312 research outputs found
Aflatoxina M1 em leite: um risco para a saúde pública.
Introdução. As Aflatoxinas. A Aflatoxina M1 (AFM1). Mecanismos de contaminação do leite por AFM1. Principais efeitos tóxicos. Relação de AFB1 ingerida e a concentração de AFM1, excretada no leite. Prevenção. Métodos de detecção e qualificação de Aflatoxina M1 em leite e derivados. Legislação. Referências bibliográficas.bitstream/item/79983/1/doc67-2005.pd
Where Snow is a Landmark: Route Direction Elements in Alpine Contexts
Route directions research has mostly focused on urban space so far, highlighting human concepts of street networks based on a range of recurring elements such as route segments, decision points, landmarks and actions. We explored the way route directions reflect the features of space and activity in the context of mountaineering. Alpine route directions are only rarely segmented through decision points related to reorientation; instead, segmentation is based on changing topography. Segments are described with various degrees of detail, depending on difficulty. For landmark description, direction givers refer to properties such as type of surface, dimension, colour of landscape features; terrain properties (such as snow) can also serve as landmarks. Action descriptions reflect the geometrical conceptualization of landscape features and dimensionality of space. Further, they are very rich in the semantics of manner of motion
Light Quality Effects on Germination and Conversion of Southern Pine Somatic Embryos
Papers and abstracts from the 27th Southern Forest Tree Improvement Conference held at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma on June 24-27, 2003
Challenges for identifying the neural mechanisms that support spatial navigation: the impact of spatial scale.
Spatial navigation is a fascinating behavior that is essential for our everyday lives. It involves nearly all sensory systems, it requires numerous parallel computations, and it engages multiple memory systems. One of the key problems in this field pertains to the question of reference frames: spatial information such as direction or distance can be coded egocentrically-relative to an observer-or allocentrically-in a reference frame independent of the observer. While many studies have associated striatal and parietal circuits with egocentric coding and entorhinal/hippocampal circuits with allocentric coding, this strict dissociation is not in line with a growing body of experimental data. In this review, we discuss some of the problems that can arise when studying the neural mechanisms that are presumed to support different spatial reference frames. We argue that the scale of space in which a navigation task takes place plays a crucial role in determining the processes that are being recruited. This has important implications, particularly for the inferences that can be made from animal studies in small scale space about the neural mechanisms supporting human spatial navigation in large (environmental) spaces. Furthermore, we argue that many of the commonly used tasks to study spatial navigation and the underlying neuronal mechanisms involve different types of reference frames, which can complicate the interpretation of neurophysiological data
SOWL QL: Querying Spatio - Temporal Ontologies in OWL
We introduce SOWL QL, a query language for spatio-temporal information in ontologies. Buildingupon
SOWL (Spatio-Temporal OWL), an ontology for handling spatio-temporal information in OWL, SOWL QL supports querying over qualitative spatio-temporal information (expressed using natural language expressions such as “before”, “after”, “north of”, “south of”) rather than merely quantitative information (exact dates,
times, locations). SOWL QL extends SPARQL with a powerful set of temporal and spatial operators, including temporal Allen topological, spatial directional and topological operations or combinations of the above.
SOWL QL maintains simplicity of expression and also, upward and downward compatibility with SPARQL. Query translation in SOWL QL yields SPARQL queries implying that, querying spatio-temporal ontologies using SPARQL is still feasible but suffers from several drawbacks the most important of them being that, queries in SPARQL become particularly complicated and users must be familiar with the underlying spatio-temporal representation (the “N-ary relations” or the “4D-fluents” approach in this work). Finally, querying in SOWL QL is supported by the SOWL reasoner which is not part of the standard SPARQL translation. The run-time performance of SOWL QL has been assessed experimentally in a real data setting. A critical analysis of its performance is also presented
Exploring an absent presence: Wayfinding as an embodied sociocultural experience
Wayfinding has often been seen as being about the quickest or shortest possible route between two points (Hölscher et al 2011; Tam 2011; Haque et al 2006). Moreover, this process has very often been seen as a cognitive one, with the experiential nature of wayfinding and with the embodied, emotional and sociocultural aspects of this experience conspicuously absent. We argue that wayfinding is rarely a purely cognitive process that involves an individual person, who is entirely instrumental in navigating a direct and precise route, but instead that this is a process almost always directed according to embodied and sociocultural needs. We propose a reassessment of present wayfinding definitions and suggest an alternative understanding that includes sociocultural elements, embodied individuals and experience through their embodied senses, as crucial elements of the concept. Seeing wayfinding from this different sociocultural ontological viewpoint, opens up new ways of understanding and planning wayfinding systems
Network and Psychological Effects in Urban Movement
Correlations are regularly found in space syntax studies between
graph-based configurational measures of street networks, represented as
lines, and observed movement patterns. This suggests that topological
and geometric complexity are critically involved in how people navigate
urban grids. This has caused difficulties with orthodox urban
modelling, since it has always been assumed that insofar as spatial
factors play a role in navigation, it will be on the basis of metric
distance. In spite of much experimental evidence from cognitive science
that geometric and topological factors are involved in navigation, and
that metric distance is unlikely to be the best criterion for
navigational choices, the matter has not been convincingly resolved
since no method has existed for extracting cognitive information from
aggregate flows. Within the space syntax literature it has also
remained unclear how far the correlations that are found with syntactic
variables at the level of aggregate flows are due to cognitive factors
operating at the level of individual movers, or they are simply
mathematically probable network effects, that is emergent statistical
effects from the structure of line networks, independent of the
psychology of navigational choices. Here we suggest how both problems
can be resolved, by showing three things: first, how cognitive
inferences can be made from aggregate urban flow data and distinguished
from network effects; second by showing that urban movement, both
vehicular and pedestrian, are shaped far more by the geometrical and
topological properties of the grid than by its metric properties; and
third by demonstrating that the influence of these factors on movement
is a cognitive, not network, effect
The process of spatial knowledge acquisition in a square and a circular virtual environment
This study investigated the effect of the environmental structure (circular vs.
