Coding of visual space during motor preparation: approaching objects rapidly modulate corticospinal excitability in hand-centered coordinates

Defensive behaviors, such as withdrawing your hand to avoid potentially harmful approaching objects, rely on rapid sensorimotor transformations between visual and motor coordinates. We examined the reference frame for coding visual information about objects approaching the hand during motor preparation. Subjects performed a simple visuomanual task while a task-irrelevant distractor ball rapidly approached a location either near to or far from their hand. After the distractor ball appearance, single pulses of transcranial magnetic stimulation were delivered over the subject's primary motor cortex, eliciting motor evoked potentials (MEPs) in their responding hand. MEP amplitude was reduced when the ball approached near the responding hand, both when the hand was on the left and the right of the midline. Strikingly, this suppression occurred very early, at 70-80ms after ball appearance, and was not modified by visual fixation location. Furthermore, it was selective for approaching balls, since static visual distractors did not modulate MEP amplitude. Together with additional behavioral measurements, we provide converging evidence for automatic hand-centered coding of visual space in the human brain.

Objects and positions in visual scenes: effects of perirhinal and postrhinal cortex lesions in the rat

The authors assessed rats' encoding of the appearance or egocentric position of objects within visual scenes containing 3 objects (Experiment 1) or I object (Experiment 2A). Experiment 2B assessed encoding of the shape and fill pattern of single objects, and encoding of configurations (object + position, shape + fill). All were assessed by testing rats' ability to discriminate changes from familiar scenes (constant-negative paradigm). Perirhinal cortex lesions impaired encoding of objects and their shape; postrhinal cortex lesions impaired encoding of egocentric position, but the effect may have been partly due to entorhinal involvement. Neither lesioned group was impaired in detecting configural change. In Experiment 1, both lesion groups were impaired in detecting small changes in relative position of the 3 objects, suggesting that more sensitive tests might reveal configural encoding deficits.

Increasing food familiarity without the tears. A role for visual exposure?

Research has established the success of taste exposure paradigms as a means of increasing children’s acceptance, and liking, of previously unfamiliar or disliked foods. Yet, parents report that they tend to avoid the stress associated with repeatedly offering their children foods that are likely to be rejected. Given that successful taste exposure programmes often enhance children’s familiarity with a food’s appearance, as well as its taste, this article reviews the potential for exposure interventions that do not require repeated tastings to bring about positive attitude changes towards healthy foods. Recent evidence from studies that expose toddlers to picture books about fruit and vegetables suggest that familiarity with the origins and appearance of unfamiliar foods might increase children’s willingness to accept these into their diets.

Spoken word recognition in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders and specific language impairment

Spoken word recognition, during gating, appears intact in specific language impairment (SLI). This study used gating to investigate the process in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders plus language impairment (ALI). Adolescents with ALI, SLI, and typical language development (TLD), matched on nonverbal IQ listened to gated words that varied in frequency (low/high) and number of phonological onset neighbors (low/high density). Adolescents with ALI required more speech input to initially identify low-frequency words with low competitor density than those with SLI and those with TLD, who did not differ. These differences may be due to less well specified word form representations in ALI.

Terrorist transgressions: gendered representations of the terrorist in visual culture

The aim of Terrorist Transgressions is to analyse the myths inscribed in images of the terrorist and identify how agency is attributed to representation through invocations and inversions of gender stereotypes. In modern discourses on the terrorist the horror experienced in Western societies was the appearance of a new sense of the vulnerability of the body politic, and therefore of the modern self with its direct dependency on security and property. The terrorist has been constructed as the epitome of transgression against economic resources and moral, physical and political boundaries. Although terrorism has been the focus of intense academic activity, cultural representations of the terrorist have received less attention. Yet terrorism is dependent on spectacle and the topic is subject to forceful exposure in popular media. While the terrorist is predominantly aligned with masculinity, women have been active in terrorist organisations since the late 19th century and in suicidal terrorist attacks since the 1980s. Such attacks have confounded constructions of femininity and masculinity, with profound implications for the gendering of violence and horror. The publication arises from an AHRC networking grant, 2011-12, with Birkbeck, and includes collaboration with the army at Sandhurst RMA. The project relates to a wider investigation into feminism, violence and contemporary art.

