Despite having relatively accurate timing, subjective time can be influenced by various contexts,... more Despite having relatively accurate timing, subjective time can be influenced by various contexts, such as stimulus spacing and sample frequency. Several electroencephalographic (EEG) components have been associated with timing, including the contingent negative variation (CNV), offset P2, and late positive component of timing (LPCt). However, the specific role of these components in the contextual modulation of perceived time remains unclear. In this study, we conducted two temporal bisection experiments to investigate this issue. Participants had to judge whether a test duration was close to a short or long standard. Unbeknownst to them, we manipulated the stimulus spacing (Experiment 1) and sample frequency (Experiment 2) to create short and long contexts while maintaining consistent test ranges and standards across different sessions. The results revealed that the bisection threshold shifted towards the ensemble mean, and both CNV and LPCt were sensitive to context modulation. In the short context, the CNV exhibited an increased climbing rate compared to the long context, whereas the LPCt displayed reduced amplitude and latency. These findings suggest that the CNV represents an expectancy wave preceding a temporal decision process, while the LPCt reflects the decision-making process itself, with both components influenced by the temporal context.
Despite relatively accurate time judgment, subjective time is susceptible to various contexts, su... more Despite relatively accurate time judgment, subjective time is susceptible to various contexts, such as sample spacing and frequency. Several electroencephalographic (EEG) components have been linked to timing, including the contingent negative variation (CNV), offset P2, and late positive component of timing (LPCt). However, the specific role of these components in the contextual modulation of perceived time remains unclear. In this study, we conducted two temporal bisection experiments, where participants had to judge if a test duration was close to a short or long standard. Unbeknownst to participants, the sample spacing (Experiment 1) and frequency (Experiment 2) were altered to create short and long contexts while keeping the test range and standards the same in different sessions. The results showed that the bisection threshold shifted toward the ensemble mean and that CNV and LPCt were sensitive to context modulation. Compared to the long context, the CNV climbing rate increas...
Despite the crucial role of complex temporal sequences, such as speech and music, in our everyday... more Despite the crucial role of complex temporal sequences, such as speech and music, in our everyday lives, our ability to acquire and reproduce these patterns is prone to various contextual biases. In this study, we examined how the temporal order of auditory sequences affects temporal reproduction. Participants were asked to reproduce accelerating, decelerating or random sequences, each consisting of four intervals, by tapping their fingers. Our results showed that the reproduction and the reproduction variability were influenced by the sequential structure and interval orders. The mean reproduced interval was assimilated by the first interval of the sequence, with the lowest mean for decelerating and the highest for accelerating sequences. Additionally, the central tendency bias was affected by the volatility and the last interval of the sequence, resulting in a stronger central tendency in the random and decelerating sequences than the accelerating sequence. Using Bayesian integrat...
ABSTRACT The increasing complexity of embedded systems makes the formal specification of requirem... more ABSTRACT The increasing complexity of embedded systems makes the formal specification of requirements both more important and more difficult. Services can help provide a foundation for model-driven requirements engineering for multi-functional embedded systems. This paper provides a conceptual framework that applies a novel modeling approach to the development of embedded systems. We suggest tables as pragmatic specification formalism for a both precise and readable specification of systems, their interfaces, and their functional properties. By translating tables into logical formulas, which define precise semantics for them, the structure specification and refinement of system can be contained. The approach is illustrated by a case study – a tabular specification of a SwStore system.
International Journal of Modeling and Optimization, 2014
An open issue in the area of formal methods is the automation methods and their support tools whi... more An open issue in the area of formal methods is the automation methods and their support tools which need to be applied in the specification process. The automated methodology not only saves time, but also excludes human factors that lead to failure, so it is becoming a trend of model-driven development technology in requirements engineering. For this purpose, we proposed and implemented a formal specification automation process which aims to generate formal specification documents from software engineering models. Our work focuses on the automatic generation of requirements specification in the Focus modeling framework from AutoFocus models. The proposed method not only generates a readable specification of the requirements, but also provides an effective way to combine the CASE tool AutoFocus and the Focus framework.
