Differences in acoustic and perceptual parameters of the voice between elderly and young women at habitual and high intensity

The present study aimed to compare elderly and young female voices in habitual and high intensity. The effect of increased intensity on the acoustic and perceptual parameters was assessed. Sound pressure level, fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, and harmonic to noise ratio were obtained at habitual and high intensity voice in a group of 30 elderly women and 30 young women. Perceptual assessment was also performed. Both groups demonstrated an increase in sound pressure level and fundamental frequency from habitual voice to high intensity voice. No differences were found between groups in any acoustic variables on samples recorded with habitual intensity level. No significant differences between groups were found in habitual intensity level for pitch, hoarseness, roughness, and breathiness. Asthenia and instability obtained significant higher values in elderly than young participants, whereas, the elderly demonstrated lower values for perceived tension and loudness than young subjects. Acoustic and perceptual measures do not demonstrate evident differences between elderly and young speakers in habitual intensity level. The parameters analyzed may lack the sensitivity necessary to detect differences in subjects with normal voices. Phonation with high intensity highlights differences between groups, especially in perceptual parameters. Therefore, high intensity should be included to compare elderly and young voice.

Impact of inter-judge agreement on perceptual judgment of nasality

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Visual estimation of apertures for wheelchair locomotion in novices: perceptual judgment and motor practice

The aim of the present study was to determine the effects of motor practice on visual judgments of apertures for wheelchair locomotion and the visual control of wheelchair locomotion in wheelchair users who had no prior experience. Sixteen young adults, divided into motor practice and control groups, visually judged varying apertures as passable or impassable under walking, pre-practice, and post-practice conditions. The motor practice group underwent additional motor practice in 10 blocks of five trials each, moving the wheelchair through different apertures. The relative perceptual boundary was determined based on judgment data and kinematic variables that were calculated from videos of the motor practice trials. The participants overestimated the space needed under the walking condition and underestimated it under the wheelchair conditions, independent of group. The accuracy of judgments improved from the pre-practice to post-practice condition in both groups. During motor practice, the participants adaptively modulated wheelchair locomotion, adjusting it to the apertures available. The present findings from a priori visual judgments of space and the continuous judgments that are necessary for wheelchair approach and passage through apertures appear to support the dissociation between processes of perception and action.

PRoSPer: perceptual similarity queries in medical CBIR systems through user profiles

In this paper, we present a novel approach to perform similarity queries over medical images, maintaining the semantics of a given query posted by the user. Content-based image retrieval systems relying on relevance feedback techniques usually request the users to label relevant/irrelevant images. Thus, we present a highly effective strategy to survey user profiles, taking advantage of such labeling to implicitly gather the user perceptual similarity. The profiles maintain the settings desired for each user, allowing tuning of the similarity assessment, which encompasses the dynamic change of the distance function employed through an interactive process. Experiments on medical images show that the method is effective and can improve the decision making process during analysis.

Perceptual maps analysis for organic food consumers in China: a study on Shanghai consumers

Although in Europe and in the USA many studies focus on organic, little is known on the topic in China. This research provides an insight on Shanghai consumers’ perception of organic, aiming at understanding and representing in graphic form the network of mental associations that stems from the organic concept. To acquire, process and aggregate the individual networks it was used the “Brand concept mapping” methodology (Roedder et al., 2006), while the data analysis was carried out also using analytic procedures. The results achieved suggest that organic food is perceived as healthy, safe and costly. Although these attributes are pretty much consistent with the European perception, some relevant differences emerged. First, organic is not necessarily synonymous with natural product in China, also due to a poor translation of the term in the Chinese language that conveys the idea of a manufactured product. Secondly, the organic label has to deal with the competition with the green food label in terms of image and positioning on the market, since they are easily associated and often confused. “Environmental protection” also emerged as relevant association, while the ethical and social values were not mentioned. In conclusion, health care and security concerns are the factors that influence most the food consumption in China (many people are so concerned about food safety that they found it difficult to shop), and the associations “Safe”, “Pure and natural”, “without chemicals” and “healthy” have been identified as the best candidates for leveraging a sound image of organic food .

