Familiar Gestures Research Articles

Automated Gesture Recognition Using Zebra Optimization Algorithm with Deep Learning Model for Visually Challenged People

Gesture recognition for visually challenged people plays a vital role in improving their convenience and interaction with digital gadgets and environments. It includes improvement of systems that permit them to relate with digital devices by using hand actions or gestures. To improve user-friendliness, these systems select in-built and effortlessly learnable gestures, often integrating wearable devices prepared with sensors for precise detection. Incorporating auditory or haptic feedback devices offers real-time cues about achievement of familiar gestures. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods are useful tools for accurate gesture detection, with customization choices to accommodate individual preferences. In this view, this article concentrates on design and development of Automated Gesture Recognition using Zebra Optimization Algorithm with Deep Learning (AGR-ZOADL) model for Visually Challenged People. The AGR-ZOADL technique aims to recognize the gestures to aid visually challenged people. In the AGR-ZOADL technique, the primary level of data pre-processing is involved by median filtering (MF). Besides, the AGR-ZOADL technique applies NASNet model to learn complex features from the preprocessed data. To enhance performance of NASNet technique, ZOA based hyperparameter procedure performed. For gesture recognition process, stacked long short term memory (SLSTM) model is applied. The performance validation of AGR-ZOADL technique carried out using a benchmark dataset. The experimental values stated that AGR-ZOADL methodology extents significant performance over other present approaches

Maintaining, relinquishing, and adapting bonds in bereavement: A qualitative study of grave sweeping in China

BackgroundContinuing bonds with the deceased are essential and ongoing aspects of bereavement. In China, the annual ritual of grave sweeping involves family members visiting the graves of their loved ones to offer items and conversation. However, the connections between the specific practices and bereavement have not been thoroughly investigated. PurposeThis article explores how continuing bonds may be maintained through the ritual of grave sweeping, which is part of the communal religion that is practiced by a majority of the population in China. MethodsUtilizing a multiple case study design, we examine the ritual activities of grave sweeping with four ethnographic observations and two in-depth interviews conducted in 2014–2015 in western, southern, and northern regions of China (Sichuan, Xiamen, Harbin, and Qiqihar). Our analysis focuses on qualitative data collected on objects, affect, language, and interactions between participants to better understand the activities involved in the ritual. ResultsThe acts of offering food, gifts, and engaging in conversation with the deceased during the ritual of grave sweeping provide family members with opportunities to maintain and transform their relationship with the deceased. This practice involves a combination of familiar gestures, such as offering food, as well as differences in the way they interact, such as the food being not consumed together. The actions establish an experience of social exchange between family members and their deceased loved one. ConclusionsGrave sweeping provides an interactional setting for survivors to maintain, relinquish, and adapt bonds to the deceased. Other ritual practices in different settings may offer similar opportunities for continuing bonds.

A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

A Whole Carnal Stereophony: The Wooster Group Stages Brecht

An Image of the Cosmos: Repetition and Temporality in Sciarrino’s Instrumental Sillabazione Scivolata

