A survey of the discrepant findings regarding the effects of attention focusing and distraction on exposure suggested that subjective measures of anxiety and avoidance respond better to the latter condition, and heart rate (HR) reaction responds to the former. To test this hypothesis, 63 dental phobics were recruited who had not visited a dentist for a mean of 6.6 (1.5-25) years. Participants r...

Query relevance ranking and sentence saliency ranking are the two main tasks in extractive query-focused summarization. Previous supervised summarization systems often perform the two tasks in isolation. However, since reference summaries are the trade-off between relevance and saliency, using them as supervision, neither of the two rankers could be trained well. This paper proposes a novel sum...

Some fifty years after the first physiological studies of auditory attention, the field is now ripening, with exciting recent insights into the psychophysics, psychology, and neural basis of auditory attention. Current research seeks to unravel the complex interactions of pre-attentive and attentive processing of the acoustic scene, the role of auditory attention in mediating receptive-field pl...

When confronted with cluttered natural environments, animals still perform orders of magnitude better than artificial vision systems in tasks such as orienting, target detection, navigation and scene understanding. The recent widespread availability of significant computational resources, however, in particular through the deployment of so-called "Beowulf" clusters of low-cost personal computer...

A significant component of human observational learning is the ability to focus attention toward important or relevant input features. Amechanism with this capability can serve as an inductive bias to facilitate learning in both humans and machines. Past attempts to model attentional focus for human learning have postulated a single salience value for each feature, such that features with great...

Ruminative habits of thought about one's problems and the resulting consequences are correlated with symptoms of depression and cognitive biases (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008). In our orienting task, brooders and non-brooders concentrated on self-focusing phrases while they were also exposed to neutral target words. On each trial in the unfocused condition, participants saw and th...

Any attempt to introduce automation into the monitoring of complex physical systems must start from a robust anomaly detection capability. This task is far from straightforward, for a single definition of what constitutes an anomaly is difficult to come by. In addition, to make the monitoring process efficient, and to avoid the potential for information overload on human operators, attention fo...

Any attempt to introduce automation into the moniwring of complex physical systems must start from a robust anomaly detection capability. This task is far from straightforward, for a single definition of what constitutes an anomaly is difficult to come by. In addition, to make the monitoring process efficient, and to avoid the potential for information overload on human operators, attention foc...

Comprehension and production of text and discourse do not solely depend on linguistic expressions, but also on the physical context. The questions addressed in this study are 1) whether deictic gestures are substitutable for deictic expressions, and 2) whether deictic gestures establish joint attention. An eye tracking experiment investigated the effect of referring expressions and gestures on ...