In the present study, we addressed the problem of whether hand representations, derived from the control of hand gesture, are used in handedness recognition. Pictures of hands and fingers, assuming either common or uncommon postures, were presented to right-handed subjects, who were required to judge their handedness. In agreement with previous results (Parsons, 1987, 1994; Gentilucci, Daprati, & Gangitano, 1998), subjects recognized handedness through mental movement of their own hand in order to match the posture of the presented hand. This (...) was proved by a control experiment of physical matching. The new finding was that presentation of common finger postures affected responses differently from presentation of less common finger postures. These effects could be not attributed to mental matching movements nor related to richness in hand-finger cues useful for handedness recognition. The results of the present study are discussed in the context of the notion that implicit visual analysis of the presented hands is performed before mental movement of one's hand takes place (Parsons, 1987; Gentilucci et al., 1998). In this process, hand representation acquired by experience in the control and observation of one's and other people's hand gestures is used. We propose that such an immediate recognition mechanism belongs to the class of mental processes which are grouped under the name of intuition, that is, the processes by which situations or people's intentions are immediately understood, without conscious reasoning. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the international scientific output on postpartum depression research during 2000–2020 through a bibliometric analysis and to explore research hotspots, frontiers, and trends in the field of postpartum depression. We searched the Web of Science Core Collection for publications on postpartum depression published between 2000 and 2020. CiteSpace, gCluto, and other software applications were used to analyze the data by year, journal, and country. A total of 2,963 publications were retrieved and 96 (...) countries or regions published related papers. The United States had the largest number of published papers and the highest betweenness centrality, which is the dominant position in the field of postpartum depression. A total of 717 journals published papers, with the Archives of Womens Mental Health ranked first in terms of volume and betweenness centrality. In this study, 31 high-frequency main MeSH terms/subheadings were selected. The high-frequency MeSH terms were clustered into six categories: an overview of depression-related research, diagnostic and screening scales for postpartum depression, epidemiological investigation into postpartum depression, treatment and drug selection for postpartum depression, psychological research on postpartum depression, and etiology, physiopathology, complications, genetics of postpartum depression. Finally, we used strategic diagram to analyze research trends in postpartum depression. This study has identified a continuous significant increase in the publication of PPD articles. Currently, the etiology, physiological pathology, intervention and treatment of complications on PPD are immature, which provides reference for the trend of obstetric psychology. (shrink)

Social semiotics is now widely regarded as one of the leading research areas. This study is the first attempt to present a holistic overview of social semiotics based on the data in the Web of Science core collection database from 2001 to 2020. The study investigates, among other issues, social semiotics’ publishing tendency, the most productive authors, countries, institutions, and hotspots. The results exhibit a steady rise in its publications and citations. The current analysis verifies the growing quantitative and (...) qualitative research contributions and influences of this field. Furthermore, what the journals focus on are the innovative and contemporary themes, manifested predominantly in sign, multimodality, gender, experimental semiotics, advertising, culture, and social media, which involve a wide range of methodologies to make the research more acceptable and constructive. These results are expected to offer refreshing insights that inspire scholars in formulating scientific agendas and advising their research strategies, thereby facilitating substantial contributions to the domain. (shrink)

The growing influence of the visual media in contemporary society is quite alarming; hence, learning to explicate them is inevitable. This is a paradigm shift from verbal argumentation to visual argumentation. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of visual analysis and visual literacy, a part of discourse analysis. Visuals employ a number of rhetorical devices; however, understanding the effectiveness of these devices is still a challenge. Adopting Visual Argumentation (...) Theory, the article analyzes argumentation in cartoons on the post-election violence that rocked Kenya in 2007/2008. From the analyses, it is concluded that visuals can argue as simply and forcefully as their verbal counterparts. The blending of caricature and portraiture makes them even more explicit as portraiture denotes the characters so that we can recognize who they are; caricature ridicules them, analogy attributes actions to them in a satirical or sarcastic way, and cultural memory is needed to access the reference to the analogies. Visuals are designed to make the reader think not only about the event or the people being portrayed but also about the message being communicated. This means visuals have the ability to stretch the truth beyond caricature or mere amusement. (shrink)

