Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis investigates the role of colour in the cognitive processesing of emotional information. The research is guided by the effect of colour diagnosticity which has been shown previously to influence recognition performance of several types of objects as well as natural scenes. The research presented in Experiment 1 examined whether colour information is considered a diagnostic perceptual feature of seven emotional categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise and neutral. Participants (N = 119), who were naïve to the specific purpose and expectations of the experiment, chose colour more than any other perceptual quality (e.g. shape and tactile information) as a feature that describes the seven emotional categories. The specific colour features given for the six basic emotions were consistently different from those given to the non-emotional neutral category. While emotional categories were often described by chromatic colour features (e.g. red, blue, orange) the neutral category was often ascribed achromatic colour features (e.g. white, grey, transparent) as the most symptomatic perceptual qualities for its description. The emotion 'anger' was unique in being the only emotion showing an agreement higher that 50% of the total given colour features for one particular colour - red. Confirming that colour is a diagnostic feature of emotions led to the examination of the effect of diagnostic colours of emotion on recognition memory for emotional words and faces: the effect, if any, of appropriate and inappropriate colours (matched with emotion) on the strength of memory for later recognition of faces and words (Experiments 2 & 3). The two experiments used retention intervals of 15 minutes and one week respectively and the colour-emotion associations were determined for each individual participant. Results showed that regardless of the subject’s consistency level in associating colours with emotions, and compared with the individual inappropriate or random colours, individual appropriate colours of emotions significantly enhance recognition memory for six basic emotional faces and words. This difference between the individual inappropriate colours or random colours and the individual appropriate colours of emotions was not found to be significant for non-emotional neutral stimuli. Post hoc findings from both experiments further show that appropriate colours of emotion are associated more consistently than inappropriate colours of emotions. This suggests that appropriate colour-emotion associations are unique both in their strength of association and in the form of their representation. Experiment 4 therefore aimed to investigate whether appropriate colour-emotion associations also trigger an implicit automatic cognitive system that allows faster naming times for appropriate versus inappropriate colours of emotional word carriers. Results from the combined Emotional-Semantic Stroop task confirm the above hypothesis and therefore imply that colour plays a substantial role not only in our conceptual representations of objects but also in our conceptual representations of basic emotions. The resemblance of the present findings collectively to those found previously for objects and natural scenes suggests a common cognitive mechanism for the processing of emotional diagnostic colours and the processing of diagnostic colours of objects or natural scenes. Overall, this thesis provides the foundation for many future directions of research in the area of colour and emotion as well as a few possible immediate practical implications.

When participants are presented with lists of items for immediate serial recall, tradition would suggest that a race begins - between the need to constantly refresh or recycle the memory trace of that list, and a tendency for the memory trace to decay. Standard models in the literature assumed a complex interaction of mental subsystems whereby a controlling attentional process strove to keep the memory of such a list alive for a sufficiently long period of time so it could be remembered and output in order, using a type of recirculating loop rehearsal and storage mechanism to offset the decay process. Evidence supporting such models stemmed from the observation that more short words could be remembered in order than long words (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975). This word length effect, described in the second chapter, was a crucial piece of evidence for rehearsal and decay models, in the example given, the recirculating loop was seen as being time-based and extremely limited in capacity, such that memory was deemed equivalent to the amount of information which could be cycled through the rehearsal loop in about two seconds. A number of recent challenges to this model of remembering have cast doubt on the nature of the process as described in such models as that of Baddeley (1990; 1996). Chapter 1 began by providing an overview of the development of such models from their earliest form, and also introduced some alternative ideas about the structure and function of human memory. A processing view was described, in which the probability of recalling a list of items depended not upon a race between decay and rehearsal, but on differential processing of items based on their nature. As remembering a list in its original order involves not only remembering the items themselves, but also information about how they relate together in the list, an alternate theory was advanced that in some cases the processing of information about the items, and information about their serial order could dissociate, producing a processing tradeoff. As individual items were better remembered, information about their presentation order diminished. This observation (Nairne, Riegler, & Serra, 1991) was introduced as the item-order hypothesis. The item-order hypothesis suggested that under certain conditions increased item processing could lead to deficits in order processing, and that this produced a dissociation in performance between item and order memory tasks. The generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978) was one such example, as was the perceptual interference effect (Mulligan, 2000), and these were discussed in Chapter 3. The word length effect was seen as another instance where this tradeoff might be observed. A design incorporating elements of item and order tasks based upon Nairne et al. (1991) was detailed in the fourth chapter, leading on to empirical testing of the word length effect (Chapter 5), the generation effect (Chapter 6) and the perceptual interference effect (Chapter 7). This series of experiments compared word length and generation effects under serial recall and single item recognition tasks, using a range of test conditions designed to allow replication and extension of existing data from these separate streams of research. Results did not appear as predicted for some aspects of generation and all aspects of perceptual interference, and further experiments in Chapter 8 attempted to address the current findings. For the experiments involving word length, short words were better recalled than long words on the serial recall task, but long words were better recognised in the recognition task. Following additional manipulations in Chapter 8, the generation effect began to produce a similar pattern, but the results for perceptual interference were inconclusive. Word length data, however, were consistent with the item-order approach and supported a novel explanation for the word length effect. Implications and conclusions were discussed in Chapter 9.

viii, 139, xii leaves : ill. ; 26 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Microbiology, 1974

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: James E. Hoffman, Dept. of Psychology. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

<p>The purpose of this project is to test and improve people’s ability of face recognition. </p><p>Although there are some tests on the internet with the same purpose, the problem is that people </p><p>may feel bored and give up before finishing the tests. Consequently they may not benefit from </p><p>testing nor from training. To solve this problem, face recognition and online game are put </p><p>together in this project. The game is supposed to provide entertainment when people are playing, </p><p>so that more people can take the test and improve their abilities of face recognition. </p><p>In the game design, the game is assumed to take place in the face recognition lab, which is </p><p>an imaginary lab. The player plays the main role in this game and asked to solve a number of </p><p>problems. There are several scenarios waiting for the player, which mainly need face recognition </p><p>skills from the player. At the end the player obtains the result of evaluation of her/his skills in </p><p>face recognition.</p>

<p>It is difficult for people to recognize currencies from different countries. Our aim is to help people solve this problem. However, currency recognition systems that are based on image analysis entirely are not sufficient. Our system is based on image processing and makes the process automatic and robust. We use SEK and Chinese RMB as examples to illustrate the technique. Color and shape information are used in our algorithm.</p>

This paper discusses how sparse local measurements of positions and surface normals may be used to identify and locate overlapping objects. The objects are modeled as polyhedra (or polygons) having up to six degreed of positional freedom relative to the sensors. The approach operated by examining all hypotheses about pairings between sensed data and object surfaces and efficiently discarding inconsistent ones by using local constraints on: distances between faces, angles between face normals, and angles (relative to the surface normals) of vectors between sensed points. The method described here is an extension of a method for recognition and localization of non-overlapping parts previously described in [Grimson and Lozano-Perez 84] and [Gaston and Lozano-Perez 84].