Affective stimuli can elicit fast and automatic responses. Traditional accounts assume a dual route mechanism with one route underlying automatic processing and one route underlying controlled processing. Recent studies show that automatic processes may be affected by top-down influences. To account for this interaction between automatic and controlled processing, we present a computational mod...

Feature modeling is an important approach to capturing commonalities and variabilities in system families and product lines. In this paper, we propose a cardinality-based notation for feature modeling, which integrates a number of existing extensions of previous approaches. We then introduce and motivate the novel concept of staged configuration. Staged configuration can be achieved by the step...

In this paper we present a hierarchical framework for representation of manipulation actions and its applicability to the problem of top down action extraction from observation. The framework consists of novel probabilistic semantic models, which encode contact relations as probability distributions over the action phase. The models are action descriptive and can be used to provide probabilisti...

In this research, we employ Agent-Based Modeling to analyze how asset prices are affected by investors’ Behavior. We construct a virtual financial markets that contains several types of investors: fundamentalists and non-fudamentalists. In this analysis, we place focus on the influence of overconfident investors on financial markets. As a result of intensive analysis, we find that overconfident...

Prosodic prominence denotes the perceptual salience of linguistic units. There exists no agreement on (1) adequate methods for its subjective measurement, (2) its objective acoustic correlates and (3) its relationship to linguistic structure. A traditional approach for evaluating any of these descriptive layers is an inter-level comparison, e.g. between a perceptual and an acoustic model of pro...

This paper describes a method to build artificial societies that can dynamically expand themselves from bottom-up, in order to cope with environmental changes. This method is then applied to model the evolutions through the first stages of human societies, inspired by social science theories.

Selecting visual targets for saccadic eye movements is a vital step in sensorimotor processing. This selection is made on the basis of target salience: a saccade tends to be made to the most interesting part of the visual "eld. Both bottom-up and top-down processes have been postulated to contribute to salience, but the exact mechanisms by which some areas of the visual "eld are rendered to be ...

To evaluate how top-down and bottom-up processes contribute to learning from animated displays, we conducted four experiments that varied either in the design of animations or the prior knowledge of the learners. Experiments 1–3 examined whether adding interactivity and signaling to an animation benefits learners in developing a mental model of a mechanical system. Although learners utilized in...

Habitual sentences (e.g. Bill smokes.) generalize an event over time, but how do you know when a habitual sentence is true? We develop a computational model and use this to guide experiments into the truth conditions of habitual language. In Expts. 1 & 2, we measure participants’ prior expectations about the frequency with which an event occurs and validate the predictions of the model for when...