Mapping cognitive demands in complex problem-solving worlds

Abstract. Ornamentation in the Islamic architecture in addition to elegance, suggest other concepts such as pantheism and tiling considers an elegant method of ornamentation throughout Muslim’s world.In Safavid era seven-colored tiles were widely used in Isfahan palaces. The present study aims to analyze the ornamentation of mosques inSafavid era from an aesthetic point of view. Therefore, Shaikhlotfollah, Char Bagh and Shah Mosque of Isfahan are samples studied in a descriptive-analytical method and library document data collection, data analysis is based on the Gestalt principles. Finally, aesthetic of mosque’s ornamentation is analyzed based on the principle of perception and formulate some criteria to identify it.

Energy saving performance assessment and lessons learned from the operation of an active phase change materials system in a multi-storey building in Melbourne

Effective communication of scientific content can be challenging due to cognitive overload. This is experienced especially during conferences and poster presentations, where the presence of competing stimuli limits message retention. Scientific visuals offer a means to overcome this limitation by emphasizing the essential components of a narrative in a form that is rapidly and intuitively processed. Rather than serving primarily as demonstrations of complexity or markers of personal accomplishment, scientific visuals should function as tools for idea exchange, enabling broader comprehension and facilitating dialogue. The Gestalt principles are an important guide for the visual creation process. These perceptual principles exploit pre-attentive processing mechanisms that allow viewers to extract essential structure and meaning immediately with minimal conscious effort. Effective development of scientific visuals can be approached in three stages: an initial sketch phase, focused on defining the core content and refining the central message, followed by a design phase and refinement phase, in which form, layout and color are used according to perceptual principles. This structured process ensures that complex narratives can be communicated with clarity and precision. By prioritizing cognitive accessibility over ornamental design, visuals become a central and intrinsic component of scientific discourse, supporting insight generation, fostering dialogue, and contributing to collaborative learning and consecutive knowledge building.

Based on recent earthquakes experiences in Taiwan, losses do not necessarily result from damages of building structures but non-structural components. For instance, the leakage of the fire protection sprinkler systems in hospitals during small earthquakes could results in shortage of medical function and fire protection, and malfunction and repairs of medical equipment. The break of sprinkler systems caused by strong earthquakes could even harm the life safety. Taking a medium-scale hospital as an example, this research aims to conduct a simplified seismic evaluation method to improve seismic performance of the fire protection sprinkler system in critical buildings. The content of this research is summarized below: 1. Numerical analysis of the sample sprinkler piping system: a detailed numerical model of the fire protection sprinkler system in the sample hospital was established with SAP2000 v.20 software. Proper parameters to simulate the threaded joint of piping and the gap between adjacent partition walls or ceiling systems were proposed and verified by the results of component tests and shaking table tests. Ambient vibration tests in the sample hospital were conducted with velocimeters to clarify the structural characteristics of the building structure and the sprinkler piping system. 2. Fragility analysis of sprinkler piping systems: seismic fragility curves the fire protection sprinkler system in the sample hospital were conducted according to a mount of detailed analysis results and verified by the real damage state under Jiaxian earthquake. The effects of engineering demand parameters and categories of ground motion on fragility results are discussed for three types of failure modes. 3. Simplified seismic evaluation method for sprinkler piping systems: according to the results of shaking table tests and detailed analysis, a reliable simplified evaluation method was established to predict seismic behavior of typical sprinkler piping systems in hospitals by the information obtained from in-situ survey. The conservative level and accuracy of simplified evaluation results were verified by comparing the results of fragility analysis of numerical model and simplified evaluation.

