A common problem in vision research is explaining how humans perceive a coherent, detailed and stable world despite the fact that the eyes make constant, jumpy movements and the fact that only a small part of the visual field can be resolved in detail at any one time. This is essentially a problem of integration over time - how successive views of the visual world can be used to create the impression of a continuous and stable environment. A common way of studying this problem is to use complete visual scenes as stimuli and present a changed scene after a disruption such as an eye movement or a blank screen. It is found in these studies that observers have great difficulty detecting changes made during a disruption, even though these changes are immediately and easily detectable when the disruption is removed. These results have highlighted the importance of motion cues in tracking changes to the environment, but also reveal the limited nature of the internal representation. Change blindness studies are interesting as demonstrations but can be difficult to interpret as they are usually applied to complex, naturalistic scenes. More traditional studies of scene analysis, such as visual search, are more abstract in their formulation, but offer more controlled stimulus conditions. In a typical visual search task, observers are presented with an array of objects against a uniform background and are required to report on the presence or absence of a target object that is differentiable from the other objects in some way. More recently, scene analysis has been investigated by combining change blindness and visual search in the `visual search for change' paradigm, in which observers must search for a target object defined by a change over two presentations of the set of objects. The experiments of this thesis investigate change blindness using the visual search for change paradigm, but also use principles of design from psychophysical experiments, dealing with detection and discrimination of basic visual qualities such as colour, speed, size, orientation and spatial frequency. This allows the experiments to precisely examine the role of these different features in the change blindness process. More specifically, the experiments are designed to look at the capacity of visual short-term memory for different visual features, by examining the retention of this information across the temporal gaps in the change blindness experiments. The nature and fidelity of representations in visual short-term memory is also investigated by manipulating (i) the manner in which featural information is distributed across space and objects, (ii) the time for which the information is available, (iii) the manner in which observers must respond to that information. Results point to a model in which humans analyse objects in a scene at the level of features/attributes rather than at a pictorial/object level. Results also point to the fact that the working representations which humans retain during visual exploration are similarly feature- rather than object-based. In conclusion the thesis proposes a model of scene analysis in which attention and vSTM capacity limits are used to explain the results from a more information theoretic standpoint.

<p>Reklam på internet är ständigt ökande och många internetanvändare är negativt inställda till den. Därför har de utvecklat olika medvetna och omedvetna strategier för att undvika den när de ska göra något på internet. För skapare av reklam på Internet kan det vara bra att känna till hur reklamen undviks för att kunna bli bättre på att skapa effektiv reklam. Denna undersökning har baserats på intervjuer med vana internetanvändare med olika bakgrund för att få reda på hur de hanterar reklambanners samt en förståelse för hur de tänker. Intervjuerna föregicks av en videoinspelning där försöksdeltagarna fick specifika uppgifter att utföra för att eftersträva ett naturligt beteende.</p><p>Resultatet av undersökningen visade att banner blindness är ett fenomen som används av många försöksdeltagare, både på ett medvetet och omedvetet plan. Det visade sig att bara några få gör något aktivt fö ratt slippa eller undvika reklambanners. Anledningarna till varför de undvek reklamen visade sig i många fall bero på tre anledningar som tas upp i Cho och Cheons (2004) teoretiska modell : reklamen stör deras uppgift; många och röriga banners samt tidigare negativa erfarenheter.</p>

The aim of this thesis is to develop an technical aid (software) to help people with colourblindness. Colour blind people have difficulties to differentiate between certain colours,so the implemented software will name a selected colour. The software is implementedas a Mozilla Firefox extension and also uses a XPCOM component. Furthermore canthe user select different colour databases and change the displaying properties.The aim of this thesis is to develop an technical aid (software) to help people with colourblindness. Colour blind people have difficulties to differentiate between certain colours,so the implemented software will name a selected colour. The software is implementedas a Mozilla Firefox extension and also uses a XPCOM component. Furthermore canthe user select different colour databases and change the displaying properties.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Higher Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 42-50). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR45962

