Intuition is an innate ability through which human beings acquire knowledge about the world around them. Throughout history people have speculated about how intuition operates and about the accuracy and usefulness of intuitively derived conclusions, but there have been few attempts at empirical investigation primarily due to the fact that a person using intuition does not appear to be doing anything at all. In fact, clinical lore suggests that that trying too hard may actually impede progress toward achieving an intuitively derived solution. As source of knowledge or understanding, intuition appears to stand somewhere between perception and reason. Phenomenologically, intuitively derived solutions resemble perceptions, in that both are experienced as “given,” however unlike perception intuition involves no discernable physiological pathway leading from sensory stimulation to the conscious awareness of some thing. Functionally, intuition has similarities to the process of reasoning, in that both can provide useful information about the world to consciousness. In use, however, intuition differs from reasoning, which takes place through explicit, observable intermediates between the recognition of a problem in need of a solution and the achievement of a successful solution. Intuition involves no such intermediates. Thus, intuition appears to be a function with neither pathway nor process. The set of studies discussed in Part A of this thesis was designed to examine the notion that, rather than an abrupt and disjunctive “change of state,” intuition is an incremental, accumulative process through which implicit and increasingly complete intermediates, or states of “partial knowledge” are generated prior to the achievement of a solution in consciousness. In Part A, it was demonstrated that unsuccessful attempts to identify objects portrayed in difficult visual gestalts significantly facilitated participants’ performance on a related partial-word solution task. When the unrecognized stimulus items were incoherent, i.e., altered so that the component parts were displaced and rotated relative to each other, the facilitation effect, while still significant, was less than when the unrecognized gestalt was coherent. This finding supports the idea that the amount of solution-relevant implicit knowledge generated in an unsuccessful attempt to solve a problem varies with the quality of information present in the problem situation. The set of studies in Part B examined the effect of inserting “dead air” interval between the visual gestalt and the related partial-word in the partial-word solution phase. Against prediction, coherent partial-word facilitation did not decrease at any interval condition, while incoherent partial-word increased at the longest interval condition. Overall, the findings are best explained by a bi-directional, dual-processing model in which the organization of visual stimuli and the symbolic labeling of sub-components within the visual stimuli are processed independently. Such a model could provide some context for the dispute between proponents of reorganization vs. forgetting in the debate about mechanism underlying incubation effects.

Intuition is an innate ability through which human beings acquire knowledge about the world around them. Throughout history people have speculated about how intuition operates and about the accuracy and usefulness of intuitively derived conclusions, but there have been few attempts at empirical investigation primarily due to the fact that a person using intuition does not appear to be doing anything at all. In fact, clinical lore suggests that that trying too hard may actually impede progress toward achieving an intuitively derived solution. As source of knowledge or understanding, intuition appears to stand somewhere between perception and reason. Phenomenologically, intuitively derived solutions resemble perceptions, in that both are experienced as “given,” however unlike perception intuition involves no discernable physiological pathway leading from sensory stimulation to the conscious awareness of some thing. Functionally, intuition has similarities to the process of reasoning, in that both can provide useful information about the world to consciousness. In use, however, intuition differs from reasoning, which takes place through explicit, observable intermediates between the recognition of a problem in need of a solution and the achievement of a successful solution. Intuition involves no such intermediates. Thus, intuition appears to be a function with neither pathway nor process. The set of studies discussed in Part A of this thesis was designed to examine the notion that, rather than an abrupt and disjunctive “change of state,” intuition is an incremental, accumulative process through which implicit and increasingly complete intermediates, or states of “partial knowledge” are generated prior to the achievement of a solution in consciousness. In Part A, it was demonstrated that unsuccessful attempts to identify objects portrayed in difficult visual gestalts significantly facilitated participants’ performance on a related partial-word solution task. When the unrecognized stimulus items were incoherent, i.e., altered so that the component parts were displaced and rotated relative to each other, the facilitation effect, while still significant, was less than when the unrecognized gestalt was coherent. This finding supports the idea that the amount of solution-relevant implicit knowledge generated in an unsuccessful attempt to solve a problem varies with the quality of information present in the problem situation. The set of studies in Part B examined the effect of inserting “dead air” interval between the visual gestalt and the related partial-word in the partial-word solution phase. Against prediction, coherent partial-word facilitation did not decrease at any interval condition, while incoherent partial-word increased at the longest interval condition. Overall, the findings are best explained by a bi-directional, dual-processing model in which the organization of visual stimuli and the symbolic labeling of sub-components within the visual stimuli are processed independently. Such a model could provide some context for the dispute between proponents of reorganization vs. forgetting in the debate about mechanism underlying incubation effects.

