scholarly journals Using child-friendly movie stimuli to study the development of face, place, and object regions from age 3 to 12 years

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederik S. Kamps ◽  
Hilary Richardson ◽  
N. Apurva S. Ratan Murty ◽  
Nancy Kanwisher ◽  
Rebecca Saxe
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Change ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Functional Change ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Data Retention ◽  
Early Maturity ◽  
Subject Specific ◽  
The Face ◽  
Child Friendly ◽  
Posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus

Scanning young children while watching short, engaging, commercially-produced movies has emerged as a promising approach for increasing data retention and quality. Movie stimuli also evoke a richer variety of cognitive processes than traditional experiments - allowing the study of multiple aspects of brain development simultaneously. However, because these stimuli are uncontrolled, it is unclear how effectively distinct profiles of brain activity can be distinguished from the resulting data. Here we develop an approach for identifying multiple distinct subject-specific Regions of Interest (ssROIs) using fMRI data collected during movie-viewing. We focused on the test case of higher-level visual regions selective for faces, scenes, and objects. Adults (N=13) were scanned while viewing a 5.5 minute child-friendly movie, as well as a traditional experiment with isolated faces, scenes, and objects. We found that just 2.7 minutes of movie data could identify subject-specific face, scene, and object regions. While successful, the movie approach was still less effective than a traditional localizer. Having validated our approach in adults, we then used the same methods on movie data collected from 3-12-year-old children (N=122). Movie response timecourses in 3-year-old childrens face, scene, and object regions were already significantly and specifically predicted by timecourses from the corresponding regions in adults. We also found evidence of continued developmental change, particularly in the face-selective posterior superior temporal sulcus. Taken together, our results reveal both early maturity and functional change in face, scene, and object regions, and more broadly highlight the promise of short, child-friendly movies for developmental cognitive neuroscience.

Inefficient Encoding as an Explanation for Age-Related Deficits in Recollection-Based Processing

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 148-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Friedman ◽  
Ray Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Memory Performance ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Semantic Retrieval ◽  
Age Related ◽  
The Face ◽  
Episodic Memories

A cardinal feature of aging is a decline in episodic memory (EM). Nevertheless, there is evidence that some older adults may be able to “compensate” for failures in recollection-based processing by recruiting brain regions and cognitive processes not normally recruited by the young. We review the evidence suggesting that age-related declines in EM performance and recollection-related brain activity (left-parietal EM effect; LPEM) are due to altered processing at encoding. We describe results from our laboratory on differences in encoding- and retrieval-related activity between young and older adults. We then show that, relative to the young, in older adults brain activity at encoding is reduced over a brain region believed to be crucial for successful semantic elaboration in a 400–1,400-ms interval (left inferior prefrontal cortex, LIPFC; Johnson, Nessler, & Friedman, 2013 ; Nessler, Friedman, Johnson, & Bersick, 2007 ; Nessler, Johnson, Bersick, & Friedman, 2006 ). This reduced brain activity is associated with diminished subsequent recognition-memory performance and the LPEM at retrieval. We provide evidence for this premise by demonstrating that disrupting encoding-related processes during this 400–1,400-ms interval in young adults affords causal support for the hypothesis that the reduction over LIPFC during encoding produces the hallmarks of an age-related EM deficit: normal semantic retrieval at encoding, reduced subsequent episodic recognition accuracy, free recall, and the LPEM. Finally, we show that the reduced LPEM in young adults is associated with “additional” brain activity over similar brain areas as those activated when older adults show deficient retrieval. Hence, rather than supporting the compensation hypothesis, these data are more consistent with the scaffolding hypothesis, in which the recruitment of additional cognitive processes is an adaptive response across the life span in the face of momentary increases in task demand due to poorly-encoded episodic memories.

