Immersive Composition for Sensory Rehabilitation: 3D Visualisation, Surround Sound, and Synthesised Music to Provoke Catharsis and Healing

There is a wide range of sensory therapies using sound, music and visual stimuli. Some focus on soothing or distracting stimuli such as natural sounds or classical music as analgesic, while other approaches emphasize the active performance of producing music as therapy. This paper proposes an immersive multi-sensory Exposure Therapy for people suffering from anxiety disorders, based on a rich, detailed surround-soundscape. This soundscape is composed to include the users’ own idiosyncratic anxiety triggers as a form of habituation, and to provoke psychological catharsis, as a non-verbal, visceral and enveloping exposure. To accurately pinpoint the most effective sounds and to optimally compose the soundscape we will monitor the participants’ physiological responses such as electroencephalography, respiration, electromyography, and heart rate during exposure. We hypothesize that such physiologically optimized sensory landscapes will aid the development of future immersive therapies for various psychological conditions, Sound is a major trigger of anxiety, and auditory hypersensitivity is an extremely problematic symptom. Exposure to stress-inducing sounds can free anxiety sufferers from entrenched avoidance behaviors, teaching physiological coping strategies and encouraging resolution of the psychological issues agitated by the sound

It didn't seem to be like that when I was there: ethical dilemmas of representing lives

“It didn’t seem to be like that when I was there: The ethical dilemmas in representing a life” In any biographical account, there are at least two points of view, and multiple representations of one life story. An agreement is made at the outset of the dialogue to represent the ‘truth’ in the story. But what if the truth is equivocal or disagreeable? Current ethical recommendations urge the review of transcripts by the individual, providing an opportunity for change and clarification. But beyond that, what rights does the subject have over the story and in what ways should the researcher address the possibility of pain caused by representing that individual? Annie and Judith trod this delicate path when Annie, who was researching the lives of colonial women in East Africa, interviewed Judith. Judith subsequently attended a conference where Annie gave a paper on her research. What ensued was an emotional dialogue around portraying and being portrayed. These complex issues raised ethical questions about the research participant’s anonymity and the use of voice and pseudonyms. Temporal and authorial issues were highlighted in the re-writing and presentation process. This paper is a collaborative venture exploring our attempts to represent a life and the mutual shaping of ethics and truth

ROC analysis of the verbal overshadowing effect: testing the effect of verbalisation on memory sensitivity

This study investigated the role of memory sensitivity versus recognition criterion in the verbal overshadowing effect (VOE). Lineup recognition data was analysed using ROC analysis to separate the effects of verbalisation on memory sensitivity from criterion placement. Participants watched a short crime video, described the perpetrator's facial features then attempted a lineup identification. Description instructions were varied between participants. There was a standard (free report), forced (report everything), and warning (report accurate information) condition. Control participants did not describe the perpetrator. Memory sensitivity was greater in the control compared to the standard condition. Memory sensitivity was also greater in the warning compared to forced and standard conditions. Memory sensitivity did not differ across the forced and standard description conditions, although a more conservative lineup decision standard was employed in the forced condition. These results, along with qualitative analyses of descriptions, support both retrieval-based and criterion-based explanations of the VOE

Forensic Interviews of Children: The Components of Scientific Validity and Legal Admissibility

The problems associated with assessments of children\u27s reports of victimization in criminal proceedings came to national attention during the 1980s and 1990s in a series of highly publicized trials of daycare staff. Walker describes information that professionals need to know if they are to conduct valid interview of children in forensic contexts

Looking at the Lanham Act: Images in Trademark and Advertising Law

Words are the prototypical regulatory subjects for trademark and advertising law, despite our increasingly audiovisual economy. This word-focused baseline means that the Lanham Act often misconceives its object, resulting in confusion and incoherence. This Article explores some of the ways courts have attempted to fit images into a word-centric model, while not fully recognizing the particular ways in which images make meaning in trademark and other forms of advertising. While problems interpreting images are likely to persist, this Article suggests some ways in which courts could pay closer attention to the special features of images as compared to words

