Comparison of Nine Methods of Indicating the Direction to Objects: Data from Blind Adults

Perception ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Haber ◽  
Ralph Norman Haber ◽  
Suzanna Penningroth ◽  
Kevin Novak ◽  
Hilary Radgowski

Nine methods of indicating the direction to object locations were tested on twenty blind adult subjects. The task was to indicate the location of active auditory targets distributed in a semicircle with a 1.7 m radius around the subject. Target location, practice, and feedback were systematically varied for each method. The greatest accuracy and lowest variability were found for pointing methods that used body parts (directing the nose at the target, facing it with the chest, and pointing with the index finger) and extensions of body parts (pointing with a hand-held cane or with a short stick). Two less accurate methods involved rotating a dial. The least accurate methods involved drawing and a verbal description in terms of clockface labels. Method interacted significantly with target location, and with individual differences. In general, the body-part and extension method were affected less than other methods by target location and individual differences. The findings suggest that a pointing response that uses a body part or an extension of a body part is the best choice for experimental or diagnostic measurement of object location by blind subjects. Differences between the results of this study of blind subjects and auditory localization accuracy in sighted subjects are discussed, and the implications for spatial processing in the blind are considered.

2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 83-113
Author(s):  
Gordana Strbac

This article focuses on the human body as the source domain in the conceptualization of different activities in various target domains. The paper examines the role of body part terms jezik, uho/uvo, mozak and obraz in the development of phraseological meaning. The corpus for the research includes 211 idioms collected from the phraseological and other dictionaries (for example, drzati jezik za zubima, nemati dlake na jeziku, puniti kome usi, govoriti gluvim usima, imati mozga u glavi, puniti kome mozak, imati obraz kao djon, covek crna obraza, etc.). The analysis shows that the phraseological potential of body part terms depends on their conceptual, semantic and derivational potential, i.e. body part terms which have a rich derivational and semantic network also have numerous idioms. The phraseological meaning is often motivated by the functional seme in the sememe of the body part term, so the metonymy BODY PART FOR ITS FUNCTION is the most common pattern of semantic change. The idioms with lexemes jezik, uho/uvo, mozak and obraz mainly denote actions that are peculiar to these parts of the body. These meanings are based on metaphorical mental images in which the body parts have some qualities, or operate as the subject, object or instrument of a physical action. The existence of the same semantic patterns in other languages confirms the universality of bodily experience in the conceptualization of emotions, knowledge and reasoning, speaking, hearing, etc.


2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brennen W. Mills ◽  
Owen B. J. Carter ◽  
Robert J. Donovan

The objective of this case study was to experimentally manipulate the impact on arousal and recall of two characteristics frequently occurring in gruesome depictions of body parts in smoking cessation advertisements: the presence or absence of an external physical insult to the body part depicted; whether or not the image contains a clear figure/ground demarcation. Three hundred participants (46% male, 54% female; mean age 27.3 years, SD = 11.4) participated in a two-stage online study wherein they viewed and responded to a series of gruesome 4-s video images. Seventy-two video clips were created to provide a sample of images across the two conditions: physical insult versus no insult and clear figure/ground demarcation versus merged or no clear figure/ground demarcation. In stage one, participants viewed a randomly ordered series of 36 video clips and rated how “confronting” they considered each to be. Seven days later (stage two), to test recall of each video image, participants viewed all 72 clips and were asked to identify those they had seen previously. Images containing a physical insult were consistently rated more confronting and were remembered more accurately than images with no physical insult. Images with a clear figure/ground demarcation were rated as no more confronting but were consistently recalled with greater accuracy than those with unclear figure/ground demarcation. Makers of gruesome health warning television advertisements should incorporate some form of physical insult and use a clear figure/ground demarcation to maximize image recall and subsequent potential advertising effectiveness.


