A HOLISTIC APPROACH OF RELATIONSHIP MARKETING IN LAUNCHING LUXURY NEW PRODUCTS

On the basis of increased complexity of the exchange mechanism, at the beginning of the third millennium the contemporary marketing suffers some physiognomic changes. Holistic orientation of the contemporary marketing is imposed by the new dimensions therelationship marketing, holistic marketing, luxury marketing, residential complex, research on perception of luxury

Architectural Indoor Analysis: A Holistic Approach to Understand the Relation of Higher Education Classrooms and Academic Performance

The influence of learning space on users has been broadly accepted and tested. However, the literature has focused on single factor research, instead of holistic approaches. Additionally, lower educational levels have been the focus of interest, while higher education is moving towards multi-method teaching. This paper focuses on how learning spaces for different purposes (practice and lecture rooms) may influence academic performance from a holistic approach of learning physical environment perception. For this, the iPEP scale (Indoor physical environment perception) is used and validated through Cronbach Alpha and Exploratory Factorial Analysis. Then, multiple linear regression is conducted. The results indicate that iPEP measures near to 63 percent of the construct, which is structured in six factors. Moreover, linear regression analyses support previous literature concerning the influence of learning physical environment on academic performance (R2 = 0.154). The differences obtained between practice and lecture room in terms of predictor variables bring to the light the need to diagnose learning environments before designing changes in educational buildings. This research provides a self-reported way to measure indoor environments, as well as evidence concerning the modern university, which desires to combine several teaching methods

Understanding customers' holistic perception of switches in automotive human–machine interfaces

For successful new product development, it is necessary to understand the customers' holistic experience of the product beyond traditional task completion, and acceptance measures. This paper describes research in which ninety-eight UK owners of luxury saloons assessed the feel of push-switches in five luxury saloon cars both in context (in-car) and out of context (on a bench). A combination of hedonic data (i.e. a measure of ‘liking’), qualitative data and semantic differential data was collected. It was found that customers are clearly able to differentiate between switches based on the degree of liking for the samples' perceived haptic qualities, and that the assessment environment had a statistically significant effect, but that it was not universal. A factor analysis has shown that perceived characteristics of switch haptics can be explained by three independent factors defined as ‘Image’, ‘Build Quality’, and ‘Clickiness’. Preliminary steps have also been taken towards identifying whether existing theoretical frameworks for user experience may be applicable to automotive human–machine interfaces

Differences in holistic processing do not explain cultural differences in the recognition of facial expression

The aim of this study was to investigate the causes of the own-race advantage in facial expression perception. In Experiment 1, we investigated Western Caucasian and Chinese participants’ perception and categorization of facial expressions of six basic emotions that included two pairs of confusable expressions (fear and surprise; anger and disgust). People were slightly better at identifying facial expressions posed by own-race members (mainly in anger and disgust). In Experiment 2, we asked whether the own-race advantage was due to differences in the holistic processing of facial expressions. Participants viewed composite faces in which the upper part of one expression was combined with the lower part of a different expression. The upper and lower parts of the composite faces were either aligned or misaligned. Both Chinese and Caucasian participants were better at identifying the facial expressions from the misaligned images, showing interference on recognizing the parts of the expressions created by holistic perception of the aligned composite images. However, this interference from holistic processing was equivalent across expressions of own-race and other-race faces in both groups of participants. Whilst the own-race advantage in recognizing facial expressions does seem to reflect the confusability of certain emotions, it cannot be explained by differences in holistic processing. </jats:p

