Increasing food familiarity without the tears. A role for visual exposure?

Research has established the success of taste exposure paradigms as a means of increasing children’s acceptance, and liking, of previously unfamiliar or disliked foods. Yet, parents report that they tend to avoid the stress associated with repeatedly offering their children foods that are likely to be rejected. Given that successful taste exposure programmes often enhance children’s familiarity with a food’s appearance, as well as its taste, this article reviews the potential for exposure interventions that do not require repeated tastings to bring about positive attitude changes towards healthy foods. Recent evidence from studies that expose toddlers to picture books about fruit and vegetables suggest that familiarity with the origins and appearance of unfamiliar foods might increase children’s willingness to accept these into their diets.

The impact of novel labels on visual processing during infancy

The impact of novel labels on visual processing was investigated across two experiments with infants aged between 9 and 21 months. Infants viewed pairs of images across a series of preferential looking trials. On each trial, one image was novel, and the other image had previously been viewed by the infant. Some infants viewed images in silence; other infants viewed images accompanied by novel labels. The pattern of fixations both across and within trials revealed that infants in the labelling condition took longer to develop a novelty preference than infants in the silent condition. Our findings contrast with prior research by Robinson and Sloutsky (e.g., Robinson & Sloutsky, 2007a; Sloutsky & Robinson, 2008) who found that novel labels did not disrupt visual processing for infants aged over a year. Provided that overall task demands are sufficiently high, it appears that labels can disrupt visual processing for infants during the developmental period of establishing a lexicon. The results suggest that when infants are processing labels and objects, attentional resources are shared across modalities.

Manual response preparation and saccade programming are linked to attention shifts: ERP evidence for covert attentional orienting and spatially specific modulations of visual processing

The premotor theory of attention claims that attentional shifts are triggered during response programming, regardless of which response modality is involved. To investigate this claim, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants covertly prepared a left or right response, as indicated by a precue presented at the beginning of each trial. Cues signalled a left or right eye movement in the saccade task, and a left or right manual response in the manual task. The cued response had to be executed or withheld following the presentation of a Go/Nogo stimulus. Although there were systematic differences between ERPs triggered during covert manual and saccade preparation, lateralised ERP components sensitive to the direction of a cued response were very similar for both tasks, and also similar to the components previously found during cued shifts of endogenous spatial attention. This is consistent with the claim that the control of attention and of covert response preparation are closely linked. N1 components triggered by task-irrelevant visual probes presented during the covert response preparation interval were enhanced when these probes were presented close to cued response hand in the manual task, and at the saccade target location in the saccade task. This demonstrates that both manual and saccade preparation result in spatially specific modulations of visual processing, in line with the predictions of the premotor theory.

Visual enhancement of touch in spatial body representation

Perception of our own bodies is based on integration of visual and tactile inputs, notably by neurons in the brain’s parietal lobes. Here we report a behavioural consequence of this integration process. Simply viewing the arm can speed up reactions to an invisible tactile stimulus on the arm. We observed this visual enhancement effect only when a tactile task required spatial computation within a topographic map of the body surface and the judgements made were close to the limits of performance. This effect of viewing the body surface was absent or reversed in tasks that either did not require a spatial computation or in which judgements were well above performance limits. We consider possible mechanisms by which vision may influence tactile processing.

The distributed work of local action: interaction amongst virtually collocated research teams

Existing research on synchronous remote working in CSCW has highlighted the troubles that can arise because actions at one site are (partially) unavailable to remote colleagues. Such ‘local action’ is routinely characterised as a nuisance, a distraction, subordinate and the like. This paper explores interconnections between ‘local action’ and ‘distributed work’ in the case of a research team virtually collocated through ‘MiMeG’. MiMeG is an e-Social Science tool that facilitates ‘distributed data sessions’ in which social scientists are able to remotely collaborate on the real-time analysis of video data. The data are visible and controllable in a shared workspace and participants are additionally connected via audio conferencing. The findings reveal that whilst the (partial) unavailability of local action is at times problematic, it is also used as a resource for coordinating work. The paper considers how local action is interactionally managed in distributed data sessions and concludes by outlining implications of the analysis for the design and study of technologies to support group-to-group collaboration.

An eye for an eye: robust motion segmentation by applying the latest in human vision research

Automatically extracting interesting objects from videos is a very challenging task and is applicable to many research areas such robotics, medical imaging, content based indexing and visual surveillance. Automated visual surveillance is a major research area in computational vision and a commonly applied technique in an attempt to extract objects of interest is that of motion segmentation. Motion segmentation relies on the temporal changes that occur in video sequences to detect objects, but as a technique it presents many challenges that researchers have yet to surmount. Changes in real-time video sequences not only include interesting objects, environmental conditions such as wind, cloud cover, rain and snow may be present, in addition to rapid lighting changes, poor footage quality, moving shadows and reflections. The list provides only a sample of the challenges present. This thesis explores the use of motion segmentation as part of a computational vision system and provides solutions for a practical, generic approach with robust performance, using current neuro-biological, physiological and psychological research in primate vision as inspiration.

