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EducationDoctor of Education (Ed.D.

Both Sides of the Brain: Strategies for Reinvention for Solo Video Journalists

Technological advances have made it possible for one video journalist to do the work of three. These solo video journalists perform the research and writing functions of a reporter, the field production tasks of a videographer, and the post-production assembly of an editor. Many of these hybrid journalists are veterans of the industry; once single-skilled journalists who have retrained themselves to work alone. However, while technology makes it possible, it takes much more than technical mastery for a professional to make this transition. Not everyone will be able to make the transition. From a series of qualitative interviews with former videographers and reporters, this text examines what factors are required for a successful transition into becoming a solo video journalist, including training, newsroom support, motivation, production competency and personal qualities

The effects of immediate vision on implicit hand maps

Perceiving the external spatial location of the limbs using position sense requires that immediate proprioceptive afferent signals be combined with a stored body model specifying the size and shape of the body. Longo and Haggard (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107:11727–11732, 2010) developed a method to isolate and measure this body model in the case of the hand in which participants judge the perceived location in external space of several landmarks on their occluded hand. The spatial layout of judgments of different landmarks is used to construct implicit hand maps, which can then be compared with actual hand shape. Studies using this paradigm have revealed that the body model of the hand is massively distorted, in a highly stereotyped way across individuals, with large underestimation of finger length and overestimation of hand width. Previous studies using this paradigm have allowed participants to see the locations of their judgments on the occluding board. Several previous studies have demonstrated that immediate vision, even when wholly non-informative, can alter processing of somatosensory signals and alter the reference frame in which they are localised. The present study therefore investigated whether immediate vision contributes to the distortions of implicit hand maps described previously. Participants judged the external spatial location of the tips and knuckles of their occluded left hand either while being able to see where they were pointing (as in previous studies) or while blindfolded. The characteristic distortions of implicit hand maps reported previously were clearly apparent in both conditions, demonstrating that the distortions are not an artefact of immediate vision. However, there were significant differences in the magnitude of distortions in the two conditions, suggesting that vision may modulate representations of body size and shape, even when entirely non-informative

The taste of cutlery: how the taste of food is affected by the weight, size, shape, and colour of the cutlery used to eat it

Background: Recent evidence has shown that changing the plateware can affect the perceived taste and flavour of food, but very little is known about visual and proprioceptive influences of cutlery on the response of consumers to the food sampled from it. In the present study, we report three experiments designed to investigate whether food tastes different when the visual and tactile properties of the plastic cutlery from which it is sampled are altered. We independently varied the weight, size, colour, and shape of cutlery. We assessed the impact of changing the sensory properties of the cutlery on participants’ ratings of the sweetness, saltiness, perceived value, and overall liking of the food tasted from it. Results: The results revealed that yoghurt was perceived as denser and more expensive when tasted from a lighter plastic spoon as compared to the artificially weighted spoons; the size of the spoon only interacted with the spoon-weight factor for the perceived sweetness of the yoghurt. The taste of the yoghurt was also affected by the colour of the cutlery, but these effects depended on the colour of the food as well, suggesting that colour contrast may have been responsible for the observed effects. Finally, we investigated the influence of the shape of the cutlery. The results showed that the food was rated as being saltiest when sampled from a knife rather than from a spoon, fork, or toothpick. Conclusions: Taken together, these results demonstrate that the properties of the cutlery can indeed affect people’s taste perception of everyday foods, most likely when expectations regarding the cutlery or the food have been disconfirmed. We discuss these results in the context of changing environmental cues in order to modify people’s eating habits. Keywords: Flavour, Cutlery, Hedonic rating, Sweetness, Colour, Weight, Multisensory, Expectation, Disconfirmed expectatio

Accurate Inference for Repeated Measures in High Dimensions

This paper proposes inferential methods for high-dimensional repeated measures in factorial designs. High-dimensional refers to the situation where the dimension is growing with sample size such that either one could be larger than the other. The most important contribution relates to high-accuracy of the methods in the sense that p-values, for example, are accurate up to the second-order. Second-order accuracy in sample size as well as dimension is achieved by obtaining asymptotic expansion of the distribution of the test statistics, and estimation of the parameters of the approximate distribution with second-order consistency. The methods are presented in a unified and succinct manner that it covers general factorial designs as well as any comparisons among the cell means. Expression for asymptotic powers are derived under two reasonable local alternatives. A simulation study provides evidence for a gain in accuracy and power compared to limiting distribution approximations and other competing methods for high-dimensional repeated measures analysis. The application of the methods are illustrated with a real-data from Electroencephalogram (EEG) study of alcoholic and control subjects

Visual detail about the body modulates tactile localisation biases

The localisation of tactile stimuli requires the integration of visual and somatosensory inputs within an internal representation of the body surface, and is prone to consistent bias. Joints may play a role in segmenting such internal body representations, and may therefore influence tactile localisation biases, although the nature of this influence remains unclear. Here, we investigate the relationship between conceptual knowledge of joint locations and tactile localisation biases on the hand. In one task, participants localised tactile stimuli applied to the dorsum of their hand. A distal localisation bias was observed in all participants, consistent with previous results. We also manipulated the availability of visual information during this task, to determine whether the absence of this information could account for the distal bias observed here and by Mancini and colleagues (2011). The observed distal bias increased in magnitude when visual information was restricted, without a corresponding decrease in precision. In a separate task, the same participants indicated, from memory, knuckle locations on a silhouette image of their hand. Analogous distal biases were also seen in the knuckle localisation task. The accuracy of conceptual joint knowledge was not correlated with tactile localisation bias magnitude, although a similarity in observed bias direction suggests that both tasks may rely on a common, higher-order body representation. These results also suggest that distortions of conceptual body representation may be more common in healthy individuals than previously thought