Search Results

Intervention Studies

K. Warner Schaie

in Developmental Influences on Adult Intelligence: The Seattle longitudinal study

This chapter reports the results of the cognitive intervention studies and their long-term follow-up and replication with new cohorts, as part of the Seattle Longitudinal Study. These studies lead to ... More

This chapter reports the results of the cognitive intervention studies and their long-term follow-up and replication with new cohorts, as part of the Seattle Longitudinal Study. These studies lead to the conclusion that, for many persons, cognitive decline in old age may be a function of disuse rather than deterioration of the physiological substrates of cognitive behavior. A brief five-hour training program on the abilities of Inductive Reasoning and Spatial Orientation involving individual tutorials was designed to improve the performance of participants above the age of sixty-four years. Participants were assigned either to training in the ability on which they had declined or randomly to one of the two training conditions if they had declined or remained stable on both abilities.Less

The neural basis for a sense of direction: head direction neurons

Paul A. Dudchenko

in Why People Get Lost: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Spatial Cognition

This chapter opens with a description of the discovery of head direction cells. It also describes grid cells — a remarkable type of spatially tuned neuron that fires in a grid-like pattern within any ... More

This chapter opens with a description of the discovery of head direction cells. It also describes grid cells — a remarkable type of spatially tuned neuron that fires in a grid-like pattern within any environment. Next the anatomy of the head direction/grid cell circuit is described. Following this, the basic properties of head direction cells are summarised. Like place cells and grid cells, the spatial orientation of head direction cells is anchored to visual landmarks in the environment when these are available. In some instances, spatial behaviour and the behaviour of head direction cells is correlated. Head direction firing also reflects path integration, and head direction cells maintain their specific direction across connected environments. However, this integration is prone to error, and the accumulation of such error may underlie misorientation.Less

Using Locomotion to Update Spatial Orientation: What Changes with Learning and Development?

John J. Rieser and Herbert L. Pick

in The Emerging Spatial Mind

This chapter focuses on human spatial orientation and how it changes with learning and development. It begins with a brief historical overview of ... More

This chapter focuses on human spatial orientation and how it changes with learning and development. It begins with a brief historical overview of techniques and devices that people have used over the centuries for navigation. Then, it presents definitions and concepts that create the framework of the theory that action, perception, and representation are coupled together as a functionally organized system. It also spells out the theory and sketches some of the empirical reasons why it is a good way to characterize and explain how adults use movement to update spatial orientation. Moreover, it illustrates the application of the model to the development of using movement information to update position. It considers the development of the perception-action-representation system without a life history of visual experience or with impaired vision. Furthermore, some of the more general implications of the views, for action, perception, and representation across a wide range of activities, and two different ways in which the functional organization of the system might emerge during learning and development, are shown.Less

Self-Motion Perception: Multisensory Integration in Extrastriate Visual Cortex

Christopher R. Fetsch, Yong Gu, Gregory C. DeAngelis, and Dora E. Angelaki

in Sensory Cue Integration

The accurate perception of self-motion is essential for spatial orientation, navigation, and motor planning. Estimating our instantaneous direction of translation, or heading, is a particularly ... More

The accurate perception of self-motion is essential for spatial orientation, navigation, and motor planning. Estimating our instantaneous direction of translation, or heading, is a particularly relevant multisensory problem because it requires cross-modal integration even under ordinary conditions. This chapter discusses how heading perception is a useful model for studying the neural basis of multisensory integration for two main reasons. First, there are well-defined brain structures that receive both visual and vestibular signals related to self-motion (e.g., macaque areas MSTd and VIP). Second, the problem is amenable to study using a standard “fine” psychophysical discrimination task, for which there are already well-established behavioral and neurophysiological analysis methods.Less

Neuroanatomy of Central Vestibular Pathways

Jay M. Goldberg, Victor J. Wilson, Kathleen E. Cullen, Dora E. Angelaki, Dianne M. Broussard, Jean A. Büttner-Ennever, Kikuro Fukushima, and Lloyd B. Minor

in The Vestibular System: A Sixth Sense

Chapters 2 through 5 considered the peripheral vestibular organs, including their structure, cellular physiology, signal processing, and efferent feedback. While many questions remain to be answered, ... More

Chapters 2 through 5 considered the peripheral vestibular organs, including their structure, cellular physiology, signal processing, and efferent feedback. While many questions remain to be answered, we have a fairly complete picture of the afferent signals that reach the brain and inform it about the angular and linear forces acting on the head. This chapter considers central mechanisms, including how the brain combines vestibular and nonvestibular signals to achieve postural and gaze stabilization, as well as to estimate self-motion and spatial orientation. It describes the anatomical organization of central vestibular pathways. Such knowledge provides an essential background for the interpretation of physiological and behavioral studies.Less

Orientation: Figurations of Oriented Space

in The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism

This chapter analyzes the figuration of oriented space in cartography, philosophy, and poetry around 1800. According to Kant, spatial orientation means the determination of direction based on a ... More

This chapter analyzes the figuration of oriented space in cartography, philosophy, and poetry around 1800. According to Kant, spatial orientation means the determination of direction based on a subjective, bodily experience of difference. Oriented space is a space with which an individual is bodily at one, a space in which one feels at home. Cartography sought to help the individual orient himself in unwanted spaces, to make the vast territory of his country into an oriented space by imparting to him a specific kind of spatial judgment called the visual sense. The early Romantic philosophy pursued the same goal of making the world as oriented as the home. Meanwhile, by making “making nonpresence into presence,” the goal of universal orientation could be ultimately reached in Romantic poetry.Less

Spatial orientations

Gerjan van Schaaik

in The Oxford Turkish Grammar

Whereas the dative and ablative case markers are primarily used in combination with verbs denoting movement to and from some object, the locative signifies that all movement is absent. This natural ... More