Contour integration and principles of perceptual grouping

Ziel der Arbeit ist die Analyse von Prinzipien der Konturintegration im menschlichen visuellen System. Die perzeptuelle Verbindung benachbarter Teile in einer visuellen Szene zu einem Ganzen wird durch zwei gestalttheoretisch begründete Propositionen gekennzeichnet, die komplementäre lokale Mechanismen der Konturintegration beschreiben. Das erste Prinzip der Konturintegration fordert, dass lokale Ähnlichkeit von Elementen in einem anderen Merkmal als Orientierung nicht hinreicht für die Entdeckung von Konturen, sondern ein zusätzlicher statistischer Merkmalsunterschied von Konturelementen und Umgebung vorliegen muss, um Konturentdeckung zu ermöglichen. Das zweite Prinzip der Konturintegration behauptet, dass eine kollineare Ausrichtung von Konturelementen für Konturintegration hinreicht, und es bei deren Vorliegen zu robuster Konturintegrationsleistung kommt, auch wenn die lokalen merkmalstragenden Elemente in anderen Merkmalen in hohem Maße zufällig variieren und damit keine nachbarschaftliche Ähnlichkeitsbeziehung entlang der Kontur aufweisen. Als empirische Grundlage für die beiden vorgeschlagenen Prinzipien der Konturintegration werden drei Experimente berichtet, die zunächst die untergeordnete Rolle globaler Konturmerkmale wie Geschlossenheit bei der Konturentdeckung aufweisen und daraufhin die Bedeutung lokaler Mechanismen für die Konturintegration anhand der Merkmale Kollinearität, Ortsfrequenz sowie der spezifischen Art der Interaktion zwischen beiden Merkmalen beleuchten. Im ersten Experiment wird das globale Merkmal der Geschlossenheit untersucht und gezeigt, dass geschlossene Konturen nicht effektiver entdeckt werden als offene Konturen. Das zweite Experiment zeigt die Robustheit von über Kollinearität definierten Konturen über die zufällige Variation im Merkmal Ortsfrequenz entlang der Kontur und im Hintergrund, sowie die Unmöglichkeit der Konturintegration bei nachbarschaftlicher Ähnlichkeit der Konturelemente, wenn Ähnlichkeit statt über kollineare Orientierung über gleiche Ortsfrequenzen realisiert ist. Im dritten Experiment wird gezeigt, dass eine redundante Kombination von kollinearer Orientierung mit einem statistischen Unterschied im Merkmal Ortsfrequenz zu erheblichen Sichtbarkeitsgewinnen bei der Konturentdeckung führt. Aufgrund der Stärke der Summationswirkung wird vorgeschlagen, dass durch die Kombination mehrerer Hinweisreize neue kortikale Mechanismen angesprochen werden, die die Konturentdeckung unterstützen. Die Resultate der drei Experimente werden in den Kontext aktueller Forschung zur Objektwahrnehmung gestellt und ihre Bedeutung für die postulierten allgemeinen Prinzipien visueller Gruppierung in der Konturintegration diskutiert. Anhand phänomenologischer Beispiele mit anderen Merkmalen als Orientierung und Ortsfrequenz wird gezeigt, dass die gefundenen Prinzipien Generalisierbarkeit für die Verarbeitung von Konturen im visuellen System beanspruchen können.

Diffusion maps in the Subriemannian motion group and perceptual grouping

Il presente lavoro è motivato dal problema della constituzione di unità percettive a livello della corteccia visiva primaria V1. Si studia dettagliatamente il modello geometrico di Citti-Sarti con particolare attenzione alla modellazione di fenomeni di associazione visiva. Viene studiato nel dettaglio un modello di connettività. Il contributo originale risiede nell'adattamento del metodo delle diffusion maps, recentemente introdotto da Coifman e Lafon, alla geometria subriemanniana della corteccia visiva. Vengono utilizzati strumenti di teoria del potenziale, teoria spettrale, analisi armonica in gruppi di Lie per l'approssimazione delle autofunzioni dell'operatore del calore sul gruppo dei moti rigidi del piano. Le autofunzioni sono utilizzate per l'estrazione di unità percettive nello stimolo visivo. Sono presentate prove sperimentali e originali delle capacità performanti del metodo.