Enterprise Network has increasingly gained popularity in academia. Over the past few decades, a substantial amount of EN studies have been published in China. Drawing upon a sample of 603 papers retrieved from the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index database between 1998 and 2020, this study aims to delve into the status quo, knowledge base, research focus, and evolutionary trends of EN research in China. A multifaceted bibliometric analysis was performed using CiteSpace. The findings mainly indicate that the research (...) on EN in China has a clear development context, and the research content gradually changes from macro to micro. In addition to foreign Social Network theories, the research results of domestic scholars have become the basic knowledge in this field. The research includes these topics: the conceptualization of EN, EN as indicators of enterprise development, EN’s impact on start-ups, mechanisms of EN’s effect and governance of EN. The potential direction for future research has been identified as the integration between EN and other forms of networks, and the structure of EN. (shrink)

Brownfield has become one of the critical issues in modern cities. Over the past few decades, a considerable number of papers on brownfield research have been published. This study reviewed 773 documents themed with “brownfield” in the Web of Science core database between 1980 and 2020 and used the CiteSpace software to sort out the spatial and temporal distribution, knowledge groups, subject structures and hotspot fields, and evolutionary trends of global brownfield research. The analysis focuses on distribution of lead (...) authors and their institutions, high-frequency categories and keywords, high influential journals, author contribution, and evolutionary trends based on coword analysis, coauthor analysis, cocitation analysis, and cluster analysis of documents. On the basis of the aforementioned keywords, clusters, and citation bursts analysis, this paper establishes a multidisciplinary framework for brownfield research, suggesting the main research directions for the future development, which provides theoretical support and practical guidance for the research direction of future brownfield research. (shrink)

The article focuses on the differences between Eastern and Western art, characteristics of the representation of women's images in Eastern and Western art, and aesthetic criteria regarding women's images in Eastern and Western art. The author emphasized the need to understand the image of women in Eastern and Western visual artworks in different cultural and historical contexts and concluded that studying the image of women in visual art can help one better understand regional gender paradigm differences. To understand (...) the representation of women in Eastern and Western cultures, it is necessary to first understand the differences and similarities between these two cultures in order to gain a deeper understanding of how women are portrayed in these cultures. A few of the differences that can be found between East and West include the geographical structure, the ethno-cultural colors, the social outlooks, and the aesthetic ideals of the two regions. In addition to these factors, it is also important to consider how the visual arts of the two regions differ in their methods, materials, and religious, philosophical and philosophical perspectives. Throughout the article, the author discusses these aspects in great detail, showing specific approaches as to how the female image is represented in Eastern and Western visual art traditions. As such, the article provides valuable insight into the cultural divide between East and West and how their respective artistic styles have interacted with each other. (shrink)

Global warming and other climate issues seriously threaten global sustainable development. As citizen environmental behavior can have a positive impact on the environment, it is of great theoretical significance and practical reference value to study the impact of psychological distance theory on citizen environmental behavior. This study obtained 2,633 related studies from 1980 to 2020 from the Web of Science as research objects, and used CiteSpace, VOSviewer, Netdraw, and other software programs to perform a bibliometric analysis, which can show (...) the complex relationship implied in the citation, intuitively grasp the development context and hot frontier in this field, and help scholars better study citizen environmental behavior. The results and conclusions are as follows. The related research covered three periods: infancy, growth, and outbreak. Chronologically, the relevant research evolved from building models to analyze the impact of environmental enrichment on human environmental behavior, to studying the motivation behind citizen environmental behavior, and finally to paying attention to sustainable development. A cluster analysis of high-frequency keywords identified three research hotspots: “drivers of psychological distance of environmental change perception on citizen environmental behavior,” “impact of social distance on adolescents’ behavior,” and “construal level theory and citizen green behavior.” Based on these findings, possible future research directions were identified, including changing from a single theory to a combination of multiple theories to comprehensively study citizen environmental protection behavior; analyzing the motivation of citizen environmental behavior and summarizing the general motivation of environmental behavior according to its internal relationship; and determining how to narrow the global psychological distance, strengthen the awareness of the community of human destiny, and explore the establishment of an efficient global climate cooperation mechanism. (shrink)