The current study examined two means of reducing uncertainty in visual search: 1) visual relatedness of a prime to the target (a data-driven, bottom-up processing) and 2) expectancy (a top-down process based on the proportion of validly primed trials). The two processes were decoupled using a short and a long inter-stimulus interval (ISI) to examine their time course in visual search. Competing hypotheses were contrasted in order to determine whether relatedness is associated with iconic memory (Neely, 1977) or a longer lasting visual-structural implicit memory (Schacter and Cooper, 1995) and what role participant expectancy plays in visual search performance. Twelve participants engaged in a discrimination task and a visual search task. The obtained results suggest that visual relatedness is a bottom-up process, probably mediated by a short-term iconic store that affects search performance early, but whose effects rapidly decay. They also suggest that expectancy is a top-down process that requires time to build up before it can affect visual search performance, but whose effects are more long lasting than visual relatedness.

Given the high prevalence of automobile collisions in the United States, the need for collision prevention research is evident. To understand the complete cause of these incidents, it is critical to examine the drivers perception of these situations. This study involved simulations of multiple driving situations variant on luminance, rate of closure, and vehicle motions. Findings suggest changes in brake onset times of younger drivers based on roles of a lead vehicle. Multiple perceptually different rear end collisions caused participants to alter their brake onset times. The brake onset times were used to analyze braking models, including constant distance and constant tau. Additional analysis included correlations of the effects Useful Field of View and Test Anxiety on brake onset times. Effects identified not only aid in the general understanding of driving behavior, but also facilitate the application of driver assistive systems, which are currently being integrated into production vehicles.

Influenced by synesthesia, the creators of such ‘visual musics’ as abstract art, color organs, abstract film, and most recently visualizers, have attempted to illustrate correspondences between the senses. This thesis attempts to develop a framework for music visualization founded on emotional analogues between visual art and music. The framework implements audio signal spectrum analysis, mood modeling, and color theory to produce pertinent data for use in visualizations. The research is manifest as a computer program that creates a simple visualizer. Built in Max/MSP/Jitter, a programming environment especially for musical and multimedia processing, it analyzes data and produces images in real-time. The program employs spectrum analysis to extract musical data such as loudness, brightness, and note attacks from the audio signals of AIFF song files. These musical features are used to calculate the Energy and Stress of the song, which determine the general mood of the music. The mood can fall into one of the four general categories of Exuberance, Contentment, Depression, and Anxious/Frantic. This method of automatic mood classification resulted in an eighty-five percent accuracy rate. Applying color expression theory yields a color palette that reflects the musical mood. The color palette and the musical features are then supplied to four different animation schemes to produce visuals. The visualizer generates shapes and forms in a three-dimensional environment and animates them in response to the real-time musical data. The visualizer allows user input to actively direct the creation of a variety of different visualizations. This personalization of the synesthetic effects of the visualizer invites the viewer to actively consider his or her own unique associations and facilitates understanding of the phenomenon of synesthesia and sensory fusion.

The proposed transcoding system consists of the spatial-resolution reduction and the temporal-resolution reduction method via visual attention model analysis. In the spatial domain, the visual attention model can be used to obtain the visual attention region. Then, the bitrate can be reduced since we can extract attention region of the original frame. The attention region conveys the same concept as that of the original frame. In the temporal domain, a frame skipping algorithm is proposed for reducing the temporal resolution to fit the channel target bitrate. The visual attention model is employed to measure the frame complexity in order to determine whether the frames should be skipped or not. Then, we can preserve the significant frames to avoid jerky effect. After combining with the motion vector composition algorithm, we can speedup the transcoding process with slight quality degradation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-59).

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Bath, 2000. / BLDSC reference no.: DX217254.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.