scholarly journals Sleep, Little Baby: The Calming Effects of Prenatal Speech Exposure on Newborns’ Sleep and Heartrate

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adelheid Lang ◽  
Renata del Giudice ◽  
Manuel Schabus
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Stimulation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Auditory Stimuli ◽  
Deep Sleep ◽  
Nursery Rhyme ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Behavioral States ◽  
Calming Effect ◽  
Basic Level ◽  
Wake State

In a pilot study, 34 fetuses were stimulated daily with a maternal spoken nursery rhyme from week 34 of gestation onward and re-exposed two and five weeks after birth to this familiar, as well as to an unfamiliar rhyme, both spoken with the maternal and an unfamiliar female voice. During auditory stimulation, newborns were continuously monitored with polysomnography using video-monitored hdEEG. Afterward, changes in sleep–wake-state proportions during familiar and unfamiliar voice stimulation were analyzed. Our preliminary results demonstrate a general calming effect of auditory stimulation exclusively in infants who were prenatally “familiarized” with a spoken nursery rhyme, as evidenced by less waking states, more time spent in quiet (deep) sleep, and lower heartrates. A stimulation naïve group, on the other hand, demonstrated no such effects. Stimulus-specific effects related to the familiarity of the prenatally replayed voice or rhyme were not evident in newborns. Together, these results suggest “fetal learning” at a basic level and point to a familiarization with auditory stimuli prior to birth, which is evident in the first weeks of life in behavioral states and heartrate physiology of the newborn.

Effects of Visual and Auditory Stimulation on Subsequent Visual Preferences in Neonates

1986 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith M. Gardner ◽  
David J. Lewkowicz ◽  
Susan A. Rose ◽  
Bernard Z. Karmel
Keyword(s):  
Visual Attention ◽  
Inverse Relationship ◽  
Temporal Frequency ◽  
The Other ◽  
Auditory Stimuli ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Visual Preferences ◽  
Internal Sources ◽  
Additional Stimulation

The effects of prior exposure to slow or fast temporal frequencies of visual or auditory stimuli on subsequent preferences for visual temporal frequencies were examined in three groups of neonates (N =12 in each group). The 2 Hz group was exposed to lights flashing at 2 Hz prior to half the preference trials and sounds pulsing at 2 Hz prior to the other half of the preference trials. The 8 Hz group was similarly prestimulated with 8 Hz lights and sounds. The control group received no prestimulation prior to preference trials. Preference trials consisted of the presentation of all possible pairs of 2, 4, or 8 Hz flashing lights for 20 sec per pair. Regardless of modality, visual preferences varied systematically with changes in prior stimulation such that there was an inverse relationship between amount of prestimulation and preferred temporal frequency. Infants looked more at slower frequencies and less at faster frequencies as the amount of prestimulation increased from none to 2 Hz to 8 Hz. These effects are similar to those found when internal stimulation is increased by testing neonates before feeding while unswaddled. Thus, we conclude that additional stimulation, whether from external or internal sources, influences neonates' visual attention through general rather than stimulus-specific effects on arousal.

scholarly journals EVALUATION OF THE CORRELATION BETWEEN FACIAL MUSCLE AND BRAIN ACTIVITIES IN AUDITORY STIMULATION

Fractals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (01) ◽  
pp. 2150100
Author(s):  
MIRRA SOUNDIRARAJAN ◽  
MARTIN AUGUSTYNEK ◽  
ONDREJ KREJCAR ◽  
HAMIDREZA NAMAZI
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Strong Correlation ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Sample Entropy ◽  
Auditory Stimulation ◽  
Auditory Stimuli ◽  
Facial Muscle ◽  
Eeg Signals ◽  
Facial Muscles ◽  
The Brain

Evaluation of the correlation of the activities of various organs is an important area of research in physiology. In this paper, we evaluated the correlation among the brain and facial muscles’ reactions to various auditory stimuli. We played three different music (relaxing, pop, and rock music) to 13 subjects and accordingly analyzed the changes in complexities of EEG and EMG signals by calculating their fractal exponent and sample entropy. Based on the results, EEG and EMG signals experienced more significant changes by presenting relaxing, pop, and rock music, respectively. A strong correlation was observed among the alterations of the complexities of EMG and EEG signals, which indicates the coupling of the activities of facial muscles and brain. This method could be further applied to investigate the coupling of the activities of the brain and other organs of the human body.

