Perception

The study addresses the role of empathy in the recognition of vocal emotions (joy, anger, sadness) when they are moderately expressed in speech which is listened to without the speaker being seen. The test was taken by 67 adults (29 male and 38 female subjects aged 30–60), whose empathy level had previously been measured by Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright’s self-report questionnaire, the Empathy Quotient (EQ). In the test group only men (n=14) had a low empathy level (EQ<32), and only women (n=16) had a high empathy level (EQ>51). A comparison of the men (n=15) and women (n=22) who had a medium empathy quotient showed that gender was a factor in the recognition of emotions. To eliminate the possible gender influence, the recognition of emotions was tested by comparing the results of the men with a low EQ with those of the men with a medium EQ and the results of the women with a medium EQ with those of the women with a high EQ. According to the results, personal empathic ability does not affect the recognition of emotions from the voice.

""The establishment of the Estonian Emotional Speech Corpus (EESC) began in 2006 within the framework of the National Programme for Estonian Language Technology at the Institute of the Estonian Language. The corpus contains 1,234 Estonian sentences that express anger, joy and sadness, or are neutral. The sentences come from text passages read out by non-professionals who were not given any explicit indication of the target emotion. It was assumed that the content of the text would elicit an emotion in the reader and that this would be expressed in their voice. This avoids the exaggerations of acted speech. The emotion of each sentence in the corpus was then determined by listening tests. The corpus is publicly available at http://peeter.eki.ee:5000/.
This article gives an overview of the theoretical starting-points of the corpus and their usefulness for its implementation.""

The Estonian emotional speech corpus (EEKK) is being created in the framework of the National Programme for Estonian Language Technology in the Institute of the Estonian Language. The corpus contains recordings of read speech sentences expressing anger, joy and sadness, and neutral sentences. The corpus serves two objectives: 1) to form an acoustic basis of corpus-based emotional text-to-speech synthesis; 2) to provide a reliable database for studying emotions rendered by speech. The underlying principle of the corpus is that emotions can be relatively well recognised in natural, non-acted speech which is a precondition for synthesising natural speech (see Iida et al. 2003). The reliability of the corpus is ensured by perception tests: each corpus sentence is provided with perception test results on the recognisability of an emotion. The corpus is now in the testing stage. The present article gives an overview of the stages of corpus creation and results of perception tests.

"Movement lies at the heart of matter; all matter is always moving, in many different modes. Matter organised in the form of living cells and animals does something peculiar, however. Its collective movements are purposeful and goal-oriented, geared for the appropriation of an immediate future and generally for the preservation of its existence. The organisation of the movement of matter lies at the heart of living: from the organised biochemical activity within small compartments of cells, to the movements and activities of cells and cell systems, to the gross body movements of large multicellular organisms like you and I. All of life is the organised movement of matter.
Living organisation enacts purposeful behaviours that sustain the existence of the living thing, a feature that I will show here fundamentally requires prospective control to anticipate the future present. How an organism senses and moves prospectively purposefully within its environment is an essential question for the emerging “systems” sciences, and is the theme for this paper."

""Tyler Burge's anti-individualism – the view that individuating many of a creature's mental kinds is necessarily dependent on relations that the creature bears to the physical, or in some cases social, environment – backs his theory of perceptual representation, i.e. perceptual anti-individualism. Perceptual anti-individualism articulates a framework that, according to Burge, perceptual psychology assumed without articulation. In this interview, Burge talks about the main tenets and underpinnings of perceptual anti-individualism in relation to classic representational theories of perceptual experience, reductive theories of mental content, theories of phenomenal consciousness, and other associated topics.
"

 The present paper addresses the question of the possible links between perceptive visual field dependence-independence and the visual contribution to postural control. In our differential approach, visual field dependent (FD) and independent (FI) subjects were selected on the basis of their score in the Rod and Frame Test (subjective vertical). The hypothesis that we have tested is that the FD subjects use mainly visual cues for estimating not only their subjective vertical but also their body orientation and stability. Moreover, we have postulated that these subjects use mainly dynamic visual cues to control their postural stability. In the postural test, the selected subjects were instructed to stand in the sharpened Romberg position in darkness and under normal or stroboscopic illumination, in front of either a vertical or a tilted frame. Lateral head and body orientation and stability were measured. We found that: (1) all subjects leaned slightly towards the tilted frame (postural frame effect), and this was obtained on the basis of the static visual cues alone; (2) FD subjects were less stable than FI subjects, and their stability required the use of dynamic visual cues, mainly extracted from the vertical frame. In FI subjects, static visual cues may act as a complementary regulation, enhancing stability even with a strobe tilted frame. We thus demonstrate that visual field dependence interacts with the visual contribution to postural control.

Classical experiments on the ability of cats to turn in the air during a free fall, the air righting reflex, have shown that vestibular and visual cues can play a role in this behavior. The development of this air righting reflex in kittens blinded since birth has been studied. The results show that the development in the blinded kittens is the same as in normal kittens with vision: mature by 33 days. This result and the comparison with other studies confirm that the air righting reflex is primarily a vestibular controlled reaction.