To investigate changes in spatial orientation ability and walking performance following space flight, 7 astronaut subjects were asked preand post-flight to perform a goal directed locomotion paradigm which consisted of walking a triangular path with and without vision. This new paradigm, involving inputs from different sensory systems, allows quantification of several critical parameters, like ...

Ocular following responses (OFRs) are tracking eye movements elicited at ultrashort latency by the sudden movement of a textured pattern. Here we report the results of our study of their dependency on the spatial arrangement of the motion stimulus. Unlike previous studies that looked at the effect of stimulus size, we investigated the impact of stimulus location and how two distinct stimuli, pr...

We show on the basis of German that prosodic patterns change in the course of a traditional sentence-list elicitation. Two frequent methods are analyzed: sentence-frame and syntax-frame elicitations. While only the sentences of the sentence-frame elicitation show an increase in speaking rate, both elicitation methods cause a drastic reduction in the alignment variability of nuclear pitch-accent...

Studies over the last decade into Australian rainfall have often noted the presence of long-term and shortterm trends but have rarely identified any statistically significant trends, mainly because the data are characterised by high interannual variability. The only exception is the southwest region of Western Australia (SWWA) where a relatively sudden decrease in winter season (and annual) rai...

A statistically significant decrease in rainfall in southwest Western Australia (SWWA), since the middle of last century, has been reported in a number of studies (Wright 1974a, b; Pittock 1983; Nicholls and Lavery 1992; Yu and Neil 1993; Hennessy et al. 1999 and IOCI 2002). This decrease in rainfall not only affects economic activities in Western Australia, but a lack of understanding of mecha...

The current study reports the enhancing effect of a high variability training procedure in the learning of a Japanese geminate-singleton fricative contrast. Dutch natives took part in a five-day training procedure in which they identified geminate and singleton variants of the Japanese fricative /s/. They heard either many repetitions of a limited set of words recorded by a single speaker (simp...

introduction one of the critical issues associated with sustainability in the twenty-first century is how cities are growing and developing in the space. rapid urban growth and physical development of cities cause disintegration of the spatial organization of cities and consequently spatial inequality between urban spaces. this phenomenon can be considered as spatial segregation or fragmentatio...

social pathology, a new concept taken from biological science in the 19th century, is a science dealing with the study and analysis of social disorders. the objectives of this science are the identification of social injuries and their causes and methods of preventing them. lack of place sense (place belonging) and community sense in the citizens who have migrated to large cities create many so...