Kinds Of Awareness Research Articles

Awareness of Functional Status: People with Alzheimer's Disease Abilities to Self-Report Impairment in Activities of Daily Living.

Background:Awareness of functional status may underlie specific profiles and differences related to stage severity in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD).Objective:This study aimed to assess self-reported experiences of awareness of functional activity in people with mild and moderate AD.Methods:This is a mixed methods approach. The qualitative part was conducted through semi-structured interviews concerning the experiences and awareness of deficits in 38 older adults with mild or moderate AD. The quantitative approach included a comparison between groups with regard to concerns of awareness and clinic and demographic data.Results:Impairment on awareness of disease and awareness of functional deficits was observed even in the mild stages of AD. There was also a noticeable progression of impairments of both kinds of awareness from mild to moderate stage of disease. The majority of participants with mild and moderate AD were partially aware of their functional deficits. Both groups of participants reported some negative impact; however, they were not able to entirely describe their functional status. Also, deficits to recognize the need for help with hygiene and general tasks were observed. Significant differences were found in awareness of need for help with general tasks and awareness of need for help with hygiene tasks.Conclusion:People with mild and moderate AD may describe their aware of the disease better than specific functional deficits, and most of them can provide some reports concerning to the impact of the disease.

After Moscow Conceptualism: Reflections on the Center and Periphery and Cultural Belatedness

Conceptual art is not only subject to a striking unevenness and a range of diverse forms across national territories during its emergence, but each national-cultural context in which it emerges is also exposed to the general belatedness of conceptual art’s relationship to its own avant-garde past. Each national-cultural formation was working with, and through, very different cultural and historical materials on the basis of very different kinds of awareness of the avant-garde past and the recent conceptual present. This article addresses this unevenness and belatedness by looking at the case of Moscow conceptualism in the 1970s and 1980s. In a period of post-Thaw and late Soviet ‘stagnation’, conceptual art takes the form in Russia of a generalised apophatic withdrawal from the ‘public sphere’, in which the absences, phlegmatic silences, and textual ambiguities of (some) conceptual art, assume a kind of heightened moral and poetic antipode to the (failed) rhetoric of Stalinist productivism. Yet, despite, its modernist reverence for indeterminancy, this work, nevertheless, retains an active ‘working’ relationship to the avant-garde (collective practice, the critique of the artistic monad). As such, this article examines the active and revenant links of Moscow Conceptualism to the memory of the avant-garde, based on Russian art’s contemporary sense of itself as a once major (revolutionary) centre of avant-garde production.

Can you feel the body that you see? On the relationship between interoceptive accuracy and body image

Interoception and exteroception for body signals are two different ways of perceiving the self: the first from within, the second from outside. We investigated the relationship between Interoceptive Accuracy (IAcc) and external perception of the body and we tested if seeing the body from an external perspective can affect IAcc. Fifty-two healthy female subjects performed a standard heartbeat perception task to assess the IAcc, before and after the Body Image Revealer (BIR), which is a body perception task designed to assess the different aspects of body-image. The performance of the lower IAcc group in the heartbeat perception task significantly improved after the exteroceptive task. These findings highlight the relations between interoceptive and exteroceptive body-representations, supporting the view that these two kinds of awareness are linked and interact with each other.

Tuning-in

This article describes the idea and method of ‘tuning-in’ as a component of environmental arts practice, developed during my participation in the Landscape Quartet research project. It describes how such an approach includes awareness of the different senses and kinds of awareness, and how artistic responses to specific spaces and locations can be developed through sound and music. This includes outcomes that range in scope from live performances and/or sound installations on-site, electroacoustic compositions, and audiovisual pieces.

Control your mind, make affordance available.

