Search results for " performance."

Enhanced Spatial Navigation Skills in Sequence-Space Synesthetes

2018

Contains fulltext : 219554.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Individuals with sequence-space synesthesia (SSS) perceive sequences like months, days and numbers in certain spatial arrangements. Several cognitive benefits have been associated with SSS, such as enhanced mental rotation, more vivid visual imagery and an advantage in spatial processing. The current study aimed to further investigate these cognitive benefits, focusing on spatial navigation skills, to explore if their enhanced sensitivity to spatial relations is reflected in enhanced navigational performance. Synesthetes were distinguished from controls by means of a questionnaire, a consistency test and drawings. A virtu…

Right-handers and left-handers have different representations of their own hand

1998

The visual control of our own hand when dealing with an object and the observation of interactions between other people's hand and objects can be involved in the construction of internal representations of our own hand, as well as in hand recognition processes. Therefore, a different effect on handedness recognition is expected when subjects are presented with hands holding objects with either a congruent or an incongruent type of grip. Such an experiment was carried out on right-handed and left-handed subjects. We expected that the different degree of lateralisation in motor activities observed in the two populations [J. Herron, Neuropsychology of left- handedness, Academic Press, New York…

2017

The Cognitive reserve (CR) hypothesis was put forward to account for the variability in cognitive performance of patients with similar degrees of brain pathology. Compensatory neural activity within the frontal lobes has often been associated with CR. For the first time we investigated the independent effects of two CR proxies, education and NART IQ, on measures of executive function, fluid intelligence, speed of information processing, verbal short term memory (vSTM), naming, and perception in a sample of 86 patients with focal, unilateral frontal lesions and 142 healthy controls. We fitted multiple linear regression models for each of the cognitive measures and found that only NART IQ pre…

Do aetiology, age and cogntive reserve affect executive performance?

2017

Background: The behavioral effect of frontal lesions may be influenced by confounding factors such as aetiology, age and cogntive reserve. Yet no studies have investigated their effects on patients with focal lesions. Objective: Is the grouping of patients with frontal lesions caused by stroke or tumours methodologically appropriate; does age affect cognitive performance, can cognitive reserve protect against cognitive impairment? Patients and Methods/Material and Methods: Cognitive performance was compared across a large sample of frontal patients with stroke, high or low grade tumour, or meningioma. The effect of age, education and NART IQ on the cognitive performance of patients with foc…

Differential Learning as a Key Training Approach to Improve Creative and Tactical Behavior in Soccer

2018

The aim of this study was to identify the effects of a differential-learning program, embedded in small-sided games, on the creative and tactical behavior of youth soccer players. Forty players from under-13 (U13) and under-15 (U15) were allocated into control and experimental groups and were tested using a randomized pretest to posttest design using small-sided games situations.The experimental group participated in a 5-month differential-learning program embodied in small-sided games situations, while the control group participated in a typical small-sided games training program. In-game creativity was assessed through notational analyses of the creative components, and the players' posit…

The Influence of Collective Behavior on Pacing in Endurance Competitions

2015

A number of theoretical models have been proposed in recent years to explain pacing strategies observed in individual competitive endurance events. These have typically related to the internal regulatory processes that inform the making of decisions relating to muscular work rate. Despite a substantial body of research which has investigated the influence of collective group dynamics on individual behaviors in various animal species, this issue has not been comprehensively studied in individual athletic events. This is somewhat surprising given that athletes often directly compete in close proximity to one another, and that collective behavior has also been observed in other human environme…

Lesion of areas 17/18/19: effects on the cat's performance in a binary detection task

1988

The ability of two cats to discriminate between two geometrical outline patterns in the presence of superimposed Gaussian visual noise — i.e. in a binary detection task — was tested before and after bilateral removal of cortical areas 17, 18 and 19. The detection probability PD was measured as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio. After a lesion of areas 17, 18 and 19 both cats were unable to carry out the discrimination tasks. Their detection performance dropped to chance level, but after an extensive phase of retraining (3 months) they regained the ability to discriminate visual patterns. It was thus possible to obtain detection curves and to determine a measure of a performance which …

“Pursuing Community Resilience through Outcome-Based Public Policies: Challenges and Opportunities for the Design of Performance Management Systems”

2017

The purpose of this symposium is to contribute to the ongoing debate on this topic in the public administration literature by exploring the contribution of performance management in the implementation of effective governance systems that may foster community resilience, especially to social “wicked” problems. The set of articles hosted in this issue provides a variegated mix of ideas and experiences in this field, encompassing different countries (from Northern to Southern Europe, and Canada), sectors (including labor, healthcare, tourism, and public utilities), and methodological approaches. An empirical perspective is adopted by the authors, involving case studies, interviews, and field r…

School performance and educational attainment of the children of immigrants in comparative perspective

2008

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Can we be satisfied with our football team? Evidence from spanish professional football.

2009

This article assesses the sporting performance of Spanish professional football teams at competition level, namely, League, King’s Cup, and European competitions (Champions League and Union of European Football Associations [UEFA] Cup). Then, the gap between the result obtained by a team at the end of a season and that expected according to its potential is used as a proxy of the degree of satisfaction that fans should feel: the narrower the gap the greater the level of satisfaction. Regarding methodology, Data Envelopment Analysis techniques and directional distance functions are used. Results reveal that most teams perform rather differently across competitions, the lower average performa…