La, V. P., & Vuong, Q. H. (2019). bayesvl: Visually learning the graphical structure of Bayesian networks and performing MCMC with ‘Stan’. The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).

Although the existence of implicit motor learning is now widely accepted, the findings concerning perceptual implicit learning are ambiguous. Some researchers have observed perceptual learning whereas other authors have not. The review of the literature provides different reasons to explain this ambiguous picture, such as differences in the underlying learning processes, selective attention, or differences in the difficulty to express this knowledge. In three experiments, we investigated implicit visual learning within the original serial reaction time task. We used different (...) response devices in order to manipulate selective attention towards response dimensions. Results showed that visual and motor sequence learning differed in terms of RT-benefits, but not in terms of the amount of knowledge assessed after training. Furthermore, visual sequence learning was modulated by selective attention. However, the findings of all three experiments suggest that selective attention did not alter implicit but rather explicit learning processes. (shrink)

We study the claim that multisensory environments are useful for visual learning because nonvisual percepts can be processed to produce error signals that people can use to adapt their visual systems. This hypothesis is motivated by a Bayesian network framework. The framework is useful because it ties together three observations that have appeared in the literature: (a) signals from nonvisual modalities can “teach” the visual system; (b) signals from nonvisual modalities can facilitate learning in the visual (...) system; and (c) visual signals can become associated with (or be predicted by) signals from nonvisual modalities. Experimental data consistent with each of these observations are reviewed. (shrink)

The present online volume contains the papers prepared for the 11th Budapest Visual Learning Conference – ENVISIONING AN ELECTRIFYING FUTURE – held in a physical-online blended form on Nov. 13, 2024, organized by the University of Pécs (represented by Prof. Gábor Szécsi, Dean, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Education and Regional Development), and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (represented by Prof. Kristóf Nyíri, Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). Nyíri and Szécsi were responsible for sending out the call for (...) abstracts and inviting plenary speakers, Szécsi organized the physical surroundings. Nyíri’s task was to build up and continuosly update the conference website, as well as to edit the accepted submissions. As we indicated in the call for submissions, the conference was planned as an interdisciplinary encounter of communication and media theory, cultural sciences, sociology, psychology, philosophy, pedagogy, history, political science, picture theory, and other disciplines. We insisted on achieving new scholarly results. Especially with AI now complementing, or intruding into, the world of the internet, what image of the future can we conceive of, what new patterns of life and in particular forms of education should we strive to create? (shrink)

To learn a visual code in an unsupervised manner, one may attempt to capture those features of the stimulus set that would contribute significantly to a statistically efficient representation. Paradoxically, all the candidate features in this approach need to be known before statistics over them can be computed. This paradox may be circumvented by confining the repertoire of candidate features to actual scene fragments, which resemble the “what+where” receptive fields found in the ventral visual stream in primates. We (...) describe a single-layer network that learns such fragments from unsegmented raw images of structured objects. The learning method combines fast imprinting in the feedforward stream with lateral interactions to achieve single-epoch unsupervised acquisition of spatially localized features that can support systematic treatment of structured objects [1]. (shrink)

From a theoretical perspective, most discussions of statistical learning have focused on the possible “statistical” properties that are the object of learning. Much less attention has been given to defining what “learning” is in the context of “statistical learning.” One major difficulty is that SL research has been monitoring participants’ performance in laboratory settings with a strikingly narrow set of tasks, where learning is typically assessed offline, through a set of two-alternative-forced-choice questions, which follow a brief visual or auditory (...) familiarization stream. Is that all there is to characterizing SL abilities? Here we adopt a novel perspective for investigating the processing of regularities in the visual modality. By tracking online performance in a self-paced SL paradigm, we focus on the trajectory of learning. In a set of three experiments we show that this paradigm provides a reliable and valid signature of SL performance, and it offers important insights for understanding how statistical regularities are perceived and assimilated in the visual modality. This demonstrates the promise of integrating different operational measures to our theory of SL. (shrink)

