We attempt to use a group-specific stochastic frontier method to analyze temporal change in the regional productivity performance of China. This method allows us to separate China into three different regional groups, namely the eastern, central, and western, each of which can have its own temporal movement of inefficiency. Our estimation indicates that Shanghai is the most efficient economy in...

This paper calls attention to research showing that binocular disparity, which is an effective cue to depth, plays a secondary role, at best, in the perception of 3D shape. This claim has implications both for how shape should be studied and how this unique perceptual property should be modeled. These issues are discussed from a historical perspective, which shows how the failure to appreciate ...

Sensitivity to binocular disparity modulation has been shown to have a bandpass nature. This paper presents a computational account for the disparity modulation function (DMF) in terms of a Bayesian surface reconstruction. The Bayesian approach suggests that prior assumptions about surface structure will affect the perception of disparity modulation. Taking into account a prior constraint of su...

For the online control of movement, it is important to respond fast. The extent to which cues are effective in guiding our actions might therefore depend on how quickly they provide new information. We compared the latency to alter a movement when monocular and binocular cues indicated that the surface slant had changed. We found that subjects adjusted their movement in response to three types ...

In the past decade, effects of pattern coherence have indicated that perception during binocular rivalry does not result solely from reciprocal inhibitory competition between monocular channels. In this study we were interested in feature selectivity both during dominance and during suppression. The first experiment shows that a suppressed stimulus perceptually appears earlier when it shares fe...

Recent physiological studies have established that cortical cells that are tuned for the direction of motion may also exhibit tuning for binocular disparity. This tuning does not appear to provide any advantage in discriminating the direction of global motion in random-dot kinematograms. Here we investigated the possibility that this tuning may be important in the perception of transparent moti...

This paper describes a series of visual search experiments for targets defined by their hinocular characteristics. In searches for targets defined by binocular rivalry among fused distractors, or vice versa, the rivalrous items do not "pop out" (reaction time [RT] increases with number of distractors). Binocular luster, a variety of rivalry, is an exception. Luster, an important property of vis...

Familiar and recognizable stimuli enjoy an advantage of predominance during binocular rivalry, and this advantage is usually attributed to their enhanced processing during the dominant phase. However, do familiar and recognizable stimuli have an advantage in breaking suppression? Test images were gradually introduced to one eye to compete against a standard high-contrast dynamic noise pattern p...

Binocular disparities have a straightforward geometric relation to object depth, but the computation that humans use to turn disparity signals into depth percepts is neither straightforward nor well understood. One seemingly solid result, which came out of Wheatstone's work in the 1830s, is that the sign and magnitude of horizontal disparity predict the perceived depth of an object: 'positive' ...