Academic literature on the topic 'Time perception, Numbers, Psychophysics'

A study is reported on the perception of empty time intervals marked by auditory signals. Nakajima's supplement hypothesis, which states that the subjective duration of a subjectively empty time interval is proportional to its physical duration plus a constant of ~80 ms, was examined quantitatively. Although this hypothesis has been used to explain various general aspects of time perception, from a global viewpoint, it has lacked the quantitative data necessary to describe the shape of the psychophysical functions mathematically. In the present study, subjects used two positive numbers to estimate the subjective ratio ( m: n) between the durations of two serial or separate empty intervals. The psychophysical functions for empty durations 50–600 ms long could be approximated by a straight line with a positive y-intercept, as predicted by the hypothesis. The effective range of the hypothesis could be extended to ~1200 ms. A power function (without any modifications) also gave good approximations. The reliability and validity of the supplement hypothesis are discussed.

The connection between stimulus perception and time perception remains unknown. The present study combines human and rat psychophysics with sensory cortical neuronal firing to construct a computational model for the percept of elapsed time embedded within sense of touch. When subjects judged the duration of a vibration applied to the fingertip (human) or whiskers (rat), increasing stimulus intensity led to increasing perceived duration. Symmetrically, increasing vibration duration led to increasing perceived intensity. We modeled real spike trains recorded from vibrissal somatosensory cortex as input to dual leaky integrators–an intensity integrator with short time constant and a duration integrator with long time constant–generating neurometric functions that replicated the actual psychophysical functions of rats. Returning to human psychophysics, we then confirmed specific predictions of the dual leaky integrator model. This study offers a framework, based on sensory coding and subsequent accumulation of sensory drive, to account for how a feeling of the passage of time accompanies the tactile sensory experience.

AbstractPsychophysical methods in haptic technology help in comparative study and eventually be a data set to achieve realism over skin sensation. Textural based haptic applications are widely developed using tactile displays over human fingertips. The tactile displays work on open-loop admittance feedback system and are controlled with flexible parameters by ignoring the impact of noise or disturbance variables. Human skin undergoes various noise factors like temperature, humidity, sweat, and influence of alternative senses. This paper presents the newly adopted method of psychophysics to study the influence of environmental conditions over perceiving textural surfaces. The paper adopts the detection mode of psychophysics which uses perception time as an output parameter for understanding perception memory of the human skin. We have recorded the period of the perception in three environmental conditions over human subjects under a single blindfold method to study the behaviour of human skin at fingertips. The perception time of stimulus is analysed with arithmetic average roughness value (Ra) to understand the tolerance factor required during tactile based textural applications. The proposed method is simple to structure and improves in creating the dataset required to consider the noise factor for an open-loop admission feedback system.

AbstractA necessary consequence of the nature of neural transmission systems is that as change in the physical state of a time-varying event takes place, delays produce error between the instantaneous registered state and the external state. Another source of delay is the transmission of internal motor commands to muscles and the inertia of the musculoskeletal system. How does the central nervous system compensate for these pervasive delays? Although it has been argued that delay compensation occurs late in the motor planning stages, even the earliest visual processes, such as phototransduction, contribute significantly to delays. I argue that compensation is not an exclusive property of the motor system, but rather, is a pervasive feature of the central nervous system (CNS) organization. Although the motor planning system may contain a highly flexible compensation mechanism, accounting not just for delays but also variability in delays (e.g., those resulting from variations in luminance contrast, internal body temperature, muscle fatigue, etc.), visual mechanisms also contribute to compensation. Previous suggestions of this notion of “visual prediction” led to a lively debate producing re-examination of previous arguments, new analyses, and review of the experiments presented here. Understanding visual prediction will inform our theories of sensory processes and visual perception, and will impact our notion of visual awareness.

Under optimal conditions, just 3–6 ms of visual stimulation suffices for humans to see motion. Motion perception on this timescale implies that the visual system under these conditions reliably encodes, transmits, and processes neural signals with near-millisecond precision. Motivated by in vitro evidence for high temporal precision of motion signals in the primate retina, we investigated how neuronal and perceptual limits of motion encoding relate. Specifically, we examined the correspondence between the time scale at which cat retinal ganglion cells in vivo represent motion information and temporal thresholds for human motion discrimination. The timescale for motion encoding by ganglion cells ranged from 4.6 to 91 ms, and depended non-linearly on temporal frequency, but not on contrast. Human psychophysics revealed that minimal stimulus durations required for perceiving motion direction were similarly brief, 5.6–65 ms, and similarly depended on temporal frequency but, above ~10%, not on contrast. Notably, physiological and psychophysical measurements corresponded closely throughout (r = 0.99), despite more than a 20-fold variation in both human thresholds and optimal timescales for motion encoding in the retina. The match in absolute values of the neurophysiological and psychophysical data may be taken to indicate that from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) through to the level of perception little temporal precision is lost. However, we also show that integrating responses from multiple neurons can improve temporal resolution, and this potential trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution would allow for loss of temporal resolution after the LGN. While the extent of neuronal integration cannot be determined from either our human psychophysical or neurophysiological experiments and its contribution to the measured temporal resolution is unknown, our results demonstrate a striking similarity in stimulus dependence between the temporal fidelity established in the retina and the temporal limits of human motion discrimination.

The present article deals with perception of time (subjective assessment of temporal intervals), complexity and aesthetic attractiveness of visual objects. The experimental research for construction of functional relations between objective parameters of fractals' complexity (fractal dimension and Lyapunov exponent) and subjective perception of their complexity was conducted. As stimulus material we used the program based on Sprott's algorithms for the generation of fractals and the calculation of their mathematical characteristics. For the research 20 fractals were selected which had different fractal dimensions that varied from 0.52 to 2.36, and the Lyapunov exponent from 0.01 to 0.22. We conducted two experiments: (1) A total of 20 fractals were shown to 93 participants. The fractals were displayed on the screen of a computer for randomly chosen time intervals ranging from 5 to 20 s. For each fractal displayed, the participant responded with a rating of the complexity and attractiveness of the fractal using ten-point scale with an estimate of the duration of the presentation of the stimulus. Each participant also answered the questions of some personality tests (Cattell and others). The main purpose of this experiment was the analysis of the correlation between personal characteristics and subjective perception of complexity, attractiveness, and duration of fractal's presentation. (2) The same 20 fractals were shown to 47 participants as they were forming on the screen of the computer for a fixed interval. Participants also estimated subjective complexity and attractiveness of fractals. The hypothesis on the applicability of the Weber–Fechner law for the perception of time, complexity and subjective attractiveness was confirmed for measures of dynamical properties of fractal images.

Previous studies have demonstrated the involvement of spatial codes in the representation of time and numbers. We took advantage of a well-known spatial modulation (prismatic adaptation) to test the hypothesis that the representation of time is spatially oriented from left to right, with smaller time intervals being represented to the left of larger time intervals. Healthy subjects performed a time-reproduction task and a time-bisection task, before and after leftward and rightward prismatic adaptation. Results showed that prismatic adaptation inducing a rightward orientation of spatial attention produced an overestimation of time intervals, whereas prismatic adaptation inducing a leftward shift of spatial attention produced an underestimation of time intervals. These findings not only confirm that temporal intervals are represented as horizontally arranged in space, but also reveal that spatial modulation of time processing most likely occurs via cuing of spatial attention, and that spatial attention can influence the spatial coding of quantity in different dimensions.

