A SMARC Effect for Loudness

Various reports suggest that the pitch height of musical tones may be represented along a mental space, with lower pitch heights represented on the left or lower sectors and higher pitch heights represented on the right or upper sectors of the mental space. Given that in Western languages the loudness of tones is often addressed spatially, with loud sounds referred to as \u201chigh\u201d and quiet sounds referred to as \u201clow,\u201d here we investigated whether loudness might also have a spatial representation. Participants judged whether a tone was louder or quieter than a reference tone, by pressing two keys: one at the top and the other at the bottom of a response box. Participants were faster in a situation where they pressed the key at the top to report louder sounds, and the key at the bottom to report quieter sounds, than vice versa. This result supports the view that loudness, like other types of magnitudes, might be represented spatially

«Gli eroi son tutti giovani e belli». L'immagine del soldato fra retorica e realtà 1870-1935

Il volume traccia e commenta l'evoluzione subita dall'immagine del soldato a partire dal racconto delle guerre risorgimentali fino all'epoca fascista. Si tratta di una ricerca condotta attraverso un'attenta mappatura di immagini pittoriche, scultoree e fotografiche che ha consentito di capire come la figura del combattente venga dapprima rappresentata in vista della costruzione dell'identità nazionale e quindi, dopo la prima guerra mondiale, in funzione del ricordo collettivo

Luciano Mercante scultore

il saggio affronta per la prima volta in maniera organica la produzione scultore di Luciano Marcant

Il mare in una stanza: arte e cantieristica navale

Il saggio affronta alcune tematiche relative alla sinergia tra l’arte figurativa e la cantieristica navale, un binomio che attraversa l’intera storia delle grandi navi passeggeri impegnate sulle rotte oceaniche. In particolare vengono analizzati i motivi per cui nella decorazione di quelle navi i motivi marini sono stati per molto tempo trascurati. Dagli inizi del Novecento fino alla fine degli anni venti infatti le classi di lusso delle navi di linea erano assimilate ai grandi palazzi di rappresentanza, e come tali dovevano per quanto possibile far dimenticare i disagi dei lunghi viaggi oceanici. Il progressivo affermarsi delle tendenze funzionaliste in architettura e il fatto che le grandi navi diventeranno ideali ‘ambasciatrici’ delle rispettive industrie nazionali, farà sì che a partire dagli anni trenta gli interni dei transatlantici vengano progettati anche in funzione dell’ambiente circostante, aprendo sempre più verso l’esterno gli spazi comuni anche con l’inserimento di decori che richiamassero il mare e il viaggio. In questo campo nel secondo dopoguerra avrà un ruolo di particolare rilievo la cantieristica italiana e in particolare quella della Venezia Giulia, in grado di fornire architetti e artisti capaci di trasformare le nuove imbarcazioni in vere e proprie gallerie d’arte galleggianti

Domenico Fabris, Angelo Cameroni e Luigi Tommasi nel teatro L’Armonia di Trieste

The essay shows a room decorated in 1857 by Domenico Fabris and Luigi Tommasi and by a series of reproductions of ancient statues. The room was part of the wider complex of theater Armonia, designed by Andrea Scala and divided between two buildings, the main one of which will be demolished in 1912. The latter belonged also fourteen Caryatids in Vicenza’s stone that you can now assign to Angelo Cameroni

