Search results for "Control"
showing 10 items of 13168 documents
Visual illusions and the control of children arm movements.
2001
The aim of the present study was to determine whether children like adults (Gentilucci M, Chieffi S, Daprati E, Saetti MC, Toni I. Visual illusion and action. Neuropsychologia 1996;34:369-76; Gentilucci M, Daprati E, Gangitano M, Toni I. Eye position tunes the contribution of allocentric and egocentric information to target localisation in human goal directed arm movements. Neurosci Lett 1997;222:123-6) are influenced by visual illusions when they transform visual information in motor command. Children and adults pointed to a shaft extremity of the Müller-Lyer configurations, as well as to an extremity of a control configuration. Movements were executed in two experimental conditions. In th…
The effect of physical activity on long-term income.
2013
Abstract Empirical evidence for the direct effects of physical activities on long-term labor market outcomes is limited. This state of affairs is surprising, because there is a growing amount of support on the positive effects of physical activities on health on the one hand and on the effects of good health on labor market outcomes on the other hand. We examine the long-term income effects of physical activity using a large sample ( N = 5042) of male twins from Finland (Older Finnish Twin Cohort Study, 1975, 1981, 1990), matched to detailed register-based income data (Finnish Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data, 1990–2004). Our primary income measure is calculated over a fifteen-year peri…
Three-dimensional (3D) versus two-dimensional (2D) laparoscopic adrenalectomy: A case-control study
2016
Abstract Introduction Laparoscopic adrenalectomy is today considered the gold standard of treatment for adrenal tumors. The development of high definition cameras does not eliminate the major limitation of two-dimensional (2D) laparoscopy: lack of depth perception and loss of spatial orientation. Tree-dimensional (3D) HD laparoscopy was developed as an alternative to conventional 2D laparoscopy. Methods We report our experience with use of 3D vision system for laparoscopic adrenalectomy. Between January 2009 and March 2015 we performed a total of 52 laparoscopic adrenalectomies. In this case-control study we considered 13 laparoscopic adrenalectomies performed with three-dimensional (3D) vi…
Preparedness for landing after a self-initiated fall.
2012
A startling auditory stimulus (SAS) causes a faster execution of voluntary actions when applied together with the imperative signal in reaction time tasks (the StartReact effect). However, speeding up reaction time may not be the best strategy in all tasks. After a self-initiated fall, the program for landing has to be time-locked to foot contact to avoid damage, and therefore advanced execution of the program would not be convenient. We examined the effects of SAS on the landing motor program in 8 healthy subjects that were requested to let themselves fall from platforms either 50 or 80 cm high at the perception of a visual imperative signal and land on specific targets. In trials at rand…
Functional polymorphism in the neuropeptide Y gene promoter (rs16147) is associated with serum leptin levels and waist-hip ratio in women
2013
<b><i>Objective:</i></b> The neuropeptide-Y (NP-Y) gene is a strong candidate gene in the pathophysiology of obesity-linked behavior, and several single-nucleotide polymorphisms of NP-Y have already been linked to body weight and appetite. However, the results from current studies remain inconclusive. The aim of the present study was to test whether a certain functional genetic variant (SNP rs16147) in the NP-Y promoter gene is associated with serum leptin levels and body fat distribution. <b><i>Method:</i></b> We genotyped and measured the serum leptin levels of the NP-Y rs16147 polymorphism in 1,097 Caucasian subjects in the context of a pop…
The effect of associative strength on semantic priming in schizophrenia
2017
The present research was designed to investigate the pattern of semantic priming in schizophrenia as a function of strength of association (or semantic distance between concepts in the semantic network). Thirty schizophrenia patients, without formal thought disorder, and twenty-nine healthy controls participated in a lexical decision task in which prime-target associative strength (strong, weak and not related) and stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA: 250 ms and 750 ms) were manipulated. Patients and controls showed the same associative strength effect on RTs. In the short SOA condition priming effects were obtained for both strong and weak prime-target associative conditions. However in the lon…
Effects of kinematics constraints on hand trajectory during whole-body lifting tasks
2000
Trajectories of the hands and whole-body center of mass were studied during whole-body lifting tasks. The movements of different parts of the body were monitored with the ELITE system. Subjects were instructed to lift to shoulder height an object placed at one of two distances (5-45 cm) before them on the floor. The lifts were performed both with and without kinematics constraints (i.e. to produce a straight hand trajectory while lifting, and to lift without any instructions, respectively). Hand trajectories were roughly straight when performed under the constrained condition, but curved when performed without instruction. Hand velocity curves showed bell-shaped profiles. In both groups, bo…
From development to aging: Holistic face perception in children, younger and older adults.
2015
Few published reports examine the development of holistic face processing across the lifespan such that face-specific processes are adequately differentiated from general developmental effects. To address this gap in the literature, we used the complete design of the composite paradigm (Richler & Gauthier, 2014) with faces and non-face control objects (watches) to investigate holistic processing in children (8-10years), young adults (20-32years) and older adults (65-78years). Several modifications to past research designs were introduced to improve the ability to draw conclusions about the development of holistic processing in terms of face-specificity, response bias, and age-related differ…
Double-decision lexical tasks in thought-disordered schizophrenic patients: a path towards cognitive remediation?
2005
Abstract It has been shown that schizophrenics have certain difficulties in the processing of semantic context. These difficulties have usually been evaluated using lexical decision tasks with semantic priming. In this study, we chose to examine the idea of an abnormality in the early stages of semantic context processing in thought-disordered schizophrenics using two double lexical decision tasks: one with a high (25%) and one with a low (15%) proportion of related words to assess the participants’ competency in controlled and possibly also more automatic context processing. The results obtained in 40 control participants and 40 schizophrenic patients revealed no significant differences in…
The role of perceptual information in familiarity-based scene recognition.
2012
A method to analyze the role of familiarity in recognizing pictures of everyday scenes is introduced. The idea is to manipulate two within-subjects conditions: an experimental condition where the scenes repeat perceptual information (e.g. buildings and/or vehicles) and a control condition. The results show the two conditions did not differ in terms of hit rates, but in the experimental condition there were significantly fewer false alarms, yielding better results, which supports the findings of past research studies that have used verbal materials. This perceptual facilitation was maintained throughout a week-long retention interval. Finally, a detailed analysis of this facilitation shows i…