Throughout history, education has always been essential for humanity's justice and fundamental for the creation of a free and satisfying society with the dissemination of knowledge. Hence, in addition to the life occurrences educating people, traditional higher education methods have played an important role for a long period. However, the age of technology has changed the educational system along with the people's lifestyles to meet the continuously changing conditions. During the past twenty years, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) led (...) to the emergence of e-learning non-traditional educational methods bringing about an innovative dimension of virtual learning. With its beneficial features provided by the Internet and various technologies, this method passes the control of time and location from the tutors to the students during the learning process. Despite the entrance of online education into the students' life many years ago, the Covid-19 outbreak initiated in 2020 turned this method into the only possible way of education for almost two years. Afterward, plenty of studies investigated its effects on students' social and academic life, mostly considering its negative impacts on their mental health and motivation due to interaction issues. They also pointed out the specific problems of tactile learner students in the lack of face-to-face design courses. As an innovative solution able to be adopted, game technologies, increasing immersion of the learner in a real-world skill, and triggering motivation are one of the best methods integrated into educational systems. Known as serious games, these games, adopted by almost any domain, convey educational content along with entertainment, increasing interaction. They train or enhance a certain skill or topic to the player by immersing them. While serious games are more expanded nowadays, they are still not being played by the mass public due to people's immersiveness expectations of a game. Hence, the Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), with their emergence, increased the players' engagement and immersion with all types of virtual environments in digital games. This technology, however, evolved serious games area most, among others, by enabling the opportunity to provide a riskless and low-cost learning environment for real-world skills. In the process of suggesting serious games as a replacement for the traditional educational methods, the most important factor is being aware of their effectiveness for education. Generally, digital games, one of the world's biggest and fastest-growing industries, rely heavily on the virtual landscape, a major part of its development process. Its design demands remarkable effort, and it directly affects the whole game's characteristics. Hence, serious games, as a type of digital game, carry the same attributes. With the appearance of virtual reality technology, gaming started to gain more immersiveness and engagement with artificial elements and environments. Although virtual landscapes were always being developed since the emergence of digital games, the studies taking virtual landscapes into account are mostly using them as a tool for enhancing real spaces, not as a domain for the sake of its development. While other design domains are applying various design methodologies, it is challenging to find a standard design methodology for the design and production of virtual landscapes in the gaming industry, leading to inconsistent and low-quality results. Hence, it comes to the question of what is the virtual landscapes' role in serious games and their effect on the data comprehension rate. Since the literature lacks regarding the gradual change of the virtual landscape in serious games and the content they transmit, this thesis aims to figure out the gradual chronological evolution of the virtual landscapes in serious games. It also aims to seek how this change and the virtual reality technology invention have affected the contents transmitted by digital games and its influence on the player interaction and learning rate. To do so, in the process of this thesis, we developed, tested, and evaluated various serious games, both text-based and with 360° photos. The steps taken revealed the reluctance of the players to follow the providing educational content and their inadequacy of interaction. Hence, the thesis seeks the reasons ending to this result and the ways of increasing this learning rate. Afterward, the thesis uses a currently available but not massively used digital game classification methodology. This methodology, which is based on the principles of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, classifies the games based on their constituting virtual landscapes. Hence, the thesis considers all Steam games, one of the biggest video game digital distribution services, filtered with the 'education' tag, ending in 2531 digital games. Afterward, adding the 'game' tag the result reduced to 1102 games. Finally, with some manual filterings ignoring the irrelevant content, the final number decreased to 702. Sorting chronologically, we made an Excel database including the games' introductory information, the content they transmit, their release date, if they support HMD or not, and whether they are simulation games or not. Due to Steam's dating spectrum, our database includes games dating back from 1992 to 2020. Afterward, we classified all of these games using the virtual landscape classification methodology and generated their related codes based on their player scale, story, dimension, space shape, and interaction level. Investigating the results, they revealed some growth patterns relating to the content educated in the game, the VR technology, and the virtual landscape evolution. Adding the user reviews of Steam, we reverse engineered five of the best serious games on the database due to the digital game design methodology. This methodology divides the games' virtual environment into five layers, namely, player activity map (PAM), story layer, natural environment layer, virtual environment layer, and media layer. Reverse engineering the five best digital games ever, based on the IGN database, enabled us to compare the outcomes. Due to released data, we understand how the games' assets are distributed within the various layers of the virtual environment in the most successful games. Finally, the thesis aims to provide a framework based on these results for developing serious games to increase player interaction and enhance the learning rate. However, these results can be expanded to any virtual landscape other than only serious games' for their interaction enhancement. Currently, the landscape architecture domain only adopts the virtual landscape area as a tool for enhancing design in the real world. However, in the near future, landscape architects will perform in the virtual landscape area as a domain to be enhanced. Hence, that day, the results of this study will play an important role and will be a roadmap for generating highly interactive virtual landscapes. (shrink)

