Previous studies have demonstrated that patients with schizophrenia and individuals with schizotypy experience decreased anticipatory pleasure. However, it is unclear whether this decrease is contributed by altered reward processing at the proximal or distal future. In order to investigate the preference for receiving rewards in the proximal or distal future for individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, individuals with either high or low levels of negative schizotypy performed a delay discounting task under positive, neutral and negative affective priming conditions. Compared with individuals with low levels of negative schizotypy, individuals with high levels of schizotypy exhibited increased delay discounting, preferring to choose immediate but smaller rewards instead of delayed but larger rewards across all three affective priming conditions. Negative affective priming elevated discounting for both groups compared with both the positive and neutral affective conditions. After dividing delayed temporal distance into the proximal and distal future, the results showed that individuals with high levels of negative schizotypy exhibited more preference for immediate but smaller rewards in the distal instead of proximal future compared with controls. Our results suggest that individuals with high levels of negative schizotypy have altered anticipatory reward processing, which is mainly attributed to alterations in representing rewards in the distal future. These findings extend the alterations in representing reward values from schizophrenia patients to schizotypal individuals, and suggest that diminished anticipatory pleasure in schizophrenia spectrum disorders may be due to changes in processing anticipatory rewards in the distal future.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate how linguistic information influences attention allocation in visual search and memory for words. In Experiment 1, participants searched for the synonym of a cue word among five words. The distractors included one antonym and three unrelated words. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to judge whether the five words presented on the screen comprise a valid sentence. The relationships among words were sentential, semantically related or unrelated. A memory recognition task followed. Results in both experiments showed that linguistically related words produced better memory performance. We also found that there were significant interactions between linguistic relation conditions and memorization on eye-movement measures, indicating that good memory for words relied on frequent and long fixations during search in the unrelated condition but to a much lesser extent in linguistically related conditions. We conclude that semantic and syntactic associations attenuate the link between overt attention allocation and subsequent memory performance, suggesting that linguistic relatedness can somewhat compensate for a relative lack of attention during word search.

The shipbuilding industry demands intelligent robot, which is capable of various tasks without laborious pre-teaching or programming. Vision system guided robots could be a solution for autonomous working. This paper introduces the principle and technique details of a vision system that guides welding robots in ship small assembly production. TOF sensors are employed to collect spatial points of workpieces. Huge data amount and complex topology bring great difficulty in the reconstruction of small assemblies. A new unsupervised line segment detector is proposed to reconstruct ship small assemblies from spatial points. Verified using data from actual manufacturing, the method of this paper demonstrated good robustness which is a great advantage for industrial applications. This paper’s work has been implemented in shipyards and shows good commercial potential. Intelligent, flexible industrial robots could be implemented with the findings of this study, which will push forward intelligent manufacturing in the shipbuilding industry.

Although it has been suggested that reward expectation affects the performance of spatial working memory tasks, controversial results have been found in previous experiments. Hence, it is still unclear to what extent reward expectation has an effect on working memory. To clarify this question, a memory-guided saccade task was applied, in which participants were instructed to retain and reconstruct a temporospatial sequence of four locations by moving their eyes in each trial. The global- and local-level spatial working memory accuracies were calculated to determine the reward effect on the global and local level of processing in spatial working memory tasks. Although high reward expectation enhanced the encoding of spatial information, the percentage of trials in which the cued location was correctly fixated decreased with increment of reward expectation. The reconstruction of the global temporospatial sequence was enhanced by reward expectation, whereas the local reconstruction performance was not affected by reward. Furthermore, the improvements in local representations of uncued locations and local sequences were at the cost of the representation of cued locations. The results suggest that the reward effect on spatial working memory is modulated by the level of processing, which supports the flexible resource theory during maintenance.