Author(s):  
Cristóbal Pera

ABSTRACTIf the human body is really a fabric, should surgeons be considered architects, as some surgeons describe themselves today? The author raises and analyzes this question, and he concludes that vsurgeons cannot be considered as such: the architect is the creator of his work —fabric or building—, but the surgeon is not the creator of this complex biological fabric —vulnerable and subject to deterioration and with an expiration date— which is the human body. This body is the object upon which his hands and instruments operate. The surgeon cures and heals wounds, immobilizes and aligns fractured bones in order to facilitate their good and timely repair, and cuts open the body’s surface in order to reach its internal organs. He also explores the body with his hands or instruments, destroys and reconstructs its ailing parts, substitutes vital organs taken from a donor’s foreign body, designs devices or prostheses, and replaces body parts, such as arteries and joints, that are damaged or worn out. In today’s culture, dominated by the desire to perfect the body, other surgeons keep retouching its aging façade, looking for an iconic and timeless beauty. This longing can drive, sometimes, to surgical madness. The surgeon is not capable of putting into motion, from scratch, a biological fabric such as the human body. Thus, he can’t create the subject of his work in the way that an architect can create a building. In contrast, the surgeon restores the body’s deteriorated or damaged parts and modifies the appearance of the body’s façade.RESUMEN¿Si el cuerpo humano fuera realmente una fábrica, podría el cirujano ser considerado su arquitecto, como algunos se pregonan en estos tiempos? Esta es la cuestión planteada por el autor y, a tenor de lo discurrido, su respuesta es negativa: porque así como el arquitecto es el artífice de su obra —fábrica o edificio— el cirujano no es el artífice de la complejísima fábrica biológica —vulnerable, deteriorable y caducable— que es el cuerpo humano, la cual le es dada como objeto de las acciones de sus manos y de sus instrumentos. El cirujano cura y restaña sus heridas, alinea e inmoviliza sus huesos fracturados para que su reparación llegue a buen término, penetra por sus orificios naturales o dibuja sobre la superficie corporal incisiones que le permitan llegar a sus entrañas, las explora con sus manos o mediante instrumentos, destruye y reconstruye sus partes enfermas, sustituye órganos vitales que no le ayudan a vivir por los extraídos de cuerpos donantes, y concibe, diseña y hace fabricar artefactos o prótesis, como recambio fragmentos corporales deteriorados o desgastados, como arterias o articulaciones. Otros cirujanos, en la predominante cultura de la modificación del cuerpo, retocan una y otra vez su fachada envejecida ineludiblemente por el paso del tiempo, empeñados en la búsqueda incesante de una belleza icónica y mediática e intemporal, una pretensión que puede conducir, y a veces conduce, al desvarío quirúrgico. En definitiva, el cirujano es incapaz de poner de pie, ex novo, una fábrica biológica como la del cuerpo humano y, por lo tanto, no puede ser su artífice, como lo es el arquitecto de su edificio. A lo sumo, es el restaurador de sus entrañas deterioradas y el modificador de su fachada, de su apariencia.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3.24) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Norlizaa Mohamad ◽  
Jafri Mohd Rohani ◽  
Ismail Abdul Rahman ◽  
Anis Amira Mat Zuki

Prolonged standing is one of the common activities in electronic industry as the task requirement. Prolonged standing can cause discomfort on the body of the workers and can lead to injury and occupational disease. The purpose of this study is to investigate standing workers perception on the fatigue and the discomfort on their respective body region for 12 hours working time. The subjects are the 80 workers with a good health condition and at least 6 months tenure. The subject data are collected via questionnaires and Likert scale to define the discomfort, pain, and fatigue. The workers were interviewed regarding their job and perceived fatigue discomfort. The results show the domination of the lower body region with the higher mean at the lower back, legs, and foot ankle. No statistically significant differences were found between the job tenure and body part discomfort pain and fatigue. There is a significant relation between gender and discomfort pain on legs and foot ankle. The result also shows a strong relation between age and the discomfort body parts of thigh and foot ankle. The perceptions of the workers towards discomfort pain and fatigue cause by prolonged standing during performing the task. The results from this study will provide a view for industrial consultants or ergonomist with evidence to support for ergonomic interventions for prolonged standing activity such as job rotation and work-rest schedule. 


2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-335
Author(s):  
Bistoon Abasi ◽  
Amer Gheitury

Human body as a universal possession of human beings constitutes an interesting domain where questions regarding semantic categorisations might be sought crosslinguistically. In the following, we will attempt to describe the terms used to refer to the body in Hawrami, an Iranian language spoken in Paveh, a small township in the western province of Kermanshah near Iraqi borders. Due to the scarcity of written material, the inventory of 202 terms referring to external and internal body parts were obtained through a field work, which took a long time, and techniques, such as the “colouring task”, observation and recording the terms as used in ordinary conversations and informal interviews with native speakers. The semantic properties of the terms and the way they are related in a partonymy or locative relationship were also investigated. As far as universals of body part terms are concerned, while conforming to ‘depth principle’ concerning the number of levels each partonomy may consist of, Hawrami violates an important feature of this principle by not allowing transitive relations between different levels of partonomic hierarchies. In addition, Hawrami lacks a term for labelling the ‘whole’.


2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 341-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning Yu

This study presents a semantic analysis of how emotions and emotional experiences are described in Chinese. It focuses on conventionalized expressions in Chinese, namely compounds and idioms, which contain body-part terms. The body-part terms are divided into two classes: those denoting external body parts and those denoting internal body parts or organs. It is found that, with a few exceptions, the expressions involving external body parts are originally metonymic, describing emotions in terms of their externally observable bodily events and processes. However, once conventionalized, these expressions are also used metaphorically regardless of emotional symptoms or gestures. The expressions involving internal organs evoke imaginary bodily images that are primarily metaphorical. It is found that the metaphors, though imaginary in nature, are not really all arbitrary. They seem to have a bodily or psychological basis, although they are inevitably influenced by cultural models.