This book introduces readers to the ethical and goal-oriented functions of touch in professional practice. Touch is both an increasingly visible topic today and a core skill in many professions, especially in health, education and social work. This book combines helpful theoretical discussions and practical information, offering a balanced and culturally-informed introduction to an issue that both students and professionals often find difficult to navigate. Chapters discuss the various functions of touch and its uses, giving readers a deeper understanding of (...) the potential of tactile work practices. The authors offer clear legal and ethical guidance to empower learners. They discuss key issues such as harmful touch and the increasing digitisation of patient work. Activities, case studies and further readings promote learning and help readers reflect on their own relationship to touch. This book will be an invaluable resource for students in undergraduate and graduate courses in healthcare, nursing, education and social work, and to practitioners looking for guidance on this topic. (shrink)

Research on sequence effects on learning visual categories has shown that interleaving (i.e., studying the categories in a mixed manner) facilitates category induction as compared to blocking (i.e., studying the categories one by one), but learners are unaware of the interleaving effect and prefer blocking. However, little attention has been paid to sequence effects in perceptual learning across further sensory modalities. The present (preregistered) research addresses this shortcoming by using auditory (birdcalls), olfactory (tealeaves), gustatory (ingredient mixtures), and tactile (...) (stones) stimuli across four analog experiments. The number of participants per experiment was determined based on a medium effect size of interleaving. Participants studied six categories (with six exemplars, respectively) either interleaved or blocked. No single experiment showed a significant effect of interleaving. We ran a comprehensive meta‐analysis based on the data from all experiments, which revealed a significant small effect of interleaving, demonstrating its applicability to perceptual learning across all sensory modalities. Learners in the interleaved condition underestimated their classification performance. Overall, learners did not rate interleaving as less effective than blocking, which is at odds with previous studies that consistently demonstrated a metacognitive preference of blocking. Our findings suggest that learners rely less on conventional beliefs about the effectivity of study sequence when dealing with unfamiliar (blindfolded) perceptual learning tasks. (shrink)

In the first of these prospective representations, I am using a sort of hollowedout upright box in the turnstile that represents belief ; below I will use a filled-in upright box to represent knowledge. I suspect that the second way I am imagining writing it - by putting the content believed in a thinly framed box (knowledge by contrast having something more, a heavy frame) - would have some advantages – for example when we consider some of the other phenomena (...) we might want to find latent in this material, e.g. action, acting together. It is a defect of all of the whole setup that the representation of atomic unembedded knowledge attributions does not bring out the fact that the one who makes them is committed to the proposition, i.e., that knowledge is ‘factive’. (shrink)

In the haptic domain, a double dissociation can be proposed on the basis of neurological deficits between tactile information for action, represented by tactile apraxia, and tactile information for perception, represented by tactile agnosia. We suggest that this dissociation comes from different networks, both involving the anterior intraparietal area of the posterior parietal cortex.

Representations of the fingers are embodied in our cognition and influence performance in enumeration tasks. Among deaf signers, the fingers also serve as a tool for communication in sign language. Previous studies in normal hearing (NH) participants showed effects of embodiment (i.e., embodied numerosity) on tactile enumeration using the fingers of one hand. In this research, we examined the influence of extensive visuo‐manual use on tactile enumeration among the deaf. We carried out four enumeration task experiments, using 1–5 (...) stimuli, on a profoundly deaf group (n = 16) and a matching NH group (n = 15): (a) tactile enumeration using one hand, (b) tactile enumeration using two hands, (c) visual enumeration of finger signs, and (d) visual enumeration of dots. In the tactile tasks, we found salient embodied effects in the deaf group compared to the NH group. In the visual enumeration of finger signs task, we controlled the meanings of the stimuli presentation type (e.g., finger‐counting habit, fingerspelled letters, both or neither). Interestingly, when comparing fingerspelled letters to neutrals (i.e., not letters or numerical finger‐counting signs), an inhibition pattern was observed among the deaf. The findings uncover the influence of rich visuo‐manual experiences and language on embodied representations. In addition, we propose that these influences can partially account for the lag in mathematical competencies in the deaf compared to NH peers. Lastly, we further discuss how our findings support a contemporary model for mental numerical representations and finger‐counting habits. (shrink)

Why do learners fail to seek help, when doing so would be beneficial? Principles of rational decision suggest that seeking help is not an optimal action if its costs are greater than its expected b...

