The problem of this study was to determine the effect of a modified form of Kephart's perceptual-motor training program on the performance of kindergarten pupils on Metropolitan Readiness Tests. This program was made up of certain perceptual-motor activities which were utilized during the regular school play periods.

This investigation examined the development of young children's behaviors on swings in the outdoor play environment and their emerging understanding of the physics principles associated with those behaviors. The children's language interactions were also examined in an effort to determine the relationship between language and cognitive development in their construction of physical knowledge. The procedures involved observing the children's behaviors and collecting samples of their spontaneous language interactions during their swinging activities. Informal interviews were also conducted with individual and groups of children. The findings indicate that young children's swinging behaviors develop in eight hierarchical stages. As these behaviors develop, children experiment with the physics principles of balance, gravity, force, resistance, and resonance. Children's swinging behaviors develop in a social context. Many early behaviors are acquired through observing and modeling other children. Language provides the medium for more-experienced peers to assist novice swingers through encouragement and direct instruction. The stage development of swinging behaviors is compared to Cratty's Theory of Perceptual-Motor Development and Harrow's Taxonomy of the Psychomotor Domain. Children's cognitive processing and language interactions are discussed in the context of Piagetian and Vygotskian theories of development. Implications for instruction and suggestions for further research are discussed.

I investigated how two types of rhythmic complexity, syncopation and tempo fluctuation, affect the neural and behavioral responses of listeners. The aim of Experiment 1 was to explore the role of attention in pulse and meter perception using complex rhythms. A selective attention paradigm was used in which participants attended either to a complex auditory rhythm or a visually presented list of words. Performance on a reproduction task was used to gauge whether participants were attending to the appropriate stimulus. Selective attention to rhythms led to increased BOLD (Blood Oxygen Level-Dependent) responses in basal ganglia, and basal ganglia activity was observed only after the rhythms had cycled enough times for a stable pulse percept to develop. These observations show that attention is needed to recruit motor activations associated with the perception of pulse in complex rhythms. Moreover, attention to the auditory stimulus enhanced activity in an attentional sensory network including primary auditory, insula, anterior cingulate, and prefrontal cortex, and suppressed activity in sensory areas associated with attending to the visual stimulus. In Experiment 2, the effect of tempo fluctuation in expressive music on emotional responding in musically experienced and inexperienced listeners was investigated. Participants listened to a skilled music performance, including natural fluctuations in timing and sound intensity that musicians use to evoke emotional responses, and a mechanical performance of the same piece, that served as a control. Participants reported emotional responses on a 2-dimensional rating scale (arousal and valence), before and after fMRI scanning. During fMRI scanning, participants listened without reporting emotional responses. Tempo fluctuations predicted emotional arousal ratings for all listeners. / Expressive performance was associated with BOLD increases in limbic areas for all listeners and in limbic and reward related areas forthose with musical experience. Activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate, which may reflect temporal expectancy, was also dependent on the musical experience of the listener. Changes in tempo correlated with activity in a mirror neuron network in all listeners, and mirror neuron activity was associated with emotional arousal in experienced listeners. These results suggest that emotional responding to music occurs through an empathic motor resonance. / by Heather L. Chapin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation investigated the nature of pulse in the tempo fluctuation of music performance and how people entrain with these performed musical rhythms. In Experiment 1, one skilled pianist performed four compositions with natural tempo fluctuation. The changes in tempo showed long-range correlation and fractal (1/f) scaling for all four performances. To determine whether the finding of 1/f structure would generalize to other pianists, musical styles, and performance practices, fractal analyses were conducted on a large database of piano performances in Experiment 3. Analyses revealed signicant long-range serial correlations in 96% of the performances. Analysis showed that the degree of fractal structure depended on piece, suggesting that there is something in the composition's musical structure which causes pianists' tempo fluctuations to have a similar degree of fractal structure. Thus, musical tempo fluctuations exhibit long-range correlations and fractal scaling. To examine how people entrain to these temporal fluctuations, a series of behavioral experiments were conducted where subjects were asked to tap the pulse (beat) to temporally fluctuating stimuli. The stimuli for Experiment 2 were musical performances from Experiment 1, with mechanical versions serving as controls. Subjects entrained to all stimuli at two metrical levels, and predicted the tempo fluctuations observed in Experiment 1. Fractal analyses showed that the fractal structure of the stimuli was reected in the inter-tap intervals, suggesting a possible relationship between fractal tempo scaling, pulse perception, and entrainment. Experiments 4-7 investigated the extent to which people use long-range correlation and fractal scaling to predict tempo fluctuations in fluctuating rhythmic sequences. / Both natural and synthetic long-range correlations enabled prediction, as well as shuffled versions which contained no long-term fluctuations. Fractal structure of the stimuli was again in the inter-tap intervals, with persistence for the fractal stimuli, and antipersistence for the shuffled stimuli. 1/f temporal structure is suficient though not necessary for prediction of fluctuations in a stimulus with large temporal fluctuations. / by Summer K. Rankin. / Vita. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Since students can adjust the speed of online videos by time-compression which is available through common software (Pastore & Ritzhaupt, 2015), it is important to learn at which point compression impacts comprehension. The focus of the study is whether the speaker’s face benefits comprehension during a 50% compressed lecture. Participants listened to a normal lecture or a 50% compressed lecture. Each participant saw an audio and audiovisual lecture, and were eye tracked during the audiovisual lecture. A comprehension test revealed that participants in the compressed lecture group performed better with the face. Eye fixations revealed that participants in the compressed lecture group looked less at the eyes and more at the nose when compared to eye fixations for those that viewed the normal lecture. This study demonstrates that 50% compression affects eye fixations and that the face benefits the listener, but this much compression will still lessen comprehension. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