There are three main results in this dissertation. The first result is the construction of an abstract visual space for rational numbers mod1, based on the visual primitives, colour, and rational radial direction. Mathematics is performed in this visual notation by defining increasingly refined visual objects from these primitives. In particular, the existence of the Farey tree enumeration of rational numbers mod1 is identified in the texture of a two-dimensional animation. ¶ The second result is a new enumeration of the rational numbers mod1, obtained, and expressed, in abstract visual space, as the visual object coset waves of coset fans on the torus. Its geometry is shown to encode a countably infinite tree structure, whose branches are cosets, nZ+m, where n, m (and k) are integers. These cosets are in geometrical 1-1 correspondence with sequences kn+m, (of denominators) of rational numbers, and with visual subobjects of the torus called coset fans. ¶ The third result is an enumeration in time of the visual hierarchy of the discrete buds of the Mandelbrot boundary by coset waves of coset fans. It is constructed by embedding the circular Farey tree geometrically into the empty internal region of the Mandelbrot set. In particular, coset fans attached to points of the (internal) binary tree index countably infinite sequences of buds on the (external) Mandelbrot boundary.

This thesis documents a series of experiments designed to investigate the mechanisms subserving sub-second duration processing in humans. Firstly, duration aftereffects were generated by adapting to consistent duration information. If duration aftereffects represent encoding by neurons selective for both stimulus duration and non-temporal stimulus features, adapt-test changes in these features should prevent duration aftereffect generation. Stimulus characteristics were chosen which selectively target differing stages of the visual processing hierarchy. The duration aftereffect showed robust interocular transfer and could be generated using a stimulus whose duration was defined by stimuli invisible to monocular mechanisms, ruling out a pre-cortical locus. The aftereffects transferred across luminance-defined visual orientation and facial identity. Conversely, the duration encoding mechanism was selective for changes in the contrast-defined envelope size of a Gabor and showed broad spatial selectivity which scaled proportionally with adapting stimulus size. These findings are consistent with a second stage visual spatial mechanism that pools input across proportionally smaller, spatially abutting filters. A final series of experiments investigated the pattern of interaction between concurrently presented cross-modal durations. When duration discrepancies were small, multisensory judgements were biased towards the modality with higher precision. However, when duration discrepancies were large, perceived duration was compressed by both longer and shorter durations from the opposite modality, irrespective of unimodal temporal reliability. Taken together, these experiments provide support for a duration encoding mechanism that is tied to mid-level visual spatial processing. Following this localised encoding, supramodal mechanisms then dictate the combination of duration information across the senses.

The past twenty years have seen a successful formalization of the idea that perception is a form of probabilistic inference. Bayesian Decision Theory (BDT) provides a neat mathematical framework for describing how an ideal observer and actor should interpret incoming sensory stimuli and act in the face of uncertainty. The predictions of BDT, however, crucially depend on the observer’s internal models, represented in the Bayesian framework by priors, likelihoods, and the loss function. Arguably, only in the simplest scenarios (e.g., with a few Gaussian variables) we can expect a real observer’s internal representations to perfectly match the true statistics of the task at hand, and to conform to exact Bayesian computations, but how humans systematically deviate from BDT in more complex cases is yet to be understood. In this thesis we theoretically and experimentally investigate how people represent and perform probabilistic inference with complex (beyond Gaussian) one-dimensional distributions of stimuli in the context of sensorimotor decision making. The goal is to reconstruct the observers’ internal representations and details of their decision-making process from the behavioural data – by employing Bayesian inference to uncover properties of a system, the ideal observer, that is believed to perform Bayesian inference itself. This “inverse problem” is not unique: in principle, distinct Bayesian observer models can produce very similar behaviours. We circumvented this issue by means of experimental constraints and independent validation of the results. To understand how people represent complex distributions of stimuli in the specific domain of time perception, we conducted a series of psychophysical experiments where participants were asked to reproduce the time interval between a mouse click and a flash, drawn from a session-dependent distribution of intervals. We found that participants could learn smooth approximations of the non-Gaussian experimental distributions, but seemed to have trouble with learning some complex statistical features such as bimodality. To investigate whether this difficulty arose from learning complex distributions or computing with them, we conducted a target estimation experiment in which “priors” where explicitly displayed on screen and therefore did not need to be learnt. Lack of difference in performance between the Gaussian and bimodal conditions in this task suggests that acquiring a bimodal prior, rather than computing with it, is the major difficulty. Model comparison on a large number of Bayesian observer models, representing different assumptions about the noise sources and details of the decision process, revealed a further source of variability in decision making that was modelled as a “stochastic posterior”. Finally, prompted by a secondary finding of the previous experiment, we tested the effect of decision uncertainty on the capacity of the participants to correct for added perturbations in the visual feedback in a centre of mass estimation task. Participants almost completely compensated for the injected error in low uncertainty trials, but only partially so in the high uncertainty ones, even when allowed sufficient time to adjust their response. Surprisingly, though, their overall performance was not significantly affected. This finding is consistent with the behaviour of a Bayesian observer with an additional term in the loss function that represents “effort” – a component of optimal control usually thought to be negligible in sensorimotor estimation tasks. Together, these studies provide new insight into the capacity and limitations people have in learning and performing probabilistic inference with distributions beyond Gaussian. This work also introduces several tools and techniques that can help in the systematic exploration of suboptimal behaviour. Developing a language to describe suboptimality, mismatching representations and approximate inference, as opposed to optimality and exact inference, is a fundamental step to link behavioural studies to actual neural computations.

Consumers are constantly evaluating quantitative information, such as the prices of different products, the time spent on an activity, or the distance covered during one day. Substantial research in psychology has demonstrated that judgments of quantity in one dimension (e.g., numbers) influence subsequent judgments on another dimension (e.g., time). The present research contributes to a growing body of work by exploring how the shared representation of time, space, and numbers affects consumer perceptions and behaviors. My first dissertation essay explores how the organization of time on a spatial plane affects temporal judgments, product evaluations, and intertemporal discounting (i.e., time-space interaction). It has been well documented that Western consumers typically arrange temporal sequences following a past-left, future-right spatial pattern. Merging insights gained from numerical cognition and time psychology, the author develops a framework to explain how displaying temporal sequences congruently with this spatial organization of time increases subjective estimations of time and biases consumers toward present rewards. My second dissertation essay seeks to understand how and why expressing quantitative information in symbolic code (i.e., “6”) compared to verbal code (i.e., “six”) affects magnitude judgments and product evaluations (i.e., time-number interaction). Two rival accounts to explain the symbol-verbal effect are described and tested: (1) a systematic processing account based on Arabic symbols’ perceptual and cognitive features and (2) a fluency account based on the frequency of use and facilitation of processing Arabic symbols. This research has important managerial implications related to the effective communication of quantitative information.

