I claim that we should reject a sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction according to which documentary is faithful representation of the facts, whilst films merely invite us imagine what made up. Instead, think as genres: categories whose membership determined by combination non-essential features influence appreciation in variety ways. An objection this approach it renders too conven...

The prevalence of age-related cognitive decline will increase due to graying of the global population. The goal of the present study was to test whether playing online cognitive training games can improve cognitive control (CC) in healthy older adults. Fifty-four older adults (age 60-77) played five different cognitive training games online for 30 min a day over a period of seven weeks (game gr...

Most language documentation efforts focus on capturing lexico-grammatical information on individual languages. Comparatively little effort has been devoted to considering a language’s sociolinguistic contexts. In parts of the world characterized by high degrees of multilingualism, questions surrounding the factors involved in language choice and the relationship between ‘communities’ and ‘langu...

Consider the setup where one wants to apply ASR in the presence of background music, as is often the case with broadcast news or documentary programmes. The speech of these is of good quality, a human has no problem understanding it, but an ASR system (although very robust against moderate white noise) fails terribly when the noise is more structured, since music is disturbing the frequency spe...

On a basic level, perception of user control over media content should be partially a function of control option availability. At the same time, prior user experience with control options should interact with control availability to produce joint effects on control perception. To assess these ideas, we present experimental data from 101 University students in the United States. Participants eng...

Computer-Assisted Interactive Documentary and Performance Arts in Illimitable Space Miao Song, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2014 This major component of the research described in this thesis is 3D computer graphics, specifically the realistic physics-based softbody simulation and haptic responsive environments. Minor components include advanced human-computer interaction environments, non-linear...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Stereotypes about schizophrenia may lead to prejudicial attitudes and discrimination with debilitating effects on people diagnosed with schizophrenia. There is thus a need to develop interventions aiming to prevent, reduce or eliminate such stereotypes. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of a documentary film on schizophrenia on cognitive, affective and ...