Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Skin Portraiture: Embodied Representations in Contemporary Art

In recent years, human skin has been explored as a medium, metaphor, and milieu. Images of and objects made from skin flesh out the critical role it plays in experiences of embodiment such as reflexivity, empathy, and relationality, expanding conceptions of difference. This project problematizes the correlation between the appearance of the epidermis and a person’s identity. By depicting the subject as magnified, fragmented, anatomized patches of skin, “skin portraiture”—a sub-genre of portraiture I have coined—questions what a portrait is and what it can achieve in contemporary art. By circumnavigating and obfuscating the subject’s face, skin portraiture perforates the boundaries and collapses the distance between bodies. Feminist, this project pays attention to skin portraits made by women. To better understand skin, each chapter is focused on a particular skin metaphor. In the preface, a consideration of skin and its representation leads into an investigation of the skin-as-self metaphor in the introduction (chapter one). Framing the skin as an organ we dwell in, the skin-as-home metaphor (chapter two) explores touch and its role in experiences of empathy. Turning to the idea that skin is a garment, the skin-as-clothing metaphor (chapter three) fleshes out relationality and a queering of skin. Tackling race and skin colour, the skin-as-screen metaphor (chapter four) investigates the embodied experiences of mixed-raced, multicultural women. Addressing a loss of difference at the level of skin within bioengineering, the skin-as-technology metaphor (chapter five) considers the collapse of differences between bodies and species within bio-art

Towards a general model for the design of virtual reality learning environments

Virtual reality (VR) has been described as a new and unique type of learning media primarily because it encourages active participation. However, a large number of VR worlds are barely more than passive 3D graphic visualisations. This might be due to the lack of guidelines for the design of interactive worlds, or to the learning preferences of the designers themselves. The literature indicates a number of principles, especially in the area of VR design and learning theory that could form the basis of appropriate design guidelines and this thesis presents these as a set of guidelines for VR designers. There is a lack of information about the learning preferences of VR designers or the design of appropriate help systems for VR learning media so four additional fieldwork studies were carried out to investigate the learning styles, communication styles, attitudes towards the use of VR in learning and training situations, and preferences for the design and use of VR help systems using a sample of VR designers and VR design students. The results indicated that the learning style and communication profiles of VR designers may not be suitable for the design of active learning material. It was also found that VR designers had positive attitudes towards the development of VR in general but less so for learning situations. VR designers tended to provide mainly text-based (visual) instruction in their designs, which may be linked to their predominantly visual learning modalities. However, the results suggested that visual-dominant VR design students were equally likely to prefer voiced (auditory) instructions when used naturally within a VR world. The findings from these four studies were incorporated into a broad set of top-level guidelines that form the first step towards a general model for the design of active, participatory VR learning environments

The role of phonology in visual word recognition: evidence from Chinese

Posters - Letter/Word Processing V: abstract no. 5024The hypothesis of bidirectional coupling of orthography and phonology predicts that phonology plays a role in visual word recognition, as observed in the effects of feedforward and feedback spelling to sound consistency on lexical decision. However, because orthography and phonology are closely related in alphabetic languages (homophones in alphabetic languages are usually orthographically similar), it is difficult to exclude an influence of orthography on phonological effects in visual word recognition. Chinese languages contain many written homophones that are orthographically dissimilar, allowing a test of the claim that phonological effects can be independent of orthographic similarity. We report a study of visual word recognition in Chinese based on a mega-analysis of lexical decision performance with 500 characters. The results from multiple regression analyses, after controlling for orthographic frequency, stroke number, and radical frequency, showed main effects of feedforward and feedback consistency, as well as interactions between these variables and phonological frequency and number of homophones. Implications of these results for resonance models of visual word recognition are discussed.postprin

Early cross-modal interactions and adult human visual cortical plasticity revealed by binocular rivalry

In this research binocular rivalry is used as a tool to investigate different aspects of visual and multisensory perception. Several experiments presented here demonstrated that touch specifically interacts with vision during binocular rivalry and that the interaction likely occurs at early stages of visual processing, probably V1 or V2. Another line of research also presented here demonstrated that human adult visual cortex retains an unexpected high degree of experience-dependent plasticity by showing that a brief period of monocular deprivation produced important perceptual consequences on the dynamics of binocular rivalry, reflecting a homeostatic plasticity. In summary, this work shows that binocular rivalry is a powerful tool to investigate different aspects of visual perception and can be used to reveal unexpected properties of early visual cortex

Interactive effects of orthography and semantics in Chinese picture naming

Posters - Language Production/Writing: abstract no. 4035Picture-naming performance in English and Dutch is enhanced by presentation of a word that is similar in form to the picture name. However, it is unclear whether facilitation has an orthographic or a phonological locus. We investigated the loci of the facilitation effect in Cantonese Chinese speakers by manipulating—at three SOAs (2100, 0, and 1100 msec)—semantic, orthographic, and phonological similarity. We identified an effect of orthographic facilitation that was independent of and larger than phonological facilitation across all SOAs. Semantic interference was also found at SOAs of 2100 and 0 msec. Critically, an interaction of semantics and orthography was observed at an SOA of 1100 msec. This interaction suggests that independent effects of orthographic facilitation on picture naming are located either at the level of semantic processing or at the lemma level and are not due to the activation of picture name segments at the level of phonological retrieval.postprin

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2022, held in Hamburg, Germany, in May 2022. The 36 regular papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 129 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: haptic science; haptic technology; and haptic applications

