Browsing by Subject "Color"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Cultural meaning of color in healthcare environments: a symbolic interaction approach.
    (2010-05) Kwon, Jain
    Color planning in today's healthcare environments is a challenge for interior designers due to the diverse occupants who may establish different meanings of environmental colors based on their backgrounds and life experiences. Researchers have shown the close relationship between color perception and patients' mental and/or emotional attitudes. Moreover, studies have shown that certain colors can affect some people as stressors while the same colors can be positive distractions to others. This exploratory qualitative study investigates the significance of culture in the ways people interpret and establish color meaning in healthcare environments. The theoretical framework of this study is based on Blumer's (1969; 2004) discussion on symbolic interaction between humans and environments. Specifically, the relationship between a role of `the self' and cultural influences was analyzed to investigate people's interpretation and establishment of color meaning in healthcare environments. A semi-structured interview questionnaire and a color palette instrument were developed and used to collect data from a sample of 13 female and 12 male Koreans living in Twin Cities, MN and ranging in age from 25 to 39. A research model based on the theoretical constructs of symbolic interaction--the self, objects, social interaction, and joint action--was used to formulate interview questions. Five color palettes were based on the five primary interior color combinations in the Korean tradition and used to assess the subjects' meaning assigned to color in the cultural context. The interview data were analyzed to determine the role of the constructs of symbolic interaction--the self, object, self-interaction, and social interaction--in Koreans' meaning establishment of color in healthcare environments. Findings include: 1) Color as an abstract object appeared to be related to self-interaction, and color as a physical object and a social object was related to social interaction; 2) the subjects' concepts of healthcare color were based on their personal experiences and cultural backgrounds. Care/warmness, stability, and vitality seemed to be established in the subjects' self-interaction, and hygiene status, comfort from familiarity, professionalism, and users' characteristics were established through the subjects' social interaction. The subjects did not seem to consider `healing' as a concept of healthcare color.
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    Light-mediated Sexual Dimorphism in Opsin Expression During Spawning in Nematostella vectensis
    (2024-04) Wagner, Starla J.; McCulloch, Kyle J.
    Across animals, opsins are the primary protein responsible for light detection. Currently, there is a large gap in knowledge in the evolutionary history of opsin function and how it correlates with other biological responses like spawning. Cnidarians (jellyfish and anemones) are prime candidates for closing this gap. They are a sister taxon to bilaterally symmetric animals like flies and humans, and so studying their opsin function and expression in non-visual contexts allows for further understanding of how light sensing may have evolved to form modern visual systems. In this experiment, qPCR analysis on the Cnidarian, Nematostella vectensis (the starlet sea anemone), was used to determine the effect of certain wavelengths of light that an animal was exposed to during spawning had on opsin expression levels. The impact of sex and tissue type on these expression levels was an additional area of interest. The data showed that certain wavelengths like blue light were correlated with larger amounts of opsin expression in female mesenteries and tentacles/skin tissue than in male tissue types. This indicates that opsin expression is sexually dimorphic which implies there is a relationship between opsin expression and spawning, something that was previously unknown. Future experiments using RNA-seq will allow for a deeper understanding of this relationship and the proteins involved.
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    Measurements of Malleable Visual Mechanisms Through High-resolution fMRI and Perceptual Learning
    (2023-05) Navarro, Karen
    For many decades, low-level properties of the visual system, like orientation selectivity, were considered stable. However, advances in methodologies and theoretical frameworks have challenged this belief; we now know that external and internal factors can influence many low-level visual properties. I conducted three separate studies that looked at different visual properties using both behavioral and high-resolution neuroimaging methods, focusing on mechanisms in the primary visual cortex.The first study explored laminar profiles of magnocellular and parvocellular pathways in human V1. This neuroimaging study used achromatic checkerboards with low spatial frequency and high temporal frequency to target the color-insensitive magnocellular pathway and chromatic checkerboards with higher spatial frequency and low temporal frequency to target the color-selective parvocellular pathway of V1. This work resulted in three main findings. First, responses driven by chromatic stimuli had a laminar profile biased towards superficial layers of V1, as compared to responses driven by achromatic stimuli. Second, we found a stronger preference for chromatic stimuli in parafoveal V1 compared with peripheral V1. Finally, we found alternating stimulus-selective bands stemming from the V1 border into V2 and V3. The second study explored the orientation dependence of neural activity in human V1. This study measured responses to stimuli at different orientations to capture the orientation-tuning properties of V1 both across cortical space and through cortical depth. This work resulted in two main findings. First, we validated previous work that orientation preference can be predicted by retinotopic location (i.e., radial bias). Second, we captured V weak orientation selectivity across all depths in cortex and attribute this finding to the fact that fMRI responses reflect neural activity averaged over a finite volume of cortex. The last study explored if temporal dynamics of sensory eye dominance could be altered using a perceptual learning technique. This study used orthogonal gratings during binocular rivalry to influence the temporal dynamics of sensory eye dominance through repeated training. Participants completed 12 days of a task meant to increase representation of one stimulus over the other. Temporal dynamics before and after training were compared. We found an increase in the total time participants spent seeing the grating from the trained eye and concluded that temporal dynamics can be changed through perceptual learning. However, this effect was relatively weak and varied in strength across participants.
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    The Role of Chromaticity in Postural Control
    (2021-09) Rath, Ruth
    I investigated the role of chromaticity in the visual control of standing body sway. In this novel study, I adapted the moving room paradigm—an experimental design that has been widely used in research on the visual control of stance—introducing the unique design element of chromatic lighting variations. Studies relating the control of stance to imposed oscillation of the illuminated environment suggest that, in most cases, postural control is most strongly related to optic flow in the retinal periphery. I asked whether this relation might differ as a function of the chromaticity (color) of light, as, separately, studies on chromatic perception across the visual field also indicate perceptual differences between the retinal center and retinal periphery. Detection and identification of colored stimuli is reported to be best near the fovea and declines in the visual periphery. In particular, the periphery of the retina is more sensitive to blue light than to red light. It has also been reported that some colors appear to move more rapidly than others. I used a within-participants design to expose young adults to the illuminated environment in a moving room, where nearly global optic flow was oscillated in a simple sinusoid pattern in the AP direction relative to observers. Three chromatic conditions were used to illuminate the room (Red vs. Blue vs. Full spectrum), presented in random order. A magnetic motion capture system was used to collect postural data of the head and torso (analyzed separately for movement in the AP and ML axes), in addition to AP movement data of the room. I separately evaluated the spatial magnitude of sway (operationalized as positional variability), and the extent to which body sway was coupled with the movement of the room (using average mutual information). While my experimental design was found to be robust overall—replicating common effects demonstrated in the moving room paradigm—I found no evidence that spatial magnitude of sway, or observer-room coupling differed across chromatic conditions. My study is the first to synthesize and extend differential chromatic perception across the visual field to the domain of perception and action in a moving room paradigm. Color interacts with luminance, form, and motion in ways that are not fully understood, and there are numerous other possibilities for future research investigating the realm of color and its ecological implications.