Browsing by Subject "Visual"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Employees' satisfaction as influenced by acoustic and visual privacy in the open office environment
    (2014-08) Soules, Maureen Jeanette
    The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between employees' acoustic and visual privacy issues and their perceived satisfaction in their open office work environments while in focus work mode. The study examined the Science Teaching Student Services Building at the University of Minnesota Minneapolis. The building houses instructional classrooms and administrative offices that service UMN students. The Sustainable Post-Occupancy Evaluation Survey was used to collect data on overall privacy conditions, acoustic and visual privacy conditions, and employees' perceived privacy conditions while in their primary workplace. Paired T-tests were used to analyze the relationships between privacy conditions and employees' perceptions of privacy. All hypotheses are supported indicating that the privacy variables are correlated to the employees' perception of satisfaction within the primary workplace.The findings are important because they can be used to inform business leaders, designers, educators and future research in the field of office design.
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    Evaluation of Visual Attention to Images by Adults with Traumatic Brain Injury
    (2017-05) Swanson, Sarah
    Abstract The most common persistent symptoms following traumatic brain injury (TBI) include deficits in vision, cognition, and communication. The combination of cognitive-communication and visual impairments experienced by those with brain injury have detrimental effects on rehabilitation and recovery, affecting an individual’s ability to interpret the physical and social world and even engage in basic self-care tasks. Considering the widespread effects of these deficits on an individual’s daily life, healthcare professionals need information on implementation of visual supports in the rehabilitation process. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine how individuals with and without TBI exhibit differences in the decision-making process, organizational search, processing time, and accuracy when engaging in a visual processing task comparing explicit and implicit information conditions. Participants included 15 adults with histories of mild to severe TBI and 15 age-, gender-, and education-matched controls. Participants completed a decision-making task where they matched picture to sentence for three conditions: (a) a condition targeting the main action, (b) a condition targeting a background detail, and (c) a condition targeting a physical or mental inference. The researchers utilized eye-tracking hardware and software to track participant eye movements and analyze various eye-movement metrics. Results of this study demonstrated that participants with and without TBI demonstrated significantly more regressions to the sentence, a higher number of fixations, and longer average fixation duration for the inference condition. Furthermore, participants with TBI displayed significantly longer fixations for the inference condition compared to controls, all of which suggest that the inference condition was more challenging or engaging than the explicit conditions. Additionally, all participants allocated nearly the same percentage of time fixating on the target image as they did to viewing all three foil images collectively. This information provides insight into how individuals with and without TBI make decisions. Rehabilitation professionals need information regarding the use of visual supports for individuals with TBI. The knowledge gained from this research provides important information visual processing following TBI and the use of images in rehabilitation to support cognition and language comprehension.
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    An fMRI investigation of perceptual impairments on the DS-CPT in Schizophrenia patients.
    (2010-12) Force, Rachel Brook
    The Degraded-Stimulus Continuous Performance Task (DS-CPT) has been utilized to examine vigilance deficits in schizophrenia patients for decades. However, recent evidence suggests sustained attention may not be the foremost cognitive process underlying task performance. Through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and manipulating the perceptual load of the objects in a pseudorandomized order regions of interest that are involved in the creation and maintenance of novel mental representations as well as the implementation of unambiguous cues were identified. Whole-brain exploratory analysis resulted in statistical regions of interest that were further categorized as to their response patterns as involved in task performance, task difficulty, object perception, and the default mode network. Group differences were found in each category of response and correlations with behavioral indices indicated several mechanisms that may underlie cognitive deficits. As areas identified as providing top-down feedback such the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex exhibited atypical activation, functional compensatory mechanisms may contribute to the lack of performance deficits observed in this sample. Increasing the understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in DS-CPT performance in schizophrenia patients may offer greater insight into the nature of visual perceptual deficits in the disorder.
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    From traditional to digital: understanding remediation of the postcard through the case of PostSecret.com
    (2013-08) Armfield, Dawn Maurie
    PostSecret has been credited with blurring the lines between private and public information and traditional media formats and digital media formats. In 2004, what began as one man's art project became a worldwide phenomenon that has continued past the publishing of this dissertation, a lifetime in online lifespans. This dissertation examines a rhetoric of remediation, the dynamics and rhetorical aims of ethos, habitus, and materiality that construct, support, and complicate a traditional to digital remediation of postcards that furthers our understanding of what it means to meet audience expectations and needs in multiple spaces.
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    The rhetoric of Facebook icons: general principles and examples of how icons impact and form identity in social networking
    (2014-02) Weinberg, Joseph M.
    The visual rhetoric of icons plays a major role in the establishment of online identity. In many cases of online discourse, particularly social networking, the icon provides a first impression of a rhetor online. By examining the theories of identity and of (visual) rhetoric, I establish the ways the icon can be used in the establishment of online identity, on the creation of that first impression. Once that theory is laid as groundwork, I investigate several sets of specific examples on Facebook where icons have been chosen in order to better explain the rhetorical decisions behind those icons. The icons that are chosen with no knowledge of the audience who will form that first impression help to highlight the decisions behind the icon, behind the intended message sent by the rhetor. Icons that are chosen to create secondary identities, such as those of performers, help to highlight the intentional role of icons in establishing online identity. In this study, I investigated how identity online changes over time and the way icons always act as a first impression, even when an identity has been established for a long period of time. Finally, looking at the icons chosen for a different social network site, gendersociety.com, has allowed me to examine the icon selection process when the rhetor has a very clear and specific understanding of the audience who will be interacting with and receiving the first impression of that icon in social networking.
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    Visualizing Living Streets in North St. Paul: A Visual Preference Survey in the Casey Lake Neighborhood
    (Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2014-05-19) Rahn, Sean