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This paper considers the sociocultural implications of biological pest control that sit at the cusp of managing an invasive species for conservation or productivity (i.e. a 'natural enemy') and socially driven 'manipulating life' arguments. We consider the role of perceived humaneness or, more accurately, animal welfare as it relates to managing invasive species from a scientific and social perspective. In order to highlight and articulate particular nuances and standards across different pest control contexts, we use three case examples (feral cats, wild rabbits, and invasive cane toads) and explore where biological pest control and animal welfare interests intersect. The paper summarises key scientific welfare concerns and then extends the literature to also examine key social characteristics of each pest management scenario, including lay perceptions of animal welfare, the sociocultural context that pests exist within, and overarching psychological factors contributing to public sentiment, including perceived risks. The subsequent descriptive model presented is useful in articulating core sociocultural beliefs relative to each case and how these antecedent associations and attitudes about an animal influence subsequent beliefs about a pest management strategy and ultimately acceptance of the management approach. The model can inform invasive species management policies and highlight key sociocultural factors likely to influence public responses. The model also informs interdisciplinary science designed to develop acceptable and socially responsible biocontrol strategies that consider public perceptions of animal welfare and cultural appropriateness. • Explores where biological pest control and animal welfare interests intersect. • Three cases are explored: feral cats, wild rabbits, and invasive cane toads. • Implications for management examined from psychology, welfare and ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background An increasing number of studies have suggested adverse effects of air pollution on mental health. Given the potentially negative impacts of ozone exposure on the immune and nervous system driven from animal experiments, ozone might also affect mental health. However, no systematic synthesis of the relevant literature has been conducted yet. This paper reviews the studies that assessed the link between ozone exposure and mental health thus far. Methods We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis (PRISMA). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were systematically searched for epidemiological studies on ambient ozone exposure and mental or behavioral disorders according to the International Classification of Disease. The period was from January 1st, 1960 to December 14st, 2017. We evaluated the risk of bias by the Office of Health Assessment and Translation (OHAT) Approach and Navigation Guide for each included study. Results The keyword search yielded 567 results. 31 papers met the selection criteria and were included in the review. We found only inconclusive evidence that ozone affects autism spectrum disorders, impairment of cognitive functions and dementia, depression, and suicide. The large heterogeneity of study designs, outcome definitions and study quality in general prevented us from conducting meta-analyses. Conclusions Current evidence for an association between ambient ozone exposure and mental health outcomes is inconclusive and further high quality studies are needed to assess any potential links given the strong biologic plausibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the evolution (past, present and future) of the 'psychology of programming' over the 50 year period of this anniversary issue. The International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS) has been a key venue for much seminal work in this field, including its first foundations, and we review the changing research concerns seen in publications over these five decades. We relate this thematic evolution to research taking place over the same period within more specialist communities, especially the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG), the Empirical Studies of Programming series (ESP), and the ongoing community in Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). Many other communities have interacted with psychology of programming, both influenced by research published within the specialist groups, and in turn influencing research priorities. We end with an overview of the core theories that have been developed over this period, as an introductory resource for new researchers, and also with the authors' own analysis of key priorities for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Navigation designs in virtual environments often draw on research findings on human navigation behaviors in the real world, in particular the landmark–route–survey spatial knowledge model. Geographers and cognitive psychologists have argued that this model is insufficient to capture the complexity of spatial cognition related to navigation. They have suggested that new theories are needed to understand the integration of various kinds of spatial knowledge and their relationship with spatial activities, such as route planning, route choosing and so on. In virtual environments, users can scale up and down the virtual space to obtain different spatial knowledge and interaction domains. Such flexibility offers an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the relationship between spatial knowledge and spatial action. This paper reports a study on how scaling in virtual environments can improve the integration of spatial knowledge and spatial action. This paper first proposes a multiscale progressive model that couples spatial knowledge and movement across scale in navigation in virtual environments. Then, the paper introduces the design of multiscale environments to support the coupling. Results of an experimental study show the benefits of the coupled spatial knowledge and movement for navigation involving subtasks at different scale levels. In addition to helping better understand the relationship between spatial knowledge and spatial action, this research also gives some insight into designs to support navigation in virtual environments as well as designs to support cross-scale spatial knowledge access in the real world. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Knowledge engineering projects deal with a wide range of domains within organizational and academic contexts. A number of elicitation techniques are used to acquire knowledge from experts. Most of these techniques originated within psychology but have been developed by knowledge engineers to become more structured, efficient and systematic. Until now, nobody has tried to re-apply these modified techniques back into psychology. This paper describes work that addresses this matter. It focuses on the psychological knowledge possessed by all people that enables them to deal with everyday problems and make life decisions. We refer to this as ‘personal knowledge’. To take a knowledge engineering approach to personal knowledge, we investigated the use of knowledge elicitation techniques to capture personal knowledge. We describe an empirical study involving ten participants and 80 knowledge acquisition sessions that assessed eight elicitation techniques in this context. The results revealed that each of the techniques showed promise at efficiently capturing and structuring aspects of an individual''s personal knowledge. A content analysis of the acquired knowledge led to the construction of a meta-model (a primitive ontology) of personal knowledge and to the design for a new methodology for psychological research. From the perspective of psychology, the paper shows that knowledge engineering methods can be of value to psychologists. From the perspective of knowledge engineering and the wider computer science community, the paper shows that empirical methods used by psychologists can benefit the development and evaluation of ontologies and elicitation techniques. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents various semantics in the branching-time spectrum of discrete-time and continuous-time Markov chains (DTMCs and CTMCs). Strong and weak bisimulation equivalence and simulation pre-orders are covered and are logically characterized in terms of the temporal logics Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) and Continuous Stochastic Logic (CSL). Apart from presenting various existing branching-time relations in a uniform manner, this paper presents the following new results: (i) strong simulation for CTMCs, (ii) weak simulation for CTMCs and DTMCs, (iii) logical characterizations thereof (including weak bisimulation for DTMCs), (iv) a relation between weak bisimulation and weak simulation equivalence, and (v) various connections between equivalences and pre-orders in the continuous- and discrete-time setting. The results are summarized in a branching-time spectrum for DTMCs and CTMCs elucidating their semantics as well as their relationship. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Neurological Music Therapy uses live music to improve the sensorimotor regulation of children with severe autism. However, they often lack musical training and their impairments limit their interactions with musical instruments. In this paper, we present our co-design work that led to the BendableSound prototype: an elastic multisensory surface encouraging users to practice coordination movements when touching a fabric to play sounds. We present the results of a formative study conducted with 18 teachers showing BendableSound was perceived as “usable” and “attractive”. Then, we present a deployment study with 24 children with severe autism showing BendableSound is “easy to use” and may potentially have therapeutic benefits regarding attention and motor development. We propose a set of design insights that could guide the design of natural user interfaces, particularly elastic multisensory surfaces. We close with a discussion and directions for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we evaluate how speaker familiarity influences the engagement times and performance of blind children and young adults when playing audio games made with different synthetic voices. We also show how speaker familiarity influences speaker and synthetic speech recognition. For the first experiment we develop synthetic voices of school children, their teachers and of speakers that are unfamiliar to them and use each of these voices to create variants of two audio games: a memory game and a labyrinth game. Results show that pupils have significantly longer engagement times and better performance when playing games that use synthetic voices built with their own voices. These findings can be used to improve the design of audio games and lecture books for blind and visually impaired children and young adults. In the second experiment we show that blind children and young adults are better in recognizing synthetic voices than their visually impaired companions. We also show that the average familiarity with a speaker and the similarity between a speaker’s synthetic and natural voice are correlated to the speaker’s synthetic voice recognition rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to better study team behavior and performance, much attention has focused on obtaining team members' mental models for the purposes of analysis and prediction. This paper describes a knowledge capture approach and a supporting graphical tool that together allow for direct acquisition of team mental models in the form of conceptual graphs. We performed acquisition experiments on over one hundred teams where team members used the tool to specify their team process. In addition to acquiring team members' models, non-team