Learning to See Biological Motion: Brain Activity Parallels Behavior

2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (9) ◽  
pp. 1669-1679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily D. Grossman ◽  
Randolph Blake ◽  
Chai-Youn Kim
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Biological Motion ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Superior Temporal Sulcus ◽  
Fusiform Face Area ◽  
Face Area ◽  
Perceptual Performance ◽  
Trained Observers ◽  
Posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus

Individuals improve with practice on a variety of perceptual tasks, presumably reflecting plasticity in underlying neural mechanisms. We trained observers to discriminate biological motion from scrambled (nonbiological) motion and examined whether the resulting improvement in perceptual performance was accompanied by changes in activation within the posterior superior temporal sulcus and the fusiform “face area,” brain areas involved in perception of biological events. With daily practice, initially naive observers became more proficient at discriminating biological from scrambled animations embedded in an array of dynamic “noise” dots, with the extent of improvement varying among observers. Learning generalized to animations never seen before, indicating that observers had not simply memorized specific exemplars. In the same observers, neural activity prior to and following training was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neural activity within the posterior superior temporal sulcus and the fusiform “face area” reflected the participants' learning: BOLD signals were significantly larger after training in response both to animations experienced during training and to novel animations. The degree of learning was positively correlated with the amplitude changes in BOLD signals.

European Strategic Autonomy: The Test Case of Iran

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-477
Author(s):  
Sascha Lohmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Test Case ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Special Purpose Vehicle ◽  
The Face ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Security Actor ◽  
Strategic Autonomy

Abstract The ideal of the European Union (EU) as a global peace and security actor is increasingly clashing with the reality of a multipolar world defined by militarised conflict, and a loosening of the formerly close trans-Atlantic relationship with the United States. European policy-makers have identified strategic autonomy as a possible remedy in the face of a growing number of internal and external security threats. This paper adds to the conceptualisation of strategic autonomy by contextualising its current usage and political genealogy. Empirically, European strategic autonomy is examined concerning the efforts to preserve the Iranian nuclear deal after the Trump administration had ceased US participation in May 2018. In particular, the paper assesses the European response to counter the re-imposed unilateral United States (US) sanctions against European individuals and entities by updating the so-called blocking regulation, and setting up a special purpose vehicle (spv) for facilitating trade with Iran. The results show that the European struggle toward achieving strategic autonomy has largely failed, but that it holds valuable lessons to approximate this ideal in the future.

scholarly journals Emotion Modulation of the Body-Selective Areas in the Developing Brain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paddy Ross ◽  
Beatrice de Gelder ◽  
Frances Crabbe ◽  
Marie-Hélène Grosbras
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Of Interest ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Childhood And Adolescence ◽  
Body Perception ◽  
Body Area ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
First Time ◽  
Posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus

AbstractEmotions are strongly conveyed by the human body and the ability to recognize emotions from body posture or movement is still developing through childhood and adolescence. To date, there are very few studies exploring how these behavioural observations are paralleled by functional brain development. Furthermore, there are currently no studies exploring the development of emotion modulation in these areas. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the brain activity of 25 children (age 6-11), 18 adolescents (age 12-17) and 26 adults while they passively viewed short videos of angry, happy or neutral body movements. We observed that when viewing bodies generally, adults showed higher activity than children bilaterally in the body-selective areas; namely the extra-striate body area (EBA), fusiform body area (FBA), posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and amygdala (AMY). Adults also showed higher activity than adolescents, but only in right hemisphere body-selective areas. Crucially, however, we found that there were no age differences in the emotion modulation of activity in these areas. These results indicate, for the first time, that despite activity selective to body perception increasing across childhood and adolescence, emotion modulation of these areas in adult-like from 7 years of age.Conflict of InterestThe author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Emmanuel Levinas and the Problem of Meaningless Suffering: the Holocaust as a Test Case

Horizons ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
Marie L. Baird
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Christian Spirituality ◽  
Johann Baptist Metz ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

AbstractJohann Baptist Metz has exhorted Christian theologians to discard “system concepts” in favor of “subject concepts” in their theologizing. This revisioning of Christian theology recovers the primacy of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the individual from totalizing doctrinal formulations and systems that function, for Metz, without reference to the subject. In short, a revisionist Christian theology in light of the Holocaust recovers the preeminence of the inviolability of individual human life.How can such a revisioning be accomplished in the realm of Christian spirituality? This article will utilize the thought of Emmanuel Levinas to assert the primacy of ethics as “first philosophy” replacing ontology, and by implication the ontological foundations undergirding Christian spirituality, with the ethical relation. Such a relation is the basis for a new Christian spirituality that posits the primacy of merciful and compasionate action in the face of conditions of life in extremity.

