Visual object recognition ability is not related to experience with visual arts.

SummaryRecent work suggests that some aspects of lung nodule detection ability may relate to object recognition ability. However, this work only sampled radiological novices. Here, we further investigate whether object recognition ability predicts lung nodule detection ability (as measured by the Vanderbilt Chest Radiograph Test or VCRT), after controlling for experience and fluid intelligence, in a sample of radiologists and nonradiologists. We find that radiological experience accounts for approximately 50% of VCRT variance. After controlling for experience, fluid intelligence and object recognition ability account for an additional 15% of VCRT variance. These results suggest that while training is key in learning to detect nodules, given the same experience level, those with higher fluid intelligence and object recognition ability perform better. The recently proposed construct of visual object recognition ability may add unique information relative to general cognitive skills in assessing aptitude for a career in radiology.

Measurement of object recognition (OR) ability could predict learning and success in real-world settings, and there is hope that it may reduce bias often observed in cognitive tests. Although the measurement of visual OR is not expected to be influenced by the language of participants or the language of instructions, these assumptions remain largely untested. Here, we address the challenges of measuring OR abilities across linguistically diverse populations. In Study 1, we find that English–Spanish bilinguals, when randomly assigned to the English or Spanish version of the novel object memory test (NOMT), exhibit a highly similar overall performance. Study 2 extends this by assessing psychometric equivalence using an approach grounded in item response theory (IRT). We examined whether groups fluent in English or Spanish differed in (a) latent OR ability as assessed by a three-parameter logistic IRT model, and (2) the mapping of observed item responses on the latent OR construct, as assessed by differential item functioning (DIF) analyses. Spanish speakers performed better than English speakers, a difference we suggest is due to motivational differences between groups of vastly different size on the Prolific platform. That we found no substantial DIF between the groups tested in English or Spanish on the NOMT indicates measurement invariance. The feasibility of increasing diversity by combining groups tested in different languages remains unexplored. Adopting this approach could enable visual scientists to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion in their research, and potentially in the broader application of their work in society.

The selection, use, and memory for the information that support visual object recognition is a general ability that applies across varied tasks and categories. In convergence with cross-modal experimental studies, individual differences research suggests that this ability also predicts haptic object recognition. An important component in the measurement of a general construct for haptic object recognition is the use of multiple tasks to form a latent construct that can explain behavior across tasks with different constraints. While the ultimate goal is to use latent variable modeling, as an intermediate step, we developed two new haptic tests and use the principle of aggregation to create representative estimates for abilities of interest. One test emphasizes the use of texture features with Braille stimuli and another test emphasizes shape features using palm-sized 3D-printed Greebles. We measured object recognition ability using existing visual and haptic object recognition tests alongside our new tests (n=87). Our new tests have acceptable reliability (omegas > .72). The new Braille test correlates with an existing haptic test also using texture features with flat buttons (r=.40, BF10=1490). Similarly, the new Greebles test correlates with an existing shape-reliant test with 3D-printed spaceships, though weaker (r=.19, BF10=2.33). Combining these pairs of tests into two aggregate measures of haptic object recognition ability dependent on feature type reveals a correlation (r=.41, BF10=2999). Furthermore, combining all four haptic test scores into a single haptic object recognition measure reveals a correlation with general visual object recognition ability measured by two tests (r=.34, BF10=132.41). Our results suggest a general factor for haptic object recognition regardless of feature types, one that overlaps with visual object recognition ability. This is an important step in building a latent construct for general haptic object recognition ability to test its relationship with the analogous general visual ability.