Gegenstand dieser Arbeit ist die Divergenz zwischen subjektiver und objektiver Zeitwahrnehmung. In drei empirischen Studien wird untersucht, wie Zeitwahrnehmung vom Inhalt eines Zeitintervalls beeinflusst wird. Dabei werden Paradigmen aus der Forschung zur visuellen Wahrnehmung mit Messungen der Zeitwahrnehmung kombiniert und durch Ableitungen neuronaler Aktivität (Elektroenzephalographie) ergänzt. Sensorische Modelle der Zeitwahrnehmung basieren auf der Annahme, dass die subjektive Dauer eines sensorischen Reizes in den selben neuronalen Netzwerken entsteht, die den Reiz selbst verarbeiten. Unter dieser Annahme müsste jede Veränderung des Reizes, welche neuronale Verarbeitung hervorruft, auch einen Effekt auf die wahrgenommene Dauer des Reizes haben, auch wenn diese Eigenschaft nicht bewusst wahrgenommen wird. Die Ergebnisse zeigen jedoch das nur Veränderungen die auch bewusst wahrgenommen werden einen Einflusss auf subjektive Dauer haben. Darüberhinaus zeigte sich, dass die subjektiv wahrgenommene Stärke der Veränderung die subjektive Dauer bestimmt. Die Befunde sprechen eher für das Modell einer zentrale inneren Uhr, das jedoch auch erklären muss, mittels welcher Mechanismen der Inhalt eines Zeitintervalls dessen subjektive Dauer beeinflusst. Anhand elektrophysiologischer Korrelate der Zeitwahrnehmung wird untersucht, ob die Dynamik visueller Reize die Zeitwahrnehmung schon während des Enkodierens der Zeit beeinflusst, oder erst später wenn eine Entscheidung über die Dauer des Zeitintervalls getroffen wird. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die neuronalen Korrelate der Zeitwahrnehmung nicht die zeitliche Verzerrung widerspiegeln, die durch dynamische Reize hervorgerufen wird. Dies spricht dafür, dass diese Verzerrung auf einer späteren Prozessstufe eintritt. Insgesamt zeigen die Befunde der drei Studien, das Zeitwahrnehmung zwar stark vom sensorischen Inhalt beeinflusst wird, sich aber nicht direkt von der sensorischen Reizverarbeitung ableiten lässt.
Often, perceived time differs from objective time. This work addresses how perceived time is influenced by the content of a time interval. Three empirical studies were conducted to assess how visual stimulus dynamics affect perceived duration. We combined paradigms from vision research with timing tasks and measures of neural processing using electroencephalogram (EEG). Sensory models of interval timing claim that duration of a time interval is encoded in the same neural networks that process its sensory content. Thus, even stimulus dynamics that are processed only on the sensory level but are not consciously perceived should affect perceived duration. In contrary, we showed that only consciously perceived stimulus dynamics affect perceived duration, with more perceived dynamics leading to longer perceived duration. Changes that were not perceived but evoked a neural response (measured in the EEG) did not affect perceived duration. These findings argue against the assumption of sensory timing models, but are consistent with models that assume a central internal clock. However, internal clock models do not sufficiently explain why stimulus dynamics affect perceived duration. We tested whether stimulus dynamics affect the stage of temporal encoding as postulated by internal clock models, by measuring neural correlates of temporal encoding in the EEG. We found that the neural correlates of temporal encoding reflected internal variations in perceived duration, but not the dilation induced by stimulus dynamics. We argue that visual stimulus dynamics affect perceived duration after temporal encoding. In sum, the findings show that duration perception is not grounded in early sensory processing, but is probably achieved by a specialized timing system that can be biased by the perception of dynamic stimuli. The discussion addresses theoretical implication of these findings for theories of time perception, and their implications for further research in the field.

Nos últimos vinte e cinco anos a atenção visual tem sido descrita em termos de diversas metáforas, salientando-se o holfote atencional, a lente zoom e o gradiente atencional. Um aspecto essencial dessas metáforas é a distribuição dos recursos atencionais no campo visual, que não é necessariamente determinado pelo ponto de fixação e que pode depender tanto de eventos externos como também de estados mentais. Esse estudo apresenta uma abordagem inovadora, baseada em tempos de reação analisados através de métodos geoestatísticos, para investigar como a atenção visual se distribui em áreas extensas do campo visual. Cinco diferentes experimentos foram realizados: no experimento I participantes foram solicitados a não atender nenhuma região em particular do espaço (da tela do computador) caracterizando assim a atenção difusa. Nos demais experimentos, os participantes foram solicitados a direcionar a atenção explicitamente ao centro (expt. II); de maneira encoberta para esquerda (expt. III) ou para direita (expt. IV); ou dividindo a atenção em duas regiões tanto a direita como a esquerda simultaneamente, mas não para o centro (expt. V). A distribuição espacial da atenção, medida através de tempos de reação, foi obtida na forma de mapa de pixieis resultante da análise geoestatísica. O experimento I teve como resultado um favorecimento atencional do quadrante nasal do hemicampo inferior. O experimento II, como esperado, apresentou um foco atencional coincidente com o ponto de fixação. Os experimentos III e IV mostraram claramente focos atencionais para esquerda e direita, respectivamente. Por fim o experimento V mostrou dois focos atencionais, à esquerda e direita, indicando divisão atencional. Esses resultados demonstram a utilidade da geoestatística para a análise de tempos de reação no estudo da atenção visual. O método também forneceu evidências claras da possibilidade de dividir a atenção visual à direita e à esquerda do ponto de fixação, um tema ainda controverso na literatura.
In the past twenty five years visual attention has been described in terms of varied metaphors, among which a spotlight, a zoom lens and a gradient field. An essential aspect of all these metaphors is the distribution of attentional resources in the visual field, which is not necessarily determined by the fixation point, and may depend on both external events and internal mental processes. This study presents a novel approach, based on reaction times and analyzing data with geostatistical techniques, to investigate how visual attention is allocated in large continuous regions of space. Five different experiments were performed: in experiment I participants were asked not to attend to any particular region, but rather try to spread their attention as uniformly as possible over the computer screen (diffuse attention). In the remaining experiments, participants were instructed to direct their visual attention overtly towards the center (expt. II), or covertly to the left (expt. III) to the right (expt. IV), or to divide their attention attending regions both right and left (but not to the center (expt. V). The spatial distribution of attention, as evaluated through reaction times, was obtained in the form of pixel maps resulting from the geostatistical analysis. Experiment I showed a lower hemifield advantage, in the nasal quadrant. Experiment II, as expected, presented an atentional focus coincident with the fixation point. Experiments IV and V showed clear attentional foci, to the left and to the right, respectively. Finally, Experiment V showed two clear lateral foci, one to the left, the other to the right, indicating attentional division. These results demonstrate the usefulness of geostatistics to analyze reaction time data for the study of visual attention. The method also provided clear evidence for the ability of subjects to divide their visual attention in two well separated foci, to the right and to the left of their fixation point, an issue still debated in the literature.

Att tidsperceptionen är påverkbar har tidigare påvisats. Studien syftar till att undersöka huruvida tidsperceptionen påverkar fartperceptionen, med hypotesen att när interna taktgivaren går snabbare uppfattas farten som lägre. 28 försöksdeltagare fick under fyra betingelser (Lugn, Stressig, Egen musik och Tyst) utföra tids- och fartestimationer under bilfärd. Inga signifikanta resultat påvisades ifråga om vare sig tidsperceptionen eller dess inverkan på fartperceptionen. Däremot skilde sig prospektiv estimation av medelfart åt beroende på betingelsen. Tyst betingelse befrämjade mer korrekt fartestimation, stressig musik och egen musik gjorde estimationen mindre korrekt. Likt tidigare forskning var det fråga om ”response expansion” avseende upplevelsen av deceleration medan fartupplevelsen var relativt linjär i fråga om konstant fart och acceleration. Då inga signifikanta skillnader i tidsperception uppnåddes kan dess inverkan på fartperceptionen ej förkastas. Studien bör replikeras med en annan på förhand testad stressor.
Time perception has been shown to be influenceable. This study aims to investigate whether time perception affects speed perception, with the hypothesis that when the internal pacemaker have a faster pace, speed are perceived as lower. 28 participants performed time and speed estimations while they were passengers in a car. These were made under four conditions (Calm, Stressful, Own music, Quiet). No significant results were found in terms of whether time perception or its impact on speed perception. However the prospective estimation of speed differed depending on condition. Quiet condition promoted more accurate speed estimation, stressful music, and own music made the estimation less accurate. Similar to previous research, there was an effect of "response expansion" for the experience of deceleration while speed experience was relatively linear in terms of constant speed and acceleration. Since no differences in time perception was achieved, their impact on speed perception can not be rejected. The study should be replicated with another pre-tested stressor.