In this article we explore the relationship between semiotic analysis of images and quantitative analysis of vast image corpora, in particular the work produced by Lev Manovich and the Cultural Analytics Lab, called “Media Visualization.” Media Visualization has been chosen as corpus because of its metavisual operation (images are visualized and analyzed by images) and its innovating way of conceiving analysis: by visual instruments. In this paper semiotics is used as an approach to Media Visualization and (...) taken as an object of study as well, especially visual semiotics. In this sense, a comparison between visual semiotics (close reading of small corpora) and quantitative analyses of images (distant reading of vast collections) are conducted from a semiotic point of view. Post-Greimassian semiotics guides this study with respect to the issue of the image-within-an-image and metavisual visualization; Peircean semiotics is employed to explain and develop the notion of diagram. (shrink)

In this paper I will present a visual method that I have created to demonstrate the validity of propositional arguments and predicates, based on the traditional Venn diagrams. This idea was born after becoming aware of how useful visual methods are in other scientific fields, such as geometrical representations of arithmetic and algebraic concepts. This method illustrates the relationship between propositional logic, predicate logic and set theory, and it can be used to explain linguistic semantic concepts such as (...) synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, entailment, and lexical substitution. (shrink)

It has been recently argued that some machine learning techniques known as Kernel methods could be relevant for capturing cognitive and neural mechanisms (Jäkel, Schölkopf, & Wichmann, 2009). We point out that ‘‘String kernels,’’ initially designed for protein function prediction and spam detection, are virtually identical to one contending proposal for how the brain encodes orthographic information during reading. We suggest some reasons for this connection and we derive new ideas for visual word recognition that are successfully put to (...) the test. We argue that the versatility and performance of String kernels makes a compelling case for their implementation in the brain. (shrink)

Despite the importance of effective observational analysis in the technical aspects of climbing performance, limited research informs this aspect of climbing coach education. Thus, the purpose of the present research was to explore cognitive-perceptual mechanisms underpinning visual search strategies of expert and novice climbing coaches through the novel combination of eye-tracking technology and retrospective think-aloud methodology. Analysis of gaze data revealed expert climbing coaches to demonstrate fewer fixations of greater duration, and fixate on distinctly different areas of (...) the visual display, than their novice counterparts. Retrospective think-aloud interviews further demonstrated differences in the cognitive-perceptual mechanisms underpinning these visual search strategies, with expert coaches more cognisant of their visual search strategy. To expand, the gaze behaviour of expert climbing coaches was underpinned by hierarchical and complex knowledge structures relating to principles of climbing movement. This enabled expert coaches to actively focus on the most relevant aspects of a climber’s performance for analysis. Findings demonstrate the utility of combining eye tracking and retrospective think-aloud interviewing as a new, efficient methodology of capturing the cognitive-perceptual processes of climbing coaches to inform coaching education/strategies. (shrink)

Visual stylometry is a new interdisciplinary research field that sits at the junction of digital humanities, empirical aesthetics, and computer science. Research in this field employs image analysis algorithms to study key aspects of artistic style. The nature of artistic style is the subject of ongoing debate within art history and philosophy of art. Computational and statistical methods in visual stylometry allow researchers to quantify and compare aspects of artistic style over the course of the career of (...) an individual artist, among artists who share in a common artistic style, and across different schools of art. The results of these studies provide clues to the image features that enable viewers to categorize works as belonging to different artistic styles. -/- We have developed a system that can act as an open access laboratory for visual stylometry. This approach is powerful enough to support advanced academic research in computer science, cognitive science, art history, and the philosophy of art while at the same time providing a user friendly interface accessible to students and researchers with little or no computer science background. Our framework is designed around the idea of scientific workflows. Scientific workflows allow users to build executable analyses in the same way they would draw a flowchart, by dragging objects representing data sets and image analysis procedures onto the work-space and drawing links between them. These workflows and data sets can be exported using open standards as web objects that can then be shared or modified by other users. -/- Our platform, Workflows for the Analysis of Images in Visual Stylometry (WAIVS), has the potential to promote computational literacy and data analytic skills among humanities students, to introduce science students to research in art and the humanities, to explore the nature of artistic style and its role in our understanding of artwork, and to help researchers in cognitive science understand how viewers perceptually categorize, recognize, and otherwise engage with artworks. (shrink)

