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Biomedical subjects

B P McCloskey

Publications and source records attributed to B P McCloskey.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1993

Cognitive representations of functional interactions with objects.

Two studies addressed people's knowledge about the movements underlying functional interactions with objects, when the interactions were described by simple verbal labels expressing environmental goals. In Experiment 1, subjects rated each action with respect to six dimensions: which portion of the limb moved, distance moved, forcefulness, effectors involved, size of the contact surface, and resemblance to grasp. Ratings were systematic and fell on two distinct underlying factors related to limb movement and effector (usually the hand) configuration. In Experiment 2, subjects sorted a subset of the actions by similarity of movement. Clustering and multidimensional scaling solutions indicated that the six initial dimensions contributed to similarity judgments, along with additional parameters. The results support the existence of cognitively accessible, but still relatively specific, representations of functional actions, with potential implications for motor and memory performance.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Rubbing your stomach while tapping your fingers: interference between motor planning and semantic judgments.

Previous research (Klatzky et al., 1989) shows that the time required to make sensible/nonsensible judgments about an action-object phrase (e.g., "rub your stomach") is reliably faster when the phrase is preceded by a cure representing a specific prototypical hand shape (vs. a neutral cue). The current experiments investigated the effects of preparing for an alternate task (finger tapping vs. syllable vocalization) on facilitatory priming of sensibility judgments. Preparation for finger tapping reduced the magnitude of the priming effect more than preparation for vocalization, suggesting that resources accessed during semantic processing of action-object phrases are also used during manual response preparation. The results support the existence of a system representing manual actions that is limited in the number of activities that can be represented at one time and that is not so general that it represents manual and vocal tract movements.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Timecourse of preshaping for functional responses to objects.

The present study explores the unfolding of hand shaping the context of functional responding to common objects. The principal issue addressed by this study is whether distinct, identifiable preshapes are evidenced in preparation for four distinct types of hand contact, including nonprehensile as well as prehensile hand shapes, and for small and large surfaces of contact. All four shapes considered here (poke, pinch, palm and clench) showed evidence of distinct preshaping, with similar timecourses in relation to the onset of reaching. The initial separation of the fingers, formation of first identifiable preshape feature, and completion of the preshape appeared at essentially the same time relative tot he onset of reaching for all four hand shapes. The hand shapes did differ, however, in the time between the completion of a stable preshape and contact with the object. The time for preshape-to-contact was greater for hand shapes with small surfaces of contact than for those with large surfaces and for prehensile shapes than for nonprehensile. These differences are attributed to the precision required for the ultimate object-contact response.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1978

Early Childhood Development Programme--early detection.

The Early Childhood Development Programme has four main objectives. These are: 1. To foster child development in families with young children largely through personal involvement of the family in an education context. 2. To provide enrichment programmes to enrich the social, emotional and physical environment and to ensure that children with special needs have these needs met optimally. 3. To provide for the early detection of children who are more vulnerable because of the presence of a condition which may tend to limit optimal development and make the child more open to adverse influence of social or cultural pressures; that is a health assessment programme. 4. To provide a family support service for families of children with special needs to enable these families to foster and to fulfil themselves in the society in which they live. This family support service is seen as providing a structure for home centred parent/infant habilitation aimed at keeping the family in the main stream insofar as education and health are concerned.

Australia↗