The approach to empower learners as the subject in the use of AI is in line with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s AI and Education Guidance for Policy-Makers and is pursued in recognition of the three paradigmatic shifts in the use of AI in educational setting. To strengthen the role of learners as leaders in the use of AI, this article uses the idea of the acting person from Karol Wojtyla. The concept of the (...) acting person focuses on moral responsibility founded in human consciousness and conducted through human actions. The moral act of an acting person leads to responsible use that requires the commitment to the common good. In the first part, I will describe the history and development of AI technologies. In the second part, I will discuss the idea of the acting person and the AI as an acting machine. In the last part, I will present an analysis of the importance of grounding educational policy on the use of AI in learners’ ethical role as the acting person. (shrink)

My aim is to show that dissatisfaction with the term ‘tactile pictures’ and the proposal for ‘a multisensory pictorial aesthetic’ introduced by Dominic Lopes is due to an ambiguity of ‘picture’ between visual and spatial representation in-volving more than one sense. In order to avoid this ambiguity, I propose another term in its place and I investigate some of the directions that a richer multimedia and multimodal aesthetic can take.

While the most prevalent means to measure the effectiveness of research ethics and integrity training formats is using learners’ self-assessment, there is a need for reliable and feasible self-assessment tools to evaluate the level of understanding. The aim of the study was to design a reliable tool and test its accuracy in various training contexts. The current study utilized a design-based research (DBR) approach. Data were collected from 401 participants in training sessions and ten experts were involved in tool (...) evaluation. The results indicate that in the context of research ethics and integrity learners can quite accurately (more than 80%) evaluate their level of understanding with the designed self-reflection form. The research revealed that participants who assessed themselves to have higher levels of understanding or who used the tool several times were more likely to provide well-elaborated descriptions of their learning that matched their indicated level of understanding. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Learner Student Speaker Coda Notes References.

This experiment used event-related potentials to study the tactile-visual information conflict processing in a tactile-visual pairing task and its modulation by tactile-induced emotional states. Eighteen participants were asked to indicate whether the tactile sensation on their body matched or did not match the expected tactile sensation associated with the object depicted in an image. The type of tactile-visual stimuli and the valence of tactile-induced emotional states were manipulated following a 2 × 2 factorial (...) design. Electrophysiological analyses revealed a mismatched minus matched negative difference component between 420 and 620 ms after stimulus onset in the negative tactile-induced emotional state condition. This ND420-620 component was considered as a sign of the cross-modal conflict processing during the processing of incongruent tactile-visual information. In contrast, no significant mismatched minus matched negative difference component was found in the positive tactile-induced emotional state condition. Together, these results support the hypothesis that a positive emotional state induced by a positive tactile stimulation improves tactile-visual conflict processing abilities. (shrink)

Abstract:The haptic sense is an essential component of aesthetic evaluation that is often overlooked in today’s mobile internet age. Unlike hearing and vision, the sense of touch is less widely transmitted. Unfortunately, most aesthetic theories and explanations have focused solely on the visual and auditory senses, with minimal attention given to tactile evaluation. To address this gap in knowledge, we have collected studies on tactile aesthetics within the framework of experimental aesthetics from 2000 to 2022. After statistical generalization, (...) our findings suggest the following: The criteria for evaluating tactile aesthetics were mostly dichotomous, that is, positive (like/appreciation/pleasure) and negative (dislike/disgust/unpleasant). Tactile aesthetics predominantly involved the toucher dimension (synesthesia/need for touch/touch pattern) and the touch sample dimension (shape/type/texture), with the commonly overlooked factors of “need for touch” and “touch pattern.” Some studies did not restrict the shape and material of the touch samples. Based on our findings, we have systematically summarized and concluded what tactile factors influence aesthetic evaluation and have analyzed future research trends. (shrink)