observers created “expert” models of the team process for comparison. We obtained good results on accepted measures of recall and precision compared to the “expert” models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video-based spontaneous expression recognition is a challenging task due to the large inter-personal variations of both the expressing manners and the executing rates for the same expression category. One of the key is to explore robust representation method which can effectively capture the facial variations as well as alleviate the influence of personalities. In this paper, we propose to learn a kind of typical patterns that can be commonly shared by different subjects when performing expressions, namely “prototypes”. Specifically, we first apply a statistical model (i.e. linear subspace) on facial regions to generate the specific expression patterns for each video. Then a clustering algorithm is employed on all these expression patterns and the cluster means are regarded as the “prototypes”. Accordingly, we further design “simile” features to measure the similarities of personal specific patterns to our learned “prototypes”. Both techniques are conducted on Grassmann manifold, which can enrich the feature encoding manners and better reveal the data structure by introducing intrinsic geodesics. Extensive experiments are conducted on both posed and spontaneous expression databases. All results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art and also possesses good transferable ability under cross-database scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce methods to differentiate posed expressions from spontaneous ones by capturing global spatial patterns embedded in posed and spontaneous expressions, and by incorporating gender and expression categories as privileged information during spatial pattern modeling. Specifically, we construct multiple restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) with continuous visible units to model spatial patterns from facial geometric features given expression-related factors, i.e., gender and expression categories. During testing, only facial geometric features are provided, and the samples are classified into posed or spontaneous expressions according to the RBM with the largest likelihood. Furthermore, we propose efficient inference algorithm by extending annealing importance sampling to RBM with continuous visible units for calculating partition function of RBMs. Experimental results on benchmark databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in modelling global spatial patterns as well as its superior posed and spontaneous expression distinction performance over existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic analysis of human spontaneous behavior has attracted increasing attention in recent years from researchers in computer vision. This paper proposes an approach for multi-modal video-induced emotion recognition, based on facial expression and electroencephalogram (EEG) technologies. Spontaneous facial expression is utilized as an external channel. A new feature, formed by percentage of nine facial expressions, is proposed for analyzing the valence and arousal classes. Furthermore, EEG is used as an internal channel supplementing facial expressions for more reliable emotion recognition. Discriminative spectral power and spectral power difference features are exploited for EEG analysis. Finally, these two channels are fused on feature-level and decision-level for multi-modal emotion recognition. Experiments are conducted on MAHNOB-HCI database, including 522 spontaneous facial expression videos and EEG signals from 27 participants. Moreover, human perception in emotion recognition compared to the proposed approach is tested with 10 volunteers. The experimental results and comparisons with the average human performance show the effectiveness of the proposed multi-modal approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study addresses the question of how transmission delay affects user perception during speech communication over telephone systems. It aims to show that the occurrence of pure delay should not be neglected when planning a telephone or conferencing system even if no impact on the perceived quality of the call can be found. It is, for instance, known that, the communication surface structure changes dramatically when transmission delay is inserted by the communication system. Furthermore, studies suggest a change in the perception of the interlocutor at the far-end. This paper describes two experiments that assess the misattribution of the technical impairment delay to personality and behavior-related attributes of the conversation partners. The first experiment shows that interlocutors are perceived as being less attentive when conversing in a three-party setting with symmetrical and asymmetrical delay conditions. In the second experiment, the misattribution is considered in more detail looking at ascribed personality attributes in two-party interaction under transmission delay. For both experiments, comparing the conversation surface structure of delayed to non-delayed calls helped to understand the found outcomes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Global climate change modelling has identified south-east Australia as a ‘hot spot’ for more frequent climatic extremes. Rural landholders may be vulnerable to the risks climate change presents. Australia''s rural landholders are considered highly adaptable, with a history of responding to climatic uncertainty and variability. Yet it is possible that some of their adaptations will not be effective in reducing vulnerability, and may have downstream impacts. Rural landholder decision making is complex, and this is one of a limited number of papers examining rural landholder responses to climate change and the factors influencing their decisions. Data were gathered using semi-structured interviews and a mail