Visual enhancement of touch and the bodily self

We experience our own body through both touch and vision. We further see that others’ bodies are similar to our own body, but we have no direct experience of touch on others’ bodies. Therefore, relations between vision and touch are important for the sense of self and for mental representation of one’s own body. For example, seeing the hand improves tactile acuity on the hand, compared to seeing a non-hand object. While several studies have demonstrated this visual enhancement of touch (VET) effect, its relation to the ‘bodily self’, or mental representation of one’s own body remains unclear. We examined whether VET is an effect of seeing a hand, or of seeing my hand, using the rubber hand illusion. In this illusion, a prosthetic hand which is brushed synchronously—but not asynchronously—with one’s own hand is felt to actually be one’s hand. Thus, we manipulated whether or not participants felt like they were looking directly at their hand, while holding the actual stimulus they viewed constant. Tactile acuity was measured by having participants judge the orientation of square-wave gratings. Two characteristic effects of VET were observed: (1) cross-modal enhancement from seeing the hand was inversely related to overall tactile acuity, and (2) participants near sensory threshold showed significant improvement following synchronous stroking, compared to asynchronous stroking or no stroking at all. These results demonstrate a clear functional relation between the bodily self and basic tactile perception.     

Sexual Subjectivity: A Semiotic Analysis of Girlhood, Sex, and Sexuality in the Film Juno

Historical approaches to girlhood provide a basis for understanding changing cultural ideologies of sex, sexuality, and youth. While situating sexual desire, biological possibilities, and social responses to girls’ engagement in sexual intercourse at the center of its plot, the film Juno depicts the transgressive sexual agency of a young girl without substantially disrupting longstanding discourses of femininity. Through an analysis of the semiotics of girlhood within the film, I argue that the girl figure in this representation signifies an amalgam of two traditionally dichotomized conceptions of “femininity.” Juno serves as a particularly intriguing example of the ways in which adolescent female sexuality is conceptualized within popular western culture during the early part of the 21st century.

Visual speech contributes to phonetic learning in 6-month-old infants

Previous research has shown that infants match vowel sounds to facial displays of vowel articulation [Kuhl, P. K., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1982). The bimodal perception of speech in infancy. Science, 218, 1138–1141; Patterson, M. L., & Werker, J. F. (1999). Matching phonetic information in lips and voice is robust in 4.5-month-old infants. Infant Behaviour & Development, 22, 237–247], and integrate seen and heard speech sounds [Rosenblum, L. D., Schmuckler, M. A., & Johnson, J. A. (1997). The McGurk effect in infants. Perception & Psychophysics, 59, 347–357; Burnham, D., & Dodd, B. (2004). Auditory-visual speech integration by prelinguistic infants: Perception of an emergent consonant in the McGurk effect. Developmental Psychobiology, 45, 204–220]. However, the role of visual speech in language development remains unknown. Our aim was to determine whether seen articulations enhance phoneme discrimination, thereby playing a role in phonetic category learning. We exposed 6-month-old infants to speech sounds from a restricted range of a continuum between /ba/ and /da/, following a unimodal frequency distribution. Synchronously with these speech sounds, one group of infants (the two-category group) saw a visual articulation of a canonical /ba/ or /da/, with the two alternative visual articulations, /ba/ and /da/, being presented according to whether the auditory token was on the /ba/ or /da/ side of the midpoint of the continuum. Infants in a second (one-category) group were presented with the same unimodal distribution of speech sounds, but every token for any particular infant was always paired with the same syllable, either a visual /ba/ or a visual /da/. A stimulus-alternation preference procedure following the exposure revealed that infants in the former, and not in the latter, group discriminated the /ba/–/da/ contrast. These results not only show that visual information about speech articulation enhances phoneme discrimination, but also that it may contribute to the learning of phoneme boundaries in infancy.     

Categorical perception of colour in the left and right visual field is verbally mediated: evidence from Korean

In this study we demonstrate that Korean (but not English) speakers show Categorical perception (CP) on a visual search task for a boundary between two Korean colour categories that is not marked in English. These effects were observed regardless of whether target items were presented to the left or right visual field. Because this boundary is unique to Korean, these results are not consistent with a suggestion made by Drivonikou [Drivonikou, G. V., Kay, P., Regier, T., Ivry, R. B., Gilbert, A. L., Franklin, A. et al. (2007) Further evidence that Whorfian effects are stronger in the right visual field than in the left. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, 1097-1102] that CP effects in the left visual field provide evidence for the existence of a set of universal colour categories. Dividing Korean participants into fast and slow responders demonstrated that fast responders show CP only in the right visual field while slow responders show CP in both visual fields. We argue that this finding is consistent with the view that CP in both visual fields is verbally mediated by the left hemisphere language system.     

用库恩“范式论”浅析心力衰竭的治疗进展

美国著名科学哲学家库恩认为每一个科学发展阶段都有特殊的内在结构,而体现这种结构的模型即“范式”。并认为任何科学研究都是在某一范式的指导下进行的,范式是一个科学部门达到成熟的标志,而科学革命实际上就是范式的转变,指出一种范式经革命向另一种范式逐步过渡,正是成熟科学的通常模式。本文就范式理论对心力衰竭治疗进展的影响进行探讨。     

浅议中医的范式丢失

借鉴库恩的“范式”理论,在分析中医“范式丢失”的起源和发展过程的基础上,提出中医“范式丢失”是引起近现代中医停滞不前的根本原因。“范式丢失”后的中医在管理层面上失去了话语权,并直接导致中医教育、研究的去中医化,从根本上限制了中医自身的发展。寻求中医的“范式”回归是现代中医发展的唯一道路。     

Asymmetry and performance: toward a neurodevelopmental theory

Hemispheric asymmetry implies the existence of developmental influences that affect one hemisphere more than the other. However, those influences are poorly understood. One simple view is that asymmetry may exist because of a relationship between a mental process' degree of lateralization and how well it functions. Data scaling issues have largely prevented such investigations, but it is shown that scaling effects are minimized after correction for ceiling and floor effects. After correction, lateralization-performance correlations are pervasive. However, while some correlations are positive, others are negative, with the direction depending on the underlying lateralized process. Two hypotheses are proposed that can account for these relationships by pointing either to individual differences in maturation of the corpus callosum or to developmental limits encountered at different ages of childhood. Their investigation should contribute toward a neurodevelopmental theory of hemispheric asymmetry.     

Perceptual visual grouping under inattention: electrophysiological functional imaging

Two types of perceptual visual grouping, differing in complexity of shape formation, were examined under inattention. Fourteen participants performed a similarity judgment task concerning two successive briefly presented central targets surrounded by task-irrelevant simple and complex grouping patterns. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 22 scalp electrodes and source current density estimations were conducted for the net response to the task-irrelevant background patterns, using low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA). Although participants’ subjective reports indicated that neither type of organization induced awareness, electrophysiological results showed they both evoked significant activation in occipital, parieto-temporal and frontal brain areas. Behavioral results demonstrated that only grouping of the simple pattern arose under inattention. In contrast to the complex pattern, the processing of the simple pattern was associated with an initially longer latency and higher activation beginning at 130 ms. These results support the distinction of grouping patterns differing in complexity of shape formation.