Lexicon, sensory wheel and kit as sensory communication tools: a review

A lexicon comprises a collection of standardized sensory vocabulary of product along with its unambiguous definitions and references. It is widely used as a communication tool among sensory panel and it provides sensory insights to product developers, marketing professionals, and suppliers, across countries or cultures to describe similar products. Specific sensory lexicon have been developed for beverages, dairy, fruits and vegetables, nuts and grains, soy and meat products, and animal feed. Based on its lexicon, a sensory wheel can be established hierarchically as an overview of the entire product’s sensory attributes. Furthermore, an intense training for panels is necessary to get a good sensory judgement. Sensory panel calibration can be performed such as by using sensory kit as a training tools. The aim of this paper is to review the latest developed lexicon, sensory wheel and sensory kit, as well as its application.

Please listen to us: Adolescent autistic girls speak about learning and academic success

Limited research is available with a focus on adolescent Autistic girls and their needs during secondary schooling. Consequently, many issues are often not recognised and addressed by educators. The small-scale Australian research reported here explored the experiences of five Autistic girls during their first 2 years of secondary school, with data being gathered via an online survey and semi-structured interviews. Findings are presented from the perspective of the girls themselves and highlight the negative impact of sensory, communication, and social difficulties, as well as the influence of anxiety and executive dysfunction on their learning and academic success. Unique insights into how the girls feel about school and the anxiety they experience there, together with everyday barriers to learning they encounter provide some important messages to schools and teachers.

The Effectiveness of Playgrounds through Vegetated-Setting Approach in Tembalang, Indonesia

As part of urban public space, playgrounds are a children's play space that can improve children's sensory, communication, and physical abilities. Playgrounds must be able to create comfort and education for children to engage with nature. One of the approaches to achieve is by the vegetated setting. Tembalang is a sub-district in Semarang, with children dominating 44% of the total population. Therefore, the playground's effectiveness in Tembalang was assessed based on comfort nature and connection with nature. Nine playgrounds are the object of this research. This study is aimed to determine the effectiveness level of the playground in Tembalang using the vegetated-setting approach. The research used a quantitative approach with Guttman-Scale scoring. This study's output assesses the level of effectiveness of the vegetated-setting playground through two aspects. The first aspect, comfort nature, which included in the effective level (71%) in the form of vegetation, protects children from heat and rain while playing, vegetation that provides shelter when children relax or gather under trees, vegetation can cause cold air and the condition of the grass field. It is comfortable to use and is not slippery. In comparison, the second aspect, the connection with nature, is included in the effective level (50%) in the form of plucked vegetation such as fruit or flowers, vegetation that can climb to train the child physically, vegetation that can bring animals to live in, such as birds or butterflies, and grass fields that children can use for running and physical activity.

Sensory communication in YouTube reviews: The interactional construction of products

This study draws on interactionist frameworks of sensorial communication to analyse product reviews on YouTube. Existing studies of YouTube review work have focused on how vloggers manage conflicting neoliberal identity discourses such as ‘authenticity’, ‘being entertaining’ and ‘selling’. I argue that this focus has been at the expense of the communicative work involved in constructing products in reviews, and I suggest that identity issues should be conceptually expanded through a much broader focus on communicative action and conventions of practice. In order to achieve a first step in this expansion, my analysis focusses on reviewers’ sensorial engagement with objects and explores the communicative processes through which they symbolically transform products into enlivened, sensorially rich phenomena. I argue that these communicative strategies are important for situating neoliberal discourses within ‘mundane’ actions of description and in broader cultural practices of reviewing.

Sensory Integration: Cross-Modal Communication Between the Olfactory and Visual Systems in Zebrafish

Cross-modal sensory communication is an innate biological process that refers to the combination and/or interpretation of different types of sensory input in the brain. Often, this process conjugates with neural modulation, by which the neural signals that convey sensory information are adjusted, such as intensity, frequency, complexity, and/or novelty. Although the anatomic pathways involved in cross-modal sensory integration have been previously described, the course of development and the physiological roles of multisensory signaling integration in brain functions remain to be elucidated. In this article, I review some of the recent findings in sensory integration from research using the zebrafish models. In zebrafish, cross-modal sensory integration occurs between the olfactory and visual systems. It is mediated by the olfacto-retinal centrifugal (ORC) pathway, which originates from the terminalis nerve (TN) in the olfactory bulb and terminates in the neural retina. In the retina, the TNs synapse with the inner nuclear layer dopaminergic interplexiform cells (DA-IPCs). Through the ORC pathway, stimulation of the olfactory neurons alters the cellular activity of TNs and DA-IPCs, which in turn modulates retinal neural function and increases behavioral visual sensitivity.

Visual Aurality in Russian Modernist Experiments: Explorations in Synesthesia and Auditory Imagination

Russian modernist experiments in sensory communication include the interplay of sound and light in Alexander Scriabin’s symphonic mysteries as well as colored sounds in Wassily Kandinsky’s stage compositions. Inspired by various philosophical principles and creative methodologies, these artists explored the dialogue between the aural and the visual and its potential to influence the creative process and impact audience perception. This article seeks to assess the role of music and sound in synesthetic experiments of Scriabin and Kandinsky and place their theory and practice within the larger philosophical, artistic, and scientific contexts of their period and beyond.

Wearables for Performance Support and Learning

Wearables include a variety of body-borne sensory, communication, and computational components that users wear on, under, over the body or within clothing. These mechanisms have potential benefits for: (a) human performance support; and (b) cognitive and psychomotor learning. This review of existing wearable research begins with a historical overview of wearables and then provides the reader with a current and future perspective of their use across a variety of educational environments.