The Emptiness of Hardcore: Consuming Violence in Hotline: Miami

The article explores the challenges to (media) consumerism posed in the indie action game Hotline: Miami (Dennaton Games, 2012). Hotline deconstructs not only indulgence associated with violent gaming but also its main nostalgic interest–the cultural era of the 1980s–through a ludification of excess. I will aim to demonstrate this through an analysis of the game’s “procedural rhetoric” (Bogost) and narrative structure. Overwhelming the player’s senses with intense audiovisuals, and explicitly confronting her motivations for participating in extreme violence, the game balances the game experience between a trance-like state of indulgent overexposure and metaleptic commentary. The sensory overload is also sharply contrasted with the level of precision necessary to complete the levels, bending the adrenaline-pumping core of the gameplay towards mechanics more common in stealth-based games. The system of in-game rewards and the overall narrative structure further complicate the purposefulness of player acts, questioning the teleology of gore in gaming and subverting the conventional notion of video game violence as entertainment. As I will argue, the metaludic commentary destabilizes the game through irony, relativizing the player’s commitment to it. In so doing, it makes Hotline: Miami a prime example of “dissonant development” (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter), a game that manages to both sweep the market and challenge its basic premises as an entertainment medium.

Processing of expressions by individuals with autistic traits: Empathy deficit or sensory hyper-reactivity?

Individuals with autistic traits display impaired social interaction and communication in everyday life, but the underlying cognitive neural mechanisms remain very unclear and still remain controversial. The mind-blindness hypothesis suggests that social difficulties in individuals with autistic traits are caused by empathy impairment in individuals; however, the intense world theory suggests that these social difficulties are caused by sensory hyper-reactivity and sensory overload, rather than empathy impairment. To further test these two theories, this study investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the cognitive neural processing of repetitive expressions in individuals with autistic traits. This study employed the Mandarin version of the autism-spectrum quotient (AQ) to assess autistic traits in 2,502 healthy adults. Two subset groups were used, e.g., the participants of a high-AQ group were randomly selected among the 10% of individuals with the highest AQ scores; similarly, the participants in the low-AQ group were randomly selected from the 10% of participants with the lowest AQ scores. In an experiment, three different facial expressions (positive, neutral, or negative) of the same person were presented successively and pseudo-randomly in each trial. Participants needed to define the expression of the face that was presented last. The results showed that compared with the low-AQ group, the high-AQ group exhibited higher P1 amplitudes induced by the second and third presented expressions, as well as higher P3 amplitudes induced by the third presented negative expressions. This indicates that individuals with autistic traits may experience overly strong perception, attention, and cognitive evaluation to repetitive expressions, particularly negative expressions. This result supports the intense world theory more strongly than the mind-blindness hypothesis.

Effects of methylphenidate on mismatch negativity and P3a amplitude of initially psychostimulant-naïve, adult ADHD patients

Background Deficient information processing in ADHD theoretically results in sensory overload and may underlie the symptoms of the disorder. Mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a amplitude reflect an individual's detection and subsequent change in attention to stimulus change in their environment. Our primary aim was to explore MMN and P3a amplitude in adult ADHD patients and to examine the effects of methylphenidate (MPH) on these measures. Methods Forty initially psychostimulant-naïve, adult ADHD patients without comorbid ASD and 42 matched healthy controls (HC) were assessed with an MMN paradigm at baseline. Both groups were retested after 6 weeks, in which patients were treated with MPH. Results Neither significant group differences in MMN nor P3a amplitude were found at baseline. Although 6-week MPH treatment significantly reduced symptomatology and improved daily functioning of the patients, it did not significantly affect MMN amplitude; however, it did significantly reduce P3a amplitude compared to the HC. Furthermore, more severe ADHD symptoms were significantly associated with larger MMN amplitudes in the patients, both at baseline and follow-up. Conclusion We found no evidence for early information processing deficits in patients with ADHD, as measured with MMN and P3a amplitude. Six-week treatment with MPH decreased P3a but not MMN amplitude, although more severe ADHD-symptoms were associated with larger MMN amplitudes in the patients. Given that P3a amplitude represents an important attentional process and that glutamate has been linked to both ADHD and MMN amplitude, future research should investigate augmenting MPH treatment of less responsive adults with ADHD with glutamatergic antagonists.