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non‐signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between VSL and sign language skill. Our second goal was to test the Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis, which makes the prediction that deaf people should be impaired in sequential processing (...) tasks. For the VSL task, we adopted a modified version of the triplet learning paradigm, with stimuli presented sequentially across space and time. Results revealed that measures of sign language skill (sentence comprehension/repetition) did not correlate with VSL scores, possibly due to the sequential nature of our VSL task. Reading comprehension scores (PIAT‐R) were a significant predictor of VSL accuracy in hearing but not deaf people. This finding might be due to the sequential nature of the VSL task and to a less salient role of the sequential orthography‐to‐phonology mapping in deaf readers compared to hearing readers. The two groups did not differ in VSL scores. However, when reading ability was taken into account, VSL scores were higher for the deaf group than the hearing group. Overall, this evidence is inconsistent with the Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis, suggesting that humans can develop efficient sequencing abilities even in the absence of sound. (shrink)

How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment investigates 10-month-old infants' use of brief prior experiences with objects to visually organize a display consisting of multiple geometrically shaped three-dimensional blocks created for this study. After a brief exposure (...) to a multipart portion of the display, each infant was shown two test events, one of which preserved the unit the infant had seen and the other of which broke that unit. Overall, infants looked longer at the event that broke the unit they had seen prior to testing than the event that preserved that unit, suggesting that infants made use of the brief prior experience to (a) form a cohesive unit of the multipart portion of the display they saw prior to test and (b) segregate this unit from the rest of the test display. This suggests that infants made inferences about novel parts of the test display based on limited exposure to a subset of the test display. Like adults, infants learn features of the three-dimensional world through their experiences in it. (shrink)

Humans have been shown capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness, and how this differs from learning about conscious cues. Participants’ manual (Experiment 1) and saccadic (Experiment 2) response speeds were influenced by both conscious and unconscious (...) cues. However, participants were only able to adapt to reversals of the cue-target contingencies (Experiment 1) or changes in the reliability of the cues (Experiment 2) when consciously aware of the cues. Therefore, although visual cues can be processed unconsciously, learning about cues over a few trials requires conscious awareness of them. Finally, we discuss implications for cognitive theories of consciousness. (shrink)

The image is the raw material of the twenty-first century. Images infiltrate all social and cultural spaces. Its digital-mediated realities drive communication, industry and knowledge. Images saturate life and adolescent learners are familiar with the participatory nature of image production and its social, educational and personal communicative realities. Vision and visibility, seeing and being now dominate how we inter-subjectively recognise ourselves and perform our world. We also find our aesthetic and embodied self increasingly constituted within imaging acts that are relational. (...) Visual culture may have colonised the self and learning, but imagination is without borders. The current pictorial turn opens possibilities to explore truth in flux through visual artistic acts. This article embeds Deleuzian method, which is one of intuitions, going beyond the actual, or our limited forms of representing life, to recognising that life has future imaginative potential forms and is always becoming. The article discusses an arts-based inquiry project for gifted artist visualiser/learners at an Australian regional university who are given broad topics on science phenomena and asked to give them expression. It suggests that pedagogies of the visual with their performative acts can prise open curriculum where an art-science interchange between two disciplines is made difficult by the current siloed nature of curriculum knowledge. Drawing on an analysis of Anika’s and Joel’s artworks and visual diaries it aims to reveal how their learning events dwell and are performed in aesthetic borderlands and how visual pedagogies forge new fluid visual borderlands and new learning. (shrink)

Interpreting a seemingly simple function word like “or,” “behind,” or “more” can require logical, numerical, and relational reasoning. How are such words learned by children? Prior acquisition theories have often relied on positing a foundation of innate knowledge. Yet recent neural‐network‐based visual question answering models apparently can learn to use function words as part of answering questions about complex visual scenes. In this paper, we study what these models learn about function words, in the hope of better understanding (...) how the meanings of these words can be learned by both models and children. We show that recurrent models trained on visually grounded language learn gradient semantics for function words requiring spatial and numerical reasoning. Furthermore, we find that these models can learn the meanings of logical connectives and and or without any prior knowledge of logical reasoning as well as early evidence that they are sensitive to alternative expressions when interpreting language. Finally, we show that word learning difficulty is dependent on the frequency of models' input. Our findings offer proof‐of‐concept evidence that it is possible to learn the nuanced interpretations of function words in a visually grounded context by using non‐symbolic general statistical learning algorithms, without any prior knowledge of linguistic meaning. (shrink)

The visual world of adults consists of objects at various distances, partly occluding one another, substantial and stable across space and time. The visual world of young infants, in contrast, is often fragmented and unstable, consisting not of coherent objects but rather surfaces that move in unpredictable ways. Evidence from computational modeling and from experiments with human infants highlights three kinds of learning that contribute to infants’ knowledge of the visual world: learning via association, learning via active (...) assembly, and learning via visual-manual exploration. Infants acquire knowledge by observing objects move in and out of sight, forming associations of these different views. In addition, the infant’s own self-produced behavior—oculomotor patterns and manual experience, in particular—is an important means by which infants discover and construct their visual world. (shrink)

