1,720,988 research outputs found
Spatial representation of described environments: the characteristics of verbal descriptions and the role of physical movement
No full textRecent findings support the assumption that the verbal description of an environment allows the creation of a mental representation of the environment that is functionally equivalent to that deriving from direct perception. Moreover, the verbal descriptions of an environment are commonly used in daily life to communicate with both sighted people in remote environment or visually impaired people. However, many questions on this topic still need to be answered, especially regarding the characteristics of the verbal descriptions and the potential fostering effect of physical movements. Thus, the aim of the present work was to shed light on the role of the physical movements in supporting the verbal descriptions, after a brief examination of some features important for the verbal descriptions.
The first part of the manuscript deals with the specific characteristics of the verbal description which could affect the corresponding mental representation. Thus, the influence of the serial position effect on different types of verbal stimuli has been investigated in order to clarify whether people are able to remember all the information provided with a verbal description of an environment or systematically lose information positioned in the central part of the description. Then, the effect of the direction of the verbal description (Clockwise or Counterclockwise) on the recall performance/modality has been considered; I found that people prefers to recall spatial relations that are congruent with the description encoded, extending a well-established effect of memory congruency also to the domain of spatial representation.
The second part of the thesis, instead, deals with the influence of physical movement on spatial updating within described environments. Even though several researchers focused on the role of movement in immediate and remote environments, only few of them investigated its role on verbally described environments; moreover, they mainly targeted their studies on imagined movements, rotation and translation, neglecting more ecological movements, such as physical walking. Thus, two separate experiments shed light on the contribution of physical walking compared to both physical and imagined rotation, on spatial updating – that is, the ability to keep track of the self-to-object relations during observer’s movement. By manipulating the movements required during the encoding of the description or after the description, results suggested different effects of the multisensory pattern of information provided by physical walking on spatial updating, depending on the situation in which the movements were executed. Finally, a third experiment, which used an ecological experimental procedure, examined the effectiveness of the physical exploration of an environment in fostering the development of an adequate spatial representation.
In conclusion, the results provide further evidence for the effectiveness of adopting verbal material to describe an environment, and highlight the important role of the physical movements in enhancing people’s ability to successfully interact with the described environments
Audio-based interventions in sport
Full text linkIn common practice, sports-perceptual interventions are mainly based on vision. However, research demonstrates that sporting performance can also be improved through the use of sounds, showing the relevance of the auditory channel to convey sports-related information, which can positively affect athletes’ motor outcomes. This review examines the potential of audio-based interventions in sport. The relevant concepts are defined, a brief overview of the techniques based on vision is given and laboratory studies demonstrating the effectiveness of sounds in improving the execution of simple rhythmic motor tasks are reviewed. Subsequently, neurophysiological evidence of the influence of sounds on the motor regions of the brain is provided and different kinds of audio-based interventions, emphasising their methodological details and the effects of their application to specific sporting performances are described. Finally, recommendations for further research in this field, aimed both at maximizing the potential of audio-based interventions and their implementation at applied sporting contexts, are suggested
Walking reduces the gap between encoding and sensorimotor alignment effects in spatial updating of described environments
No full textSpatial updating allows people to keep track of the self-to-object relations during movement. Previous studies demonstrated that physical movement enhanced spatial updating in remote environments, but failed to find the same effect in described environments. However, these studies mainly considered rotation as a physical movement, without examining other types of movement, such as walking. We investigated how walking affects spatial updating within described environments. Using the judgement of relative directions task, we compared the effects of imagination of rotation, physical rotation, and walking on spatial updating. Spatial updating was evaluated in terms of accuracy and response times in different perspectives, and by calculating two indexes, namely the encoding and sensorimotor alignment effects. As regards response times, we found that in the imagination of rotation and physical rotation conditions the encoding alignment effect was higher than the sensorimotor alignment effect, while in the walking condition this gap disappeared. We interpreted these results in terms of an enhanced link between allocentric and sensorimotor representations, due to the information acquired through walking
Autonomous Physical Exploration Influences Spatial Representation: Evidence From Blind and Sighted
Full text linkEvidences demonstrated that verbal information allows to construct a mental representation of space, even for persons who have no previous experience of sight. However, the construction of a mental model from verbal description is not presentation-free, as the verbal description anchors participants to a single perspective. The aim of our study is to test the perspective of spatial representation after the physical exploration of space, in order to avoid the influence of format presentation. We asked visual impaired and sighted participants to explore autonomously a room and then to perform a Sentence Verification Task, with sentences presented in an egocentric and in an allocentric version. We measured both response time and accuracy. Data demonstrated a better performance with allocentric perspective, even if the response time suggests that participants are more confident with the egocentric perspective. In conclusion, we suggest that the physical exploration of space leads to the development of an allocentric representation
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
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
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