<p> The incorporation of virtual reality (VR) into the realm of sport injury recovery is a developing area of VR application. The purpose of this study was to collect information from a subpopulation of collegiate athletes (i.e., soccer players) to assess the interest level of VR as an intervention to recovery from injury, and to identify the virtual features athletes want to view and encounter within a sport specific virtual world. The survey included sport-injury, VR interests and preferences, and general demographic questions. VR preference questions were created from Bandura&rsquo;s Self-Efficacy Theory, specifically the efficacy sources. Of the 118 participants that were recruited, 87 responses were valid. Responses to survey questions were based on a 10-point Likert-type scale ranging from not interested (1) to extremely interested (10), which revealed a strong interest in using VR for sport performance enhancement (<i>M</i> = 7.86, <i>SD</i> = 2.58) and injury recovery (<i>M</i> = 6.87, <i>SD</i> = 2.65) amongst collegiate soccer athletes. A gender difference between men and women regarding level of interests in VR interventions and preferences questions was detected. An understanding of the elements to include in a sport specific VR environment that reflects the expectations and desires of collegiate athletes is of special importance. Such specific information can capture the elements that can be more conducive for positive sport outcomes, whether for general performance enhancement or returning to pre-injury performance level.</p><p>

<p> Providing care for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) presents many challenges to parents. Research has primarily explored the negative outcomes of caregiving experiences in parents of children with ASD, such as stress, depression, anxiety, and disruption of social relationships. Much less attention, however, has been dedicated to the positive aspects of experience in parenting a child with ASD. The purpose of this study was to examine both positive and negative aspects of the experience in parenting a child with ASD and relate them to child symptom severity and parenting self-efficacy. Multivariate regression analyses indicated a significant effect of interaction between stress and parenting self-efficacy on the prediction of enrichment. These findings point to the possibility that enrichment occurs, disregarding the severity of the child&rsquo;s ASD symptoms, and that stress may potentially serve to moderate the role of parenting efficacy in facilitating the experience of enrichment in parents.</p><p>

The relatively slow variations in amplitude across time (amplitude modulation or AM) inherent to many behaviorally relevant sounds are of fundamental importance to auditory perception and communication. This is true for listeners with normal hearing, listeners with hearing loss, and, in particular, for listeners with cochlear implants, for whom limitations on frequency resolution imposed by current-generation implants make AM cues the dominant source of auditory information in some settings. As such, a core problem in contemporary hearing research is determining how AM cues are processed, in particular in multisource listening environments in which multiple AM components (peaks in the AM spectrum) associated with multiple, competing sources of sound occur simultaneously, and therefore must be processed selectively. While past research has revealed many of the low-level sensory mechanisms that mediate such processing, relatively little is known about the high-level, nonsensory factors involved. This dissertation reports the results of three studies that were designed to yield a better understanding of one such nonsensory factor; namely, listener uncertainty. The first study demonstrated that listener uncertainty regarding the AM spectrum of a masker (AM-rate uncertainty) can have an adverse effect on the detectability of target AM. The other two studies identified stimulus and psychological factors that can both produce and reduce this effect. In all three studies, psychophysical techniques that long have been used to investigate the effects of uncertainty in the context of auditory informational masking (IM) were adapted and applied to the study of AM-rate uncertainty for the first time, yielding insights into what we will call IM in the AM domain, or "modulation IM." Taken together, the results shed new light on how uncertainty in general, and AM-rate uncertainty in particular, affects auditory perception and communication in the types of dynamic, multisource listening environments that characterize everyday life. / 2024-05-09T00:00:00Z

Our eyes are always in motion. Even when we attempt to maintain steady gaze, fixational eye movements, which include ocular drift and microscopic saccades (known as microsaccades or fixational saccades) continually shift the projection of the visual scene onto the retina. Despite much progress during the last decade, many aspects regarding the visual function of these movements remain unknown. This dissertation describes four studies in which fixational eye movements were recorded by means of a high resolution eye tracker to provide answers to the following fundamental questions: (1) What is the visual input to the retina? Data from a large group of untrained observers show that the precision of fixation varies widely across individuals. Furthermore, they show that the line of sight normally covers a much larger area and ocular drift is much faster than commonly assumed. (2) What triggers fixational saccades? Data obtained with a new method for measuring the fixation error clarify that both spatial and temporal factors contribute to the generation of microsaccades. During intended fixation on a point, fixational saccades typically correct for foveation errors, but microsaccades also occur at very small fixation displacements after a prolonged period of time. (3) Are microsaccades controlled in the same way as saccades? The results of adaptation experiments show that microsaccades undergo plastic changes similar to those exhibited by larger saccades, strengthening the hypothesis that microsaccades and saccades are mediated by the same neural structures. (4) What are the mechanisms of visual encoding during fixational eye movements? We examined whether humans are capable of extracting spatial information made available by fixational eye movements in the form of temporal modulations. Results of experiments with precise control of retinal stimulation show that, in the absence of explicit spatial information, fixational modulations are sufficient to establish accurate spatial representation. These results advance the field in multiple important ways. They show that fixational eye movements are under tight oculomotor control and that they contribute to the processing of visual information.

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<p> Mothers&rsquo; socialization has been shown to impact prosocial tendencies in children. Discussions during joint book reading may provide a context to observe mothers&rsquo; strategies for evoking emotions. More specifically, mother-child talk about emotions, cognitive states, and inductive reasoning may enhance children&rsquo;s perspective taking about characters experiencing diversity. However, mothers may differ in their amount and type of talk if the characters in the story are from an in-group or out-group. While not all mothers may engage in these strategies during book reading, evoking sympathy in children has been shown to predict children&rsquo;s prosocial attitudes and behaviors toward others in need. The goal of this study was to explore mothers&rsquo; discourse strategies during a joint book reading task with first and second graders. Moreover, this study aimed to test whether reading and discussing a story about an in-group or out-group member differed and whether certain differences increased donating behavior and prosocial attitudes and from pre- to post-tests. In the main results, children&rsquo;s donations did not significantly increase from pre-test to post-test as hypothesized nor did donations differ between the in-group or out-group story condition. However, children&rsquo;s prosocial attitudes toward both in-group and out-group children improved equally from pre-test to post-test. Also as hypothesized, maternal discourse differed between story conditions. More specifically, there was an interaction between child gender and story condition where mothers with daughters used more emotion talk and cognitive state talk when discussing out-group members than did mothers with sons. Exploratory analyses revealed that mothers who used more emotion talk and inductive reasoning had children with lower prosocial attitudes when averaged across time of measurement toward both the in-group and out-group. Alternatively, children&rsquo;s trait sympathy predicted higher average donations and prosocial attitudes. Finally, children&rsquo;s civic identity scores predicted children&rsquo;s average prosocial attitudes and maternal discourse variables (i.e., emotion words, cognitive state words, and number of inductive sequences). Future research should continue to investigate the relationship between children&rsquo;s civic identity and maternal discourse, as this was the first study to explore the two. In conclusion, inducing sympathy in children may be an effective strategy for fostering more favorable attitudes toward other people in need regardless of their group identification. Additionally, individual child characteristics may predict children&rsquo;s inclination to help others in need; however, aspects of mothers discourse may hinder such prosocial tendencies with children if they induce personal distress.</p>

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