Evaluating the affordance–control interpretation of the relationship between performance and object estimation has been proposed by psychophysical and psychonomic studies. This study examined the weight estimation–performance relationship. Individuals with visual impairment or blindness put shots that varied in weight among five scales. In Experiment 1, only the perceived weight was a significant performance constraint. In Experiment 2, the weight was perceived as heavier when the participants’ actions were manipulated through cognitive interpretation. The increase in perceived weight appeared to be related to performance and intrinsically scaled to the action, even when the action was only mental rather than physical. The study’s findings suggest that bodily experience and action are the basis for physical judgments and likely underlie other basic cognitive interpretations of sensory stimuli. This suggestion goes hand in hand with the biofunctional approaches which assume direct experience of the integrated wholeness of one’s body is fundamental for developing other kinds of awareness. Different perspectives from oriental philosophy and psychology are also discussed.

Current Conditions and Worker Attitudes in End-of-Life Care for the Elderly in Korea

Korea has led the way within Asia with its pioneering nursing insurance system. This study examines the current state of end-of-life for the elderly, along with future trends, based on surveys and interviews of managers and employees of institutions related to nursing and nursing insurance. Korea is seeing a gradual increase in its latter stage elderly population. It naturally follows that this puts pressure on dealing with end-of-life care, and this study revealed concern that the environment cannot keep pace with the concurrent increase in medical needs. Korea's system restricts end-of-life to hospital facilities, so facility staff lack experience and certain kinds of awareness. Workers' own attitudes toward life and death, as well as those toward caring for the sick, influence the quality of end-of-life care. It was found that these attitudes are significantly influenced by religious beliefs and work experience. Social workers had longer experience in caring for the infirm and a stronger tendency to be cognizant of which focuses on a patient's family. Results indicated that in the future, it will be necessary to consider how workers can best think about and approach end-of-life as a team. workers due to the rapidly ageing society; an increase in elderly people living alone resulting from factors such as the rise of nuclear families and increased social progress for women; and, a sharp rise in medical costs and the need for long term associated with an increase in chronic illnesses all became problems.(2) These led to the introduction of a system of long-term insurance for the elderly (hereafter referred to as care insurance) in July, 2008. There are a number of similarities between Japan and Korea in terms of the progression of their ageing societies and the decreases in the population of children. So, Korea's insurance was created with reference to Japan's nursing insurance system. The two countries have many issues in common, as they share a system of values based on Confucian culture and have accordingly developed which focuses on families. Fifteen years have passed since the introduction of insurance in Japan. In that time, the rapid increase in the later-stage elderly population and in the severity of related problems has continued, leading to the new issue of how to make changes in approaches to end-of-life care. A paper on terminal for the elderly in Korea was introduced during a seminar held on the Comparative Study in Ideal Terminal Care and Death by the International Longevity Center Japan.(3) However, this did not include any material related to current conditions or attitudes of staff in terminal facilities for the elderly. Korea is also exploring for solutions to prepare for its impending super-aging society. There is a need to shed light on current conditions and staff attitudes toward end-of-life in elderly facilities. With Korea having been the first in East Asia to introduce insurance, it is possible to think of Korea and Japan as having a common perspective on these issues. This study seeks to foster mutual understanding by examining issues the two countries have in common.

Reviewing the quality of awareness support in collaborative applications

Awareness to users is a valuable feature of a collaborative system. Therefore, the designers of a system of this type may find it useful to receive hints on the awareness support provided by the system when it is under development or evolution. This paper proposes a tool for their use to obtain suggestions on the awareness features provided by the system and those not currently supported by it. The considered kinds of awareness were obtained from a review of a significant number of proposals from the literature. The tool is based on a checklist of design elements related to these awareness types to be applied by the application designer. The construction of this checklist was done as follows. The process started with an analysis of the types of awareness to be provided. This step ended with 54 selected design elements and six awareness types. Experts on the development of collaborative systems used their experience to provide correlations between the design elements and the types of awareness previously identified, thus encapsulating their expertise within the checklist. The proposal was applied to three existing collaborative systems and the results are presented. The obtained results suggest that the checklist is adequate to provide helpful hints that may be used to improve an application's awareness support.