Beyond words: Visual metaphors that can demonstrate comprehension of KM as a paradoxical activity system

Following criticism that, in business and management, metaphor is largely verbal and primarily used to convey similarity, this paper explores how visual metaphors can communicate the anomalous and the paradoxical aspects of KM more concisely than words, whilst simultaneously presenting more tacit associations to stimulate creative thinking. It considers a series of 30 assessed posters that aimed to re-present six basic KM paradoxes through imagery that captures both the analogous and the anomalous. We found six categories of radial metaphors able to convey paradoxical complexity in a concise way. This has implications for organizations thinking about how to engage people with both the familiar and the strange. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Psychosocial impact of visual impairment in working-age adults

Future research is required into the prevalence of loneliness, anxiety and depression in adults with visual impairment, and to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions for improving psychosocial well-being such as counselling, peer support and employment programmes.

The spatial impact of visual distractors on saccade latency

Remote transient changes in the environment, such as the onset of visual distractors, impact on the exe- cution of target directed saccadic eye movements. Studies that have examined the latency of the saccade response have shown conflicting results. When there was an element of target selection, saccade latency increased as the distance between distractor and target increased. In contrast, when target selection is minimized by restricting the target to appear on one axis position, latency has been found to be slowest when the distractor is shown at fixation and reduces as it moves away from this position, rather than from the target. Here we report four experiments examining saccade latency as target and distractor posi- tions are varied. We find support for both a dependence of saccade latency on distractor distance from target and from fixation: saccade latency was longer when distractor is shown close to fixation and even longer still when shown in an opposite location (180°) to the target. We suggest that this is due to inhib- itory interactions between the distractor, fixation and the target interfering with fixation disengagement and target selection.

Intermittently-visual tracking experiments reveal the roles of error-correction and predictive mechanisms in the human visual-motor control system

Prediction mechanism is necessary for human visual motion to compensate a delay of sensory-motor system. In a previous study, “proactive control” was discussed as one example of predictive function of human beings, in which motion of hands preceded the virtual moving target in visual tracking experiments. To study the roles of the positional-error correction mechanism and the prediction mechanism, we carried out an intermittently-visual tracking experiment where a circular orbit is segmented into the target-visible regions and the target-invisible regions. Main results found in this research were following. A rhythmic component appeared in the tracer velocity when the target velocity was relatively high. The period of the rhythm in the brain obtained from environmental stimuli is shortened more than 10%. The shortening of the period of rhythm in the brain accelerates the hand motion as soon as the visual information is cut-off, and causes the precedence of hand motion to the target motion. Although the precedence of the hand in the blind region is reset by the environmental information when the target enters the visible region, the hand motion precedes the target in average when the predictive mechanism dominates the error-corrective mechanism.

Entertainment education theory and practice in HIV/AIDS communication: a South Africa / United Kingdom comparison

Within development communication, gaps remain in theory and practice: communication innovations are taking place which either do not incorporate theory or fail to challenge the assumptions of development communication and HIV/AIDS theory. This can lead to the implementation of unsuccessful interventions that lack theoretical frameworks or to uninformed practice, making it difficult to replicate. Further, research has demonstrated that Entertainment Education (EE) interventions have a measurable impact on behaviour in areas such as HIV/AIDS prevention. Given the transitions in EE practice and evidence of its impact, EE theory and practice can contribute insight into these challenges. A pilot study investigated these dilemmas within the context of the monitoring and evaluation of development communication. Framing this discussion is the concept of South-North dialogue, using comparative analysis of EE interventions to distil lessons through contrasting experiences in two diverse settings. It holds as a principle that lessons from the experience of EE in the Southern context can inform lessons for the North. Further, comparison of the case studies can generate insights for the broader development communication field. We present four case studies, informed by key informant interviews, of EE interventions in the UK and South Africa. We address how communication is defined in planning, implementation and evaluation, highlighting how it often misses the importance of 'listening'. The case studies show that HIV/AIDS communication, and development communication more broadly, has not internalised ideas of evaluation and listening in communication. Successes in the case studies can be partially attributed to responsiveness and context-specificity rather than following rigid planning templates, such as those found in some development communication literature. This indicates the importance of flexibility and responsiveness to context for both development communication and HIV/AIDS communication.

An overview of interactive visual data mining techniques for knowledge discovery

n the past decade, the analysis of data has faced the challenge of dealing with very large and complex datasets and the real-time generation of data. Technologies to store and access these complex and large datasets are in place. However, robust and scalable analysis technologies are needed to extract meaningful information from these datasets. The research field of Information Visualization and Visual Data Analytics addresses this need. Information visualization and data mining are often used complementary to each other. Their common goal is the extraction of meaningful information from complex and possibly large data. However, though data mining focuses on the usage of silicon hardware, visualization techniques also aim to access the powerful image-processing capabilities of the human brain. This article highlights the research on data visualization and visual analytics techniques. Furthermore, we highlight existing visual analytics techniques, systems, and applications including a perspective on the field from the chemical process industry.

Visual search for basic emotional expressions in autism; impaired processing of anger, fear and sadness, but a typical happy face advantage

Facial expression recognition was investigated in 20 males with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger syndrome (AS), compared to typically developing individuals matched for chronological age (TD CA group) and verbal and non-verbal ability (TD V/NV group). This was the first study to employ a visual search, “face in the crowd” paradigm with a HFA/AS group, which explored responses to numerous facial expressions using real-face stimuli. Results showed slower response times for processing fear, anger and sad expressions in the HFA/AS group, relative to the TD CA group, but not the TD V/NV group. Reponses to happy, disgust and surprise expressions showed no group differences. Results are discussed with reference to the amygdala theory of autism.