Positive Technology Journal

Contribution of virtual reality to neuropsychology of memory: study in aging.

Psychol Neuropsychiatr Vieil. 2008 Mar;6(1):7-22

Authors: Plancher G, Nicolas S, Piolino P

The principal interest of virtual reality is its potential to create experiments close to daily life with a perfect experimental control. In a first time, we review the studies illustrating the contribution of virtual reality for neuropsychology, mainly for memory study. In a second time, we present the results of an experiment in which the subjects were driving in a virtual town, that tested all the episodic memory components, i.e. the memories of what, where and when events happened. Young and elderly adults performed the virtual test, either with intentional or incidental encoding, and either in active (they drove a virtual car) or passive exploration of the town (they were passengers). The results showed that older subjects recalled the spatiotemporal context and the details of the events in a lower proportion than younger, as well in active as in passive condition. Subject's memory complaints were correlated with the virtual scores, but not with usual verbal episodic memory tests. Therefore, virtual tests seem to allow a better assessment of episodic memory than the usual ones, especially because of their spatiotemporal memory assessment, and appear to be a hopeful tool for a neuropsychology closer to patient's daily life than the usual tests.

A Pilot Study Comparing the Effects of Mindfulness-Based and Cognitive-Behavioral Stress Reduction.

J Altern Complement Med. 2008 Mar 27;

Authors: Smith BW, Shelley BM, Dalen J, Wiggins K, Tooley E, Bernard J

ABSTRACT Objectives: The objective of this pilot study was to compare the effects of two mind-body interventions: mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and cognitive-behavioral stress reduction (CBSR). Subjects: Fifty (50) subjects were recruited from the community and took part in MBSR (n = 36) and CBSR (n = 14) courses. Participants self-selected into MBSR or CBSR courses taught at different times. There were no initial differences between the MBSR and CBSR subjects on demographics, including age, gender, education, and income. Intervention: MBSR was an 8-week course using meditation, gentle yoga, and body scanning exercises to increase mindfulness. CBSR was an 8-week course using cognitive and behavioral techniques to change thinking and reduce distress. Design: Perceived stress, depression, psychological well-being, neuroticism, binge eating, energy, pain, and mindfulness were assessed before and after each course. Pre-post scores for each intervention were compared by using paired t tests. Pre-post scores across interventions were compared by using a general linear model with repeated measures. Settings/Locations: Weekly meetings for both courses were held in a large room on a university medical center campus. Results: MBSR subjects improved on all eight outcomes, with all of the differences being significant. CBSR subjects improved on six of eight outcomes, with significant improvements on well-being, perceived stress, and depression. Multivariate analyses showed that the MBSR subjects had better outcomes across all variables, when compared with the CBSR subjects. Univariate analyses showed that MBSR subjects had better outcomes with regard to mindfulness, energy, pain, and a trend for binge eating. Conclusions: While MBSR and CBSR may both be effective in reducing perceived stress and depression, MBSR may be more effective in increasing mindfulness and energy and reducing pain. Future studies should continue to examine the differential effects of cognitive behavioral and mindfulness-based interventions and attempt to explain the reasons for the differences.

Via KurzweilAI.net

An international team has built vision- and speech-driven avatar technology that imitates 66 facial expressions and basic hand gestures in real time.  

Via Medgadget

A curious picture taken from the blog Street Anatomy

Via SharpBrains 

Results of a study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) published March 25 in the Public Library of Science One suggest that positive emotions such as loving-kindness and compassion can be learned in the same way as playing a musical instrument or being proficient in a sport. The scans revealed that brain circuits used to detect emotions and feelings were dramatically changed in subjects who had extensive experience practicing compassion meditation.

Abstract. Recent brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have implicated insula and anterior cingulate cortices in the empathic response to another's pain. However, virtually nothing is known about the impact of the voluntary generation of compassion on this network. To investigate these questions we assessed brain activity using fMRI while novice and expert meditation practitioners generated a loving-kindness-compassion meditation state. To probe affective reactivity, we presented emotional and neutral sounds during the meditation and comparison periods. Our main hypothesis was that the concern for others cultivated during this form of meditation enhances affective processing, in particular in response to sounds of distress, and that this response to emotional sounds is modulated by the degree of meditation training. The presentation of the emotional sounds was associated with increased pupil diameter and activation of limbic regions (insula and cingulate cortices) during meditation (versus rest). During meditation, activation in insula was greater during presentation of negative sounds than positive or neutral sounds in expert than it was in novice meditators. The strength of activation in insula was also associated with self-reported intensity of the meditation for both groups. These results support the role of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. The comparison between meditation vs. rest states between experts and novices also showed increased activation in amygdala, right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in response to all sounds, suggesting, greater detection of the emotional sounds, and enhanced mentation in response to emotional human vocalizations for experts than novices during meditation. Together these data indicate that the mental expertise to cultivate positive emotion alters the activation of circuitries previously linked to empathy and theory of mind in response to emotional stimuli.

