Do we dance because we walk? The impact of regular vestibular experience on the early development of beat production and perception

Movement to music is a universal human behaviour (Savage, Brown, Sakai & Currie, 2015). Whilst the strong link between music and movement is clearly bidirectional, the origins are not clear. Studying the emergence of rhythmic skills through infancy provides a window into the perceptual and physical attributes, experience, and contexts necessary, to attain the basics of human musicality. This thesis asks whether the human experience of bipedal locomotion, as a primary source of regular vestibular information, is crucial for sensorimotor synchronisation (SMS), spontaneous motor tempo (SMT), and impacts rhythm perception. The first experiment evidences the emergence of tempo-flexibility when moving to music between 10- and 18-months-of-age. The following study is the first to show that experience of locomotion, including from infant carrying, predicts the temporal matching of infant movement to music. Curious if carrying practices influence the very rhythms that we naturally produce, a large-scale correlational study finds infant SMT is predicted by parent height, but not infant’s own body size, such that infants with taller caregivers show a slower SMT than those with shorter caregivers. We contend that this reflects infant experience of being carried by their caregiver. The fourth experiment confirms that experience of being carried at a novel tempo can alter the rhythms infant spontaneously produce. Finally, we asked how information from being carried during locomotion might be changing rhythm perception; specifically, if infants show greater activation of their sensorimotor system when hearing rhythms that match the tempo at which they were carried. Combined, these studies present a highly original piece of research into the ways in which early experiences of locomotion may impact fundamental musical skill

Do we dance because we walk? The impact of regular vestibular experience on the early development of beat production and perception

Movement to music is a universal human behaviour (Savage, Brown, Sakai & Currie, 2015). Whilst the strong link between music and movement is clearly bidirectional, the origins are not clear. Studying the emergence of rhythmic skills through infancy provides a window into the perceptual and physical attributes, experience, and contexts necessary, to attain the basics of human musicality. This thesis asks whether the human experience of bipedal locomotion, as a primary source of regular vestibular information, is crucial for sensorimotor synchronisation (SMS), spontaneous motor tempo (SMT), and impacts rhythm perception. The first experiment evidences the emergence of tempo-flexibility when moving to music between 10- and 18-months-of-age. The following study is the first to show that experience of locomotion, including from infant carrying, predicts the temporal matching of infant movement to music. Curious if carrying practices influence the very rhythms that we naturally produce, a large-scale correlational study finds infant SMT is predicted by parent height, but not infant’s own body size, such that infants with taller caregivers show a slower SMT than those with shorter caregivers. We contend that this reflects infant experience of being carried by their caregiver. The fourth experiment confirms that experience of being carried at a novel tempo can alter the rhythms infant spontaneously produce. Finally, we asked how information from being carried during locomotion might be changing rhythm perception; specifically, if infants show greater activation of their sensorimotor system when hearing rhythms that match the tempo at which they were carried. Combined, these studies present a highly original piece of research into the ways in which early experiences of locomotion may impact fundamental musical skill

Family Portraits: Contemporary Women Novelists and the Nuclear Family.

A society whose economy becomes increasingly dependent on commodity fetishism cultivates obsessive materialistic desire in its subjects. The demand for mass consumerism buoys reification, a mania wherein human beings are analogous to goods and vice versa. Successful reification depends upon hegemonic apparatuses: social, legal, and political agencies of dominant ideology. Reification is perhaps most fully realized in the form of fetishized human relationships. In the United States today, the most coercive and unassailable hegemonic apparatus is the institutionalized nuclear family, a social and legal affiliation between individuals so dogmatically fetishized as to have become compulsory. Contemporary American women writers are asserting opposition to this institution. I begin by suggesting that Leslie Marmon Silko\u27s use of magical realism in the novel Almanac of the Dead serves as a narrative device meant to disrupt the continuity of contemporary rationalization and resist the forces of assimilation, including the fetishization of the nuclear family. I proceed to examine Gloria Naylor\u27s Linden Hills and Toni Cade Bombara\u27s The Salt Eaters, suggesting that both entreat readers to recognize the impending desecration of the African American community that will come of allowing cultural ideals to be displaced by capitalist values and the myth of individualism. I suggest that each novel utilizes the disembodied female voice to demonstrate that the persistence of patriarchy will undermine efforts to resist reification, and that the nuclear family, completely naturalized within capitalistic hegemony, is the means by which patriarchy is perpetuated. Finally, I conclude with an analysis of Carolyn Chute\u27s Merry Men, suggesting that Chute draws explicit connections between disenfranchisement, heterosexism and the tradition of the nuclear family. Within their novels, these writers critique our compulsion to fetishize the nuclear family. They conclude that the idealized nuclear family is an oppressive and ultimately unattainable archetype staunchly preserved primarily for its serviceability to capitalism. All four writers suggest that just as capitalism reifies human beings, so too the hegemonic operation of herding them into nuclear families alienates and estranges them. Thus it is that each of their novels concludes with the self-destruction of the community depicted within its pages