Infant and adult learners are able to identify word boundaries in fluent speech using statistical information. Similarly, learners are able to use statistical information to identify word–object associations. Successful language learning requires both feats. In this series of experiments, we presented adults and infants with audio–visual input from which it was possible to identify both word boundaries and word–object relations. Adult learners were able to identify both kinds of statistical relations from the same input. Moreover, their learning was actually (...) facilitated by the presence of two simultaneously present relations. Eight-month-old infants, however, do not appear to benefit from the presence of regular relations between words and objects. Adults, like 8-month-olds, did not benefit from regular audio–visual correspondences when they were tested with tones, rather than linguistic input. These differences in learning outcomes across age and input suggest that both developmental and stimulus-based constraints affect statistical learning. (shrink)

Tense/aspect morphology on verbs is often thought to depend on event features like telicity, but it is not known how speakers identify these features in visual scenes. To examine this question, we asked Japanese speakers to describe computer‐generated animations of simple actions with variation in visual features related to telicity. Experiments with adults and children found that they could use goal information in the animations to select appropriate past and progressive verb forms. They also produced a large number (...) of different verb forms. To explain these findings, a deep‐learning model of verb production from visual input was created that could produce a human‐like distribution of verb forms. It was able to use visual cues to select appropriate tense/aspect morphology. The model predicted that video duration would be related to verb complexity, and past tense production would increase when it received the endpoint as input. These predictions were confirmed in a third study with Japanese adults. This work suggests that verb production could be tightly linked to visual heuristics that support the understanding of events. (shrink)

Background Despite the bourgeoning of digital tools for bioethics research, education, and engagement, little research has empirically investigated the impact of interactive visualizations as a way to translate ethical frameworks and guidelines. To date, most frameworks take the format of text-only documents that outline and offer ethical guidance on specific contexts. This study’s goal was to determine whether an interactive-visual format supports frameworks in transferring ethical knowledge by improving learning, deliberation, and user experience.Methods An experimental comparative study was conducted (...) with a pre-, mid-, and post-test design using the online survey platform Qualtrics. Participants were university based early-stage health researchers who were randomly assigned to either the control condition (text-only document) or the experimental condition (interactive-visual). The primary outcome variables were learning, (measured using a questionnaire), deliberation (using cases studies) and user experience (measured using the SED/UD Scale). Analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics and mixed-effects linear regression.Results Of the 80 participants, 44 (55%) used the text-only document and 36 (45%) used the interactive-visual. Results of the knowledge-test scores showed a statistically significant difference between participants’ post-test scores, indicating that the interactive-visual format better supported understanding, acquisition, and application of the framework’s knowledge. Findings from the case studies showed both formats supported ethical deliberation. Results further indicated the interactive-visual provided an overall better episodic and remembered user experience compared with the text-only document.Conclusions Our findings show that ethical frameworks formatted with interactive and visual qualities provide a more pleasing user experience and are effective formats for ethics learning and deliberation. These findings have implications for practitioners developing and deploying ethical frameworks and guidelines (e.g., in educational or employee-onboarding settings), in that the knowledge generated can lead to more effective dissemination practices of normative guidelines and health data ethics concepts. (shrink)

In order to extract the regularities underlying a continuous sensory input, the individual elements constituting the stream have to be encoded and their transitional probabilities (TPs) should be learned. This suggests that variance in statistical learning (SL) performance reflects efficiency in encoding representations as well as efficiency in detecting their statistical properties. These processes have been taken to be independent and temporally modular, where first, elements in the stream are encoded into internal representations, and then the co‐occurrences between them are (...) computed and registered. Here, we entertain a novel hypothesis that one unifying construct—the rate of information in the sensory input—explains learning performance. This theoretical approach merges processes related to encoding of events and those related to learning their regularities into a single computational principle. We present data from two large‐scale experiments with over 800 participants tested in support for this hypothesis, showing that rate of information in a visual stream clearly predicts SL performance, and that similar rate of information values leads to similar SL performance. We discuss the implications for SL theory and its relation to regularity learning. (shrink)

