Obesity has been related to postural instability during static standing. It remains unknown how obesity influences stability during dynamic movements like gait. The primary aim of this study was to investigate the effects of obesity on dynamic gait stability control in young adults during gait. Forty-four young adults (21 normal-weight and 23 obese) participated in this study. Participants walk...

Walking speed was timed for male and female pedestrians on a public sidewalk with fast, slow, or no music playing in the background (n = 20 per condition). Pedestrians in the fast music condition walked more rapidly than those in the other two conditions. Slow music did not reduce walking speed, relative to the no music condition. Walking speed did not differ by gender in any of the three condi...

People frequently analyze the actions of other people for the purpose of action coordination. To understand whether such self-relative action perception differs from other-relative action perception, the authors had observers either compare their own walking speed with that of a point-light walker or compare the walking speeds of 2 point-light walkers. In Experiment 1, observers walked, bicycle...

Chronic motor deficits in the upper limb (UL) are a major contributor to disability following stroke. This study investigated the effect of short-duration robot-assisted therapy on motor impairment, as measured by clinical scales and robot-derived performance measures in patients with chronic, severe UL impairments after stroke. As part of a larger study, 15 individuals with chronic, severe UL ...

Hippocampal structural integrity is commonly quantified using volumetric measurements derived from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Previously reported associations with cognitive decline have not been consistent. We investigate hippocampal integrity using quantitative MRI techniques and its association with cognitive abilities in older age. Participants from the Lothian Birth Cohort 193...

A digital high-speed camera in combination with a light intensiier and a exible endoscope is used to record running human speech. Due to the light absorbtion of the exible endo-scope, the recorded image sequences are too dark for human examination and too poor for digital motion analysis. Therefore, two diierent image enhancement methods are compared to improve the image sequences. Resulting tr...

Background: Processing speed training using a 1-year intervention period improves cognitive functions and emotional states of elderly people. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether short-term processing speed training such as 4 weeks can benefit elderly people. This study was designed to investigate effects of 4 weeks of processing speed training on cognitive functions and emotional states of...

This study investigated the temporal characteristics of gait initiation and gait termination. Ten nondisabled adult volunteers and ten people with unilateral transtibial limb loss performed starting and stopping for slow, normal, and fast walking speeds. We used kinematic and anthropomorphic data to determine the body center of mass (BCOM) position of each subject. The BCOM acceleration was der...

A substantial body of evidence points to a cue-based direct-access retrieval mechanism as a crucial component of skilled adult reading. We report two experiments aimed at examining whether poor readers are able to make use of the same retrieval mechanism. This is significant in light of findings that poor readers have difficulty retrieving linguistic information (e.g., Perfetti, 1985). Our expe...

This study recorded basic gait data from 656 healthy primary school-aged children (5-13 years) and 81 young adults (18-27 years) whilst walking over-ground across a level walkway at varying speed. It investigated the effect of gait speed and re-examined the issue of gait maturation. Participants completed 6-8 walks at self-selected slow, free and fast speed along a GAITRite walkway whilst weari...