Do Postures of Distal Effectors Affect the Control of Actions of Other Distal Effectors? Evidence for a System of Interactions between Hand and Mouth

The present study aimed at determining whether, in healthy humans, postures assumed by distal effectors affect the control of the successive grasp executed with other distal effectors. In experiments 1 and 2, participants reached different objects with their head and grasped them with their mouth, after assuming different hand postures. The postures could be implicitly associated with interactions with large or small objects. The kinematics of lip shaping during grasp varied congruently with the hand posture, i.e. it was larger or smaller when it could be associated with the grasping of large or small objects, respectively. In experiments 3 and 4, participants reached and grasped different objects with their hand, after assuming the postures of mouth aperture or closure (experiment 3) and the postures of toe extension or flexion (experiment 4). The mouth postures affected the kinematics of finger shaping during grasp, that is larger finger shaping corresponded with opened mouth and smaller finger shaping with closed mouth. In contrast, the foot postures did not influence the hand grasp kinematics. Finally, in experiment 5 participants reached-grasped different objects with their hand while pronouncing opened and closed vowels, as verified by the analysis of their vocal spectra. Open and closed vowels induced larger and smaller finger shaping, respectively. In all experiments postures of the distal effectors induced no effect, or only unspecific effects on the kinematics of the reach proximal/axial component. The data from the present study support the hypothesis that there exists a system involved in establishing interactions between movements and postures of hand and mouth. This system might have been used to transfer a repertoire of hand gestures to mouth articulation postures during language evolution and, in modern humans, it may have evolved a system controlling the interactions existing between speech and gestures

Bisyllabic words for speech audiometry: a new italian material

Bisyllabic words are the most frequently used italian speech material in evaluating intelligibility function. The italian words presently used are those proposed by Bocca and Pellegrini in 1950. The Lists of these words do, however, present some problems with regard to phonemic balance and word familiarity. In speech audiometry testing, Lists are considered interchangeable if each individual List has the same phonemic balance. So as to avoid incorrect identification due to incomprehension of infrequently used words, we chose 200 of the most familiar bisyllabic words from the most recent, widely used occurrence vocabulary of the Italian Language. Secondly, we proceeded with phonemic balance of the speech material. The selected words were divided into ten lists of 20 words each, arranged in order to obtain the best phonemic balance within each individual List and among different Lists. The differences between the new and old speech material are presented and discussed

Choosing one’s own informal institutions: on Hayek’s critique of Keynes’s immoralism

Institutions, Rules, Traditions, Morality, Liberty, Rule of law, B25, O17, P48, Z13,

Populism as the Crisis of Political Trust

Populism is an ideal litmus test to interpret the crisis of trust that today seems to affect liberal democracies and their institutions. It is by looking at this crisis that some deep motivations of populism can be understood. However, it is also by analyzing populism as a crisis of political trust that we can understand in which way the “prism of trust” is essential to understand political phenomena. This article shows how populism appears as a crisis of political trust in democracy, in representation, and in authority, and try to develop a theoretical framework about this phenomenon in terms of political theory