Doctorateness in Design Disciplines. Negotiating Connoisseurship and Criticism in Practice-related Fields

Discussions on the concept of ‘doctorateness’ have been growing during last years in traditional academic disciplines as well as in creative fields. This paper is a brief report from the first stage of a research project which studies how the concept of ‘doctorateness’ could be considered in the field of architecture, design and arts. The project builds upon a series of doctoral courses for architects and designers, and includes the study and evaluation of already accepted doctoral theses. In analyses of assessment assignments, the ‘connoisseurship model’ of Elliot W. Eisner was found to be useful. Eisner’s model of Connoisseurship & Criticism has served as the main tool for the analyses of empirical data, and as a framework for developing the concept of ‘doctorateness’ further. From the first phase of studies in the research project, the importance of particular kinds of awareness can be stressed as crucial for ‘doctorateness’, and here the model of connoisseurship and criticism has been operative. A more elaborate definition of ‘doctorateness’ is presumed to be of use as a pedagogical tool in research education in design fields as well as in dialogues between professionals of design practice and research.

SUSRET PSIHOTERAPIJA ISTOKA I ZAPADA

U radu se diskutuju kreativni izazovi sa kojima se susreće psihoterapija kao novaprofesija u novom milenijumu. Koncept ega i dva tipa svesnosti su ključni u razmatranjurazličitosti psihoterapijskog pristupa Istoka i Zapada u pogledu lekovitosti terapijskogodnosa. Koncept duhovnosti, takođe. Razmatraju se i različiti ciljevi koji se postavljaju upsihoterapijskom tretmanu, a koji nužno vode i do različitih ishoda. Ostaje pitanje: da li jestvarno susret različitih pristupa Istoka i Zapada moguć, i ,ako jeste, kako se najbolje možeostvariti njihova saradnja.

Aversive Conditioning under Conditions of Restricted Awareness: Effects on Spatial Cueing

In the literature on aversive conditioning there is still debate on the role of awareness. According to some authors, affective learning can occur with or without contingency learning (dual-process model), whereas others argue that a single process produces both affective responses and contingency knowledge. Although many studies have investigated these models, the results to date are inconclusive. Based on a review of the literature, a new series of experiments was designed to examine aversive conditioning in the absence of contingency awareness. In the present study we examined the effects of subliminal aversive conditioning on a spatial cueing task. Awareness was stringently tested after conditioning. Three kinds of awareness were distinguished: contingency awareness (awareness of the CS-US contingencies, where CS is the conditioned stimulus, and US is the unconditioned stimulus), perceptual awareness (awareness of the perceptual differences between the CSs), and US expectancy (awareness of a threat feeling when confronted with the CS+, but not when confronted with the CS-). The results of three experiments demonstrated that responses on the spatial cueing task were modulated by subliminal aversive conditioning. Importantly, none of the participants was contingency aware or able to perceptually discriminate between the conditioned stimuli. However, in Experiment 3, only those participants showing some level of postconditioning expectancy awareness exhibited conditioning effects. These experiments suggest that subliminal aversive conditioning produces small but significant effects, which may be modulated by expectancy awareness.

Modelling of discrete-time SIS models with awareness interactions on degree-uncorrelated networks

Many epidemic models ignored the impact of awareness on epidemics in a population, though it is not the case from the real viewpoints. In this paper, a discrete-time SIS model with awareness interactions on degree-uncorrelated networks is considered. We study three kinds of awareness, including local awareness and global awareness which are originated from the epidemic-dependent information, and individual awareness which is epidemic-independent and determined by the individual information. We demonstrate analytically that awareness of the epidemic-dependent information cannot change the epidemic threshold regardless of the global or local spreading information. In contrast, epidemic-independent awareness to individual information increases the epidemic threshold in finite scale-free networks, but cannot halt the absence of epidemic threshold in an infinite scale-free network. By numerical simulations, we find that local awareness has a stronger impact on epidemic prevalence than global awareness. Our findings explore the effects of various types of awareness on epidemic spreading and address their roles in the epidemic control.