Lorsque le système visuel est confronté à un nouvel environnement, un nombre trop important d’informations lui parvient en même temps. De façon précoce, avant tout mouvement oculaire, l’attention explore automatiquement la scène pour sélectionner les éléments d’intérêt. Des recherches récentes ont montré que cette exploration du champ visuel ne se faisait pas aléatoirement, mais se basait sur la saillance des éléments visuels. La saillance est une caractéristique qui émerge de la comparaison des éléments visuels entre eux, par exemple une fleur jaune dans un jardin de fleurs rouges va être considérée comme plus saillante que son voisinage. En permanence et de façon continue, une hiérarchie des éléments est établie à un niveau préattentif ; ils sont triés du plus au moins saillant, et l’attention se base sur cet organisation pour progresser dans le champ visuel. Les recherches présentées dans ce document avaient pour objectif d’investiguer les mécanismes de ce phénomène : quels sont les mécanismes cognitifs impliqués dans la progression de l’attention sur la base de la hiérarchie de la saillance ? Le présent document regroupe des articles qui cherchent à répondre à cette question grâce à des travaux en Psychologie expérimentale. Par ailleurs, de nombreux travaux de Psychologie, Neurophysiologie et Neuroimagerie se sont penchés sur le substrat neural de l’attention visuelle et ont révélé un ensemble de structures clés qui sous-tendraient les mécanismes responsables des fonctions attentionnelles. Cependant, vis-à-vis de la progression de l’attention sur la base de la saillance, seule une étude récente a pu apporter des indices quant au rôle de certaines voies visuelles. Les recherches présentées ici avaient donc également pour objectif de définir ces voies visuelles et les structures corticales et sous-corticales qui les composent, pour investiguer leurs rôles dans la hiérarchie de la saillance et la progression de l’attention. Le présent document regroupe des travaux qui ont exploré ces aspects par le biais de l’approche Psychophysique et Electroencéphalographique
When confronted to a new environment, the visual system faces too much information intake and cannot process it all at once. Before any eye movement, early automatic attention explores the visual scene in order to select relevant items.Recent research revealed that the exploration of the visual scene is not a random process, but is based on the respective saliency of the items in the field. Salience is not a characteristic of an item per se but is emerging as a result of the comparison between an item and its visual neighborhood. For instance, a yellow flower in a garden of red flowers will be considered as more salient than the others in its visual neighborhood. Thus, a hierarchical ordering of the items is continuously established in a preattentive stage, and consists in a sorting of every element from the most to the least salient. Attention, then, relies on this hierarchy to progress in the visual field. The present dissertation had for objective to investigate the cognitive mechanisms involved in this phenomenon: what mechanisms support the salience-based progression of visual attention? Several papers are reported here and explored this question with experimental Psychology.Moreover, numerous works in Psychology, Neurophysiology and Neuroimaging took interest in the neural substrate of visual attention and revealed several key-structures that would subtend the mechanisms involved in attentional functions. However, when it comes to the salience-based progression of attention, only one study could bring cues of the involvement of certain visual pathways in this phenomenon. Another objective of the present dissertation was to define the cortical and sub-cortical structures that constitute those pathways, in order to explore their roles in the salience-base progression of attention. Several papers in the present report are investigating this aspect through Psychophysics and Electroencephalography studies

Despite decades of research concerning the sensory mechanisms for the processing of spatial, temporal and numerical information, several points still remain subject of debate. In this work, we will report a series of studies aimed at providing new evidence regarding the sensory mechanisms specific for the processing of space, time and number, and also to investigate the possibility that a common magnitude system might play a role in their processing. In the first part of the work, we examine the disruptive perceptual effects during eye movements (“saccades”), affecting the representation of space. Such distortion of space, thought to be related to the ocular-motor parameters and linked to visual stability processes, is not usually observed under normal viewing conditions – which give rise to the possibility that it could be due at least in part to the saccade automaticity and stereotyping reached in the typical experimental paradigms. Our results, however, showed that the pattern of saccadic effects was only marginally affected by practice over the course of the experiment and that performance of experts remained similar when tested in a condition leading to less stereotypical saccades. These results indicate that perisaccadic compression is a robust behavior, insensitive to the specific paradigm and to the level of practice with the saccade task. In the second part, we will report two studies concerning the perception of time. In the first study we investigated the effect of motion adaptation on apparent time (i.e. the observation that adapting to fast motion causes a reduction in perceived duration of the subsequent stimuli), which has been previously tested using only simple translational motion. Our results showed that the adaptation-induced compression of time is specific for translational motion, while adaptation to complex motion, either circular or radial, did not affect perceived duration of subsequently viewed stimuli. These results show that such effect occurs only for uni-directional translational motion, ruling out the possibility that the neural mechanisms of the adaptation occur at early levels of visual processing. In the second study, we investigated the predictions of a recent model concerning time perception (the State-Dependent Network model), to test whether it could be extended to different sensory modalities. Our results showed that, while some of the constrains might be variable according to the specific sensory modality tested, the general predictions of the model hold under different circumstances. In the third part, we will present a study concerning the perception of numerosity, and the idea of number as a primary perceptual feature. Recent works showed that like other perceptual attributes, numerosity is susceptible to adaptation, but this idea has been challenged claiming that adaptation may operate via related mechanisms, such as texture-density. To disentangle this issue we measured the effect of adaptation on clouds of connected-dots (creating a robust underestimation of numerosity) and unconnected dots. We showed that adaptation to the same number of dots as the test causes robust adaptation of the connected, but not of the unconnected dot-pattern, suggesting that adaptation occurs at neural levels encoding perceived numerosity, rather than at lower levels responding to the number of elements in the scene. Finally, in the fourth part, we investigated the possibility of a generalized magnitude system. To find further evidence for such system, we tested the effect of motion adaptation on perceived numerosity, as it as been previously tested on perceived time. Our results showed a partially similar pattern of results, suggesting a common general system, but showing also that mechanisms for time and numerosity could partially different. In the second study, we investigated the interplay between space and time – namely, the possibility to exploit spatial information to improve temporal judgments. Our results showed that such interplay is actually possible: providing additional information about where an event is bound to happen, improve the temporal resolution in judging when the event will happen – which supports the idea that such magnitudes might be encoded within a common metric. We also tested the possibility of exploiting timing information (audio-visual asynchrony) to perform spatial judgments concerning size and distance in depth, but without finding any influence of such cues on visual size and distance judgments. Although we could not completely rule out this possibility, our results suggest that the influence of timing cues would not be as strong as other visual cues, and so it might be limited to a small range of circumstances. We conclude that: (1) saccadic distortions and are not a by-product of specific methodologies, but are strictly related to saccade ocular-motor parameters; (2) time perception is supported by a distributed mechanism, deeply rooted into the sensory streams; (3) numerosity is a primary perceptual attribute, and numerosity adaptation acts via number-specific mechanisms; (4) space, time and number might be processed by a generalized magnitude system with a common metric, but their processing could exploit partially different mechanisms.

There are three main results in this dissertation. The first result is the construction of an abstract visual space for rational numbers mod1, based on the visual primitives, colour, and rational radial direction. Mathematics is performed in this visual notation by defining increasingly refined visual objects from these primitives. In particular, the existence of the Farey tree enumeration of rational numbers mod1 is identified in the texture of a two-dimensional animation. The second result is a new enumeration of the rational numbers mod1, obtained, and expressed, in abstract visual space, as the visual object coset waves of coset fans on the torus. Its geometry is shown to encode a countably infinite tree structure, whose branches are cosets, nZ+m, where n, m (and k) are integers. These cosets are in geometrical 1-1 correspondence with sequences kn+m, (of denominators) of rational numbers, and with visual subobjects of the torus called coset fans. The third result is an enumeration in time of the visual hierarchy of the discrete buds of the Mandelbrot boundary by coset waves of coset fans. It is constructed by embedding the circular Farey tree geometrically into the empty internal region of the Mandelbrot set. In particular, coset fans attached to points of the (internal) binary tree index countably infinite sequences of buds on the (external) Mandelbrot boundary.

In this chapter, I review the evidence that has tested A Theory of Magnitude (ATOM) and extend the idea to build a bridge between ATOM and metaphorical theories of time and space perception. There is now substantial evidence to support the idea of common processing mechanisms for time, space, and number, but this is constrained by the evidence largely coming from perceptual or psychophysical studies. The chapter ends by outlining a series of outstanding problems in understanding magnitude representation. Key amongst these problems are the links between sensory and metaphorical processing, the links between prelinguistic and linguistic associations, and a clearer understanding of the developmental processes involved in the construction of magnitude representations.