According to rich views of consciousness (e.g., James, Searle), we have a constant, complex flow of experience (or 'phenomenology') in multiple modalities simultaneously. According to thin views (e.g., Dennett, Mack and Rock), conscious experience is limited to one or a few topics, regions, objects, or modalities at a time. Existing introspective and empirical arguments on this issue (including arguments from 'inattentional blindness') generally beg the question. Participants in the present experiment wore beepers during everyday activity. When a beep sounded, they (...) were to take note of the conscious experience, if any, they were having at the last undisturbed moment immediately prior to the beep. Some participants were asked to report any experience they could remember. Others were asked simply to report whether there was visual experience or not (and if so, what it was). Still others were asked about experience in the far right visual field, or tactile experience, or tactile experience in the left foot. A majority of participants in the full experience and the visual conditions reported visual experience in every single sample. Tactile and peripheral visual experience were reported less often. However, the proper interpretation of these results is uncertain. (shrink)

The rubber hand paradigm is used to create the illusion of self-touch, by having the participant administer stimulation to a prosthetic hand while the Examiner, with an identical stimulus, administers stimulation to the participant’s hand. With synchronous stimulation, participants experience the compelling illusion that they are touching their own hand. In the current study, the robustness of this illusion was assessed using incongruent stimuli. The participant used the index finger of the right hand to administer stimulation to a prosthetic hand (...) while the Examiner used a paintbrush to administer stimulation to the participant’s left hand. The results indicate that this violation of tactile expectations does not diminish the illusion of self-touch. Participants experienced the illusion despite the use of incongruent stimuli, both when vision was precluded and when visual feedback provided clear evidence of the tactile mismatch. (shrink)

It seems that there are important differences concerning the way in which space itself is presented in visual and tactile modalities. In the case of vision, it is usually accepted that visual objects are experienced as located in a visual field. However, it is controversial whether similar field-like characteristics can be attributed to the space in which tactile entities are experienced to be located. The paper investigates whether postulating the presence of a tactile field is justified. I (...) argue that the answer is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ due to the dual nature of touch: touch is both an interoceptive modality that presents states of one’s body and an exteroceptive modality that presents external entities. More specifically, the interoceptive tactile space has a character of a spatial field. On the other hand, the exteroceptive tactile space does not have characteristics necessary for ascribing the field-status. (shrink)

The last years a growing body of research has been developed on tactile displays and interfaces, which can give physical form to digital information. In spite of the numerous tactile devices that h...

In this paper I discuss three different ways in which we can refer to those we teach: as learner, as student or as speaker. My interest is not in any aspect of teaching but in the question whether there can be such a thing as emancipatory education. Working with ideas from Jacques Rancière I offer the suggestion that emancipatory education can be characterised as education which starts from the assumption that all students can speak. It starts from the assumption, in (...) other words, that students neither lack a capacity for speech, nor that they are producing noise. The idea of the student as a speaker is not offered as an empirical fact but as a different starting point for emancipatory education, one that positions equality at the beginning of education, not at its end. (shrink)

Soft robots promise an exciting design trajectory in the field of robotics and human–robot interaction (HRI), promising more adaptive, resilient movement within environments as well as a safer, more sensitive interface for the objects or agents the robot encounters. In particular, tactile HRI is a critical dimension for designers to consider, especially given the onrush of assistive and companion robots into our society. In this article, we propose to surface an important set of ethical challenges for the field of (...) soft robotics to meet. Tactile HRI strongly suggests that soft-bodied robots balance tactile engagement against emotional manipulation, model intimacy on the bonding with a tool not with a person, and deflect users from personally and socially destructive behavior the soft bodies and surfaces could normally entice. (shrink)

Moral virtue is, for Aristotle, a state to which an agent’s motivation is central. For anyone interested in Aristotle’s account of moral development this invites reflection on two questions: how is it that virtuous motivational dispositions are established? And what contribution do the moral learner’s existing motivational states make to the success of her habituation? I argue that views which demand that the learner act with virtuous motives if she is to acquire virtuous dispositions misconstrue the nature and structure of (...) the habituation process, but also obscure Aristotle’s crucial insight that the very practice of virtuous actions affords a certain discovery and can be transformative of an agent’s motivational states. Drawing attention, in Aristotle’s account, to an asymmetry between the agential perspective and the observation of others, I consider what the agential perspective affords the learner, and offer a novel interpretation of the role a learner’s existing motives play in her habituation. (shrink)