Previous research demonstrates that implicitly learned probability information can guide visual attention. We examined whether the probability of an object changing can be implicitly learned and then used to improve change detection performance. In a series of six experiments, participants completed 120–130 training change detection trials. In four of the experiments the object that changed color was the same shape on every trial. Participants were not explicitly aware of this change probability manipulation and change detection performance was not improved (...) for the trained shape versus untrained shapes. In two of the experiments, the object that changed color was always in the same general location . Although participants were not explicitly aware of the change probability, implicit knowledge of it did improve change detection performance in the trained location. These results indicate that improved change detection performance through implicitly learned change probability occurs for location but not shape. (shrink)

The neural mechanisms underlying behavioral improvement in the detection or discrimination of visual stimuli following learning are still ill understood. Studies in nonhuman primates have shown relatively small and, across studies, variable effects of fine discrimination learning in primary visual cortex when tested outside the context of the learned task. At later stages, such as extrastriate area V4, extensive practice in fine discrimination produces more consistent effects upon responses and neural tuning. In V1 and V4, the effects of (...) learning were most prominent in those neurons that can contribute the most reliable information about the trained stimuli. I suggest that, depending on the particulars of the task demands, neurons at various stages of stimulus and task processing can change their tuning and responses, so that execution of the task will produce a higher frequency of reward. I speculate that the sort of changes that will occur depend on the task and on stimulus analysis require- ments, and they may vary from changes in bottom-up stimulus processing ⁄ tuning within early visual areas or more efficient readout of early visual areas to top-down driven changes in response proper- ties of these areas. (shrink)

This study investigates the effects of visual mnemonics and the methods of presenting learning materials on learning visually similar characters for Chinese-as-second-language (CSL) learners. In supporting CSL learners to build robust orthographic representations in Chinese, addressing the challenges of visual similarity of characters (e.g., 理 and 埋) is an important issue. Based on prior research on perceptual learning, we tested three strategies that differ in the extent to which they promote interrelated attention to the form and meaning of (...) characters: (1) Stroke Sequence, aform-emphasisstrategy, (2) Key-images, aform+meaningstrategy utilizing visual code, (3) Pithy Formulas with Key-images, aform+meaningstrategy combining visual and verbal codes. A pretest–posttest equivalent-group design was adopted. The independent variables were the learning strategy, the method of presenting character pairs (visually similar vs. dissimilar), and testing time. The dependent variables were learners’ proportions of accurate responses to reading and writing Chinese characters through a posttest (immediately performed after learning) and a delayed posttest (1 week after learning); a learner experience survey was also administered to investigate learners’ opinions on each strategy. Sixty-six non-beginning learners of Chinese participated; they were randomly assigned to one of the two groups in which participants learned ten charactersviathe three strategies, respectively, differing between whether the characters were presented in similar pairs or dissimilar pairs. Data were analyzedviathree-way ANCOVAs. The Pithy Formulas with Key-images and the Key-images generally yielded higher writing accuracy than Stroke Sequence immediately after learning. Notably, the advantage of the Pithy Formulas with Key-images (verbal and visual) over the Key-images (visual) on writing was specific to the participants that learned with visually similar pairs rather than those that learned with dissimilar pairs. All strategies were effective for reading, yet learners’ experience ratings favored the twoform+meaningstrategies over the strategy that focused primarily onform.Suggestions for future research and pedagogical implications on learning visually similar characters were offered. (shrink)

In response to the ubiquitous graphs and maps of COVID-19, artists, designers, data scientists, and public health officials are teaming up to create counter-plots and subaltern maps of the pandemic. In this intervention, we describe the various functions served by these projects. First, they offer tutorials and tools for both dataviz practitioners and their publics to encourage critical thinking about how COVID-19 data is sourced and modeled—and to consider which subjects are not interpellated in those data sets, and why not. (...) Second, they demonstrate how the pandemic’s spatial logics inscribe themselves in our immediate material landscapes. And third, they remind us of our capacity to personalize and participate in the creation of meaningful COVID visualizations—many of which represent other scales and dimensions of the pandemic, especially the quarantine quotidian. Together, the official maps and counter-plots acknowledge that the pandemic plays out differently across different scales: COVID-19 is about global supply chains and infection counts and TV ratings for presidential press conferences, but it is also about local dynamics and neighborhood mutual aid networks and personal geographies of mitigation and care. (shrink)

This article probes the visual spatial représentations underlying the creative conceptual design of complex objects.