1970 ◽  
Vol 176 (1044) ◽  
pp. 291-293

It is generally assumed that in multicellular organisms the diversity of the different cell types is the result of different gene activity which becomes manifest in the course of development. This theoretical concept of cell differentiation was developed on the basis of results obtained from a relatively small number of suitable experimental systems. One of them comprises the imaginal disks of the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster . Imaginal disks are larval primordia in holometabolic insects such as flies and mosquitoes, and consist of densely packed populations of morphologically uniform cells. They give rise to defined structures of the adult body (mainly integument), thus replacing parts of the larva which are almost completely histolysed during metamorphosis. The prospective fate of the various imaginal disks can be tested, for example, by transplantation experiments. Individual disks are removed from larvae of a genetically marked strain and transplanted into the body cavity of another larva with which the transplants undergo metamorphosis. The metamorphosed derivatives of the disks are then found in the abdomen of the fly and can be microscopically identified on the basis of the morphology of bristles, hairs and other structural features of the integument. The same method is applied for examination of the developmental performance of disk fragments. From the results of such experiments the following conclusions are drawn: (1) Individual disks of fully grown larvae, that is larvae which are ready to pupate, are determined (programmed) for exactly defined body parts of the adult organism. (2) The individual subregions of such a body part can be localized precisely within a disk. Based on these facts fate maps (anlage plans) can be worked out. (3) From experiments in which different genetically marked disks are intermingled and then transplanted into larvae it is concluded that even single cells are determined for structures of a specific body region.


2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radhika Rao

The legal status of the human body is hotly contested, yet the law of the body remains in a state of confusion and chaos. Sometimes the body is treated as an object of property, sometimes it is dealt with under the rubric of contract, and sometimes it is not conceived as property at all, but rather as the subject of privacy rights. Which body of law should become the law of the body? This question is even more pressing in the context of current biomedical research, which permits commodification and commercialization of the body by everyone except the person who provides the “raw materials.” The lack of property protection for tangible parts of the human body is in stark contrast to the extensive protection granted to intellectual property in the body in the form of patents upon human genes and cell lines. Moreover, even courts that reject ownership claims on the part of those who supply body parts appear willing to grant property rights to scientists, universities, and others who use those body parts to conduct research and create products.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. A. Huisman ◽  
Roeland van Hout ◽  
Asifa Majid

Abstract The human body is central to myriad metaphors, so studying the conceptualisation of the body itself is critical if we are to understand its broader use. One essential but understudied issue is whether languages differ in which body parts they single out for naming. This paper takes a multi-method approach to investigate body part nomenclature within a single language family. Using both a naming task (Study 1) and colouring-in task (Study 2) to collect data from six Japonic languages, we found that lexical similarity for body part terminology was notably differentiated within Japonic, and similar variation was evident in semantics too. Novel application of cluster analysis on naming data revealed a relatively flat hierarchical structure for parts of the face, whereas parts of the body were organised with deeper hierarchical structure. The colouring data revealed that bounded parts show more stability across languages than unbounded parts. Overall, the data reveal there is not a single universal conceptualisation of the body as is often assumed, and that in-depth, multi-method explorations of under-studied languages are urgently required.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 12022
Author(s):  
Cannan Yi ◽  
Fan Tang ◽  
Kaiway Li ◽  
Hong Hu ◽  
Huali Zuo ◽  
...  

Pulling is one of the manual material handling activities that could lead to work-related musculoskeletal disorders. The objectives of this study were to explore the development of muscular fatigue when performing intermittent pulling tasks and to establish models to predict the pull strength decrease due to performing the tasks. A simulated truck pulling experiment was conducted. Eleven healthy male adults participated. The participants pulled a handle with a load of 40 kg, which resulted in a pulling force of approximately 123 N. The pulling tasks lasted for 9 or 12 min with one, two, or three pauses embedded. The total time period of the embedded pauses was 3 min. The pull strength after each pull and rest was measured. Ratings of the perceived exertion on body parts after each pull were also recorded. The results showed insignificant differences regarding the development of muscular fatigue related to rest frequency. We found that the development of muscular fatigue for pulling tasks with embedded pauses was significantly slower than that for continuous pulls. The forearm had a higher CR-10 score than the other body parts indicating that the forearm was the body part suffering early muscle fatigue. An exponential model was developed to predict the pull strength of the pulling tasks with embedded pauses. This model may be used to assess the developing of muscular fatigue for pulling tasks.


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