Although visual object recognition is well studied and relatively well understood, much less is known about how shapes are recognized by touch and how such haptic stimuli might be compared with visual shapes. One might expect that the processes of visual and haptic object recognition engage similar brain structures given the advantages of avoiding redundant brain circuitry and indeed there is some evidence that this is the case. A potentially fruitful approach to understanding the differences in how shapes might be neurally represented is to find an algorithmic method of comparing shapes, which agrees with human behavior and determines whether that method differs between different modality conditions. If not, it would provide further evidence for a shared representation of shape. We recruited human participants to perform a one-back same–different visual and haptic shape comparison task both within (i.e., comparing two visual shapes or two haptic shapes) and across (i.e., comparing visual with haptic shapes) modalities. We then used various shape metrics to predict performance based on the shape, orientation, and modality of the two stimuli that were being compared on each trial. We found that the metrics that best predict shape comparison behavior heavily depended on the modality of the two shapes, suggesting differences in which features are used for comparing shapes depending on modality and that object recognition is not necessarily performed in a single, modality-agnostic region.

2 - Object Recognition

Reviewed by: After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010 by Fernando J. Rosenberg Tara Daly Fernando J. Rosenberg, After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010. U of Pittsburgh P, 2016. 296 pp. Fernando Rosenberg's book is a theoretically sophisticated and timely inquiry into the way that human rights discourse is invoked and transformed in contemporary Latin American novels, installation art, photography, and films produced in post-dictatorial and global contexts between 1990 and 2010. Chapter 1 presents Rosenberg's main lines of argument and serves as the compelling introduction to the book. His thesis is that human rights and neoliberal common sense share common ground but neither one "exhausts the emancipatory possibilities of human rights nor exempts neoliberal politics of blatantly ignoring basic rights" (1). Rosenberg then makes the case that both discourses are relevant beyond the (post)political, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Taking the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as his starting point, Rosenberg proves that the After of his title not only signals a posterior time to the original activation of human rights discourse, but also refers to an ongoing "expression of desire, pointing to the presence of a post-and transnational imagination for social change that resists codification" (12). Through detailed analysis of artists from most of Latin America and [End Page 541] some of the Caribbean, Rosenberg graphs the interstices of global human rights discourse, market capitalism, and a neoliberal ethos as the matrix in which the constitution of the political and justice are continuously negotiated and transformed. Chapter 2, "Literature between Rights and the Possibility of Justice" and Chapter 3, "Global Fictions, Truth and Reconciliation, and the Judgment of History" will appeal to scholars of the Latin American novel, particularly as world literature. In Chapter 2, Rosenberg revisits Rulfo's canonical Pedro Páramo to underscore the paradoxical relationship between rights and patriarchal oligarchy as illuminated through a fictional juridical order that frames Páramo's right to land as the foundation of patriarchal personhood (35). In Rulfo, human rights hover on the horizon line as a sense of possibility amid state catastrophe. Rosenberg complements Rulfo with readings of two Colombian novels, Laura Restrepo's La multitud errante and Fernando Vallejo's La virgen de los sicarios. His analysis of Restrepo demonstrates that what is usually referred to as a weak or absent state proves to be a ghostly presence in her novel, defined not by its capacity to impose force but to relinquish the very force exerted on its behalf. Rosenberg's relentless ability to articulate complex contradictions through his readings attests to his deep appreciation of the manner in which literature reveals political nuance in ways that might otherwise remain insensible. Rosenberg takes up the post-dictatorial Latin American "novel of truth and reconciliation" as it invokes a global imaginary of the post-political—that is, the way that the novel mobilizes the imaginary of human rights toward a final overcoming of insurmountable political rifts—in Chapter 3. He analyzes En busca de Klingsor by Jorge Volpi (Mexico), El desierto by Carlos Franz (Chile), Abril rojo by Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru), La hora azul by Alonso Cueto (Peru) and Insensatez by Salvadorean Horacio Castellanos Moya. In all of the novels, in different ways, Rosenberg argues that in the absence of a sense of the common, human rights is the formation that mediates and domesticates the abyss between sovereignty and subjection (91). In Chapters 4 through 7, Rosenberg moves from literature to visual media. In Chapter 4, "The Disappeared: Visual Arts and Auratic Distance," he discusses a collective exhibit of various disappeared groups that was, before touring internationally, hosted by the North Dakota Museum of Art. The exhibit exemplifies two different trends in the aesthetic representation of political violence: first, a cosmopolitan human rights sensibility that fosters an ability to identify with "distant suffering"; second, the constant flux of visual media representing this suffering and accessed by remote audiences. Rosenberg argues that the exhibit's power lies in its Benjaminian "aura," that is, the manifestation of distant power brought near through the artistic experience. Scholars of memory...

