Rudolf Laban: Father of Modern dance, revolutionary within the field of movement studies, and inventor of Labanotation. His work is so universal it has been applied to dancing, acting, industrial work, and movement therapy. This thesis will specifically discuss the use of his system as it applies to actor training. However before that it is important for me as a teacher to understand the potential ideologies and historical implications that are associated with a theory or body of work before passing it on, lest we unknowingly propagate a system of thought that is associated with destructive ideologies. This becomes particularly significant in the case of Laban. From 1933 until 1936 Laban’s movement analysis and choreographic skills were an integral and leading part of the Reich Chamber of Culture’s division of dance. Many of his contemporaries labeled him a Nazi, and many scholars today struggle to extricate his work from the Nazi stain. If his work, as his contemporaries claimed, was fascist in nature and his work was uniquely expressive of the German volk, as Goebbels had instructed him it should be, then we as teachers have a moral obligation to be judicious in our applications of his system. Therefore in this thesis I will first examine the time Laban spent working for the Third Reich, and only after concluding that his actual system of understanding movement had little to do with the politics during that time of his life will I then go on to discuss how Laban Movement Analysis can be an integral tool for actor training, and discuss the ideologies that I, as a teacher, bring to the table.

Recently concern about aviation security has focused on the work of airport security screeners who detect threat items in passengers' luggage. An effective method of training and screening is required for improving screeners' detection abilities and performance to cope with the unreliable human performance of screening. The overall aim of this thesis is to understand and define the potential visual and cognitive factors in the task of inspecting airport passengers' X-ray luggage images, examine usability of perceptual feedback in this demanding task and develop a new method of salient regions which assist screeners to detect targets. The result of this work would obtain knowledge and skills of X-ray luggage images examination, provide insight into the design of training system and develop a method to significantly enhance screeners' detection ability. A questionnaire was developed for screeners to extract the expertise of the screening task and investigate the effect of image features on visual attention. A series of experiments were designed to understand the screening task and explore how knowledge and skills are developed with practice. Results indicated that training under time stressed conditions is recommended for ensuring adequate high detection ability in real life situation as screeners have to balance accuracy and speed in time pressure. The advantages of screeners are better detection ability and search skills which were gained by experience of the search task. Hit rate of naive people was improved with the perceptual exposure of images of threat items. However, scanning did not become efficient. It has demonstrated that detection performance and search skills are improved by the practice of frequency exposure targets in the search task and such ability partly transfer to novel targets. Learning in visual search of threat items is stimuli specific such that familiarity with stimulus and task is the source of performance enhancement. Threat items should be updated constantly and massive amount of X-ray threat objects should be employed for airport security screeners training so as to enlarge object knowledge and enhance recognition ability. Perceptual feedback of circling areas with dwell duration longer than 1000ms does not Significantly improve observers' detection ability in the airport screening task. Features of bags and threat items influence initial attention and attention allocation in the search process. Salient regions, based on the pure stimulus properties, not only contain most of targets in X-ray images but also improve observers' detection performance of high hit rate by forcing observers to scrutinize these areas carefully.

Title: Physical activity and sports history of children 11 to 19 years old Objectives: To analyse the level of leisure physical activity and its specifics on a sample of the adolescent population. To analyse the activity development from the historical perspective of the proband from the initial experience with organized physical activity. The results of the survey are further compared with the conclusions of previous studies on the issue. Methods: A total of 563 respondents (235 boys and 328 girls) from Prague's Gymnasiums (secondary grammar schools) took part in the research. Data were obtained using a questionnaire survey (CAWI) based on preliminary research and evaluated using MS Excel, GraphPad Prism and mathematical software R. Results: The preference of single sport (63.8 %) was found in the examined population with a predominance of the frequency of 2 to 4 trainings per week (61.2 %). The vast majority (93.6 %) stated that they were participated fundamental movement training at a younger school age. More than half (61 %) experienced pain or injury within physical activity, especially in the lower limbs (61.9 %). Less than half of respondents (46.3 %) have already visited a physiotherapist. The main factor in the cessation of physical activity is psychosocial reasons (76.9 %). Increasing age...

Movement training modulates the excitability in several cortical and subcortical areas. Compared to training with a single arm, movement training with both arms yields a greater increase in motor related cortical regions. A short-term session of bimanual training (BMT) enhances cortical activity of motor preparation and execution areas in both hemispheres. The underlying neural mechanisms for this increased activation with BMT are unclear, but may involve interhemispheric connections between homologous primary motor cortex (M1) representations and input from motor preparatory areas (i.e. dorsal premotor cortex (PMd)). Also, it is unclear how selective up-regulation or down-regulation of specific motor-related areas may contribute to changes in M1 excitability when combined with BMT. The work in this thesis investigated modulation of M1 excitability in terms of in-phase versus anti-phase BMT (Study #1), potentially up-regulating the left dorsal premotor cortex (lPMd) via iTBS before BMT (Study #2), theoretically down-regulating contralateral (right) M1 homologous representation before BMT (Study #3), and finally the potential intracortical and interhemispheric cortical adaptations in M1 bilaterally due to the same interventions as Study #2 (Study #4). For Study #1, it was hypothesized that in-phase BMT would lead to an increased excitability in M1. For Studies #2-4, it was hypothesized that modulation of motor-related areas would cause an increase in the excitability of left M1, and this modulation would be greater when combined with BMT. Study #1 found that in-phase, and not anti-phase BMT, lead to increase M1 excitability. Study #2 found that iTBS to lPMd followed by BMT caused a unique increase in M1 excitability, in terms of increased spatial extent and global MEP amplitude. Study #3 found that the combination of cTBS to right M1 with BMT caused greater excitability enhancements than either intervention alone. Finally, Study #4 found distinct modulations of cortical excitability within and across M1 bilaterally due to BMT, iTBS to lPMd and the combination of these interventions that involved long-interval inhibitory circuitry asymmetrically. Overall, this current work found that the modulation of remote cortical areas to M1 (i.e. lPMd and contralateral M1) in combination with movement training led to unique, and at times greater, excitability enhancements of M1 which could be advantageous in enhancing short-term plasticity in damaged M1.