An Image of the Cosmos: Repetition and Temporality in Sciarrino’s Instrumental Sillabazione Scivolata Antares Boyle (bio) Introduction: Sillabazione Scivolata in Sciarrino’s String Music Salvatore sciarrino’s recent music is characterized by a special type of repetition in which brief, distinctive melodic figures are minutely and unpredictably varied across their many recurrences. Example 1 shows a family of utterances from String Quartet No. 8 (2008) that loosely resemble each other in rhythm, pitch, melodic contour, and dynamic shape. These statements have been aligned vertically in the figure, with the precise duration of each initial long glissando removed, in order to make the varied repetition visually apparent. The excerpts are typical of a style of writing that has come to dominate Sciarrino’s recent work, which the composer once termed sillabazione scivolata, or “gliding syllable articulation.”1 My analyses of three passages from the Quartet will demonstrate how the distinctive features of this style can shape temporal experience by creating a [End Page 129] dynamic tension between the immediacy of familiar gestures and more elusive long-range continuities. But first, a preliminary description of the sillabazione scivolata technique, its transferal from the vocal to the instrumental realm, and its implications for periodization and analysis of Sciarrino’s output will provide context and motivation for this analytical claim. Click for larger view View full resolution Example 1. A FAMILY OF UTTERANCES IN THE SILLABAZIONE SCIVOLATA STYLE, STRING QUARTET NO. 8, MM. 85–100 Sciarrino has said that sillabazione scivolata, originally conceived as a vocal style, imitates the rhythms and inflections of natural speech.2 It involves melodies performed by an individual voice or by multiple voices in unison or octaves. Although consecutive melodic statements may overlap somewhat, they are only rarely presented in harmony or counterpoint—Sciarrino has called the style “absolute monody.”3 Its identifying features are listed in Example 2. [End Page 130] Click for larger view View full resolution Example 2. FOUR ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF SILLABAZIONE SCIVOLATA The extensive varied repetitions of the style establish families of utterances such as those in Example 1, and these excerpts can be considered paradigmatic instances of the technique.4 Such families are often defined by the position of specific pitches within a recurring series of gestures—such as, in Example 1, the F♯4 and F4 that end the first and last glissando of each excerpt—rather than by intervallic consistency. Canonical post-tonal operations such as transposition and inversion seem to play little to no role in this music. Although scholars have described the style as “modular,” repeated gestures are not reordered entirely freely: complexes like those in Example 1 are defined by a basic series of event types, although recurrences are subject to variation.5 The sillabazione scivolata style was originally developed for the vocal parts in Sciarrino’s operas of the 1990s; the composer first used it in Perseo e Andromeda (1990) and perfected it in Luci mie traditrici (1996–98).6 He began to apply the technique to his string writing shortly thereafter. String Quartet No. 7 (1999)—the composer’s first full-length quartet—repurposes a significant amount of material from Luci mie traditrici, and might even be considered a kind of overture to the opera, although Sciarrino makes no mention of this in his program note.7 String Quartet No. 8, from which the three analytical examples in this article are drawn, is written in a similar style but without any clearly recycled material. However, because sillabazione scivolata generates particular kinds of musical gestures, which are then subject to extensive variation, the line between self-referentiality and new [End Page 131] composition (or between “content” and “style”) is blurred in these works. Quotation and allusion have always been part of Sciarrino’s aesthetic practice—his published output includes homages to artists ranging from Hoagy Carmichael to Mozart—and his recent sillabazione scivolata works might be variously interpreted as a new frontier in intertextuality, an abundant flowering of a highly distinctive style, a strategy for compositional efficiency (one that has taken Sciarrino’s oft-noted productivity to new levels), or some mixture of the above. The composer himself does...

Covenanting in Sixteenth-century Scotland

In 1638 the National Covenant deliberately looked backwards, as well as forwards, by incorporating the text of the Negative Confession (1581). Its authors utilised the patchwork of sixteenth-century covenant ideas by drawing upon religious bonding, confessions of faith and the coronation oath. Deeply familiar actions and gestures were used alongside the words, and especially the emotional ritual of taking a vow with hands upraised. This resonated with the broader identity and culture of protestants as a godly people, who, like the Old Testament Israelites, upheld their covenantal relationship with God by the ‘purity'of their reformed worship and discipline.

