5,179 research outputs found
Multisensory perception of looming and receding objects in human newborns
Full text linkWhen newborns leave the enclosed spatial environment of the uterus and arrive in the outside world, they are faced with a new audiovisual environment of dynamic objects, actions and events both close to themselves and further away. One particular challenge concerns matching and making sense of the visual and auditory cues specifying object motion [1-5]. Previous research shows that adults prioritise the integration of auditory and visual information indicating looming (for example [2]) and that rhesus monkeys can integrate multisensory looming, but not receding, audiovisual stimuli [4]. Despite the clear adaptive value of correctly perceiving motion towards or away from the self - for defence against and physical interaction with moving objects - such a perceptual ability would clearly be undermined if newborns were unable to correctly match the auditory and visual cues to such motion. This multisensory perceptual skill has scarcely been studied in human ontogeny. Here we report that newborns only a few hours old are sensitive to matches between changes in visual size and in auditory intensity. This early multisensory competence demonstrates that, rather than being entirely naïve to their new audiovisual environment, newborns can make sense of the multisensory cue combinations specifying motion with respect to themselves
Developmental disorders and multisensory perception
Full text linkThis chapter presents a review of research concerning multisensory processing impairments in three developmental disorders: developmental coordination disorder (DCD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and developmental dyslexia (DD). By comparing multisensory processes across these three disorders, a number of similarities in sensory responses were noted (e.g., hypo- and hyper-sensitivity to sensory information, sensorimotor impairments). This chapter discusses whether multisensory processing abnormalities could represent a particular vulnerability or, perhaps more importantly, a particular risk factor in atypical development. Within and across disorders, possible developmental trajectories that may have led to such impairments are examined. Finally, the need for further multisensory research in developmental disorders is highlighted, and avenues for future research explored.</p
Father Andrew Mullen 1790-1818: a study in early nineteenth century spirituality
Full text linkThis thesis is laid out in three parts: Part I. The life and death of Andrew Mullen. The life is based, to a large extent, on a long letter to his mother, Catherine Mullen, dated 7 January 1810. The letter gives a definite insight into his spirituality based on his membership of the Archconfraternity of the Blessed Sacrament. There is a hint that he had a premonition of an early death. Part II. The burial of Andrew Mullen and the immediate cult to him This is based on documentary evidence. Part III. Most of this part is a catalogue of testimonies taken from 1993 onwards. Then there is the conclusion on the popular devotion to Andrew Mullen stressing the theological aspect of the subject. In the course of writing the thesis it was decided to separate the documentary evidence from the oral tradition. This was advantageous in developing the thesis, and the documents provided a secure basis for the oral tradition. Two pieces of information were found in March 1997. They are death notices: 2 January 1819, The Leinster Journal and 7 January 1819, The Car low Morning Post. There is a slight discrepancy between the two on the date of his death. Also this discrepancy shows a slight difference from the date of the tombstone
What I know about my ancestors, and their families : also, some account of my wife's ancestors, and their families /
No full textIncludes index."This book is donated by Dr. Victor J. Andrew, great grandson of the author, who copied it from the original manuscript which is in the possession of Mr. Morton O. Perkins, grandson of the author, and who still lives on the author's farm."Reprint of: What I know about my ancestors, and their families : also some account of my wife's ancestors, and their families / Edward Perkins. Weymouth, Ohio : Perkins, 1888.Mode of access: Internet
Crossmodal spatial distraction across the lifespan
Full text linkThe ability to resist distracting stimuli whilst voluntarily focusing on a task is fundamental to our everyday cognitive functioning. Here, we investigated how this ability develops, and thereafter declines, across the lifespan using a single task/experiment. Young children (5–7 years), older children (10–11 years), young adults (20–27 years), and older adults (62–86 years) were presented with complex visual scenes. Endogenous (voluntary) attention was engaged by having the participants search for a visual target presented on either the left or right side of the display. The onset of the visual scenes was preceded – at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 50, 200, or 500 ms – by a task-irrelevant sound (an exogenous crossmodal spatial distractor) delivered either on the same or opposite side as the visual target, or simultaneously on both sides (cued, uncued, or neutral trials, respectively). Age-related differences were revealed, especially in the extreme age-groups, which showed a greater impact of crossmodal spatial distractors. Young children were highly susceptible to exogenous spatial distraction at the shortest SOA (50 ms), whereas older adults were distracted at all SOAs, showing significant exogenous capture effects during the visual search task. By contrast, older children and young adults' search performance was not significantly affected by crossmodal spatial distraction. Overall, these findings present a detailed picture of the developmental trajectory of endogenous resistance to crossmodal spatial distraction from childhood to old age and demonstrate a different efficiency in coping with distraction across the four age-groups studied
