Conference: Predicting Perceptions

"Welcome to the website for Predicting Perceptions: the 3rd
International Conference on Appearance. It follows on from the highly
successful cross-disciplinary conferences in Ghent and Paris that
attracted 120 and 150 participants from a wide variety of backgrounds.

This year we aim to broaden the scope of the conference:

a) to include measurement and prediction of perceptions derived from
all sensing modalities (not just sight)

b) to widen the range of 'perceptions' considered from the
established properties of colour, gloss, texture, and translucency to
include more emotive considerations such as engagement, perceived
worth and quality; and

c) to emphasise that, due to the increasing role played by the
Digital Economy, digital media is an important stimuli in its own
right.

We very much hope you will enjoy the conference in Easter 2012.

Best wishes
Mike Chantler, Julie Harris and Mike Pointer
"

http://www.perceptions.macs.hw.ac.uk/?page_id=9

Science Data Sharing Site figshare Relaunches, Adds Features

Might be a nice place to share stuff.

 

 

Naudojant „Google Reader" atsiųsta jums nuo Jonas:

 

 

Science Data Sharing Site figshare Relaunches, Adds Features

per TechCrunch autorius Scott Merrill 12.1.17

figshare, originally launched in January 2011, is re-launching today with some new features. figshare aims to be a repository for scientific figures, raw datasets, videos and more. The retooled service offers AWS storage, version control, and unlimited public storage capacity. All uploaded data is made available with easy-to-use citation links (and a QR code) and is licensed under CreativeCommons terms to encourage re-use. In addition to faster uploads and an easier-to-navigate interface, figshare is also working on desktop clients.

According to their FAQ, "We are a data sharing platform where you can add figures that might otherwise go unpublished – complete with the raw data tables." All data is organized by categorgy and tags and is readily searchable, making it easy for researchers to find the data they need. Visitors can comment on the works, too.

One of the goals of figshare is to get researchers to share even negative results from their works, in order to reduce duplication of effort, as well as to encourage citations. Publicly available data leads to more citations. According to figshare, unless "we as scientists publish all of our data, we will never achieve access to the sum of all scientific knowledge." By sharing unpublished negative results, researchers can accrue citations for their efforts from other researchers who build upon the work.

You can also follow figshare on Twitter, if that's your thing.

 

 

Veiksmai, kuriuos dabar galite atlikti:

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

 

 

Call for participation: Scottish Vision Group Conference

http://svg.psy.gla.ac.uk/

Conference Date: March 23-25, 2012

Deadline for abstracts/registration: Feb 20th, 2012

The 11th meeting of the Scottish Vision group will be held in
Douneside House, close to the village Tarland in the picturesque
Deeside area of the Scottish Highlands. For more information on the
conference venue and the surrounding area, please visit
http://www.dounesidehouse.co.uk/

Scottish Vision Group holds a three-day (Fri afternoon - Sun
lunchtime) conference that attracts vision scientists from Scotland,
the UK and beyond. Our aim is to provide an intimate setting for a
small group to share scientific ideas and results. The invited speaker
for this year's conference will be Dr Hannah Smithson (University of
Oxford) and her talk is entitled "Colour now and then: Time-dependent
transformations of colour appearance". Friday will be devoted to the
invited talk, preceded by a round table on colour vision, while the
following days will contain a series of talk sessions on various
research topics in vision science. The abstracts from the meeting will
be published in iPerception.

The cost of the conference will depend on whether you are staying in a
single room or sharing. Based on bed, breakfast, lunch and dinner,
for 2 days, we expect the cost to be 191.25 pounds per person (single
room) and 175.78 pounds per person (twin room). This year's meeting is
kindly supported by SR Research and Principal's fund of the University
of Aberdeen.

If you would like to participate, please email your abstract to Amelia
Hunt and Jasna Martinovic, this year's conference organisers, at
scottish.vision.group.2012@gmail.comThis e-mail address is being
protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by
20.2.2012.

Please include the following details in your email:
(1) list of authors
(2) presentation title (or indicate 'non' if you do not want to present)
(3) student or not (we will try to offer a small student discount)
(4) shared or single room
(5) if you're asking for a shared room, please say who you would like
to share with

We look forward to seeing you in Scotland!

Conference announcement: Optimizing performance in dynamic environments

http://www3.fbw.vu.nl/~EBrenner/codde.html

Organizers: Eli Brenner and Rob van Beers

Where: Faculty of Human Movement Sciences of the VU University Amsterdam.

When: From noon on Monday the 2nd of July until the early afternoon on
Thursday the 5th of July 2012.

What: The meeting will be about optimizing performance in dynamic
environments. It will examine how various kinds of information
acquired at various moments are combined for making appropriate
decisions. The decisions in question are decisions that underlie
behaviour such as goal-directed eye and arm movements and movements of
the whole body. The meeting will consider both sensory and motor
issues in human performance, and will include behavioural and brain
imaging studies as well as computational modelling.