“Lady, Shall I Lie in Your Lap?”: Gender, Status, and Touch on the English Stage

“Lady, Shall I Lie in Your Lap?”: Gender, Status, and Touch on the English Stage

More Than the Sum of Its Parts

African American verse differs significantly from poetry composed in either Western or Eastern contexts. It stems, not from a longstanding written tradition, but from a spoken tradition which has consistently evolved over time. Originally, oral stories were used to preserve cultural traditions from the African homeland, providing continuity amid trials and tribulations of forced relocation. To resolve subsequent cultural, linguistic, and social barriers brought about by imposed diversity, a common means to communicate through song and dance was developed. Shared musical compositions allowed slaves to establish familiar linguistic structures, gestures, and thematic content that everyone could understand, thereby facilitating communication and cultural consolidation. Such oral media and content, along with the sociological functions with which they were imbued, were then encoded within African American verse. While the adoption of past cultural traditions has made African American poetry distinctive, it is the synergistic impact of this poetry on American society which makes the art form truly exceptional. Not only has it served to develop the African American community, it has invoked significant responses from white hegemonic institutions of discrimination. In an attempt to further ascertain the sociological impact of African American verse, the following paper investigates how characteristics of form and meaning coalesce to evoke emotion, cultivate ethnic solidarity, and prompt social reform.

Vestibular loss promotes procedural response during a spatial task in rats

Declarative memory refers to a spatial strategy using numerous sources of sensory input information in which visual and vestibular inputs are assimilated in the hippocampus. In contrast, procedural memory refers to a response strategy based on motor skills and familiar gestures and involves the striatum. Even if vestibular loss impairs hippocampal activity and spatial memory, vestibular-lesioned rats remain able to find food rewards during complex spatial memory task. Since hippocampal lesions induce a switch from declarative memory to procedural memory, we hypothesize that vestibular-lesioned rats use a strategy other than that of hippocampal spatial response to complete the task and to counterbalance the loss of vestibular information. We test, in a reverse T-maze paradigm, the types of strategy vestibular-lesioned rats preferentially uses in a spatial task. We clearly demonstrate that all vestibular-lesioned rats shift to a response strategy to solve the spatial task, while control rats use spatial and response strategies equally. We conclude that the loss of vestibular informations leading to spatial learning impairments is not offset at the hippocampus level by integration process of other sense mainly visual informations; but favors a response strategy through procedural memory most likely involving the striatum, cerebellum, and motor learning.

Eighteen-month-old human infants show intensive development in comprehension of different types of pointing gestures

This study explored children's development in comprehending four types of pointing gestures with different familiarity. Our aim was to highlight human infants' pointing comprehension abilities under the same conditions used for various animal species. Sixteen children were tested longitudinally in a two-choice task from 1year of age. At the age of 12 and 14months, infants did not exceed chance level with either of the gestures used. Infants were successful with distal pointing and long cross-pointing at the age of 16months. By the age of 18months, infants showed a high success rate with the less familiar gestures (forward cross-pointing and far pointing) as well. Their skills at this older age show close similarity with those demonstrated previously by dogs when using exactly the same testing procedures. Our longitudinal studies also revealed that in a few infants, the ability to comprehend pointing gestures is already apparent before 16months of age. In general, we found large individual variation. This has been described for a variety of cognitive skills in human development and seems to be typical for pointing comprehension as well.

The peer model advantage in infants' imitation of familiar gestures performed by differently aged models.

Infants’ imitation of differently aged models has been predominately investigated with object-related actions and so far has lead to mixed evidence. Whereas some studies reported an increased likelihood of imitating peer models in contrast to adult models, other studies reported the opposite pattern of results. In the present study, 14-month-old infants were presented with four familiar gestures (e.g., clapping) that were demonstrated by differently aged televised models (peer, older child, adult). Results revealed that infants were more likely to imitate the peer model than the older child or the adult. This result is discussed with respect to a social function of imitation and the mechanism of imitating familiar behavior.

Atypical lateralization of language predicts cerebral asymmetries in parietal gesture representations

Humans typically show left-hemisphere dominance both for language and manual gestures. If this reflects a dependence of these behaviors on a common cerebral specialization, then healthy left-handers with atypical organization of language should show a similar pattern for gesture. Consistent with this hypothesis, we report fMRI data indicating that sinistrals (5/15) with bilateral, or right-lateralized, language representations in inferior frontal cortex exhibit a similar atypical pattern in inferior parietal representations of familiar gestures.