square environment) on spatial knowledge acquisition in a desktop virtual
situation in which self-determined movement was allowed with a total of 120
participants: 7-, 8-year-old children; 11, 12-year-old children, and adults. In
all measurements of spatial knowledge acquisition an overall developmental
performance increase from younger children to adults was found. In contrast to
that, the exploration and learning behavior did not differ between adults and
children. Furthermore, the environmental structure influencedthenumber of trials
needed to learn the two routes used and the distance walked to the determined
landmarks. All these tasks were easier in a circular than in a square
environment. This influenceofthe environmental structure was absent in the
direction estimations task. The advantage of spatial knowledge acquisition in a
circular environment in three of four tasks is discussed
No advantage for remembering horizontal over vertical spatial locations learned from a single viewpoint
Previous behavioral and neurophysiological research has shown better memory for horizontal than for vertical locations. In these studies, participants navigated toward these locations. In the present study we investigated whether the orientation of the spatial plane per se was responsible for this difference. We thus had participants learn locations visually from a single perspective and retrieve them from multiple viewpoints. In three experiments, participants studied colored tags on a horizontally or vertically oriented board within a virtual room and recalled these locations with different layout orientations (Exp. 1) or from different room-based perspectives (Exps. 2 and 3). All experiments revealed evidence for equal recall performance in horizontal and vertical memory. In addition, the patterns for recall from different test orientations were rather similar. Consequently, our results suggest that memory is qualitatively similar for both vertical and horizontal two-dimensional locations, given that these locations are learned from a single viewpoint. Thus, prior differences in spatial memory may have originated from the structure of the space or the fact that participants navigated through it. Additionally, the strong performance advantages for perspective shifts (Exps. 2 and 3) relative to layout rotations (Exp. 1) suggest that configurational judgments are not only based on memory of the relations between target objects, but also encompass the relations between target objects and the surrounding room—for example, in the form of a memorized view
Route knowledge and configural knowledge in typical and atypical development: a comparison of sparse and rich environments
Background:
Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) and individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) have poor
navigation skills, which impact their potential to become independent. Two aspects of navigation were investigated
in these groups, using virtual environments (VE): route knowledge (the ability to learn the way from A to B by
following a fixed sequence of turns) and configural knowledge (knowledge of the spatial relationships between
places within an environment).
Methods:
Typically developing (TD) children aged 5 to 11 years (N = 93), individuals with DS (N = 29) and individuals
with WS (N = 20) were presented with a sparse and a rich VE grid maze. Within each maze, participants were asked to
learn a route from A to B and a route from A to C before being asked to find a novel shortcut from B to C.
Results:
Performance was broadly similar across sparse and rich mazes. The majority of participants were able to learn
novel routes, with poorest performance in the DS group, but the ability to find a shortcut, our measure of configural knowledge, was limited for all three groups. That is, 59 % TD participants successfully found a shortcut, compared to 10 % participants with DS and 35 % participants with WS. Differences in the underlying mechanisms associated with route knowledge and configural knowledge and in the developmental trajectories of performance across groups were observed. Only the TD participants walked a shorter distance in the last shortcut trial compared to the first, indicative of
increased configural knowledge across trials. The DS group often used an alternative strategy to get from B to C, summing the two taught routes together.
Conclusions:
Our findings demonstrate impaired configural knowledge in DS and in WS, with the strongest deficit in DS. This suggests that these groups rely on a rigid route knowledge based method for navigating and as a result are
likely to get lost easily. Route knowledge was also impaired in both DS and WS groups and was related to different underlying processes across all three groups. These are discussed with reference to limitations in attention and/or visuo-spatial processing in the atypical groups
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