Speakers will include:

Gustavo Deco
Jörn Diedrichsen
Benoni Edin
Marc Ernst
Karl Gegenfurtner
Vassilia Hatzitaki
Michael Herzog
Pascal Mamassian
Guillaume Masson
Anna Montagnini
Michele Rucci
Jeroen Smeets
Andy Smith
Andrew Welchman

There will also be talks and posters by other participants, including
post-docs and PhD students.

This will be the final meeting of an EU training project (CODDE), but
there will also be place for about 50 participants from outside the
project.

If you are interested in taking part please let us know. There is no
registration fee, but the space is limited (deadline 1 April or when
the maximal number of people who will fit in the lecture hall is
exceeded).

Students Find Multiple-Choice Tests Fun and Rewarding with Gamification

An example how making tests fun and rewarding (with virtual badges, not anything else) can lead to undergrad students voluntarily opting-in (!) for boring multiple-choice tests.

 

 

Naudojant „Google Reader" atsiųsta jums nuo Jonas:

 

 

Students Find Multiple-Choice Tests Fun and Rewarding with Gamification

per NeoAcademic autorius Richard N. Landers 12.1.12

In a recent study by Landers and Callan^[1], undergraduates completed optional multiple-choice tests online and reported them, on average, as "fun", "enjoyable", and "rewarding". They did this in the context of an online social network platform previously covered on this blog.  Students were awarded badges (social rewards) in exchange for completing optional practice tests theorized to improve their learning.

This is, to my knowledge, the first published empirical study of gamification in educational settings.

Landers and Callan posit that gamification can be best expressed as an extension of goal setting theory.  By making explicit goals and recognizing their achievement, we can motivate people to action.  Gamification, in this sense, is the recognition of goals electronically and automatically, without the need for a human mediator (most often an instructor in an educational context or a supervisor in an organizational context).  This makes the reward for goal achievement more immediate than is possible with traditional methods and thus more motivating.  Goal setting is well established as a motivational intervention in a wide variety of contexts, so we would expect gamification to be similarly versatile – and perhaps even more powerful.

What's especially interesting about this study (if I do say so myself) is that the authors managed to make the completion of optional multiple choice tests a valid student goal.  Most of the time, grades on tests are themselves a performance goal for students.  But if you ask them to complete practice tests on their own time, you are often met with varying levels of resistance – or simple apathy.  With gamification, about 30% of students enrolled in the social network platform opted to take these tests for no reward other than a virtual badge.  I expect you'd see similar success with an organizational training intervention (upcoming research!).

So why should we get students to complete optional multiple choice tests?  Because other research suggests that the act of testing promotes long term retention of knowledge better than studying does.  Not only do they get a badge, but they learn material for their courses more effectively than they could do on their own!  I consider that a win-win.

Footnotes:

1. Landers, R. N., & Callan, R. C. (2011). Casual social games as serious games: The psychology of gamification in undergraduate education and employee training. In M. Ma, A. Oikonomou, & L. C. Jain (Eds.), Serious Games and Edutainment Applications (pp. 399-423).  Surrey, UK: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4471-2161-9_20

Related articles from NeoAcademic:

• Please Support SOCL in the Global Education Challenge
• Students Self-Handicap to Protect Themselves
• Graduate Students Who Teach Are More Skilled at Research
• Call for Participants in NSF Proposal to Integrate Social Media in Undergraduate Education
• Learn About Our University Library Through Minecraft

 

 

Veiksmai, kuriuos dabar galite atlikti:

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

 

 

Top-down modulation: bridging selective attention and working memory

 

Feed: TRENDS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES
Posted on: donderdag 29 december 2011 1:00
Author: TRENDS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES
Subject: Top-down modulation: bridging selective attention and working memory

 

Adam Gazzaley, Anna C. Nobre. Selective attention, the ability to focus our cognitive resources on information relevant to our goals, influences working memory (WM) performance. Indeed, attention and working memory are increas....

View article...

Sugegsted by Maarten

Feature-based attention spreads preferentially in an object-specific manner

Publication year: 2011 Source: Vision Research, Available online 29 December 2011 Yariv Festman, Jochen Braun We studied the spreading of feature-based attention from attended to ignored motion fields (linear, circular, and combinations). When observers attended one of two superimposed motion fields on one side of the visual midline, sub-threshold priming by an ignored motion field was altered significantly on the opposite side of the midline. This attentional spreading was observed only when attended and ignored motion fields conformed to a complex global flow, not when they shared the same linear motion. These findings corroborate an earlier study (Festman, Braun, 2010, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics), which obtained similar results with a complementary methodology. We conclude that feature-based attention is more complex than hitherto appreciated in that it spreads preferentially in an object-specific manner. Highlights ► We studied the spreading of feature-based attention throughout the visual fields. ► Observers attended one of two superimposed motion fields displayed on one side. ► While, a subthreshold priming was presented concurrently on the other, ignored, side. ► Attentional spreading occurred when the two fields conformed to a complex global flow. ► This suggests that object factors shape the distribution of feature-based attention.

View article...

Suggested by Maarten