Capturing the dynamics of attention control from individual to distributed systems: the shape of models to come

New technology presents opportunities for enhancing the performance of human systems that are tasked to meet multiple, often competing demands. Yet, mistakes in designing and deploying these technologies can create complexities that make human systems more brittle. To many stakeholders, the answer to this challenge is increase situation awareness. But what these advocates refer to when they talk about enhancing situation awareness varies tremendously. Over 15 years ago, the authors commented on how the label was ill defined. Today, the label is more popular than ever but the range of situations and the kinds of awareness are now so diverse that the label is better referred to as multiply defined. This paper returns to basic concepts and findings about human perception and the control of attention and the critical role that these processes play in individual as well as joint and distributed activity–how people know where to focus next in changing situations. This paper also briefly reviews recent studies on the neurobiology of the control of attention that help explain how people find what is relevant despite the fact that this is highly context sensitive. Together, the findings from this research can be synthesised into new models that capture how human systems can fluently and dynamically shift focus as context, goals and situations change. These models are needed to be able to understand, predict and support the processes involved in assessing situations and achieving situation awareness. They can be scaled up to address environments where technology is used to extend human perception into distant scenes and where technology connects multiple interdependent agents (both human groups and machine agents) over new temporal and spatial scales.

The Mud of Experience and Kinds of Awareness

In Authority and Estrangement Richard Moran takes some rather illuminating steps towards getting rid of the Cartesian picture of self-knowledge. I argue, however, that Moran's crucial distinction between deliberative and theoretical attitude is seriously contaminated by that traditional picture.

Supporting Awareness in Ubiquitous Learning

This article focuses on awareness in computer supported ubiquitous learning environments. In ubiquitous learning, awareness is a key process in individual and/or collaborative learning. Awareness is structured into social, task, concept, workspace, knowledge, and context. This article introduces four systems for supporting various kinds of awareness and concludes with some discussion and proposals for future work.

Consciousness as Pure Self-Reflection in the Writings of Michael Polanyi

Recognition that Michael Polanyi is one of the greatest minds of the Post-Modern era is rapidly increasing. His theory of tacit knowledge is one of Polanyi's most significant contributions to the philosophy of mind. In our view, that notion can be most fully understood when read in the context of his general assertions and assumptions about the nature of consciousness. Our analysis of Polanyi's use of the term finds three distinct meanings. These are: Consciousness 1, consciousness as self-awareness; Consciousness 2, consciousness as thoughts, feelings, perceptions, or the mental content of Consciousness 1; and, Consciousness 3, consciousness as understood in contrast to unconsciousness. Numerous instances of these usages are quoted and explained. In some cases, Polanyi's use of these terms is ambiguous, or misleading. This occurs especially with his use of the words attention and awareness. The paper concludes with the suggestion that social scientists, and other readers of Polanyi, who are interested in understanding his theory of can avoid the misleading connotations of those terms by heeding these few suggestions: (a). read the term awareness as focal attention; (b). read the term awareness as subsidiary reliance; and, (c). keep in mind that there are not two levels nor two kinds of awareness, but only one awareness: self-awareness.

The Conflicted Character of Picture Perception

It is often said that picture perception has dual character, which makes looking at pictures fundamentally different from looking at things like trees, chairs, and people. This duality can be explained in variety of ways, but it is most commonly explained in terms of competing perceptions of space.1 That is, it is frequently asserted that the perception of pictures (at least those depicting objects in space) involves two distinct impressions of space-the two-dimensional picture surface and the three-dimensional depicted scene-that are somehow in conflict, or inconsistent, with one another. For instance, R. L. Gregory contends that, visually, pictures have an extraordinary double reality: flat objects seen as flat, and at the same time as quite different three-dimensional objects in different space.2 Similarly, James J. Gibson claims that a picture is both surface in its own right and display of information about something else. The viewer cannot help but see both, yet this is paradox, for the two kinds of awareness are discrepant.3 In much of the psychological literature on the subject, this perceptual conflict is generally understood as function of conflicting cues. When we look at picture, so the story goes, there are cues that indicate that we are looking at flat surface, and also cues that indicate that we are looking at three-dimensional scene. These cues suggest two mutually incompatible impressions of the object we are looking at (the picture), which our visual system is able to resolve in one way or another. The end result is that we perceive both the two-dimensional surface of the picture and three-dimensional pictorial space simultaneously, despite the inherent contradiction between the two.