2009 WRI International Conference on Communications and Mobile Computing, 2009
... Reliability, security and inexpensive characteristics re-quired will all be essential in the ... more ... Reliability, security and inexpensive characteristics re-quired will all be essential in the remote ... This study developed a complete and on-line monitoring system for remote water quality ... Agsm-based remote wireless automatic monitoring system for field information: A case study ...
One of the common problems of system development projects is that the system documentation is oft... more One of the common problems of system development projects is that the system documentation is often outdated and does not describe the latest version of the system. The situation is even more complicated if we are speaking not about a natural language description of the system, but about its formal specification. In this paper we discuss how the problem could be solved by updating the documentation automatically, by generating a new formal specification from the model if the model is frequently changed.
Task schedule is a critical issue of distributed computing. Foster et al. (2001) defined &amp... more Task schedule is a critical issue of distributed computing. Foster et al. (2001) defined "Grid problem", which is defined as flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources -what they referred to as virtual organizations (VO). Improving the performance of grid computing relies much on the grid task scheduling algorithm. In this paper, a new
Water quality monitoring and forecasting plays an important role in modern intensive fish farming... more Water quality monitoring and forecasting plays an important role in modern intensive fish farming management. This paper describes an online water quality monitoring system for intensive fish culture in China, which combined web-server-embedded technology with mobile telecommunication technology. Based on historical data, this system is designed to forecast water quality with artificial neural networks (ANNs) and control the water quality in time to reduce catastrophic losses. The forecasting model for dissolved oxygen half an hour ahead has been validated with experimental data. The results demonstrate that multi-parametric, long-distance and online monitoring for water quality information can be accurately acquired and predicted by using this established monitoring system.
Model-based development approaches have attracted a lot of attention in the last decade due to th... more Model-based development approaches have attracted a lot of attention in the last decade due to their ability to deal with complexity in large software engineering projects. However, a natural question raises, to what extent model-based development approaches are suited to tackle engineering challenges from other application domains such as the automation domain. In order to answer this question, we apply the model based SPES development method to an industrial case study from the automation domain, focusing on the control software components of a desalination plant. In particular, we demonstrate the formalization of requirements, the elicitation of a functional and a logical specification with automatic verification of formal requirements. Compared to classical software engineering approaches, where verification phase is done after the logical implementation phase, our approach focuses on a strict integration of modelling and automatic verification of formal requirements in early development phases such as the system functionalities definition.
Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect ... more Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect termed contextual cueing. Previous solo-performance studies have shown that successful acquisition of contextual memories requires explicit allocation of attentional resources to the task-relevant repeated contexts. By contrast, repeated but task-irrelevant contexts could not be learned when presented together with repeated task-relevant contexts due to a blocking effect. Here we investigated if such blocking of context learning could be diminished in a social context, when the task-irrelevant context is task-relevant for a co-actor in a joint action search mode. We adopted the contextual cueing paradigm and extended this to the co-active search mode. Participants learned a context-cued subset of the search displays (color-defined) in the training phase, and their search performance was tested in the transfer phase, where previously irrelevant and relevant subsets were swapped. The experiments were conducted either in a solo search mode (Experiments 1 and 3) or in a co-active search mode (Experiment 2). Consistent with the classical contextual cueing studies, contextual cueing was observed in the training phase of all three experiments. Importantly, however, in the "swapped" test session, a significant contextual cueing effect was manifested only in the co-active search mode, not in the solo search mode. Our findings suggest that social context may widen the scope of attention, thus facilitating the acquisition of task-irrelevant contexts.
Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect ... more Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect termed "contextual cueing". Previous solo-performance studies have shown that contextual learning requires explicit allocation of attentional resources to the task-relevant repeated context, while repeated, but task-irrelevant subsets of items show no contextual benefits. Lack of attention to repeated, but task-irrelevant contexts may weaken contextual cueing. In a co-active environment, however, people often share some attention to both self-relevant and co-actor relevant context. Whether participants can acquire co-actor relevant, but self-irrelevant repeated contexts remains unsolved. Thus, the present study adopted the contextual cueing paradigm under the co-active social context. Participants learned a cued subset of the search display (either black or white) in the learning phase, and tested the search performance for the irrelevant subsets in the transfer phase. The expe...