Optimal Speech feature extraction which tries to acquire a parametric illustration of an input speech signal plays a vital role in the overall performance of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system. A good feature extraction technique along with feature selection algorithm should capture the important features of the signal and also should reject some irrelevant features. Feature selection is a critical task which can influence the performance of pattern classification and recognition system. In this paper, we have presented a hybrid evolutionary algorithm called Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for optimal feature extraction and selection strategy. The proposed method consists of three stages, preprocessing, feature extraction and selection, and recognition. Initially, the preprocessing is done by wiener filter to reduce the noise level. Next, we extract eight type of statistical and acoustic features in the feature stage. The optimal set of extracted features is selected by using hybrid ABC-PSO algorithm. Finally, these optimized features are used for training the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and based on these optimized features of the given input speech signal the corresponding text is displayed as the output. The proposed ASR is implemented on the MATLAB working platform and the experimental results show that overall performance of the system is high and the proposed hybrid algorithm is best suited for speech recognition.

Different data mining techniques are employed in stylometry domain for performing authorship attribution tasks. Sometimes to improve the decision system the discretization of input data can be applied. In many cases such approach allows to obtain better classification results. On the other hand, there were situations in which discretization decreased overall performance of the system. Therefore, the question arose what would be the result if only some selected attributes were discretized. The paper presents the results of the research performed for forward sequential selection of attributes to be discretized. The influence of such approach on the performance of the decision system, based on Naive Bayes classifier in authorship attribution domain, is presented. Some basic discretization methods and different approaches to discretization of the test datasets are taken into consideration.

In theories of auditory scene analysis and melodic implication/realization, melodic expectation results from an interaction between top-down processes (assumed to be learned and schema-based) and bottom-up processes (assumed innate, based on Gestalt principles). If principles of melodic expectation are partly acquired, it should be possible to manipulate them – to condition listeners' expectations. In this study, the resistance of three bottom-up expectation principles to learning was tested experimentally. In Experiment 1, expectations for stepwise motion (pitch proximity) were manipulated by conditioning listeners to large melodic leaps; preference for small intervals was reduced after a brief exposure. In Experiment 2, expectations for leaps to rise and steps to fall (step declination) were manipulated by exposing listeners to melodies comprising rising steps and falling leaps; this reduced preferences for descending seconds and thirds. Experiment 3 did not find and hence failed to alter the expectation for small intervals to be followed by an interval in the same direction (step inertia). The results support the theory that bottom-up principles of melodic perception are partly learned from exposure to pitch patterns in music. The long-term learning process could be reinforced by exposure to speech based on similar organization principles.

It is widely assumed that cognitive functions decline with age and that these decrements are associated with age-related changes in patterns of functional activity. However, these functional changes may be due to age-related increased responsiveness to task demands and not to other cognitive processes on which neural and behavioural responses rely, since many ageing studies use task paradigms that may not be orthogonal to the cognitive function being investigated. Here we test this hypothesis in adults aged 20–86 years by combining measures of language comprehension, functional connectivity and neural integrity to identify functional networks activated in two language experiments with varying task demands. In one, participants listened to spoken sentences without performing an overt task (the natural listening condition) while in the other they performed a task in response to the same sentences. Using task-based ICA of fMRI, we identified a left-lateralised frontotemporal network associated with syntactic analysis, which remained consistently activated regardless of task demands. In contrast, in the task condition only a separate set of components showed task-specific activity in Opercular, Frontoparietal, and bilateral PFC. Only the PFC showed age-related increases in activation which, furthermore, was strongly mediated by grey matter health. These results suggest that, contrary to prevailing views, age-related changes in cognitive activation may be due in part to differential responses to task-related processes.

The importance of perceptual organization (also called feature grouping) in biological vision systems is well-known. The use of perceptual organizational principles, typically based on principles first enumerated in the 1920s by the Gestalt psychologists, has also begun to appear in recent work in computer vision. However, very little of this work has involved the use of motion, or time varying imagery, despite the significance of temporal cues in the vision systems of humans and many other animals.

