The neural correlates of face individuation—the acquisition of memory representations for novel faces—have been studied only in coarse detail and disregarding individual differences between learners. In their seminal study, Tanaka et al . (Tanaka et al. 2006 J. Cogn. Neurosci. 18 , 1488–1497. ( doi:10.1162/jocn.2006.18.9.1488 )) required the identification of a particular novel face across 70 trials and found that the N250 component in the EEG event-related potentials became more negative from the first to the second half of the experiment, where it reached a similar amplitude as a well-known face. We were unable to directly replicate this finding in our study when we used the original split of trials. However, when we applied a different split of trials we observed very similar changes in N250 amplitude. We conclude that the N250 component is indeed sensitive to the build-up of a robust representation of a face in memory; the time course of this process appears to vary as a function of variables that may be determined in future research.

Background: Building Information Modelling (BIM) is becoming a standard in Architecture, Building and Construction (ABC) industries. It provides a method for a unified representation of information about building throughout its lifecycle – from the design phase to the building maintenance. At the design phase the focus is usually on fulfilling the requirements and applicable norms and standards. One of the issues that is considered to be very important deals with the accessibility of buildings. While the design tools usually support the legal requirements for accessibility for disabled persons, little effort has been observed to address the quality of the access routes in terms of time, length and convenience of the route to be taken. Methods: This paper introduces a method of searching routes accessible for disabled people in public buildings, which is based on the building-related knowledge. This knowledge is stored in graph-based representations of buildings. A graph model of the considered building is effectively created by extracting information about the building from the IFC file, which is an interoperable BIM standard. The information about the topology of spatial layouts of buildings is stored in the graph representation together with characteristics of elements ensuring access between spaces. This model allows for homogenous encoding of both spatial and non-spatial information of different types, which is necessary for route calculation. Attributes assigned to graph nodes encode types of spaces and their sizes. Attributes of graph edges represent costs of moving between spaces, which depend on width of openings, equipping stairs with ramps, door types and their opening directions. As for people moving around on wheelchairs easiness of passing a route between two places can depend on the route direction, the directed graphs are used to represent building layouts. The optimal routes accessible for disabled are specified using the modified algorithm of graph search for single-source minimum-cost paths, where costs of passing through different spaces and between them are considered. This approach is applied to find best routes to a chosen room starting from all possible building entrances. Results: The proposed application offers intelligent knowledge-based navigation, which is based on the graph representation of buildings. The system is aimed to aid people to decide about the routes they should take using mobile devices. It enables them to select from all accessible routes the one which requires the lowest effort in traversing it. Apart from the user interface allowing for visualization the results of design analysis in respect to the accessible routes, a visual tool dedicated for designers, which shows on the floor layout the actual route a disabled person has to take, is proposed. Offering a designer such a visualization can shift the focus of the design from mere existence of accessible routes to existence of quality routes for disabled. The presented examples illustrate the proposed approach by depicting the found accessible routes on the building layout. Conclusions: Building-specific knowledge, which is extracted from the IFC file and stored in the graph building representation, is used to find the best routes accessible for disabled people. The search for these routes is performed by a knowledge-based graph-search procedure, which takes into consideration costs of passing through different spaces and between them. There is a possibility of adding in future more elements which can be treated as different obstacles in moving around the building.

Various surveillance systems capture signs of human activities of daily living (ADLs) and store multimodal information as time line behavioral records. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the analysis of a behavioral record used in a surveillance system designed for use in elderly smart homes. The description of a subject's activity is first decomposed into elementary poses - easily detectable by dedicated intelligent sensors - and represented by the share coefficients. Then, the activity is represented in the form of an attributed graph, where nodes correspond to elementary poses. As share coefficients of poses are expressed as attributes assigned to graph nodes, their change corresponding to a subject's action is represented by flow in graph edges. The behavioral record is thus a time series of graphs, which tiny size facilitates storage and management of long-term monitoring results. At the system learning stage, the contribution of elementary poses is accumulated, discretized and probability-ordered leading to a finite list representing the possible transitions between states. Such a list is independently built for each room in the supervised residence, and employed for assessment of the current action in the context of subject's habits and a room purpose. The proposed format of a behavioral record, applied to an adaptive surveillance system, is particularly advantageous for representing new activities not known at the setup stage, for providing a quantitative measure of transitions between poses and for expressing the difference between a predicted and actual action in a numerical way.