When the author sets out to use anthropology to understand his physical blindness, he discovers a dialectical tension between empirical observation versus heuristics that is held in common by both ethnography and disability. Ensuing discussions synthesize personal experience with the history of anthropology and the philosophy of science in order to construct a critical dialogue in which blindness can be understood anthropologically, while the individuality of the experience of blindness ultimately pushes ethnography past its generic limits. The essays argue that the study of cultural differences cannot apprehend disability processually. Disability is instead properly understood as an unshared individual difference dissociated from communicative practice and learned practices of embodiment, dissociated as well by ethnographic accounts of collective practices. Individual difference is disabling; meanwhile, ideologically, the visible products of disability are driven into the individual body, qualifying it as disabled, without reference to the generative process. This exploration becomes an application of "reflexive anthropology," which departs qualitatively from the conventional project of ethnography by centering critical attention on the interlocutory field that includes the anthropologist as a fully invested participant. It remediates the situated cultural production of one's own knowledge and experience, which opens the possibility to become attentive to the individual differences that constitute the present. The essays historicize three advents in interpretive anthropology: the repulsion of the study of mind by the study of interpretation, the flirtation with and rapid domestication of the self within the representation of the other, and the divorce between the critical study of texts versus the empirical study of language. The approach incorporates discourse pragmatics and practice theory, but also post-objectivist sensibilities. However, the discourse of affirmation associated with poststructuralism is here replaced with one stemming from suffering and disability. Collectively, the essays argue that the ethical practice of "thinking anthropologically" outside ethnography, by students and anthropologists as students, warrants programmatic attention.

This thesis examines the labour market experiences of a purposive sample of legally blind people in a medium-sized Canadian city. Relevant literature on disability, employment and stigma is reviewed, providing context for the thesis. Thematic analysis of qualitative data gathered from 18 in-depth face-to-face interviews of legally blind working-age participants provide rich narratives of their experiences in the labour market and society at large. The participants’ current and past employment situations are described and barriers to acceptance of their disability in the workforce are identified. Findings suggest that while perceived, enacted, and felt stigma constitute significant barriers to meaningful employment for the participants, many employ effective strategies to adapt to or resist stigmatizing treatment by others. Policy suggestions are provided to mitigate the impact of stigma on the lives of legally blind Canadians. The thesis concludes with suggestions for future directions of research in the area. / Graduate / 0629 / 0630 / 0626 / martha.jansenberger@gmail.com

This study described how suburban public elementary school principals and teachers perceived the principals' social justice leadership as shifting demographic diversity increased in racial and ethnic minority students, decreased in white students, increased in child poverty, and threatened schools academic achievement status. The two Arizona high performance suburban public elementary schools (SPES) were located in two different suburban districts on opposite sides of a metropolitan city. A multiple embedded replication case study involved principals and six K-5 grade teachers at each school and included participant semi-structured interviews, school observations, and document analysis. The data showed how principals' leadership was perceived and practiced in educating students with social and educational inequalities while simultaneously trying to maintain high performance schools. Findings revealed that principals' different and similar practices were not motivated from a social justice disposition. Nevertheless, I discovered that principals' leadership practices imperceptibly included tenets of social justice. The teachers perceived that principals made concerted efforts beyond contemporary leadership practices that addressed children's inequalities owing to poverty and lack of academic preparation. The principals and teachers cared for the students and pushed for additional resources. The educators expressed being underprepared professionally for the tensions brought about by students' shifting demographics. An unexpected finding was that child poverty trumped the children's race and ethnicity as the foremost issue challenging the principals and teachers. As a result of the findings, part of my proposition supported the premise that principals would perceive the educational inequalities experienced by students. Conversely, part of the premise stating that principals' perceptions of students' educational inequalities would influence them to use social justice leadership was weakly supported because principals did not perceive or attribute their practices with teachers as driven by a belief in social justice. Two themes emerged from the analysis of patterns across cases: (1) Principals did not have a social justice consciousness driving their leadership practices, and (2) Principals' contemporary leadership practices imperceptibly combined social justice leadership tenets to influence teachers and promote equality of educational opportunity for all students.

In this essay, I examine how the nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon of phrenology is made apparent in the abolitionist arguments of Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Blind Tom” (1862), a nonfiction character sketch of the popular blind slave and idiot savant-musician. The first portion of my argument constructs a probable reality that allows for the influence of Davis’s exposure to phrenology first as a student, then later as a writer. I then perform a critical assessment of “Blind Tom,” revealing how Davis relies upon phrenological terminology, such as that employed by famous phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler, in her descriptions of the musician’s physical appearance in order to call for his freedom, from not only slavery on the Georgian planation he called home, but also, from being paraded as an sideshow and a spectacle before audiences across America.

Thesis (M.S.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 72 p. : ill. Includes bibliographical references.