Teaching a new concept with gestures – hand movements that accompany speech – facilitates learning above-and-beyond instruction through speech alone (e.g., Singer & GoldinMeadow, 2005). However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are still being explored. Here, we use eye tracking to explore one mechanism – gesture’s ability to direct visual attention. We examine how children allocate th...

We present evidence that neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) of monkey posterior parietal cortex (PPC) are activated by the instruction to make an eye movement, even in the complete absence of a spatial target. This study employed a visually guided motor task that dissociated the type of movement to make (saccade or reach) from the location where the movement was to be made. Using t...

This paper describes recent large-scale-integration programmable processors designed for multimedia processing such as real-time compression and decompression of audio and video as well as the generation of computer graphics. As the target of these processors is to handle audio and video in real time, the processing capability must be increased tenfold compared to that of conventional microproc...

Cognitive linguists contend that learners’ awareness of motivations is the key in not only second language acquisition but also figurative language learning. Two cognitive-oriented methods are proposed to raise L2 learners’ awareness on metaphoric/metonymic expressions and to enhance retention: instruction involving conceptual metaphors (CM) and instruction involving metaphoric mappings (MM). T...

We describe the sound design and initial user study of an audio game created for gamers with visual impairments. Despite the wild popularity of platform games such as Super Mario [1] and the development of many audio games over the past decade, the platform genre has so far been all but ignored by audio game designers. To fill this gap and to add to the limited entertainment choices visually im...

Reducing energy consumption has become an important issue in designing hardware and software systems in recent years. Although low power hardware components are critical for reducing energy consumption, the switching activity, which is the main source of dynamic power dissipation in electronic systems, is largely determined by the software running on these systems. In this paper, we present and...

Information seeking is a form of human behavior that involves seeking for information by means of the active examination of information sources or information retrieval systems to satisfy the information need or to solve a problem. This study explores the information seeking behavior of visually impaired students in Maulana Azad Library, AMU. The purpose of the study is to examine the informati...

In order to access the Web news, visually impaired people have to resort to some types of screen readers to convert the textual information into audio streams. Such special users have to listen to the information line by line. It is particularly inefficient with a mobile device to search and navigate interested information in Web news-sphere in which the content structure is complicated and the...

The inherent visual nature of Internet browsers makes the Web inaccessible to the visually impaired. Although several nonvisual browsers have been developed, they usually transform the visual content of HTML documents into textual information only, that can be rendered by a text-to-speech converter or a Braille device. The loss of spatial layout and of textual attributes should be avoided since...

Finding ones way to an unknown destination, navigating complex routes, finding desired inanimate objects; these are all tasks that can be challenging for the visually impaired. The project NAVIG (Navigation Assisted by artificial VIsion and GNSS) is directed towards increasing the autonomy of visually impaired users in known and unknown environments, exterior and interior, large scale and small...