This book opens readers' eyes to something they see all the time but take for granted: street signs. It is a portrait of the signs on modern English streets: what they look like, who and what they ...are for, how they link to English history and how they form part of life in multilingual England today.
We are pleased to present a Special Issue of Languages on the topic of Sign Language Emergence. Sign languages are the only extant languages that can be caught in the act of being born and developing ...with no model, and they, therefore, offer the only empirical evidence for language emergence in human societies. We have brought together a collection of articles on emerging sign languages that contribute a great deal to our current understanding of this process.This Special Issue covers eleven different emerging sign languages around the world. The articles deal with several aspects of language emergence, including, most notably: (1) the relationship between the emerging language and the culture of the larger society; (2) the role of iconicity in the emergence of sign language; (3) the relationship between the shared context in a small signing community and the degree of variation in the vocabulary; and (4) the vulnerability of budding sign languages. Spoken creole languages are also young, but are different from emerging sign languages, in that the speakers of pidgins from which creoles are assumed to have descended already had native languages. One article compares the features of creoles and of emerging sign languages.We are especially pleased with the diversity and breadth of interests of the contributors to the volume, who are based on four continents. The languages that they cover are equally diverse in their geographical provenance.
Drivers' incorrect perception and interpretation of the road space are among reasons for human errors. Proper road markings are elements improving perception of road space. Their effectiveness relies ...on traffic participants receiving the provided information correctly. The range of signs used is constantly expanding and unusual situations in traffic require use of non-standard signs or an unusual combination of existing standard signs. The aim of this study was to explore the level of comprehensibility of four different types of non-standard signs. The relationship between the level of comprehensibility of these signs and personality traits of the drivers was also studied. A total of 369 drivers were tested using a questionnaire to analyze the traffic signs comprehensibility and Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). The obtained results indicate that symbolic signs, unlike symbolic and text ones, are much better comprehended by drivers. Men comprehend the significance of non-standard symbolic regulatory signs better than women. Higher level of comprehensibility of symbolic and text regulatory signs is shown by older, better educated drivers and professional drivers. The study found there is a link between personality traits of the driver and the comprehensibility of symbolic regulatory signs.
•Road sign comprehension is a persisting international problem.•This study compared comprehension of alternative sign designs in five countries.•Ergonomics-based alternatives were generally superior ...to conventional signs.•Comprehension correlated well with ratings of the same signs by ergonomics experts.•Applying ergonomics criteria can improve comprehension of new and existing signs.
Traffic sign design can have a substantial impact on road safety and traffic flow. The current study had three objectives: 1) Cross-validate the importance of ergonomic sign design; 2) Evaluate the ability of ergonomics experts to predict sign comprehension by the average driver; 3) Offer improved sign designs for poorly designed road signs. In a previous study (Ben Bassat et al., 2019), human factors and ergonomics experts evaluated several alternative designs for 31 different road signs, based on three ergonomics criteria – familiarity, standardization, and message/symbol compatibility. Some of these signs were tested in the current study and the correlation between the results of the two studies was analyzed.
In this study, 805 licensed drivers from five countries were tested on their comprehension of 24 conventional signs and 32 alternative signs. Signs were individually presented on a screen and as soon as the participant decided on the meaning, the sign disappeared, and an experimenter wrote the stated meaning. The verbal responses were coded as correct (perfectly or partially), wrong, or opposite of the true meaning. Sign identification response time was also recorded.
In all countries across all signs, more drivers comprehended the alternative ergonomically superior signs, and the identification response times were shorter for these sign designs. Furthermore, the correlation between ergonomics experts' ratings as found in previous study and the percent of comprehension for each sign design was statistically significant and positive with r = 0.61.
Road signs should be designed according to ergonomics-based criteria. Human factors experts' opinions can be a useful tool in improving the design of poorly comprehended signs (or icons) and in designing new signs (or icons).
