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"MICHAEL A. COHEN"
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Infrastructure policy and inequality
\"This book reframes the purpose of infrastructure from being an input to economic growth to becoming a major instrument in reducing socio-economic inequalities in both industrialized and developing countries. Drawing on global and national lessons of COVID-19 and extensive working experience in 55 countries, the book reviews infrastructure policies and performance over several decades and suggests that the \"underperformance\" of infrastructure could be improved by more attention to users and the demand side, and thereby contribute to overcoming many obstacles facing low-income communities around the world. The book argues that growth is not a necessary condition for sustainability or social justice, and that both are undermined by structural inequalities which reduce the income and opportunities of urban households. More focus on user needs can substantially change the distribution of benefits and the quality of living conditions of low-income people. It provides a unique theoretical and on-the-ground critique of conventional infrastructure practices while illustrating to readers the many positive experiences around the world. More infrastructure is not enough; different and better is needed. The book reviews World Bank experience in launching a 30-year program to alleviate urban poverty through some 7,000 projects, showing that many significant policy changes have led to a big improvement in global urban policies adopted by national and local governments, yet have failed to significantly address and reduce intra-urban inequalities. The audience for this book includes academics, both faculty and advanced graduate students, while also a wider public interested in the prospects for international development\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The limits of color awareness during active, real-world vision
Color ignites visual experience, imbuing the world with meaning, emotion, and richness. As soon as an observer opens their eyes, they have the immediate impression of a rich, colorful experience that encompasses their entire visual world. Here, we show that this impression is surprisingly inaccurate. We used head-mounted virtual reality (VR) to place observers in immersive, dynamic real-world environments, which they naturally explored via saccades and head turns. Meanwhile, we monitored their gaze with in-headset eye tracking and then systematically altered the visual environments such that only the parts of the scene they were looking at were presented in color and the rest of the scene (i.e., the visual periphery) was entirely desaturated. We found that observers were often completely unaware of these drastic alterations to their visual world. In the most extreme case, almost a third of observers failed to notice when less than 5% of the visual display was presented in color. This limitation on perceptual awareness could not be explained by retinal neuroanatomy or previous studies of peripheral visual processing using more traditional psychophysical approaches. In a second study, we measured color detection thresholds using a staircase procedure while a set of observers intentionally attended to the periphery. Still, we found that observers were unaware when a large portion of their field of view was desaturated. Together, these results show that during active, naturalistic viewing conditions, our intuitive sense of a rich, colorful visual world is largely incorrect.
Journal Article
On the currency of egalitarian justice, and other essays in political philosophy
This is a posthumous collection of essays in political philosophy by G.A. Cohen. Part I asks what egalitarians have most reason to equalize. Part II considers the relationship between freedom and property. Part III reflects upon ideal theory and political practice.
Book
Invariant representation of physical stability in the human brain
Successful engagement with the world requires the ability to predict what will happen next. Here, we investigate how the brain makes a fundamental prediction about the physical world: whether the situation in front of us is stable, and hence likely to stay the same, or unstable, and hence likely to change in the immediate future. Specifically, we ask if judgments of stability can be supported by the kinds of representations that have proven to be highly effective at visual object recognition in both machines and brains, or instead if the ability to determine the physical stability of natural scenes may require generative algorithms that simulate the physics of the world. To find out, we measured responses in both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the brain (using fMRI) to natural images of physically stable versus unstable scenarios. We find no evidence for generalizable representations of physical stability in either standard CNNs trained on visual object and scene classification (ImageNet), or in the human ventral visual pathway, which has long been implicated in the same process. However, in frontoparietal regions previously implicated in intuitive physical reasoning we find both scenario-invariant representations of physical stability, and higher univariate responses to unstable than stable scenes. These results demonstrate abstract representations of physical stability in the dorsal but not ventral pathway, consistent with the hypothesis that the computations underlying stability entail not just pattern classification but forward physical simulation.
Journal Article
Natural-Scene Perception Requires Attention
Is visual attention required for visual consciousness? In the past decade, many researchers have claimed that awareness can arise in the absence of attention. This claim is largely based on the notion that natural scene (or \"gist'\") perception occurs without attention. This article presents evidence against this idea. We show that when observers perform a variety of demanding, sustained-attention tasks, inattentional blindness occurs for natural scenes. In addition, scene perception is impaired under dualtask conditions, but only when the primary task is sufficiently demanding. This finding suggests that previous studies that have been interpreted as demonstrating scene perception without attention failed to fully engage attention and that natural-scene perception does indeed require attention. Thus, natural-scene perception is not a preattentive process and cannot be used to support the idea of awareness without attention.
Journal Article
Processing multiple visual objects is limited by overlap in neural channels
High-level visual categories (e.g., faces, bodies, scenes, and objects) have separable neural representations across the visual cortex. Here, we show that this division of neural resources affects the ability to simultaneously process multiple items. In a behavioral task, we found that performance was superior when items were drawn from different categories (e.g., two faces/two scenes) compared to when items were drawn from one category (e.g., four faces). The magnitude of this mixed-category benefit depended on which stimulus categories were paired together (e.g., faces and scenes showed a greater behavioral benefit than objects and scenes). Using functional neuroimaging (i.e., functional MRI), we showed that the size of the mixed-category benefit was predicted by the amount of separation between neural response patterns, particularly within occipitotemporal cortex. These results suggest that the ability to process multiple items at once is limited by the extent to which those items are represented by separate neural populations.