Novel object recognition ability in female mice following exposure to nanoparticle-rich diesel exhaust

Perceiving, recognizing and remembering 3-dimensional (3-D) objects encountered in the environment has a very high survival value; unsurprisingly, this ability is shared among many animal species, including humans. The psychological, psychophysical and neural basis for object perception, discrimination, recognition and memory has been extensively studied in humans, monkeys, pigeons and rodents, but is still far from understood. Nearly all 3-D object recognition studies in the rodent used the “novel object recognition” paradigm, which relies on innate rather than learned behavior; however, this procedure has several important limitations. Recently, investigators have begun to recognize the power of behavioral tasks learned through reinforcement training (operant conditioning) to reveal the sensorimotor and cognitive abilities of mice and to elucidate their underlying neural mechanisms. Here, we describe a novel method for training and testing mice in visual and tactile object discrimination, recognition and memory, and use it to begin to examine the underlying sensory basis for these cognitive capacities. A custom-designed Y maze was used to train mice to associate one of two 3-D objects with a food reward. Out of nine mice trained in two cohorts, seven reached performance criterion in about 20–35 daily sessions of 20 trials each. The learned association was retained, or rapidly re-acquired, after a 6 weeks hiatus in training. When tested under low light conditions, individual animals differed in the degree to which they used tactile or visual cues to identify the objects. Switching to total darkness resulted only in a transient dip in performance, as did subsequent trimming of all large whiskers (macrovibrissae). Additional removal of the small whiskers (microvibrissae) did not degrade performance, but transiently increased the time spent inspecting the object. This novel method can be combined in future studies with the large arsenal of genetic tools available in the mouse, to elucidate the neural basis of object perception, recognition and memory.

A single-case study is presented of a patient w ith a modality-specific problem in visual object recognition, w hich can be linked to impaired stored descriptions for objects. Performance was poor on tasks requiring naming, semantic decisions, and object decisions to seen objects. Performance on semantic decisions w ith w ords, however, was relatively good, demonstrating that the problem was not due solely to a general semantic impairment. Moreover, in contrast to the impairments in visual object recognition, both face recognition and on-line visual word recognition w ere within normal limits. The data indicate that im pairments of object recognition can be distinguished from impairments of face and visual w ord recognition, even when the problem can be localised within the structural description system for objects. We discuss the im plications of the results for understanding the relations between object, face, and word identification.

It is typically assumed that perception for action and object recognition are subserved by functionally and neuroanatomically distinct processing streams in the brain. However, recent evidence challenges this classical view and suggests an interaction between both visual processing streams. While previous studies showed an influence of object perception on action-related tasks, we investigated whether action representations facilitate visual object recognition. In order to address this question, two briefly displayed masked objects were sequentially presented, either affording congruent or incongruent motor interactions. We found superior naming accuracy for object pairs with congruent as compared to incongruent motor interactions (Experiment 1). This action priming effect indicates that action representations can facilitate object recognition. We further investigated the nature of the representations underlying this action priming effect. The effect was absent when the prime stimulus was presented as a word (Experiment 2). Thus, the action priming effect seems to rely on action representations specified by visual object information. Our findings suggest that processes of object-directed action influence object recognition.

