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112-735: The word tranquility dates to the 12th century in the Old French word tranquilite , meaning "peace" or "happiness". The word's sense evolved in the late 14th century, but it maintains its reference to the absence of disturbance and peacefulness. Being in a tranquil or "restorative" environment allows people to take respite from the periods of sustained "directed attention" that characterise modern living. In developing their Attention Restoration Theory (ART), Kaplan and Kaplan proposed that people could most effectively recover from cognitive overload by engaging with natural restorative environments, those that are away from daily distractions and that have

224-415: A modular way , with different areas processing different kinds of sensory information. Some of these modules take the form of sensory maps , mapping some aspect of the world across part of the brain's surface. These different modules are interconnected and influence each other. For instance, taste is strongly influenced by smell. The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, known as

336-826: A Gaulish substrate, although there is some debate. One of these is considered certain, because this fact is clearly attested in the Gaulish-language epigraphy on the pottery found at la Graufesenque ( A.D. 1st century). There, the Greek word paropsid-es (written in Latin) appears as paraxsid-i . The consonant clusters /ps/ and /pt/ shifted to /xs/ and /xt/, e.g. Lat capsa > *kaxsa > caisse ( ≠ Italian cassa ) or captīvus > *kaxtivus > OF chaitif (mod. chétif ; cf. Irish cacht 'servant'; ≠ Italian cattiv-ità , Portuguese cativo , Spanish cautivo ). This phonetic evolution

448-482: A decision could be made within 150ms of the image being seen, indicating the speed at which cognitive visual processing occurs. Audition, and the components that comprise the soundscape (a term coined by Schafer to describe the array of sounds that constitute the sonic environment) also inform the ways people characterise landscapes. Auditory reaction times are 50 to 60ms faster than visual ones. Sound can also alter visual perception, and under certain conditions areas of

560-421: A definitive influence on the development of Old French, which partly explains why the earliest attested Old French documents are older than the earliest attestations in other Romance languages (e.g. Strasbourg Oaths , Sequence of Saint Eulalia ). It is the result of an earlier gap created between Classical Latin and its evolved forms, which slowly reduced and eventually severed the mutual intelligibility between

672-620: A feudal elite and commerce. The area of Old French in contemporary terms corresponded to the northern parts of the Kingdom of France (including Anjou and Normandy , which in the 12th century were ruled by the Plantagenet kings of England ), Upper Burgundy and the Duchy of Lorraine . The Norman dialect was also spread to England and Ireland , and during the Crusades , Old French

784-420: A fraindre, Fors Sarragoce qu'est en une montaigne; Li reis Marsilies la tient, ki Deu nen aimet, Mahomet sert ed Apolin reclaimet: Ne·s poet guarder que mals ne l'i ataignet! ˈt͡ʃarləs li ˈre͜is, ˈnɔstr‿empəˈræðrə ˈmaɲəs ˈsɛt ˈant͡s ˈtot͡s ˈple͜ins ˈað esˈtæθ en esˈpaɲə ˈtræs k‿en la ˈmɛr konˈkist la ˈtɛr alˈta͜iɲə t͡ʃasˈtɛl ni ˈaθ ki dəˈvant ˈly͜i rəˈma͜iɲəθ ˈmyrs nə t͡siˈtæθ n‿i ˈɛst rəˈmæs

896-463: A location is perceived to be. Likewise when responding to uni-modal auditory stimuli, the perceived loudness of biological sounds positively influences the perception of tranquillity, whilst the perceived loudness of mechanical sounds have a negative effect. However, when presented with bi-modal auditory-visual stimuli the individual soundscape and landscape components alone no longer influence the perception of tranquillity. Rather configurational coherence

1008-479: A mountain. King Marsilie is its master, he who loves not God, He serves Mohammed and worships Apollo: [Still] he cannot prevent harm from reaching him. Perception Perception (from Latin perceptio  'gathering, receiving') is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through

