In the current study participants explored a desktop virtual environment (VE) representing a suburban neighborhood with signs of public disorder (neglect, vandalism, and crime), while being exposed to either room air (control group), or subliminal levels of tar (unpleasant; typically associated with burned or waste material) or freshly cut grass (pleasant; typically associated with natural or f...

Careful measurements of the dynamics of speech production have provided important insights into phonetic properties of spoken languages. By contrast, analytic quantification of the visual properties of signed languages remains largely unexplored. The purpose of this study was to characterize the spatial and temporal visual properties of American Sign Language (ASL). Novel measurement techniques...

OBJECTIVE To assess visual search and recognition of roadside targets and safety errors during a landmark and traffic sign identification task in drivers with Alzheimer's disease. METHODS 33 drivers with probable Alzheimer's disease of mild severity and 137 neurologically normal older adults underwent a battery of visual and cognitive tests and were asked to report detection of specific landm...

The perceptual loop theory of self-monitoring posits that auditory speech output is parsed by the comprehension system. For sign language, however, visual input from one's own signing is distinct from visual input received from another's signing. Two experiments investigated the role of visual feedback in the production of American Sign Language (ASL). Experiment 1 revealed that signers were po...

The Hand Motion Understanding (HMU) system is a vision-based Australian sign language recognition system that recognises static and dynamic hand signs. It uses a visual hand tracker to extract 3D hand configuration data from a visual motion sequence, and a classifier that recognises the changes of these 3D kinematic data as a sign. This paper presents the HMU classifier that uses an adaptive fu...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to detect salient traffic signs, which is based on visual saliency and auto-generated strokes for image segmentation. The proposed algorithm deals with two tasks on detecting traffic signs: auto-location and auto extraction. Firstly, inspired by recent work of visual saliency detection, we obtain the location of traffic signs in a natural image by multi-...

Developmental dyslexia is a complex syndrome whose exact cause remains unknown. It has been suggested that a problem with fatty acid metabolism may play a role, particularly in relation to the visual symptoms exhibited by many dyslexics. We explored this possibility using two self-report questionnaires, designed on the basis of clinical experience, to assess (1) clinical signs of fatty acid def...

BACKGROUND Prominent visual symptoms can present in the visual variant of Alzheimer's disease (VVAD). Ophthalmologists have a significant role to play in the early diagnosis of VVAD. METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the files of ten consecutive patients diagnosed with VVAD. All patients had a full neuro-ophthalmologic examination, a formal neurological and neuro-psychological testing, and ...

Reitz Chr, Tang M-X, Schupf N et al. (2010) A Summary Risk Score for the Prediction of Alzheimer Disease in Elderly Persons. Arch Neurol. 67(7), 835-841. doi:10.1001/archneurol.2010.136. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068839/ “Risk factors contributing to the risk score were age, sex, education, ethnicity, APOE ε4 genotype, history of diabetes, hypertension or smoking, high-densit...