Each day, when you take your morning shower, you face a 1 in 1,000 chance of serious injury or even death from a fall. You might at first think that each time you get into the shower your chance of a fall and serious injury is 1 in 1,000 and therefore there is very little to worry about. That is probably because you remember that someone once taught you the famous coin-flip rule of elementary statistics: because each toss is an independent event, you have a 50% chance of heads each time you flip. But in this case you would be wrong. The actual chance of falling in the shower is additive. This is known in statistics as the “law of large numbers.” If you do something enough times, even a rare event will occur. Hence, if you take 1,000 showers you are almost assured of a serious injury—about once every 3 years for a person who takes a shower every day. Of course, serious falls are less common than that because of a variety of intervening factors. Nevertheless, according to the CDC, mishaps near the bathtub, shower, toilet, and sink caused an estimated 234,094 nonfatal injuries in the United States in 2008 among people at least 15 years old. In 2009, there were 10.8 million traffic accidents and 35,900 deaths due to road fatalities in the United States. The CDC estimates a 1-in-100 lifetime chance of dying in a traffic accident and a 1-in-5 lifetime chance of dying from heart disease. But none of these realities affect our behaviors very much. We don’t take very many (if any) precautions when we shower. We text, eat, talk on the phone, and zone out while driving, paying little attention to the very real risk we pose to ourselves (and others) each time we get in the car. And we keep eating at McDonald’s and smoking cigarettes, completely disregarding the fact that these behaviors could eventually affect our health in extreme and fatal ways. On the other hand, there is zero proven risk of death as a result of the diphtheria- tetanus- pertussis (DTP) vaccine.

Vision sense is achieved using cells called rods (luminosity) and cones (color). Color perception is required when interacting with educational materials, industrial environments, traffic signals, among others, but colorblind people have difficulties perceiving colors. There are different tests for colorblindness like Ishihara plates test, which have numbers with colors that are confused with colorblindness. Advances in computer sciences produced digital assistants for colorblindness, but there are possibilities to improve them using artificial intelligence because its techniques have exhibited great results when classifying parameters. This chapter proposes the use of artificial neural networks, an artificial intelligence technique, for learning the colors that colorblind people cannot distinguish well by using as input data the Ishihara plates and recoloring the image by increasing its brightness. Results are tested with a real colorblind people who successfully pass the Ishihara test.

Community events have long been a cornerstone of local life (Getz & Page, 2020; Ferdinand & Kitchen, 2017; Shone & Parry, 2019), but these events have evolved significantly in recent years to become annual traditions and signify a wider community identity (Antchak et al.,2019). The communities around the event expect the event to happen, that they will be able to attend without charge, and that it will be a safe and enjoyable experience. The societal expectation is that the local council (that is, the public sector) fund and manage the event (Richards & Palmer, 2010), creating a potential perception by some attendees that it is not their responsibility to either contribute or behave safely (Silvers & O’Toole, 2021). Therefore, for community events, the tangible challenge is ensuring safety and fulfilling expectations within the financial resources available, particularly when public funding can be limited. Most community events take place in public spaces, and the legal requirements around access to public spaces mean that controlling access, ingress and egress for free-to-attend events is challenging (Smith, 2016). Operationally, this may require significant resources, such as security personnel and stewards, and barriers and signage, to ensure securely controlled access. This creates the need to manage a delicate balance between staging a successful event without impinging upon public access. Simply put, event managers cannot restrict pedestrian access to the entirety of a public space, such as a high street or park (Smith, 2016), even though there may be allowances for closing off or controlling elements of a public space when delivering the event. Financially, delivering events in public spaces requires significant cost and personnel, requiring high levels of knowledge, expertise, and time. It is this tension between expectation and resource that results in many community events failing in terms of safety, expectations, or financial viability.

Ideas about the British Palaeolithic and its connections to geological time changed enormously between the days of the early eighteenth century, when Bagford wondered whether the implement found by Conyers at Gray’s Inn Lane had been left by an Ancient Briton near the bones of a Roman elephant, and the century covered in this book. In the hundred years that followed the acceptance of human antiquity—between c.1860 and c.1960— similar tools were scrutinized by many other interested eyes; they were labelled and classified, and their age and meaning were vigorously debated. In the present study, I have provided a picture of changing ideas about British Palaeolithic tools and their place in geological time, and have also tried to recover the excitement of the arguments that swept through this century of geological research and its little-known relations with archaeology. Views of the past were not built up by dispassionate authorities, coolly observing the range of available and expanding data; the gaze of each individual was restricted by different questions and expectations that encouraged them to describe, interpret, and defend different patterns in the ancient stone tools of Britain. It is now time, before closing this chapter on the history of British Palaeolithic research, to stand back and take a broader look at some of the reasons for these differing beliefs and for their varying success. But first, a recapitulation is offered of the major developments. In this summary, presented below, the Gray’s Inn Lane implement is followed through time to highlight the changes in perception of the Palaeolithic. During the latter part of the tale, this pear-shaped ‘hand-axe’ found by Conyers is accompanied by the Clactonian industry, which has supplied a more familiar anchor point for the shifting interpretations described in previous chapters. Human antiquity was widely accepted in learned circles after they heard the famous papers of 1859. But it was a few years more before the hand-axe from Gray’s Inn Lane became described as the contemporary of many extinct prehistoric animals and assigned to post-submergence, post-glacial times. The work of geologists was central to the task of placing such implements more precisely in Britain’s distant past. Chapters 1 and 2 described how geologists had been attracted in increasing numbers to the once-unpopular drifts and the bones and tools that they preserved.

Fast advancements in equipment, programming, and correspondence advances have permitted the rise of internet-associated tangible gadgets that give perception and information estimation from the physical world. It is assessed that the aggregate number of internet-associated gadgets being utilized will be in the vicinity of 25 and 50 billion. As the numbers develop and advances turn out to be more develop, the volume of information distributed will increment. Web-associated gadgets innovation, alluded to as internet of things (IoT), keeps on broadening the present internet by giving network and cooperation between the physical and digital universes. Notwithstanding expanded volume, the IoT produces big data described by speed as far as time and area reliance, with an assortment of numerous modalities and changing information quality. Keen handling and investigation of this big data is the way to creating shrewd IoT applications. This chapter evaluates the distinctive machine learning techniques that deal with the difficulties in IoT information.

In this work, we study a discrete-time consensus protocol for a group of agents which communicate over a class of stochastically switching networks inspired by fish schooling. The network model incorporates the phenomenon of numerosity that has a prominent role on the collective behavior of animal groups by defining the individuals’ perception of numbers. The agents comprise leaders, which share a common state, and followers, which update their states based on information exchange among neighboring agents. We write a closed form expression for the asymptotic convergence factor of the protocol, which measures the decay rate of disagreement among the followers’ and the leaders’ states. Numerical simulations are conducted to validate analytical results and illustrate the consensus dynamics as a function of the group size, number of leaders in the group, and the numerosity.

Abstract This paper is the third in a series of efforts to address the troublesome departure of promising college students, most notably women and minorities, from the field of mechanical engineering and similar disciplines. Despite widespread and largely successful efforts to increase the numbers of women and minorities in engineering education, their numbers continue to shrink at a time when they should be expanding. Our first inquiry (IMECE 2017-72597) proposed a mismatch between the empathizing tendency of many students and a climate that discourages professional outlets for such tendencies; as well as incongruencies between professional and engineering identities. We argued that female students were deterred from their engineering aspirations by a climate that included engineering stereotypes, a traditional male-style hierarchy, and differential treatment. Our second endeavor (IMECE 2020-23679) showcased findings from a subsequent STEMpathy study we conducted at our own institution that inspired a persistence model that placed social responsibility goals, or the desire to pursue a career for the betterment of humanity, as well as treatment of students, front and center in the effort to better understand female and minority persistence. Surrounding that goal orientation are categories of factors that deter women and minorities that can be categorized as: 1) Cultural ideological forces; 2) Social structural factors; and 3) the Organizational culture of mechanical engineering. The current undertaking advances empirically based recommendations on ways to: 1) foster a more inclusive engineering culture; 2) enhance the curriculum; and 3) improve public perception of mechanical engineering with the aim of boosting students’ desire to embrace and persist in mechanical engineering. Persistence data from our study informs a five-year NSF grant: S-STEM: The Mechanical Engineering Retention, Academic Success and Career Pathway Program (NSF: DUE-2027632).