The residential sector represents a major source of increasing energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions. To meet these energy demands and reduce these harmful emissions, innovative solutions based on renewable energy sources must be developed. Here, a multigeneration solar energy-driven system that produces electric power, cooling, heating, and hot water to a residential building is introduced. Then, a thermodynamic model to analyze and evaluate this integrated system is developed by applying the four balance equations, namely mass, energy, entropy, and exergy. Next, a residential building in Ottawa, Ontario is selected as a base case for analyzing the performance of this integrated system. The results show that the integrated system has overall energy and exergy efficiencies of 39.2% and 19.9%, respectively. The highest source of exergy destruction rate is identified to be at the solar collector, so a careful design of this component is necessary. Next, parametric studies are conducted on this integrated system. The findings show that increasing the amount of solar energy received by the system increases its energy efficiency significantly, but not its exergy efficiency. Increasing the cooling load enhances the overall performance of the system and increases the hot-water production along with it due to the integration of different cycles in the multigeneration system.

Small object detection is a critical task in applications like autonomous driving and ship black smoke detection. While Deformable DETR has advanced small object detection, it faces limitations due to its reliance on CNNs for feature extraction, which restricts global context understanding and results in suboptimal feature representation. Additionally, it struggles with detecting small objects that occupy only a few pixels due to significant size disparities. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Context-Aware Enhanced Feature Refinement Deformable DETR, an improved Deformable DETR network. Our approach introduces Mask Attention in the backbone to improve feature extraction while effectively suppressing irrelevant background information. Furthermore, we propose a Context-Aware Enhanced Feature Refinement Encoder to address the issue of small objects with limited pixel representation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the baseline, achieving a 2.1% improvement in mAP.

Research on an evaluation system of the application effect of ground source heat pump systems for green buildings in China

Visualization techniques are becoming more prevalently used as decision support tools for parameter design and engineering optimization. Despite the apparent advantages of visualization techniques, we have found little evidence in the engineering literature that assesses the impact of fast, graphical design interfaces on the efficiency and effectiveness of engineering design decisions or the design optimization process. In this paper, we present experimental results from an I-beam design problem that was used to test the impact of having fast graphical feedback on design efficiency and effectiveness, extending our previous studies. The importance of rapid feedback is investigated by incorporating time delays in the software response to mimic computationally expensive design analyses. Design efficiency is measured by recording the completion time for solving the design problem, and design effectiveness is measured by calculating the error between a submitted design and the known optimum. The impact of graphical feedback is examined by comparing user performance on three different interfaces. The interfaces were constructed based on a richness scale that was motivated from principles of visual attention and object perception to explain the extent to which task demands are compatible with the graphical form of the interface. Response delay appears to have more of an affect on design effectiveness and efficiency, while interface richness appears to have more of an affect on the design search process. Experimental results indicate that response delays of 1.5 seconds significantly impact user performance and that users perform better as the richness of the design interface increases. We also found that the perceived workload of the users increased as delay increased and as the richness of the design interface decreased. Implications for graphical design interface development for engineering design and optimization are explored within the context of our findings.Copyright © 2004 by ASME

Influencing the difficulty of performance tasks is of great interest in science education as in several other subjects. In the context of the VAMPS project, difficulty-generating features with respect to the cognitive demand of text-based physics tasks were systematically varied at three levels. Based on preliminary work and two pilot studies presented here briefly, a model was developed by which cognitive requirement was varied according to three features. The viability of this model was empirically tested with a sample of n = 414 secondary school students. The feature <i>cognitive activity</i> proved to be a significant factor influencing the empirically measured difficulty of tasks. With the help of the feature <i>number of information obtained from task stem</i> and <i>number of subject-specific mental procedures</i>, no systematic influence on task difficulty could be shown. The influence of the test persons’ individual prior knowledge on the actual task difficulty is generally assumed to be a confounding factor. Overall, the present study contributes to a better understanding of construct representation in assessments of subject-specific proficiency and empirically confirms that a systematic variation of the task feature <i>cognitive activity</i> on three levels affects task difficulty

Neighbouring shading effect on photovoltaic panel system: Its implication to green building certification scheme