Seeing Spaces: An Eye-Tracking Study Of Speech Segmentation

Speech is often a multimodal process, presented audiovisually through a talking face. One area of speech perception influenced by visual speech is speech segmentation, or the process of breaking a stream of speech into individual words. Mitchel and Weiss (2013) demonstrated that a talking face contains specific cues to word boundaries and that subjects can correctly segment a speech stream when given a silent video of a speaker. The current study expanded upon these results, using an eye tracker to identify highly attended facial features of the audiovisual display used in Mitchel and Weiss (2013). In Experiment 1, subjects were found to spend the most time watching the eyes and mouth, with a trend suggesting that the mouth was viewed more than the eyes. Although subjects displayed significant learning of word boundaries, performance was not correlated with gaze duration on any individual feature, nor was performance correlated with a behavioral measure of autistic-like traits. However, trends suggested that as autistic-like traits increased, gaze duration of the mouth increased and gaze duration of the eyes decreased, similar to significant trends seen in autistic populations (Boratston & Blakemore, 2007). In Experiment 2, the same video was modified so that a black bar covered the eyes or mouth. Both videos elicited learning of word boundaries that was equivalent to that seen in the first experiment. Again, no correlations were found between segmentation performance and SRS scores in either condition. These results, taken with those in Experiment, suggest that neither the eyes nor mouth are critical to speech segmentation and that perhaps more global head movements indicate word boundaries (see Graf, Cosatto, Strom, & Huang, 2002). Future work will elucidate the contribution of individual features relative to global head movements, as well as extend these results to additional types of speech tasks.

Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces

Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovereignty, or rule by chance. This allows us to see camps and borders not only as the outcomes of humanitarian projects but also of anxieties about governance and rule; to see their inhabitants not only as abject recipients of aid, but also as individuals who make decisions and choices in complex conditions; and to show that while the outcome of projects within such spaces is often unpredictable, the assumptions that undergird such projects create regular cycles of implementation and failure.

Differential optical densities of intraretinal spaces

PURPOSE: To test the hypothesis that hyporeflective spaces in the neuroretina found on optical coherence tomography (OCT) examination have different optical reflectivities according to whether they are associated with exudation or degeneration. METHODS: Retrospective analysis of eyes with idiopathic perifoveal telangiectasia (IPT), diabetic macular edema (DME), idiopathic central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC), retinitis pigmentosa (RP), or cone dystrophy (CD) and eyes of healthy control subjects. OCT scans were performed. Raw scan data were exported and used to calculate light reflectivity profiles. Reflectivity data were acquired by projecting three rectangular boxes, each 50 pixels long and 5 pixels wide, into the intraretinal cystoid spaces, centrally onto unaffected peripheral RPE, and onto the prefoveolar vitreous. Light reflectivity in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), vitreous, and intraretinal spaces for the different retinal conditions and control subjects were compared. RESULTS: Reflectivities of the vitreous and the RPE were similar among the groups. Hyporeflective spaces in eyes with exudation (DME, RP, and CSC) had higher reflectivity compared with the mean reflectivity of the vitreous, whereas the cystoid spaces in the maculae of the eyes without exudation (CD and IPT) had a lower reflectivity than did the normal vitreous. CONCLUSIONS: Analysis of the light reflectivity profiles may be a tool to determine whether the density of hyporeflective spaces in the macula is greater or less than that of the vitreous, and may be a way to differentiate degenerative from exudative macular disease.

Blighted Spaces and the Politics of Everyday Life

While a great deal is known about the demographic and historical trends that shape the built environment of American cities, much less is known about the politics of everyday life among residents who continue to live in postindustrial neighborhoods. This study seeks to compensate for the current gaps in academic research by conducting spatially informed ethnography in a North Philadelphia community. Specifically, the study will explore the issue of urban "blight" from a cultural geography perspective, primarily by looking at the ways in which "blighted" spaces shape everyday life, and everyday life in turn shapes and produces the spatial environment. In response to these concerns, my study poses the questions: What would it mean to focus on the ways in which human agency, imagination, and subjectivity are shaped by "blighted" geographical locations? What would it mean to pay ethnographic attention to how subjects in given historical conditions are shaped by "blighted" spaces, as well as how they respond to these spaces in culturally specific ways? By incorporating critical interdisciplinary approaches, this study offers a new way of looking at the various practices of daily life - including flexible, informal economic activities and post-welfare related "lifestyles" of resistance. Through the lens of spatial ethnography, the study seeks to elucidate the ways in which postindustrial space interacts with culture, poverty and addiction; as well as the ways in which users continue to appropriate postindustrial spaces in culturally meaningful ways under the aegis of the semi-welfare state.