Visual object recognition is just one of the many applications of camera-equipped smartphones. The ability to recognise objects through photos taken with wearable and handheld cameras is already possible through some of the larger internet search providers; yet, there is little rigorous analysis of the quality of search results, particularly where there is great disparity in image quality. This has motivated us to develop the Small Hand-held Object Recognition Test (SHORT). This includes a dataset that is suitable for recognising hand-held objects from either snapshots or videos acquired using hand-held or wearable cameras. SHORT provides a collection of images and ground truth that help evaluate the different factors that affect recognition performance. At its present state, the dataset is comprised of a set of high quality training images and a large set of nearly 135,000 smartphone-captured test images of 30 grocery products. In this paper, we will discuss some open challenges in the visual object recognition of objects that are being held by users. We evaluate the performance of a number of popular object recognition algorithms, with differing levels of complexity, when tested against SHORT.

Despite the importance of the arts in human life, psychologists still know relatively little about what characterises their experience for the recipient. The current research approaches this problem by studying people's word usage in aesthetics, with a focus on three important art forms: visual art, film, and music. The starting point was a list of 77 words known to be useful to describe aesthetic impressions of visual art (Augustin et al 2012, Acta Psychologica139 187–201). Focusing on ratings of likelihood of use, we examined to what extent word usage in aesthetic descriptions of visual art can be generalised to film and music. The results support the claim of an interplay of generality and specificity in aesthetic word usage. Terms with equal likelihood of use for all art forms included beautiful, wonderful, and terms denoting originality. Importantly, emotion-related words received higher ratings for film and music than for visual art. To our knowledge this is direct evidence that aesthetic experiences of visual art may be less affectively loaded than, for example, experiences of music. The results render important information about aesthetic word usage in the realm of the arts and may serve as a starting point to develop tailored measurement instruments for different art forms.

Visual object recognition has been extensively studied under fixation conditions, but our natural viewing involves frequent saccadic eye movements that scan multiple local informative features within an object (e.g., eyes and mouth in a face image). These saccades would contribute to object recognition by subserving the integration of sensory information across local features, but mechanistic models underlying this process have yet to be established due to the presumed complexity of the interactions between the visual and oculomotor systems. Here, we employ a framework of perceptual decision making and show that human object categorization behavior with saccades can be quantitatively explained by a model that simply accumulates the sensory evidence available at each moment. Human participants of both sexes performed face and object categorization while they were allowed to freely make saccades to scan local features. Our model could successfully fit the data even during such a free viewing condition, departing from past studies that required controlled eye movements to test trans-saccadic integration. Moreover, further experimental results confirmed that active saccade commands (efference copy) do not substantially contribute to evidence accumulation. Therefore, we propose that object recognition with saccades can be approximated by a parsimonious decision-making model without assuming complex interactions between the visual and oculomotor systems.

This paper presents data from a unique longitudinal study exploring the visual art experiences of nine children in two Scottish primary schools. Using a theoretical lens of cultural capital, the study is focused on spaces where children experience visual art and the value of these experiences, using arts‐informed, visual methods. While each child presented a particular insight, the findings question the value of current school visual art experience over other spaces. The findings also demonstrate the capacity of children to resist the control of cultural capital by adults, engaging with visual art on their own terms.

Following a right-hemisphere lesion, the patient SM had impaired object recognition, with good elementary visual abilities, and could derive information about object structure. He was also impaired on all tasks tapping stored structural knowledge, even when tested in the verbal modality. This suggests that SM has a disorder affecting stored knowledge of object structure, though he remains able to assemble novel structural descriptions. His object recognition ability also appeared significantly worse for non-living things. By contrast, existing models relating to stored knowledge would predict that SM would show greater impairment with living things. We argue that SM’s deficit reflects the loss of a type of structural knowledge that relates to the “within-item structural diversity” of items. It is argued that living things show less structural variation than objects in the natural world, and might arguably be easier to recognise, because the image of the to-be-recognised object would be similar to the stored representation. Hence, a deficit affecting this aspect of stored knowledge would differentially impact upon non-living things. This argument receives confirming independent support from the finding that normal subjects ratings for the within-item structural diversity of visual stimuli are (unlike other “critical” variables) significant predictors of SM’s naming performance.