1,721,432 research outputs found
''Frozen'' motion and ''melted'' stereopsis: Linking the double nail and Ternus illusions
No full textIcono: a universal language that shows what it says
Full text linkThis article lays out the foundation of a new language for easier written communication that is inherently reader-friendly and inherently international. Words usually consist of strings of sounds or squiggles whose meanings are merely a convention. In Icono, instead, they typically are strings of icons that illustrate what they stand for. “Train,” for example, is expressed with the icon of a train, “future” with the icon of a clock surrounded by a clockwise arrow, and “mammal” with the icons of a cow and a mouse—their combination’s meaning given by what they have in common. Moreover, Icono reveals sentence structure graphically before, rather than linguistically after, one begins reading. On smartphones and computers, writing icons can now be faster than writing alphabetic words. And using simple pictures as words helps those who struggle with conditions like dyslexia, aphasia, cerebral palsy, and autism with speech impairment. Because learning its pronunciation or phonetic spelling is optional rather than a prerequisite, and because it shows what it says, Icono is bound to be easier to learn to read—and then easier to read—than any other language, including our own
Iconic Mathematics: Math Designed to Suit the Mind
Full text linkMathematics is a struggle for many. To make it more accessible, behavioral and educational scientists are redesigning how it is taught. To a similar end, a few rogue mathematicians and computer scientists are doing something more radical: they are redesigning mathematics itself, improving its ergonomic features. Charles Peirce, an important contributor to ordinary symbolic logic, also introduced a rigorous but non-symbolic, graphical alternative to it that is easier to picture. In the spirit of this iconic logic, George Spencer-Brown founded iconic mathematics. Performing iconic arithmetic, algebra, and even trigonometry, resembles doing calculations on an abacus, which is still popular in education today, has aided humanity for millennia, helps even when it is merely imagined, and ameliorates severe disability in basic computation. Interestingly, whereas some intellectually disabled individuals excel in very complex numerical tasks, others of normal intelligence fail even in very simple ones. A comparison of their wider psychological profiles suggests that iconic mathematics ought to suit the very people traditional mathematics leaves behind
The Making of a Comic Star: Buster Keaton and The Saphead (partial and slightly revised reprint of essay first published in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed.Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins)
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Remote effects on lightness
No full textWith the help of the double-anchoring theory of lightness (Bressan, 2006 Psychological Review 113 526 - 553), we investigated the occurrence and reversal of simultaneous contrast in the dungeon illusion (Bressan, 2001 Perception 30 1031 - 1046). In this display, target disks surrounded by contextual disks contrast with them rather than with the immediate background. We show that the dungeon illusion reverses if the luminance of the target is either lower (double decrement) or higher (double increment) than the luminances of both the background and contextual disks, rather than in-between them. We also show that remote luminances outside the display of primary interest affect these inverted-dungeon displays in ways that depend on the strength of grouping between target and contextual disks. As a consequence, the double-decrement inverted-dungeon illusion decreases, and the double-increment inverted-dungeon illusion increases, with remote luminance. We conclude that far-away luminances that are normally ignored as of marginal importance can play a critical role in lightness
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