Instagram is currently the social media platform most associated with online images, but images from other platforms also can be collected and grouped, arrayed by similarity, stacked, matched, stained, labelled, depicted as network, placed side by side and otherwise analytically displayed. In the following, the initial focus is on Instagram, together with certain schools of thought such as Instagramism and Instagrammatics for its aesthetic and visual cultural study. Building on those two approaches, it subsequently focuses on other web and (...) social media platforms, such as Google Image Search, Twitter, Facebook and 4chan. It provides demonstrations of how querying techniques create online image collections, and how these sets are analytically grouped through arrangements collectively referred to as metapictures. (shrink)

In January 2019, What is Peppa?, a promotional video for a Chinese New Year movie, received widespread attention in China immediately after its release. This paper explains the success of the video from the perspective of visual framing, and employs Systemic Visual Grammar to analyze how visual semiotics are applied to frame prominent topics so as to achieve promotional purposes. The results show that: (i) visual semiotics are used to frame the topic of empty nesters, implying (...) that this issue brings negative consequences and evoking the audience’s empathy and concern; (ii) visuals frame the topic of family love, in which the main protagonist’s actions are highlighted; and (iii) the topic of family reunion is mainly framed and realized by delicate compositional arrangements. Using various visual semiotics at the denotative, stylistic-semantic, connotative, and ideological levels, this video establishes both visual and emotional communication between the main character and the audience, making the promotional purpose more successful. The results highlight and specify the important roles of visual frames in promotional videos, and the integration of Peppa with traditional Chinese culture, love, and family reunion represents a visual approach to glocalization. (shrink)

Automatic detection of information changes in the visual environment is crucial for individual survival. Researchers use the oddball paradigm to study the brain’s response to frequently presented stimuli and occasionally presented stimuli. The component that can be observed in the difference wave is called visual mismatch negativity, which is obtained by subtracting event-related potentials evoked by the deviant from ERPs evoked by the standard. There are three hypotheses to explain the vMMN. The sensory fatigue hypothesis considers that weakened (...) neural activity caused by repetition results in decreased ERPs of the standard. The memory trace hypothesis proposes that vMMN results from increased responses to the deviant. The predictive coding hypothesis attributes the difference to enhanced responses for deviants and suppression for standards. However, when distinguishing between these effects, previous researchers did not consider the effect of low-level features on the vMMN. In this experiment, we used face sequences composed of different emotions and presented an oddball sequence, a reverse oddball sequence, and an equiprobable sequence to participants. The deviant of the oddball sequence was subtracted from the standard of the oddball sequence, the reverse oddball sequence, and the same type of stimulus of the equiprobable sequence to get oddball-vMMN, reverse oddball-vMMN, and equiprobable-vMMN, respectively. The results showed no significant difference between vMMN2 and vMMN3 in 100–350 ms following stimulus onset, while the vMMN effect was significant, indicating that the probability of the standard did not affect vMMN, which supported the memory trace hypothesis. Additionally, the fearful-related vMMN were more negative than the neutral-related vMMN within the range of 100–150 ms, suggesting a negative bias. We analyzed the source location of different vMMNs. There was no significant difference in brain regions between different vMMNs. Time-frequency analysis showed that the deviant had stronger theta-band oscillatory than the standard. However, there was no difference between vMORs2 and vMORs3, indicating that vMORs reflect an enhanced response to the deviant in terms of neural oscillation, supporting the memory trace hypothesis. (shrink)