A Descriptive Framework of Workspace Awareness for Real-Time Groupware

Supporting awareness of others is an idea that holds promise for improving the usability of real-time distributed groupware. However, there is little principled information available about awareness that can be used by groupware designers. In this article, we develop a descriptive theory of awareness for the purpose of aiding groupware design, focusing on one kind of group awareness called i>workspace awareness. We focus on how small groups perform generation and execution tasks in medium-sized shared workspaces – tasks where group members frequently shift between individual and shared activities during the work session. We have built a three-part framework that examines the concept of workspace awareness and that helps designers understand the concept for purposes of designing awareness support in groupware. The framework sets out elements of knowledge that make up workspace awareness, perceptual mechanisms used to maintain awareness, and the ways that people use workspace awareness in collaboration. The framework also organizes previous research on awareness and extends it to provide designers with a vocabulary and a set of ground rules for analysing work situations, for comparing awareness devices, and for explaining evaluation results. The basic structure of the theory can be used to describe other kinds of awareness that are important to the usability of groupware.

Raising your software consciousness

I n 1970, Charles Reich published a bestselling book called The Greening of America.1 In it, Reich identifies three kinds of awareness or consciousness, which he calls Consciousness I, Consciousness II, and Consciousness III. Consciousness I (“Con I”) is the pioneer mentality. People who operate at Con I place great value on independence and self-satisfaction. They don’t easily tolerate other people telling them what to do. They are highly self-reliant and self-sufficient. Reich believes that Con I dominated the American psyche during America’s first centuries and that this focus on selfreliance was a significant factor in America’s development. Consciousness II is the gray flannel suit mentality—corporation man. People who operate at Con II understand the importance of getting along with others and playing by the rules. They believe rules are good for society, and they think everyone should follow them. Reich believes that Con II became more dominant than Con I in the mid-twentieth century. Consciousness III is the mentality of enlightened independence. The Con III person operates on the basis of principles, with little regard for the rules that predominate in Con II and without the selfishness that predominates in Con I. By the time Greening was published, Reich argued that Con II’s time was over. He believed Con III was in its ascendancy and would soon replace Con II. Although The Greening of America struck a resonant chord when it was published, history has not been kind to the book. In 1999, Slate magazine’s readers voted it the silliest book of the 20th century. Reich’s Con III was a hippie nirvana, and the “greening” Reich predicted was a nationwide movement toward the hippie culture of the 1960s and 1970s—psychedelic drugs, bell-bottom pants, and all. As the hippie culture faded into obscurity in the 1980s, so did the credibility of Reich’s predictions.

Critical Thinking and Interdisciplinarity in Environmental Higher Education: The case for epistemological and values awareness

A key learning outcome of most, if not all, higher education is that students should be able to think critically about the subjects they have studied. This applies as much to broad-based undergraduate programmes in environmental higher education as elsewhere. In environmental higher education, this means that students should be able to think critically both within and across the various disciplines that constitute their study programme. An implication of this is that students need to have an awareness of the epistemological and value-based commitments that are present though frequently unacknowledged-in all 'knowledge claims'; and, in particular, that they should be sensitive to the ways in which these commitments often vary within and between different disciplines. Put another way, it is our view that awareness of epistemological and value-related questions is a prerequisite for critical thinking in environmental higher education. Moreover, in so far as critical thinking across disciplines enables students to integrate knowledges produced within different disciplines, these two kinds of awareness are also prerequisites for interdisciplinarity.

Catching the eye

In this paper, we show how different elements of awareness information in groupware systems can be defined in terms of conveying attentive states of the participants. Different kinds of awareness are distinguished: at macro- and micro-level, the latter consisting of workspace awareness and conversational awareness. We summarize the functional elements of micro-level awareness, organizing them hierarchically in terms of their relation to the attention of participants. We further discuss how groupware systems can capture and represent awareness by means of attention-based metaphors, and give an example of a virtual meeting room in which the gaze direction of the participants is conveyed by means of modern ‘imaging’ eyetracking technology.