Citation: Lutz A, Brefczynski-Lewis J, Johnstone T, Davidson RJ (2008) Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise. PLoS ONE 3(3): e1897. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001897

Previous 'mind-reading' studies have differentiated patterns of brain activity without understanding the underlying processes. A new study in Nature uses a model of neural encoding mechanisms to identify brain activity patterns

link (journal subscription needed to full-text access)

OpenSpime is a project of a pervasive technology infrastructure that allows individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors.

A brainchild of Leandro Agrò, Roberto Ostinelli and David Orban, OpenSpime was inspired by Bruce Sterling's vision of "Internet of Things". Sterling describes a new type of technological device called "spime", a physical object that is part of the internet as it becomes trackable in space and time, through pervasive RFID communications and GPS navigation.

The first spime they've designed is a sensor that can measure the CO2 level in parts-per-million in the surrounding air, and through a wireless connection can send that information back to the OpenSpime servers. There they can be mashed up and aggregated on Google Maps.

check it out the concept video:

Cognitive processing and motor skill learning in motor-handicapped teenagers: effects of learning method.

Somatosens Mot Res. 2007 Dec;24(4):163-9

Authors: Deviterne D, Gauchard GC, Lavisse D, Perrin PP

Assessing human reorientation ability inside virtual reality environments: the effects of retention interval and landmark characteristics.

Cogn Process. 2008 Mar 20;

Authors: Bosco A, Picucci L, Caffò AO, Lancioni GE, Gyselinck V

The purpose of the present study was to assess the navigational behaviour of adult humans following a disorientation procedure that perturbed their egocentric frame of reference. The assessment was carried out in a virtual reality (VR) environment by manipulating the disorientation procedure, the retention interval, the relative positions of target and landmark. The results of experiment I demonstrated that adding a physical rotation to a virtual disorientation procedure did not yield an additional decrease in searching performance. The results of experiment II showed that shortening the delay between study and test phase decreased the errors more markedly for geometric than landmark ones. An orientation specificity effect due to the manipulation of the relative position between target and landmark was discussed across the experiments. In conclusion, VR seemed to be a valuable method for studying human reorientation. Moreover, the virtual experimental setting involved here promoted knowledge of the relationship between working memory and spatial reorientation paradigm.

Planned publication date: September 2008

Google has launched a dedicated portal of Google services for non-profit organizations.

Google for Non-Profits offers “a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization’s mission in a smart, cost-efficient way.” This site includes ideas and tutorials on ways Google tools can be used to promote non-profits, raise money and operate more efficiently.

Event Date: 9 July 2008 to 11 July 2008
Are you a presence researcher or PhD student? Are you looking to find out more about the latest presence research, technologies and applications? If so then the second PEACH Summer School is for you.

PEACH is an EU FP6 Coordination Action on Presence. Its objective is to stimulate, structure and support the presence research community, with a special focus on the challenges associated with the interdisciplinary character of the field. It also has the objective of producing visions and roadmaps to support ongoing and future research. The Summer School is the ideal place to join the leaders in the field for a series of lectures and presentations. There are also working groups, which will focus on the latest technologies and applications along with poster/demo sessions where you will present your work to other attendees and experts.

SPEAKERS INCLUDE
Prof Mel Slater, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (PRESENCCIA IP-EU Project)
Prof Franco Tecchia, PERCRO - Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Prof Mavi Sanchez-Vives, Institut d'Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (PRESENCCIA IP-EU Project)
Prof Selim Balcisoy, Sabanci University
Prof Benoit Macq, Université catholique de Louvain
Dr Xavier Marichal, Alterface S.A.
Dr Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute
Dr Eric Meyer, Oxford Internet Institute
Prof Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University
Prof Dominic Massaro, University of California, Santa Cruz
Prof Miriam Reiner, Technion (PRESENCCIA and IMMERSENCE IP-EU Project)
Fulvio Dominici, Ultramundum Foundation
Gianluca Zaffiro, Telecom Italia
Prof Igor Pandžić, University of Zagreb
Dr Marco Gillies, University College London
Dr Rod McCall, Fraunhofer FIT (IPCity EU Project)
Claudia Redaelli, ITIA
Prof. Martyn Bracewell, University of Wales, Bangor

The deadline for registration is the 18th April.

Source: Eetimes 

Passing the Turing test - the holy grail of AI (a human conversing with a computer can't tell it's not human) - may now be possible in a limited way with the world's fastest supercomputer (IBM's Blue Gene) and mimicking the behavior of a human-controlled avatar in a virtual world, according to AI experts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "We are building a knowledge base that corresponds to all of the relevant background for our synthetic character--where he went to school, what his family is like, and so on," said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. The researchers plan to engineer, from the start, a full-blown intelligent character and converse with him in an interactive virtual environment, like Second Life.

read full article here

Via Medgadget 

Frost & Sullivan has awarded Exmocare, Inc. with 2008 North American Emotion Monitoring Technology Innovation of the Year Award for "developing the ExmoCare physiology and emotion monitoring platform that aids in understanding the physiological state of a person through monitoring the expression of emotion patterns. The platforms developed by the company Exmocare, Inc. are unique in that they are the first of their kind to become a first-stop solution for vital sign monitoring , emotional monitoring, and online reporting."