Virgil's fourth Eclogue and the visual arts

Virgil's poetry has frequently appeared in illustrated editions, and has regularly provided subjects for other works of art, including some of the most celebrated masterpieces of the western tradition. In view of its constant appropriation in literary contexts over the course of the centuries, we might expect the famous fourth Eclogue (the so-called ‘messianic’ eclogue) to have exerted more of an impact on visual culture than it appears to have done. This paper considers some of the possible reasons for the apparent scarcity of engagement with Virgil's poem beyond the literary sphere, and examines the uses to which the poet's text is put when it does make an appearance in visual media — perhaps more often than has sometimes been supposed.

Grafisk profil åt Borlänge Bandy : Framtagning av en sportförenings visuella profil

Borlänge Bandy är en sportförening med säte i Borlänge. Målet med detta arbete var att utreda hur Borlänge Bandy uppfattas av sin målgrupp idag, och utifrån detta skapa en ny grafisk profil som gör att Borlänge Bandy bättre uppfattas som enhetligt av målgruppen, det vill säga bandyspelare på Borlänge Bandy, anställda och styrelseledamöter på Borlänge Bandy och nya potentiella medlemmar. Dessutom skapades en förnyad logotyp i enighet med åsikterna som kom fram i enkätundersökningarna som utfördes.   Genom flera enkätundersökningar gavs bakgrundsinformation om hur Borlänge Bandy uppfattas av sin målgrupp. Svaren från enkätundersökningarna låg sedan till grund för en förnyelse av Borlänge Bandys logotyp då det framkommit att en majoritet av Borlänge Bandys målgrupp ansåg att den behövde förändras. Genom diskussion med en fokusgrupp diskuterades förslag på en förnyad logotyp och utifrån deras kritik skapades en slutgiltigt förnyad logotyp. I fokusgruppen diskuterades även vilka typsnitt som passar att bli Borlänge Bandys nya hustypsnitt. Alla resultat som togs fram jämfördes och kontrollerades med hjälp av teorin som framtagits. En utvärderande fokusgrupp kontrollerade sedan att det önskade resultatet uppnåtts genom att jämföra Borlänge Bandys tidigare visuella utseende med den nya grafiska profilen som skapats.     Resultatet blev en ny grafisk profil med tillhörande grafisk manual till Borlänge Bandy innehållandes information om typografi, färger, logotyp, bildspråk, korrespondensmaterial, företagsprodukter och grafiska element. Om det grafiska materialet hanteras konsekvent skapas igenkänning. Slutsatserna blev att den nya grafiska profilen uppfattas som enhetlig och harmonisk enligt den utvärderande fokusgruppen bestående av Borlänge Bandys målgrupp. 

Evolvable hardware applied to voice recognition

This paper presents some results of the application on Evolvable Hardware (EHW) in the area of voice recognition. Evolvable Hardware is able to change inner connections, using genetic learning techniques, adapting its own functionality to external condition changing. This technique became feasible by the improvement of the Programmable Logic Devices. Nowadays, it is possible to have, in a single device, the ability to change, on-line and in real-time, part of its own circuit. This work proposes a reconfigurable architecture of a system that is able to receive voice commands to execute special tasks as, to help handicapped persons in their daily home routines. The idea is to collect several voice samples, process them through algorithms based on Mel - Ceptrais theory to obtain their numerical coefficients for each sample, which, compose the universe of search used by genetic algorithm. The voice patterns considered, are limited to seven sustained Portuguese vowel phonemes (a, eh, e, i, oh, o, u).

Robust and fast vowel recognition using optimum-path forest

The applications of Automatic Vowel Recognition (AVR), which is a sub-part of fundamental importance in most of the speech processing systems, vary from automatic interpretation of spoken language to biometrics. State-of-the-art systems for AVR are based on traditional machine learning models such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs), however, such classifiers can not deal with efficiency and effectiveness at the same time, existing a gap to be explored when real-time processing is required. In this work, we present an algorithm for AVR based on the Optimum-Path Forest (OPF), which is an emergent pattern recognition technique recently introduced in literature. Adopting a supervised training procedure and using speech tags from two public datasets, we observed that OPF has outperformed ANNs, SVMs, plus other classifiers, in terms of training time and accuracy. ©2010 IEEE.

Ilustração: passeio pela poesia visual

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Design da notícia: o desenvolvimento da indústria gráfica e a comunicação visual no Jornal Diário

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

A comunicação de embalagens de produtos alimentícios para deficientes visuais

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Revista Careta: um estudo sobre humor visual no Estado Novo (1937-1945)

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Análise comparativa do uso da tabela fonética do português brasileiro cantado por cantores argentinos com e sem o uso de um recurso áudio visual

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Malcolm X: entre o texto escrito e o visual

Pós-graduação em Letras - IBILCE