Emotional Qualities of VR Space

The emotional response a person has to a living space is predominantly affected by light, color and texture as space-making elements. In order to verify whether this phenomenon could be replicated in a simulated environment, we conducted a user study in a six-sided projected immersive display that utilized equivalent design attributes of brightness, color and texture in order to assess to which extent the emotional response in a simulated environment is affected by the same parameters affecting real environments. Since emotional response depends upon the context, we evaluated the emotional responses of two groups of users: inactive (passive) and active (performing a typical daily activity). The results from the perceptual study generated data from which design principles for a virtual living space are articulated. Such a space, as an alternative to expensive built dwellings, could potentially support new, minimalist lifestyles of occupants, defined as the neo-nomads, aligned with their work experience in the digital domain through the generation of emotional experiences of spaces. Data from the experiments confirmed the hypothesis that perceivable emotional aspects of real-world spaces could be successfully generated through simulation of design attributes in the virtual space. The subjective response to the virtual space was consistent with corresponding responses from real-world color and brightness emotional perception. Our data could serve the virtual reality (VR) community in its attempt to conceive of further applications of virtual spaces for well-defined activities.Comment: 12 figure

An introduction to the constraints-led approach to learning in outdoor education

Participation in outdoor education is underpinned by a learner's ability to acquire skills in activities such as canoeing, bushwalking and skiing and consequently the outdoor leader is often required to facilitate skill acquisition and motor learning. As such, outdoor leaders might benefit from an appropriate and tested model on how the learner acquires skills in order to design appropriate learning contexts. This paper introduces an approach to skill acquisition based on ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory called the constraints-led approach to skills acquisition. We propose that this student-centred approach is an ideal perspective for the outdoor leader to design effective learning settings. Furthermore, this open style of facilitation is also congruent with learning models that focus on other concepts such as teamwork and leadership

Sensorimotor Laws, Mechanisms, and Representations

According to the sensorimotor account, vision does not imply theconstruction of internally generated representations of the environment, butit isthe skillful exercise of the sensorimotor contingencies obeying sense-specific laws. In this short study, I focus on the notion of “sensorimotor law” and characterize the kind of explanation providedby the sensorimotor theory as a form of covering law model. I then question the nature of such sensorimotor laws and describe them as mechanisms. I show that a mechanistic interpretation provides a better account of the sensorimotor invariances, which fosters us to rebalance the explanatory burden of sensorimotor action and information. Finally, I show that the question of the roleof representations within the sensorimotor theory should be reconsidered

The coupling of action and perception in musical meaning formation

The embodied perspective on music cognition has stressed the central role of the body and body move- ments in musical meaning formation processes. In the present study, we investigate by means of a behavioral experiment how free body movements in response to music (i.e., action) can be linked to specific linguistic, metaphorical descriptions people use to describe the expressive qualities they perceive in the music (i.e., per- ception). We introduce a dimensional model based on the Effort/Shape theory of Laban in order to target musical expressivity from an embodied perspective. Also, we investigate whether a coupling between action and perception is dependent on the musical background of the participants (i.e., trained versus untrained). The results show that the physical appearance of the free body movements that participants perform in response to music are reliably linked to the linguistic descriptions of musical expressiveness in terms of the underlying quality. Moreover, this result is found to be independent of the participants’ musical background

The use of Rough Set and Spatial Statistic in evaluating the Periurban Fringe

The distinction among urban, peri-urban and rural areas inside a territory represents a classical example of uncertainty in land classification. The transition among the three classes is not much clear and can be described with Sorites Paradox, considering the residential buildings and the settlements. Peri-urban fringe can be considered as a transition zone between urban and rural areas, as an area with its own intrinsic organic rules, as a built area without formal organisation or as an abandoned rural area contiguous to urban centres. In any case, concepts as density of buildings, services and infrastructures or the degree of rural, residential and industrial activities, will lead to uncertainty in defining classes, due to the uncertainty in combining some properties. One of the methods which can be utilized is the rough sets theory, which represents a different mathematical approach to uncertainty capturing the indiscernibility. The definition of a set is connected to information knowledge and perception about phenomena. Some phenomena can be classified only in the context of the information available about them. Two different phenomena can be indiscernible in some contexts and classified in the same way (Pawlak 83). The rough sets approach to data analysis hinges on two basic concepts, the lower approximation which considers all the elements that doubtlessly belong to the class, and the upper approximation which includes all the elements that possibly belong to the class. The rough sets theory furthermore takes into account only properties which are independent. This approach has been tested in the case of study of Potenza Province. This area, located in Southern Italy, is particularly suitable to the application of this theory, because it includes 100 municipalities with different number of inhabitants, quantity of services and distance from the main road infrastructures.

Macaques preferentially attend to visual patterns with higher fractal dimension contours.

Animals' sensory systems evolved to efficiently process information from their environmental niches. Niches often include irregular shapes and rough textures (e.g., jagged terrain, canopy outlines) that must be navigated to find food, escape predators, and master other fitness-related challenges. For most primates, vision is the dominant sensory modality and thus, primates have evolved systems for processing complicated visual stimuli. One way to quantify information present in visual stimuli in natural scenes is evaluating their fractal dimension. We hypothesized that sensitivity to complicated geometric forms, indexed by fractal dimension, is an evolutionarily conserved capacity, and tested this capacity in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Monkeys viewed paired black and white images of simulated self-similar contours that systematically varied in fractal dimension while their attention to the stimuli was measured using noninvasive infrared eye tracking. They fixated more frequently on, dwelled for longer durations on, and had attentional biases towards images that contain boundary contours with higher fractal dimensions. This indicates that, like humans, they discriminate between visual stimuli on the basis of fractal dimension and may prefer viewing informationally rich visual stimuli. Our findings suggest that sensitivity to fractal dimension may be a wider ability of the vertebrate vision system