Press release: Exmocare Taps into $200 Billion Industry - Maker of Award-winning 24/7 Bluetooth Vital Signs Wristwatch

Product page: The Exmocare BT2...

From NewScientist 

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

Google unveiled a browser version of its Google Sky application

The browser version of Google Earth software allows you to zoom in and out and pan around the celestial bodies, search for planets and galaxies and view the sky through infrared, x-ray, ultraviolet, and microwave views.

Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation.

Trends Cogn Sci. 2008 Mar 6;

Authors: Lutz A, Slagter HA, Dunne JD, Davidson RJ

Meditation can be conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Among these various practices, there are two styles that are commonly studied. One style, focused attention meditation, entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. The other style, open monitoring meditation, involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. The potential regulatory functions of these practices on attention and emotion processes could have a long-term impact on the brain and behavior.

Action verbs and the primary motor cortex: A comparative TMS study of silent reading, frequency judgments, and motor imagery.

Neuropsychologia. 2008 Feb 2;

Authors: Tomasino B, Fink GR, Sparing R, Dafotakis M, Weiss PH

Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the hand area of the left primary motor cortex or, as a control, to the vertex (STIMULATION: TMS(M1) vs. TMS(vertex)) while right-handed volunteers silently read verbs related to hand actions. We examined three different tasks and time points for stimulation within the same experiment: subjects indicated with their left foot when they (i) had finished reading, (ii) had judged whether the corresponding movement involved a hand rotation after simulating the hand movement, and (iii) had judged whether they would frequently encounter the action verb in a newspaper (TASK: silent reading, motor imagery, and frequency judgment). Response times were compared between TMS(M1) and TMS(vertex), both applied at different time points after stimulus onset (DELAY: 150, 300, 450, 600, and 750ms). TMS(M1) differentially modulated task performance: there was a significant facilitatory effect of TMS(M1) for the imagery task only (about 88ms), with subjects responding about 10% faster (compared to TMS(vertex)). In contrast, response times for silent reading and frequency judgments were unaffected by TMS(M1). No differential effect of the time point of TMS(M1) was observed. The differential effect of TMS(M1) when subjects performed a motor imagery task (relative to performing silent reading or frequency judgments with the same set of verbs) suggests that the primary motor cortex is critically involved in processing action verbs only when subjects are simulating the corresponding movement. This task-dependent effect of hand motor cortex TMS on the processing of hand-related action verbs is discussed with respect to the notion of embodied cognition and the associationist theory.

Call for Papers

PHYSICALITY AND INTERACTION
A Special Journal Issue of Interacting with Computers
Planned publication date: September 2008

Following the successful Physicality 2006 and Physicality 2007 International Workshops, which demonstrated the growing multi-disciplinary interest in this area of work, we invite submissions for this special issue on Physicality and Interaction for the interdisciplinary journal Interacting with Computers.

We live in an increasingly digital world yet our bodies and minds are naturally designed to interact with the physical. The products of the 21st century are and will be a synthesis of digital and physical elements embedded in new physical and social environments. As we design more hybrid physical/digital products, the distinctions for the user become blurred. It is therefore increasingly important that we understand what we gain, lose or confuse by the added digitality.

Augmented physical artefacts can be tailored and adapted to operate within a wide range of ecological settings. However, they also become more complex and require a fairly intensive design process to make them not simply practical and functional but also engaging. As a result, the need becomes even more pressing to comprehend the underlying computational intricacies, the physical form, properties and behaviour, the physical and social contexts, and the issues of aesthetics and creativity.

The issues in this field impact many areas of study: architecture, art, cognitive science, geography, human�computer interaction, philosophy, product design, sociology, tangible interface and ubiquitous computing.

We invite contributions that address physicality at various levels, including:

� design at the physical-digital frontier
� the philosophy of physicality
� artefact-focussed social interaction
� physically-inspired interaction in virtual worlds
� creativity and materiality
� interactive art and performance
� digital emulation of the physical
� the evolving role of digital artefacts in material culture

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Length guide: 4000 - 7000 words
Paper deadline: 1st April 2008
To expedite the reviewing process prospective authors are encouraged to send an abstract at their earliest convenience.
Detailed author guidelines can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/525445/authorinstructions
Note: For the initial submission a single PDF copy will suffice, i.e. text and figures need not be separate.
Any further queries, please contact Devina@physicality.org

GUEST EDITORS
Devina Ramduny-Ellis, InfoLab 21, Lancaster University, UK
Alan Dix, InfoLab 21, Lancaster University, UK
Joanna Hare, National Centre for Product Design & Development Research, UWIC, UK
Steve Gill, National Centre for Product Design & Development Research, UWIC, UK