Laboratory studies are very helpful in teaching, providing experience and making the subject that is being taught more tangible to the student and hence easier to grasp. However, many educational institutions do not have the funding that the establishment and maintenance of a modern laboratory require. The solution to this issue is a remote lab, which would allow anyone to do experiments through the internet, thus giving all students the possibility to study experimental physics using high-level equipment any time and everywhere via the internet. Photovoltaic (PV) devices convert light energy to electrical energy for use in various applications. It is therefore important to understand how a specific PV device works for a range of operational conditions does. As PV systems are becoming more and more common, large numbers of skilled engineers with a greater understanding of all aspects of PV technology, both theoretical and practical, are needed. An online lab allows students to control real equipment through a visual interface and to learn in a user-friendly environment. Remote lab improve the practical knowledge of students as well as allowing them to repeat the experiment at a time suitable for their needs, unlike a physical laboratory. Therefore, a remote laboratory has been developed to allow distance learning students to investigate the energy conversion properties of photovoltaic panels. The purpose of the experiment is to study the effects of temperature and irradiance on PV panels using the characteristic measurement called the IV curve. A group of students from high school were involved in this study. Student's perception of the experience was obtained by means of personal interviews. In conclusion, the remote lab is useful as it enables students from all over the world to investigate the different properties and characteristics of photovoltaic panels.

13 million hectares of forest were lost from 2000 to 2010 (ITTO International Tropical Timber Organization) Agricultural development is one of the reasons for this deforestation. The benefits of agricultural developments are significant for residents. On the other hands, If forest protection is important for the world, what brings them better benefits than agricultural developments? It is necessary not to undermine the interests of residents for the cause of other regions, but also to benefit from participating, and to actively embark on forest conservation in order to nurture forests.Considering the global issue of forest conservation, we deal with tourism in nature, especially forest bathing in this paper. Tourists not only give money for local people, but also gives people the perception that forests are not a hindrance to cultivation, but rather meaningful resources for themselves. Research in Japan has been studying the stress reduction effects of forest bathing in the last 10 years. There are physical declines in stress hormones such as blood pressure, pulse and salivary cortisol, promotion of parasympathetic nerve activity, and decreased sympathetic nerve activity even in forest bathing for about 20 minutes (Koyama, 2009). There is also research (Takeda, 2009) that analyzed the atmosphere of forests and measured phytoncide components such as terpenes emanated from trees. It told that forest bathing is effective in reducing physical and mental parts. However, these are often influenced by weather and personal factors of subjects (Alpine,2012). In addition, since the measurement method is complicated for the physiological part, it has not reached the investigation of the scale which can be general-purpose. Research originated in Japan on forest bathing is progressing overseas aiming at the elimination of Over tourism now. We had experiments in Oku-Nikko, the Natural Park in Japan on September and November 2021. We tried to measure effects of forest bathing by performing the degrees of relaxation using EEG Measurement:αwaves increased in certain areas, and multiple subjective evaluations. The participants walked in the forest wearing bandana with simple electroencephalography on the experiments. Though temperatures and deciduous conditions are different in September and in November, effects of forest bathing were observed in both experiments. It is about 26,27℃ in the forest of Oku-Nikko on September. On the other hands, we had the experiment not as high as 10℃ on November. It seems that the situations are not so suitable for experiments in the forest bathing because of the large temperature gap. However, forest bathing has become a hot topic in foreign countries and the compositions of forests varies enclosing temperature are different among those countries. Therefore, considering such different phases is useful for our research, we will lead to the versatility of forest bathing. Participants walked some courses on September. One group walked the same 30-minute course at the forest along a fall in September (n=3) and November (n=10). According to the results of Positive and Negative Affect Schedule（PANAS）scales of 13 participants (yes/no answer), total numbers of “yes” were increased from18 at the start point to 34 after walking. The answer “active” increased from３to 11after the walking in the forest (60 minutes walking). All participants were 20s. They answered that they liked to walk in the nature. However, 5 of them answered the average exercise time per week is less than an hour and 3 participants answered 1 hour or less than 3 hours, 4 participants answered 3 hours or less than 5 hours and only 1 participant answered he exercises 5 hours or less than 10 hours per week. On the other hands, negative items decreased from 14 to 6 after walking in the forest. In addition, αwave came out loudly when 3 participants stopped to see a waterfall which was flowing sideways of the forest in September. According to our experiments, there is a possibility that forest bathing makes people feel better regardless of temperature. Participants became positive after walking in the forest. We have to proceed to analyze the date for subjective evaluation and will examine the EEG data on November, too.We started to research and will continue to use EEG measurement and will have subjective evaluation to enhance evidence for forest bathing enclosing other countries. The forests in Thailand are so different from Japanese ones. Thailand have had too many tourists in several famous cities before COVID-19. There are great forests in Thailand. We will cooperate and will find the common effects of forest bathing. In addition, informing tourists themselves of the effects of forest bathing on the spot using incorporating the brain wave measurement function into the app in the future, it will be useful for new tourism after COVID-19.