survey of rural landholders in two districts. Established socio-psychological scales were employed to measure beliefs, values and attitudes that are expected to shape landholder behaviour. Most of the rural landholders surveyed were not climate change ‘deniers’ with 70% agreeing that the climate is changing and that human activity is a major influence. Climate change was nominated as an influence on six adaptive behaviours by 50% or more of survey respondents. However, there were no significant relationships between belief in climate change and adaptive actions. Personal values and worldviews were found to be the most frequent factors linked to adaptive behaviour. These findings illustrate the complex nature of rural landholder decision making: suggesting that many rural landholders do not need convincing of the existence of climate change; and that efforts to motivate rural landholders to respond to climate change risks should be based on sound knowledge of their values and worldviews. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recently, Masanobu Kaneko introduced a conjecture on an extension of the derivation relation for multiple zeta values. The goal of the present paper is to present a proof of the conjecture by reducing it to a class of relations for multiple zeta values studied by Kawashima. In addition, some algebraic aspects of the quasi-derivation operator on , which was defined by modeling a Hopf algebra developed by Connes and Moscovici, will be presented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Electronic commerce typically lacks human warmth and sociability, since it is more impersonal, anonymous and automated than traditional face-to-face commerce. This paper explores how human warmth and sociability can be integrated through the web interface to positively impact consumer attitudes towards online shopping. An empirical study was undertaken to investigate the impact of various levels of socially rich text and picture design elements on the perception of online social presence and its subsequent effect on antecedents of attitudes towards websites. Higher levels of perceived social presence are shown to positively impact the perceived usefulness, trust and enjoyment of shopping websites, leading to more favourable consumer attitudes. Implications of these finding for practitioners and future research are outlined. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the introduction of the Arithmetica Diophantus says that in order to solve arithmetical problems one has to “follow the way he (Diophantus) will show.” The present paper has a threefold objective. Firstly, the meaning of this sentence is discussed, the conclusion being that Diophantus had elaborated a program for handling various arithmetical problems. Secondly, it is claimed that what is analyzed in the introduction is definitions of several terms, the exhibition of their symbolism, the way one may operate with them, but, most significantly, the main stages of the program itself. And thirdly, it is argued that Diophantus'' intention in the Arithmetica is to show the way the stages of his program should be practically applied in various arithmetical problems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents experiences on using five different self-report methods, two adopted from literature and three self-created, for collecting information about emotional responses to mobile applications. These methods were used in nine separate field experiments done in naturalistic settings. Based on our experiments, we can argue that all of these methods can be successfully used for collecting emotional responses to evaluate mobile applications in mobile settings. However, differences can be identified in the suitability of the methods for different research setups. Even though the self-report instruments provide a feasible alternative for evaluating emotions evoked by mobile applications, several challenges were identified, for example, in capturing the dynamic nature of mobile interaction usage situations and contexts. To summarise our results, we propose a framework for selecting and comparing these methods for different usage purposes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The popularity of computer games has exploded in recent years, yet methods of evaluating user emotional state during play experiences lag far behind. There are few methods of assessing emotional state, and even fewer methods of quantifying emotion during play. This paper presents a novel method for continuously modeling emotion using physiological data. A fuzzy logic model transformed four physiological signals into arousal and valence. A second fuzzy logic model transformed arousal and valence into five emotional states relevant to computer game play: boredom, challenge, excitement, frustration, and fun. Modeled emotions compared favorably with a manual approach, and the means were also evaluated with subjective self-reports, exhibiting the same trends as reported emotions for fun, boredom, and excitement. This approach provides a method for quantifying emotional states continuously during a play experience. