Abstract

This study investigates the impact of loss-framing and individual risk attitude on the willingness- to purchase insurance products, utilizing a game-like interface in a choice architecture. The application presents events as experienced in real-life , as a young adult searching for employment to retirement. Both financial and emotional loss-framing events are followed by choices to purchase insurance. The participant cohorts considered were undergraduate students and older participants, the latter group was further subdivided by income and education. From the within-subject analysis, the preliminary findings reveal that the loss framing effect on insurance consumption is higher in the younger population though contingent on the insurance product type. Health and accident insurance shows a negative correlation with risk attitudes for the younger age and a positive correlation with accident insurance for older participants. Risk attitude and life insurance products willingness-to-purchase showed no dependency. The findings elucidate the role of age, income, family responsibilities, and risk attitude in purchasing insurance products. Importantly, it confirms the correlation between age and the effect heuristics of framing/nudging.

Abstract

Unde rstan din g th e relationship betwee n phys ica l characte ristics an d acti vit y to kinemati c properties of th e spin e ha s impl ication s fo r sports , occupational tasks, clin ica l diagnosi s an d prognosis. This stud y aime d to ca t egorize spin e kinema tic s from flexion, la teral -bend , an d twis t exercise s by examinin g th e co rrelation s to body -mass inde x (BMI), wais t -to -hi p rati o (WHR), an d phys ica l acti vit y le vel s in health y youn g adults . Th e data wa s co llected from a marker -base d optoelectronic motion ca pture setu p an d a marker -less motion ca pture with th e RG B ca m - er a of a standard mobile phone. Co mpa rin g th e accuracies of th e tw o techniques on th e same data se t is impo r - tant to develo p inexpe nsive (RGB ca mera) diagno stics . Sixt y -tw o pa rti c ipant s (4 0 Male , 22 female ) pa rti c ipate d in th e study. Th e angula r di splac ement of th e spin e fo r each exercise wa s extracte d by ve cto r anal ysi s usin g a si n - gl e re ference node /marker . Th e anal ysi s showed no si gni ficant co rrelation s of angula r di splac ement s va lue s fo r th e thre e movement s with BM I or WHR. Th e phys ica l acti vit y leve l of male pa rti c ipant s is si gni ficantly co rrelate d with angula r di splac ement s fo r th e flexio n (p < 0.001) an d la teral -bend (p -valu e ranges from 0.00 1 to 0.04 ) an d weakly co rrelate d (but no t si gni ficant ) fo r twis t exercises. Th e phys ica l acti vit y leve l show s a si gni ficant co rrela - tion fo r only flexio n (p < 0.001) in female pa rti c ipants. Th e findings emph asize th e crit ica l role of phys ica l acti v - it y on mu sculoskel eta l flex ibi lit y in young, health y adults . Th e angles estimate d usin g both techniques were co m - parabl e an d si gni ficantly co rrelate d across pa rti c ipant s an d exercises.

Abstract

Unde rstan din g th e relationship betwee n phys ica l characte ristics an d acti vit y to kinemati c properties of th e spin e ha s impl ication s fo r sports , occupational tasks, clin ica l diagnosi s an d prognosis. This stud y aime d to ca t egorize spin e kinema tic s from flexion, la teral -bend , an d twis t exercise s by examinin g th e co rrelation s to body -mass inde x (BMI), wais t -to -hi p rati o (WHR), an d phys ica l acti vit y le vel s in health y youn g adults . Th e data wa s co llected from a marker -base d optoelectronic motion ca pture setu p an d a marker -less motion ca pture with th e RG B ca m - er a of a standard mobile phone. Co mpa rin g th e accuracies of th e tw o techniques on th e same data se t is impo r - tant to develo p inexpe nsive (RGB ca mera) diagno stics . Sixt y -tw o pa rti c ipant s (4 0 Male , 22 female ) pa rti c ipate d in th e study. Th e angula r di splac ement of th e spin e fo r each exercise wa s extracte d by ve cto r anal ysi s usin g a si n - gl e re ference node /marker . Th e anal ysi s showed no si gni ficant co rrelation s of angula r di splac ement s va lue s fo r th e thre e movement s with BM I or WHR. Th e phys ica l acti vit y leve l of male pa rti c ipant s is si gni ficantly co rrelate d with angula r di splac ement s fo r th e flexio n (p < 0.001) an d la teral -bend (p -valu e ranges from 0.00 1 to 0.04 ) an d weakly co rrelate d (but no t si gni ficant ) fo r twis t exercises. Th e phys ica l acti vit y leve l show s a si gni ficant co rrela - tion fo r only flexio n (p < 0.001) in female pa rti c ipants. Th e findings emph asize th e crit ica l role of phys ica l acti v - it y on mu sculoskel eta l flex ibi lit y in young, health y adults . Th e angles estimate d usin g both techniques were co m - parabl e an d si gni ficantly co rrelate d across pa rti c ipant s an d exercises.