Attention to safety and health are of ever-increasing priority to industrial organizations. Good Safety is demanded by stockholders, employees, and the community while increasing injury costs provide additional motivation for safety and health excellence. Safety has always been a strong corporate value of DuPont and a vital part of its culture. As a result, DuPont has become a benchmark in safety and health performance. Since 1990, DuPont has re-engineered itself to meet global competition and address future vision. In the new re-engineered organizational structures, DuPont has also had to re-engineer its safety management systems. A special Discovery Team was chartered by DuPont senior management to determine the “best practices’ for safety and health being used in DuPont best-performing sites. A summary of the findings is presented, and five of the practices are discussed. Excellence in safety and health management is more important today than ever. Public awareness, federal and state regulations, and enlightened management have resulted in a widespread conviction that all employees have the right to work in an environment that will not adversely affect their safety and health. In DuPont, we believe that excellence in safety and health is necessary to achieve global competitiveness, maintain employee loyalty, and be an accepted member of the communities in which we make, handle, use, and transport products. Safety can also be the “catalyst” to achieving excellence in other important business parameters. The organizational and communication skills developed by management, individuals, and teams in safety can be directly applied to other company initiatives. As we look into the 21st Century, we must also recognize that new organizational structures (flatter with empowered teams) will require new safety management techniques and systems in order to maintain continuous improvement in safety performance. Injury costs, which have risen dramatically in the past twenty years, provide another incentive for safety and health excellence. Shown in the Figure 1, injury costs have increased even after correcting for inflation. Many companies have found these costs to be an “invisible drain” on earnings and profitability. In some organizations, significant initiatives have been launched to better manage the workers’ compensation systems. We have found that the ultimate solution is to prevent injuries and incidents before they occur. A globally-respected company, DuPont is regarded as a well-managed, extremely ethical firm that is the benchmark in industrial safety performance. Like many other companies, DuPont has re-engineered itself and downsized its operations since 1985. Through these changes, we have maintained dedication to our principles and developed new techniques to manage in these organizational environments. As a diversified company, our operations involve chemical process facilities, production line operations, field activities, and sales and distribution of materials. Our customer base is almost entirely industrial and yet we still maintain a high level of consumer awareness and positive perception. The DuPont concern for safety dates back to the early 1800s and the first days of the company. In 1802 E.I. DuPont, a Frenchman, began manufacturing quality grade explosives to fill America’s growing need to build roads, clear fields, increase mining output, and protect its recently won independence. Because explosives production is such a hazardous industry, DuPont recognized and accepted the need for an effective safety effort. The building walls of the first powder mill near Wilmington, Delaware, were built three stones thick on three sides. The back remained open to the Brandywine River to direct any explosive forces away from other buildings and employees. To set the safety example, DuPont also built his home and the homes of his managers next to the powder yard. An effective safety program was a necessity. It represented the first defense against instant corporate liquidation. Safety needs more than a well-designed plant, however. In 1811, work rules were posted in the mill to guide employee work habits. Though not nearly as sophisticated as the safety standards of today, they did introduce an important basic concept — that safety must be a line management responsibility. Later, DuPont introduced an employee health program and hired a company doctor. An early step taken in 1912 was the keeping of safety statistics, approximately 60 years before the federal requirement to do so. We had a visible measure of our safety performance and were determined that we were going to improve it. When the nation entered World War I, the DuPont Company supplied 40 percent of the explosives used by the Allied Forces, more than 1.5 billion pounds. To accomplish this task, over 30,000 new employees were hired and trained to build and operate many plants. Among these facilities was the largest smokeless powder plant the world had ever seen. The new plant was producing granulated powder in a record 116 days after ground breaking. The trends on the safety performance chart reflect the problems that a large new work force can pose until the employees fully accept the company’s safety philosophy. The first arrow reflects the World War I scale-up, and the second arrow represents rapid diversification into new businesses during the 1920s. These instances of significant deterioration in safety performance reinforced DuPont’s commitment to reduce the unsafe acts that were causing 96 percent of our injuries. Only 4 percent of injuries result from unsafe conditions or equipment — the remainder result from the unsafe acts of people. This is an important concept if we are to focus our attention on reducing injuries and incidents within the work environment. World War II brought on a similar set of demands. The story was similar to World War I but the numbers were even more astonishing: one billion dollars in capital expenditures, 54 new plants, 75,000 additional employees, and 4.5 billion pounds of explosives produced — 20 percent of the volume used by the Allied Forces. Yet, the performance during the war years showed no significant deviation from the pre-war years. In 1941, the DuPont Company was 10 times safer than all industry and 9 times safer than the Chemical Industry. Management and the line organization were finally working as they should to control the real causes of injuries. Today, DuPont is about 50 times safer than US industrial safety performance averages. Comparing performance to other industries, it is interesting to note that seemingly “hazard-free” industries seem to have extraordinarily high injury rates. This is because, as DuPont has found out, performance is a function of injury prevention and safety management systems, not hazard exposure. Our success in safety results from a sound safety management philosophy. Each of the 125 DuPont facilities is responsible for its own safety program, progress, and performance. However, management at each of these facilities approaches safety from the same fundamental and sound philosophy. This philosophy can be expressed in eleven straightforward principles. The first principle is that all injuries can be prevented. That statement may seem a bit optimistic. In fact, we believe that this is a realistic goal and not just a theoretical objective. Our safety performance proves that the objective is achievable. We have plants with over 2,000 employees that have operated for over 10 years without a lost time injury. As injuries and incidents are investigated, we can always identify actions that could have prevented that incident. If we manage safety in a proactive — rather than reactive — manner, we will eliminate injuries by reducing the acts and conditions that cause them. The second principle is that management, which includes all levels through first-line supervisors, is responsible and accountable for preventing injuries. Only when senior management exerts sustained and consistent leadership in establishing safety goals, demanding accountability for safety performance and providing the necessary resources, can a safety program be effective in an industrial environment. The third principle states that, while recognizing management responsibility, it takes the combined energy of the entire organization to reach sustained, continuous improvement in safety and health performance. Creating an environment in which employees feel ownership for the safety effort and make significant contributions is an essential task for management, and one that needs deliberate and ongoing attention. The fourth principle is a corollary to the first principle that all injuries are preventable. It holds that all operating exposures that may result in injuries or illnesses can be controlled. No matter what the exposure, an effective safeguard can be provided. It is preferable, of course, to eliminate sources of danger, but when this is not reasonable or practical, supervision must specify measures such as special training, safety devices, and protective clothing. Our fifth safety principle states that safety is a condition of employment. Conscientious assumption of safety responsibility is required from all employees from their first day on the job. Each employee must be convinced that he or she has a responsibility for working safely. The sixth safety principle: Employees must be trained to work safely. We have found that an awareness for safety does not come naturally and that people have to be trained to work safely. With effective training programs to teach, motivate, and sustain safety knowledge, all injuries and illnesses can be eliminated. Our seventh principle holds that management must audit performance on the workplace to assess safety program success. Comprehensive inspections of both facilities and programs not only confirm their effectiveness in achieving the desired performance, but also detect specific problems and help to identify weaknesses in the safety effort. The Company’s eighth principle states that all deficiencies must be corrected promptly. Without prompt action, risk of injuries will increase and, even more important, the credibility of management’s safety efforts will suffer. Our ninth principle is a statement that off-the-job safety is an important part of the overall safety effort. We do not expect nor want employees to “turn safety on” as they come to work and “turn it off” when they go home. The company safety culture truly becomes of the individual employee’s way of thinking. The tenth principle recognizes that it’s good business to prevent injuries. Injuries cost money. However, hidden or indirect costs usually exceed the direct cost. Our last principle is the most important. Safety must be integrated as core business and personal value. There are two reasons for this. First, we’ve learned from almost 200 years of experience that 96 percent of safety incidents are directly caused by the action of people, not by faulty equipment or inadequate safety standards. But conversely, it is our people who provide the solutions to our safety problems. They are the one essential ingredient in the recipe for a safe workplace. Intelligent, trained, and motivated employees are any company’s greatest resource. Our success in safety depends upon the men and women in our plants following procedures, participating actively in training, and identifying and alerting each other and management to potential hazards. By demonstrating a real concern for each employee, management helps establish a mutual respect, and the foundation is laid for a solid safety program. This, of course, is also the foundation for good employee relations. An important lesson learned in DuPont is that the majority of injuries are caused by unsafe acts and at-risk behaviors rather than unsafe equipment or conditions. In fact, in several DuPont studies it was estimated that 96 percent of injuries are caused by unsafe acts. This was particularly revealing when considering safety audits — if audits were only focused on conditions, at best we could only prevent four percent of our injuries. By establishing management systems for safety auditing that focus on people, including audit training, techniques, and plans, all incidents are preventable. Of course, employee contribution and involvement in auditing leads to sustainability through stakeholdership in the system. Management safety audits help to make manage the “behavioral balance.” Every job and task performed at a site can do be done at-risk or safely. The essence of a good safety system ensures that safe behavior is the accepted norm amongst employees, and that it is the expected and respected way of doing things. Shifting employees norms contributes mightily to changing culture. The management safety audit provides a way to quantify these norms. DuPont safety performance has continued to improve since we began keeping records in 1911 until about 1990. In the 1990–1994 time frame, performance deteriorated as shown in the chart that follows: This increase in injuries caused great concern to senior DuPont management as well as employees. It occurred while the corporation was undergoing changes in organization. In order to sustain our technological, competitive, and business leadership positions, DuPont began re-engineering itself beginning in about 1990. New streamlined organizational structures and collaborative work processes eliminated many positions and levels of management and supervision. The total employment of the company was reduced about 25 percent during these four years. In our traditional hierarchical organization structures, every level of supervision and management knew exactly what they were expected to do with safety, and all had important roles. As many of these levels were eliminated, new systems needed to be identified for these new organizations. In early 1995, Edgar S. Woolard, DuPont Chairman, chartered a Corporate Discovery Team to look for processes that will put DuPont on a consistent path toward a goal of zero injuries and occupational illnesses. The cross-functional team used a mode of “discovery through learning” from as many DuPont employees and sites around the world. The Discovery Team fostered the rapid sharing and leveraging of “best practices” and innovative approaches being pursued at DuPont’s plants, field sites, laboratories, and office locations. In short, the team examined the company’s current state, described the future state, identified barriers between the two, and recommended key ways to overcome these barriers. After reporting back to executive management in April, 1995, the Discovery Team was realigned to help organizations implement their recommendations. The Discovery Team reconfirmed key values in DuPont — in short, that all injuries, incidents, and occupational illnesses are preventable and that safety is a source of competitive advantage. As such, the steps taken to improve safety performance also improve overall competitiveness. Senior management made this belief clear: “We will strengthen our business by making safety excellence an integral part of all business activities.” One of the key findings of the Discovery Team was the identification of the best practices used within the company, which are listed below: ▪ Felt Leadership – Management Commitment ▪ Business Integration ▪ Responsibility and Accountability ▪ Individual/Team Involvement and Influence ▪ Contractor Safety ▪ Metrics and Measurements ▪ Communications ▪ Rewards and Recognition ▪ Caring Interdependent Culture; Team-Based Work Process and Systems ▪ Performance Standards and Operating Discipline ▪ Training/Capability ▪ Technology ▪ Safety and Health Resources ▪ Management and Team Audits ▪ Deviation Investigation ▪ Risk Management and Emergency Response ▪ Process Safety ▪ Off-the-Job Safety and Health Education Attention to each of these best practices is essential to achieve sustained improvements in safety and health. The Discovery Implementation in conjunction with DuPont Safety and Environmental Management Services has developed a Safety Self-Assessment around these systems. In this presentation, we will discuss a few of these practices and learn what they mean. Paper published with permission.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the digital content of publications of one issue of the daily All-Ukrainian newspaper “Den” (March 13-14, 2020). The author aims to identify the main thematic groups of digital designations, as well as to consider cases of justified and unsuccessful use of digital designations. Applying the content analysis method, the author identifies publications that contain numerical notations, determines the number of such notations and their affiliation with the main subject groups. Finds that the thematic group of digital designations “time” (58.6% of all digital designations) is much more dominant. This indicates that timing is the most important task of a newspaper text. The second largest group of digital designations is “measure” (15.8% of all digital designations). It covers dimensions and proportions, measurements of distance, weight, volume, and more. The third largest group of digital signage is money (8.2% of all digital signage), the fourth is numbering (5.2% of all digital signage), and the fifth is people (4.4% of all digital signage). The author focuses on the fact that the digits of the journalist’s text are both a source of information and a catch for the reader. Vivid indicators give the text a sense of accuracy. When referring digital data to the text, journalists must adhere to certain rules for the writing of ordinal numbers with incremental graduation; submission of dates; pointing to unique integers that are combined (or not combined) with units of physical quantities, monetary units, etc.; writing a numerator at the beginning of a sentence; unified presentation of data. This will greatly facilitate the reader’s perception of the information.