1120-1242: A new orthography for the latter; among the earliest examples are parts of the Oaths of Strasbourg and the Sequence of Saint Eulalia . Some Gaulish words influenced Vulgar Latin and, through this, other Romance languages. For example, classical Latin equus was uniformly replaced in Vulgar Latin by caballus 'nag, work horse', derived from Gaulish caballos (cf. Welsh ceffyl , Breton kefel ), yielding ModF cheval , Occitan caval ( chaval ), Catalan cavall , Spanish caballo , Portuguese cavalo , Italian cavallo , Romanian cal , and, by extension, English cavalry and chivalry (both via different forms of [Old] French: Old Norman and Francien ). An estimated 200 words of Gaulish etymology survive in Modern French, for example chêne , 'oak tree', and charrue , 'plough'. Within historical phonology and studies of language contact , various phonological changes have been posited as caused by

1232-416: A rabbit retinal ganglion, although in a mouse retinal ganglion cell the initial spike takes between 40 and 240 milliseconds before the initial activation. The initial activation can be detected by an action potential spike, a sudden spike in neuron membrane electric voltage. A perceptual visual event measured in humans was the presentation to individuals of an anomalous word. If these individuals are shown

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1344-655: A radical change had the effect of rendering Latin sermons completely unintelligible to the general Romance-speaking public, which prompted officials a few years later, at the Third Council of Tours , to instruct priests to read sermons aloud in the old way, in rusticam romanam linguam or 'plain Roman[ce] speech'. As there was now no unambiguous way to indicate whether a given text was to be read aloud as Latin or Romance, various attempts were made in France to devise

1456-405: A receptor (one of 347 or so). It is this process that causes humans to understand the concept of smell from a physical standpoint. Smell is also a very interactive sense as scientists have begun to observe that olfaction comes into contact with the other sense in unexpected ways. It is also the most primal of the senses, as it is known to be the first indicator of safety or danger, therefore being

1568-480: A sentence, presented as a sequence of single words on a computer screen, with a puzzling word out of place in the sequence, the perception of the puzzling word can register on an electroencephalogram (EEG). In an experiment, human readers wore an elastic cap with 64 embedded electrodes distributed over their scalp surface. Within 230 milliseconds of encountering the anomalous word, the human readers generated an event-related electrical potential alteration of their EEG at

1680-440: A single source: in real situations, sounds from multiple sources and directions are superimposed as they arrive at the ears. Hearing involves the computationally complex task of separating out sources of interest, identifying them and often estimating their distance and direction. The process of recognizing objects through touch is known as haptic perception . It involves a combination of somatosensory perception of patterns on

1792-413: A spot in the environment first alters photoreceptor cells in the retina , which send a signal to the retina bipolar cell layer which, in turn, can activate a retinal ganglion neuron cell. A retinal ganglion cell is a bridging neuron that connects visual retinal input to the visual processing centers within the central nervous system. Light-altered neuron activation occurs within about 5–20 milliseconds in

1904-469: A time, in a process termed multistable perception . The same stimuli, or absence of them, may result in different percepts depending on subject's culture and previous experiences. Ambiguous figures demonstrate that a single stimulus can result in more than one percept. For example, the Rubin vase can be interpreted either as a vase or as two faces. The percept can bind sensations from multiple senses into

2016-557: A very distinctive identity compared to the other future Romance languages. The first noticeable influence is the substitution of the Latin melodic accent with a Germanic stress and its result was diphthongization , differentiation between long and short vowels, the fall of the unaccented syllable and of the final vowels: Additionally, two phonemes that had long since died out in Vulgar Latin were reintroduced: [h] and [w] (> OF g(u)- , ONF w- cf. Picard w- ): In contrast,

2128-479: A whole. A picture of a talking person on a television screen, for example, is bound to the sound of speech from speakers to form a percept of a talking person. In many ways, vision is the primary human sense. Light is taken in through each eye and focused in a way which sorts it on the retina according to direction of origin. A dense surface of photosensitive cells, including rods, cones, and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells captures information about

2240-505: A ˈfra͜indrə ˈfɔrs saraˈgot͡sə k‿ˈɛst en ˈynə monˈtaɲə li ˈre͜is marˈsiʎəs la ˈti͜ɛnt, ki ˈdɛ͜u nən ˈa͜iməθ mahoˈmɛt ˈsɛrt eð apoˈlin rəˈkla͜iməθ nə‿s ˈpu͜ɛt gwarˈdær kə ˈmals nə l‿i aˈta͜iɲəθ Charles the king, our great emperor, Has been in Spain for seven full years: He has conquered the lofty land up to the sea. No castle remains standing before him; No wall or city is left to destroy Other than Saragossa, which lies atop

