Search results for "Gestures"

Feeling addressed! The neural processing of social communicative cues in patients with major depression

2020

Abstract The feeling of being addressed is the first step in a complex processing stream enabling successful social communication. Social impairments are a relevant characteristic of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). Here, we investigated a mechanism which—if impaired—might contribute to withdrawal or isolation in MDD, namely, the neural processing of social cues such as body orientation and gesture. During funtional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquisition, 33 patients with MDD and 43 healthy control subjects watched video clips of a speaking actor: one version with a gesture accompanying the speech and one without gesture. Videos were filmed simultaneously from two …

Human newborns match tongue protrusion of disembodied human and robotic mouths

2011

International audience; No evidence had been provided so far of newborns' capacity to give a matching response to 2D stimuli. We report evidence from 18 newborns who were presented with three types of stimuli on a 2D screen. The stimuli were video-recorded displays of tongue protrusion shown by: (a) a human face, (b) a human tongue from a disembodied mouth, and (c) an artificial tongue from a robotic mouth. Compared to a baseline condition, neonates increased significantly their tongue protrusion when seeing disembodied human and artificial tongue movements, but not when seeing a 2D full-face protruding tongue. This result was interpreted as revealing the exploration of top-heavy patterns o…

Supramodal neural processing of abstract information conveyed by speech and gesture

2013

Abstractness and modality of interpersonal communication have a considerable impact on comprehension. They are relevant for determining thoughts and constituting internal models of the environment. Whereas concrete object-related information can be represented in mind irrespective of language, abstract concepts require a representation in speech. Consequently, modality-independent processing of abstract information can be expected. Here we investigated the neural correlates of abstractness (abstract vs. concrete) and modality (speech vs. gestures), to identify an abstractness-specific supramodal neural network. During fMRI data acquisition 20 participants were presented with videos of an ac…

Is displacement possible without language? Evidence from preverbal infants and chimpanzees

2013

Is displacement possible without language? This question was addressed in a recent work by Liszkowski and colleagues (Liszkowski, Schafer, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). The authors carried out an experiment to demonstrate that 12-month-old prelinguistic infants can communicate about absent entities by using pointing gestures, while chimpanzees cannot. The main hypothesis of their study is that displacement does not depend on language but is, however, exclusively human and instead depends on species-specific social-cognitive human skills. Against this hypothesis, we will argue that a symbolic representation is needed to intentionally communicate absence and that this symbolic representa…

Global functorial hypergestures over general skeleta for musical performance

2016

Musical performance theory using Lagrangian formalism, inspired by physical string theory, has been described in previous research. That approach was restricted to zero-addressed hypergestures of local character, and also to digraph skeleta of simple arrow type. In this article, we extend the theory to hypergestures that are defined functorially over general topological categories as addresses, are global, and are also defined for general skeleta. We also prove several versions of the important Escher Theorem for this general setup. This extension is highly motivated by theoretical and practical musical performance requirements of which we give concrete examples.

Hypergestures in Complex Time: Creative Performance Between Symbolic and Physical Reality

2015

Musical performance and composition imply hypergestural transformation from symbolic to physical reality and vice versa. But most scores require movements at infinite physical speed that can only be performed approximately by trained musicians. To formally solve this divide between symbolic notation and physical realization, we introduce complex time (\(\mathbb {C}\)-time) in music. In this way, infinite physical speed is “absorbed” by a finite imaginary speed. Gestures thus comprise thought (in imaginary time) and physical realization (in real time) as a world-sheet motion in space-time, corresponding to ideas from physical string theory. Transformation from imaginary to real time gives us…

Some Mathematical and Computational Relations Between Timbre and Color

2022

In physics, timbre is a complex phenomenon, like color. Musical timbres are given by the superposition of sinusoidal signals, corresponding to longitudinal acoustic waves. Colors are produced by the superposition of transverse electromagnetic waves in the domain of visible light. Regarding human perception, specific timbre variations provoke effects similar to color variations, for example, a rising tension or a relaxation effect. We aim to create a computational framework to modulate timbres and colors. To this end, we consider categorical groupoids, where colors (timbres) are objects and color variations (timbre variations) are morphisms, and functors between them, which are induced by co…

Performative Habitats and the aesthetics of ordinary gestures

2022

Il saggio analizza il progetto artistico di Egle Oddo, Performative Habitats, alla luce dell’estetica dei gesti ordinari. Con Performative Habitats biologia, botanica e scienze naturali incontrano i molteplici linguaggi delle discipline artistiche. In un momento storico in cui il cambiamento climatico è tra le emergenze primarie, l’artista si prefigge l’obiettivo di riconvertire le pratiche quotidiane e stabilire nuove modalità di produzione artistica che siano sostenibili per l’ambiente. The essay explores Egle Oddo's artistic project, Performative Habitats, in light of the aesthetics of ordinary gestures. With Performative Habitats biology, botany and natural sciences meet the multiple la…

2019

The development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of the structural combinatoriality of a language, has been widely investigated in relation to reading (dis)ability across languages. However, the extent to which knowledge of phonemic units may interact with spoken language organization in (transparent) alphabetical languages has hardly been investigated. The present study examined whether phonemic awareness correlates with coarticulation degree, commonly used as a metric for estimating the size of children's production units. A speech production task was designed to test for developmental differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree in 41 German children from 4 to 7 years of a…

Perception and replication of planar sonic gestures

2012

As tables, boards, and walls become surfaces where interaction can be supported by auditory displays, it becomes important to know how accurately and effectively a spatial gesture can be rendered by means of an array of loudspeakers embedded in the surface. Two experiments were designed and performed to assess: (i) how sequences of sound pulses are perceived as gestures when the pulses are distributed in space and time along a line; (ii) how the timing of pulses affects the perceived and reproduced continuity of sequences; and (iii) how effectively a second parallel row of speakers can extend sonic gestures to a two-dimensional space. Results show that azimuthal trajectories can be effectiv…