Lotus is one of the traditional Chinese patterns that runs deep in the history of China. During the rule of Wei and Jin dynasties, as well as Northern and Southern dynasties, Buddhism teaching has become widespread in China. Buddhism affected the traditional Chinese lotus patterns in terms of the used artistic means and methods of expression. Analysis is conducted on manifestation and evolution of the artistic form of the lotus pattern in Chinese culture, as well as the changes in (...) its artistic means of expression and graphics based on the information described in the scientific literature dedicated to artefacts. The conclusion is made that the development and evolution of decorative patterns is often a result of interaction of different cultures and forms of art, rather than continuation of one or another single line. The author summarizes the common artistic form of lotus patterns of this period, as well as the basis of the visual language of lotus patterns and its development. The artistic style of this period under review remains in a relatively stable transitional stage from the perspective of formal expression. (shrink)

Visual imagery is a form of sensory imagination, involving subjective experiences typically described as similar to perception, but which occur in the absence of corresponding external stimuli. We used the Activation Likelihood Estimation algorithm (ALE) to identify regions consistently activated by visual imagery across 40 neuroimaging studies, the first such meta-analysis. We also employed a recently developed multi-modal parcellation of the human brain to attribute stereotactic co-ordinates to one of 180 anatomical regions, the first time this approach (...) has been combined with the ALE algorithm. We identified a total 634 foci, based on measurements from 464 participants. Our overall comparison identified activation in the superior parietal lobule, particularly in the left hemisphere, consistent with the proposed ‘top-down’ role for this brain region in imagery. Inferior premotor areas and the inferior frontal sulcus were reliably activated, a finding consistent with the prominent semantic demands made by many visual imagery tasks. We observed bilateral activation in several areas associated with the integration of eye movements and visual information, including the supplementary and cingulate eye fields (SCEFs) and the frontal eye fields (FEFs), suggesting that enactive processes are important in visual imagery. V1 was typically activated during visual imagery, even when participants have their eyes closed, consistent with influential depictive theories of visual imagery. Temporal lobe activation was restricted to area PH and regions of the fusiform gyrus, adjacent to the fusiform face complex (FFC). These results provide a secure foundation for future work to characterise in greater detail the functional contributions of specific areas to visual imagery. (shrink)

To assess the effectiveness of Visual Thinking Strategies in medical education curricula, a pretest–posttest experimental study design was used to evaluate the impact of participating in VTS workshops on first-year medical students. A total of forty-one intervention and sixty comparative students completed the study which included the analysis of clinical images followed by a measurement of word count, length of time analyzing images, and quality of written observations of clinical images. VTS training increased the total number of words (...) used to describe clinical images, the time spent analyzing the images, and the number of clinically relevant observations. (shrink)

Can visual thinking be a means of discovery in elementary analysis, as well as a means of illustration and a stimulus to discovery? The answer to the corresponding question for geometry and arithmetic seems to be ‘yes’ (Giaquinto [1992], [1993]), and so a positive answer might be expected for elementary analysis too. But I argue here that only in a severely restricted range of cases can visual thinking be a means of discovery in analysis. Examination (...) of persuasive visual routes to two simple theorems (Rolle, Bolzano) shows that they are not ways of discovering the theorems; the type of visual thinking involved can never be used to discover analytic theorems of a certain generality. The hypothesis that visual thinking is never a means of discovering the existence or nature of the limit of some infinite process is considered, and a likely counter-example is set out. It is still possible that restricted theorems can be discovered visually: an example from Littlewood is examined in detail and not found wanting. Even when visual thinking is not a means of discovery it can provide the idea for a proof in a direct way; an example is presented (Intermediate Value Theorem). In conclusion: it may be possible to discover theorems in elementary real analysis by visual means, but only theorems of a restricted kind; however, visual thinking in analysis can be very useful in other ways. (shrink)