1,720,972 research outputs found
Muscular effort coding in action representation in ballet dancers and controls: electrophysiological evidence
No full textThe present electrophysiological (EEG) study investigated the neural correlates of perceiving effortful vs. effortless movements belonging to a specific repertoire (ballet). Previous evidence has shown an increased heart and respiratory rate during the observation and imagination of human actions that require a great muscular effort. In addition, TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) and EEG studies have evidenced a greater muscle-specific cortical excitability and an increase in late event-related potentials during the observation of effortful actions. In this investigation, fifteen professional female ballet dancers and 15 controls with no experience whatsoever with dance, gymnastics, or martial arts were recruited. They were shown 326 short videos displaying a male dancer performing standard ballet steps that could be either effortful or relatively effortless. Participants were instructed to observe each clip and imagine themselves physically executing the same movement. Importantly, they were blinded to the stimuli properties. The observation of effortful compared with effortless movements resulted in a larger P300 over frontal sites in dancers only, likely because of their visuomotor expertise with the specific steps. Moreover, an enhanced Late Positivity was identified over posterior sites in response to effortful stimuli in both groups, possibly reflecting the processing of larger quantities of visual kinematic information. The source reconstruction swLORETA performed on the Late Positivity component showed greater engagement of frontoparietal regions in dancers, while task-related frontal and occipitotemporal visual regions were more active in controls. It, therefore, appears that, in dancers, effort information was encoded in a more refined manner during action observation and in the absence of explicit instruction. Acquired motor knowledge seems to result in visuomotor resonance processes, which, in turn, underlies enhanced action representation of the observed movements
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Quale performance? : indicatori e sistemi di misurazione in uso nei Ministeri di sette Paesi OCSE : proposte per le amministrazioni centrali italiane
No full textLa misurazione e la valutazione della performance della pubblica amministrazione costituiscono elementi indispensabili nel processo di modernizzazione del settore pubblico. La sfida di progettare e implementare sistemi di misurazione e valutazione della performance organizzativa, che operino anche come elemento complementare ai più tradizionali strumenti di valutazione delle politiche pubbliche, è stato uno degli elementi che più hanno caratterizzato gli ultimi vent’anni di riforme in molti Paesi del mondo. Il presente White Paper analizza i sistemi di misurazione e valutazione della performance di una selezione di Ministeri in un campione di sette Paesi rappresentativo delle tradizioni amministrative occidentali identificando un modello di misurazione e valutazione della performance per le amministrazioni centrali italian
Semantic brain areas are involved in gesture comprehension: an electrical neuroimaging study
No full textWhile the mechanism of sign language comprehension in deaf people has been widely investigated, little is known about the neural underpinnings of spontaneous gesture comprehension in healthy speakers. Bioelectrical responses to 800 pictures of actors showing common Italian gestures (e.g., emblems, deictic or iconic gestures) were recorded in 14 persons. Stimuli were selected from a wider corpus of 1122 gestures. Half of the pictures were preceded by an incongruent description. ERPs were recorded from 128 sites while participants decided whether the stimulus was congruent. Congruent pictures elicited a posterior P300 followed by late positivity, while incongruent gestures elicited an anterior N400 response. N400 generators were investigated with swLORETA reconstruction. Processing of congruent gestures activated face- and body-related visual areas (e.g., BA19, BA37, BA22), the left angular gyrus, mirror fronto/parietal areas. The incongruent-congruent contrast particularly stimulated linguistic and semantic brain areas, such as the left medial and the superior temporal lobe
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
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
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
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