HOMOLOGOUS RADIOIMMUNOASSAY OF THYROTROPHIN IN RAT PLASMA

1974 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. David Kieffer ◽  
Bruce D. Weintraub ◽  
Walter Baigelman ◽  
Susan Leeman ◽  
Farahe Maloof
Keyword(s):  
Zero Point ◽  
Rat Plasma ◽  
Cross Reaction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Male Rats ◽  
List Type ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
The One ◽  
Bovine Tsh ◽  
Tsh Levels

ABSTRACT An homologous radioimmunoassay (RIA) using the highly purified rat thyrotrophin (TSH) and anti-rat TSH recently made available by NIAMDD is described in detail. Evidence that the assay measures TSH and only TSH includes the following: Treatment of rats with TSH-releasing hormone (TRH) caused a significant increase (averaging 12-fold) and treatment with T4, a significant decrease (averaging 4.5-fold), in plasma TSH. Points for TSH standards and those for dilutions of plasma from TRH-treated rats fell on the same line, and regression lines calculated separately for standards and dilutions of plasma did not depart significantly from parallelism. At 14 days after gonadectomy of male rats, a time when plasma LH and FSH levels are known to be high, the assay showed no increase in plasma TSH. Moreover, reduction of plasma TSH levels by T4 was as great in gonadectomized rats as in controls. Assay of rat LH, rat FSH and rat prolactin, in 7 concentrations each, showed that cross-reaction averaged less than 1 % in all cases. Other workers have calculated values greater than 1 % for TSH contamination of rat LH and FSH. The slopes of regression lines for the 3 hormones tested for cross-reaction did not differ significantly from the slope for TSH standards. This result strengthens the hypothesis that the apparent slight cross-reactions are due to TSH contamination. Findings for T4-treated rats and saline-treated controls show that the homologous RIA is more sensitive than previous, heterologous assays: In previous studies, plasma TSH levels of most or all of rats treated with T4 were not clearly greater than zero. By contrast, in the homologous RIA reported here, values for such rats did not overlap the range of the zero point on the one hand, nor the range for saline-treated controls on the other. Thus, distinct ranges were defined for both normal and low TSH levels. In view of the 1:20 final dilution of plasma during assay, it does not seem likely that non-specific effects of plasma were primarily responsible for the low TSH values of T4-treated rats. Additionally, the useful range of the homologous assay (about 200-fold) is greater than that of earlier assays (about 70-fold, or less). Finally, the use of highly purified rat TSH for standards has avoided inconsistencies previously encountered with bovine TSH standards.

scholarly journals Sport Courage, Worry and Fear in Relation to Success of Alpine Ski Learning

Sports ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 96
Author(s):  
Vjekoslav Cigrovski ◽  
Ivan Radman ◽  
Erkut Konter ◽  
Mateja Očić ◽  
Lana Ružić
Keyword(s):  
Motor Skills ◽  
Psychological Factors ◽  
Positive Association ◽  
Negative Association ◽  
The Other ◽  
Alpine Skiing ◽  
Psychological Traits ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Basic Level

(1) Background: Individuals’ psychological traits can influence not just success in sport but also the ability to learn new motor skills. We investigated whether sport courage, worry and fear differ between alpine ski-naive and basic level skiers and how they affect ski learning. (2): A total of 337 students (249 ski-naive and 88 basic level) participated in research consisting of a four-part questionnaire and structured skiing program. (3) Results: For beginners, lower fear (r = −0.30, p < 0.01) and higher Self-efficiency (r = 0.28, p < 0.05) and mastery (r = 0.20, p < 0.01) were associated with better performance; reducing fear and increasing self-efficiency and worry increased performance. Experienced skiers were better in determination, mastery, and self-efficiency (all p < 0.05). In case of lower score in worry (r = −0.28, p < 0.01) and higher in self-efficiency (r = 0.22, p < 0.05) performance was better. Males scored higher in sport courage scale-31 (all p < 0.05). In particular, self-efficiency was associated with better (r = 0.39, p < 0.01), and higher fear with poorer performance (r = −0.33, p < 0.01). Moreover, self-efficiency was a predictor of ski success (p < 0.001). On the other hand, females like ski beginners scored higher in fear (p < 0.001). In females, determination, mastery and self-efficiency had a positive correlation with skiing (r = 0.21, p < 0.05, r = 0.28, p < 0.01, and r = 0.33, p < 0.01, respectively), while association between Fear and skiing (r = −0.46, p < 0.01) was negative, and fear (p < 0.001) was inversely related to success. (4): Conclusions: Psychological factors and gender differences need to be considered during learning phases of alpine skiing. There is a positive association between self-efficiency and performance of male ski beginners, and negative association between fear and achieved results in basic alpine ski school in case of female ski beginners.