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A variety of technologies—from agents designed to assist or encourage you, to context-based messaging services—have the opportunity to interrupt you many times throughout the day. One of the challenges with designing new highly interruptive technologies is how to objectively assess their influence on human experience. This paper presents an assessment of a new mobile system that interrupts the wearer to support self-monitoring of stress. We utilize a diverse set of assessment techniques, including a newly proposed measure, relative subjective count, which compares the difference in perceived number of interruptions to actual number of interruptions. This measure, together with direct and indirect subjective reports, and a behavioral choice, is used to evaluate an empathetic version of the mobile system vs. a non-empathetic version. We found that post-experience direct questionnaire assessments such as “how stressful has using the system been?” do not significantly distinguish user experiences with the two systems; however, the new measure of relative subjective count, the behavioral choice, and another indirect questioning strategy, do point toward a preference for the empathetic system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Developing learning experiences that facilitate self-actualization and creativity is among the most important goals of our society in preparation for the future. To facilitate deep understanding of a new concept, to facilitate learning, learners must have the opportunity to develop multiple and flexible perspectives. The process of becoming an expert involves failure, as well as the ability to understand failure and the motivation to move onward. Meta-cognitive awareness and personal strategies can play a role in developing an individual''s ability to persevere through failure, and combat other diluting influences. Awareness and reflective technologies can be instrumental in developing a meta-cognitive ability to make conscious and unconscious decisions about engagement that will ultimately enhance learning, expertise, creativity, and self-actualization. This paper will review diverse perspectives from psychology, engineering, education, and computer science to present opportunities to enhance creativity, motivation, and self-actualization in learning systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The dual-point generalized Hough transform is one of the most powerful tools for object recognition. Usually a single policy is used for all types of shapes, which may give rise to problems for objects with specific shapes. A shape dependent scheme can provide us a better R-table, and consequently reduce the number of point pairs for the accumulation process. In this paper, an adaptive approach is proposed to determine the policies for selecting the point pairs such that the resultant voting process is able to reduce spurious peaks and the point selection process is made more efficient. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper highlights a psychological phenomenon affecting the accuracy of mental models. It occurs when two consecutive events happen as expected by an operator. Typically, such a situation reinforces the confidence in one''s mental model. However, consecutive events can happen as a random co-occurrence, for reasons that actually differ from the ones believed by the operator. Nonetheless, because of the consistency between the environmental data and the operator''s expectations, one event can be taken to be the cause of the other. When this false belief happens, the mental model is erroneously assumed to be valid. We discuss this phenomenon and its potential disastrous consequences using the example of a real commercial air crash. We finally address some implications for systems’ design and support tools. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Objective: This paper studies the differences between controlled medical vocabularies that are designed as external artifacts and the mental concepts that are inside users' heads and used by users for reasoning, decision making, diagnosis, and treatment.Design: The major theories of concept representations developed in cognitive science were reviewed, analyzed, and compared with the major controlled medical vocabularies developed in medicine.Results: It was found that there are significant mismatches between controlled medical vocabularies that are designed as external artifacts and the mental concepts that are inside users' heads and used by users for reasoning, decision making, diagnosis, and treatment.Conclusions: Controlled medical vocabularies should be designed with systematical considerations of the cognitive structures and processes of the users. Without such considerations, the designed vocabularies will not be appropriate for people because they are hard to use, although they may or may not be appropriate for machine processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the role of facilitation in the successful implementation of Computerized Decision Support (CDS). Facilitation processes include education, specialized computerized decision support, and work process reengineering. These techniques, as well as modeling and feedback enhance self-efficacy, which we propose is one of the factors that mediate the effectiveness of any CDS. In this study, outpatient clinics implemented quality improvement (QI) projects focused on improving geriatric care. Quality Improvement is the systematic process of improving quality through continuous measurement and targeted actions. The program, entitled "Advancing Geriatric Education through Quality Improvement" (AGE QI), consisted of a 6-month, QI based, intervention: (1) 2h didactic session, (2) 1h QI planning session, (3) computerized decision support design and implementation, (4) QI facilitation activities, (5) outcome feedback, and (6) 20h of CME. Specifically, we examined the impact of the QI based program on clinician's perceived self-efficacy in caring for older adults and the relationship of implementation support and facilitation on perceived success. The intervention was implemented at 3 institutions, 27 community healthcare system clinics, and 134 providers. This study reports the results of pre/post surveys for the forty-nine clinicians who completed the full CME program. Self-efficacy ratings for specific clinical behaviors related to care of older adults were assessed using a Likert based instrument. Self-ratings of efficacy improved across the following domains (depression, falls, end-of-life, functional status and medication management) and specifically in QI targeted domains and were associated with overall clinic improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]