Whereas the dative and ablative case markers are primarily used in combination with verbs denoting movement to and from some object, the locative signifies that all movement is absent. This natural relation justifies a simultaneous discussion of these case forms in deictic pronouns. These markers play a crucial role in expressions based on the genitive-possessive construction applied to nouns denoting a space. Such constructions fulfil the same job as prepositional phrases in other languages. Interestingly, these space nouns are used as pure adjectives as well, and in the final sections two other peculiarities are illustrated. Besides a fully fledged genitive-possessive construction, for metaphorical usage there is a construct without the genitive, the possessive part of which has much in common with a postposition. Secondly, adverbial phrases based on nouns denoting some location have come into existence in a similar way.Less

Research Spotlight—Insect Polarization Vision: Peripheral And Central Mechanisms

Eric Warrant and U. Homberg

in Structure and Evolution of Invertebrate Nervous Systems

The ability to detect linearly polarized light is used by insects for spatial orientation, object identification and, in a few cases, sexual signalling. The use of polarization vision for sky compass ... More

The ability to detect linearly polarized light is used by insects for spatial orientation, object identification and, in a few cases, sexual signalling. The use of polarization vision for sky compass orientation has received particular attention. Scattering of sunlight by air molecules generates a pattern of skylight polarization, which insects can use, just like the sun itself, as a visual celestial compass. Polarized skylight is detected by specialized ommatidia in the so-called dorsal rim area of the eye. In this eye region, ommatidial photoreceptors have highly aligned rhodopsin-bearing microvilli, resulting in high polarization sensitivity. Photoreceptors are homochromatic and occur in each ommatidium as sets of receptors with orthogonal microvillar orientations. Antagonistic input from these photoreceptors likely results in polarization-opponency in neurons of the polarization vision pathway in the brain. Studies in locusts, monarch butterflies, and a few other species have shown that convergence of signals from both eyes occurs in the central complex, a group of midline-spanning neuropils in the brain. Here, bilateral integration results in a compass-like topographic representation of zenithal E-vectors, which may be used as a frame of reference for spatial memory, path integration, and other spatial tasks. Integration of other celestial cues, such as the sky chromatic contrast, occurs at central stages of the polarization vision system, presumably to increase the robustness of the sky compass signal.Less

Ontological Foundations for Inka Archaeology

María Cecilia Lozada (ed.)

in Andean Ontologies: New Archaeological Perspectives

Understanding distinctively Inka (and southern Quechua) ways of interacting with the world requires integrated social, cultural, linguistic, cognitive, and material evidence. These include properties ... More

Understanding distinctively Inka (and southern Quechua) ways of interacting with the world requires integrated social, cultural, linguistic, cognitive, and material evidence. These include properties of the world (“what there is”), causal relationships among them (for example, that places have social agency); and spatial orientation. Each of these follow general principles-- embodied in language, cognition, social relations, and material culture—that are interconnectioned, some mutually compatible, and others incompatible, which warrant certain social and material outcomes and not others. These in turn can be tested archaeologically.Less

On Language and Thought: A Question of Formats

David J. Lobina and José E. García-Albea

in On Concepts, Modules, and Language: Cognitive Science at Its Core

The relationship between language and thought remains an unsettled issue. The chapter approaches it from the perspective of whether any of the representations the language faculty generates can be ... More

The relationship between language and thought remains an unsettled issue. The chapter approaches it from the perspective of whether any of the representations the language faculty generates can be said to be constitutive of thought (i.e., to form part of thought representations). It reviews four such linguistic formats or representations—phonetic (PHON), syntactic (SEM), phonological, and semantic—and argues that all of them are in principle extraneous to what a theory of thought requires. Thought must be subsumed by abstract, amodal, structured, and fully explicit propositional representations to account for cognitive flexibility, and all four formats fall short of exhibiting the necessary properties.Less

Rainbows and Communism: Material, Sensory, and Mnemonic Ruptures

Eli Rubin

in Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany

This chapter explores the experiences of the East Germans who moved to Marzahn in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing especially on their sensory worlds, inner lives, memories, and sense of spatial ... More

This chapter explores the experiences of the East Germans who moved to Marzahn in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing especially on their sensory worlds, inner lives, memories, and sense of spatial orientation and awareness. In particular, it describes a parallelism between their personal, psychological, and emotional sense of rupture and amnesia on one hand and the amnesia and rupture of the landscape and architectural and urban material reality of Marzahn on the other. It is argued that Marzahn was a highly desirable place for most East Germans, who were often desperate to escape the slums of the old Berlin. Yet everything there—from new weather patterns to new elevations and new kinds of soil—played a role in detaching people from their old lives, and transforming them into a new kind of conscious subject, one shaped more fundamentally by socialism.Less

Growing with Marzahn: Childhood, Community, and the Space of Socialism’s Future

Eli Rubin

in Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany

This chapter focuses on the experience of children and childhood in Marzahn. Because of East German policy, the highly desirable apartments in Marzahn were often reserved for families with young ... More

This chapter focuses on the experience of children and childhood in Marzahn. Because of East German policy, the highly desirable apartments in Marzahn were often reserved for families with young children. As a result, Marzahn quickly became overrun with children, and it is argued here that as the first generation with no personal memory of urban spaces dating back to the pre-socialist era, the children of the prefabricated socialist housing settlement were profoundly shaped by material manifestation of the state’s utopian project. It details the ways in which the construction sites, the new routines, and even new domestic spaces (such as one’s own room, not possible in the old buildings) were both formative for the children, and also a core part of the state’s propaganda that this new place was a tabula rasa for the socialist utopia.Less