Objectives: Paper and pencil exercises are extensively used to enhance children’s visual perceptual skills, while exercises involving volumetric shapes have been neglected. The present study aimed to develop a combined training package, including volumetric shapes and paper and pencil exercises, and to investigate its effectiveness in strengthening the visual perceptual skills of preschool chil...

introduction: motor skills play an important role during life span, and older adults need to learn or relearn these skills. the purpose of this study was to investigate how aging affects induction of improved movement performance by motor training. methods: serial reaction time test (srtt) was used to assess movement performance during 8 blocks of motor training. participants were tested in two...

Despite unconditional feature inversion being the foundation of many image synthesis applications, training an inverter demands a high computational budget, large decoding capacity and imposing conditions such as autoregressive priors. To address these limitations, we propose use adversarially robust representations perceptual primitive for inversion. We train encoder to extract disentangled pe...

This paper describes a thesis exploring how computer programs can collaborate as equals in the artistic creative process. The proposed system, CoCo Sketch, encodes some rudimentary stylistic rules of abstract sketching and music theory to contribute supplemental lines and music while the user sketches. We describe a three-part research method that includes defining rudimentary stylistic rules f...

This article provides an overview of the research concerning the nature of the distinct, listener-oriented speaking style called 'clear speech' and its effect on intelligibility for various listener populations. We review major findings that identify talker, listener and signal characteristics that contribute to the characteristically high intelligibility of clear speech. Understanding the inte...

In this paper a new approach towards the analysis of speech rhythm is presented. In the speech rhythm literature it was often discussed that rhythmic phenomena are more transparent in the metrical structure of orally produced poetry. However, up to now only a few phoneticians have worked on this special speaking style. For analyzing the rhythmic and prosodic patterns of this kind of speech, a c...

This paper describes a technique for modeling and controlling emotional expressivity of speech in HMM-based speech synthesis. A problem of conventional emotional speech synthesis based on HMM is that the intensity of an emotional expression appearing in synthetic speech completely depends on the database used for model training. To take into account the emotional expressivity that listeners act...

Forty unpaid normal volunteers (20 men and 20 women) were given the Autokinetic Test, the Embedded-Figures Test, and the Rod-and-Frame Test prior to instruction in the Transcendental Meditation technique. After three months of regular meditation subjects were retested and demonstrated increased ego-distance and field independence, as compared with controls, on all of the above tests. These rema...