5,952 research outputs found

    Neural mechanisms of attention become more specialised during infancy: Insights from combined eye tracking and EEG

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    The Fixation Shift Paradigm (FSP) measures infants' ability to shift gaze from a central fixation stimulus to a peripheral target (e.g. Hood & Atkinson, 1993: Infant Behavior and Development, 16(4), 405-422). Cortical maturation has been suggested as crucial for the developing ability to shift attention. This study investigated the development of neural mechanisms by combining EEG with simultaneous eye tracking during FSP testing, in typically developing infants aged between 1 and 8 months. The most prominent neural response was a frontal positivity which occurred only in the hemisphere contralateral to the target in the youngest infants but became more ipsilateral with age. This changing lateralisation was associated with improving ability to shift attention (decreasing saccade latencies and fewer 'sticky fixations'-failures to disengage attention from the central target). These findings suggest that the lateralisation of neural responses develops during infancy, possibly due to developing intracortical connections, allowing infants to shift attention more efficiently.DAAD; Leverhulme Trus

    The British ‘Bluesman’ Paul Oliver and the Nature of Transatlantic Blues Scholarship

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    Recent revisionist studies have argued that much of what is known about music known as the blues’ has been 'invented' by the writing of enthusiasts far removed from the African American culture that created the music. Elijah Wald and Marybeth Hamilton in particular have attempted to sift through the clouds of romanticism, and tried to unveil more empirical histories that were previously obscured by the fallacious genre distinctions conjured up during the 1960s blues revival. While this revisionist scholarship has shed light on some previously ignored historical facts, writers have tended to concentrate on the romanticism of blues writing strictly from an American perspective, failing to acknowledge the genesis and influence of transatlantic scholarship, and therefore ignoring the work of the most prolific and influential blues scholar of the twentieth century, British writer Paul Oliver. By examining the core of Oliver’s research and writing during the 1950s and 1960s, this study aims to place Oliver in his rightful place at the centre of blues historiography. His scholarship allows a more detailed appreciation of the manner in which the blues was studied, through lyrics, recordings, oral histories, photography and African American literature. These historical sources were interpreted in accordance with the author’s attitudes to the commercial popular music, which allowed the ‘reconstruction’ of an African American ‘folk’ culture in which the blues became the antithesis of pop. Importantly, this study seeks to transcend dominant discourses of national cultural ownership or ethnocentrism, and demonstrate that representations of African American music and culture were constructed within a transatlantic context. The blues is music with roots in the African American experience within the United States; however, as Paul Oliver’s writing shows, its reception and representation were not limited by the same national, cultural or racial boundaries

    Where Oliver Fits by C. Atkinson

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    Atkinson, Cale. Where Oliver Fits. Toronto, Tundra Books, 2017. Oliver is a unique little puzzle piece with a cute round head smattered with blue and orange. He wants to be part of a bigger picture and goes on a journey to find where he fits. As he finds different puzzles, he discovers that the other puzzle pieces are not like him at all. Some puzzle pieces complain that he does not have enough of the right colour to fit properly. Others say that he is not the right shape. Determined to find his place in the world, he decides that he needed to be more like others in order to be accepted. He uses creative strategies to change his shape and colour, however, after continuing to be rejected, he becomes desperate enough to create a disguise to finally fit into a puzzle. Although he finally finds his fit, Oliver begins to question whether or not it was right to pretend he was someone else and learns that it is better to be himself.                    This is a wonderful story of imagination. Children learn through the eyes of Oliver that it is better to be one’s true self rather than changing to fit in. The illustrations are bright, colourful, and capture all the conflicting emotions that Oliver goes through. Designed for children ages 3-7, this book provides a good moral lesson in a fun and creative way.      Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Janice Kung Janice Kung is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta, John W. Scott Health Sciences Library. She obtained her undergraduate degree in commerce and completed her MLIS degree in 2013. She believes that the best thing to beat the winter blues is to cuddle up on a couch and lose oneself in a good book

    Janette Atkinson 1 and Oliver Braddick 2

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    The Extended Atkinson Family and Changes in the Expenditure Distribution: Spain 1973/74-2003

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    This paper emphasizes the properties of a family of inequality measures which extends the Atkinson indices and is axiomatically characterized by a multiplicative decomposition property where the withingroup component is a generalized weighted mean with weights summing exactly to 1. This family contains canonical forms of all aggregative inequality measures, each bounded above by 1, has a useful and intuitive geometric interpretation and provides an alternative dominance criterion for ordering distributions in terms of inequality. Taking the Spanish Household Budget Surveys (HBS) for 1973/74, 1980/81, and 1990/91 and the more recent Continuous HBS for 2003, we show the advantages and possibilities of this extended family in regard to completing and detailing information in studies of inequality focussing on the tails of the distribution and on the changes in the distribution when the population is partitioned into population subgroups.inequality measurement, Atkinson indices

    Neural Differences between Covert and Overt Attention Studied using EEG with Simultaneous Remote Eye Tracking

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    Research on neural mechanisms of attention has generally instructed subjects to direct attention covertly while maintaining a fixed gaze. This study combined simultaneous eye tracking and electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure neural attention responses during exogenous cueing in overt attention shifts (with saccadic eye movements to a target) and compared these with covert attention shifts (responding manually while maintaining central fixation). EEG analysis of the period preceding the saccade latency showed similar occipital response amplitudes for overt and covert shifts, although response latencies differed. However, a frontal positivity was greater during covert attention shifts, possibly reflecting saccade inhibition to maintain fixation. The results show that combined EEG and eye tracking can be successfully used to study natural overt shifts of attention (applicable to non-verbal infants) and that requiring inhibition of saccades can lead to additional frontal responses. Such data can be used to refine current neural models of attention that have been mainly based on covert shifts.Open-Access-Publikationsfonds 201

    A Reading By Poet Mary Oliver

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    Mary Oliver\u27s poetry, with her lyrical connection to the natural world, has firmly established her in the highest realm of American poets. She is renowned for her evocative and precise imagery, which brings nature into clear focus, transforming the everyday world into a place of magic and discovery. As poet Stanley Kunitz has said, Mary Oliver\u27s poetry is fine and deep; it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations. Please join Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver as she shares her joyous, accessible, and intimate observations of the natural world. Mary Oliver is the celebrated author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose. With her lyrical connection to the natural world, Oliver\u27s poetry has firmly established her in the highest realm of American poets. Oliver has been honored with the National Book Award for Poetry, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, among others

    Gaze control: a developmental perspective

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    The full-text of this book chapter is not available in ORA. Oliver Braddick is now based at the Visual Development Unit, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. Citation: Atkinson, J. & Braddick, O. (2001). Gaze control: a developmental perspective. In: Motion vision: computational, neural and ecological constraints. Berlin: Springer, pp.219-225

    Development of basic visual functions

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    Professor Oliver Braddick is now based at the Visual Development Unit, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. The full-text of this book chapter is not available in ORA. Citation: Atkinson, J. & Braddick, O. (1989). Development of basic visual functions. In: Slater, A. & Bremner, G. (eds.) Infant development. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp.7-42
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