Gesture production in school vs. clinical samples of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) and typically developing children

Dyspraxia, a difficulty in executing an operationalised act, has been associated with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). However, issues relating to the area such as comparisons across modalities, comparisons of school vs. clinical populations, and developmental delay vs. pathology have not been addressed in the same, comprehensive study. In the current study, therefore, familiar gesture production in DCD was addressed in a comprehensive manner to follow-up outstanding issues from previous studies: The production of familiar gestures and praxis imagery in a school ( n = 26) vs. clinic sample ( n = 19) of children with DCD was examined in relation to typically developing age matched ( n = 24) all aged from 9 to 11 years, and two groups of younger children within the age ranges of 5–6 ( n = 23) and 4–5 ( n = 26) years. Overall, children with Developmental Coordination Disorder showed an impaired ability to produce familiar gestures compared to their typical peers, and this was dependant on the type of gesture and presentation modality. Differences were found between school and clinic samples of children with DCD, suggestive of the recruitment of different underlying mechanisms in the two samples. The results have a bearing on our understanding of the relationship of developmental dyspraxia to DCD, as well as of the issue of developmental delay vs. pathology.

Familiarity modulates mirror neuron and mentalizing regions during intention understanding

Recent research suggests that the inference of others' intentions from their observed actions is supported by two neural systems that perform complementary roles. The human putative mirror neuron system (pMNS) is thought to support automatic motor simulations of observed actions, with increased activity for previously experienced actions, whereas the mentalizing system provides reflective, non-intuitive reasoning of others' perspectives, particularly in the absence of prior experience. In the current fMRI study, we show how motor familiarity with an action and perceptual familiarity with the race of an actor uniquely modulate these two systems. Chinese participants were asked to infer the intentions of actors performing symbolic gestures, an important form of non-verbal communication that has been shown to activate both mentalizing and mirror neuron regions. Stimuli were manipulated along two dimensions: (1) actor's race (Caucasian vs. Chinese actors) and (2) participants' level of experience with the gestures (familiar or unfamiliar). We found that observing all gestures compared to observing still images was associated with increased activity in key regions of both the pMNS and mentalizing systems. In addition, observations of one's same race generated greater activity in the posterior pMNS-related regions and the insula than observations of a different race. Surprisingly, however, familiar gestures more strongly activated regions associated with mentalizing, while unfamiliar gestures more strongly activated the posterior region of the pMNS, a finding that is contrary to prior literature and demonstrates the powerful modulatory effects of both motor and perceptual familiarity on pMNS and mentalizing regions when asked to infer the intentions of intransitive gestures.

Neural Underpinnings of Gesture Discrimination in Patients with Limb Apraxia

Limb apraxia (LA), is a neuropsychological syndrome characterized by difficulty in performing gestures and may therefore be an ideal model for investigating whether action execution deficits are causatively linked to deficits in action understanding. We tested 33 left brain-damaged patients and 8 right brain-damaged patients for the presence of the LA. Importantly, we also tested all the patients in an ad hoc developed gesture recognition task wherein an actor performs, either correctly or incorrectly, transitive (using objects) or intransitive (without objects) meaningful conventional limb gestures. Patients were instructed to judge whether the observed gesture was correct or incorrect. Lesion analysis enabled us to evaluate the relationship between specific brain regions and behavioral performance in gesture execution and gesture comprehension. We found that LA was present in 21 left brain-damaged patients and it was linked to frontal and parietal lesions. Moreover, we found that recognition of correct execution of familiar gestures performed by others was more impaired in patients with LA than in nonapraxic patients. Crucially, the gesture comprehension deficit correlated with damage to the opercular and triangularis portions of the inferior frontal gyrus, two regions that are involved in complex aspects of action-related processing. In contrast, no such relationship was observed with lesions centered on the inferior parietal cortex. The present findings suggest that lesions to left frontal regions that are involved in planning and performing actions are causatively associated with deficits in the recognition of the correct execution of meaningful gestures.