Problems of Village Leadership after Land Reform

1968 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Land Reform ◽  
The Other ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
Political Involvement ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
Small Producer ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Democratic Revolution ◽  
The Village ◽  
Basic Level

Two threats arose in China after land reform that imperilled the transition from the anti-feudal, new democratic revolution of land reform to the socialist revolution of collectivisation. One threat came from “below,” from the village environment; the other from “above,” from the hierarchy of party and government. Both threats centred on the basic-level leadership and activists who had been recruited into political roles during the guerrilla years and especially during land reform. One threat arose as the interests of the peasants in the maintenance of the small-producer economy affected the attitudes and behaviour of village leaders, leading them to such responses as wanting to withdraw from political involvement. The other threat arose as the rural administrative system became increasingly burdened by numerous tasks and assignments. As pressure to produce results increased, rural leaders tended to become administrators and command mobilisers, orientated towards getting each job done quickly, using coercion. This approach caused a variety of problems; for example, it jeopardised a central goal of the socialist transformation of agriculture of securing peasant support and cooperation with this change.

The Effect of Visual Information on Young Children’s Perceptual Sensitivity to Musical Beat Alignment

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 88-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Einarson ◽  
Laurel J. Trainor
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Visual Stimuli ◽  
The Other ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Auditory Stimuli ◽  
Auditory Information ◽  
Perceptual Sensitivity ◽  
Visual Condition ◽  
Main Effect

Recent work examined five-year-old children’s perceptual sensitivity to musical beat alignment. In this work, children watched pairs of videos of puppets drumming to music with simple or complex metre, where one puppet’s drumming sounds (and movements) were synchronized with the beat of the music and the other drummed with incorrect tempo or phase. The videos were used to maintain children’s interest in the task. Five-year-olds were better able to detect beat misalignments in simple than complex metre music. However, adults can perform poorly when attempting to detect misalignment of sound and movement in audiovisual tasks, so it is possible that the moving stimuli actually hindered children’s performance. Here we compared children’s sensitivity to beat misalignment in conditions with dynamic visual movement versus still (static) visual images. Eighty-four five-year-old children performed either the same task as described above or a task that employed identical auditory stimuli accompanied by a motionless picture of the puppet with the drum. There was a significant main effect of metre type, replicating the finding that five-year-olds are better able to detect beat misalignment in simple metre music. There was no main effect of visual condition. These results suggest that, given identical auditory information, children’s ability to judge beat misalignment in this task is not affected by the presence or absence of dynamic visual stimuli. We conclude that at five years of age, children can tell if drumming is aligned to the musical beat when the music has simple metric structure.

scholarly journals Sztuka wobec antropocenu – wybrane strategie artystyczne

2021 ◽  
pp. 98-114
Author(s):  
Marta Anna Raczek-Karcz
Keyword(s):  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Changes ◽  
Human History ◽  
Common Goal ◽  
Human Influence ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Production Processes ◽  
Natural Factors ◽  
Individual Actions

Art and the Anthropocene – Selected Artistic Strategies The article presents an analysis of the artistic projects of three graphic artists who for nearly a decade have been trying to illustrate the causes and effects of the Anthropocene in various ways. Each of the authors in question uses a separate language of forms and different artistic tools, but their common goal is to establish, as Angelos Koutsourakis excellently put it, “dialectical representation of the Anthropocene” based on “self-reflexive representational tropes”. This self-reflexivity is not about constantly reminding that what is in front of the viewer’s eyes and what he/she experiences when entering the space of the installation is an artistic construction, but to sensitize him/her to the fact that what he/she looks at and participates in – both through form and the content – is a way of representing the causes that produce specific effects and the effects behind which specific processes lie. In the case of Sean Caulfield, it is about making the viewer aware of the cumulative effect of individual actions, which, when depicted in the form of a gradually destroyed installation, direct attention to individual acts causing global changes. On the other hand, Angela Snieder sensitizes the viewer to the influence that the historical conditions shaping the production processes influenced the way people perceive nature. The artist uses the visual attractiveness of the dioramas to blur the border between what is natural and what is industrial, ultimately confronting the viewer with the artificiality of the created reality. While Ellen Karin Maehlum raises the problem of connection between histories often treated separately: human and natural. The organisms shown by her are creations in which natural factors and those resulting from human influence on the environment combine with each other. Recognizing this fact allows us to consider natural and human history as interconnected vessels and realms that interact with each other. The article analyzes the strategies used by these artists to establish an engaging dialogue between them and the viewers, which may result in awakening the viewers’ awareness of the complex causes and effects of the Anthropocene.

scholarly journals Basic levels of categorization: A comparison of selected English and Polish verbs