Journal Article
Auditory recognition memory is inferior to visual recognition memory
Visual memory for scenes is surprisingly robust. We wished to examine whether an analogous ability exists in the auditory domain. Participants listened to a variety of sound clips and were tested on their ability to distinguish old from new clips. Stimuli ranged from complex auditory scenes (e.g., talking in a pool hall) to isolated auditory objects (e.g., a dog barking) to music. In some conditions, additional information was provided to help participants with encoding. In every situation, however, auditory memory proved to be systematically inferior to visual memory. This suggests that there exists either a fundamental difference between auditory and visual stimuli, or, more plausibly, an asymmetry between auditory and visual processing.
Journal Article
Repurposing Therapeutics for Potential Treatment of SARS-CoV-2: A Review
The need for proven disease-specific treatments for the novel pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 necessitates a worldwide search for therapeutic options. Since the SARS-CoV-2 virus shares extensive homology with SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, effective therapies for SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV may also have therapeutic potential for the current COVID-19 outbreak. To identify therapeutics that might be repositioned for treatment of the SARS-CoV-2 disease COVID-19, we strategically reviewed the literature to identify existing therapeutics with evidence of efficacy for the treatment of the three coronaviruses that cause severe respiratory illness (SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2). Mechanistic and in vitro analyses suggest multiple promising therapeutic options with potential for repurposing to treat patients with COVID-19. Therapeutics with particularly high potential efficacy for repurposing include camostat mesylate, remdesivir, favipiravir, tocilizumab, baricitinib, convalescent plasma, and humanized monoclonal antibodies. Camostat mesylate has shown therapeutic potential, likely by preventing viral entry into epithelial cells. In early research, the targeted antivirals remdesivir and favipiravir appear to benefit patients by decreasing viral replication; clinical trials suggest that remdesivir speeds recovery from COVID-19. Tocilizumab and baricitinib appear to improve mortality by preventing a severe cytokine storm. Convalescent plasma and humanized monoclonal antibodies offer passive immunity and decreased recovery time. This review highlights potential therapeutic options that may be repurposed to treat COVID-19 and suggests opportunities for further research.
Journal Article
Community-based program to increase use of hearing conservation practices among farm and rural youth: a cluster randomized trial of effectiveness
Background
Noise exposure and associated hearing loss affects an estimated 2 million farm youth who are exposed as farm residents, farm family workers, hired workers, children of migrant or seasonal workers, and farm visitors. Risk factors for farm youth include frequent exposure to high farm noise; farm work from an early age, and exposure to high recreational noise (e.g., firearms, ATVs, and personal listening devices).
Methods
This study compared the effectiveness of two interventions and control. The programs included a community-based interactive youth educational program alone (Group A), a community-based interactive youth educational program followed by an Internet-based booster (Group B), and a no-interaction control (Group C). The study used a cluster randomized control design, with equal allocation ratio to each cluster, without blinding. Inclusion criteria included enrollment in grade 4, parental consent, English speaking, and attending a community-based educational event included in the cluster sampling. A total of 1979 youth were enrolled at 36 sites distributed across the 3 study arms in the following distribution:
N
= 662 in 13 sites (Group A),
N
= 680 in 12 sites (Group B), and
N
= 637 in 11 sites (Group C).
Results
Comparison with pre-intervention data showed no difference in intent to use hearing conservation strategies in experimental groups. However, knowledge and attitudes toward hearing conservation were improved in the groups receiving the Internet-based booster. Participants reported frequent exposure to sources of hazardous noise (e.g., loud sporting events, firecrackers, personal listening devices).
Conclusions
It is feasible and acceptable to incorporate hearing health education into an already existing system designed to deliver health and safety educational programming to farm and rural youth. The program was adopted by the partner agency for dissemination to up to 100,000 youth annually. Results of this study inform future intervention studies, interventions aimed at farm youth, and interventions to increase use of hearing conservation strategies, as well as offer a base for developing programs for non-English speaking children.
Trial registration
Clinicaltrials.gov
registration
CT02472821
.
Date of trial registration: 06/09/2015 (retrospectively registered).
Journal Article
Auditory and visual memory in musicians and nonmusicians
Numerous studies have shown that musicians outperform nonmusicians on a variety of tasks. Here we provide the first evidence that musicians have superior auditory recognition memory for both musical and nonmusical stimuli, compared to nonmusicians. However, this advantage did not generalize to the visual domain. Previously, we showed that auditory recognition memory is inferior to visual recognition memory. Would this be true even for trained musicians? We compared auditory and visual memory in musicians and nonmusicians using familiar music, spoken English, and visual objects. For both groups, memory for the auditory stimuli was inferior to memory for the visual objects. Thus, although considerable musical training is associated with better musical and nonmusical auditory memory, it does not increase the ability to remember sounds to the levels found with visual stimuli. This suggests a fundamental capacity difference between auditory and visual recognition memory, with a persistent advantage for the visual domain.
Journal Article