Children struggle beyond preschool-age in a continuous version of the ambiguous figures task

Children until the age of five are only able to reverse an ambiguous figure when they are informed about the second interpretation. In two experiments, we examined whether children’s difficulties would extend to a continuous version of the ambiguous figures task. Children (Experiment 1: 66 3- to 5-year olds; Experiment 2: 54 4- to 9-year olds) and adult controls saw line drawings of animals gradually morph—through well-known ambiguous figures—into other animals. Results show a relatively late developing ability to recognize the target animal, with difficulties extending beyond preschool-age. This delay can neither be explained with improvements in theory of mind, inhibitory control, nor individual differences in eye movements. Even the best achieving children only started to approach adult level performance at the age of 9, suggesting a fundamentally different processing style in children and adults

A Neuro-Mathematical Model for Size and Context Related Illusions

We provide here a mathematical model of size/context illusions, inspired by the functional architecture of the visual cortex. We first recall previous models of scale and orientation, in particular Sarti et al. in Biol Cybern 9:33–48, (2008), and simplify it, only considering the feature of scale. Then we recall the deformation model of illusion, introduced by Franceschiello et al. (J Math Imaging Vis 60:94–108, 2017b) to describe orientation related GOIs, and adapt it to size illusion. We finally apply the model to the Ebbinghaus and Delboeuf illusions, validating the results by comparing them with experimental data from Massaro and Anderson (J Exp Psychol 89:147, 1971) and Roberts et al. (Perception 34:847–856, 2005)

First Measurement of the Electron Neutrino Charged-Current Pion Production Cross Section on Carbon with the T2K Near Detector

International audienceThe T2K Collaboration presents the first measurement of electron neutrino-induced charged-current pion production on carbon in a restricted kinematical phase space. This is performed using data from the 2.5$^{\deg}$ off-axis near detector, ND280. The differential cross sections with respect to the outgoing electron and pion kinematics, in addition to the total flux-integrated cross section, are obtained. Comparisons between the measured and predicted cross section results using the Neut, Genie and NuWro Monte Carlo event generators are presented. The measured total flux-integrated cross section is [2.52 $\pm$ 0.52 (stat) $\pm$ 0.30 (sys)] x $10^{-39}$ cm$^2$ nucleon$^{-1}$, which is lower than the event generator predictions