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1. Microsaccades mediate perceptual alternations in Monet’s “Impression, sunrise”

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82222-3  

   Alexander, Robert G.; Venkatakrishnan, Ashwin; Chanovas, Jordi; Macknik, Stephen L.; Martinez-Conde, Susana (December 2021, Scientific Reports)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Troxler fading, the perceptual disappearance of stationary images upon sustained fixation, is common for objects with equivalent luminance to that of the background. Previous work showed that variations in microsaccadic rates underlie the perceptual vanishing and intensification of simple stimuli, such as Gabor patches. Here, we demonstrate that microsaccade dynamics also contribute to Troxler fading and intensification during the viewing of representational art. Participants fixated a small spot while viewing either a Gabor patch on a blank background, or Monet’s painting “Impression, Sunrise.” They continuously reported, via button press/release, whether the Gabor patch, or the sun in Monet’s painting, was fading versus intensifying, while their eye movements were recorded with high precision. Microsaccade rates peaked before reports of increased visibility, and dropped before reports of decreased visibility or fading, both when viewing Gabor patches and Monet’s sun. These results reveal that the relationship between microsaccade production and the reversal and prevention of Troxler fading applies not only to the viewing of contrived stimuli, but also to the observation of “Impression, Sunrise.” Whether or not perceptual fading was consciously intended by Monet, our findings indicate that observers’ oculomotor dynamics are a contributor to the cornerstone of Impressionism. 

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2. An Experimental Investigation of Combined Symmetric-Asymmetric Composite Laminates

   https://doi.org/10.3390/jcs3030071  

   Kemmann, Guy; Myers, Oliver (September 2019, Journal of Composites Science)

   It has been found that certain asymmetric composite laminates exhibit bistability, where the composite laminate exhibits multiple stable static equilibrium states. If the bistable composite is actuated, it will snap to its secondary equilibrium state and then remain there without further actuation. This study investigates how the amount of symmetry in a combined symmetric asymmetric rectangular laminate under an imposed clamped edge boundary condition affects the bistability and the curvature of the laminate. Laminates with varying amounts of asymmetry were fabricated and then measured using a profilometer to capture the curvatures of the equilibrium shapes. The results showed that up to 20% symmetry can be introduced in the laminate without a substantial loss in snap through curvature, and that up to 83% symmetry can be introduced in the laminate before bistability is lost. Finite element simulations were conducted in Abaqus and showed good correlation with the experimental results. 

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3. Superposition principle applies to human walking with two simultaneous interventions

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-86840-9  

   Rasouli, Fatemeh; Kim, Seok Hun; Reed, Kyle B. (December 2021, Scientific Reports)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Gait rehabilitation therapies provide adjusted sensory inputs to modify and retrain walking patterns in an impaired gait. Asymmetric walking is a common gait abnormality, especially among stroke survivors. Physical therapy interventions using adaptation techniques (such as treadmill training, auditory stimulation, visual biofeedback, etc.) train gait toward symmetry. However, a single rehabilitation therapy comes up short of affecting all aspects of gait performance. Multiple-rehabilitation therapy applies simultaneous stimuli to affect a wider range of gait parameters and create flexible training regiments. Understanding gait responses to individual and jointly applied stimuli is important for developing improved and efficient therapies. In this study, 16 healthy subjects participated in a four-session experiment to study gait kinetics and spatiotemporal outcomes under training. Each session consisted of two stimuli, treadmill training and auditory stimulation, with symmetric or asymmetric ratios between legs. The study hypothesizes a linear model for gait response patterns. We found that the superposition principle largely applies to the gait response under two simultaneous stimuli. The linear models developed in this study fit the actual data from experiments with the r-squared values of 0.95 or more. 

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4. Simon says “stay in touch”: Reachability moderates the effect of irrelevant spatial congruence

   https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-026-02879-7  

   Paavola, Michael L; Mordkoff, J Toby; Moore, Cathleen M (April 2026, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review)

   Abstract The Simon Effect refers to the finding that simple left-right manual responses tend to be faster and more accurate when the response and stimulus are on the same side (congruent) compared to when they are on opposite sides (incongruent) even though the response is determined by a non-spatial attribute (e.g., color). We compared the Simon Effect with stimuli at reachable and unreachable distances within a virtual reality environment to test its dependence on the potential to interact with the stimulus. We controlled for confounds by matching image size and the viewing angle of stimuli within the environment across groups of participants. The magnitude of the Simon Effect was larger for stimuli in reachable than unreachable locations. These findings held regardless of image-size and viewing-angle conditions. This implies that task-irrelevant spatial congruence, like task-irrelevant motor affordances, is computed in ways that reflect the potential interactions with objects in a three-dimensional world. 

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5. Rotationally-Consistent Novel View Synthesis for Humans

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3394171.3413754  

   Kwon, Youngjoong; Petrangeli, Stefano; Kim, Dahun; Wang, Haoliang; Fuchs, Henry; Swaminathan, Viswanathan (October 2020, MM '20: Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia)

   null (Ed.)

   Human novel view synthesis aims to synthesize target views of a human subject given input images taken from one or more reference viewpoints. Despite significant advances in model-free novel view synthesis, existing methods present two major limitations when applied to complex shapes like humans. First, these methods mainly focus on simple and symmetric objects, e.g., cars and chairs, limiting their performances to fine-grained and asymmetric shapes. Second, existing methods cannot guarantee visual consistency across different adjacent views of the same object. To solve these problems, we present in this paper a learning framework for the novel view synthesis of human subjects, which explicitly enforces consistency across different generated views of the subject. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view supervision and an explicit rotational loss during the learning process, enabling the model to preserve detailed body parts and to achieve consistency between adjacent synthesized views. To show the superior performance of our approach, we present qualitative and quantitative results on the Multi-View Human Action (MVHA) dataset we collected (consisting of 3D human models animated with different Mocap sequences and captured from 54 different viewpoints), the Pose-Varying Human Model (PVHM) dataset, and ShapeNet. The qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in both per-view synthesis quality, and in preserving rotational consistency and complex shapes (e.g. fine-grained details, challenging poses) across multiple adjacent views in a variety of scenarios, for both humans and rigid objects. 

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