Non-functional biomimicry : utilising natural patterns to provoke attention responses

Natural reoccurring patterns arise from chaos and are prevalent throughout nature. The formation of these patterns is controlled by, or produces, underlying geometrical structures. Biomimicry is the study of nature’s structure, processes and systems, as models and solutions for design challenges and is being widely utilized in order to address many issues of contemporary engineering. Many academics now believe that aesthetics stem from pattern recognition, consequently, aesthetic preference may be a result of individuals recognising, and interacting with, natural patterns. The goal of this research was to investigate the impact of specific naturally occurring pattern types (spiral, branching, and fractal patterns) on user behaviour; investigating the potential of such patterns to control and influence how individuals interact with their surrounding environment. The results showed that the underlying geometry of natural patterns has the potential to induce attention responses to a statistically significant level

Non-functional biomimicry : utilising natural patterns to provoke attention responses

Natural reoccurring patterns arise from chaos and are prevalent throughout nature. The formation of these patterns is controlled by, or produces, underlying geometrical structures. Biomimicry is the study of nature’s structure, processes and systems, as models and solutions for design challenges and is being widely utilized in order to address many issues of contemporary engineering. Many academics now believe that aesthetics stem from pattern recognition, consequently, aesthetic preference may be a result of individuals recognising, and interacting with, natural patterns. The goal of this research was to investigate the impact of specific naturally occurring pattern types (spiral, branching, and fractal patterns) on user behaviour; investigating the potential of such patterns to control and influence how individuals interact with their surrounding environment. The results showed that the underlying geometry of natural patterns has the potential to induce attention responses to a statistically significant level

Perceptual Styles of Left- and Right-Lookers

The left and right hemispheres have unique modes of processing data: the former verbal-analytic, the latter spatial-holistic. Dominant direction of lateral eye movement on answering reflective questions has been interpreted as indicating differential contralateral hemispheric activation and, by inference, predominant reliance on one or the other mode. This study tested the hypothesis that neurological organization of the brain underlies and unifies individual perceptual, cognitive, and personality style differences. Right-lookers were expected to be more obsessive-compulsive and to obtain a predicted pattern of test scores congruent with left hemispheric characteristics, while left-lookers were expected to be more hysteroid and to obtain a contrasting pattern of scores. Predictions regarding sex differences were also made. Forty-three right-handed undergraduate psychology students from the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota, were solicited from subjects screened for dominant direction of lateral eye movement in a related study: 11 male left-lookers, 9 male right-lookers, 12 female left-lookers, 11 female right-lookers (percentage of unilateral eye movements, 63-100%). Subjects (compensated $10.00 each) were tested individually, completing the Hysteroid:Obsessoid Questionnaire, the Rorschach Inkblot Test (following Exner\u27s Comprehensive System guidelines), with pre- and post-administrations of the State Anxiety Inventory. A 2 x 2 factorial design was utilized with independent variables \u27sex\u27 and \u27direction of lateral eye movement.\u27 An Analysis of Variance on 53 variables yielded a significant interaction on 5, with trends on 3, and significant main effects on 11, with trends on 10. A Multivariate Analysis of Variance on 4 variables yielded no overall group effect. Factor Analysis of 53 variables produced 13 factors, accounting for 86% of the variance. A Discriminant Function Analysis of these factors produced no overall effect for the independent variables or their interaction; the Analysis of Variance portion of this procedure indicated a trend on one factor. No clear patterns in test scores emerged, some results were unpredicted or contrary to expectation, and sex differences appeared important. It was concluded that critical Rorschach scoring issues need to be resolved, that sample population characteristics may be implicated, and that use of the lateral eye movement phenomenon to determine hemispheric dominance may be inadequate

Can we Build Theories of Understanding on the Basis of Mirror Neurons?

The discovery of mirror neurons and the characterization of their response properties is certainly an important achievement in neurophysiology and cognitive neuroscience. The reference to the role of mirror neurons in ‘reading’ the intentions of other creatures and in the learning process fulfils an explanatory function in understanding many cognitive phenomena beginning from imitating, towards understanding, and finishing with complex social interactions. The focus of this paper is to review selected approaches to the role of mirror neurons in mental activity as understanding, and to conclude with some possible implications for researches on mirror neurons for philosophical theories of understanding