Impaired Adaptation and Laminar Processing of the Oddball Paradigm in the Primary Visual Cortex of Fmr1 KO Mouse

Both adaptation and novelty detection are an integral part of sensory processing. Recent animal oddball studies have advanced our understanding of circuitry underlying contextual processing in early sensory areas. However, it is unclear how adaptation and mismatch (MM) responses depend on the tuning properties of neurons and their laminar position. Furthermore, given that reduced habituation and sensory overload are among the hallmarks of altered sensory perception in autism, we investigated how oddball processing might be altered in a mouse model of fragile X syndrome (FX). Using silicon probe recordings and a novel spatial frequency (SF) oddball paradigm, we discovered that FX mice show reduced adaptation and enhanced MM responses compared to control animals. Specifically, we found that adaptation is primarily restricted to neurons with preferred oddball SF in FX compared to WT mice. Mismatch responses, on the other hand, are enriched in the superficial layers of WT animals but are present throughout lamina in FX animals. Last, we observed altered neural dynamics in FX mice in response to stimulus omissions. Taken together, we demonstrated that reduced feature adaptation coexists with impaired laminar processing of oddball responses, which might contribute to altered sensory perception in FX syndrome and autism.

POET(H)IC INQUIRY AND THE FICTIVE IMAGINATION

Women’s voices have historically been silenced in a vast array of contexts. Ethical incongruities exist between theoretical perspectives regarding right action for protection of women’s dignity and the tangible dilemma presented by systemic silencing. A fictive imagination found in the arts – and literature in particular – often plays a role in bridging that ethical gap between theory and practice. Using my arts-based approach of poet(h)ic inquiry (Duff, 2016a), I portray the symbolic power of women’s voices, fictionality, and textual polyvocality in a research-based play. Poet(h)ic inquiry is a method for ethical reflection incorporating spiritual and poetic-aesthetic values: a pedagogical space of inquiry within a non-fixed site of teaching, life-long learning, creativity, and knowing, located at the confluence of the creative writing process (in the context of fiction as research), ethics, and spirit. In “Story about Story. Toronto 2001,” I inquire poet(h)ically, in a speculative fictional tale about a woman’s journey with her baby, using research journal data and “freefall writing” notes as springboard for a “fictive leap” (Mitchell, 1977). Through the fictive writing process, knowledge is generated with respect to themes of isolation and connection towards re-finding the lost self’s language. Voices heard and unheard, pinpoint an ethic of meaning towards transcending silence, suffering, and colonial injustices. My story evokes ironies and eco-ethical queries within wildlife research, as well as questions evoked by the sensory overload of urban commerce, and an unspoken class system. I include reflections on fictionality, literature, and redemption.

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening

This chapter explores cinematic listening by bringing together ideas from contemporary musical and sound studies, the concept of erotics in art championed in the 1970s feminist discourse, and ideas of “new materialism” in film studies. It emphasizes the sensuousness of film form as something distinct from sensory overload, and suggests that a sensuous mode of listening is inherently musical. Focusing on films including Arrival (2016), Under the Skin (2013), Elephant (2003), and Tree of Life (2011), the chapter shows that the erotics of cinematic listening is facilitated by the practice of foregrounding the materiality of music and an increasingly integrated approach to the soundtrack.

Cool place to be

Welcome to the Greysbrooke Beach Hut – an inner sanctuary of calm where children can enjoy one-to-one time with teachers or enjoy small group activities which enable them to combat sensory overload. Karen Hart steps inside for a relaxing experience.

Somatosensory Gating Responses Are Associated with Prognosis in Patients with Migraine

Sensory gating, a habituation-related but more basic protective mechanism against brain sensory overload, is altered in patients with migraine and linked to headache severity. This study investigated whether somatosensory (SI) gating responses determined 3-months treatment outcomes in patients with episodic migraine (EM) and chronic migraine (CM). A 306-channel magnetoencephalography (MEG) with paired-pulse stimulation paradigm was used to record their neuromagnetic responses. To calculate the peak amplitude and latency and compute the gating ratios (second vs. first amplitude), the first and second responses to the paired stimuli from the primary somatosensory cortex were obtained. All patients were assigned to subgroups labeled good or poor according to their headache frequency at baseline compared with at the third month of treatment. The gating ratio in the CM group (n = 37) was significantly different between those identified as good and poor (p = 0.009). In the EM group (n = 30), the latency in the second response differed by treatment outcomes (p = 0.007). In the receiver operating characteristic analysis, the areas under the curve for the CM and EM groups were 0.737 and 0.761, respectively. Somatosensory gating responses were associated with treatment outcomes in patients with migraine; future studies with large patient samples are warranted.

Get the last five minutes of your lesson right…

The last five minutes of any lesson is vital if we are to avoid disengaged students, sensory overload, and anxiety – especially for those with SEN. Sara Alston advises