Although humans are well capable of precise time measurement, their duration judgments are nevert... more Although humans are well capable of precise time measurement, their duration judgments are nevertheless susceptible to temporal context. Previous research on temporal bisection has shown that duration comparisons are influenced by both stimulus spacing and ensemble statistics. However, theories proposed to account for bisection performance lack a plausible justification of how the effects of stimulus spacing and ensemble statistics are actually combined in temporal judgments. To explain the various contextual effects in temporal bisection, we develop a unified ensemble-distribution account (EDA), which assumes that the mean and variance of the duration set serve as a reference, rather than the short and long standards, in duration comparison. To validate this account, we conducted three experiments that varied the stimulus spacing (Experiment 1), the frequency of the probed durations (Experiment 2), and the variability of the probed durations (Experiment 3). The results revealed sig...
Invariant spatial context can guide attention and facilitate visual search, an effect referred to... more Invariant spatial context can guide attention and facilitate visual search, an effect referred to as “contextual cueing.” Most previous studies on contextual cueing were conducted under conditions of photopic vision and high search item to background luminance contrast, leaving open the question whether the learning and/or retrieval of context cues depends on luminance contrast and ambient lighting. Given this, we conducted three experiments (each contains two subexperiments) to compare contextual cueing under different combinations of luminance contrast (high/low) and ambient lighting (photopic/mesopic). With high-contrast displays, we found robust contextual cueing in both photopic and mesopic environments, but the acquired contextual cueing could not be transferred when the display contrast changed from high to low in the photopic environment. By contrast, with low-contrast displays, contextual facilitation manifested only in mesopic vision, and the acquired cues remained effecti...
It is well established that statistical learning of visual target locations in relation to consta... more It is well established that statistical learning of visual target locations in relation to constantly positioned visual distractors facilitates visual search. In the present study, we investigated whether such a contextual-cueing effect would also work crossmodally, from touch onto vision. Participants responded to the orientation of a visual target singleton presented among seven homogenous visual distractors. Four tactile stimuli, two to different fingers of each hand, were presented either simultaneously with or prior to the visual stimuli. The identity of the stimulated fingers provided the crossmodal context cue: in half of the trials, a given visual target location was consistently paired with a given tactile configuration. The visual stimuli were presented above the unseen fingers, ensuring spatial correspondence between vision and touch. We found no evidence of crossmodal contextual cueing when the two sets of items (tactile, visual) were presented simultaneously (Experiment...
Searching for targets among similar distractors requires more time as the number of items increas... more Searching for targets among similar distractors requires more time as the number of items increases, with search efficiency measured by the slope of the reaction-time (RT)/set-size function. Horowitz and Wolfe (Nature, 394(6693), 575-577, 1998) found that the target-present RT slopes were as similar for "dynamic" as for standard static search, even though the items were randomly reshuffled every 110 ms in dynamic search. Somewhat surprisingly, attempts to understand dynamic search have ignored that the target-absent RT slope was as low (or "flat") as the target-present slope-so that the mechanisms driving search performance under dynamic conditions remain unclear. Here, we report three experiments that further explored search in dynamic versus static displays. Experiment 1 confirmed that the targetabsent:target-present slope ratio was close to or smaller than 1 in dynamic search, as compared with being close to or above 2 in static search. This pattern did not change when reward was assigned to either correct target-absent or correct target-present responses (Experiment 2), or when the search difficulty was increased (Experiment 3). Combining analysis of search sensitivity and response criteria, we developed a multiple-decisions model that successfully accounts for the differential slope patterns in dynamic versus static search. Two factors in the model turned out to be critical for generating the 1:1 slope ratio in dynamic search: the "quit-the-search" decision variable accumulated based upon the likelihood of "target absence" within each individual sample in the multiple-decisions process, whilst the stopping threshold was a linear function of the set size and reward manipulation.