2352-456: Is a measurable difference between the making of a decision and the feeling of agency. Through methods such as the Libet experiment , a gap of half a second or more can be detected from the time when there are detectable neurological signs of a decision having been made to the time when the subject actually becomes conscious of the decision. There are also experiments in which an illusion of agency

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2464-490: Is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition ). The following process connects a person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge ) with restorative and selective mechanisms, such as attention , that influence perception. Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system , but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness . Since

2576-490: Is called Vulgar Latin , the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire . Vulgar Latin differed from Classical Latin in phonology and morphology as well as exhibiting lexical differences; however, they were mutually intelligible until the 7th century when Classical Latin 'died' as a daily spoken language, and had to be learned as a second language (though it was long thought of as the formal version of

2688-609: Is common in its later stages with the shift of the Latin cluster /kt/ in Old French ( Lat factum > fait , ≠ Italian fatto , Portuguese feito , Spanish hecho ; or lactem * > lait , ≠ Italian latte , Portuguese leite , Spanish leche ). This means that both /pt/ and /kt/ must have first merged into /kt/ in the history of Old French, after which this /kt/ shifted to /xt/. In parallel, /ps/ and /ks/ merged into /ks/ before shifting to /xs/, apparently under Gaulish influence. The Celtic Gaulish language

2800-515: Is considered the fifth primary taste, is a relatively recent development in Western cuisine . Other tastes can be mimicked by combining these basic tastes, all of which contribute only partially to the sensation and flavor of food in the mouth. Other factors include smell , which is detected by the olfactory epithelium of the nose; texture , which is detected through a variety of mechanoreceptors , muscle nerves, etc.; and temperature, which

2912-481: Is detected by thermoreceptors . All basic tastes are classified as either appetitive or aversive , depending upon whether the things they sense are harmful or beneficial. Smell is the process of absorbing molecules through olfactory organs , which are absorbed by humans through the nose . These molecules diffuse through a thick layer of mucus ; come into contact with one of thousands of cilia that are projected from sensory neurons; and are then absorbed into

3024-434: Is exploited in human technologies such as camouflage and biological mimicry . For example, the wings of European peacock butterflies bear eyespots that birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerous predator. There is also evidence that the brain in some ways operates on a slight "delay" in order to allow nerve impulses from distant parts of the body to be integrated into simultaneous signals. Perception

3136-400: Is growing evidence that exposure to natural environments can contribute to health and wellbeing . Exposure to nature contributes to physical and psychological wellbeing. One review found evidence of "nature-deficit-disorder" in children, which suggests that the importance of being able to engage with restorative environments applies across a wide age range. Natural tranquil surroundings affect

3248-505: Is induced in psychologically normal subjects. In 1999, psychologists Wegner and Wheatley gave subjects instructions to move a mouse around a scene and point to an image about once every thirty seconds. However, a second person—acting as a test subject but actually a confederate—had their hand on the mouse at the same time, and controlled some of the movement. Experimenters were able to arrange for subjects to perceive certain "forced stops" as if they were their own choice. Recognition memory

3360-501: Is needed to associate the feeling with a specific source. Sexual stimulation is any stimulus (including bodily contact) that leads to, enhances, and maintains sexual arousal , possibly even leading to orgasm . Distinct from the general sense of touch , sexual stimulation is strongly tied to hormonal activity and chemical triggers in the body. Although sexual arousal may arise without physical stimulation , achieving orgasm usually requires physical sexual stimulation (stimulation of

3472-429: Is one of the oldest fields in psychology. The oldest quantitative laws in psychology are Weber's law , which states that the smallest noticeable difference in stimulus intensity is proportional to the intensity of the reference; and Fechner's law , which quantifies the relationship between the intensity of the physical stimulus and its perceptual counterpart (e.g., testing how much darker a computer screen can get before