Ways of Seeing Jacob, Pierre; Jeannerod, Marc
10/2003
eBook
This book is about human vision. It results from the collaboration between a world famous cognitive neuroscientist and an eminent philosopher. In the past forty years, cognitive neuroscience has made ...many startling discoveries about the human brain and about the human visual system in particular. This book brings many recent empirical findings, from electrophysiological recordings in animals, the neuropsychological examination of human patients, psychophysics, and developmental cognitive psychology, to bear on questions traditionally addressed by philosophers. What is the meaning of the English verb ‘to see’? How does visual perception yield knowledge of the world? How does visual perception relate to thought? What is the role of conscious visual experience in visually guided actions? How does seeing actions relate to seeing objects? In the process the book provides a new assessment of the ‘two visual systems’ hypothesis, according to which the human visual system comprises two anatomical pathways with separable visual functions.
In recent decades, China has transitioned from an inherently agricultural country to an emerging economic titan with a vast transportation network that befits its newly globalized status. Through ...this fast-paced economic development, the country soon became a nation of drivers. By 2019, the country had 260 million automobiles and 397 million drivers, most of whom were only years from being a novice. In 2019 alone, another 26 million new drivers joined the Chinese roadways. At the same time, China encountered many traffic-related problems: overcrowded urban areas, a deteriorating environment, the chaos of traffic signs, the building boom due to urbanization, and the pressure of traffic management, among others.Historically, China was never a country adept at traffic and transportation. Despite this, it has been trying to catch up with the world's pace and to welcome its guests from across the globe. This book zeroes in on the authentic discourses in Chinese traffic by demonstrating the interaction between traffic signs and their users (specifically the new drivers who are unfamiliar with traffic contexts, driving, or the Chinese language). Guangzhou (Canton), a prosperous first-tier city with over 20 million residents, was chosen as the sampling area for this study. The book scrutinizes the city's traffic signage, its drivers' experiences, and its traffic authorities' comments in order to provide a true picture of China, shifting from a country with big traffic to one with modern traffic.
Traffic signs play an important role for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) as well as for autonomous driving vehicles. Most of the works done focus on recognizing symbol based signs leaving ...apart important information provided by other type of signs like complementary panels or text based signs. In this paper, we include detection and classification of both symbol and text based signs focusing on the most common ones found in European urban environments. The system consists of three stages, traffic sign detection, refinement and classification. The detection and refinement is performed using Mask R-CNN while the classification is achieved with a proposed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. We introduced the extended version of the German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark (GTSDB), labeled in a pixel manner (masks) with 164 classes grouped into 8 categories. It is used for the detection and classification steps. Experimental results on German environments show that our proposed system is capable of detecting all categories of traffic signs while at the same time recognizing them with high accuracy achieving comparable performance with the state of the art.
Vital signs, including heart rate and body temperature, are useful in detecting or monitoring medical conditions, but are typically measured in the clinic and require follow-up laboratory testing for ...more definitive diagnoses. Here we examined whether vital signs as measured by consumer wearable devices (that is, continuously monitored heart rate, body temperature, electrodermal activity and movement) can predict clinical laboratory test results using machine learning models, including random forest and Lasso models. Our results demonstrate that vital sign data collected from wearables give a more consistent and precise depiction of resting heart rate than do measurements taken in the clinic. Vital sign data collected from wearables can also predict several clinical laboratory measurements with lower prediction error than predictions made using clinically obtained vital sign measurements. The length of time over which vital signs are monitored and the proximity of the monitoring period to the date of prediction play a critical role in the performance of the machine learning models. These results demonstrate the value of commercial wearable devices for continuous and longitudinal assessment of physiological measurements that today can be measured only with clinical laboratory tests.
Although traffic sign detection has been studied for years and great progress has been made with the rise of deep learning technique, there are still many problems remaining to be addressed. For ...complicated real-world traffic scenes, there are two main challenges. First, traffic signs are usually small-sized objects, which makes them more difficult to detect than large ones; second, it is hard to distinguish false targets which resemble real traffic signs in complex street scenes without context information. To handle these problems, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning method for traffic sign detection in complex environments. Our contributions are as follows: 1) we propose a multi-resolution feature fusion network architecture which exploits densely connected deconvolution layers with skip connections, and can learn more effective features for a small-size object and 2) we frame the traffic sign detection as a spatial sequence classification and regression task, and propose a vertical spatial sequence attention module to gain more context information for better detection performance. To comprehensively evaluate the proposed method, we experiment on several traffic sign datasets as well as the general object detection dataset, and the results have shown the effectiveness of our proposed method.
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