Using content analysis and in-depth interviews, this research undertakes a case study of the online progressive blogosphere as a social movement. Previous research into social movement applications of the Internet and computer-mediated communication (CMC) focuses on "street" movement application of Internet resources. These studies find that though Internet applications are a boon to movements, they offer nothing novel, instead allowing movements to perform normal tasks at a faster rate. More recently, scholars have begun to examine movements with stronger roots in the online world, or "e-movements." Earl and Schussman (2003, 2004) assert that not only do unique e-movements exist, but that they have important substantial differences from street movements. This research examines the progressive blogosphere (PB) as one of these e-movements. I examine the movement activity of the PB through the lens of framing and New Social Movements (NSM) in order to gain insight to where e-movements fit within our current knowledge structures. In the end, I find that though decentralized and informal, the PB movement utilizes existing framing tasks and processes in order to mobilize passive readers into active users. After analyzing the PB movements' identity construction, mobilization techniques, goals, and leadership structures, I propose the existence of a "user-based model" for e-movements.

Even during fixation, the eye is rarely still, as miniature eye movements continue to occur within fixational periods of the eye. These miniature movements are referred to as fixational eye movements. Microsaccades are one of the three types of fixational eye movements that have been identified. Microsaccades have been attributed to different visual processes/phenomena such as fixation stability, perceptual fading, and multistable perception. Still, debates surrounding the functional role of microsaccades in vision ensued, as many of the findings from earlier microsaccade reports contradict one another and the polarity in the field caused by these debates led many to believe that microsaccades do not hold a necessary/specialized role in vision. To gain a deeper understanding of microsaccades and its relevance in vision, we sought out to assess the role of microsaccades in bistable motion perception in our behavioral/eye-tracking study. Observers participated in an eye-tracking experiment where they were asked to complete a motion discrimination task while viewing a bistable apparent motion stimuli. The collected eye-tracking data was then used to train a classification model to predict directions of illusory motion perceived by observers. We found that small changes in gaze position during fixation, occurring within or outside microsaccadic events, predicted the direction of motion pattern imposed by the motion stimuli. Our findings suggest that microsaccades and fixational eye movements are correlated with motion perception and that miniature eye movements occurring during fixation may have relevance in vision. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Master of Arts / Department of Sociology / Robert K. Schaeffer / The intention of this thesis was to understand why and how women organized or participated in peaceful movements aimed at stopping collective, organized male violence in the public sphere. Historical archives were used to examine four social movements – Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Greenham Common Peace Camp, Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, and the Antimafia Movement – that attempted to end violence from male organizations. The findings from this thesis discovered that through the process of framing, which was permitted by increased power obtained in society through the workforce, women took a peaceful, self-invested, but overall altruistic, role in social movements.

Trial-level evidence for feedback sensitivity in fixations during category learning has been previously described as weak. In this dissertation, steps were taken to overcome some methodological issues potentially obscuring the evidence for such sensitivity. Jointly, the three experiments reported here suggest that sensitivity to error in visual attention reflects cue competition, as opposed to error-driven learning of a selective visual profile. These outcomes are in agreement with previous research in human vision, which holds that fixations reflect the agent’s task representation. A case is made for the top-down control of visual attention during category learning, manifested as effects of prior knowledge, long-standing expectations, decisional uncertainty, and vacillations between alternative sources of conflicting evidence. A suggestion is made that the time-based measures of visual attention may align with the continuous ratings of the perceived category membership (reflecting learner confidence).

Visual memory has been demonstrated to play a role in both visual search and attentional prioritization in natural scenes. However, it has been studied predominantly in experimental paradigms using multiple two-dimensional images. Natural experience, however, entails prolonged immersion in a limited number of three-dimensional environments. The goal of the present experiment was to recreate circumstances comparable to natural visual experience in order to evaluate the role of scene memory in guiding eye movements in a natural environment. Subjects performed a continuous visual-search task within an immersive virtual-reality environment over three days. We found that, similar to two-dimensional contexts, viewers rapidly learn the location of objects in the environment over time, and use spatial memory to guide search. Incidental fixations did not provide obvious benefit to subsequent search, suggesting that semantic contextual cues may often be just as efficient, or that many incidentally fixated items are not held in memory in the absence of a specific task. On the third day of the experience in the environment, previous search items changed in color. These items were fixated upon with increased probability relative to control objects, suggesting that memory-guided prioritization (or Surprise) may be a robust mechanisms for attracting gaze to novel features of natural environments, in addition to task factors and simple spatial saliency. / text

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