Duration estimates are often biased by the sampled statistical context, yielding the classical ce... more Duration estimates are often biased by the sampled statistical context, yielding the classical central-tendency effect, i.e., short durations are over- and long duration underestimated. Most studies of the central-tendency bias have primarily focused on the integration of the sensory measure and the prior information, without considering any cognitive limits. Here, we investigated the impact of cognitive (visual working-memory) load on duration estimation in the duration encoding and reproduction stages. In four experiments, observers had to perform a dual, attention-sharing task: reproducing a given duration (primary) and memorizing a variable set of color patches (secondary). We found an increase in memory load (i.e., set size) during the duration-encoding stage to increase the central-tendency bias, while shortening the reproduced duration in general; in contrast, increasing the load during the reproduction stage prolonged the reproduced duration, without influencing the central ...
2014 IEEE 22nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2014
The growth of software complexity and high degree of dependencies between functionalities motivat... more The growth of software complexity and high degree of dependencies between functionalities motivates the use of models during requirements engineering. Hence, readability and comprehensibility of currently requirements specification techniques should be increased. Additionally, multi-view modeling and tabular expression are widely accepted techniques in requirements documentation. We present a tool that allows structured multi-view modeling of the behavior of the system by means of tabular notation. Our tool provides various table patterns to support different behavior views, which leverage the advantages of tabular specification, e.g., unambiguous, precise, and easier to read, analyses and communicate. Our aim is to reduce the complexity in the development of software systems.
Water quality monitoring and forecasting plays an important role in modern intensive fish farming... more Water quality monitoring and forecasting plays an important role in modern intensive fish farming management. This paper describes an online water quality monitoring system for intensive fish culture in China, which combined web-server-embedded technology with mobile telecommunication technology. Based on historical data, this system is designed to forecast water quality with artificial neural networks (ANNs) and control the water quality in time to reduce catastrophic losses. The forecasting model for dissolved oxygen half an hour ahead has been validated with experimental data. The results demonstrate that multi-parametric, long-distance and online monitoring for water quality information can be accurately acquired and predicted by using this established monitoring system.
Despite having relatively accurate timing, subjective time can be influenced by various contexts,... more Despite having relatively accurate timing, subjective time can be influenced by various contexts, such as stimulus spacing and sample frequency. Several electroencephalographic (EEG) components have been associated with timing, including the contingent negative variation (CNV), offset P2, and late positive component of timing (LPCt). However, the specific role of these components in the contextual modulation of perceived time remains unclear. In this study, we conducted two temporal bisection experiments to investigate this issue. Participants had to judge whether a test duration was close to a short or long standard. Unbeknownst to them, we manipulated the stimulus spacing (Experiment 1) and sample frequency (Experiment 2) to create short and long contexts while maintaining consistent test ranges and standards across different sessions. The results revealed that the bisection threshold shifted towards the ensemble mean, and both CNV and LPCt were sensitive to context modulation. In the short context, the CNV exhibited an increased climbing rate compared to the long context, whereas the LPCt displayed reduced amplitude and latency. These findings suggest that the CNV represents an expectancy wave preceding a temporal decision process, while the LPCt reflects the decision-making process itself, with both components influenced by the temporal context.
Despite relatively accurate time judgment, subjective time is susceptible to various contexts, su... more Despite relatively accurate time judgment, subjective time is susceptible to various contexts, such as sample spacing and frequency. Several electroencephalographic (EEG) components have been linked to timing, including the contingent negative variation (CNV), offset P2, and late positive component of timing (LPCt). However, the specific role of these components in the contextual modulation of perceived time remains unclear. In this study, we conducted two temporal bisection experiments, where participants had to judge if a test duration was close to a short or long standard. Unbeknownst to participants, the sample spacing (Experiment 1) and frequency (Experiment 2) were altered to create short and long contexts while keeping the test range and standards the same in different sessions. The results showed that the bisection threshold shifted toward the ensemble mean and that CNV and LPCt were sensitive to context modulation. Compared to the long context, the CNV climbing rate increas...
