Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Anne E. Beamish / The purpose of this research was to develop a mobile sensory garden to help children with Sensory Integration Disorders. Sensory Integration (SI) is how an individual processes sensory information. Issues with sensory integration can lead to behavioral disorders, which can cause difficulties with social-emotional skills, gross motor skills, fine motor skills, play skills, and self-help skills. The goal of the project was to develop a mobile sensory garden to help alleviate or reduce the negative aspects of Sensory Integration Disorders. The research involved qualitative research, projective design, and evaluative research on a mobile sensory cart that was used in an elementary school in Topeka, Kansas. Methods included: interviews, design/build, and observation. The current sensory room was inventoried in Williams Science & Fine Arts Elementary Magnet School in Topeka, Kansas, and the children who used were observed. The faculty at the school, including the principal, teachers whose students use the current sensory room, counselors, and other support faculty, were interviewed. Once the observations were analyzed, a mobile sensory garden cart was designed and built. The new cart was brought to the elementary school and placed in the sensory room. A second phase of observation assessed how the children interacted with the new mobile sensory garden cart. During the second phase of observation the children showed intense interest in the mobile sensory garden cart. Some of this can be attributed to it being a new item in the sensory room. Some of the most popular items included the zen garden, wood slices on the wooden dowel, and the plants. In the second week children transitioned to using both the sensory garden cart and the original items in the sensory room. When an item on the sensory garden cart best suited their needs, that item was chosen and when their needs were best suited by other items in the room then that item was chosen. Overall the mobile sensory garden cart was beneficial to the school and the children. It can be easily replicated and modified to fit the individual needs of the children and school.

dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Therapeutic Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Occupational Therapy Johannesburg, 2017 / Parents of children who have sensory modulation disorder (SMD) and who have sensory over-responsiveness (SOR) themselves may display mal-adaptive self-regulatory strategies, contributing to elevated stress levels. The purpose of the study is to determine the perceived stress levels and sensory self-regulatory strategies of mothers of children with SMD, who presented with SOR themselves. A twelve-week stress management programme using a sensory modulation-based approach was developed and implemented with a sample of five mothers with SOR. The quasi-experimental pre-test post-test design required the participants to complete the Parenting Stress Index-4 Short Form and a sensory self-regulatory questionnaire. The effectiveness of the programme was assessed by determining change in perceived stress and self-regulatory behaviours immediately after and three months following the programme. Although no statistically significant change was found, clinically relevant change with large effect sizes was evident in the scores for parental distress, difficult child, total stress, and self-regulatory behaviour after the intervention period. Further clinical change was found for parental distress, difficult child and parent child dysfunctional interaction with moderate effect sizes after the follow up period. The results of this study indicate the importance of addressing the mother’s stress levels, in addition to treating their child with SMD. / MT2017

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

The aim of the work reported in this thesis is to investigate a methodology for studying perception by building and testing robotic models of animal sensory mechanisms. Much of Artificial Intelligence studies agent perception by exploring architectures for linking (often abstract) sensors and motors so as to give rise to particular behaviour. By contrast, this work proposes that perceptual investigations should begin with a characterisation of the underlying physical laws which govern the specific interaction of a sensor (or actuator) with its environment throughout the execution of a task. Moreover, it demonstrates that, through an understanding of task-physics, problems for which architectural solutions or explanations are often proposed may be solved more simply at the sensory interface - thereby minimising subsequent computation. This approach is applied to an investigation of the acoustical cues that may be exploited by several species of tone emitting insectivorous bats (species in the families Rhinolophidae and Hipposideridae) which localise prey using systematic pinnae scanning movements. From consideration of aspects of the sound filtering performed by the external and inner ear or these bats, three target localisation mechanisms are hypothesised and tested aboard a 6 degree-of-freedom, binaural, robotic echolocation system. In the first case, it is supposed that echolocators with narrow-band call structures use pinna movement to alter the directional sensitivity of their perceptual systems in the same whay that broad-band emitting bats rely on pinnae morphology to alter acoustic directionality at different frequencies. Scanning receivers also create dynamic cues - in the form of frequency and amplitude modulations - which very systematically with target angle. The second hypothesis investigated involves the extraction of timing cues from amplitude modulated echo envelopes.

