Abstract: Observers are faster to detect a target among a set of distracters if the targets and distracters come from different color categories. This cross-boundary advantage seems to be limited to the right visual field, which is consistent with the dominance of the left hemisphere for language processing [Gilbert et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 489 (2006)]. Here we study whether a similar visual field advantage is found in the color identification task in speakers of Mandarin, a language that uses a logographic system. Forty late Mandarin-English bilinguals performed a blue-green color categorization task, in a blocked design, in their first language (L1: Mandarin) or second language (L2: English). Eleven color singletons ranging from blue to green were presented for 160 ms, randomly in the left visual field (LVF) or right visual field (RVF). Color boundary and reaction times (RTs) at the color boundary were estimated in L1 and L2, for both visual fields. We found that the color boundary did not differ between the languages; RTs at the color boundary, however, were on average more than 100 ms shorter in the English compared to the Mandarin sessions, but only when the stimuli were presented in the RVF. The finding may be explained by the script nature of the two languages: Mandarin logographic characters are analyzed visuospatially in the right hemisphere, which conceivably facilitates identification of color presented to the LVF.

Abstract: This paper presents a supervised subspace learning method called Kernel Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors (KGDCV), as a novel extension of the known Discriminative Common Vectors method with Kernels. Our method combines the advantages of kernel methods to model complex data and solve nonlinear
problems with moderate computational complexity, with the better generalization properties of generalized approaches for large dimensional data. These attractive combination makes KGDCV specially suited for feature extraction and classification in computer vision, image processing and pattern recognition applications. Two different approaches to this generalization are proposed, a first one based on the kernel trick (KT) and a second one based on the nonlinear projection trick (NPT) for even higher efficiency. Both methodologies
have been validated on four different image datasets containing faces, objects and handwritten digits, and compared against well known non-linear state-of-art methods. Results show better discriminant properties than other generalized approaches both linear or kernel. In addition, the KGDCV-NPT approach presents a considerable computational gain, without compromising the accuracy of the model.