Abstract

1 Introduction Recent studies show that sexually-objectified women are not only treated as sex objects but also visually processed similar to objects (local processing)[1,2]. However, Sexual objectification(SO) research has predominantly studied western society's perceptions, with few empirical studies examining other cultures. In this study, we explore SO of women in an Asian-Indian cultural/social setting using a novel design and stimuli representative of the culture. We conduct an eye tracking study that uses Navon local/global and body inversion[3] paradigms to investigate the gaze behavior and underlying visual processing when looking at non-sexualized male and female images. 2 Methods The study sample consists of Ninety-four (24 women, 70 men, age=18-27, mean=21, stdev=±2.1) undergraduate and graduate students. There are 20 trial blocks. Each trial block consists of a male/female image in upright/inverted orientation, off-centre to the screen for 7 seconds followed by a plus sign for 1 second, followed by a Navon letter identification task. The priming condition and Navon task are randomised to minimise confounding effects. The Navon image is a large letter made of small letters. The participants press 'B' if they identify either one of the target letters ('H'/‘O') either as a contour or a feature (the letter itself) otherwise press ‘N’. The classification of local/global recognition is implicit as the participants press the same key ‘B’ for both local and global images. We selected black and white male images(MI) and female images(FI) wearing casual attires like jeans/pant and top/shirt. The experiment is designed using Tobii Studio. Tobiix120 eye tracker is used to capture the gaze. We mark face, chest, hip as our Areas of Interest(AoIs) and calculate the fixation duration(FD), revisit frequency(RF), first fixation duration(FFD) for the AoIs. We define sexual body(SB) parts as sum of hip and chest AoIs. For gaze analysis, 5 participants data with poor sampling rate (below 40%) are excluded. We use Tukey Fence outlier detection method to remove outliers and removed 10 participants data for first fixation duration analysis. We measure Response Time(RT) as the time taken to press the key from the onset of the Navon image presentation. For RT analysis, we consider only the data points with at least one correct response in each priming condition, reducing our data to 59 participants. The alpha level for p-value is set to 0.05 in all tests. 3 Results There is a main effect of target (priming stimulus) gender and orientation on the FD and RF. • FD: Face FD of upright > inverted and SB parts FD of upright < inverted for both MI and FI. Face FD of FI < MI and SB parts FD of FI > MI in both upright and inverted orientation. Face FD > SB parts FD for all target images. • RF: Face RF of upright > inverted for both MI and FI. SB parts RF of inverted > upright for FI. Importantly, SB parts RF of FI > MI in upright and inverted orien-tation. Face RF < SB parts RF for all target images. • FFD: There is significant effect of orientation for FI but not for MI. Face FFD of upright FI > inverted FI and SB parts FFD of inverted FI > upright FI. • RT: Global recognition is faster in female priming for both orientations. Local recognition is faster in male priming, but the significance is found only for inverted image. The participant gender effect on RT is not significant. There is no significant correlation between local/global RT and FD. 4 Discussion Objectification theory states that women have a greater propensity to be sexually objectified than men do. This is evident from our data, female sexual body parts received greater attention than male sexual body parts and vice versa for face. However the visual attention is still greatest on the face for both male and female images, in line with [4,5,6,7,8]. As for global/local perception, non-sexualized males are processed similar to objects more than females. This is in contrast to[3,1,6] but find support in a study on Chinese population [9]. We can attribute our findings to the choice of the stimuli being personalised as against sexualized. There is a strong inversion effect on gaze, both gender images are more objectified in inverted than upright position but this doesn’t affect the underlying cognitive processing implying that the difference in the visual processing between objectified and non-objectified is more quantitative than qualitative. References 3) Bernard, P., Gervais, S. J., & Klein, O. (2018). Objectifying objectification: When and why people are cognitively reduced to their parts akin to objects. European Review of So-cial Psychology, 29(1), 82–121. 4) Bernard, P., Rizzo, T., Hoonhorst, I., Deliens, G., Gervais, S., B, Bayard, C., Deltenre, P., Colin, C., & Klein, O. (2018). The Neural Correlates of Cognitive Objectification. So-cial Psychological and Personality Science, 9, 550–559. 2) Bernard, P., Gervais, S. J., Allen, J., Campomizzi, S., & Klein, O. (2012). Integrating Sexual Objectification with Object Versus Person Recognition: The Sexualized-Body-Inversion Hypothesis. Psychological Science, 23(5), 469–471. 1) Bareket, O., Shnabel, N., Abeles, D., Gervais, S., & Yuval-Greenberg, S. (2019). Evi-dence for an Association between Men’s Spontaneous Objectifying Gazing Behavior and their Endorsement of Objectifying Attitudes toward Women. Sex Roles, 81(3–4), 245–256. 5) Cogoni, C., Carnaghi, A., Mitrovic, A., Leder, H., Fantoni, C., & Silani, G. (2018). Understanding the mechanisms behind the sexualized-body inversion hypothesis: The role of asymmetry and attention biases. PLOS ONE

Abstract

Investigation of microstates extracted from EEG signals of tip-pinch and wrist flexion/extension movement