Small Dances about Big Ideas (review)

Reviewed by: Small Dances about Big Ideas Christine Jowers Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Small Dances about Big Ideas, presented by The Culture Project/Impact Festival and Dance New Amsterdam. The Choreographer's Commentary Version of the work, October, 2006. The choreographer Liz Lerman was once told that she would never earn any critical support because her work wasn't confrontational. The [End Page 177] memory of that comment has stuck with her despite her being recognized with a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 2002 and receiving numerous critical accolades for performance and community work. During a question-and-answer period at the conclusion of the New York City performances of Small Dances about Big Ideas, she said of her audience, "I want to keep them in the theater, not chase them out," and added, "I love this"—referring to the sense of community one feels after a shared theatrical experience. For Small Dances about Big Ideas, an evening-length dance/theater piece, Lerman was commissioned by the Seevak Fund for Harvard Law School to create a choreographic work commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Nuremburg Trials that would encompass human rights law from Nuremburg onward—an important and unprecedented commission for a dance company. Even in New York City, often called the dance capital of the world, dance artists can feel like an irrelevant part of the culture as they struggle to convince presenters, arts funders, critics, and new audiences of the validity of their work. Much of having a contemporary dance company involves teaching people why they should care about the art form at all. Then along comes Harvard Law School, an unusual dance partner, demonstrating not only that they appreciate the relevance and possibility of the medium but also that they are willing to commission a work for it. In the choreographer's commentary version of Small Dances about Big Ideas (a smaller version of the original work, designed to fit into tiny spaces like Dance New Amsterdam's black box theater), Lerman talks to the audience, reading e-mails between herself and her legal muse at Harvard, Professor Martha Minow. Minow believed that Lerman, with movement, could illuminate human rights law in an unacademic fashion that would resonate with an audience in their very bones. One of the powerful stories presented in Small Dances is that of a woman forensic anthropologist, an analyst of skeletal remains who determines whether bodies have been tortured or mutilated before death. The "bone woman's" voice is overheard speaking of her work. She talks of marking victims by placing red flags beside their bodies. In a short time she discovers that there are not enough flags. A dancer (Cassie Meador), on a dimly-lit stage, moves away from a mound of crumpled bodies at her feet. She reaches out for one of the male figures in the pile, tenderly rolling, folding, and kneading his body to bring him toward her. She embraces his head, caresses the back of his neck lovingly with her finger tips, she nestles her ear to his thigh, then gently cradles and rocks his body as one would a newborn. As she moves, we see the Narrator (Peter DiMuro) observing from the background while reading from a text describing the bone woman's disbelief at the torture she uncovers. Meanwhile, Meador continues her mindful ritual, listening to the story this body has tell, its various positions seeming to whisper, "I was hit here . . . on the left side . . . on the right side." At the scene's conclusion the bone woman releases [End Page 178] the cradled body from her grasp and stretches out empathetically to rest on the ground beside him. The scene evokes an additional aspect of genocide: the beauty and commitment of those who fight for victims. Many stories overlap in this performance, some danced—at times with simple movement and at times with great energy and technique—and others vocalized. Lerman and her company of dance artists use straightforward minimal movement (walking, running, jumping, and falling) with abstracted familiar gestures (waving, nodding one's head, wiping a brow, or rubbing eyes) to reach out directly to the audience. Most of the movements, with the exception...

Imaging a cognitive model of apraxia: the neural substrate of gesture-specific cognitive processes.

