1,721,061 research outputs found
Body and action in patients with central nervous system injuries
The central nervous system supports a wide range of sensory, motor, and cognitive abilities that are inextricably linked to our body - a body that we inhabit, perceive and control and that allows us to interact with the world around us, primarily through movement. Spinal cord injury or brain damage can severely impair our ability to act, the 'glue' that binds body and mind, profoundly affecting our bodily self and sensorimotor interactions. Through four different experimental studies, this thesis aims to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying body representation, motor control and action perception, particularly in relation to emotional content. The first study examines the role of interoceptive and exteroceptive signals in maintaining body awareness following thoracic spinal cord injury using the rubber hand illusion paradigm and a heartbeat monitoring task. Results reveal that individuals with high thoracic injuries exhibit greater malleability of body ownership, reduced accuracy in perceiving interoceptive signals, and a greater sense of detachment from their body compared to those with lower injuries. The second and third studies focus on apraxia. A systematic review of lesion studies in stroke patients reveals that insular damage is associated with deficits in imitation and pantomime. This finding can be explained by the role of the insula in integrating sensorimotor information, which is crucial for body representation and motor awareness processes. The third study investigates the influence of emotions expressed by specific body parts on action recognition in patients with apraxia. Results indicate that emotional content improves the detection of actions performed with the face and body in patients with bucco-facial and limb apraxia, respectively. Furthermore, voxel-based lesion symptom mapping reveals that emotional processing can occur independently of motor perception within the frontal areas of the action observation network. Finally, the fourth study assesses pupil dilation as a physiological response to the observation and imitation of gestures based on their meaning and spatial direction (towards or away from the body) in a healthy population. Results indicate that observing meaningful gestures modulates autonomic activation, with increased sympathetic activity for gestures associated with mental states or self-care. Individual differences in empathy and prosocial tendencies further influence physiological responses. Interestingly, the imitation condition did not produce significant differences compared to passive observation. These findings provide new insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying body awareness and motor cognition, with potential implications for developing targeted therapeutic strategies following central nervous system injury. Specifically, the results underscore the importance of interoceptive and visual information for maintaining a stable body representation after spinal cord injury. They also highlight that insular damage is associated with symptoms of apraxia and not as a mere consequence of middle cerebral artery infarction. The last two studies demonstrate the complex interaction between actions and their communicative (symbolic or emotional) value in gesture processing
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The 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
“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
We 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
Per un "Atlante delle residenze nobiliari del Barocco in Italia"
atti a cura di V. Cazzato, V. Basil
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We 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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