A growing body of evidence suggests that there is a close link between power and self. The sense of power could significantly affect the perceptions and judgments of self/others. For example, when in ...a powerful state, the individuals would overestimate their height and underestimate the other's height. It means that power affects the judgment and perception of self/others' physical height. The present study further examines whether the sense of power affects the spatial representation of self/other in three experiments using different paradigms. The results showed that participants in a powerful state responded faster to the self-related words at the top of the screen than at the bottom (Exp1), with an upward direction than with a downward direction (Exp2), and were more likely to choose an upward response after naming the self-related words than after naming the other-related words (Exp3), while these patterns were consistently reversed in a powerless state. This finding supports that the self/other is associated with the upper/lower space in the powerful state, and the self/other is associated with the lower/upper space in the powerless state. The present study enriches the literature on the psychological and behavioral effects of power, deepens the understanding of the mental representation of the self-concept from the perspective of power, and essentially provides new evidence for the flexibility of self-concept in humans.
•The sense of power could affect the spatial representation of self/other.•In the powerful state, the self is associated with the upper space, the other is associated with the lower space.•In the powerless state, the self is associated with the lower space, the other is associated with the upper space.
•Vision and touch provide respectively allocentric and egocentric spatial coordinates.•Blindness is presumed to affect the development of allocentric spatial representation.•Typical children are more ...“egocentric” in the haptic rather than in the visual domain.•Blind children are more “allocentric” in the haptic domain compared to sighted peers.
Vision and touch play a critical role in spatial development, facilitating the acquisition of allocentric and egocentric frames of reference, respectively. Previous works have shown that children’s ability to adopt an allocentric frame of reference might be impaired by the absence of visual experience during growth. In the current work, we investigated whether visual deprivation also impairs the ability to shift from egocentric to allocentric frames of reference in a switching-perspective task performed in the visual and haptic domains. Children with and without visual impairments from 6 to 13 years of age were asked to visually (only sighted children) or haptically (blindfolded sighted children and blind children) explore and reproduce a spatial configuration of coins by assuming either an egocentric perspective or an allocentric perspective. Results indicated that temporary visual deprivation impaired the ability of blindfolded sighted children to switch from egocentric to allocentric perspective more in the haptic domain than in the visual domain. Moreover, results on visually impaired children indicated that blindness did not impair allocentric spatial coding in the haptic domain but rather affected the ability to rely on haptic egocentric cues in the switching-perspective task. Finally, our findings suggested that the total absence of vision might impair the development of an egocentric perspective in case of body midline-crossing targets.
Behavioral and neurophysiological experiments have demonstrated that distinct and common cognitive processes and associated neural substrates maintain allocentric and egocentric spatial ...representations. This review aimed to provide evidence from previous behavioral and neurophysiological studies on collating cognitive processes and associated neural substrates and linking them to the state of visuospatial representations in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Even though MCI patients showed impaired visuospatial attentional processing and working memory, previous neuropsychological experiments in MCI largely emphasized memory impairment and lacked substantiating evidence of whether memory impairment could be associated with how patients with MCI encode objects in space. The present review suggests that impaired memory capacity is linked to impaired allocentric representation in MCI patients. This review indicates that further research is needed to examine how the decline in visuospatial attentional resources during allocentric coding of space could be linked to working memory impairment.
There are many putatively distinct phenomena related to perception in the oblique regions of space. For instance, the classic oblique effect describes a deficit in visual acuity for oriented lines in ...the obliques, and classic “prototype effects” reflect a bias to misplace objects towards the oblique regions of space. Yet these effects are explained in very different terms: The oblique effect itself is often understood as arising from orientation-selective neurons, whereas prototype effects are described as arising from categorical biases. Here, we explore the possibility that these effects (and others) may stem from a single underlying spatial distortion. We show that there is a general distortion of (angular) space in the oblique regions that influences not only orientation judgments, but also location, extent, and size. We argue that these findings reflect oblique warping, a general distortion of spatial representations in the oblique regions which may be the root cause of many oblique effects.
Traffic forecasting has attracted considerable attention due to its importance in proactive urban traffic control and management. Scholars and engineers have exerted considerable efforts in improving ...the performance of traffic forecasting algorithms in terms of accuracy, reliability, and efficiency. Spatial feature representation of traffic flow is a core component that greatly influences traffic forecasting performance. In previous studies, several spatial attributes of traffic flow are ignored due to the following issues: a) traffic flow propagation does not comply with the road network, b) the spatial pattern of traffic flow varies over time, and c) single adjacent matrix cannot handle the complex and hierarchical urban traffic flow. To address the abovementioned issues, this study proposes a novel traffic forecasting algorithm called traffic transformer, which achieves great success in natural language processing. The multihead attention mechanism and stacking layers enable the transformer to learn dynamic and hierarchical features in sequential data. Two components, namely, global encoder and global-local decoder, are proposed to extract and fuse the spatial patterns globally and locally. Experimental results indicate that the proposed traffic transformer outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The learned dynamic and hierarchical features of traffic flow can help achieve a better understanding of spatial dependency of traffic flow for effective and efficient traffic control and management strategies.