Despite the crucial role of complex temporal sequences, such as speech and music, in our everyday... more Despite the crucial role of complex temporal sequences, such as speech and music, in our everyday lives, our ability to acquire and reproduce these patterns is prone to various contextual biases. In this study, we examined how the temporal order of auditory sequences affects temporal reproduction. Participants were asked to reproduce accelerating, decelerating or random sequences, each consisting of four intervals, by tapping their fingers. Our results showed that the reproduction and the reproduction variability were influenced by the sequential structure and interval orders. The mean reproduced interval was assimilated by the first interval of the sequence, with the lowest mean for decelerating and the highest for accelerating sequences. Additionally, the central tendency bias was affected by the volatility and the last interval of the sequence, resulting in a stronger central tendency in the random and decelerating sequences than the accelerating sequence. Using Bayesian integrat...
ABSTRACT The increasing complexity of embedded systems makes the formal specification of requirem... more ABSTRACT The increasing complexity of embedded systems makes the formal specification of requirements both more important and more difficult. Services can help provide a foundation for model-driven requirements engineering for multi-functional embedded systems. This paper provides a conceptual framework that applies a novel modeling approach to the development of embedded systems. We suggest tables as pragmatic specification formalism for a both precise and readable specification of systems, their interfaces, and their functional properties. By translating tables into logical formulas, which define precise semantics for them, the structure specification and refinement of system can be contained. The approach is illustrated by a case study – a tabular specification of a SwStore system.
International Journal of Modeling and Optimization, 2014
An open issue in the area of formal methods is the automation methods and their support tools whi... more An open issue in the area of formal methods is the automation methods and their support tools which need to be applied in the specification process. The automated methodology not only saves time, but also excludes human factors that lead to failure, so it is becoming a trend of model-driven development technology in requirements engineering. For this purpose, we proposed and implemented a formal specification automation process which aims to generate formal specification documents from software engineering models. Our work focuses on the automatic generation of requirements specification in the Focus modeling framework from AutoFocus models. The proposed method not only generates a readable specification of the requirements, but also provides an effective way to combine the CASE tool AutoFocus and the Focus framework.
2009 WRI International Conference on Communications and Mobile Computing, 2009
... Reliability, security and inexpensive characteristics re-quired will all be essential in the ... more ... Reliability, security and inexpensive characteristics re-quired will all be essential in the remote ... This study developed a complete and on-line monitoring system for remote water quality ... Agsm-based remote wireless automatic monitoring system for field information: A case study ...
One of the common problems of system development projects is that the system documentation is oft... more One of the common problems of system development projects is that the system documentation is often outdated and does not describe the latest version of the system. The situation is even more complicated if we are speaking not about a natural language description of the system, but about its formal specification. In this paper we discuss how the problem could be solved by updating the documentation automatically, by generating a new formal specification from the model if the model is frequently changed.
Task schedule is a critical issue of distributed computing. Foster et al. (2001) defined &amp... more Task schedule is a critical issue of distributed computing. Foster et al. (2001) defined "Grid problem", which is defined as flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources -what they referred to as virtual organizations (VO). Improving the performance of grid computing relies much on the grid task scheduling algorithm. In this paper, a new
Water quality monitoring and forecasting plays an important role in modern intensive fish farming... more Water quality monitoring and forecasting plays an important role in modern intensive fish farming management. This paper describes an online water quality monitoring system for intensive fish culture in China, which combined web-server-embedded technology with mobile telecommunication technology. Based on historical data, this system is designed to forecast water quality with artificial neural networks (ANNs) and control the water quality in time to reduce catastrophic losses. The forecasting model for dissolved oxygen half an hour ahead has been validated with experimental data. The results demonstrate that multi-parametric, long-distance and online monitoring for water quality information can be accurately acquired and predicted by using this established monitoring system.
Model-based development approaches have attracted a lot of attention in the last decade due to th... more Model-based development approaches have attracted a lot of attention in the last decade due to their ability to deal with complexity in large software engineering projects. However, a natural question raises, to what extent model-based development approaches are suited to tackle engineering challenges from other application domains such as the automation domain. In order to answer this question, we apply the model based SPES development method to an industrial case study from the automation domain, focusing on the control software components of a desalination plant. In particular, we demonstrate the formalization of requirements, the elicitation of a functional and a logical specification with automatic verification of formal requirements. Compared to classical software engineering approaches, where verification phase is done after the logical implementation phase, our approach focuses on a strict integration of modelling and automatic verification of formal requirements in early development phases such as the system functionalities definition.
Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect ... more Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect termed contextual cueing. Previous solo-performance studies have shown that successful acquisition of contextual memories requires explicit allocation of attentional resources to the task-relevant repeated contexts. By contrast, repeated but task-irrelevant contexts could not be learned when presented together with repeated task-relevant contexts due to a blocking effect. Here we investigated if such blocking of context learning could be diminished in a social context, when the task-irrelevant context is task-relevant for a co-actor in a joint action search mode. We adopted the contextual cueing paradigm and extended this to the co-active search mode. Participants learned a context-cued subset of the search displays (color-defined) in the training phase, and their search performance was tested in the transfer phase, where previously irrelevant and relevant subsets were swapped. The experiments were conducted either in a solo search mode (Experiments 1 and 3) or in a co-active search mode (Experiment 2). Consistent with the classical contextual cueing studies, contextual cueing was observed in the training phase of all three experiments. Importantly, however, in the "swapped" test session, a significant contextual cueing effect was manifested only in the co-active search mode, not in the solo search mode. Our findings suggest that social context may widen the scope of attention, thus facilitating the acquisition of task-irrelevant contexts.
Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect ... more Repeatedly presenting a target within a stable search array facilitates visual search, an effect termed "contextual cueing". Previous solo-performance studies have shown that contextual learning requires explicit allocation of attentional resources to the task-relevant repeated context, while repeated, but task-irrelevant subsets of items show no contextual benefits. Lack of attention to repeated, but task-irrelevant contexts may weaken contextual cueing. In a co-active environment, however, people often share some attention to both self-relevant and co-actor relevant context. Whether participants can acquire co-actor relevant, but self-irrelevant repeated contexts remains unsolved. Thus, the present study adopted the contextual cueing paradigm under the co-active social context. Participants learned a cued subset of the search display (either black or white) in the learning phase, and tested the search performance for the irrelevant subsets in the transfer phase. The expe...
Although humans are well capable of precise time measurement, their duration judgments are nevert... more Although humans are well capable of precise time measurement, their duration judgments are nevertheless susceptible to temporal context. Previous research on temporal bisection has shown that duration comparisons are influenced by both stimulus spacing and ensemble statistics. However, theories proposed to account for bisection performance lack a plausible justification of how the effects of stimulus spacing and ensemble statistics are actually combined in temporal judgments. To explain the various contextual effects in temporal bisection, we develop a unified ensemble-distribution account (EDA), which assumes that the mean and variance of the duration set serve as a reference, rather than the short and long standards, in duration comparison. To validate this account, we conducted three experiments that varied the stimulus spacing (Experiment 1), the frequency of the probed durations (Experiment 2), and the variability of the probed durations (Experiment 3). The results revealed sig...
Invariant spatial context can guide attention and facilitate visual search, an effect referred to... more Invariant spatial context can guide attention and facilitate visual search, an effect referred to as “contextual cueing.” Most previous studies on contextual cueing were conducted under conditions of photopic vision and high search item to background luminance contrast, leaving open the question whether the learning and/or retrieval of context cues depends on luminance contrast and ambient lighting. Given this, we conducted three experiments (each contains two subexperiments) to compare contextual cueing under different combinations of luminance contrast (high/low) and ambient lighting (photopic/mesopic). With high-contrast displays, we found robust contextual cueing in both photopic and mesopic environments, but the acquired contextual cueing could not be transferred when the display contrast changed from high to low in the photopic environment. By contrast, with low-contrast displays, contextual facilitation manifested only in mesopic vision, and the acquired cues remained effecti...
