Dutch and Victorian approaches to land appraisal

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The effect of background music on emotional processing : evaluation using a dot probe paradigm

Music plays an important role in all of the world\u27s cultures, and background music is an ever-present phenomenon. Despite this, few studies have formally addressed whether background music influences the way people think. The aim of this study was to discover whether the presence of background music can influence cognition. Specifically, the differential effects of music rated as being positive (inducing happy emotions) and negative (inducing anxiety) on a person\u27s allocation of attention was investigated. A dot probe task with positive and negative word pairings, matched for length and frequency was used in order to test the hypotheses that the presence of negative music would increase a person\u27s tendency to notice threatening words, and happy music would decrease this tendency. Each participant performed the task in silence. Following this, they were required to perform the task again in the presence of positive background music, and then again in the presence of negative background music. The mean reaction times for each of the musical conditions was recorded and compared. The data failed to support these hypotheses. It was concluded that if positive and negative background music does differentially influence attention, it happens at a later processing stage rather than at the initial orienting stage. Future research directions are briefly discussed

The embodied user : corporeal awareness & media technology

Human beings are proficient users of tools and technology. At times, our interactions with a technological artifact appear so effortless, that the distinction between the artifact and the body starts to fade. When operating anthropomorphically designed teleoperation systems, for example, some people develop the vivid experience that they are physically there at the remote site (i.e., telepresence). Others might even come to sense the slave robot’s arms and hands as their own. The process in which the central nervous system categorizes an object as a part of the body, and in which a discrimination is made between what is contained within and outside the bodily boundaries, is called self-attribution. The aim of this thesis is twofold: (a) To determine the personal factors (e.g., the characteristics of an individual’s psychological makeup) and situational factors (e.g., the appearance of objects) that constrain or facilitate self-attribution, and (b) to determine the degree to which these factors affect people’s experiences with media technology. In Chapter 2, we describe the theoretical framework of our research which is centered on a conception of the user of technology as an embodied agent. In this chapter we distinguish two important, but often confused aspects of embodiment: the body schema, and the body image. The body schema is defined as a dynamic distributed network of procedures aimed at guiding behavior. In contrast, we defined the body image as a part of the process of consciousness and, thus, as consisting of those higher-order discriminations (or qualia) that pertain to the body, and one’s self-perception thereof. To investigate the individual and situational factors that constrain or facilitate selfattribution (i.e., incorporation into the body image), we employ the experimental paradigm of the rubber-hand illusion (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998). In this illusion, which is induced by stroking a person’s concealed hand together with a visible fake one, some people start to sense the fake hand as an actual part of their body. In Chapter 3, we investigate the rubberhand illusion under two mediated conditions: (1) a virtual reality condition, where both the fake hand and its stimulation were projected on the table in front of the participant, and (2) a mixed reality condition, where the fake hand was projected, but its stimulation was unmediated. Our experiment reveals that people can develop the rubber-hand illusion under mediated conditions, but the resulting illusion may, depending on the technology used, be less vivid than in the traditional unmediated setup. In Chapter 4, we investigate the extent to which visual discrepancies between the foreign object and a human hand affect people in developing a vivid rubber-hand illusion. We found that people experience a more vivid illusion when the foreign object resembles the human hand in terms of both shape and texture. Taken together, the experiments in Chapters 3 and 4 support the view that the rubber-hand illusion is not merely governed by a bottom-up process (i.e., based on visuotactile integration), but is affected, top-down, by a cognitive representation of what the human body is like (e.g., Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005). In the rubber-hand illusion, people commonly misperceive the location of their concealed hand toward the direction of the fake hand (Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005). As such, this so-called proprioceptive