Many researchers interested in connectionist models accept that such models are "neurally inspired " but do not worry too much about whether their models are biologically realistic. While such a position may be perfectly justifiable, the present paper attempts to illustrate how biological information can be used to constrain connectionist models. Two particular areas are discussed. The first section deals with visual information processing in the primate and human visual system. It is argued that speed with which visual information is processed imposes major constraints on the architecture and operation of the visual system. In particular, it seems that a great deal of processing must depend on a single bottum-up pass. The second section deals with biological aspects of learning algorithms. It is argued that although there is good evidence for certain coactivation related synaptic modification schemes, other learning mechanisms, including back-propagation, are not currently supported by experimental data.

This article reports a theoretical and experimental attempt to relate and contrast 2 traditionally separate research programs: inattentional blindness and attention capture. Inattentional blindness refers to failures to notice unexpected objects and events when attention is otherwise engaged. Attention capture research has traditionally used implicit indices (e.g., response times) to investigate automatic shifts of attention. Because attention capture usually measures performance whereas inattentional blindness measures awareness, the 2 fields have existed side by side with no shared theoretical framework. Here, the authors propose a theoretical unification, adapting several important effects from the attention capture literature to the context of sustained inattentional blindness. Although some stimulus properties can influence noticing of unexpected objects, the most influential factor affecting noticing is a person’s own attentional goals. The authors conclude that many—but not all—aspects of attention capture apply to inattentional blindness but that these 2 classes of phenomena remain importantly distinct.

Inspired by an old Chinese game, Go, we have designed a new graphical password scheme, Pass-Go, in which a user selects intersections on a grid as a way to input a password. While offering an extremely large full password space (256 bits for the most basic scheme), our scheme provides acceptable usability, as empirically demonstrated by, to the best of our knowledge, the largest user study (167 subjects involved) on graphical passwords, conducted in the fall semester of 2005 in two university classes. Our scheme supports most application environments and input devices, rather than being limited to small mobile devices (PDAs), and can be used to derive cryptographic keys. We study the memorable password space and show the potential power of this scheme by exploring further improvements and variation mechanisms.

This report describes the development of an experimental service for picture-based document retrieval for the Electronic Visualization Library (EVlib). The EVlib is a digital library for scientific visualization, established at the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fur Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB). The picture-based retrieval service allows users to look for documents by describing the pictures they contain. This query method was developed based on the assumption that (1) pictures often represent relevant parts of the contents of a document, and (2) pictures are often remembered well. A picture-based approach provides a new quality of accessing and exploring scientific literature. Motivation, concepts and realization of our service are outlined. Results of a user test are presented, too. The results indicate that this service can be used for searching and browsing the document collection in principle. On the other hand, problems were detected which can give fruitful hints for futur...

To what extent does neural activation in human visual cortex follow the temporal dynamics of the optical retinal stimulus? Specifically, to what extent does stimulus evoked neural activation persist after stimulus termination? In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the resulting temporal non-linearities across the entire constellation of human visual areas. Gray-scale images of animals, houses and faces were presented at two different presentation rates — 1 and 4 Hz — and the fMRI signal was analyzed in retinotopic and in high order occipito-temporal visual areas. In early visual areas and the motion sensitive area MT/V5, a fourfold increase in stimulus presentation rate evoked a twofold increase in signal amplitude. However, in high order visual areas, signal amplitude increased only by 25%. A control experiment ruled out the possibility that this difference was due to signal saturation (‘ceiling’) effects. A likely explanation for the stronger non-linearities in occipito-temporal cortex is a persistent neuronal activation that continues well after stimulus termination in the 1 Hz condition. These persistent activations might serve as a short term (iconic) memory mechanism for preserving a trace of the stimulus even in its absence and for future integration with temporally correlated stimuli. Two alternative models of persistence (inhibitory and excitatory) are proposed to explain the data.

this paper, since providing the rationale (either implicit or explicit) behind many works discussed in the sequel

Phishing is a model problem for illustrating usability concerns of privacy and security because both system designers and attackers battle using user interfaces to guide (or misguide) users.

Current secure systems suffer because they neglect the importance of human factors in security. We address a fundamental weakness of knowledge-based authentication schemes, which is the human limitation to remember secure passwords. Our approach to improve the security of these systems relies on recognition-based, rather than recall-based authentication. We examine the requirements of a recognition-based authentication system and propose Deja Vu, which authenticates a user through her ability to recognize previously seen images. Deja Vu is more reliable and easier to use than traditional recall-based schemes, which require the user to precisely recall passwords or PINs. Furthermore, it has the advantage that it prevents users from choosing weak passwords and makes it difficult to write down or share passwords with others.

The authors provide evidence that long-term memory encoding can occur for briefly viewed objects in a rapid serial visual presentation list, contrary to claims that the brief presentation and quick succession of objects prevent encoding by disrupting a memory consolidation process that requires hundreds of milliseconds of uninterrupted processing. Subjects performed a search task in which each item was presented for only 75 ms. Nontargets from the search task generated priming on 2 subsequent indirect memory tests: a search task and a task requiring identification of visually masked objects. Additional experiments revealed that information encoded into memory for these nontargets included perceptual and conceptual components, and that these results were not due to subjects maintaining items in working memory during list presentation. These results are consistent with recent neurophysiological evidence showing that stimulus processing can occur at later stages in the cognitive system even when a subsequent new stimulus is presented that initiates processing at earlier stages.

Informal note taking is a significantly different task from note taking in structured settings. This type of activity requires a special set of requirements including a substantial lowering of hurdles to capture and access across a variety of environments. Cepher is a prototype note capture system that supports the capture and retrieval of short notes through a variety of input devices. People would often like to use a variety of methods to immediately capture these thoughts instead of waiting until later for an available recording mechanism. Current digital note capture systems tend to be monolithic applications that do not either dynamically support a variety of input mechanism or allow flexible access from a variety of viewers. Wireless sensor network research focuses on using sensor nodes in ubiquitous computing environments instead of the traditional routing and ad hoc networking issues. Cepher leverages research advances in hardware and software to provide a flexible infrastructure for note taking applications, which can then be treated as a federation of independent input, output, sensing and storage subsystems.