Musicians have better memory than nonmusicians: A meta-analysis

Background Several studies have found that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks, but this is not always the case, and the strength of this apparent advantage is unknown. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis with the aim of clarifying whether musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks. Methods Education Source; PEP (WEB)\u2014Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing; Psychology and Behavioral Science (EBSCO); PsycINFO (Ovid); PubMed; ScienceDirect\u2014AllBooks Content (Elsevier API); SCOPUS (Elsevier API); SocINDEX with Full Text (EBSCO) and Google Scholar were searched for eligible studies. The selected studies involved two groups of participants: young adult musicians and nonmusicians. All the studies included memory tasks (loading long-term, short-term or working memory) that contained tonal, verbal or visuospatial stimuli. Three meta-analyses were run separately for long-term memory, short-term memory and working memory. Results We collected 29 studies, including 53 memory tasks. The results showed that musicians performed better than nonmusicians in terms of long-term memory, g = .29, 95% CI (.08\u2013.51), short-term memory, g = .57, 95% CI (.41\u2013.73), and working memory, g = .56, 95% CI (.33\u2013.80). To further explore the data, we included a moderator (the type of stimulus presented, i.e., tonal, verbal or visuospatial), which was found to influence the effect size for short-term and working memory, but not for long-term memory. In terms of short-term and working memory, the musicians\u2019 advantage was large with tonal stimuli, moderate with verbal stimuli, and small or null with visuospatial stimuli. Conclusions The three meta-analyses revealed a small effect size for long-term memory, and a medium effect size for short-term and working memory, suggesting that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks. Moreover, the effect of the moderator suggested that, the type of stimuli influences this advantage

Auditory and cognitive performance in elderly musicians and nonmusicians

Musicians represent a model for examining brain and behavioral plasticity in terms of cognitive and auditory profile, but few studies have investigated whether elderly musicians have better auditory and cognitive abilities than nonmusicians. The aim of the present study was to examine whether being a professional musician attenuates the normal age-related changes in hearing and cognition. Elderly musicians still active in their profession were compared with nonmusicians on auditory performance (absolute threshold, frequency intensity, duration and spectral shape discrimination, gap and sinusoidal amplitude-modulation detection), and on simple (short-term memory) and more complex and higher-order (working memory [WM] and visuospatial abilities) cognitive tasks. The sample consisted of adults at least 65 years of age. The results showed that older musicians had similar absolute thresholds but better supra-threshold discrimination abilities than nonmusicians in four of the six auditory tasks administered. They also had a better WM performance, and stronger visuospatial abilities than nonmusicians. No differences were found between the two groups\u2019 short-term memory. Frequency discrimination and gap detection for the auditory measures, and WM complex span tasks and one of the visuospatial tasks for the cognitive ones proved to be very good classifiers of the musicians. These findings suggest that life-long music training may be associated with enhanced auditory and cognitive performance, including complex cognitive skills, in advanced age. However, whether this music training represents a protective factor or not needs further investigation

PSYCHOACOUSTICS: a comprehensive MATLAB toolbox for auditory testing

PSYCHOACOUSTICS is a new MATLAB toolbox which implements three classic adaptive procedures for auditory threshold estimation. The first includes those of the Staircase family (method of limits, simple up-down and transformed up-down); the second is the Parameter Estimation by Sequential Testing (PEST); and the third is the Maximum Likelihood Procedure (MLP). The toolbox comes with more than twenty built-in experiments each provided with the recommended (default) parameters. However, if desired, these parameters can be modified through an intuitive and user friendly graphical interface and stored for future use (no programming skills are required). Finally, PSYCHOACOUSTICS is very flexible as it comes with several signal generators and can be easily extended for any experiment

Personalized medicine—a modern approach for the diagnosis and management of hypertension

The main goal of treating hypertension is to reduce blood pressure to physiological levels and thereby prevent risk of cardiovascular disease and hypertension-associated target organ damage. Despite reductions in major risk factors and the availability of a plethora of effective antihypertensive drugs, the control of blood pressure to target values is still poor due to multiple factors including apparent drug resistance and lack of adherence. An explanation for this problem is related to the current reductionist and ‘trial-and-error’ approach in the management of hypertension, as we may oversimplify the complex nature of the disease and not pay enough attention to the heterogeneity of the pathophysiology and clinical presentation of the disorder. Taking into account specific risk factors, genetic phenotype, pharmacokinetic characteristics, and other particular features unique to each patient, would allow a personalized approach to managing the disease. Personalized medicine therefore represents the tailoring of medical approach and treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient and is expected to become the paradigm of future healthcare. The advancement of systems biology research and the rapid development of high-throughput technologies, as well as the characterization of different –omics, have contributed to a shift in modern biological and medical research from traditional hypothesis-driven designs toward data-driven studies and have facilitated the evolution of personalized or precision medicine for chronic diseases such as hypertension