SEALED WITH A KISS: HEAD-TURNING ASYMMETRIES DURING KISSING ARE MODULATED BY CONTEXT AND INFLUENCE PERCEPTUAL JUDGEMENTS

When leaning forward to kiss a romantic partner, individuals tend to direct their kiss to the right more often than to the left. The theoretical mechanism guiding this asymmetry is that it originates from a right head-turning preference observed within early stages of human development. By contrast, other lateral turning biases are theorized to stem from differences of hemispheric specialization of emotion rather than from an innate influence, to which the lateral direction of these biases are dependent on their situational context. My first two studies examine if the context for non-romantic conventions of lip-kissing convey a comparable right-turn bias, as the existing literature has focused on romantic-kissing gestures. If kissing laterality is caused from an innately guided right head-turning bias, this directionality should transcend different forms of kissing. Study 1 analysed the turning directions of kisses from videos from the First Kiss social media trend, featuring strangers performing a lip-to-lip kiss. The predominant right-turn bias was not supported; rather, no significant directional bias was observed. To further explore the role of a non-romantic kissing context, study 2 introduced the type of kiss shared between a parent and child. Images of parent-parent kissing (romantic context) and parent-child kissing (parental context) couples were collected for an archival analysis. A right-turn kissing bias was revealed, but only for the romantic kissing couples; for parental kisses, a leftward bias was found. Collectively, the first two studies do not coincide with the congenital account of kissing laterality, as attenuated and reversed turning biases were found. For study 3, romantic and parental kissing were further investigated while also exploring if perceptual input of kissing biases corresponds to the direction of motor output. Studies 3a and 3b employed a forced-choice task in which image-pairs of romantic and parental kissing couples were presented and asked which image was perceived as more “passionate” and “loving”, respectively. Kisses between romantic couples were perceived to be more passionate when displaying a right turn in comparison to a left turn, whereas images with neither left nor right turns were perceived to be more loving for parent-child kissing couples. The final study examines how cognitive evaluations unrelated to the kiss are influenced in the field of advertising. Original and mirror-reversed versions of advertisements with models kissing were displayed in a forced-choice preference task and consumer-judgement task. Models illustrating a right turn (vs left turn) when kissing were preferred when identical images were presented. When ads were presented individually, right-turn (vs left-turn) kisses resulted in higher consumer attitudes and purchase intention. This body of research challenges the previous rationale that kissing laterality persists from the right head-turning preference observed in infancy, as contexts with parental and strangers kissing reveal a leftward preference or no directional bias. Our findings also contribute to our understanding of how kissing biases are exhibited within earlier stages of cognitive processing, such that perceptions of passion and consumer preferences for visual stimuli displaying romantic kissing corresponds to the direction of authentic turning behaviour: the right. Further discussion speculates on how cerebral lateralization of emotions may contribute to kissing laterality, to which a variety of future directions are suggested to test these predictions

The Psychosomatic Journey of Trauma and Its Healing: A Comparative Synthesis Between Scientific and Psycho-spiritual Perspectives

The purpose of this paper is to create a comparative synthesis between scientific perspectives and spiritual perspectives of understanding the psychosomatic (mind-body) nature of trauma. In order to do so we will consider the works of Dr.Bessel van der Kolk, a world-leading psychiatrist in the field of trauma therapy who advocates for the use of body-oriented approaches to healing, and the works of Carl Jung and Donald Kalsched. Jung is considered one of the founding fathers of the field of Transpersonal Psychology, while Kalsched is a Jungian psychoanalyst who specializes in working with trauma patients. We will see that while Van der Kolk enables us to understand trauma through scientific, diagnostic, and empirical frameworks, Jung and Kalsched illumine the “soulful, mytho-poetic, and imaginal” dimensions of trauma, its healing, and the psychosomatic nature of this process. Though these paradigms addresses trauma through very different “languages,” we will illumine the parallels between them and demonstrate how they can be considered together in order to create a more holistic, expansive, and wider reaching understanding of trauma and its healing. The harmony between these frameworks confirms that the human experience of trauma is indeed a neurobiological phenomena, as well as a psycho- spiritual one. In the course of our individual and collective evolution towards constructing a better trauma-informed society at large, both of these languages play an essential role