Neural correlates of tactile expectation in infancy
No full textAs adults, we can accurately predict the timing and location of an impending touch specified by a looming visual object (Clery et al., 2015, Kandula et al., 2015). The developmental origins of this adaptively important ability, likely underpinned by multisensory neurons representing peripersonal space, have not yet been investigated. To address this, we presented 4-, 8- and 10-month- old infants with visual stimuli either looming towards their hands or receding towards the background, followed by a brief tactile stimulus delivered on their hands at the expected time-to-contact of the visual looming stimulus. We recorded infants’ spontaneous brain activity during the stimulus presentation using scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and we measured their somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) in response to the touches. Preliminary results suggest that already at 4 months of life the tactile stimuli that have been preceded by a visual looming stimulus (i.e. anticipated touches) are processed differently from those that have been preceded by a visual receding stimulus. In particular, the SEPs showed a consistently larger amplitude of the potential in response to the anticipated vs non anticipated touches. However, this difference seems to disappear at 8 and 10 months of life. More complete results will be presented and discussed
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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
Object-centred spatial reference in 4-month-old infants
No full textAn appreciation of object-centred spatial relations involves representing a 'within-object' spatial relation across changes in the object orientation. This representational ability is important in adult object recognition [Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding. Psychological Review, 94, 115-147; Marr, D., and Nishihara, H. K. (1978) Representation and recognition of the spatial organisation of three-dimensional structure. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B (Biological Sciences), 200, 269-294; Tarr, M.J., and Pinker, S. (1990) When does human object recognition use a viewer-centred reference frame? Psychological Science, 1, 253-256] and is also thought to be a fundamental component of the mature object concept [Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child. Routledge and Kegan-Paul: London, UK. (originally published in French in 1937)]. An experiment is reported in which eighteen 4-month-old infants were familiarised to a specific spatial relation within an object, across six different orientations of the object. On subsequent test trials the object was presented to the infants in an entirely novel orientation. Between successive test trials the within-object spatial relation was alternated between novel and familiar. The infants demonstrated significant sensitivity of their looking to both the novelty of the stimuli and the order in which novel and familiar stimuli were presented. It is concluded that by 4 months of age infants are able to form object-centred spatial frames of reference. These findings are discussed in the light of our current understanding of the development of object representation during infancy
Visual objects approaching the body modulate subsequent somatosensory processing at 4 months of age
Full text linkWe asked whether, in the first year of life, the infant brain can support the dynamic crossmodal interactions between vision and somatosensation that are required to represent peripersonal space. Infants aged 4 (n = 20, 9 female) and 8 (n = 20, 10 female) months were presented with a visual object that moved towards their body or receded away from it. This was presented in the bottom half of the screen and not fixated upon by the infants, who were instead focusing on an attention getter at the top of the screen. The visual moving object then disappeared and was followed by a vibrotactile stimulus occurring later in time and in a different location in space (on their hands). The 4-month-olds’ somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs) were enhanced when tactile stimuli were preceded by unattended approaching visual motion, demonstrating that the dynamic visual-somatosensory cortical interactions underpinning representations of the body and peripersonal space begin early in the first year of life. Within the 8-month-olds’ sample, SEPs were increasingly enhanced by (unexpected) tactile stimuli following receding visual motion as age in days increased, demonstrating changes in the neural underpinnings of the representations of peripersonal space across the first year of life
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