drift is often used as an alternative to self-reports in assessing the vividness of the illusion (e.g., Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005). In Chapter 5, we investigate the extent to which the observed shift in felt position of the concealed hand can be attributed to experiencing the illusion. For this purpose, we test how various features of the experimental setup of the rubber-hand illusion, which in themselves are not sufficient to elicit the illusion, affect proprioceptive drift. We corroborate existing research which demonstrates that looking at a fake hand or a tabletop for five minutes, in absence of visuotactile stimulation, is sufficient to induce a change in the felt position of an unseen hand (e.g., Gross et al., 1974). Moreover, our experiments indicate that the use of proprioceptive drift as a measure for the strength of the rubber-hand illusion yields different conclusions than an assessment by means of self-reports. Based on these results, we question the validity of proprioceptive drift as an alternative measure of the vividness of the rubber-hand illusion. In Chapter 6, we propose and test a model of the vividness of the rubber-hand illusion. In two experiments, we successfully modeled people’s self-reported experiences related to the illusion (e.g., "the fake hand felt as my own") based on three estimates: (a) a person’s susceptibility for the rubber-hand illusion, (b) the processing demand that is required for a particular experience, and (c) the suppression/constraints imposed by the situation. We demonstrate that the impressions related to the rubber-hand illusion, and by inference the processes behind them, are comparable for different persons. This is a non-trivial finding as such invariance is required for an objective scaling of individual susceptibility and situational impediment on the basis of self-reported experiences. Regarding the validity of our vividness model, we confirm that asynchrony (e.g., Botvinick & Cohen, 1998) and information-poor stimulation (e.g., Armel & Ramachandran, 2003) constrain the development of a vivid rubber-hand illusion. Moreover, we demonstrate that the correlation between a person’s susceptibility for the rubber-hand illusion and the extent of his of her proprioceptive drift is fairly moderate, thereby confirming our conclusions from Chapter 5 regarding the limited validity of proprioceptive drift as a measure of the vividness of the rubber-hand illusion. In Chapter 7, we investigate the extent to which the large individual differences in people’s susceptibility for the illusion can be explained by body image instability, and the ability to engage in motor imagery of the hand (i.e., in mental own hand transformations). In addition, we investigate whether the vividness of the illusion is dependent on the anatomical implausibility of the fake hand’s orientation. With respect to body image instability, we corroborate a small, but significant, correlation between susceptibility and body image aberration scores: As expected, people with a more unstable body image are also more susceptible to the rubber-hand illusion (cf. Burrack & Brugger, 2005). With respect to the position and orientation of the fake hand on the table, we demonstrate that people experience a less vivid rubber-hand illusion when the fake hand is orientated in an anatomically impossible, as compared to an anatomically possible manner. This finding suggests that the attribution of foreign objects to the self is constrained by the morphological capabilities of the human body. With respect to motor imagery, our results indicate a small, but significant, correlation between susceptibility and response times to a speeded left and right hands identification task. In other words, people who are more attuned to engage in mental own hand transformations are also better equipped to develop vivid rubber-hand illusions. In Chapter 8, we examine the role of self-attribution in the experience of telepresence. For this purpose, we introduce the technological domain of mediated social touch (i.e., interpersonal touching over a distance). We anticipated that, compared to a morphologically incongruent input medium, a morphologically congruent medium would be more easily attributed to the self. As a result, we expected our participants to develop a stronger sense of telepresence when they could see their interaction partner performing the touches on a sensor-equipped mannequin as opposed to a touch screen. Our participants, as expected, reported higher levels of telepresence, and demonstrated more physiological arousal with the mannequin input medium. At the same time, our experiment revealed that these effects might not have resulted from self-attribution, and thus that other psychological mechanisms of identification might play a role in telepresence experiences. In Chapter 9, the epilogue, we discuss the main contributions and limitations of this thesis, while taking a broader perspective on the field of research on media technologies and corporeal awareness

Disentangling novelty and usefulness:Essays on creativity in the arts and sciences

