Search results for "visual"

Graphic emotion: a critical rhetorical analysis of online children-related charity communication in poland

2019

This study explores dominant applications of graphic affordances in a sample of children-related charity appeals collected from the official websites of nine prominent Polish foundations in late 2016. It provides a systematic description of salient typographic and iconographic resources and an assessment of their rhetorical potential to solicit donations. The analysis focuses on three dominant discursive strategies used by charity communicators, namely how graphic affordances project utility (logos), confidence (ethos) and engagement (pathos). The article offers a critique of strategic emotional stimulation through aestheticized imagery and infantilizing graphics that replace arguments with…

No relation between digit ratio (2D:4D) and visual attention patterns to sexually preferred and non-preferred stimuli

2018

Abstract Digit ratio (2D:4D) is a marker of prenatal androgenic exposure that is correlated with different behaviour patterns. Here, we explore the relationship between 2D:4D ratio and early versus late attention to sexually preferred stimuli using an eye-tracking paradigm with 78 androphilic or gynephilic men and women. We simultaneously presented preferred and non-preferred adult stimuli and assessed visual attention across time to first fixation and total duration fixation on entire body and three specific areas (face, chest and pelvis), and investigated whether digit ratio was related to visual attentional biases towards sexually preferred stimuli. As expected, participants tended to fi…

2020

Abstract Background/Objective Assessments of health can be biased by response shift effects. One method for detecting such effects is the use of anchoring vignettes. The aim of this study was to analyze the relationship between participants’ self-assessed health state and their assessments of these vignettes. Method A total of 342 cardiovascular patients assessed their own state of health on a 0-100 visual analogue scale. The patients additionally assessed two vignettes featuring fictional persons suffering from specific complaints. A sample of the general population (N = 1,236) served as controls. Results The participants rated the health state of the vignette character featuring physical …

Visual, Verbal and Everyday Memory 2 Years After Bariatric Surgery: Poorer Memory Performance at 1-Year Follow-Up

2021

Severe obesity has been associated with reduced performance on tests of verbal memory in bariatric surgery candidates. There is also some evidence that bariatric surgery leads to improved verbal memory, yet these findings need further elucidation. Little is known regarding postoperative memory changes in the visual domain and how patients subjectively experience their everyday memory after surgery. The aim of the current study was to repeat and extend prior findings on postoperative memory by investigating visual, verbal, and self-reported everyday memory following surgery, and to examine whether weight loss and somatic comorbidity predict memory performance. The study was a prospective, ob…

Towards Bankruptcy Prediction: Deep Sentiment Mining to Detect Financial Distress from Business Management Reports

2018

Due to their disclosure required by law, business management reports have become publicly available for a large number of companies, and these reports offer the opportunity to assess the financial health or distress of a company, both quantitatively from the balance sheets and qualitatively from the text. In this paper, we analyze the potential of deep sentiment mining from the textual parts of business management reports and aim to detect signals for financial distress. We (1) created the largest corpus of business reports analyzed qualitatively to date, (2) defined a non-trivial target variable based on the so-called Altman Z-score, (3) developed a filtering of sentences based on class-co…

On the Objective Evaluation of Motion Cueing in Vehicle Simulations

2021

Motion-based simulators are used for a variety of applications, such as research, education, entertainment and training. In fact, motion cues are required to achieve the highest regulatory certifications in training vehicle simulators. Nonetheless, the reproduction of self-motion cues presents technological and economic limitations that are not present in the generation of audiovisual cues. For this reason, the generated motion does not generally match the expected one. Therefore, it is necessary to define means to assess the suitability/fidelity of the generated motion cues. After more than 50 years of motion-based vehicle simulation, no mechanism has been universally accepted as the stand…

How is the Driver's Workload Influenced by the Road Environment?

2017

Abstract This paper focuses on the study of the driver's workload while driving on a rural two-lane road with different traffic flows. The aim of the research is to examine a parameter that could be representative of the driving effort, quite sensible to the external factors that cause disturbance to the regular driving activity. To solve this problem, the authors used a specific instrumented vehicle for monitoring some physiological parameters of the driver (as the eye movements and the Galvanic Skin Resistance), referring their values to the road context. The results are very interesting and confirm that knowing the workload is useful to improve the road safety only if it is related to th…

Donald Friedman's Interviews : Writers as Visual Artists

2018

With Volume 39, “Gestures and their Traces” INTERFACES, now an on-line journal, began its third iteration. In volume 40, we welcome Donald Friedman, novelist, essayist, and preeminently the author of The Writer’s Brush, Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers, as a regular contributor to the journal. In the process of researching The Writer’s Brush, he video interviewed a number of contemporary writers; he is editing these tapes and these will begin a new feature of the journal. The fir...

Women Scientists as Decor: The Image of Scientists in Spanish Press Pictures

2017

Women are still less present in scientific areas than men. This study analyzes the visual representation of women scientists in Spanish press and concludes that they are also underrepresented in newspapers. We analyze 1,134 photographs published in 2014 and 2015 in the science news sections of the four largest distribution Spanish newspapers. A tendency to present men more often as the protagonists of the information and women as a visual resource is also observed. This text proposes the need for the media to be aware of such underrepresentation and to match the number of men and women in graphic materials.

Entangled photographers: Agents and actants in preschoolers’ photography talk

2020

Photographs taken by young children have engendered a growing amount of research across diverse academic disciplines. Photographs have been used as visual data for analysing for example children’s social relations and well-being. However, only a few studies have addressed the photographic practices of young children as means for them to explore, imagine and coexist with the surrounding world. In this article, I introduce a case study that draws on research from art education and sociology of childhood. The data were gathered in a photography workshop in a Finnish early childhood education and care centre, where fourteen preschoolers discussed their photographs inspired by contemporary Finni…