Reading List #2

Read all the things! This week I've been working on a reply to reviewer comments on a paper I've been working on for a while. One of the reviewers gave a a deluge of citations to look at, so I've been going through those and finding a few more papers of interest.


Here are two interesting papers about how performing a reaching movement seems to attract your attention towards the point of the reach (presumably for error correction)

• Jonikaitis, D., & Deubel, H. (2011). Independent allocation of attention to eye and hand targets in coordinated eye-hand movements. Psychological Science : A Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 22(3), 339–347. http://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610397666
• Neggers, S. F. W., & Bekkering, H. (2000). Ocular gaze is anchored to the target of an ongoing pointing movement. Journal of Neurophysiology, 83(1995), 639–651.

And here's a cool one that compares eye movements and verbal reports of what subjects are paying attention to. The introduction is fascinating to me because it describes a few real life cases where people fixate on one location but direct their attention to the periphery. Most people know they can do this, but it's interesting to see concrete realistic cases where it's useful. The article mentions sports and driving and hints at the need to analyze this in ergonomics research.

• Williams, A. M., & Davids, K. (1997). Assessing cue usage in performance contexts : A comparison between eye-movement and concurrent verbal report methods. Behaviour Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 29(3), 364–375. http://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200589

Reading List #1

As noted in the previous post, I'm going to start using this blog as a public reading list, or a "recently read and interesting" list. Here are the first 3 that I read recently and liked.

Yamins, D. L. K., Hong, H., Cadieu, C. F., Solomon, E. A., Seibert, D., & DiCarlo, J. J. (2014). Performance-optimized hierarchical models predict neural responses in higher visual cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(23), 8619–24. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1403112111

Kümmerer, M., Theis, L., & Bethge, M. (2014). Deep Gaze I-Boosting Saliency Prediction with Feature Maps Trained on ImageNet. arXiv:1411.1045 [Cs, Q-Bio, Stat], (2014). Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.1045%5Cnfiles/1004/arXiv-Kummerer_et_al-2014-Deep_Gaze_I-Boosting_Saliency_Prediction_with_Feature_Maps_Trained_on_ImageNet.pdf

Hong, H., Yamins, D. L. K., Majaj, N. J., & DiCarlo, J. J. (2016). Explicit information for category-orthogonal object properties increases along the ventral stream. Nature Neuroscience, 19(4), 613–622.http://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4247

Yamins et al. (2014) and Hong et al. (2016) are both from the same group that I first learned about during the CBMM (Center for Brains Minds and Machines) course. I was quite surprised by the results in the 2014 paper and it definitely affected the direction of my research. 

Kummerer et al. (2014) basically takes the idea from Yamins et al. (2014) and applies it to my research area. He uses a set of features learned in image classification and trains a simple model to weigh those features to predict fixation maps. 

Minor Reboot and a bit of purpose

Hey folks (all 0.5 of you),

I just had someone ask me what I've been reading lately, and I thought it might be worthwhile to publish it somewhere slightly more permanent/public than in an email. Computer science/Neuroscience/Pyschology is a really big space so any help I can offer to point out interesting stuff that I've read sounds useful. If anyone happens to read this and wants to point out something interesting, definitely let me know.

On that note, I'm going to try to make this into a regular thing (frequency tbd). That means this blog might become an actual real blog (as opposed to a repository of a few posts from the beginning of grad school). For me, this will also encourage me to read a bit more science, which may get harder as I escape grad school. I'm hoping that doing so will keep me intellectually stimulated though. If I could somehow replicate the experience of going to journal club and talking about an interesting paper with informed and intelligent people on this blog, I would be ecstatic. I won't hold my breath, but hopefully something good will come of this.