Reflections about the creative process of the architectural project and its teaching

This paper aims to reflect on the importance of the eye in the creative process of architectural projects. All creation is based on a watchful eye, which acts as an instrument of knowledge and reflection; an active and creative eye that contains a thought. But creation is also in the hands of those who put these thoughts down onto paper and materialise them. In this sense, teaching architectural design should fundamentally consider educating the eye, so that students develop a perceptual ability allowing them to address all kinds of architectural projects creatively. Educating the eye therefore becomes the main goal of teaching architectural design. Learning how to see is essential. This learning calls on the eye as an instrument of knowledge and analysis of the reality to be transformed. An eye with a purpose not just of looking at something for the sake of it, but of seeing it, of seeing it to learn and to become aware of the world surrounding us, whether physically, emotionally or intellectually. An eye that focusses on the reality around them in a conscious and attentive way in order to provide the information to work with when it comes to designing, both from an objective and rational outside world and an intimate and personal world. A creative eye, capable of creating and transforming reality. An eye that involves the action of thinking. But above all, an eye that acts in coordination with hands that work as instruments of knowledge, that move between the world of matter and thought, and that allow this world of ideas to be unearthed, spilling thoughts onto paper, specifying them and fixing them until turning them into something that can be built. In the teaching of architectural design, it would be necessary to foster this action as a way of doing and thinking.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Virual world users evaluated according to environment design, task based adn affective attention measures

This paper presents research that engages with virtual worlds for education users to understand design of these applications for their needs. An in-depth multi-method investigation from 12 virtual worlds participants was undertaken in three stages; initially a small scale within-subjects eye-tracking comparison was made between the role playing game 'RuneScape' and the virtual social world 'Second Life', secondly an in-depth evaluation of eye-tracking data for Second Life tasks (i.e. avatar, object and world based) was conducted, finally a qualitative evaluation of Second Life tutorials in comparative 3D situations (i.e. environments that are; realistic to surreal, enclosed to open, formal to informal) was conducted. Initial findings identified increased users attention within comparable gaming and social world interactions. Further analysis identified that 3D world focused interactions increased participants' attention more than object and avatar tasks. Finally different 3D situation designs altered levels of task engagement and distraction through perceptions of comfort, fun and fear. Ultimately goal based and environment interaction tasks can increase attention and potentially immersion. However, affective perceptions of 3D situations can negatively impact on attention. An objective discussion of the limitations and benefits of virtual world immersion for student learning is presented

The Failure of Maternal Domesticity: An Evaluation of Frankenstein as a Didactic Source

Is man inherently good or evil? Nineteenth century Romantics, inspired by the doctrine of Jean Jacques Rousseau, hypothesized that man is a product of his or her environment. Middle class society imputed the mother as the gateway by which a child learns to become a model human being. This theory held that mothers nurture their offspring naturally. Children learn proper morals and social conduct based upon a female-inspired education. Without this domestic influence on their lives, children fall into the trap of an “eye for an eye” ideology. The monster that Mary Shelley conceives in Frankenstein defies the domestic conception of a maternally guided household. The piece serves as a didactic tool; Shelley, in representing the Romantic Movement, warns nineteenth century society about the dangers of a maternally void world, a world that contradicted the Romantic conception of proper maternal guidance in both the home and in society

Miniature Eye Movements Enhance Fine Spatial Details

Our eyes are constantly in motion. Even during visual fixation, small eye movements continually jitter the location of gaze. It is known that visual percepts tend to fade when retinal image motion is eliminated in the laboratory. However, it has long been debated whether, during natural viewing, fixational eye movements have functions in addition to preventing the visual scene from fading. In this study, we analysed the influence in humans of fixational eye movements on the discrimination of gratings masked by noise that has a power spectrum similar to that of natural images. Using a new method of retinal image stabilization18, we selectively eliminated the motion of the retinal image that normally occurs during the intersaccadic intervals of visual fixation. Here we show that fixational eye movements improve discrimination of high spatial frequency stimuli, but not of low spatial frequency stimuli. This improvement originates from the temporal modulations introduced by fixational eye movements in the visual input to the retina, which emphasize the high spatial frequency harmonics of the stimulus. In a natural visual world dominated by low spatial frequencies, fixational eye movements appear to constitute an effective sampling strategy by which the visual system enhances the processing of spatial detail.National Institutes of Health; National Science Foundatio

Perception, cognition, and action in hyperspaces: implications on brain plasticity, learning, and cognition

We live in a three-dimensional (3D) spatial world; however, our retinas receive a pair of 2D projections of the 3D environment. By using multiple cues, such as disparity, motion parallax, perspective, our brains can construct 3D representations of the world from the 2D projections on our retinas. These 3D representations underlie our 3D perceptions of the world and are mapped into our motor systems to generate accurate sensorimotor behaviors. Three-dimensional perceptual and sensorimotor capabilities emerge during development: the physiology of the growing baby changes hence necessitating an ongoing re-adaptation of the mapping between 3D sensory representations and the motor coordinates. This adaptation continues in adulthood and is quite general to successfully deal with joint-space changes (longer arms due to growth), skull and eye size changes (and still being able of accurate eye movements), etc. A fundamental question is whether our brains are inherently limited to 3D representations of the environment because we are living in a 3D world, or alternatively, our brains may have the inherent capability and plasticity of representing arbitrary dimensions; however, 3D representations emerge from the fact that our development and learning take place in a 3D world. Here, we review research related to inherent capabilities and limitations of brain plasticity in terms of its spatial representations and discuss whether with appropriate training, humans can build perceptual and sensorimotor representations of spatial 4D environments, and how the presence or lack of ability of a solid and direct 4D representation can reveal underlying neural representations of space.Published versio

Real-World Eye-Tracking in Face-to-Face and Web Modes

Eye-tracking is becoming a popular tool for understanding how different forms of asking questions influence respondents' answers. Galesic et al. 2008 have successfully shown how primacy effects can be detected through an eye-tracker that measures the time of an eye fixation at different points of a question or response scale. Until now this method has almost exclusively been used to test questions on a computer. Our article extends the application of eye-tracking to face-to-face mode with show cards (that is, paper-and-pencil interviewing, or PAPI). Unlike eye-tracking on a computer screen, tracking eye movements in different modes requires using an innovative real-world eye-tracker that enables following eye movements anywhere the respondent may look. The current article reports on using a real-world eye-tracker to measure visual attention in two modes with visual materials?web and PAPI. We discuss the potential and limitations of the technique, provide successful examples of measuring and comparing visual attention in the two modes, and conclude with suggestions for avenues that can be studied using this new tool

Analog VLSI-Based Modeling of the Primate Oculomotor System

One way to understand a neurobiological system is by building a simulacrum that replicates its behavior in real time using similar constraints. Analog very large-scale integrated (VLSI) electronic circuit technology provides such an enabling technology. We here describe a neuromorphic system that is part of a long-term effort to understand the primate oculomotor system. It requires both fast sensory processing and fast motor control to interact with the world. A one-dimensional hardware model of the primate eye has been built that simulates the physical dynamics of the biological system. It is driven by two different analog VLSI chips, one mimicking cortical visual processing for target selection and tracking and another modeling brain stem circuits that drive the eye muscles. Our oculomotor plant demonstrates both smooth pursuit movements, driven by a retinal velocity error signal, and saccadic eye movements, controlled by retinal position error, and can reproduce several behavioral, stimulation, lesion, and adaptation experiments performed on primates