Background: Public behaviour and the new hostile threats • Civil contingencies planning and preparedness for hostile threats requires accurate and up to date knowledge about how the public might behave in relation to such incidents. Inaccurate understandings of public behaviour can lead to dangerous and counterproductive practices and policies. • There is consistent evidence across both hostile threats and other kinds of emergencies and disasters that significant numbers of those affected give each other support, cooperate, and otherwise interact socially within the incident itself. • In emergency incidents, competition among those affected occurs in only limited situations, and loss of behavioural control is rare. • Spontaneous cooperation among the public in emergency incidents, based on either social capital or emergent social identity, is a crucial part of civil contingencies planning. • There has been relatively little research on public behaviour in response to the new hostile threats of the past ten years, however. • The programme of work summarized in this briefing document came about in response to a wave of false alarm flight incidents in the 2010s, linked to the new hostile threats (i.e., marauding terrorist attacks). • By using a combination of archive data for incidents in Great Britain 2010-2019, interviews, video data analysis, and controlled experiments using virtual reality technology, we were able to examine experiences, measure behaviour, and test hypotheses about underlying psychological mechanisms in both false alarms and public interventions against a hostile threat. Re-visiting the relationship between false alarms and crowd disasters • The Bethnal Green tube disaster of 1943, in which 173 people died, has historically been used to suggest that (mis)perceived hostile threats can lead to uncontrolled ‘stampedes’. • Re-analysis of witness statements suggests that public fears of Germany bombs were realistic rather than unreasonable, and that flight behaviour was socially structured rather than uncontrolled. • Evidence for a causal link between the flight of the crowd and the fatal crowd collapse is weak at best. • Altogether, the analysis suggests the importance of examining people’s beliefs about context to understand when they might interpret ambiguous signals as a hostile threat, and that. Tthe concepts of norms and relationships offer better ways to explain such incidents than ‘mass panic’. Why false alarms occur • The wider context of terrorist threat provides a framing for the public’s perception of signals as evidence of hostile threats. In particular, the magnitude of recent psychologically relevant terrorist attacks predicts likelihood of false alarm flight incidents. • False alarms in Great Britain are more likely to occur in those towns and cities that have seen genuine terrorist incidents. • False alarms in Great Britain are more likely to occur in the types of location where terrorist attacks happen, such as shopping areass, transport hubs, and other crowded places. • The urgent or flight behaviour of other people (including the emergency services) influences public perceptions that there is a hostile threat, particularly in situations of greater ambiguity, and particularly when these other people are ingroup. • High profile tweets suggesting a hostile threat, including from the police, have been associated with the size and scale of false alarm responses. • In most cases, it is a combination of factors – context, others’ behaviour, communications – that leads people to flee. A false alarm tends not to be sudden or impulsive, and often follows an initial phase of discounting threat – as with many genuine emergencies. 2.4 How the public behave in false alarm flight incidents • Even in those false alarm incidents where there is urgent flight, there are also other behaviours than running, including ignoring the ‘threat’, and walking away. • Injuries occur but recorded injuries are relatively uncommon. • Hiding is a common behaviour. In our evidence, this was facilitated by orders from police and offers from people staff in shops and other premises. • Supportive behaviours are common, including informational and emotional support. • Members of the public often cooperate with the emergency services and comply with their orders but also question instructions when the rationale is unclear. • Pushing, trampling and other competitive behaviour can occur,s but only in restricted situations and briefly. • At the Oxford Street Black Friday 2017 false alarm, rather than an overall sense of unity across the crowd, camaraderie existed only in pockets. This was likely due to the lack of a sense of common fate or reference point across the incident; the fragmented experience would have hindered the development of a shared social identity across the crowd. • Large and high profile false alarm incidents may be associated with significant levels of distress and even humiliation among those members of the public affected, both at the time and in the aftermath, as the rest of society reflects and comments on the incident. Public behaviour in response to visible marauding attackers • Spontaneous, coordinated public responses to marauding bladed attacks have been observed on a number of occasions. • Close examination of marauding bladed attacks suggests that members of the public engage in a wide variety of behaviours, not just flight. • Members of the public responding to marauding bladed attacks adopt a variety of complementary roles. These, that may include defending, communicating, first aid, recruiting others, marshalling, negotiating, risk assessment, and evidence gathering. Recommendations for practitioners and policymakers • Embed the psychology of public behaviour in emergencies in your training and guidance. • Continue to inform the public and promote public awareness where there is an increased threat. • Build long-term relations with the public to achieve trust and influence in emergency preparedness. • Use a unifying language and supportive forms of communication to enhance unity both within the crowd and between the crowd and the authorities. • Authorities and responders should take a reflexive approach to their responses to possible hostile threats, by reflecting upon how their actions might be perceived by the public and impact (positively and negatively) upon public behaviour. • To give emotional support, prioritize informative and actionable risk and crisis communication over emotional reassurances. • Provide first aid kits in transport infrastructures to enable some members of the public more effectively to act as zero responders.