People spontaneously produce gestures during speaking and thinking. The authors focus here on gestures that depict or indicate information related to the contents of concurrent speech or thought ...(i.e., representational gestures). Previous research indicates that such gestures have not only communicative functions, but also self-oriented cognitive functions. In this article, the authors propose a new theoretical framework, the gesture-for-conceptualization hypothesis, which explains the self-oriented functions of representational gestures. According to this framework, representational gestures affect cognitive processes in 4 main ways: gestures activate, manipulate, package, and explore spatio-motoric information for speaking and thinking. These four functions are shaped by gesture's ability to schematize information, that is, to focus on a small subset of available information that is potentially relevant to the task at hand. The framework is based on the assumption that gestures are generated from the same system that generates practical actions, such as object manipulation; however, gestures are distinct from practical actions in that they represent information. The framework provides a novel, parsimonious, and comprehensive account of the self-oriented functions of gestures. The authors discuss how the framework accounts for gestures that depict abstract or metaphoric content, and they consider implications for the relations between self-oriented and communicative functions of gestures.
In the last few years, the strategies of spatial representation adopted by blind and sighted subjects have been extensively studied. In particular, there is evidence that early deprivation of vision ...encourages the adoption of egocentric spatial representations. In order to shed light on this matter, we analysed the motion verbs used by blind and sighted Italian speakers while describing small-scale and large-scale environments. Th e two groups adopted diff erent spatial representations for small-scale environments, coherently with the basic assumptions of the Embodied Cognition Hypothesis. However, such a difference was not found for larger-scale environments, thus supporting a more symbolist approach to cognition.
The recent advances in developing assistive devices have attracted researchers to use visual imagery (VI) mental tasks as a control paradigm to design brain–computer interfaces that can produce a ...large number of control signals. Consequently, this can facilitate the design of control mechanisms that allow locked-in individuals to interact with the surrounding world. This paper presents a two-phase approach for decoding visually imagined digits and letters using electroencephalography (EEG) signals. The first phase employs the Choi–Williams time–frequency distribution (CWD) to construct a joint time, frequency, and spatial (TFS) representation of the EEG signals. The constructed joint TFS representation characterizes the variations in the energy encapsulated within the EEG signals over the TFS domains. The second phase presents a novel deep learning (DL) framework to automatically extract features from the constructed joint TFS representation of the EEG signals and decode the imagined digits and letters. The performance of our approach is assessed using an EEG dataset that was acquired for 16 healthy participants while imagining decimal digits and uppercase English letters. Our approach achieved an average ± standard deviation accuracy of 95.47±2.3%, which is significantly outperforming the accuracies obtained when the CWD is replaced with two alternative time–frequency analysis techniques, the accuracies obtained using four pre-trained DL models, and the accuracies obtained using CWD-based handcrafted features that are classified using four conventional classifiers. Moreover, the results of our proposed approach outperform those reported by several previous studies with regard to the accuracy and number of classes.
•An EEG-based two-phase approach is proposed for decoding visually imagined objects.•The approach focuses on decoding visually imagined digits and letters.•The first phase builds a new time–frequency–spatial representation of EEG signals.•The second phase presents a new deep learning framework to decode imagined objects.•The results show that the approach enables accurate decoding of imagined objects.
Arcadia (1992), Jim Crace’s most distinctively urban novel, bears the idiosyncratic features of its author’s writing: it is a deceptively simple story of vague geographical and historical setting ...conceived as a parable of the current world concerns, it portrays a community in a transitional moment of its existence, and it places special emphasis on spatial representations of its fictitious environment which assume metaphorical properties that convey the story’s rich ideas. Moreover, as a writer focusing on moral issues with a leftist political outlook, Crace has been consistent in his criticism of the neoliberal market economy and its negative impacts on communal values, a view which is also voiced in the novel. This paper makes use of the theoretical premises of Transmodernism as well as analytical tools of phenomenologically focused geocriticism to demonstrate that Arcadia can be subsumed within so-called transmodern fiction. This critique of globalized capitalism is carried out through sites Eric Prieto terms as the entre-deux, the in-between. Accordingly, the paper attempts to demonstrate how the novel’s liminal and heterogeneous places display non-linear and complexly interrelated temporalities which are indicative of their role within the city’s progress.
The SandBox was developed by the UC DAVIS. This box aims to be an interactive experimentation space. You can model the sand by hand using augmented reality. The 3D sand is augmented in real time with ...a color elevation map (2D) and topographic contour lines. This operation is live and creates great interaction. The two-dimensional representation (2D map) alone may not allow a good 3D perception of space. This article explains how to use the SandBox to overcome the difficulties encountered when reading the map and details how to use the potential of this device to improve spatial representation learning.
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