<p>How the food industry can use sensory marketing as a promotional advantage?</p>

Addition of acids to foods allows for enhanced food safety. Acids are the primary form of defense against microbial contamination in refrigerated foods, while use of acids in conjunction with heat or high hydrostatic pressure processing lowers energy usage resulting in cost reduction. However, addition of acids to food or beverage formulations often reduces palatability due to higher sourness and this has limited the food industry's ability to better utilize them as preservatives. This study was aimed at gaining a better understanding of sourness suppression and its underlying mechanisms so that such limitations might be ultimately overcome. This work was divided into three parts dealing with the suppression of the sourness of citric, lactic and malic acids, as perceived by a trained sensory panel in a) binary mixtures with sugars, b) binary mixtures with salts and c) tertiary mixtures. The results of the first part showed that suppression was not mediated by sugar molarity or weight, but was significantly influenced by its perceived sweetness intensity in most cases. Sucrose and fructose were more effective than glucose in suppressing acid sourness and the data supported a separate receptor site/mechanism for glucose. Suppression was thought to have both central and peripheral components. In binary acid-salt mixtures sodium acetate (NaAc) affected the most sourness reduction, along with the largest concurrent pH increase (above 4.4). Sodium chloride (NaCl) mixtures showed significant suppression without a pH increase. Sodium gluconate (NaGluc) mixtures showed moderate suppression with citric and malic acids with pH increases remaining below 4.4, but showed little effect on lactic acid sourness. Saltiness appeared to drive suppression only in the case of NaCl, while pH change was responsible for reduction of sourness with NaAc and NaGluc. The tertiary trials indicated that a two-component multiple masker was more effective when its components stimulated different (as opposed to similar) receptors/receptor mechanisms in the taste system, irrespective of taste quality. Furthermore, a two-component masker was more effective than each component alone, and both components of a two-component masker did not have to be effective individually for them to function together as an effective multiple masker. / Graduation date: 2002

The formation of dendritic arbors is necessary for the proper establishment of neuronal circuits. The Drosophila transcription factor Spineless has been shown to play an important role in the control of dendritic morphogenesis, although the pathways through which it functions are not completely understood. Here, we show genetic evidence that Spineless interacts with the actin/microtubule cross linking protein Shortstop to control the dendrite arbor development of the dendritic arborization (da) sensory neurons. In addition, we have discovered a novel function for spineless as we show that spineless mutant larvae exhibit an increased sensitivity to specific odorants in the absence of morphological defects of the chemosensory organs. These data show that spineless acts in multiple cell-specific contexts to control the diversification of sensory neuron morphology and function.

How the food industry can use sensory marketing as a promotional advantage?

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis examines the movement cues underlying human kinesthesia, using a combination of psychophysical methods and an analyticrrl framework for math<'1l1aticHI and statistical modelling of functional aspects of underlying physiological sensory mechanisms. Using an innovative psychophysical paradigm, the first experiment examines whether people are more sensitive to the occurrence of movement than to movement direction. Contrary to previous investigations, the findings are that the underlying sensitivity for movement detection and direction discrimination is the same. An analytical tool for investigating what are the sensory cues for movement detection is developed as a physiologically plausible model of movement perception. The model accounts for performance in terms of displacement and velocity sensitive directionally tuned channels and probability summation over time. Statistical analysis of optimized model parameters indicates that the dominant cue for movement detection is velocity and that the contribution of displacement information is insignificant. An extended version of a previous movement detection model based on temporal integration is also applied to data from experiment l. Derived estimates of this model's parameters suggest that displacement information does make a significant contribution to movement detection. The conflict between the two models is resolved in favour of the probability summation model, based on statistical comparisons regarding model accuracy and parsimony, and an analysis of the physiological plausibility of underlying assumptions. A second experiment investigates whether manipulation of movement acceleration affects movement detection. The probability summation model is extended to account for processing of acceleration. Estimates of the model's parameters reveal that acceleration information does not contribute significantly to velocity based movement detection.