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Olga Sokołowska
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Cognitive Domains ◽  
Semantic Account ◽  
Cognitive Semantic ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Basic English ◽  
Basic Level

The phenomenon of basic level concepts in cognition and categorization, so crucial in the cognitive account of natural language is typically accessed via what is perceptually the most outstanding phenomena represented in many languages, at least those rooted in Proto-IndoEuropean (specifically English and Polish) by nouns fulfilling the criteria of basic terms, originally established for classifying color vocabulary. These are prototypical examples in the category of nouns – relating to countable, material objects. Nominal representation, according to Langacker (1987) is indicative of a given stimulus being perceived and conceptualized as a thing, i.e., a region in one or more cognitive domains (conceptions) established in the speakers’ minds. This is a rather self-imposing construal of physical, countable stimuli, which meet the good gestalt criteria, such as animals, plants, and man-made objects of everyday use. The semantic scopes of nouns representing such phenomena seem to overlap to a relatively high degree across languages, especially related ones, such as English and Polish, and finding the precise equivalents within them does not pose particular problems. This is hardly the case when it comes to phenomena represented by verbs and classifiable as processes in Langacker’s cognitive, semantic account of the division of words into parts of speech. A comparison of the meaning of selected basic English verbs and their closest Polish counterparts reveals serious discrepancies in a number of cases. Thus, certain basic English verbs representing common, everyday physical activities prove to differ considerably from their Polish counterparts with regard to their respective levels of schematicity/ specificity of meaning, and, in consequence, the range of cognitive domains involved in their semantic scopes. This is the case of such equivalent lexemes as płynąć/pływać – swim; sail; flow; float or break – łamać; tłuc; rwać; drzeć. In both cases, one language is quite specific while the other is much more schematic as regards the actual cognitive domains activated by corresponding words and the degree to which that activation in the stimulated conceptual blends depends on the lexical context in which the respective words are used. This indicates that even related languages spoken by communities from similar cultural circles may codify considerably different construals of the same nonmaterial phenomena, specifically processes.

scholarly journals The Sleep Modeling in the Human Organism

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 01-04
Author(s):  
Janos Vincze
Keyword(s):  
Slow Wave Sleep ◽  
Paradoxical Sleep ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Organism ◽  
Deep Sleep ◽  
Natural Sleep ◽  
Sleep Analysis ◽  
Falling Asleep ◽  
Pleasant Surprise ◽  
Eeg Recordings

There are three alternating states of vigilance throughout our lives: wakefulness, NREM, and REM sleep. We usually yawn before falling asleep. Yawning is an ancient reaction, an instinctive action, manifested in a person by drowsiness or boredom. Yawning is often associated with the need for stretching. Yawning is a less strong territorial reflex. During deep sleep muscular tone is sharply reduced. Relaxation of the muscles and the lowering of their tone, howeever, are not constant and necessary components of sleep. Analysis of EEG recordings soon revealed that sleep is by no means a uniform process, but can be divided into at least two sharply separated states: one is characterized by slow waves in the EEG that are completely separate from the activity of wakefulness: this so-called slow wave sleep; the other is the so-called paradoxical sleep. Hypnopedia, as a discipline, deals with the input of fixed information introduced during the period of natural sleep, also known as sleep learning. Our hypnopedia researches was a pleasant surprise, because they were able to reproduce texts they did not know with an efficiency of approx. 25%.

Audio–visual recalibration is spatially specific, in external coordinates

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 132
Author(s):  
David Burr ◽  
Roberto Arrighi ◽  
Marco Cicchini ◽  
David Aagten-Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movement ◽  
Visual Stimulus ◽  
The Other ◽  
Auditory Stimuli ◽  
Adaptation Period ◽  
Visual Hemifield ◽  
Zero Offset ◽  
Spatial Specificity ◽  
Ventriloquist Effect ◽  
Spatial Maps

When visual and auditory stimuli are displayed with a spatial offset, the sound is heard at or near the visual stimulus (ventriloquist effect). After an adaptation period of repeated exposure to spatially offset audio–visual stimuli, sounds presented alone are perceived spatially displaced, in the direction of the adapting offset (ventriloquist aftereffect: Recanzione, 1998), pointing to recalibration of audio–visual alignment. Here we show that the recalibration is spatially selective. Adapting, one visual hemifield to (say) a leftward offset, and the other to a rightward (or zero) offset produces two separate spatially localized aftereffects, in opposite directions. If a large (30°) eye-movement is interposed between adaptation and test, the spatial specificity remains in head-centered coordinates. The results provide further evidence for the existence of spatiotopic (or at least craniotopic) spatial maps, which are subject to continual recalibration.

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