This paper explores the ways in which module and curriculum development in the context of a distance education programme plays an important role in ‘constructing’ a discipline’s object of study, thus contributing to the ways in which knowledge is understood in society. The paper examines how the process of module production both reflects and shapes the discipline within which the module is posi...

This paper briefly describes organizational, operational, and sociocultural aspects of the phase-III clinical trials of the ICRC anti-leprosy vaccine in Maharashtra, India. Our experience is that vaccine trials can be launched quickly and more cost effectively by using the services of health personnel from the existing public health infrastructure. That is why the trials could be launched in ju...

Human adults automatically mimic others' emotional expressions, which is believed to contribute to sharing emotions with others. Although this behaviour appears fundamental to social reciprocity, little is known about its developmental process. Therefore, we examined whether infants show automatic facial mimicry in response to others' emotional expressions. Facial electromyographic activity ove...

This paper explores the ways in which module and curriculum development in the context of a distance education programme plays an important role in ‘constructing’ a discipline’s object of study, thus contributing to the ways in which knowledge is understood in society. The paper examines how the process of module production both reflects and shapes the discipline within which the module is posi...

The development of attention to dynamic faces versus objects providing synchronous audiovisual versus silent visual stimulation was assessed in a large sample of infants. Maintaining attention to the faces and voices of people speaking is critical for perceptual, cognitive, social, and language development. However, no studies have systematically assessed when, if, or how attention to speaking ...

Nowadays, with the explosion of multimedia content availability, the selectiveness of its consumption increases in importance. Audiovisual content is no longer brought to us only by the television, being available through many other systems, like Personal Video Recorders and Video on Demand systems, on each one’s Personal Computer or, obviously, in the Internet. The exponential growth of websit...

We live in a world where there are countless interactions with computer systems in every-day situations. In the most ideal case, this interaction feels as familiar and as natural as the communication we experience with other humans. To this end, an ideal means of communication between a user and a computer system consists of audiovisual speech signals. Audiovisual text-to-speech technology allo...

Temporal simultaneity provides an essential cue for integrating multisensory signals into a unified perception. Early visual deprivation, in both animals and humans, leads to abnormal neural responses to audiovisual signals in subcortical and cortical areas [1-5]. Behavioral deficits in integrating complex audiovisual stimuli in humans are also observed [6, 7]. It remains unclear whether early ...

Objectives: The McGurk–MacDonald illusory percept is obtained by dubbing an incongruent articulatory movement on an auditory phoneme. This type of audiovisual speech perception contributes to the assessment of theories of speech perception. The mismatch negativity (MMN) reflects the detection of a deviant stimulus within the auditory short-term memory and besides an acoustic component, possesse...

Perceived synchrony of visual and auditory signals can be altered by exposure to a stream of temporally offset stimulus pairs. Previous literature suggests that adapting to audiovisual temporal offsets is an important recalibration to correctly combine audiovisual stimuli into a single percept across a range of source distances. Healthy aging results in synchrony perception over a wider range o...