Mental imagery can improve motor performance in stroke populations when combined with physical therapy. Valid and reliable instruments to evaluate the imagery ability of stroke survivors are needed to maximize the benefits of mental imagery therapy. The purposes of this study were to: examine and compare the test-retest intra-rate reliability of the Movement Imagery Questionnaire-Revised, Secon...

The notion that dreaming is isolated from sensory activity is chal/~ng~d by demonstrations that somatosensory stimuli are frequently incorporated illlo dreiUlI colllent. To further study such effects, four volunteers were administered pressure stimulation to either the left or the right leg during REM sleep and awakened to report tlu:ir dreams. These dreams were rated and compared to non-stimul...

BACKGROUND The term "learning style" refers to the fact that each person has a different way of accumulating knowledge. While some prefer listening to learn better, others need to write or they only need to read the text or see a picture to later remember. According to Fleming and Mills the learning styles can be classified in Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic. There is no evidence that teaching...

Kinesthetic feedback was shown to significantly improve the accuracy of teleoperations subject to rotational misalignments between the image source and the operator even without explicit training. Rotational misalignments are often encountered in teleoperation and telerobotics when a remote image sensor (usually a camera) is oriented so that the resulting display coordinates are rotated with re...

Although kinesthesia is known to largely depend on afferent inflow, recent data suggest that central signals originating from volitional control (efferent outflow) could also be involved and interact with the former to build up a coherent percept. Evidence derives from both clinical and experimental observations where vision, which is of primary importance in kinesthesia, was systematically pre...

Producing a movement in response to a sensory stimulus requires knowledge of the body's current configuration, and spindle organs embedded within muscles are a primary source of such kinesthetic information. Here, we sought to develop an animal model of kinesthetic illusions induced by mechanically vibrating muscles as a first step toward a mechanistic understanding of how kinesthesia is integr...

Psychologists distinguish between active and passive touch. The latter arises when objects are brought into contact with a passive tactile surface, such as the palm of the band. Active touch describes a dynamic exploration of objects involving receptors located in both the skin (cutaneous) and the joints (kinesthetic). Research in the area of robotic tactile perception has focussed on passive t...

In this research we implemented three different methods for presenting scientific graphs to blind and visually impaired people. Each rendering method employed either audition, kinesthetic or a combination of those two modalities. In order to allow for distance learning, we have used low cost portable devices for the output graph rendering. The three modes of representation were then compared by...

Computational geometry is a new branch of knowledge in computer science that deals with the analysis and design of algorithms for solving geometric problems. These problems typically arise in computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, and robotics. In the past few years many of the algorithms proposed for solving geometric problems have been found to be incorrect. These incorrect alg...