The prevalence of dementia is increasing with the ever-growing population of older adults. Non-pharmacological, music-based interventions, including sensory stimulation, were reported by the Lancet Commission in 2020 to be the first-choice approach for managing the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. Low frequency sinusoidal vibration interventions, related to music interventions through their core characteristics, may offer relief for these symptoms. Despite increasing attention on the effectiveness of auditory music interventions and music therapy for managing dementia, this has not included low (...) frequency vibration. This scoping review, following the JBI methodology guidelines, was conducted to investigate participants’ responses to both sound and mechanical vibration, the characteristics of the delivered interventions, methodological challenges, and the specifics of the research experiments reported. An extensive search was conducted in BMC, CINAHL, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, EMBASE, ERIC, MEDLINE, Pedro, ProQuest Central, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Web of Science. Current Controlled Trials, Clinical Trials, and Google Scholar were also searched as well as a hand search in relevant journals. Studies on adults with all types of dementia, investigating tactile low frequency sound or mechanical vibration in any context were considered. Data from eight full-length studies were extracted using the data extraction table developed by the authors and were included in the analysis and critical appraisal. Issues in quality related to, for example, control groups and blinding. Few studies addressed participants’ subjective responses to the interventions. Reporting on the intervention characteristics was unclear. It appeared more frequent sessions led to better outcomes and home-based interventions potentially addressing the issue of access and feasibility. Future research should include neuroimaging to measure and confirm the hypothesised mechanism of cerebral coherence. Standardised reporting of intervention characteristics is also needed to ensure replicability of the experiments. Higher quality research is needed to investigate the impact and effect of low frequency vibration for the symptoms of dementia and compare outcomes in meta-syntheses. (shrink)

Our analysis reveals two major types of "Community of Learners" (COL) projects: instrumental and ontological. In instrumental COL, the notion of community is separated from instruction in order to reach some preset endpoints: curricular or otherwise. We notice three main instrumental COL models: relational, instructional, and engagement. Ontological COL redefines learning as an ill-defined, distributed, social, multi-faceted, poly-goal, agency-based, and situated process that integrates all educational aspects. We will consider two ontological COL projects into: narrowly dialogic and polyphonic.

El presente artículo introduce la traducción del francés al español del estudio sobre la espacialidad en Gilles Deleuze realizado en 2010 por el profesor Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc: «Cartografía y territorios». Se presenta, para ello, una lectura culturalista de la filosofía occidental del espacio, destacando dos de sus rasgos, la hiperfecundidad y el temporalismo, que retoma el que es considerado aquí como el primer esbozo de tematización de las cartografías tacto-libidinales de lo vivo, a saber: la filosofía aristotélica del alma. Así, se (...) espera contextualizar y apreciar de mejor manera toda concepción de la espacialidad que rehabilite la hiperfecundidad del espacio y evacúe el temporalismo, permitiendo desactivar las concepciones tradicionales de subjetividad e identidad, tal como logra hacerlo la geofilosofía de Deleuze. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to examine differences in attainment of learning outcomes between students who take a class in an online format as compared to students who take a similar class in a traditional classroom setting. While on the face of it the online learners appear to attain these outcomes to a higher degree, when we control for withdrawal rates between the two groups, as well as demographic differences related to age and class standing, we see that (...) online learners no longer outperform classroom learners. We conclude that learner outcome attainment for the two delivery formats is similar for students who are more mature and/or are experienced college students. Inexperienced college freshmen, in contrast, better attain learner outcomes in a traditional classroom setting. (shrink)

The rubber hand paradigm is used to create the illusion of self-touch, by having the participant administer stimulation to a prosthetic hand while the Examiner, with an identical stimulus , administers stimulation to the participant’s hand. With synchronous stimulation, participants experience the compelling illusion that they are touching their own hand. In the current study, the robustness of this illusion was assessed using incongruent stimuli. The participant used the index finger of the right hand to administer stimulation to a prosthetic (...) hand while the Examiner used a paintbrush to administer stimulation to the participant’s left hand. The results indicate that this violation of tactile expectations does not diminish the illusion of self-touch. Participants experienced the illusion despite the use of incongruent stimuli, both when vision was precluded and when visual feedback provided clear evidence of the tactile mismatch. (shrink)

En el presente artículo proponemos un abordaje de los análisis en torno al tacto y la mano en trabajos fundamentales de Husserl y Heidegger, en un diálogo con el análisis respectivos de J. Derrida. Por la vía de una lectura que reconoce continuidades y despliegues, buscaremos demostrar que las elaboraciones prácticas del tocar desarrolladas por Derrida articulan una comprensión en cierta continuidad con aquellas elaboraciones tradicionales, en el marco de una lectura singular de los textos respectivos.

