In one of his scientific papers von Békésy describes that on board a ship he became interested in how the fog horn was made, since he had been struck by the fact that the fog signal which was heard for many miles at sea, was practically inaudible in the cabin of the ship. This episode serves as an introduction to a paper analysing those properties of the ear the functions of which are to give t...

The praxic semantic system comprises a conceptual knowledge system, which stores functional information about objects, and an action knowledge system, which stores information about the correct manipulation of objects. Moreover, mechanical problem solving abilities permit to take advantages from objects structure to use unfamiliar tools or discover alternative ways of using familiar tools. This...

BACKGROUND retirement is a major life change that is likely to affect lifestyles and yet little is still known about its influence on physical activity (PA). This study objectively quantified sedentary behaviour and ambulatory activity outcomes in retired and non-retired older, community-dwelling adults. METHODS PA was quantified in 98 community-dwelling older adults (69.1 ± 7.6 years) who wo...

This longitudinal study focused on the interaction of developing sitting postural control with look time, which served as a measure for cognitive processing. Twenty-eight typically developing infants and 16 infants with motor delays were evaluated using center-of-pressure measures to assess stability of sitting postural control and videography to assess look time at objects, at three progressiv...

Some corvids have demonstrated cognitive abilities that rival or exceed those of the great apes; for example, tool use in New Caledonian crows, and social cognition, episodic-like memory and future planning in Western scrub-jays. Rooks appear to be able to solve novel tasks through causal reasoning rather than simple trial-and-error learning. Animals with certain expectations about how objects ...

Carrying objects requires coordination of manual action and locomotion. This study investigated spontaneous carrying in 24 walkers who were 13 months old and 26 crawlers who were 13 months old during 1-hr, naturalistic observations in the infants' homes. Carrying was more common in walkers, but crawlers also carried objects. Typically, walkers carried objects in their hands, whereas crawlers mu...

Continually throughout the day, the brain must process incoming visual signals and transform them into appropriate actions, namely saccadic eye movements to the most behaviorally salient stimuli. The overarching problem that we address is how to use visual information to predict the parts of a scene that are most salient, and more specifically, to predict the targets of saccadic eye movements. ...

Tool-use is specialized in humans, and juvenile humans show much more prolific and prodigious tool-use than other juvenile primates. Nonhuman primates possess many of the basic motor and behavioral capacities needed for manual tool-use: perceptual-motor specialization, sociocultural practices and interactions, and abstract conceptualization of kinds of functions, both real and imagined. These t...

BACKGROUND There is some evidence to suggest that dog ownership may improve physical activity (PA) among older adults, but to date, studies examining this, have either depended on self-report or incomplete datasets due to the type of activity monitor used to record physical activity. Additionally, the effect of dog ownership on sedentary behaviour (SB) has not been explored. The aim of the curr...

INTRODUCTION The objective of this study was to assess change in sitting and physical activity behavior in response to a workplace intervention to disrupt prolonged sitting time. METHODS Sixty office workers were randomized to either a Stand group (n = 29), which received hourly prompts (computer-based and wrist-worn) to stand up, or a Step group (n = 31), which received the same hourly promp...