Abstract

Images are a powerful medium known to induce empathy and emotional response in people. In political protests it has the power for a people-initiated policy change and signifies the deep symbolism of a political system. In this study, we aim to quantify the range of emotional connection a person experiences for photographs of a farmers' protest.The protest was the headlines in all media at the time this experiment was conducted and had polarized public opinion. Each photograph is identified to have a set of physical and semantic features. The three selected features were presence of police, gender and close-up (vs.long-shot) in the frame. The intensity on a range of emotions (fear, disgust, anger, sadness, optimism, pessimism, surprise, shock, happiness, and respect) experienced by the viewer for each feature was collected. By statistical and dimensionality analyses, we isolate and identify influencing factors in an image. We found that the presence of police in aggressive actions and close-up shots of had the highest variation in the emotional responses of participants. Interestingly, the gender of the protesters did not show statistically significant effects. The findings from the exploratory investigation highlights the powerful role photographic features have on emotional responses of people, an understudied but critical factor in a world immersed in social media.

Abstract

In this paper, we have studied the impact of clickbait headlines on the distribution of visual attention on hyperlinked news articles. Visual attention is a driving factor in ad-based revenue models that support online journalism. Importantly, it is also an indicator of cognitive processes involved in reading and comprehension. We hypothesize that articles with clickbait headlines receive lesser visual attention when controlled for articles’ content. This is based on the premise that a significant proportion of clicks on clickbait headlines are driven by readers’ specific epistemic curiosity rather than knowledge acquisition. An eye-tracker setup was used to infer visual attention from the gaze-fixation analysis conducted on data from 60 participants. Our results suggest that clickbait headlines significantly reduce the visual attention on news articles. Though, article content comprehension measured by a recall test was comparable for clickbait and non-clickbait headlines. Our findings add to the discussions on the cognitive attention and the implications of using clickbait headlines for news publishers, newsreaders, and advertising agencies alike.

Abstract

Humans report perceptions of unease or eeriness as humanoid/android robots and digital avatars approach human-like physical resemblance, a phenomenon alluded by the Uncanny Valley theory. This study extends the discussions on interactions and acceptance of digital avatars with findings from three experiments. In the first, perceptive evaluation of actors in clips from computer-generated animation and a live-action version of the same movie was examined. In the second experiment, we considered short clips with highly realistic digital avatars to measure recognition ability, the extent of eeriness, and specific physical features identified as unreal. The fixation area and pupil size variation recorded using an eye tracker were analyzed to infer attention to the body, face, and emotional response, respectively. Building on these findings, the third experiment looked at acceptance in roles requiring human skill, empathy, and cognitive ability. The results show that based on perceptions from physical attributes, the eeriness scores diverge from the uncanny valley theory as human-likeness increases. The realistic CGI and mocap technology could have helped cross the valley. Visual attention inferred from gaze behavior was similar for live-action and CGI. At the same time, we observe pupil size changes reflecting emotions like eeriness when the avatars either talked or smiled. Proficiency and acceptance scores were lower for roles requiring complex social cognition processes, such as friends and judicial decision-making. Interestingly, real-life stereotypes of gender roles were transferred to digital avatars too. The findings suggest an ambiguity in accepting human-like avatars in social and professional interactions, emphasizing the need for a multi-dimensional approach when applying the uncanny valley theory. A detailed and contextual examination is imperative as technological advancements have placed humans closer to co-existing with digital or physical android/humanoid robots.

Abstract

Particulate matter (PM) is considered the primary contributor to air pollution and has severe implications for general health. PM concentration has high spatial variability and thus needs to be monitored locally. Traditional PM monitoring setups are bulky, expensive and cannot be scaled for dense deployments. This paper argues for a densely deployed network of IoT-enabled PM monitoring devices using low-cost sensors. In this work, 49 devices were deployed in a region of the Indian metropolitan city of Hyderabad out-of this, 43 devices were developed as part of this work and 6 devices were taken off the shelf. The low-cost sensors were calibrated for seasonal variations using a precise reference sensor. A thorough analysis of data collected for seven months has been presented to establish the need for dense deployment of PM monitoring devices. Different analyses such as mean, variance, spatial interpolation and correlation have been employed to generate interesting insights about temporal and seasonal variations of PM. In addition, event-driven spatiotemporal analysis is done for PM values to understand the impact of the bursting of firecrackers on the evening of the Diwali festival. A web-based dashboard is designed for real-time data visualization.

Abstract

Binocular vision (BV) is the result of fusion between inputs from each eye to form a coherent image. BV anomalies are evaluated using different diagnostic tests and instruments. One such instrument is the Synoptophore, which evaluates three grades of BV. This equipment though efficient has certain limitations like ambient light while testing, bulky and expensive. We propose VR-Phore, application of a VR head-mounted display for diagnostics based on principle of the haploscope similar to Synoptophore. The proposed system addresses the limitations of Synoptophore with added advantage of a software platform to incorporate testing modules for a range of clinical conditions.