'A kind of singing in me' : a critical account of women writers of the Beat generation

Abstract available: p.

All that faith creates, or love desires: Shelley’s poetic vision of being

This thesis explores the nature of creativity in the poetic vision of Percy Bysshe Shelley. "Poetic vision" is chosen for its complex connotations, which include creative imaginings, dreams and intimations of futurity. I examine questions that Shelley raises concerning perception, existence and the fabric of reality. To develop a conceptual framework that has an ontological basis, I draw on the theories of two twentieth-century non-dualist thinkers: David Bohm, who combines science, philosophy and art, and the existential thought of Martin Heidegger. I also investigate ways in which literary expression and life become interwoven and suggest that this reciprocity is explicable through a dynamically creative vision of existence. In Chapter One Shelley's reflections on the creative capacity of poetic visions to influence states of being, and his holistic apprehension of existence in On Life, provide the thesis with a conceptual paradigm which is in contradistinction to the Cartesian schism between mind and matter. A Defence of Poetry is contrasted with Peacock's The Four Ages of Poetry to show that the contention between the two writers' visions springs from questions relating to being. Shelley's declaration that the poetic impulse is central to life is examined in the light of Heidegger’s notion of the poetic as disclosing being and Bohm's quantum concepts of creativity. In Chapter Two Alastor is interpreted as a poem which raises questions about existence and I provide a counter-approach to critical positions of scepticism. Heidegger's concepts of "Being- in-the-world" and "Being-towards-death" provide the basis for an existential analysis of die Poet’s impassioned quest. A comparison between the Poet's dream of his feminine counterpart and Shelley's own vision of his ideal beloved reveals connections between artistic vision and human experience. In Chapter Three on Laon and Cythna. poetic vision is shown to operate from a metaphysical basis of thought, passion, and the human will to enact a radical transformation in consciousness. The poem's investigation of freedom is linked to Heidegger's concept of being absorbed in the "they." Chapter Four continues my extended reading of Laon and Cythna. Shelley's notion of creativity collapses the demarcations between imaginative vision and the physical world. Here his view of reality is contrasted with the psychological investigations of Jean Piaget. The poem’s vision of human empowerment is compared with Peacock's fatahsm in Ahrimanes. Chapter Five investigates challenges to Shelley's optimism. Julian and Maddalo is the major poem interpreted in a chapter v*ere the keynote is the contention between theories about the nature of reality and their validity to human life. Shelley's anxiety about communicating visions of despair is analyzed with regard to the Maniac's tragic predicament. Chapter Six interprets Prometheus Unbound as a dramatic engagement with the spiritual, imaginative, emotional and sensuous planes of being. Existence is seen to be poised on a mobile nexus of thought and emotions. Asia has a dynamic role and, through consideration of her journey with Panthea to Demogorgon, I examine Shelley's complex negotiation between free will and determinism. Spinoza's monism is discussed in relation to "Love's Philosophy. In Chapter Seven on Hellas, "Thought", "Passion", "Will", "Reason" and the "Imagination” are shown to have creative powers which determine futurity. Questions about the structure of reality are explored in the drama's dynamic interchange between the magician-like Ahasuerus and the Turkish tyrant Mahmud. Dreams are given significance as avenues of perception to realms beyond conscious experience and in relation to unfolding the future. Finally, in Chapter Eight Shelley's ideas about poetic creativity are explored through his poems to 'Jane Williams. Whilst composing these lyrics Shelley used the figure of Rousseau, in the Triumph of Life, to suggest a reciprocity between art and life. I examine the similarities between Rousseau's fictional creation of Julie in La Nouvelle Hélose and his subsequent love for Sophie d'Houdetot. Shelley's lyrics to Jane Williams communicate desire at different levels of conscious awareness, from trance-like mesmerism to overt invitation

Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age

At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed ""death,"" Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates

Pilot study for subgroup classification for autism spectrum disorder based on dysmorphology and physical measurements in Chinese children

Poster Sessions: 157 - Comorbid Medical Conditions: abstract 157.058 58BACKGROUND: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder affecting individuals along a continuum of severity in communication, social interaction and behaviour. The impact of ASD significantly varies amongst individuals, and the cause of ASD can originate broadly between genetic and environmental factors. Objectives: Previous ASD researches indicate that early identification combined with a targeted treatment plan involving behavioural interventions and multidisciplinary therapies can provide substantial improvement for ASD patients. Currently there is no cure for ASD, and the clinical variability and uncertainty of the disorder still remains. Hence, the search to unravel heterogeneity within ASD by subgroup classification may provide clinicians with a better understanding of ASD and to work towards a more definitive course of action. METHODS: In this study, a norm of physical measurements including height, weight, head circumference, ear length, outer and inner canthi, interpupillary distance, philtrum, hand and foot length was collected from 658 Typical Developing (TD) Chinese children aged 1 to 7 years (mean age of 4.19 years). The norm collected was compared against 80 ASD Chinese children aged 1 to 12 years (mean age of 4.36 years). We then further attempted to find subgroups within ASD based on identifying physical abnormalities; individuals were classified as (non) dysmorphic with the Autism Dysmorphology Measure (ADM) from physical examinations of 12 body regions. RESULTS: Our results show that there were significant differences between ASD and TD children for measurements in: head circumference (p=0.009), outer (p=0.021) and inner (p=0.021) canthus, philtrum length (p=0.003), right (p=0.023) and left (p=0.20) foot length. Within the 80 ASD patients, 37(46%) were classified as dysmorphic (p=0.00). CONCLUSIONS: This study attempts to identify subgroups within ASD based on physical measurements and dysmorphology examinations. The information from this study seeks to benefit ASD community by identifying possible subtypes of ASD in Chinese population; in seek for a more definitive diagnosis, referral and treatment plan.published_or_final_versio

Innovative teaching strategies within a nursing education model

Recent nursing literature has repeatedly proclaimed the need for creativity in nursing. The complexity of contemporary nursing practice as a result of the explosion of knowledge and technology, changing human values and diverse health care systems, requires an innovative and creative nurse who can adapt to change and provide holistic, individualised, context-specific patient care. Higher levels of cognitive thought, creative thinking and problem-solving skills have been stressed as desirable qualities of student nurses. It is suggested in the literature that the evolution of innovative strategies and the ways to implement them into nursing curricula be explored in order to assist and encourage students to develop these higher cognitive skills. From an analytical study of the literature which was undertaken with the aim of exploring the nature of creativity and the processes involved in creative thinking and learning, and of identifying innovative strategies particularly relevant to the teaching of nursing, it became apparent that the most significant determinants in teaching for creativity, are the learning enviromnent, the educator-student relationship, and the provision of a variety of teaching strategies, which are student-centred with a problem-solving focus. It was established that stimulation of both the left and right hemispheres of the brain is essential for the development of creative thinking skills. Based on the insights and knowledge gained in the study, a nursing education model for the fostering of creativity was developed. This model encompasses a wide variety of didactic considerations and is designed to stimulate whole brain learning. It is hoped that its use will be of value in the production of innovative and courageous nurse practitioners who will be better equipped to cope with the changes and challenges of their working environment and be able to provide context-specific nursing care.Health StudiesD. Litt. et Phil. (Nursing Science