Visual strategies used during the performance of an obstacle course

Vision is the sense that provides precise information about one’s position in the environment in relation to objects. The visual system is essential to guide people safely when moving around in the environment. The perception that an individual gets from a particular scene of her/his surroundings is accomplished by eye movements. The current study aims to identify differences in visual strategies between 15 women and 15 men within the age range of 18-24 years, who have been given a task to walk through an obstacle course drawn on the laboratory´s floor. They should start and finish at a predefined location. Twelve pylons were used as obstacles to be avoided during the walking.The participants' eye movements were recorded using the Mobile Eye model 1.35. The Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney Test was used for the statistical analysis. Significant differences occurred between men and women, in the duration of fixations: the men spend more time observing the finishing area than women (z=-1.929, p=.054); and in the number of fixations: before starting the task, the men fixate more often the middle phase of the obstacle course (z=-2.085, p=.037). Once they commence, the women fixate more the points outside the obstacle course than the men (z=-2.093, p=.036).

Performance of long-term care systems in Europe. ENEPRI Policy Brief No. 13, December 2012

The evaluation of long-term care (LTC) systems carried out in Work Package 7 of the ANCIEN project shows which performance criteria are important and – based on the available information – how European countries score on those criteria. This paper summarises the results and discusses the policy implications. An overall evaluation was carried out for four representative countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland. Of the four countries, the Dutch system has the highest scores on quality of life of LTC users, quality of care and equity of the LTC system, and it performs the secondbest after Poland in terms of the total burden of care (consisting of the financial burden and the burden of informal caregiving). The German system has somewhat lower scores than the Dutch on all four dimensions. The Polish system excels in having a low total burden of care, but it scores the lowest on quality of care and equity. The Spanish system has few extreme scores. Some important lessons are the following. The performance of a LTC system is a complex concept where many dimensions have to be included. Specifically, the impact of informal caregiving on the caregivers and on society should not be forgotten. The role of the state in funding and organising LTC versus individual responsibilities is one of the most important differences among countries. Choices concerning private funding and the role of informal care have a large effect not only on the public expenditures but also on the fairness of the system. International research into the relative preferences for the different performance criteria could produce a sound basis for the weights used in the overall evaluation.

An Integrated Traffic and Pedestrian Model_based Vision System

The paper describes a novel integrated vision system in which two autonomous visual modules are combined to interpret a dynamic scene. The first module employs a 3D model-based scheme to track rigid objects such as vehicles. The second module uses a 2D deformable model to track non-rigid objects such as people. The principal contribution is a novel method for handling occlusion between objects within the context of this hybrid tracking system. The practical aim of the work is to derive a scene description that is sufficiently rich to be used in a range of surveillance tasks. The paper describes each of the modules in outline before detailing the method of integration and the handling of occlusion in particular. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the system in a dynamic outdoor scene involving cars and people.

Developing a system for assessing the costs associated with different procurement routes in the construction industry

In developing techniques for monitoring the costs associated with different procurement routes, the central task is disentangling the various project costs incurred by organizations taking part in construction projects. While all firms are familiar with the need to analyse their own costs, it is unusual to apply the same kind of analysis to projects. The purpose of this research is to examine the claims that new ways of working such as strategic alliancing and partnering bring positive business benefits. This requires that costs associated with marketing, estimating, pricing, negotiation of terms, monitoring of performance and enforcement of contract are collected for a cross-section of projects under differing arrangements, and from those in the supply chain from clients to consultants, contractors, sub-contractors and suppliers. Collaboration with industrial partners forms the basis for developing a research instrument, based on time sheets, which will be relevant for all those taking part in the work. The signs are that costs associated with tendering are highly variable, 1-15%, depending upon what precisely is taken into account. The research to date reveals that there are mechanisms for measuring the costs of transactions and these will generate useful data for subsequent analysis.

Prolonged neglect following unilateral disruption of a prefrontal cortical-dorsal striatal system.

We investigated the potential function of the system formed by connections between the medial prefrontal cortex and the dorsomedial striatum in aspects of attentional function in the rat. It has been reported previously that disconnection of the same corticostriatal circuit produced marked deficits in performance of a serial, choice reaction-time task while sparing the acquisition of an appetitive Pavlovian approach behaviour in an autoshaping task (Christakou et al., 2001). Here, we hypothesized that unilateral disruption of the same circuit would lead to hemispatial inattention, contrasting with the global attention deficit following complete disconnection of the system. Combined unilateral lesions of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the medial caudate-putamen (mCPu) within the same hemisphere produced a severe and long-lasting contralesional neglect syndrome while sparing the acquisition of autoshaping. These results provide further evidence for the involvement of the medial prefrontal-dorsomedial striatal circuit in aspects of attentional function, as well as insight into the nature of neglect deficits following lesions at different levels within corticostriatal circuitry.

Performance and prediction: Bayesian modelling of fallible choice in chess

Evaluating agents in decision-making applications requires assessing their skill and predicting their behaviour. Both are well developed in Poker-like situations, but less so in more complex game and model domains. This paper addresses both tasks by using Bayesian inference in a benchmark space of reference agents. The concepts are explained and demonstrated using the game of chess but the model applies generically to any domain with quantifiable options and fallible choice. Demonstration applications address questions frequently asked by the chess community regarding the stability of the rating scale, the comparison of players of different eras and/or leagues, and controversial incidents possibly involving fraud. The last include alleged under-performance, fabrication of tournament results, and clandestine use of computer advice during competition. Beyond the model world of games, the aim is to improve fallible human performance in complex, high-value tasks.

The effects of different forms of advice on the control of a simulated complex system

Three experiments examine the effect of different forms of computer-generated advice on concurrent and subsequent performance of individuals controlling a simulated intensive-care task. Experiment 1 investigates the effect of optional and compulsory advice and shows that both result in an improvement in subjects' performance while receiving the advice, and also in an improvement in subsequent unaided performance. However, although the advice compliance displayed by the optional advice group shows a strong correlation with subsequent unaided performance, compulsory advice has no extra benefit over the optional use of advice. Experiment 2 examines the effect of providing users with on-line explanations of the advice, as well as providing less specific advice. The results show that both groups perform at the same level on the task as the advice groups from Experiment 1, although subjects receiving explanations scored significantly higher on a written post-task questionnaire. Experiment 3 investigates in more detail the relationship between advice compliance and performance. The results reveal a complex relationship between natural ability on the task and the following of advice, in that people who use the advice more tend to perform either better or worse than the more moderate users. The theoretical and practical implications of these experiments are discussed.