Can names shape facial appearance?

Our given name is a social tag associated with us early in life. This study investigates the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect wherein individuals' facial appearance develops over time to resemble the social stereotypes associated with given names. Leveraging the face-name matching effect, which demonstrates an ability to match adults' names to their faces, we hypothesized that individuals would resemble their social stereotype (name) in adulthood but not in childhood. To test this hypothesis, children and adults were asked to match faces and names of children and adults. Results revealed that both adults and children correctly matched adult faces to their corresponding names, significantly above the chance level. However, when it came to children's faces and names, participants were unable to make accurate associations. Complementing our lab studies, we employed a machine-learning framework to process facial image data and found that facial representations of adults with the same name were more similar to each other than to those of adults with different names. This pattern of similarity was absent among the facial representations of children, thereby strengthening the case for the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis. Furthermore, the face-name matching effect was evident for adults but not for children's faces that were artificially aged to resemble adults, supporting the conjectured role of social development in this effect. Together, these findings suggest that even our facial appearance can be influenced by a social factor such as our name, confirming the potent impact of social expectations.

Nameability effects and short-term memory limitations on order perception and enumeration of brief sounds.

Research has shown that perceiving the order of successive auditory stimuli could be affected by their nameability. The present research re-examined this hypothesis, using tasks requiring participants to report the order of successively presented (with no interstimulus gaps) environmental (i.e., easily named stimuli) and abstract (i.e., hard-to-name stimuli) sounds of short duration (i.e., 200 ms). Using the same sequences, we also examined the accuracy of the sounds perceived by administering enumeration tasks. Data analyses showed that accuracy in the ordering tasks was equally low for both environmental and abstract sounds, whereas accuracy in the enumeration tasks was higher for the former as compared to the latter sounds. Importantly, overall accuracy in the enumeration tasks did not reach ceiling levels, suggesting some limitations in the perception of successively presented stimuli. Overall, naming fluency seemed to affect sound enumeration, but no effects were obtained for order perception. Furthermore, an effect of each sound's location in a sequence on ordering accuracy was noted. Our results question earlier notions suggesting that order perception is mediated by stimuli's nameability and leave open the possibility that memory capacity limits may play a role.

Bridging the gap in author names: building an enhanced author name dataset for biomedical literature system.

OBJECTIVE: Author name incompleteness, referring to only first initial available instead of full first name, is a long-standing problem in MEDLINE and has a negative impact on biomedical literature systems. The purpose of this study is to create an Enhanced Author Names (EAN) dataset for MEDLINE that maximizes the number of complete author names. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The EAN dataset is built based on a large-scale name comparison and restoration with author names collected from multiple literature databases such as MEDLINE, Microsoft Academic Graph, and Semantic Scholar. We assess the impact of EAN on biomedical literature systems by conducting comparative and statistical analyses between EAN and MEDLINE's author names dataset (MAN) on 2 important tasks, author name search and author name disambiguation. RESULTS: Evaluation results show that EAN improves the number of full author names in MEDLINE from 69.73 million to 110.9 million. EAN not only restores a substantial number of abbreviated names prior to the year 2002 when the NLM changed its author name indexing policy but also improves the availability of full author names in articles published afterward. The evaluation of the author name search and author name disambiguation tasks reveal that EAN is able to significantly enhance both tasks compared to MAN. CONCLUSION: The extensive coverage of full names in EAN suggests that the name incompleteness issue can be largely mitigated. This has significant implications for the development of an improved biomedical literature system. EAN is available at https://zenodo.org/record/10251358, and an updated version is available at https://zenodo.org/records/10663234.

An intertextual reading of the novel Defend the Name.

The general objective of this intertextual analysis's was to explore Wolde's novel Defend the Name (1969) with the view to identify and interpret the several thematic and stylistic intertexts that are woven throughout the narrative. Based on available research, there is a scarcity of critical studies that have utilized the theory of intertextuality for the analysis and interpretation of Ethiopian prose fiction in English, particularly within the novel genre. The current study was aimed to partially fill in this critical gap. In doing so, the theory of intertextuality is employed as theoretical-analytical framework of the study. The findings of this intertextual analysis concentrated on the thematic and stylistic intertexts that were woven throughout the plot of the book Defend the Name. These intertexts included biblical allusions, colonial literary devices, contemporary theoretical and ideological works, and cultural and historical discourses that the book intertextually engages with in addition to other literary and nonliterary works. This study provides insightful information about the thematic diversity of Defend the Name and its involvement with multiple intertexts through its intertextual analysis. It enhances the reader's comprehension of the story, characters, and larger sociopolitical situations that the novel addresses, demonstrating the author's skill in fusing together a variety of literary, scriptural, ideological, and cultural aspects.

Neural correlates of retrospective memory confidence during face-name associative learning.

