Temporal Expressions in Speech and Gesture

People use spatial metaphors to talk about temporal concepts.They also gesture frequently during speech. Thecharacteristics of these gestures give information regardingthe mental timelines people form to experience time. Thepresent study investigates the expression of temporal conceptson a natural setting with Turkish speakers. We found thatTurkish speakers used more metaphoric temporal phrases(e.g., short period, time flies quickly) than words referring totime without spatial content (e.g., today, nowadays) in asession where they talked about people’s fortune.Spontaneous gestures were mainly classified as metaphoricand beat gestures and were mostly produced on the sagittalaxis, which contradicts with the previous findings. Yet, wealso found that people used vertical axis to represent currentand future events. These findings suggest that lateral axis maynot always be the most common direction for co-speechtemporal gesture use, and the pragmatic constraints of theenvironment may influence the spatial conceptualization oftime

Customizing ICU patient monitoring:a user-centered approach informed by nurse profiles

Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurses are burdened by excessive number of false and irrelevant alarms generated by patient monitoring systems. Nurses rely on these patient monitoring systems for timely and relevant medical information concerning patients. However, the systems currently in place are not sensitive to the perceptual and cognitive abilities of nurses and thus fail to communicate information efficiently. An efficient communication and an effective collaboration between patient monitoring systems and ICU nurses is only possible by designing systems sensitive to the abilities and preferences of nurses. In order to design these sensitive systems, we need to gain in-depth understanding of the user group through revealing their latent individual characteristics. To this end, we conducted a survey on individual characteristics involving nurses from two IC units. Our results shed light on the personality and other characteristics of ICU nurses. Subsequently, we performed hierarchical cluster analysis to develop data-driven nurse profiles. We suggest design recommendations tailored to four distinct user profiles to address their unique needs. By optimizing the system interactions to match the natural tendencies of nurses, we aspire to alleviate the cognitive burden induced by system use to ensure that healthcare providers receive relevant information, ultimately improving patient safety.</p

Describing Causal Events: Evidence from Patients with Focal Brain Injury

We investigated (1) how focal brain-injured patients describe causal events (causal verb like “push” and the instrument of the action like “the stick”) in speech and co-speech gestures and (2) whether gestures compensate for their impaired verbalization. 16 left hemisphere damaged (LHD), 16 right hemisphere damaged (RHD) and 14 controls were asked to describe causal events (22 video clips). The correct use of causal action components in speech and iconic gestures referring to these actions were coded. Results indicated that LHD patients were less accurate in using both components in speech compared to RHD and controls. There was no difference in the number of iconic gestures among groups. Yet, LHD patients were more likely to omit or misuse both components in speech and in gesture than RHD and controls. Particularly, damage to the left inferior and middle frontal gyrus resulted in problems in both modalities, suggesting conceptual deficits of causality