We sought to better understand human motor control by investigating functional interactions between the Supplementary Motor Area (SMA), dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC), and primary motor cortex (M1) in healthy adolescent participants performing visually coordinated unimanual finger-movement and n-back working memory tasks. We discovered modulation of the SMA by the dACC by analysis of fMRI BOLD time series recorded from the three ROIs (SMA, dACC, and M1) in each participant. Two measures of functional interaction were used: undirected functional connectivity was measured using the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (PMCC), and directed functional connectivity was measured from linear autoregressive (AR) models. In the first project, task-specific modulation of the SMA by the dACC was discovered while subjects performed a coordinated unimanual finger-movement task, in which the finger movement was synchronized with an exogenous visual stimulus. In the second project, modulation of the SMA by the dACC was found to be significantly greater in the finger coordination task than in an n-back working memory, in which the same finger movement signified a motor response indicating a 0-back or 2-back working memory match. We thus demonstrated in the first study that the dACC sends task-specific directed signals to the supplementary motor area, suggesting a role for the dACC in top-down motor control. Finally, the second study revealed that these signals were significantly greater in the coordinated motor task than in the n-back working memory task, suggesting that the modulation of the SMA by the dACC was associated with sustained, continuous motor production and/or motor expectation, rather than with the motor movement itself. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Supervisor: Timothy D. Lee. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

The early years of a child's growth and development are crucial for health, wellbeing and success in later life. Adequate stimulation during the pre-school years is a critical factor that can be associated with higher levels of achievement and better adjustment in school (Arnold, Barlett., Gowani, & Merali, 2006). Some children, for example those growing in contexts of adversity, are in particular need of pre-school assistance. This research evaluates a one-year implementation of the Psychomotor Education Programme (PMEP) at the Dalton Trust Education Centre, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. PMEP is an educational programme that stimulates the child‟s psychomotor functions and supports the development of the whole child through play in the pre-school years. An evaluation of the programme was required to establish if the PMEP had achieved the envisaged objectives of improving preparedness of children for their entrance into the formal school system. This summative evaluation used focus group discussions to collect data on whether the outcomes had been achieved from the perspective of the trained and experienced family facilitators who had participated in the PMEP. The participants were asked about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the PMEP. The areas identified as being attributable to the PMEP include social-emotional competence, self-awareness, emotional regulation and autonomy. The participants reported that PMEP had enabled the children to achieve the learning outcomes described by the Revised National Curriculum Statement (South African Department of Education, 2005). However, further research is needed to overcome the difficulty of maintaining the achieved outcomes in a new environment, such as the formal school context, where methods of teaching and resources may differ substantially from those provided by the PMEP. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2010.

