Presence and rehabilitation: toward second-generation virtual reality applications in neuropsychology

Virtual Reality (VR) offers a blend of attractive attributes for rehabilitation. The most exploited is its ability to create a 3D simulation of reality that can be explored by patients under the supervision of a therapist. In fact, VR can be defined as an advanced communication interface based on interactive 3D visualization, able to collect and integrate different inputs and data sets in a single real-like experience. However, "treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best" (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi). For rehabilitators, this statement supports the growing interest in the influence of positive psychological state on objective health care outcomes. This paper introduces a bio-cultural theory of presence linking the state of optimal experience defined as "flow" to a virtual reality experience. This suggests the possibility of using VR for a new breed of rehabilitative applications focused on a strategy defined as transformation of flow. In this view, VR can be used to trigger a broad empowerment process within the flow experience induced by a high sense of presence. The link between its experiential and simulative capabilities may transform VR into the ultimate rehabilitative device. Nevertheless, further research is required to explore more in depth the link between cognitive processes, motor activities, presence and flow

Grappling with movement models: performing arts and slippery contexts

The ways we leave, recognise, and interpret marks of human movement are deeply entwined with layerings of collective memory. Although we retroactively order chronological sediments to map shareable stories, our remediations often emerge unpredictably from a multidimensional mnemonic fabric: contemporary ideas can resonate with ancient aspirations and initiatives, and foreign fields of investigation can inform ostensibly unrelated endeavours. Such links reinforce the debunking of grand narratives, and resonate with quests for the new kinds of thinking needed to address the mix of living, technological, and semiotic systems that makes up our wider ecology. As a highly evolving field, movement-and-computing is exceptionally open to, and needy of, this diversity. This paper argues for awareness of the analytical apparatus we sometimes too unwittingly bring to bear on our research objects, and for the value of transdisciplinary and tangential thinking to diversify our research questions. With a view to seeking ways to articulate new, shareable questions rather than propose answers, it looks at wider questions of problem-framing. It emphasises the importance of - quite literally - grounding movement, of recognising its environmental implications and qualities. Informed by work on expressive gesture and creative use of instruments in domains including puppetry and music, this paper also insists on the complexity and heterogeneity of the research strands that are indissociably bound up in our corporeal-technological movement practices

Neural Dynamics of Autistic Behaviors: Cognitive, Emotional, and Timing Substrates

What brain mechanisms underlie autism and how do they give rise to autistic behavioral symptoms? This article describes a neural model, called the iSTART model, which proposes how cognitive, emotional, timing, and motor processes may interact together to create and perpetuate autistic symptoms. These model processes were originally developed to explain data concerning how the brain controls normal behaviors. The iSTART model shows how autistic behavioral symptoms may arise from prescribed breakdowns in these brain processes.Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-01-1-0397); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624

The particularity of emotional words. A grounded approach

This work focuses on emotional concepts. We define concepts as patterns of neural activation that re-enact a given external or internal experience, for example the interoceptive experience related to fear. Concepts are mediated and expressed through words. In the following, we will use “words” to refer to word meanings, assuming that words mediate underlying concepts. Since emotional concepts and the words that mediate them are less related to the physical environment than concrete ones, at first sight they might be depicted as abstract concepts. Evidence coming from several studies shows, instead, that the issue is more complex. In this work, we will briefly outline the debate and illustrate results from recent studies on comprehension of concrete, emotional and abstract words in children and adults. We will argue that emotional words can be accounted for from a grounded perspective and will contend that emotional words represent a particular set of words that differs from both the concrete and purely abstract ones

Magical urbanism:Walter Benjamin and utopian realism in the film Ratcatcher

Deploys Walter Benjamin to discuss fantastical representations of childhood and class in the film Ratcatcher