The transmission, emergence, and dissemination of features of racial differentiation are based on the interplay of different sensory perceptions, as this contribution will illustrate. For this purpose, examples from ethnographic travelogues from German East Africa and from the time of German colonial rule were selected to examine the functioning of tactile perception by means of the descriptions of skin colors and skin decorations. The source material reveals multisensuality in the form of synesthesia of the sense of sight with the (...) sense of touch, in that the perception of tactile stimuli is determined less by direct touch and more by the visual representation of haptic properties. (shrink)

(2001). Autonomous Learners and the Learning Society: systematic perspectives on the practice of teaching in Higher Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 33, No. 3-4, pp. 381-395.

Tactile exploration often involves sequential touches interspersed with stimulus-free durations. Whereas it is obvious that texture-related perceptual variables, irrespective of the encoding strategy, must be stored in memory for comparison, it is rather unclear which of those variables are held in memory. There are two established variables—“intensity” and “frequency”, which are “temporally global” variables because of the long stimulus integration interval required to average the signal or derive spectral components, respectively; on the other hand, a recently established third contender (...) is the “temporally local” variable that codes for kinematic profiles of very short, suprathreshold events in the vibrotactile signal. Here, we present the first psychophysical evidence that temporally local variables can be stored in memory. To that end, we asked participants to detect changes in pulsatile indentation stimuli at their fingertips with and without a gap of 1 s between stimulus presentations. The stimuli either contained global variables alone, or a mix of local and global variables. We found, first, that humans are much better at detecting a change in stimuli when local variables are available rather than global ones alone—as evident by the fact that 21 compared to only 6 participants out of 25 yielded a valid psychophysical curve, respectively. Second, this observation persists even when there is a gap between the stimuli, implying local variables must be stored in memory. Third, an extensive array of relevant intensity definitions failed to explain participants’ performance in any consistent manner, which implies that perceptual decisions were less likely to be driven by intensity coding. Taken together, our results suggest that humans perform pulsatile change detection utilizing local pulse shape, and to a lesser degree global pulse rate, and that both parameters can be stored in memory. (shrink)

The primary purpose of this study is to identify differences in at­tainment of learning outcomes for ethics courses delivered using two distinct teaching approaches. The first approach uses a case based method in the context of applied moral issues within medical practice. The second approach surveys moral theories in the context of applied moral issues. Significant differences are found in the attainment of learner outcomes between the two groups. In particular, attainment of outcomes related to moral decision-making is higher in (...) those students who take the course with a case based method. In contrast, attainment of outcomes related to personal beliefs about applied moral issues is higher in those students who take an introductory ethics course surveying moral theories in the context of applied issues. Neither of these results is especially surprising. What may be surprising, however, is that students in the case-based course do not appear attain learner outcomes with regard to applied moral issues despite studying those issues in detail. Finally, the assessment tool developed and refined through this study may be of use for assessment in a variety of ethics courses. (shrink)

This educators’ introduction to semiotics describes a communications phenomenon that has permeated and influenced learner attitudes, behaviors and cognition in any learning environment but especially formal mediated learning environments. Relevant semiotic theory is meaningfully integrated into each chapter.

To add to the currently limited research on the degree of cultural uniqueness of Chinese EFL learners’ anxiety and the multidimensional nature of second language writing anxiety (SLWA), the present qualitative study used think-aloud protocol and interview to examine Chinese EFL learners’ three dimensions of SLWA and the related variables, so as to probe into this problem that could pose an obstacle to sustainable second language writing. Findings showed that Chinese EFL learners experienced much Cognitive Anxiety, but (...) relatively little Avoidance Behavior. Learner-internal, teacher-related, and human-external variables interacted with SLWA in a dynamic way. To a certain degree, Chinese EFL learners showcased uniqueness in some aspects of SLWA, under cultural influences, regarding ethnic culture, local culture, academic culture, and disciplinary culture. (shrink)

Psychophysical experiments have demonstrated large and highly systematic perceptual distortions of tactile space. Such a space can be referred to our experience of the spatial organisation of objects, at representational level, through touch, in analogy with the familiar concept of visual space. We investigated the neural basis of tactile space by analysing activity patterns induced by tactile stimulation of nine points on a 3 × 3 square grid on the hand dorsum using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We (...) used a searchlight approach within pre-defined regions of interests to compute the pairwise Euclidean distances between the activity patterns elicited by tactile stimulation. Then, we used multidimensional scaling to reconstruct tactile space at the neural level and compare it with skin space at the perceptual level. Our reconstructions of the shape of skin space in contralateral primary somatosensory and motor cortices reveal that it is distorted in a way that matches the perceptual shape of skin space. This suggests that early sensorimotor areas critically contribute to the distorted internal representation of tactile space on the hand dorsum. (shrink)