Ten experiments examined the interactions between vision and audition in stimulusdriven spatial attention orienting and inhibition of return (IOR). IOR is the demonstration that subjects are slower to respond to stimuli that are presented at a previously stimulated location. In each experiment, subjects made go/no-go responses to peripheral targets but not to central targets. On every trial, a target was preceded by a sensory event, called a "cue," either in the same modality (intramodal conditions) or in a different modality (crossmodal conditions). The cue did not predict the location of the target stimulus in any experiment. In some experiments, the cue and target modalities were fixed and different. Under these conditions, response times to a visual target were shorter when it appeared at the same location as an auditory cue than when it appeared on the opposite side of fixation, particularly at short (100 ms) cue-target stimulus onset asynchronies (Experiments 1A and IB). Similarly, response times to an auditory target were shorter when it appeared at the same location as a visual cue than when it appeared at a location on the opposite side of fixation (Experiments 2A and 2B). These crossmodal effects indicate that stimulus-driven spatial attention orienting might arise from a single supramodal brain mechanism. IOR was not observed in either crossmodal experiment indicating that it might arise from modality specific mechanisms. However, for many subjects, IOR did occur between auditory cues and visual targets (Experiments 3A and 3B) and between visual cues and auditory targets (Experiment 4A and 4B) when the target could appear in the same modality as the cue on half of the trials. Finally, the crossmodal effects of stimulus-driven spatial attention orienting on auditory and visual event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were examined in the final two experiments. Auditory cues modulated the ERPs to visual targets and visual cues modulated the ERPs to auditory targets, demonstrating that the mechanisms for spatial attention orienting cannot be completely modality specific. However, these crossmodal ERP effects were very different from each other indicating that the mechanisms for spatial attention orienting cannot be completely shared.

The experiments in this thesis investigated the neuropharmacology of memory in the caudate nucleus, using the conditioned emotional response (CER) with visual and olfactory conditioned stimuli (CS). / In experiment 1, post-training, intrastriatal microinjections of both amphetamine and LY 171555, but not SKF 38393: (1) into the posteroventral area improved memory of a visual, but not an olfactory, CER; (2) into the ventrolateral area improved memory of an olfactory, but not a visual, CER. In experiment 2, sulpiride, but not SCH 23390, blocked the memory improving effect of amphetamine. These findings are consistant with the hypothesis that dopamine D2 receptor stimulation mediates the memory enhancement effect of amphetamine in the neostriatum. / In three experiments on a visual CER, pre-training intrastriatal micro-injections of scopolamine impaired acquisition; post-training micro-injections improved consolidation; and pre-testing micro-injections impaired retrieval. These findings are consistant with the hypothesis that striatal muscarinic receptor stimulation mediates some aspects of acquisition and retrieval of sensory-motor memory, and that blockade of these receptors following training has an effect on memory consolidation similar to that of D2-receptor stimulation. / In experiment 6, destruction of the dopaminergic nigrostriatal neurons abolished the memory improving effect of intrastriatal post-training micro-injections of scopolamine and AFDX-384, a specific muscarinic M2 antagonist. These results suggest that the post-training memory improvement produced by muscarinic blockade may be mediated by an M2 receptor, known to be located on dopaminergic nigro-striatal terminals.