Search results for "Levant"
showing 10 items of 133 documents
Earlier timbre processing of instrumental tones compared to equally complex spectrally rotated sounds as revealed by the mismatch negativity.
2014
Harmonically rich sounds have been shown to be processed more efficiently by the human brain compared to single sinusoidal tones. To control for stimulus complexity as a potentially confounding factor, tones and equally complex spectrally rotated sounds, have been used in the present study to investigate the role of the overtone series in sensory auditory processing in non-musicians. Timbre differences in instrumental tones with equal pitch elicited a MMN which was earlier compared to that elicited by the spectrally rotated sounds, indicating that harmonically rich tones are processed faster compared to non-musical sounds without an overtone series, even when pitch is not the relevant infor…
Cognitive control after distraction: event-related brain potentials (ERPs) dissociate between different processes of attentional allocation.
2008
Attentional reallocation after a distracting event is an important function of cognitive control. This process is tapped by the reorienting negativity (RON) event-related brain potential. It was argued that the RON reflects orientation of attention to relevant information in working memory. To test this hypothesis participants performed an auditory duration discrimination task. The stimuli were presented in a frequent standard or a rare deviant pitch with deviants resulting in behavioral distraction. Participants accomplished this task under two conditions: In the refocus condition participants were asked to respond to every stimulus; in the reorient condition participants were instructed t…
Mood-congruent bias and attention shifts in the different episodes of bipolar disorder
2013
An "affective" go/no-go task was used in the different episodes of bipolar patients (euthymic, depressed, and manic) to examine (1) the presence of a mood-congruent attentional bias; and (2) the patients' ability to inhibit and invert associations between stimuli and responses through blocks. A group of healthy individuals served as controls. Results revealed a mood-congruent attentional bias: patients in the manic episode processed positive information faster, whereas those in the depressive episode processed negative information faster. In contrast, neither euthymic patients nor healthy individuals showed any mood-congruent biases. Furthermore, there was a shift cost across blocks for hea…
Fear expression and return of fear following threat instruction with or without direct contingency experience
2016
Prior research showed that mere instructions about the contingency between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US) can generate fear reactions to the CS. Little is known, however, about the extent to which actual CS-US contingency experience adds anything beyond the effect of contingency instructions. Our results extend previous studies on this topic in that it included fear potentiated startle as an additional dependent variable and examined return of fear (ROF) following reinstatement. We observed that CS-US pairings can enhance fear reactions beyond the effect of contingency instructions. Moreover, for all measures of fear, instructions elicited immediate fear reac…
Bottom-up influences on working memory: behavioral and electrophysiological distraction varies with distractor strength.
2004
Abstract. The present study investigates bottom-up effects serving the optimal balance between focusing attention on relevant information and distractibility by potentially significant events outside the focus of attention. We tested whether distraction, indicated by behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) measures, varies with the strength of task-irrelevant deviances. Twenty subjects performed a tone-duration discrimination task (200 or 400 ms sinusoidal tones presented equiprobably). The stimuli were presented with frequent standard (p = 0.84; 1000 Hz) or infrequent deviant (p = 0.16) pitch. These task-irrelevant pitch changes consisted in a frequency increase/decrease of 1%,…
Distraction of task-relevant information processing by irrelevant changes in auditory, visual, and bimodal stimulus features: A behavioral and event-…
2009
Distractibility with auditory, visual, and bimodal stimulus changes was investigated using an audio-visual distraction paradigm. Participants were asked to discriminate between equiprobable short and long audio-visual stimuli. Infrequently, the auditory, the visual, or both parts of the stimuli changed. These rare deviations (deviants) were irrelevant for the actual task. The influence of the three types of deviant stimuli on the processing of task-relevant information was assessed with behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures assuming that bimodal deviants would lead to an increase in distraction. Behavioral and ERP results did not support this assumption, as reaction time (RT…
Alla ricerca dei fattori rilevanti nell’adozione dei sistemi di gestione della performance nelle amministrazioni pubbliche territoriali. L’analisi di…
2013
La ricerca scientifica ha dimostrato che la gestione della performance nelle amministrazioni pubbliche sta oggi spostando il proprio focus dalla mera attività di raccolta e rendicontazione di dati alla generazione di informazioni atte a supportare la formulazione di decisioni. L’analisi comparativa dei casi di studio analizzati in questo articolo mira ad identificare i fattori critici sottostanti alla progettazione e all’utilizzo dei sistemi di gestione della performance nelle amministrazioni regionali. Da questa analisi emerge che alcune variabili risultano essenziali ai fini di un’efficace adozione dei sistemi di performance management. Tra queste variabili sono annoverabili: il ruolo del…
Design and implementation of an augmented reality application for rock art visualization in Cova dels Cavalls (Spain)
2019
[EN] Prehistoric rock art paintings, specifically rock-shelters exposed to environmental and anthropogenic factors, are usually faint and severely damaged, being them difficult to identify and understand by visitors. Augmented Reality (AR) supplements reality with virtual information superimposed onto the real world. This sensor-based technology in smartphones/tablets can improve the paintings experience displaying the 2D digital tracings overlapped onto the real scene (rock with faint paintings). This paper presents an AR application (app) developed in Cova dels Cavalls that shows a recreation of a possible original composition full of motifs with descriptive information to improve current…
Levantamiento 3D para el estudio arqueológico y la reconstrucción virtual del Santuario de Isis en la antigua Lilybaeum (Italia)
2020
[EN] In recent years, the use of three-dimensional (3D) models in cultural and archaeological heritage for documentation and dissemination purposes has increased. New geomatics technologies have significantly reduced the time spent on fieldwork surveys and data processing. The archaeological remains can be documented and reconstructed in a digital 3D environment thanks to the new 3D survey technologies. Furthermore, the products generated by modern surveying technologies can be reconstructed in a virtual environment on effective archaeological bases and hypotheses coming from a detailed 3D data analysis. However, the choice of technologies that should be used to get the best results for dif…
Using mechanical experiments to study ground stone tool use: Exploring the formation of percussive and grinding wear traces on limestone tools
2021
Ground Stone Tools (GST) have been identified in several Levantine archaeological sites dating to the Middle Paleolithic. These tools, frequently made of limestone, are often interpreted based on their morphology and damage as having been used for knapping flint, and sometimes for breaking animal bones or processing vegetal materials as well. However, the lack of experimental referential collections on limestone is a major obstacle for the identification of diagnostic traces on these types of tools and raw material. In this sense, the understanding of the specific function of these GST and the association between tool types and activity often remains unknown or merely speculative. Recent di…