University of Groningen
Competition for feature selection
Hannus, Aave
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Publication date: 2017
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Hannus, A. (2017). Competition for feature selection: Action-related and stimulus-driven competitive biases in visual search. Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
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Acknowledgements
157 It is astonishing that I eventually came to this final chapter. I would like to ex-press my gratitude to all those people who have helped me with my research in the Netherlands.
I would like to thank my promotors for their guidance and enormous pa-tience throughout the work that led to this thesis. I owe my deepest gratitude to Harold Bekkering for his support, help and inspiration. Harold, thank you for giving me the opportunity to join your group, for your trust that I could han-dle the project, and for having confidence in my ideas. Your encouragement and unwavering support has sustained me through frustration, but more im-portantly, your ideas and comments have shaped both this thesis and also my professional and personal development. I would like to extend my sincere grat-itude to Frans Cornelissen, who continues to teach me the importance of setting high standards for good experiments. Frans, I am deeply grateful for your help in the completion of this dissertation. Your passion for vision, your dedication to work, and your tireless way of supervising makes you a great role model for me.
I would like to thank the members of the assessment committee of my the-sis: Prof. Aart Kooijman, Prof. Jan Theeuwes, and Prof. Jüri Allik, for proofread-ing my thesis and for their quick and insightful feedback. Special thanks go to Jüri Allik for his deep contribution to my scientific formation—you have formed my way of thinking since I strated studying psychology. I also wish to thank Mai Toom for proofreading my thesis and for nurturing new ideas about how to blow the lid off the competitive biases among visual features.
I gratefully acknowledge the support received from the technical per-sonnel at the Technical Support Group of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Radboud University of Nijmegen. Pascal de Water, Gerard van Oijen, Hubert Voogd, and Jos Wittebrood deserve special thanks for the clever constructions and programming that they provided to make the impossible possible. After three years of the Sisyphean tasks of integrating psychophysical signals (which, according to the manufacturer of our equipment, should not be even theoreti-cally possible), Pascal, Gerard, Hubert, and their colleagues found a way to make this still happen. Thank you so very much for this miracle!
I deeply appreciate the contribution to this thesis made in various ways by my colleagues. I thank the members of the work groups (both in Nijmegen and Groningen) whose continuing support was both crucial and vital. The con-structive input from Oliver Lindemann, Pines Nuku, Ronald van den Berg, Ed-ita Poljak, and Hein van Schie was indispensable and highly appreciated. To be honest, Oliver, only your excellent and unbroken programming made it possible to analyze the arduously acquired eye movements. And, Oliver and Pin, both of
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Acknowledgements
you have on many occasions gone the extra mile providing me with excellent feedback on my work. Thank you! I also express my sincere thanks to my co-au-thor Ronald—I am very grateful to you for the valuable discussions and for the fruitful collaboration. Thank you, Edita, for being always supportive and help-ful—every time when I was anxious about my experiments, you encouraged me and helped to find ways to get confidence again.
A great big thank you to all former NICI members for the wonderful mo-ments spent together in this institute—in the labs and outside. I am very grate-ful to Ruud Meulenbroek, Pieter Medendorp, Rob van Lier, and Piet Vos for their insights into my research (and into perception and action in general). Special thanks to Boris van Waterschoot and Vinod Unni for their contributions as stal-wart research assistants in the eyetracking lab.
I would like to thank all the members of the BCN. I would also like to ex-press my gratitude to the administrative staff members, especially Rob Visser and Diana Koopmans for their constant support and help.
Dear Ananas, I would like to thank you for giving me generous support and making my stay in the Netherlands more wonderful and meaningful. I will never forget our days together! I really enjoyed the time with you and I learned a lot from your style of enjoying life.
Pia, thank you for the long and interesting chats and for your good compa-ny, I really appreciate your generosity and friendship.
I could not have carried out my studies if my volunteer participants had not agreed to take part. The long eye movement sessions with the capricious equipment were a challenge for all participants. Again, Joyce, you became my colden subject and master of straightforward saccades—thank you for the tens of thousands of them that you provided!
In times of trouble and doubt when making decisions and continuing on with the dissertation, I was very glad to be supported by everyone at home. Dear family and friends, thank you for your eternal support. I would like to show my gratitude to my parents Malle and Sulev. Armas ema, suur ja igavene tänu Sulle toetuse, abi ja lootuse eest! Isa, ma tänan kõige eest samuti Sind, kuigi Sa täna enam meiega ei ole. Ain, aitäh kannatlikkuse ja mõistmise, praktilise sekku-mise ja paksu naha eest kõiges, mis selle Hollandi raja lõpulekäisekku-mise juures läbi on tulnud elada. Armas Iti Ilona, oma saabumisega nihutasid Sa minu perfekt-sionistlikud taotlused sinna, kus nende õige koht on — aitäh Sulle selle kergen-duse eest! Triinu, aitäh, et sa alati olemas oled ja kohe aitad, kui mul keeruliseks läheb. Kairi, Sinu niihästi sõbralik kui professionaalne ja lausa erialane toetus on mulle väga palju tähendanud — loodan, et saame seda kõike jätkata.
To sum up, I am grateful to all of you who helped me to close this long chapter of my live.
