China 
Africa 
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Oculata Manus
Published in Stephen Temple, Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design, 2018
Dr. Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, has conducted studies in which she asked children who had not yet learned to read or write to reproduce a letter form or shape presented to them. The children, “were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again. The researchers found that the initial duplication process mattered a great deal. When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex. By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect.” (Konnikova 2014) The role of the hand is significant in the learning process. The differences in neural activity generated by freehand drawing as opposed to tracing or typing was attributed “to the messiness inherent in free-form handwriting: Not only must we first plan and execute the action in a way that is not required when we have a traceable outline, but we are also likely to produce a result that is highly variable. That variability may itself be a learning tool. “‘When a kid produces a messy letter,’ Dr. James said, ‘that might help him learn it’” (Konnikova 2014).
Static, Low-Frequency, and Pulsed Magnetic Fields in Biological Systems
Published in James C. Lin, Electromagnetic Fields in Biological Systems, 2016
It is known that fMRI and MEG are sensitive to the frontal and temporal language functions, respectively. Kamada et al. (2007) established combined use of fMRI and MEG to make reliable identification of global language dominance in pathological brain conditions. The authors investigated 117 patients with brain lesions whose language dominance was successfully confirmed by the Wada test. All patients were asked to generate verbs related to acoustically presented nouns (verb generation) for fMRI and to read three-letter words for fMRI and MEG. The fMRI typically showed prominent activations in the inferior and middle frontal gyri, whereas calculated dipoles on MEG typically clustered in the superior temporal region and the fusiform gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. A total of 87 patients were further analyzed using useful data from both the combined method and the Wada test. The authors observed a 100% match of the combined method results with the results of the Wada test, including two patients who showed expressive and receptive language areas dissociated into bilateral hemispheres. The results demonstrated that this noninvasive and repeatable method is not only highly reliable in determining language dominance, but it can also locate the expressive and receptive language areas separately. The authors suggested that the method is a potent alternative to the invasive procedures of the Wada test and is useful in treating patients with brain lesions.
1
Published in Mara Cercignani, Nicholas G. Dowell, Paul S. Tofts, Quantitative MRI of the Brain: Principles of Physical Measurement, 2018
A combined quantitative and functional MRI study in children and adults examined the relationship between WC and function (Gomez et al., 2017). Face memory and place recognition were tested in children and adults while scanning relevant brain regions in the ventral temporal cortex. WC measurement was used to extract MTV (1-WC) for these brain regions. It was shown that in the posterior fusiform gyrus, selective for faces, mean MTV increased by 12.6% from childhood to adulthood. Simulations results indicated that increase in the volume of the myelin sheath is not likely to account for the full extent of this observation.
Affective Communication through Air Jet Stimulation: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2018
Mohamed Yacine Tsalamlal, Will Rizer, Jean-Claude Martin, Mehdi Ammi, Mounia Ziat
The communication of emotions through facial expressions has been widely studied and was demonstrated through numerous perceptual studies (Ekman & Friesen 1971, 1975b; Izard 1971; Matsumoto 1992). Research showed that humans are capable of discriminating at least six distinct emotions. The pioneer research led by Ekman and colleagues (Izard 1971; Ekman & Friesen 1975a) highlighted the existence of prototypical facial expressions of basic emotions (surprise, anger, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness) that prove to be similar across different cultures (Ekman & Friesen 1971; Matsumoto 1992). Regarding the neural correlates of facial expressions in the communication of emotions, the body of research in neuroscience showed that the initial perceptual processing of pictures of prototypical emotional faces takes place in the inferior occipital cortex (Dolan 2002; Rossion et al. 2003). The middle fusiform gyrus seems to be involved in structural properties of faces that determine face identity (Haxby et al. 2000; Hoffman & Haxby 2000); whereas, the processing of dynamic facial expressions activates the superior temporal sulcus area (Allison et al. 2000). A quick evaluation of the emotional and motivational significance of facial expressions appears to be mediated by the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex; whereas, structures such as the anterior cingulate, the prefrontal cortex, and somatosensory areas are linked to the conscious representation of emotional facial expressions for the strategic control of thought and action, as well as to the production of concomitant feeling states (Adolphs et al. 2003). By combining high-density EEG recordings and source localization analyses, several recent studies have systematically reported different ERP modulations in response to different emotional expressions (Batty & Taylor 2003; Pourtois 2004). However, the question on whether different emotional facial expressions give rise to specific ERP components such as magnitude, duration, and onset latencies still remains open (Eimer & Holmes 2007).