This study investigated the development of hand preference for bimanual manipulative activities and pointing gestures in toddlers observed longitudinally over a 5-month period, in relation to language acquisition. The lexical spurt was found to be accompanied by an increase in the right-sided bias for pointing but not for manipulation. Moreover, results revealed a significant correlation betwee...

This paper represents the author's attempt to come to grips with some of the practical problems that arise out of conventional algebraic manipulation and leads to a discussion of the possibilities of generalising algebraic concepts such as commutativity and associativity to other algebraic systems. An account is given of a class instance providing manipulation and simplification of 'school' alg...

During visual word recognition, string length affects performance when stimuli are presented to the left visual field (LVF), but not when they are presented to the right visual field (RVF). Using a lexical-decision experiment, we investigated an account of this phenomenon based on the SERIOL model of letter-position encoding. Bottom-up activation patterns were adjusted via positional manipulati...

Manipulation tasks are sequential in nature. Depending on the specific task constraints, more than one solution usually exist. Even for simple objects, several candidate grasps can be considered, each of which can potentially be used to plan the required arm motions. Grasp selection approaches that take into account the constraints at each task step are critical, since they allow to both identi...

We propose a method for planning motion for robots with actuation uncertainty that incorporates contact with the environment and the compliance of the robot to reliably perform manipulation tasks. Our approach consists of two stages: (1) Generating partial policies using a sampling-based motion planner that uses particle-based models of uncertainty and simulation of contact and compliance; and ...

This paper proposes an idea of Neighborhood Equilibrium (NE) and applies it to the manipulation of an object. Under NE, an object with rolling contact can automatically find another equilibrium state close to the original one even when the current one is broken due to the change of input. For manipulating an object by taking NE into account, all the contact coordinates between the object and th...

Our understanding of prenatal behavior has been significantly advanced by techniques for direct observation and manipulation of unanesthetized, behaving rodent fetuses with intact umbilical connections to the mother. These techniques involve brief administration of an inhalant anesthesic, enabling spinal transection of the rat or mouse dam, after which procedures can continue with unanesthetize...

The HIEMPA (Hybrid Instruments from Electroacoustic Manipulation And Models of Pütorino and Aquascape) project combined a team of people with technical, artistic, environmental and cultural expertise toward the artistic outcome of extending the New Zealand sonic art tradition. The project involved collecting audio samples from the aquascape of the Ruakuri Caves and Nature Reserve in Waitomo, So...

In this papera, we present a dynamic semantics for the Java Virtual Machine Language (JVML). The semantics is specified in an operational style according to the syntactic structure of JVML programs. In order to ascribe meanings to threading, the semantics is made small-step and is structured in two layers: The first layer consists of judgements that capture the semantics of sequential JVML prog...

This work presents an application that generates just-in-time holograms to be displayed in a holographic optical tweezers setup, a technique which allows the manipulation of particles in the range from micrometers to nanometers. The software is written in Java, and implements the random binary masks method to generate the holograms. It allows customization of the parameters adapted to the exper...