It is well established that statistical learning of visual target locations in relation to consta... more It is well established that statistical learning of visual target locations in relation to constantly positioned visual distractors facilitates visual search. In the present study, we investigated whether such a contextual-cueing effect would also work crossmodally, from touch onto vision. Participants responded to the orientation of a visual target singleton presented among seven homogenous visual distractors. Four tactile stimuli, two to different fingers of each hand, were presented either simultaneously with or prior to the visual stimuli. The identity of the stimulated fingers provided the crossmodal context cue: in half of the trials, a given visual target location was consistently paired with a given tactile configuration. The visual stimuli were presented above the unseen fingers, ensuring spatial correspondence between vision and touch. We found no evidence of crossmodal contextual cueing when the two sets of items (tactile, visual) were presented simultaneously (Experiment...
Searching for targets among similar distractors requires more time as the number of items increas... more Searching for targets among similar distractors requires more time as the number of items increases, with search efficiency measured by the slope of the reaction-time (RT)/set-size function. Horowitz and Wolfe (Nature, 394(6693), 575-577, 1998) found that the target-present RT slopes were as similar for "dynamic" as for standard static search, even though the items were randomly reshuffled every 110 ms in dynamic search. Somewhat surprisingly, attempts to understand dynamic search have ignored that the target-absent RT slope was as low (or "flat") as the target-present slope-so that the mechanisms driving search performance under dynamic conditions remain unclear. Here, we report three experiments that further explored search in dynamic versus static displays. Experiment 1 confirmed that the targetabsent:target-present slope ratio was close to or smaller than 1 in dynamic search, as compared with being close to or above 2 in static search. This pattern did not change when reward was assigned to either correct target-absent or correct target-present responses (Experiment 2), or when the search difficulty was increased (Experiment 3). Combining analysis of search sensitivity and response criteria, we developed a multiple-decisions model that successfully accounts for the differential slope patterns in dynamic versus static search. Two factors in the model turned out to be critical for generating the 1:1 slope ratio in dynamic search: the "quit-the-search" decision variable accumulated based upon the likelihood of "target absence" within each individual sample in the multiple-decisions process, whilst the stopping threshold was a linear function of the set size and reward manipulation.
Duration estimates are often biased by the sampled statistical context, yielding the classical ce... more Duration estimates are often biased by the sampled statistical context, yielding the classical central-tendency effect, i.e., short durations are over- and long duration underestimated. Most studies of the central-tendency bias have primarily focused on the integration of the sensory measure and the prior information, without considering any cognitive limits. Here, we investigated the impact of cognitive (visual working-memory) load on duration estimation in the duration encoding and reproduction stages. In four experiments, observers had to perform a dual, attention-sharing task: reproducing a given duration (primary) and memorizing a variable set of color patches (secondary). We found an increase in memory load (i.e., set size) during the duration-encoding stage to increase the central-tendency bias, while shortening the reproduced duration in general; in contrast, increasing the load during the reproduction stage prolonged the reproduced duration, without influencing the central ...
2014 IEEE 22nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2014
The growth of software complexity and high degree of dependencies between functionalities motivat... more The growth of software complexity and high degree of dependencies between functionalities motivates the use of models during requirements engineering. Hence, readability and comprehensibility of currently requirements specification techniques should be increased. Additionally, multi-view modeling and tabular expression are widely accepted techniques in requirements documentation. We present a tool that allows structured multi-view modeling of the behavior of the system by means of tabular notation. Our tool provides various table patterns to support different behavior views, which leverage the advantages of tabular specification, e.g., unambiguous, precise, and easier to read, analyses and communicate. Our aim is to reduce the complexity in the development of software systems.
Water quality monitoring and forecasting plays an important role in modern intensive fish farming... more Water quality monitoring and forecasting plays an important role in modern intensive fish farming management. This paper describes an online water quality monitoring system for intensive fish culture in China, which combined web-server-embedded technology with mobile telecommunication technology. Based on historical data, this system is designed to forecast water quality with artificial neural networks (ANNs) and control the water quality in time to reduce catastrophic losses. The forecasting model for dissolved oxygen half an hour ahead has been validated with experimental data. The results demonstrate that multi-parametric, long-distance and online monitoring for water quality information can be accurately acquired and predicted by using this established monitoring system.
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Papers by Xiuna Zhu