Olfactory

There are few studies of the human factors involved in the engagement of presence. The present study aims to investigate the influence of five user characteristics - test anxiety, spatial intelligence, verbal intelligence, personality and computer experience - on the sense of presence in university students when exposed to virtual environments designed to assess their levels of test anxiety. This is the first study to investigate the influence of spatial intelligence on the sense of presence, and the first to use an immersive virtual reality system to investigate the relationship between users' personality characteristics and presence. The results show a greater sense of presence in test anxiety environments than in a neutral environment. Moreover, high test anxiety students feel more presence than their non-test anxiety counterparts, especially in test anxiety environments. Spatial intelligence and introversion also influence the sense of presence experienced by high test anxiety students exposed to emotional virtual environments. Interestingly, each of these user characteristics influences different dimensions of the sense of presence. These results may help to identify new groups of patients likely to benefit from virtual reality therapy.

It is pointed out that the organisation of an organism necessarily involves fields which are the only means to make an approximately simultaneous tuning of the different subsystems of the organism-as-a-whole. Nature uses the olfactory fields, the acoustic fields, the electromagnetic fields and quantum- vacuum fields. Fields with their ability to comprehend the whole organism are the natural basis of a global interaction between organisms and of collective consciousness. Evidences are presented that electromagnetic potential fields mediate the collective field of consciousness. This result offers for the first time experimental access to the study of collective consciousness by measuring the field-related information-carrying potentials and their derivatives, the electric and magnetic fields between different individuals. The electrodynamic interaction of different brains/minds generates induction and in this way excitement, enhancement in the baseline of the interacting brains’ activity. A list of empirical evidences is presented here proving the existence of this ‘interactive excitement’ effect in the known phenomenon of collective consciousness. The fundamental phenomenon of the collective consciousness is known as ‘social facilitation’ or ‘group effect’. The character and completion of consciousness are outlined in the frame of this picture, and the role of the ‘group effect’ or ‘social facilitation’ as a primary factor in developing consciousness is described. A quantum-physical model of a multi-layered consciousness is presented, where the layering is expressed by the subsequent subtlety of the masses of the material carriers of information. I show that as the mental levels get deeper and more sensitive the couplings are on more and more global scales of their environment. I point out that direct, immediate action in distance actually exists in the electromagnetic field, which is the coupling, mediator field between waves and particles. I show how the environmental, natural and cosmic fields are determinative sources of our consciousness. The results presented point out that the Collective Field of Consciousness is a significant physical factor of the biosphere. I show that the morphogenetic field has an electromagnetic (EM) nature. EM fields are vacuum fields. Different basic forms of vacuum fields exist, and all kinds of fields, including the particle-mediated fields as well, when overlapping each other, seem to be in a direct resonant coupling, and form a complex, merged biofield. The vacuum model of consciousness presented here points to the inductive generation of consciousness, and to its self-initiating nature. Individual and collective
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methods, as well as the experimental possibilities of a global healing and improving the consciousness field of mankind are suggested.
KEYWORDS: olfactory, acoustic, electromagnetic, vacuum fields, generation of consciousness, evolution of collective consciousness, social evolution, completion of consciousness, healing

Very little is known about how nocturnal primates find their food. Here we studied the sensory basis of food perception in wild-caught gray mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus) in Madagascar. Mouse lemurs feed primarily on fruit and arthropods. We established a set of behavioral experiments to assess food detection in wild-born, field-experienced mouse lemurs in short-term captivity. Specifically, we investigated whether they use visual, auditory, and motion cues to find and to localize prey arthropods and further whether olfactory cues are sufficient for finding fruit. Visual cues from motionless arthropod dummies were not sufficient to allow reliable detection of prey in choice experiments, nor did they trigger prey capture behavior when presented on the feeding platform. In contrast, visual motion cues from moving prey dummies attracted their attention. Behavioral observations and experiments with live and recorded insect rustling sounds indicated that the lemurs make use of prey-generated acoustic cues for foraging. Both visual motion cues and acoustic prey stimuli on their own were sufficient to trigger approach and capture behavior in the mouse lemurs. For the detection of fruit, choice experiments showed that olfactory information was sufficient for mouse lemurs to find a piece of banana. Our study provides the first experimental data on the sensory ecology of food detection in mouse lemurs. Further research is necessary to address the role of sensory ecology for food selection and possibly for niche differentiation between sympatric Microcebus species.

On the basis of a large corpus of wine reviews, this paper proposes a range of interactive visualization techniques that are useful for linguistic exploration and analysis of lexical, grammatical and discursive patterns in text. Our visualization tool allows linguists and others to make comparisons of visual, olfactory, gustatory and textual properties of different wines from different parts of the worlds, from different grape varieties, or from different vintages. It also supports the immediate creation of visual profiles for descriptions of sensory perceptions for exploratory purposes as well as for purposes of confirmatory investigations of linguistic patterns in text and discourse and their correlations to metadata variables.

It is observed that the computational model of the olfactory cortex given by J. Ambros-Ingerson et al. (1990) is closely related to multistage vector quantization. Variations of the architecture and learning rules are given. The authors evaluate the performance of the various models applied to encode and classify vowels extracted from spoken letters. The efficacy of neural implementation of multistage

The authors have been developing anthropomorphic head robots in order to develop a new head mechanisms and functions for a humanoid robot having the ability to communicate naturally with a human by expressing human like emotion. We developed the anthropomorphic head-eye robot “WE-3RIV” (Waseda Eye No.3 Refined IV) which has four sensations and facially expresses emotions in 2000. We have recently added the olfactory sensation and the facial color expression function to its previous model, WE-3RIII, and we improved and rebuilt its artificial psychological model that consists of a 3D mental space having pleasantness, activation and certainty axes. When the robot senses the stimulus, a mental vector moves in the mental space based upon a set of differential equations in the mathematical formulation. We named it “equations of emotion. ” We also introduced the robot personality, which consists of the sensing personality and the expression personality. WE-3RIV was realized to express the ...

There are few studies of the human factors involved in the engagement of presence. The present study aims to investigate the influence of five user characteristics - test anxiety, spatial intelligence, verbal intelligence, personality and computer experience - on the sense of presence in university students when exposed to virtual environments designed to assess their levels of test anxiety. This is the first study to investigate the influence of spatial intelligence on the sense of presence, and the first to use an immersive virtual reality system to investigate the relationship between users' personality characteristics and presence. The results show a greater sense of presence in test anxiety environments than in a neutral environment. Moreover, high test anxiety students feel more presence than their non-test anxiety counterparts, especially in test anxiety environments. Spatial intelligence and introversion also influence the sense of presence experienced by high test anxiety students exposed to emotional virtual environments. Interestingly, each of these user characteristics influences different dimensions of the sense of presence. These results may help to identify new groups of patients likely to benefit from virtual reality therapy.