Of the many horrors of September 11, 2001, the sight of people falling and jumping to their deaths from the Towers of the World Trade Center will not be soon forgotten by anyone watching. The sight brutally expressed the desperation of those trapped above the raging fires, unable or unwilling to descend through the wounded structures. Even in light of the eventual collapse of the structures, th...

This workshop will focus on the human experience when interacting with different media, such as virtual reality, computer games, simulation rides, television shows, radio programmes, or books. On the one hand, many of these media attempt to represent reality as convincingly as possible, whereas on the other hand many people seek out these media to escape reality, to become immersed in a differe...

O n page 999, Holway et al. reveal that worm embryos would rather risk genomic mutation than disturb the timing of cell division. DNA damage–induced checkpoints, the group fi nds, are silenced during early embryogenesis. The need for the silencing arises because of the importance of timing in embryogenesis. At the worm’s two-cell stage, for instance, a two-min...

This paper presents a solution to the problem of the creation of new terms by suggesting that representations can come from the environment, and that through experience an agent discovers which representations are useful. If suitable feature building mechanisms are built into a system then it can build a large number of features of an object in the environment, many of which may be redundant. T...

This research examined human defensive reactivity when exposure to an aversive event could be escaped but not entirely avoided. Prolonged visual cues indicated whether exposure to an upcoming aversive (i.e., disgusting) picture could be terminated after onset (escaped) or not, or that a neutral go signal would appear. Acoustically elicited startle reflexes were measured during each cue interval...