The present study aimed to ascertain the neuroanatomical basis of an influential neuropsychological model for upper limb apraxia [Rothi LJ, et al. The Neuropsychology of Action. 1997. Hove, UK: Psychology Press]. Regional cerebral blood flow was measured in healthy volunteers using H2 15O PET during performance of four tasks commonly used for testing upper limb apraxia, i.e., pantomime of familiar gestures on verbal command, imitation of familiar gestures, imitation of novel gestures, and an action-semantic task that consisted in matching objects for functional use. We also re-analysed data from a previous PET study in which we investigated the neural basis of the visual analysis of gestures. First, we found that two sets of discrete brain areas are predominantly engaged in the imitation of familiar and novel gestures, respectively. Segregated brain activation for novel gesture imitation concur with neuropsychological reports to support the hypothesis that knowledge about the organization of the human body mediates the transition from visual perception to motor execution when imitating novel gestures [Goldenberg Neuropsychologia 1995;33:63-72]. Second, conjunction analyses revealed distinctive neural bases for most of the gesture-specific cognitive processes proposed in this cognitive model of upper limb apraxia. However, a functional analysis of brain imaging data suggested that one single memory store may be used for "to-be-perceived" and "to-be-produced" gestural representations, departing from Rothi et al.'s proposal. Based on the above considerations, we suggest and discuss a revised model for upper limb apraxia that might best account for both brain imaging findings and neuropsychological dissociations reported in the apraxia literature.

Alteraciones en la imitación gestual (apraxia de conducción)

The aim of this presentation is to report the performance pattern of a patient who suffered ideomotor apraxia with a disorder pattern of the conduction apraxia (CA) type. This clinical picture was originally reported by Ochipa et al. in 1994 as an alteration in the pathway that joins the two lexicons; later, in 2000, Cubelli et al. claimed that there is no evidence for the existence of such a pathway and suggested that the symptoms were due to an alteration affecting the mechanisms governing visuomotor conversion. A 51 year old patient who, following a traumatic head injury, presented aphasia and apraxia with 40% errors in the imitation of familiar gestures test, 50% errors in the imitation of non familiar gestures (NFG), 0% errors in the visual admission of objects test and 0% in the tool usage test. The differences between the performance in the imitation tests and in the other tests are statistically significant. Although the patient displayed slight alterations in the gesture decision test (20% mistakes), alterations to the action input lexicon would not account for the patient's performance since there is a significant difference between his performance in the imitation of NFG test and the gesture decision test. Moreover, he did not present alterations in the discrimination of gestures. From the above, it can be said that the patient seems to present CA due to alterations in the non semantic interlexical pathway and in the perilexical pathway, as originally postulated by Ochipa et al.

The Exotic in Western Music

Exoticism has flourished in western music since the 17th century. A blend of familiar and unfamiliar gestures, this vibrant musical language takes the listener beyond the ordinary by evoking foreign cultures and forbidden desires. In this collection, musicologists explore the ways in which western composers have used exotic elements for dramatic and striking effect. Interweaving historical, musical, and cultural perspectives, the contributors examine the compositional use of exotic styles and traditions in the works of artists as diverse as Mozart and George Harrison.

Sentences Before Words: Seeing Before Hearing

Language had to begin with gestures. Language would have happened when a community of hominids about to be human took a new look at the gestures that they and other hominoids had been making for millions of years. All at once—the moment they saw that these gestures represented more than their usual meanings, like “gimme food” or “come closer”—language began.

Error Types in Ideomotor Apraxia: A Qualitative Analysis

Seventeen brain-damaged subjects with dominant hemisphere pathology and 24 matched control subjects were asked to perform simple familiar gestures under four conditions: (1) verbal command (pantomime), (2) imitation, (3) with the actual object, and (4) verbal command a second time. The subjects subsequently watched a video of an actor performing simple movements and decided whether or not these were performed accurately. The gestural production task was videoed and analyzed for error type. Error type remained consistent over the four task conditions, although subgroups of patients made different types of errors. One group of patients with Ideomotor Apraxia (IMA) made more errors but of the same type as the controls, i.e., movement-related errors and the use of "body part as object" (BPO). The second group made mainly substituted (i.e. unrelated) movements and perseverative errors. The second group of subjects was also poorer at discriminating incorrectly performed movements in the recognition task. BPO errors were commonly made by the control group and they were also chosen as correct in the recognition task. This indicated that use of BPO may reflect a convention in symbolising gestures rather than pathology. The performance of the IMA subjects was discussed in relation to current theories of the mechanisms underlying apraxia.