The ability to accurately assess one's own memory performance during learning is essential for adaptive behavior, but the brain mechanisms underlying this metamemory function are not well understood. We investigated the neural correlates of memory accuracy and retrospective memory confidence in a face-name associative learning task using magnetoencephalography in healthy young adults (n = 32). We found that high retrospective confidence was associated with stronger occipital event-related fields during encoding and widespread event-related fields during retrieval compared to low confidence. On the other hand, memory accuracy was linked to medial temporal activities during both encoding and retrieval, but only in low-confidence trials. A decrease in oscillatory power at alpha/beta bands in the parietal regions during retrieval was associated with higher memory confidence. In addition, representational similarity analysis at the single-trial level revealed distributed but differentiable neural activities associated with memory accuracy and confidence during both encoding and retrieval. In summary, our study unveiled distinct neural activity patterns related to memory confidence and accuracy during associative learning and underscored the crucial role of parietal regions in metamemory.

Attention capture by own name decreases with speech compression.

Auditory stimuli that are relevant to a listener have the potential to capture focal attention even when unattended, the listener's own name being a particularly effective stimulus. We report two experiments to test the attention-capturing potential of the listener's own name in normal speech and time-compressed speech. In Experiment 1, 39 participants were tested with a visual word categorization task with uncompressed spoken names as background auditory distractors. Participants' word categorization performance was slower when hearing their own name rather than other names, and in a final test, they were faster at detecting their own name than other names. Experiment 2 used the same task paradigm, but the auditory distractors were time-compressed names. Three compression levels were tested with 25 participants in each condition. Participants' word categorization performance was again slower when hearing their own name than when hearing other names; the slowing was strongest with slight compression and weakest with intense compression. Personally relevant time-compressed speech has the potential to capture attention, but the degree of capture depends on the level of compression. Attention capture by time-compressed speech has practical significance and provides partial evidence for the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction.

"Why can't I say people's names?" Alexinomia as a widespread psychological phenomenon.

Psychological research has recently proposed alexinomia, characterised by an inhibited behaviour in saying names, as a distinct psychosocial phenomenon. Alexinomia is associated with anxiety and avoidance behaviours with regards to saying names and thus severely impacts every day social interactions and relationships. This study aimed to explore the prevalence of this newly established and poorly understood psychological phenomenon and to further determine its impact on everyday life. For this purpose, online advice and discussion forums were systematically searched for threads on and mentions of problems with saying names. We analysed a broad dataset from English-language comments discussing alexinomia-related experiences and behaviours, inclusive of varied demographics and geographical regions. The findings based on the qualitative analysis of 257 unique sources show that alexinomia is a widespread phenomenon. Moreover, the analysed online materials showed affected individual's use of a variety of effective and ineffective coping strategies and experience varying degrees of severity, which can potentially diminish with training. The study's results therefore highlight alexinomia as a relevant, yet highly under researched, field of study, and add to our knowledge on the experience of alexinomia in everyday life and its potential origins, especially relating to social anxiety and early-life familial dynamic.

A study of the spatial distribution characteristics of Chinese surnames.

OBJECTIVES: The spatial distribution of Chinese surnames is diverse and provides rich information about the evolution of human society. This study aims to propose several indices to quantify the spatial distribution characteristics of Chinese common surnames and to explore how these distributions are related to historical evolution. METHODS: This study uses data from China's ID information system covering 1.28 billion people across 362 cities. Based on the location quotient, several new concepts, such as "moderately concentrated cities" and "highly concentrated cities," are defined. Then indices such as range, ununiformity and spatial autocorrelation are proposed and calculated to analyze the spatial characteristics of Chinese common surnames. RESULTS: A significant correlation is observed between the commonness of a surname and its spatial characteristics: the more common the surname, the wider its spatial range, the lower the ununiformity, and the higher the autocorrelation coefficient. These patterns reflect the complex interplay of historical, geographical, and cultural factors influencing surname spatial distribution. CONCLUSIONS: The spatial distribution of Chinese surnames is intricately linked to their historical evolution. Most common surnames, often with deeper historical roots, exhibit wider distributions and lower ununiformity, whereas less common surnames show higher concentrations in specific areas. These quantitative results provide a comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary characteristics of Chinese surnames.

A deep learning approach for Named Entity Recognition in Urdu language.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a natural language processing task that has been widely explored for different languages in the recent decade but is still an under-researched area for the Urdu language due to its rich morphology and language complexities. Existing state-of-the-art studies on Urdu NER use various deep-learning approaches through automatic feature selection using word embeddings. This paper presents a deep learning approach for Urdu NER that harnesses FastText and Floret word embeddings to capture the contextual information of words by considering the surrounding context of words for improved feature extraction. The pre-trained FastText and Floret word embeddings are publicly available for Urdu language which are utilized to generate feature vectors of four benchmark Urdu language datasets. These features are then used as input to train various combinations of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), CRF, and deep learning models. The results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art studies on Urdu NER, achieving an F-score of up to 0.98 when using BiLSTM+GRU with Floret embeddings. Error analysis shows a low classification error rate ranging from 1.24% to 3.63% across various datasets showing the robustness of the proposed approach. The performance comparison shows that the proposed approach significantly outperforms similar existing studies.