(Zen And The Art Of) Post-Modern Philosophy: A Partially Interpreted Model

Wittgenstein once wrote, “a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism,” and Nyberg’s explanation as to why Hilary Putnam’s answer to the question of whether we might intelligibly suppose ourselves to be “brains in a vat” is wrong takes us, by way of Wittgenstein’s statement, to the intersection of metaphysics and epistemology, i.e., to the very cornerstone of western philosophy, where we find, waiting for us, the absolute I of solipsism. Yet, it is the solipsistic I which in its articulation most obviously violates the private language argument’s stricture against criterionless reference, though the solipsist has available a reply of sorts – the reply of silence, a complete silence which shrouds equally the blank slates of absolute solipsism and pure realism. Through silence, the I of solipsism becomes the eye of realism and, no longer visible even to itself, vanishes from the realm of analytic discourse, only to be reborn at the correspondent point of each successive incarnation of the paradigm. Other methods of philosophy must, thus, be adopted if we are ever to escape the analytic paradigm’s cyclic limits. It is here, at the point where analysis alone can carry us no further, that “Zen” transitions from an unusually-structured but still traditional philosophic essay into something else entirely, with the incorporation into its closing pages of 15 poetic pieces, each drawn from Nyberg’s 100, a longer text of philosophical poetry which takes up where “Zen” leaves off. [email protected] Iowa City, Iowa/Palo Alto, California/New York, New York/Los Angeles, California/Rapid City, South Dakota June 1982-January 202

Effects of Sulpiride on True and False Memories of Thematically Related Pictures and Associated Words in Healthy Volunteers

Episodic memory, working memory, emotional memory, and attention are subject to dopaminergic modulation. However, the potential role of dopamine on the generation of false memories is unknown. This study defined the role of the dopamine D-2 receptor on true and false recognition memories. Twenty-four young, healthy volunteers ingested a single dose of placebo or 400 mg oral sulpiride, a dopamine D-2-receptor antagonist, just before starting the recognition memory task in a randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled trial. The sulpiride group presented more false recognitions during visual and verbal processing than the placebo group, although both groups had the same indices of true memory. These findings demonstrate that dopamine D-2 receptors blockade in healthy volunteers can specifically increase the rate of false recognitions. The findings fit well the two-process view of causes of false memories, the activation/monitoring failures model.Univ Fed Sao Paulo, Dept Psychobiol, Sao Paulo, BrazilAssociacao Fundo Incent Pesquisa, Sao Paulo, BrazilUniv Fed Sao Paulo, Dept Physiol, Sao Paulo, BrazilUniv Fed Sao Paulo, Dept Psychobiol, Sao Paulo, BrazilWeb of Scienc

SAGE: Smart home Agent with Grounded Execution

The common sense reasoning abilities and vast general knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) make them a natural fit for interpreting user requests in a Smart Home assistant context. LLMs, however, lack specific knowledge about the user and their home limit their potential impact. SAGE (Smart Home Agent with Grounded Execution), overcomes these and other limitations by using a scheme in which a user request triggers an LLM-controlled sequence of discrete actions. These actions can be used to retrieve information, interact with the user, or manipulate device states. SAGE controls this process through a dynamically constructed tree of LLM prompts, which help it decide which action to take next, whether an action was successful, and when to terminate the process. The SAGE action set augments an LLM's capabilities to support some of the most critical requirements for a Smart Home assistant. These include: flexible and scalable user preference management ("is my team playing tonight?"), access to any smart device's full functionality without device-specific code via API reading "turn down the screen brightness on my dryer", persistent device state monitoring ("remind me to throw out the milk when I open the fridge"), natural device references using only a photo of the room ("turn on the light on the dresser"), and more. We introduce a benchmark of 50 new and challenging smart home tasks where SAGE achieves a 75% success rate, significantly outperforming existing LLM-enabled baselines (30% success rate)

Towards a Literary and Feminist Neo-Avant-Garde: Carla Vasio’s Experimental Fiction

Despite her active involvement in several of the Gruppo 63’s meetings and activities over the years, Carla Vasio (b. 1923) is rarely mentioned in critical discussions of the Italian neo-avant-garde, and very little attention has been devoted to her work. This is not an isolated oversight, but a part of a larger pattern of marginalizing women writers. Our reading of two of Vasio’s most interesting and innovative novels—L’orizzonte (1966) and La più grande anamorfosi del mondo (2009)–shows that this marginalization is unjustified, and that she is a writer who actively contributed to the aesthetic innovation of the Gruppo 63 while creating her own experimental narrative style. Vasio’s literary experimentation is an example of neo-avant-garde aesthetics, distinguished by its sophisticated feminist critique of both the dominant masculinist dynamic of the Gruppo 63 and the misogyny of postwar Italian culture and society.