1,720,956 research outputs found
Investigating and Modeling Human Perceptual and Motor Mechanisms with Application in Rehabilitation through Human-Robot Interaction
No full textThis thesis investigates the role of prior experience in human sensory and motor behavior in individual and interactive contexts. The final aim of this research project is to describe human behavior through quantitative models and subsequently develop novel robotic technologies that could support humans in their everyday life. To address this objective, the first study of the thesis has the goal of studying and modeling the role of prior experience in
perceptual and motor mechanisms during an interaction. To cope with sensory uncertainty, human perception takes into account previous sensory experience, and potentially leads individuals to divergent percepts. Therefore, how can humans efficiently coordinate in joint actions? This thesis presents the implementation of a novel controllable and repeatable setup, developed for the exploration of perceptual and motor processes intervening during the temporal coordination with the humanoid robot iCub. Thanks to the development of this interactive environment, a perceptual task of interval timing estimation was realized to monitor participants' and the artificial agent's perceptual and motor behavior at each instant of their interaction. Results revealed that participants managed to coordinate in time with their artificial companion, by shifting their temporal estimations towards their partner’s perceptual model. The presence or absence of their interactive agent's motor feedback produced different effects on individuals' perceptual mechanisms. The presence of the robot's motor behavior induced 30 participants to imitate their companion's kinematics, leading towards the generation of separate representations of their own and the robot’s perceptual model. On the contrary, the lack of the robot's motor cues induced 32 participants to integrate the estimations from the previous interaction into their own perceptual model. Even more interestingly, by applying Bayesian techniques to perceptual responses, human perceptual estimations were successfully predicted after the interactive sessions in the presence or the lack of their partner’s kinematics. However, prior experience influences not only the magnitude estimation of sensory stimuli, but also their association with a reward. Therefore, the second study of this thesis aims to investigate the role of prior experience in the perception
of reward-related stimuli in an individual setting with healthy and pathological populations, with the final goal of deepening the understanding of human perceptual behavior. In particular, a visual search experiment was conducted with 19 healthy individuals and 24 pathological gamblers. Since reward-related distractors have been demonstrated to delay participants’ reaction time, it was investigated if prior experience could differently affect pathological gamblers’ perceptual processes in presence of reward-related stimuli. Compared to the healthy population, pathological gamblers delayed their response in the presence of reward-related stimuli, independently of their associated value. Due to their uncontrolled impulse to gamble, pathological individuals did not vary their perceptual strategy, after an improvement in performance during the first part of the experiment. After investigating perceptual and motor mechanisms in different contexts, the third study of this thesis aims to induce motor imitation processes underlying human-robot interaction, with the final goal of influencing patients’ prior motor skills in a rehabilitation setting. Therefore, a novel clinical system was developed to exploit the interaction with the humanoid robot NAO during rehabilitative sessions. The system aimed to track participants’ movement and assess their performance through clinical labels, with the final goal of supporting patients’ motor skills, affected by cerebral palsy. Thanks to an effective communication with the system, the robot was endowed with the capability of providing patients with clinical feedback, according to their performance. Once the development of the system was completed, its validity and functioning were tested on 11 physical therapists and rehabilitation specialists. To conclude, the significant results of this thesis will contribute to develop bio-inspired adaptive models, aimed at having a complete understanding of human perceptual and motor behavior and monitoring related anomalies to prevent pathologies. Moreover, adaptive skills will endow robots with the ability of tailoring their behavior, to support humans in their daily tasks and improve their quality of life
A Controllable and Repeatable Method to Study Perceptual and Motor Adaptation in Human-Robot Interaction
No full text<p>Human perception and motion are continuously influenced by prior experience. However, when humans have to share the same space and time, different previous experience could lead towards opposite percepts and actions, consequently failing in coordination. This study presents a novel experimental setup that aims at exploring the interplay between human perceptual mechanisms and motor strategies during human-robot interaction. To achieve this goal, we developed a complex system to enable the realization of an interactive perceptual task, where the participant has to perceive and estimate temporal durations together with iCub, with the goal of coordinating with the robotic partner. Results show that the experimental setup continuously monitor how participants implement their perceptual and motor behavior during the interaction with a controllable interacting agent. Therefore, it will be possible to produce quantitative models describing the interplay between perceptual and motor adaptation during an interaction.</p>
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
A pilot study towards the implementation of perceptual and motor adaptation in robots
No full textThe aim of our study is to understand the
perceptual and motor mechanisms of adaptation underlying
human-robot interaction. Our long-term goal is to develop
novel models of adaptation that could be implemented in robots
to enhance human-robot collaboration. Realizing adaptive
robots would be fundamental not only in the biomedical field for
assistance and rehabilitation, but also in industrial settings to
improve human-robot cooperation. In the current paper, we
present a pilot experiment aimed at exploring perceptual and
motor strategies adopted by participants who try to adapt their
perception to that of a robot with different prior sensory
experience
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