ANCIL in action: progress updates on A New Curriculum for Information Literacy

Secker & Coonan’s 2011 research on A New Curriculum for Information Literacy (ANCIL) positions information literacy as a vital, holistic and institution-wide element in academic teaching and learning. Rather than taking a competency-based approach in which abilities and performance levels are delineated prescriptively, ANCIL is founded on a perception of information literacy as a continuum of skills, competences, behaviours and values around information, centred in an individual learner engaged in a specific task or moving towards a particular goal. ANCIL offers both micro- and macro-level approaches to reviewing the information literacy support offered in an institution. With its emphasis on active, reflective and transferable elements in learning, ANCIL lends itself well to practical course design and lesson planning. By reviewing the structure and content of individual sessions through the ANCIL lens, it is possible to enhance information literacy teaching significantly even where provision is restricted to one-shot or front-loaded training sessions. In addition, ANCIL’s holistic mapping of information literacy, together with the interprofessional and collaborative approach this entails, allows departments or whole institutions to audit where, how and when provision is offered to and encountered by the student in the course of his or her learning career.The original ANCIL project research was supported by the Arcadia Programme at Cambridge University Library

The emotional contents of the ‘space’ in spatial music

Human spatial perception is how we understand places. Beyond understanding what is where (William James’ formulation of the psychological approach to perception); there are holistic qualities to places. We perceive places as busy, crowded, exciting, threatening or peaceful, calm, comfortable and so on. Designers of places spend a great deal of time and effort on these qualities; scientists rarely do. In the scientific world-view physical qualities and our emotive responses to them are neatly divided in the objective-subjective dichotomy. In this context, music has traditionally constituted an item in a place. Over the last two decades, development of “spatial music” has been within the prevailing engineering paradigm, informed by psychophysical data; here, space is an abstract, Euclidean 3-dimensional ‘container’ for events. The emotional consequence of spatial arrangements is not the main focus in this approach. This paper argues that a paradigm shift is appropriate, from ‘music-in-a-place’ to ‘music-as-a-place’ requiring a fundamental philosophical realignment of ‘meaning’ away from subjective response to include consequences-in-the-environment. Hence the hegemony of the subjective-objective dichotomy is questioned. There are precedents for this, for example in the ecological approach to perception (Gibson). An ecological approach to music-as-environment intrinsically treats the emotional consequences of spatio-musical arrangement holistically. A simplified taxonomy of the attributes of artificial spatial sound in this context will be discussed

Specialized face perception mechanisms extract both part and spacing information: evidence from developmental prosopagnosia

It is well established that faces are processed by mechanisms that are not used with other objects. Two prominent hypotheses have been proposed to characterize how information is represented by these special mechanisms. The spacing hypothesis suggests that face-specific mechanisms primarily extract information about spacing among parts rather than information about the shape of the parts. In contrast, the holistic hypothesis suggests that faces are processed as nondecomposable wholes and, therefore, claims that both parts and spacing among them are integral aspects of face representation. Here we examined these hypotheses by testing a group of developmental prosopagnosics (DPs) who suffer from deficits in face recognition. Subjects performed a face discrimination task with faces that differed either in the spacing of the parts but not the parts (spacing task), or in the parts but not the spacing of the parts (part task). Consistent with the holistic hypothesis, DPs showed lower performance than controls on both the spacing and the part tasks, as long as salient contrast differences between the parts were minimized. Furthermore, by presenting similar spacing and part tasks with houses, we tested whether face-processing mechanisms are specific to faces, or whether they are used to process spacing information from any stimulus. DPs' normal performance on the tasks of two houses indicates that their deficit does not result from impairment in a general-purpose spacing mechanism. In summary, our data clearly support face-specific holistic hypothesis by showing that face perception mechanisms extract both part and spacing information

Robots, language, and meaning

People use language to exchange ideas and influence the actions of others through shared conceptions of word meanings, and through a shared understanding of how word meanings are combined. Under the surface form of words lie complex networks of mental structures and processes that give rise to the richly textured semantics of natural language. Machines, in contrast, are unable to use language in human-like ways due to fundamental limitations of current computational approaches to semantic representation. To address these limitations, and to serve as a catalyst for exploring alternative approaches to language and meaning, we are developing conversational robots. The problem of endowing robots with language highlights the impossibility of isolating language from other cognitive processes. Instead, we embrace a holistic approach in which various non-linguistic elements of perception, action, and memory, provide the foundations for grounding word meaning. I will review recent results in grounding language in perception and action and sketch ongoing work for grounding a wider range of words including social terms such as "I" and "my"