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3584-435: Is possible other sensory modalities are integrated at this stage as well. This speech information can then be used for higher-level language processes, such as word recognition . Speech perception is not necessarily uni-directional. Higher-level language processes connected with morphology , syntax , and/or semantics may also interact with basic speech perception processes to aid in recognition of speech sounds. It may be

3696-403: Is sometimes divided into two functions by neuroscientists: familiarity and recollection . A strong sense of familiarity can occur without any recollection, for example in cases of deja vu . The temporal lobe (specifically the perirhinal cortex ) responds differently to stimuli that feel novel compared to stimuli that feel familiar. Firing rates in the perirhinal cortex are connected with

3808-448: Is still active debate about the extent to which perception is an active process of hypothesis testing, analogous to science , or whether realistic sensory information is rich enough to make this process unnecessary. The perceptual systems of the brain enable individuals to see the world around them as stable, even though the sensory information is typically incomplete and rapidly varying. Human and other animal brains are structured in

3920-542: Is thought to have survived into the 6th century in France, despite considerable cultural Romanization. Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish helped shape the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French, with effects including loanwords and calques (including oui , the word for "yes"), sound changes shaped by Gaulish influence, and influences in conjugation and word order. A computational study from 2003 suggests that early gender shifts may have been motivated by

4032-417: Is to mask traffic noise or distract attention from it with an attractive water sound. Water-generated sounds may improve the perceived tranquillity of gardens blighted by noise. Litter can degrade an environment such that the tranquillity rating drops on average by one scale point . A study using fMRI neuro-imaging techniques demonstrated the significant differences in effective connectivity between areas of

4144-592: Is transparently transferred to the end of the tool. Taste (formally known as gustation ) is the ability to perceive the flavor of substances, including, but not limited to, food . Humans receive tastes through sensory organs concentrated on the upper surface of the tongue , called taste buds or gustatory calyculi . The human tongue has 100 to 150 taste receptor cells on each of its roughly-ten thousand taste buds. Traditionally, there have been four primary tastes: sweetness , bitterness , sourness , and saltiness . The recognition and awareness of umami , which

4256-594: The langue d'oïl as early as the 9th century and is attested as a distinct Gallo-Romance variety by the 12th century. Dialects or variants of Old French include: Some modern languages are derived from Old French dialects other than Classical French, which is based on the Île-de-France dialect. They include Angevin , Berrichon , Bourguignon-Morvandiau , Champenois , Franc-Comtois , Gallo, Lorrain, Norman , Picard, Poitevin , Saintongeais , and Walloon. Beginning with Plautus ' time (254–184 b.c. ), one can see phonological changes between Classical Latin and what

4368-531: The Bibliothèque bleue – that a standardized Classical French spread throughout France alongside the regional dialects. The material and cultural conditions in France and associated territories around the year 1100 triggered what Charles Homer Haskins termed the " Renaissance of the 12th century ", resulting in a profusion of creative works in a variety of genres. Old French gave way to Middle French in

4480-509: The Roman de Fauvel in 1310 and 1314, a satire on abuses in the medieval church, filled with medieval motets , lais , rondeaux and other new secular forms of poetry and music (mostly anonymous, but with several pieces by Philippe de Vitry , who would coin the expression ars nova to distinguish the new musical practice from the music of the immediately preceding age). The best-known poet and composer of ars nova secular music and chansons of

4592-433: The distal stimulus or distal object . By means of light, sound, or another physical process, the object stimulates the body's sensory organs. These sensory organs transform the input energy into neural activity—a process called transduction . This raw pattern of neural activity is called the proximal stimulus . These neural signals are then transmitted to the brain and processed. The resulting mental re-creation of

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4704-525: The chansons de geste is The Song of Roland (earliest version composed in the late 11th century). Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube in his Girart de Vienne set out a grouping of the chansons de geste into three cycles : the Geste du roi centering on Charlemagne, the Geste de Garin de Monglane (whose central character was William of Orange ), and the Geste de Doon de Mayence or the "rebel vassal cycle",

4816-426: The nervous system , which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system . Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye ; smell is mediated by odor molecules ; and hearing involves pressure waves . Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals , but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning , memory , expectation , and attention . Sensory input

