Using Augmented Reality to Elicit Pretend Play for Children with Autism.

Children with autism spectrum condition (ASC) suffer from deficits or developmental delays in symbolic thinking. In particular, they are often found lacking in pretend play during early childhood. Researchers believe that they encounter difficulty in generating and maintaining mental representation of pretense coupled with the immediate reality.

Exploring violin sound quality: investigating English timbre descriptors and correlating resynthesized acoustical modifications with perceptual properties.

Performers often discuss the sound quality of a violin or the sound obtained by particular playing techniques, calling upon a diverse vocabulary. This study explores the verbal descriptions, made by performers, of the distinctive timbres of different violins. Sixty-one common descriptors were collected and then arranged by violinists on a map, so that words with similar meanings lay close together, and those with different meanings lay far apart.

Perceptual studies of violin body damping and vibrato.

This work explored how the perception of violin notes is influenced by the magnitude of the applied vibrato and by the level of damping of the violin resonance modes. Damping influences the "peakiness" of the frequency response, and vibrato interacts with this peakiness by producing fluctuations in spectral content as well as in frequency and amplitude. Initially, it was shown that thresholds for detecting a change in vibrato amplitude were independent of body damping, and thresholds for detecting a change in body damping were independent of vibrato amplitude.

A tool for tracking visual attention: the Restricted Focus Viewer.

Eye-tracking equipment has proven useful in examining the cognitive processes people use when understanding and reasoning with visual stimuli. However, eye-tracking has several drawbacks: accurate eye-tracking equipment is expensive, it is often awkward for participants, it requires frequent recalibration, and the data can be difficult to interpret. We introduce an alternative tool: the Restricted Focus Viewer (RFV).