The cerebral cortex of the cat contains between 1 and 2 dozen representations of the visual field with different functional specializations. Six visual field maps lie along both banks of the suprasylvian sulcus, lateral and anterior to the visual areas in the occipital cortex. We have studied single-unit receptive field properties and their global organization across the visual field in 2 of th...

The role of scenic landscapes in restoring human mental fatigue has begun to receive attention from landscape researchers. However, little is known about the positive role of visually-preferred landscapes on restorative environments and in improving the mental fatigue of people. This study attempted to determine the relationship between the predictors of preference and restorative components of...

Visual world studies show that upon hearing a word in target-absent visual context containing related and unrelated items, toddlers adults briefly direct their gaze toward phonologically before shifting semantically visually ones. We present neural network model processes dynamic unfolding phonological representations of words maps them to static internal lexical, semantic, representations. The...

Animals exhibit different degrees of preference toward various visual stimuli. In addition, it has been shown that strongly preferred stimuli can often act as a reward. The aim of the present study was to determine what features determine the strength of the preference for visual stimuli in order to examine neural mechanisms of preference judgment. We used 50 color photographs obtained from the...

Most NLP systems make predictions based solely on linguistic (textual or spoken) input. We show how to use visual information to make better linguistic predictions. We focus on selectional preference; specifically, determining the plausible noun arguments for particular verb predicates. For each argument noun, we extract visual features from corresponding images on the web. For each verb predic...

What visual textures do people like and why? Here, we test whether the ecological valence theory proposed for color preferences can also predict people's preferences for visual texture. According to the theory, people should like visual textures associated with positive objects or entities and dislike visual textures associated with negative objects or entities. We compare the results for the e...

Current literature on restorative environments generally shows the importance of urban natural landscapes in increasing perceived restorativeness of urban environments. However, little is known about the positive role of visual characteristics of urban natural landscapes in increasing Perceived Restorative Potential (PRP) of urban environments. This study aimed to understand the role of four pr...

The goal of this research is to develop a methodology that will improve public satisfaction with highway design and planning where visual presentation of design options is performed. A review of two visual assessment methodologies shows that these either cannot provide satisfactory design element guidance or are too resource-intensive to be useful in situations where many design elements are un...