Sign the White House’s public access petition!

 

 

Aan u verzonden door Sander via Google Reader:

 

 

Sign the White House’s public access petition!

via Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring door Mike Taylor op 29-2-12

A quick note to remind everyone that although the RWA is dead, that only brings us back to the status quo.  At present, it's still the case that the great majority of US government-funded research goes behind paywalls.  Although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a public access policy that is resulting in a lot of papers being posted for general access at PubMed Central, the NIH is only one of a dozen U.S. Federal Agencies with research budgets exceeding $100 million.  The others are:

• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Commerce
• Department of Defense
• Department of Education
• Department of Energy
• Department of Health and Human Services
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of Transportation
• Environmental Protection Agency
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• National Science Foundation

Wouldn't it be great if all those agencies had similar policies?  If all the research funded by any of those agencies had to be openly accessible not only to all researchers but to the public — teachers, nurses, artists, translators.

That is exactly what the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) will do if it passes.  In the RWA backlash, we have a unique opportunity to rally support and ensure that this important bill passes, despite the handicap of having been proposed during an election year.

What can you do to help?  First, sign the petition at whitehouse.gov.  I've signed it: turns out you don't need to be a U.S. citizen for your voice to be heard.  It takes a minute to register on the site, then a second to sign.  Stop reading this post and do it now.

Second, if you are a U.S. Citizen, you can contact your representatives to express your support and solicit theirs.  For more on this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access's page.

And whoever you are, you can spread the word.  Blog.  Tweet.  If you're at a university, raise the subject with your colleagues.  If you're on job-search or tenure committees, undercut barrier-based publishing's historic advantage by rewarding candidates for the quality of their work rather than the journal it's published in.  (One simple way to do this, though far from perfect, is to look at citation counts rather than impact factors.)

As Michael Eisen has said, we won the Battle of the Research Works Act. Now let's win the War for Open Access.

 

 

Dingen die u vanaf hier kunt doen:

• Abonneren op Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring met Google Reader
• Aan de slag met Google Reader om eenvoudig al uw favoriete sites bij te houden

 

 

Workshop on Simplicity and Likelihood in Perceptual Organization

Understanding intrinsic simplicity and statistical likelihood in visual Gestalts

March 14-16, 2012, University of Leuven, Belgium

The Laboratory of Experimental Psychology is hosting a small-scale
workshop on simplicity and likelihood principles in perceptual
organization. The workshop aims at understanding how the brain
organizes the visual input into a coherent interpretation. Why are
certain organizations preferred over others? Is it because those
organizations are simpler, or because they are more likely?

The workshop combines tutorial style lectures by our invited speakers
(Jacob Feldman, Lars Muckli, Peter van der Helm, & Laurenz Wiskott),
with short empirically focused presentations by lab members (Hans Op
de Beeck, Wouter Braet, Maarten Demeyer, Lee de-Wit, Jonas Kubilius,
Bart Machilsen, Tom Putzeys, Michaël Sassi, Sander van de Cruys,
Nathalie van Humbeeck, Cees van Leeuwen, & Johan Wagemans). There will
be ample time for open discussion.

Anyone who is interested in participating is welcome, but note that
attendance will be limited to 30 places. Registration cost is 50
Euros. More details and practical information about the event can be
found here:

http://www.gestaltrevision.be/en/events/upcoming/27-events/234

AVA/BMVA spring (AGM) meeting 2012

Microsoft Research, Cambridge
May 22, 2012 – May 22, 2012

AVA/BMVA Meeting on Biological and Computer Vision

Microsoft Research, Cambridge

Abstract submission closes: 30th March 2012

Invited Keynote Speakers:

Aude Oliva (MIT)

The study of biological and machine vision share much common history
(eg Marr), and each discipline has benefited enormously from findings
and techniques from the other. The aim of this meeting, organised
jointly by the AVA (UK biological vision) and BMVA (UK computer
vision) is to reignite conversations between these two fields.

We particularly encourage submissions that will be of potential
cross-disciplinary interest to both human and computer vision.
However, regular human vision AVA submissions, as well as computer
vision techniques likely to be of interest to a general audience, are
welcome.

250 word short abstracts can be submitted via the conference website.
For the most part abstracts will be reviewed and published in the
journal Perception and should therefore describe original work.
Authors may choose to present less original cross-over work or to
withhold their abstract from publication in which case they should
choose the "no publication" option when submitting.

You can submit an abstract from the "call" page.

The registration fees depends on whether you are a member of the AVA,
the BMVA or neither. See the registration link. Note that AVA and BMVA
have different funding models, hence the different prices.

http://www.theava.net/conf/index.php?conference=Meeting&schedConf=avabmva

How Does the Brain Solve Visual Object Recognition?

DiCarlo and friends explain their way of understanding visual processing, from bottom to top. If you haven't read their TiCS 2007 paper, definitely check this one out!

