An augmented reality home-training system based on the mirror training and imagery approach

Mirror training and movement imagery have been demonstrated to be effective in treating several clinical conditions, such as phantom limb pain, stroke-induced hemiparesis, and complex regional pain syndrome. This article presents an augmented reality home-training system based on the mirror and imagery treatment approaches for hand training. A head-mounted display equipped with cameras captures one hand held in front of the body, mirrors this hand, and displays it in real time in a set of four different training tasks: (1) flexing fingers in a predefined sequence, (2) moving the hand into a posture fitting into a silhouette template, (3) driving a “Snake” video game with the index finger, and (4) grasping and moving a virtual ball. The system records task performance and transfers these data to a central server via the Internet, allowing monitoring of training progress. We evaluated the system by having 7 healthy participants train with it over the course of ten sessions of 15-min duration. No technical problems emerged during this time. Performance indicators showed that the system achieves a good balance between relatively easy and more challenging tasks and that participants improved significantly over the training sessions. This suggests that the system is well suited to maintain motivation in patients, especially when it is used for a prolonged period of time.     

Evolutionary Guidance System: A Community Design Project

The Evolutionary Guidance System (EGS) is a holistic and inclusive model for designing self-organizing social systems. Such a model must be driven by evolutionary values articulated by the members of the system. The small community is an ideal context for the "growing" of an Evolutionary Guidance System. This paper describes the creation of an EGS in a community organization. The rational for the activity is to bring harmony and build community among the members of the organization and, at the same time, to reach out and include the larger community. This organization can provide a model for other organizations in the town, and the ultimate goal is to install an EGS as a nongovernmental design system for the town.     

Your own actions influence how you perceive other people: A misattribution of action appraisals

The attribution of personal traits to other persons depends on the actions the observer performs at the same time (Bach & Tipper, 2007). Here, we show that the effect reflects a misattribution of appraisals of the observers’ own actions to the actions of others. We exploited spatial compatibility effects to manipulate how fluently—how fast and how accurately—participants identified two individuals performing sporty or academic actions. The traits attributed to each person in a subsequent rating task depended on the fluency of participants’ responses in a specific manner. An individual more fluently identified while performing the academic action appeared more academic and less sporty. An individual more fluently identified while performing the sporty action appeared sportier. Thus, social perception is—at least partially—embodied. The ease of our own responses can be misattributed to the actions of others, affecting which personal traits are attributed to them.     

Behandlung von chronischen Schmerzen

Die klassische Dichotomisierung zwischen „k?rperlichen“ und „seelischen” Schmerzen ist mittlerweile überholt. Stattdessen widmen sich neuere Forschungsarbeiten verst?rkt der Frage wie biologische und psychosoziale Faktoren zusammenspielen, um individuell pathogenetisch wirksam zu werden. Schmerz gilt demnach als unangenehmes bio-psycho-soziales Erlebnis, bei dem sensorische und emotionale Aspekte untrennbar miteinander verbunden sind. W?hrend bei akuten Schmerzzust?nden den somatischen Faktoren meist noch eine zentrale Rolle zukommt, gewinnen mit zunehmender Chronifizierung die psychosozialen Aspekte des Schmerzerlebens an Bedeutung. Ausgehend von diesem mehrdimensionalen Schmerzverst?ndnis ist bei der Therapie von chronischen Schmerzen auf ganzheitliche, multimodale Behandlungskonzepte zu achten. Dabei haben sich verschiedene Behandlungsans?tze bew?hrt: der Einsatz von Medikamenten (Analgetika, Antidepressiva, Antikonvulsiva etc.), klinisch-psychologische und psychotherapeutische Verfahren, k?rperorientierte und komplement?re Vorgehensweisen sowie invasive, nicht-destruktive und neurodestruktive Verfahren.     

On being forgotten and forgetting one's self.

This paper assumes that evocative constancy, the ability to evoke reliably good-enough images of self and object in times of stress, underlies not only self and object constancy, but also the development of memory and the symbolic processes. It is suggested that a crucial element in this development is the mother's ability to construct and retain a vivid, cohesive, and reliable memory of her child, and to engage--in a multitude of implicit ways--in a process of mutual holding in memory. Where this process is deficient, the child, and later the adult, may experience discontinuities of the self, which find expression in profound anxieties, phobias, and problems of memory and learning. As these discontinuities are revived in the transference and the countertransference, both patient and analyst must work together to keep each other reliably alive in memory.     

Implicit action encoding influences personal-trait judgments

When an observed action (e.g., kicking) is compatible to a to be produced action (e.g., a foot-key response as compared to a finger-key response), then the self-produced action is more fluent, that is, it is more accurate and faster. A series of experiments explore the notion that vision-action compatibility effects can influence personal-trait judgments. It is demonstrated that when an observed individual carries out an action that is compatible with the participants' response, (1) this individual is identified more fluently, and (2) the observed individual's personality is attributed with the properties of the observed action. For example, if it is easier to identify one individual with a foot-response when he is seen kicking a ball, as compared to typing, he is perceived to be more 'sporty'. In contrast, if it is easier to identify one individual with a finger response when he is seen typing as compared to kicking a ball, he is associated with the 'academic' trait. These personal-trait judgment effects can be observed with explicit measures, where participants are asked to rate the sporty/academic nature of the person on a scale. They are also obtained when implicit measures are taken in a priming task, where participants are never explicitly asked to rate the personalities of the individuals. A control experiment rules out that these personal-trait effects are merely due to an association of motor responses (foot, finger) to individuals while identifying them, but that these effects depend on a prior manipulation of vision-action fluency.     

The predictive mirror: interactions of mirror and affordance processes during action observation

An important question for the study of social interactions is how the motor actions of others are represented. Research has demonstrated that simply watching someone perform an action activates a similar motor representation in oneself. Key issues include (1) the automaticity of such processes, and (2) the role object affordances play in establishing motor representations of others' actions. Participants were asked to move a lever to the left or right to respond to the grip width of a hand moving across a workspace. Stimulus-response compatibility effects were modulated by two task-irrelevant aspects of the visual stimulus: the observed reach direction and the match between hand-grasp and the affordance evoked by an incidentally presented visual object. These findings demonstrate that the observation of another person's actions automatically evokes sophisticated motor representations that reflect the relationship between actions and objects even when an action is not directed towards an object.