scholarly journals The Trouble Interpreting fMRI Studies in Populations with Cerebrovascular Risk: The Use of a Subject-Specific Hemodynamic Response Function in a Study of Age, Vascular Risk, and Memory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian M. McDonough ◽  
Andrew Bender ◽  
Lawrence Patihis ◽  
Elizabeth A. Stinson ◽  
Sarah K. Letang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Response Function ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Hemodynamic Response ◽  
Memory Encoding ◽  
Vascular Risk ◽  
Hemodynamic Response Function ◽  
Maximum Peak ◽  
Brain Vasculature ◽  
Subject Specific ◽  
Related Design

AbstractFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is commonly used to investigate the neural bases of behavior ranging from basic cognitive mechanisms to aging to psychological disorders. However, the BOLD signal captured by fMRI is an indirect measure of neural function and is affected by many factors that are non-neural in origin. These non-neural factors, however, do affect brain vasculature such as the shape and timing of the hemodynamic response function (HRF) during task-evoked fMRI that, in turn, can cause inappropriate and/or misleading interpretations of fMRI differences between groups. In this study, we tested the proposition that vascular health risks, which often go unmeasured in neuroimaging studies, and aging interact to modify the shape and/or timing of the HRF (height, time-to-peak, width), which then affect the differences in patterns of brain activity in a task-evoked memory encoding paradigm. Adult participants (aged 20–74) answered questions about their health history and underwent two fMRI tasks: viewing of a flashing checkerboard using a slow event-related design and a paired associates memory encoding task during a fast event-related design. We found that aging and vascular risk had the largest impacts on the maximum peak value of the HRF. Using a subject-specific HRF resulted in an overall dampening of the estimated brain activity in both task-positive and task-negative regions due to a reduction in the inter-individual variance of that activity. Across three vascular risk factors, using a subject-specific HRF resulted in more consistent brain regions that reached significance and larger effect sizes compared with the canonical HRF. A slight advantage in the reliability of brain-behavior correlations also was found. The findings from this study have far reaching consequences for the interpretation of task-evoked fMRI activity, especially in populations known to experience alterations to brain vasculature including adults of all ages that have higher vascular risk, the majority of older adults, and people with neurocognitive disorders in which vasculature differences may play a role including dementia.HighlightsOlder age was associated with smaller maximum peak of the hemodynamic response.Younger and middle-aged adults with more vascular risk had higher HRF peaks.Using a subject-specific HRF resulted in a “dampening” of brain activity.A subject-specific HRF resulted in more consistent aging and vascular risk effects.

scholarly journals Three-dimensional face recognition using variance-based registration and subject-specific descriptors

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 172988141985171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naeem Iqbal Ratyal ◽  
Imtiaz Ahmad Taj ◽  
Muhammad Sajid ◽  
Nouman Ali ◽  
Anzar Mahmood ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Face Recognition ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Recognition Algorithm ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Face Images ◽  
Subject Specific ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Depth Curves

Face recognition underpins numerous applications; however, the task is still challenging mainly due to the variability of facial pose appearance. The existing methods show competitive performance but they are still short of what is needed. This article presents an effective three-dimensional pose invariant face recognition approach based on subject-specific descriptors. This results in state-of-the-art performance and delivers competitive accuracies. In our method, the face images are registered by transforming their acquisition pose into frontal view using three-dimensional variance of the facial data. The face recognition algorithm is initialized by detecting iso-depth curves in a coordinate plane perpendicular to the subject gaze direction. In this plane, discriminating keypoints are detected on the iso-depth curves of the facial manifold to define subject-specific descriptors using subject-specific regions. Importantly, the proposed descriptors employ Kernel Fisher Analysis-based features leading to the face recognition process. The proposed approach classifies unseen faces by pooling performance figures obtained from underlying classification algorithms. On the challenging data sets, FRGC v2.0 and GavabDB, our method obtains face recognition accuracies of 99.8% and 100% yielding superior performance compared to the existing methods.