The structuring body : a critical study in the description & explanation of perceptual experience

The aims of the dissertation are to find the right description of the structure of perceptual experience and to explore the ways in which the structure of the body might serve to explain it. In the first two parts, I articulate and defend the claim that perceptual experience seems direct and the claim that its objects seem real. I defend these claims as integral parts of a coherent metaphysically neutral conception of perceptual experience. Sense-datum theorists, certain influential perceptual psychologists, and early modern philosophers (most notably Berkeley) all disputed the claim that perceptual experience seems direct. In Part I, I argue that the grounds on which they did so were poor. The aim is then, in Part II, to give a proper appreciation of the distinctive intentionality of perceptual experience whilst remaining metaphysically neutral. I do so by drawing on the early work of Edmund Husserl, providing a characterisation of the perceptual experience of objects as real, qua mind-independent particulars. In Part III, I explore two possible explanations of the structure characterising the intentionality of perceptual experience, both of which accord a distinctive explanatory role to the body. On one account, perceptual experience is structured by an implicit pre-reflective consciousness of oneself as a body engaged in perceptual activity. An alternative account makes no appeal to the metaphysically laden concept of a bodily self. It seeks to explain the structure of perceptual experience by appeal to anticipation of the structural constraints of the body. I develop this alternative by highlighting the conceptual and empirical basis for the idea that a first-order structural affordance relation holds between a bodily agent and certain properties of its body. I then close with a discussion of the shared background assumptions that ought to inform disputes over whether the body itself (in addition to its representation) ought to serve as an explanans in such an account.

Neuroelectromagnetic correlates of perceptual closure processes

Perceptual closure refers to the coherent perception of an object under circumstances when the visual information is incomplete. Although the perceptual closure index observed in electroencephalography reflects that an object has been recognized, the full spatiotemporal dynamics of cortical source activity underlying perceptual closure processing remain unknown so far. To address this question, we recorded magnetoencephalographic activity in 15 subjects (11 females) during a visual closure task and performed beamforming over a sequence of successive short time windows to localize high-frequency gamma-band activity (60–100 Hz). Two-tone images of human faces (Mooney faces) were used to examine perceptual closure. Event-related fields exhibited a magnetic closure index between 250 and 325 ms. Time-frequency analyses revealed sustained high-frequency gamma-band activity associated with the processing of Mooney stimuli; closure-related gamma-band activity was observed between 200 and 300 ms over occipitotemporal channels. Time-resolved source reconstruction revealed an early (0–200 ms) coactivation of caudal inferior temporal gyrus (cITG) and regions in posterior parietal cortex (PPC). At the time of perceptual closure (200–400 ms), the activation in cITG extended to the fusiform gyrus, if a face was perceived. Our data provide the first electrophysiological evidence that perceptual closure for Mooney faces starts with an interaction between areas related to processing of three-dimensional structure from shading cues (cITG) and areas associated with the activation of long-term memory templates (PPC). Later, at the moment of perceptual closure, inferior temporal cortex areas specialized for the perceived object are activated, i.e., the fusiform gyrus related to face processing for Mooney stimuli.

The Effects of Emotions and Distraction on Attention During a Perceptual Task

According to the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, positive emotions broaden while negative emotions narrow thought-action repertoires. These processes reflect changes in attentional scope, which is the focus of this research. The present study tested the hypothesis that participants in negative mood would be better able to focus on a target figure and separate it from its context in a perceptual task, and would also be better able to focus on the task amid a distracting environment than participants in a positive mood. An undergraduate sample of 77 participants watched video clips selected to induce either fear or amusement, and completed an Embedded Figures Test either in a quiet setting or in a noisy setting. A higher-order ANOVA revealed that Mood had a marginally significant effect on task performance, F(1, 73) = 3.94, p = .051, and that Distraction, F(1, 72) = 4.61, p = .035 and the Mood x Distraction interaction, F(1, 73) = 9.12, p = .003 did significantly affect task performance. However, contrary to the hypothesis, the effect of the distraction manipulation was greater for participants in a negative mood than it was for participants in a positive mood. The author suggests future directions to clarify the relationship between emotions, attentional scope, and susceptibility to environmental distraction.