Visual Timing of Structured Dance Movements Resembles Auditory Rhythm Perception

Temporal mechanisms for processing auditory musical rhythms are well established, in which a perceived beat is beneficial for timing purposes. It is yet unknown whether such beat-based timing would also underlie visual perception of temporally structured, ecological stimuli connected to music: dance. In this study, we investigated whether observers extracted a visual beat when watching dance movements to assist visual timing of these movements. Participants watched silent videos of dance sequences and reproduced the movement duration by mental recall. We found better visual timing for limb movements with regular patterns in the trajectories than without, similar to the beat advantage for auditory rhythms. When movements involved both the arms and the legs, the benefit of a visual beat relied only on the latter. The beat-based advantage persisted despite auditory interferences that were temporally incongruent with the visual beat, arguing for the visual nature of these mechanisms. Our results suggest that visual timing principles for dance parallel their auditory counterparts for music, which may be based on common sensorimotor coupling. These processes likely yield multimodal rhythm representations in the scenario of music and dance.

Mary's Hymn of Praise in Luke 1:46–55: Reflections on Liturgy and Spiritual Formation

For Christians, memory is not mental recall of facts or events, but the continuation of a revelatory event in subsequent generations through narrative rehearsal and interpretation. Memory forms attitudes and actions. The earliest church, lacking canonical writings witnessing to Jesus, preserved his memory through worship. Hymns were particularly important. From this perspective of memory, the Magnificat is examined. This hymn places in the mouth of an ordinary woman the proclamation of Jesus as one in whom the Reign of God has come. This Reign reverses fortunes and discloses God's regard of what the world calls “power” and “weakness.” So disclosing God's righteousness, it brings the perception of those who join it into line with God's.

Modulation of the Visual Word Retrieval System in Writing: A Functional MRI Study on the Japanese Orthographies

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine whether the act of writing involves different neuro-psychological mechanisms between the two script systems of the Japanese language: kanji (ideogram) and kana (phonogram). The main experiments employed a 2 × 2 factorial design that comprised writing-to-dictation and visual mental recall for kanji and kana. For both scripts, the actual writing produced a widespread fronto-parietal activation in the left hemisphere. Especially, writing of kanji activated the left posteroinferior temporal cortex (lPITC), whereas that of kana also yielded a trend of activation in the same area. Mental recall for both scripts activated similarly the left parieto-temporal regions including the lPITC. The writing versus mental recall comparison revealed greater activations in the left sensorimotor areas and right cerebellum. The kanji versus kana comparison showed increased responses in the left prefrontal and anterior cingulate areas. Especially, the lPITC showed a significant task-by-script interaction. Two additional control tasks, repetition (REP) and semantic judgment (SJ), activated the bilateral perisylvian areas, but enhanced the lPITC response only weakly. These results suggest that writing of the ideographic and phonographic scripts, although using the largely same cortical regions, each modulates the visual word-retrieval system according to their graphic features. Furthermore, comparisons with two additional tasks indicate that the activity of the lPITC increases especially in expressive language operations regardless of sensory modalities of the input stimulus.