The Real World Computing (RWC) program is starting this year on a large scale as the successor to the Fifth Generation Computer project which formally ended in 1992. This is the next Japanese national project launched by M I T I (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) with a budget of over $ 500 million for ten years The reason why we dare call it "program" is that we intend to pursue mo...

Evidence suggests that the neural system associated with face processing is a distributed cortical network containing both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. While bottom-up face processing has been the focus of many studies, the neural areas involved in the top-down face processing have not been extensively investigated due to difficulty in isolating top-down influences from the bottom-up resp...

INTRODUCTION Emotional stimulus is processed automatically in a bottom-up way or can be processed voluntarily in a top-down way. Imaging studies have indicated that bottom-up and top-down processing are mediated through different neural systems. However, temporal differentiation of top-down versus bottom-up processing of facial emotional expressions has remained to be clarified. The present stu...

Traditional bottom-up models of visual processing assume that figure-ground organization precedes object recognition. This assumption seems logically necessary: How can object recognition occur before a region is labeled as figure? However, some behavioral studies find that familiar regions are more likely to be labeled figure than less familiar regions, a problematic finding for bottom-up mode...