Ctrl Shift: How Crip Alt Ctrl Designers Change the Game and Reimagine Access

My journey as a disabled arts practitioner has been one of invention, hacking, and re-imagining what input systems could be. I have created my own modalities for creating work, rather than relying on commercially available options. This is a common practice within the disabled community, as individuals often modify and hack their surroundings to make them more usable. For example, ADAPT activists took sledgehammers to smash curb cuts and poured curb ramps with cement bags, ultimately leading to the widespread adoption of curb cuts as a standard architectural feature. As Yergeau notes, this type of "criptastic hacking" represents a creative resistance.(Yergeau, 2012) My interfaces and art projects are a combination of science fiction world-building, technology prototyping, and experimentation with novel ways of experiencing the world that work for my ability. I have been building interactive objects for over 20 years, and my bespoke controller games are both pieces I find comfortable to play and conceptual proposals that I share with the games community to spark consideration for alternative ways of interacting with games culture. This interdisciplinary design research herein crosses a range of disciplines, drawing inspiration from radical forms of cognitive science, games studies, feminist studies, HCI, crip technoscience, radical science fiction, disability studies, and making practices. What has emerged through studying my own practice and the practices of others during this research is a criptastic design framework for creating playful experiences. My research aims to gain a deeper understanding of the ways that hacking and remaking the world manifests as modifications to the design process itself. I created four versions of a physical alt ctrl game and conducted a design study with disabled artists and alt ctrl game creators. The game, Bot Party, was developed through a series of public exhibitions and explored my relationship between criptastic bespoke interface design and embodied experiences of group play. Bot Party involves physical interaction among players in groups to understand my own ways of designing, while the study looks three other disabled designers to understand the ways in which their process is similar or different to my own. By conducting this work, I aim to contribute to the larger conversation within the games studies community about the importance of accessibility and inclusivity in game design. The results highlight the need for continued exploration and development in this area, specifically in design methods. The study’s findings as they relate to my own practice revealed the importance of considering a set of values and design processes in relation to disability when creating games and playful experiences. With this perspective, I propose an initial framework that outlines possible key themes for disabled game designers. Using values as a starting point for creating deeply accessible games, this framework serves as a starting point for future research into accessible game design. This framework seeks to subvert the notion that accessibility is a list of UX best practices, audio descriptions, captions, and haptic additions and moves towards embedding within game design the values and practices used by disabled designers from the outset of the creative process. Access can be a creative framework. An important point to make is that my efforts to do a PhD resist the academic ableism limiting the participation of people who are not from a normative background. The act of creating this PhD has eaten at the edge of my ability, and the research here was often conducted in pain under extremely trying circumstances. This perspective is relevant because it often informed my design choices and thinking. Additionally, it was conducted at a university where I experienced active discrimination from members of staff who simply refused to believe in disabilities they could not see, and in one case writing down my disability was, “self-ascribed.” To work, I had to move outside the academy and seek out workshops which gave me accessible, ergonomic equipment as is discussed in the Bot Party section. This bears mentioning because it reflects on how threatening disabilities can be within academic settings and how even providing basic levels of accessibility remains a challenge for academic institutions. The above framework could benefit academia if used to redesign postgraduate academic research practices within the academy from a place of Crip-informed pedagogy. This is future work that this academic researcher hopes to explore in depth within their academic journey. It is important to note, much of the most relevant research to this thesis around disability studies and technology has emerged in recent years and as a result, was included iteratively in the literature review. It has informed the third study and my iterative design practice as part of the journey; however, I began this work before much of the writing in the literature review existed, including the creation of Bot Party’s first iterations. Finding this scholarship and these authors has been a kinning. Kinship, according to Gavin Van Horn, “can be considered a noun…shared and storied relations and memories that inhere in people and places; or more metaphorical imaginings that unite us to faith traditions, cultures, countries, or the planet…Perhaps this kinship-in-action should be called kinning.” (Horn et al., 2021) Kinning happened throughout this work and this thesis served me as a place for discovery, contemplation, and empowerment. It is my hope sections of it will serve this function for others within my community. I found kinship with other authors working in the field of disability studies and technology, particularly with Alison Kafer, who offers a critique of Donna Haraway's cyborg in her book "Feminist Queer Crip." (Kafer, 2013) Kafer's work highlights the limitations of Haraway's cyborg as a figure of empowerment for marginalized bodies and identities, and instead advocates for a crip-queer-feminist perspective on technology and embodiment. Additionally, the author has also found resonance in the work of Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsh, whose work in disability studies and HCI has been instrumental in shaping this research. Specifically, their concept of "crip technoscience" has been a key framework for understanding technology creation by disabled technologists. (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019) Overall, it is my hope that this thesis will serve as a generative resource for others within the community on this journey, particularly for those who are working towards a more inclusive and intersectional understanding of technology and embodiment

A Conceptual Framework for Integrating TPB With Context-Relevant Variables to Predict e-Learning Success During the Covid -19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the digitalization of some aspects of our lives including education. However, as we witness a phenomenal rise in the demand for online learning, the decision to migrate to online learning platforms is dependent on the learner’s preparedness to embrace it. The objective of this study is to conceptualize a framework that measures the tendency of learners to adopt online learning in an era characterised by so many disruptions. To do this, we adopt document analysis on databases such as SCOPUS, Web of Science, EBSCO and Google Scholar using Boolean search engines; AND, OR, NOT, *, (), ‘’’’, +, -, <,>. mainly on current scientific manuscripts through the use of the keywords “e-learning”, “theory of planned behaviour”, “Covid 19”, “distance learning”, “environmental factors” and “academic technology adoption”. Subsequently, we integrate the theory of planned behaviour with other context-relevant variables as the bases of the study, and conceptualise a framework to predict e-learning success in the covid-19 era. This study contributes to the scientific body of knowledge on e-learning, particularly from the perspective of a forced mass adoption of e-learning occasioned by a global pandemic