Concerns that sophisticated algorithms and autonomous machines are replacing human labor have driven a recent interest in creativity as a key factor in maintaining innovation and economic growth. Within management and entrepreneurship research, the dominant definition of creativity is that it entails the generation of ideas or products that are both novel and useful. Novelty—being new, unique, or different, relative to central practices or views—and usefulness—being appropriate, correct, or valuable to the task at hand—are therefore each seen as necessary conditions for something to be classified as creative. In spite of its importance, a major obstacle to the study of creativity has been the translation of this simple two-criterion conceptual definition into an operational one to be utilized in empirical study. This dissertation aims to take a step back and answer the question of whether, how, and under what conditions novelty is related to usefulness. Following recent advances in the study of creativity it emphasizes that, although creativity may be jointly composed of the novelty and usefulness, these are distinct concepts that should best be considered as such. This dissertation contributes to research on creativity, management, and entrepreneurship by providing new insights into the conditions under which creativity emerges—yielding new insights as to why some novel offerings see widespread use whereas other ostensibly similar offerings linger in obscurity. This dissertation consists of four essays that address the overarching research question from a variety of theoretical lenses, and each essay is centered on a setting where creativity is of particular importance: university students who are close to starting knowledge-intensive and skilled work, the creative industries, and academia

Contrast Analysis: A Tutorial

Contrast analysis is a relatively simple but effective statistical method for testing theoretical predictions about differences between group means against the empirical data. Despite its advantages, contrast analysis is hardly used to date, perhaps because it is not implemented in a convenient manner in many statistical software packages. This tutorial demonstrates how to conduct contrast analysis through the specification of the so-called L (the contrast or test matrix) and M matrix (the transformation matrix) as implemented in many statistical software packages, including SPSS and Stata. Through a series of carefully chosen examples, the main principles and applications of contrast analysis are explained for data obtained with between- and within-subject designs, and for designs that involve a combination of between- and within-subject factors (i.e., mixed designs). SPSS and Stata syntaxes as well as simple manual calculations are provided for both significance testing and contras Accessed 4,950 times on https://pareonline.net from May 29, 2018 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right

Interaction of an Eulerian flue gas plume with wind turbines

The reduced availability of sites with the requisite wind resource, planning permission and public acceptance for the placement of wind turbines poses a significant challenge to future expansion of the wind energy industry. Developers increasingly wish to site large turbines in close proximity to industrial plants, but there is uncertainty amongst environmental protection agencies on how best to measure and regulate the impact that wind turbines may have on the dispersion of the gases that are often emitted into the atmosphere from such plants. Several simplified wind turbine-flue stack configurations have been simulated using the Vorticity Transport Model. This model provides a high-fidelity representation of the vortical flow structure within both the wind turbine wake and the plume, and is able to capture the re-direction and dispersion of the plume that occurs due to interaction with the wind turbine. The impingement of the plume on the wind turbine is shown to disrupt the wake structure downwind of the wind turbine, and may induce additional unsteady loading on the turbine rotor. The velocity deficit downwind of the wind turbine influences the rate at which the plume propagates downwind, and results in an increase in the concentration of plume material (which may include pollutant gas and particulates) around the wind turbine. This localized increase in plume concentration is shown to be sensitive to the thrust coefficient at which the wind turbine is operated. The results presented in this paper show that environmental protection agencies are justified in their concerns regarding the placement of wind turbines near to industrial plants, and suggests strongly that the interaction between wind turbines and gas plumes should be investigated further

What Does it Mean to Be Average? The Miles per Gallon versus Gallons per Mile Paradox Revisited

In the efficiency paradox, which was introduced by Hand (1994; J R Stat Soc A, 157, 317-356), two groups of engineers are in disagreement about the average fuel efficiency of a set of cars. One group measured efficiency on a miles per gallon scale, the other on a gallons per mile scale. In the present paper, I argue against an operationalistic explanation of the efficiency paradox, by showing that the paradox is neither the result of an ambiguously defined efficiency concept, nor the result of how fuel efficiency is measured (i.e., whether a miles per gallon, or gallons per mile scale is used). The actual paradox is that the two groups of engineers have asked different statistical questions, while using the same mathematical operation. The paradox results from the fact that fuel efficiency is a derived measure, like density and speed, for which end-to-end concatenation (i.e., addition) is not straightforward. Accessed 18,393 times on https://pareonline.net from April 08, 2008 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right