A model for the conservation of interactive electroacoustic repertoire: analysis, reconstruction, and performance in the face of technological obsolescence

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID BROOKE WETZEL
Keyword(s):  
Test Case ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
Interactive Electronics ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
Specific Device ◽  
The Face ◽  
Available Technology ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Stage Analysis

This paper presents a three-stage model (analysis, reconstruction and performance) for the conservation of interactive electroacoustic works for which the original technology is now obsolete or otherwise unavailable. The first stage, analysis, is a detailed documentation of the electronic processes and effects required for each work in a format that is independent of any specific device or system. The analysis provides a blueprint for future realisations using available technology. The second stage, reconstruction, provides a working performance resource, as well as a test case for the validity of the analysis. Reconstructed systems are then tested and refined through the third stage, performance. With repeated performances, compositions gain wider exposure and may be evaluated by listeners on their musical merits. To date, the author has analysed, reconstructed and performed several works for clarinet and interactive electronics. Each performance has informed the continued development of the newly reconstructed system, and has in some cases led to corrections to the underlying analysis. As a classically trained clarinettist and computer musician, the author's approach to the conservation of electroacoustic repertoire comes from a desire to find performable works and to keep them viable and accessible for as long as possible. Four works for clarinet and interactive electronics (by Musgrave, Pennycook, Kramer, and Lippe) are presented as test cases for this model.

The Application of Global Education in Child-Friendly School: Descriptive Study in Primary School in Sumedang

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Hany Handayani ◽  
Pupung Rahayu ◽  
Agusfianudin .
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Primary School ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
Global Education ◽  
Student Understanding ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
School Students ◽  
The Face ◽  
Green School ◽  
Child Friendly

Integration of global education in schools is considered insignificant by teachers, whereas in the face of the era of globalization, education is very important given to elementary school students, so with this consideration this research is carried out. The method used in this study is a descriptive method of the International Green School Primary School in Sumedang which implements child-friendly school education. This study aims to find out how schools apply global education to subjects in the classroom. The technique of data collection is done through semi-structured interviews, observation and documentation. This study was analyzed using a grounding approach. The findings of this study highlight the implementation of global education in child-friendly schools at the Green School Elementary School. Based on these findings, Elementary School teachers found learning patterns in the implementation of global education in Primary Schools. The results obtained are: 1) increasing student understanding of international and intercultural issues and, 2) increasing student understanding of strategies to participate locally, nationally, and internationally.

Islamophobia and the ECtHRA Test Case for Positive Subsidiarity for the Protection of Europe’s Long-term Migrants?

2021 ◽  
pp. 196-216
Author(s):  
Eva Brems
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Test Case ◽  
European Court ◽  
Margin Of Appreciation ◽  
Minority Religion ◽  
The Face

A reflection on the human rights of migrants in Europe cannot avoid the issue of racism. Resistance to immigration in Europe is fuelled to a large extent by resistance to the ‘otherness’ of migrants. More specifically, the ‘otherness’ that is most central to today’s debates on migration and integration in Europe is Islam. Thus, racism is commonly expressed as Islamophobia, and Islamophobia is both expressed in, and fuelled by, rights-restrictive rules that specifically target Islamic practices. The focus of the analysis in this chapter is on the messages the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is sending to national authorities regarding their approaches to multicultural conflicts over Islamic minority practices. This is situated in the framework of ‘positive subsidiarity’. It is argued that, even when the margin of appreciation is a wide one, the Court has a responsibility to offer guidance to states parties on three levels: substantive, procedural, and discursive. The chapter then explores the messages sent by the Court to states parties in the field of the restriction of Islamic minority practices. First it does so by comparing what is widely considered the Court’s ‘worst practice’ in this field—the face veil cases—with its ‘best practice’ in a different, but comparable field—the ‘gay propaganda’ cases. After that, the chapter continues the analysis on the basis of a broader case law corpus that includes all cases regarding the accommodation of Islamic practice in countries in which Islam is a minority religion.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document