심미적 시지각에 대한 인지적고찰

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 협동과정 인지과학전공, 2015. 8. 장병탁.Answering for the question what is beauty? has emerged as an issue of psychology, neuroscience and computer science during the last decade, after the long history of exploration in the field of philosophy and aesthetics. Especially, in the field of computer science, computational aesthetics pursues implementing an automated aesthetic judgement system based on the low-level features and machine learning techniques, for tangible application such as content recommendation. In this paper, as an effort of building a computational model of estimating aesthetic value of photos in content recommendation, a hypothesis that surface curvatures of objects and a place in a scene contribute to the estimation is proposed and implemented as a new visual descriptor named Local Slant Cue (LoSC) which represent catching 2.5D information which traditional local descriptors are hard to catch. Experimental results show its comparable performance just with the 30 percent of computational workload of the previous arts. However, comparative study reveals there exist a kind of glass ceiling regardless of feature selection, due to a weird attribute of the mediocre samples, which occupy an absolute majority of any given sample group, in machine learning framework. Observation to the score distributions of the mediocre group leads to the discovery of significantly high variance in consensus level among human raters for the stimuli. For quantitative validation of the observation, skewness-kurtosis map is adopted as a tool of consensus analysis and applied to a massive photo aesthetics dataset consisting of 225,000 samples, followed by the result of showing validated universality of the observation as one of four patterns, which are incompatible with Gaussianity that has been expected so far. Several computational models of visual aesthetic perception are proposed and tested from the view of how well they explain the observed patterns, finding the comparative advantage of dynamic systems model. As an effort of elaborating the idea of dynamic systems for the aesthetic perception, a new computational model named as DDM4AP (Drift-Diffusion Model for Aesthetic Perception) is proposed regarding visual aesthetic perception as a result of dynamic interaction between like factors and dislike factors. While it is concentrating to explain the wide variance in consensus level, the proposed model predicts a significantly longer latency when appreciating photos the mediocre group rather than the good or the bad, regardless of consensus level. Human subject experiments validate the prediction, supporting the model as reflecting important attributes of visual aesthetic perception in human mind. In conclusion, this study declares computational aesthetics requires new approaches of machine learning and computer vision considering dynamic interaction between two contrastive factors and selecting training data and features in accordance with such mixed data.CHAPTER 1. Introduction 1.1. Background 1.1.1 In Philosophy 1.1.2 In Psychology 1.1.3 In Neuroscience 1.2. Related Works: Computational Aesthetics CHAPTER 2. Finding Features 2.1. Background 2.2. Local Slant Cue (LoSC) 2.2.1 Representation 2.2.2 Region Description 2.3. Experiments 2.4. Discussion CHAPTER 3. Data Revisited 3.1. What Makes Glass Ceiling 3.2. Consensus Analysis 3.2.1 Data Set 3.2.2 Method 3.3. Analysis Results: 4 Patterns 3.3.1 Pattern 1: A Wide Kurtosis Range 3.3.2 Pattern 2: Consensus Asymmetry 3.3.3 Pattern 3: The 4/3 Power Law Regime 3.3.4 Pattern 4: Tag Effect 3.4. Discussion CHAPTER 4. Modeling 4.1. Background 4.2. Static Models 4.3. Dynamic Models (DDM4AP) 4.4. Discussion CHAPTER 5. Validation 5.1. Background: Prediction from DDM4AP 5.2. Method 5.3. Experimental Results 5.4. Discussion Conclusion References Appendix 1. Free vs. Non-Free Study Appendix 2. Summary of Skewness and Kurtosis 국문초록Docto

Response style differences between left- and right-handed individuals

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Design, Development and Implementation Framework for a Postgraduate Non-Surgical Aesthetics Curriculum

Non-surgical aesthetics (NSA) procedures are primarily performed in private clinics away from traditional teaching hospital settings, establishing structured training and education in these procedures during residency training has been challenging. The objective of this study was to design and develop an evidence-based postgraduate curriculum in non-surgical aesthetics. It necessitated determining the current state of training and education for NSA procedures in postgraduate clinical education. Following a design-based research approach, a subsequent systematic literature review and a cross-sectional global-needs assessment study established the need for such a curriculum. Subsequent literature reviews and series of global Delphi studies have informed and guided the design and development of the conceptual framework, core curriculum content and finally, the implementation framework to facilitate the smooth delivery of the programme. The research also incorporated pilot studies for teaching methodology, assessment strategies like “objective structured practical examination (OSPE) and objective structured clinical examination (OSCE)”, which has shown to be very effective. The conceptual framework for curriculum design and development in NSA emerged from the global Delphi study. The conceptual framework is anchored on critical thinking and uses enquiry-based learning to develop information mastery, skills, and values and attitude. Moreover, relevant threshold concepts guided the construction of learning outcomes mapped against the core curriculum. The finding of this study is a crucial first step in bringing an evidence-based structure to training and education in NSA. This thesis will act as a ‘blueprint’ for the policymakers and program directors while curating a postgraduate programme in NSA