 

 

Naudojant „Google Reader" atsiųsta jums nuo Jonas:

 

 

How Does the Brain Solve Visual Object Recognition?

per NEURON 12.2.8

James J. DiCarlo, Davide Zoccolan, Nicole C. Rust. Mounting evidence suggests that 'core object recognition,' the ability to rapidly recognize objects despite substantial appearance variation, is solved in the brain via a cascade of reflexive, lar....

 

 

Veiksmai, kuriuos dabar galite atlikti:

• Prenumeruoti NEURON naudojant „Google Reader"
• Pradėkite naudoti „Google Reader" , kad galėtumėte lengvai sekti savo mėgiamiausių svetainių naujienas.

 

 

Superior haptic-to-visual shape matching in autism spectrum disorders.

 

 

Sent to you by Krista via Google Reader:

 

 

Superior haptic-to-visual shape matching in autism spectrum disorders.

via pubmed: haptic processing or... by Nakano T, Kato N, Kitazawa S on 1/17/12

Superior haptic-to-visual shape matching in autism spectrum disorders.

Neuropsychologia. 2012 Jan 9;

Authors: Nakano T, Kato N, Kitazawa S

Abstract
A weak central coherence theory in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) proposes that a cognitive bias toward local processing in ASD derives from a weakness in integrating local elements into a coherent whole. Using this theory, we hypothesized that shape perception through active touch, which requires sequential integration of sensorimotor traces of exploratory finger movements into a shape representation, would be impaired in ASD. Contrary to our expectation, adults with ASD showed superior performance in a haptic-to-visual delayed shape-matching task compared to adults without ASD. Accuracy in discriminating haptic lengths or haptic orientations, which lies within the somatosensory modality, did not differ between adults with ASD and adults without ASD. Moreover, this superior ability in inter-modal haptic-to-visual shape matching was not explained by the score in a unimodal visuospatial rotation task. These results suggest that individuals with ASD are not impaired in integrating sensorimotor traces into a global visual shape and that their multimodal shape representations and haptic-to-visual information transfer are more accurate than those of individuals without ASD.

PMID: 22245010 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to pubmed: haptic processing or... using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

 

 

The effect of fear in the periphery in binocular rivalry

 

Feed: Perception
Posted on: vrijdag 3 februari 2012 10:05
Author: Pion
Subject: The effect of fear in the periphery in binocular rivalry

 

The perceived dominance of percepts within a rival pair of images can be influenced by emotional content, with emotional images dominating over neutral images. We investigated this effect in the periphery. Rival gratings and (fearful or neutral) face/house pairs were viewed centrally and with the near edge positioned 1° and 4° from the fixation. Both fearful and neutral faces were perceived as dominant for significantly longer than houses, with fearful faces dominating for significantly longer than neutral faces at all three eccentricities. There was no difference between dominances at 1° and 4° eccentricity, and there was no difference in the dominance of the gratings at any eccentricity. Our findings show that face stimuli, and in particular fearful faces, continue to dominate perception in binocular rivalry even when viewed in the periphery.

View article...

Suggested by Maarten

GLOMOsys: The How and Why of Global and Local Processing

 

 

Aan u verzonden door Sander via Google Reader:

 

 

GLOMOsys: The How and Why of Global and Local Processing

via Current Directions in Psychological Science current issue door Forster, J. op 31-1-12

GLOMO^sys (the global vs. local processing model, a systems account) includes predictions about cognitive mechanisms (the how) and functionalities (the why) of two processing systems: one that processes information holistically and one that processes the parts. GLOMO^sys suggests that global versus local perceptual processing carries over to other perceptual and conceptual tasks; it summarizes antecedents of global/local processing; and it proposes that global processing is functional for understanding the general meaning of novel events, whereas local processing supports encoding of details in familiar situations and when novel events are threatening.

 

 

Dingen die u vanaf hier kunt doen:

• Abonneren op Current Directions in Psychological Science current issue met Google Reader
• Aan de slag met Google Reader om eenvoudig al uw favoriete sites bij te houden

 

 

PsychFileDrawer

Now Open for Beta Testing

Upload and view results of replication attempts in Experimental Psychology.

The website is designed to make it quick and convenient to upload reports but also to require enough detail to make the report credible and responsible.The site also provides a discussion forum for each posting, allowing users to discuss the report (potentially allowing collective brainstorming about possible moderator variables, defects in the original study or in the non-replication attempt, etc.)

Also provides private article-specific networking tool for people who have failed to replicate an article and wonder if others may have had the same experience.

Benefits for the investigator:

• Takes about 15 minutes to upload a report
• Forum for discussion of your result.
• Connect with others interested in the same effect.

Benefits for the field:

• Key resource for those who would perform formal meta-analyses.
• Useful source of ideas about potential boundary conditions and moderator variables that may determine when an effect can be observed.
• Broad awareness of cases in which well-known results may be of doubtful validity.
• Article-specific discussion forums connect people around the world who are interested in discussing results of questionable robustness.
• Those providing reports can upload raw data which then become freely available for those who would like to do further analyses.

http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/