It is often assumed that the reaction time of a saccade toward visual and/or auditory stimuli reflects the sensitivities of our oculomotor-orienting system to stimulus saliency. Endogenous factors, as well as stimulus-related factors, would also affect the saccadic reaction time. However, it was not clear how these factors interact and to what extent visual and auditory-targeting saccades are accounted for by common mechanisms. The present study examined the effect of, and the interaction between, stimulus saliency and audiovisual spatial congruency on (...) the SRT for visual- and for auditory-target conditions. We also analyzed pre-target pupil size to examine the relationship between saccade preparation and pupil size. Pupil size is considered to reflect arousal states coupling with locus-coeruleus activity during a cognitive task. The main findings were that the pattern of the examined effects on the SRT varied between visual- and auditory-auditory target conditions, the effect of stimulus saliency was significant for the visual-target condition, but not significant for the auditory-target condition, Pupil velocity, not absolute pupil size, was sensitive to task set, and there was a significant correlation between the pre-saccade absolute pupil size and the SRTs for the visual-target condition but not for the auditory-target condition. The discrepancy between target modalities for the effect of pupil velocity and between the absolute pupil size and pupil velocity for the correlation with SRT may imply that the pupil effect for the visual-target condition was caused by a modality-specific link between pupil size modulation and the SC rather than by the LC-NE system. These results support the idea that different threshold mechanisms in the SC may be involved in the initiation of saccades toward visual and auditory targets. (shrink)

偶然を「運命」として生きる生き方とは何か。九鬼周造が哲学的思索の果てにたどりついた世界観を明らかにする。.

大学、学会、企業、国家などと関わりながら「制度化」の歩みを進めて来た西洋科学。現代に至るまでの歴史を概観した入門書。.

Shigeto Tsuru is one of Japan's most respected senior economists. In these lectures, he provides a reappraisal of institutionalism as a school of thought and discusses its relevance for the issues which the economic profession today must tackle. Tsuru reconsiders Marxian political economy as an 'institutionalist school', which provides a context for the following discussion of J. M. Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter and Thorstein Veblen. He goes on to present the four key elements of modern institutionalism - i.e., the open-system (...) character of the economy; the problem of planning; the evolutionary process of modern economics; and the normative character of economics - by way of an examination of three present-day institutionalists, Gunnar Myrdal, John K. Galbraith, and K. William Kapp. Tsuru concludes with an evaluation of modern institutionalism and the future of institutional economics. (shrink)

資本主義が混迷を深めるいま、経済学はどんな役割を果たせるか!社会保障の後退、環境問題、金融「カジノ化」から「市場経済と計画経済」等の理論問題までを、縦横に説き明かす。人生哲学も語る。.

This paper will address one of the “unsolved” problems that has traditionally been called the “form/content” dualism. Husserl writes in Ideas I: “This remarkable duality and unity of sensory hyle and intentional morphe plays a dominant role in the whole phenomenological sphere (in the whole sphere, namely within the stage of constituting temporality, which can be constantly verified)” (Hua III, 192). To be sure, Husserl has defined the sensory hyle “descriptively” as the really immanent [reell] part of consciousness with differences (...) of color, sound, touch and so on, as well as “functionally” as something that can become an adumbration or an aspect of objects through the animating apprehension of active consciousness. But the constitution of an object in his later analysis is clarified more and more in terms of noematic unification (Holenstein, 93), which obscures the function of hyle in the process of constitution. (shrink)

This paper extends studies on intertextuality into a more explicitly interactional context. I examine the actual process of intertextuality where comedy audiences construct recombinant selves through making sense of various membership categories as well as through making sense of a certain kind of comedy. The examination of this process requires receptive research; however, most studies leave the interpretive process unanalyzed. Conducting both a sequential analysis and a membership categorization analysis will reveal that categories are not “pre-formed” but “per-formed” in situ. (...) To illustrate these points, I report on a receptive study of Local comedy in Hawai‘i. (shrink)

Researchers are able to estimate what subjects attend to by using eye tracking systems. Existing approaches for analyzing eye movements are very useful to estimate attention to still objects. But they are inadequate to estimate attention to moving objects, although paying attention to moving objects is usual human behavior. Thus, we propose a novel approach and algorithm to estimate attention to moving objects more precisely. Our approach is to extract "eye tracking movements". We phrase both saccadic eye movements and smooth (...) pursuit eye movements as "eye tracking movements". Because previous works reveal that humans often track a moving object by the eye movements when they pay attention to the object, our approach seems to be appropriate. Our algorithm used for extracting eye tracking movements is called Path Stitching (PS) algorithm. The PS algorithm is a kind of Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) discovery algorithms using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) as a similarity measurement procedure. Eye tracking movements can be regarded as a situation that a subsequence of eye movements' trajectory is similar to a subsequence of the target's trajectory with a small or no time-difference. Because humans track a moving object by the eye movements with locally fluctuated time difference, we think the use of DTW is very appropriate. In addition, to make outputs more comprehensible, we employ the LCS discovery approach for the PS algorithm. The experimental results show that the PS algorithm is more able to extract eye tracking movements than the fixation extracting approach. The fixation extracting approach is the most popular and the strongest approach to analyze eye movements. Therefore, we conclude that our novel approach will advance the analysis of human behavior by the eye movements and human-computer interaction systems they utilize user's eye movements. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the history and current state of research activities into medical expert systems (MES) in Japan. A brief review of expert systems' work over the last ten years is provided and here is a discussion on future directions of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in medicine, which we expect the Japanese AI community in medicine (AIM) to undertake.

How vertebrates evolved different traits for acid excretion to maintain body fluid pH homeostasis is largely unknown. The evolution of Na+/H+ exchanger (NHE)‐mediated NH4+ excretion in fishes is reported, and the coevolution with increased ammoniagenesis and accompanying gluconeogenesis is speculated to benefit vertebrates in terms of both internal homeostasis and energy metabolism response to acidic stress. The findings provide new insights into our understanding of the possible adaptation of fishes to progressing global environmental acidification. In human kidney, titratable H+ and (...) NH4+ comprise the two main components of net acid excretion. V‐type H+‐ATPase‐mediated H+ excretion may have developed in stenohaline lampreys when they initially invaded freshwater from marine habitats, but this trait is lost in most fishes. Instead, increased reliance on NHE‐mediated NH4+ excretion is gradually developed and intensified during fish evolution. Further investigations on more species will be needed to support the hypothesis. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/vZuObtfm-34. (shrink)