive up to eight dimensions: risks to business (farmers, agribusiness, etc.), benefits to business, risks and benefits to the environment, risks and benefits to the developing world, and risks and benefits to self and family. Moral concerns are also recognized. Using data collected in 2002 in the United States, France, and the UK, we investigate these different dimensions. Second, we analyze the extent to which the dimensions of risk-benefit perceptions can be explained by general attitudes widely used to explain food purchase behavior (such as general attitude to the environment, to technology, etc.), as well as by perceived knowledge of GM, level of education, and trust in various sources of information. In all locations, the majority of consumers only perceive a medium level of risk from GM products. Attitude to technology is the most important attitude variable—those with a positive attitude to technology in general also have a positive attitude to GM technology. More Americans than Europeans fall into this category. Those who trust government and the food industry tend to think GM technology is less risky, whereas those who trust activists believe the opposite. Americans are more trusting of the former, Europeans of the latter. Level of education is positively associated with benefit perceptions and negatively associated with moral concerns. Location continues to play a limited independent role in explaining perceptions even after these factors have been taken into account.

Comparison of preferences for object properties in the rat using paired- and free-choice paradigms

A common method for testing preference for objects is to determine which of a pair of objects is approached first in a paired-choice paradigm. In comparison, many studies of preference for environmental enrichment (EE) devices have used paradigms in which total time spent with each of a pair of objects is used to determine preference. While each of these paradigms gives a specific measure of the preference for one object in comparison to another, neither method allows comparisons between multiple objects simultaneously. Since it is possible that several EE objects would be placed in a cage together to improve animal welfare, it is important to determine measures for rats' preferences in conditions that mimic this potential home cage environment. While it would be predicted that each type of measure would produce similar rankings of objects, this has never been tested empirically. In this study, we compared two paradigms: EE objects were either presented in pairs (paired-choice comparison) or four objects were presented simultaneously (simultaneous presentation comparison). We used frequency of first interaction and time spent with each object to rank the objects in the paired-choice experiment, and time spent with each object to rank the objects in the simultaneous presentation experiment. We also considered the behaviours elicited by the objects to determine if these might be contributing to object preference. We demonstrated that object ranking based on time spent with objects from the paired-choice experiment predicted object ranking in the simultaneous presentation experiment. Additionally, we confirmed that behaviours elicited were an important determinant of time spent with an object. This provides convergent evidence that both paired choice and simultaneous comparisons provide valid measures of preference for EE objects in rats. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Neural mechanisms of visual object priming: evidence for perceptual and semantic distinctions in fusiform cortex

Previous functional imaging studies have shown that facilitated processing of a visual object on repeated, relative to initial, presentation (i.e., repetition priming) is associated with reductions in neural activity in multiple regions, including fusiforin/lateral occipital cortex. Moreover, activity reductions have been found, at diminished levels, when a different exemplar of an object is presented on repetition. In one previous study, the magnitude of diminished priming across exemplars was greater in the right relative to the left fusiform, suggesting greater exemplar specificity in the right. Another previous study, however, observed fusiform lateralization modulated by object viewpoint, but not object exemplar. The present fMRI study sought to determine whether the result of differential fusiform responses for perceptually different exemplars could be replicated. Furthermore, the role of the left fusiform cortex in object recognition was investigated via the inclusion of a lexical/semantic manipulation. Right fusiform cortex showed a significantly greater effect of exemplar change than left fusiform, replicating the previous result of exemplar-specific fusiform lateralization. Right fusiform and lateral occipital cortex were not differentially engaged by the lexical/semantic manipulation, suggesting that their role in visual object recognition is predominantly in the. C visual discrimination of specific objects. Activation in left fusiform cortex, but not left lateral occipital cortex, was modulated by both exemplar change and lexical/semantic manipulation, with further analysis suggesting a posterior-to-anterior progression between regions involved in processing visuoperceptual and lexical/semantic information about objects. The results are consistent with the view that the right fusiform plays a greater role in processing specific visual form information about objects, whereas the left fusiform is also involved in lexical/semantic processing. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.

Object life cycles & interaction environments for cross media production & distribution

This paper addresses the requirements for a Work/flow Management System that is intended to automate the production and distribution chain for cross-media content which is by nature multi-partner and multi-site. It advocates the requirements for an ontology-based object lifecycle tracking within work/flow integration by identifying various types of interfaces, object life cycles and the work-flow interaction environments within the AXMEDIS Framework.

Workflow data exchange semantics, object discovery & integration architecture for cross media production & distribution

There has been a clear lack of common data exchange semantics for inter-organisational workflow management systems where the research has mainly focused on technical issues rather than language constructs. This paper presents the neutral data exchanges semantics required for the workflow integration within the AXAEDIS framework and presents the mechanism for object discovery from the object repository where little or no knowledge about the object is available. The paper also presents workflow independent integration architecture with the AXAEDIS Framework.