4928-470: The outer ears , which collect and filter sound waves; the middle ear , which transforms the sound pressure ( impedance matching ); and the inner ear , which produces neural signals in response to the sound. By the ascending auditory pathway these are led to the primary auditory cortex within the temporal lobe of the human brain, from where the auditory information then goes to the cerebral cortex for further processing. Sound does not usually come from

5040-433: The throat and lungs . In the case of visual perception, some people can see the percept shift in their mind's eye . Others, who are not picture thinkers , may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as their world changes. This esemplastic nature has been demonstrated by an experiment that showed that ambiguous images have multiple interpretations on the perceptual level. The confusing ambiguity of perception

5152-596: The Gallo-Romance that prefigures French – after the Reichenau and Kassel glosses (8th and 9th centuries) – are the Oaths of Strasbourg (treaties and charters into which King Charles the Bald entered in 842): Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa ... (For

5264-747: The Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words of Germanic origin borrowed from French or directly from Germanic retain /gw/ ~ /g/ , e.g. Italian, Spanish guerra 'war', alongside /g/ in French guerre ). These examples show a clear consequence of bilingualism, that sometimes even changed the first syllable of the Latin words. One example of a Latin word influencing an OLF loan is framboise 'raspberry', from OF frambeise , from OLF *brāmbesi 'blackberry' (cf. Dutch braambes , braambezie ; akin to German Brombeere , English dial. bramberry ) blended with LL fraga or OF fraie 'strawberry', which explains

5376-514: The Krause-Finger corpuscles found in erogenous zones of the body.) Other senses enable perception of body balance (vestibular sense ); acceleration , including gravity ; position of body parts (proprioception sense ). They can also enable perception of internal senses (interoception sense ), such as temperature, pain, suffocation , gag reflex , abdominal distension , fullness of rectum and urinary bladder , and sensations felt in

5488-565: The Old French dialects diverged into a number of distinct langues d'oïl , among which Middle French proper was the dialect of the Île-de-France region. During the Early Modern period , French was established as the official language of the Kingdom of France throughout the realm, including the langue d'oc -speaking territories in the south. It was only in the 17th to 18th centuries – with the development especially of popular literature of

5600-497: The Renaissance short story ( conte or nouvelle ). Among the earliest works of rhetoric and logic to appear in Old French were the translations of Rhetorica ad Herennium and Boethius ' De topicis differentiis by John of Antioch in 1282. In northern Italy, authors developed Franco-Italian , a mixed language of Old French and Venetian or Lombard used in literary works in the 13th and 14th centuries. Old French

5712-411: The U.K. supports 380,000 jobs and contributes £ 13.8 billion annually to the rural economy, and one survey showed that tranquillity is the main reason why 49% of visitors are attracted to the countryside. Natural settings that effortlessly engage our attention are associated with soft fascination and with the analysis of tranquillity discussed above. One study attempted to distinguish empirically between

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5824-479: The ability to reflect. It provides a pleasing level of sensory input that involves no cognitive effort other than removing oneself from an overcrowded mental space. For many, the chance to experience tranquillity is an advantage of the countryside over cities. In a survey by the United Kingdom Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) 58% of people said that tranquillity was

5936-475: The brain involved in processing auditory information can be activated in response to visual stimuli. When individuals make tranquillity assessments based on a uni-modal auditory or visual sensory input, they characterise the environment by drawing upon a number of key landscape and soundscape characteristics. For example, when making assessments in response to visual-only stimuli the percentage of water, flora, and geological features positively influence how tranquil

6048-435: The brain, namely the auditory cortex and the medial pre-frontal cortex , under tranquil and non-tranquil conditions. Specifically the medial pre-frontal cortex receives significantly enhanced contributions from the auditory cortex when presented with a more tranquil visual scene. The first method of mapping tranquillity was developed by Simon Rendel of ASH Consulting for a Department for Transport study in 1991. This led to

6160-441: The brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus , is responsible for the circadian rhythm (commonly known as one's "internal clock"), while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range timekeeping, known as an ultradian rhythm . One or more dopaminergic pathways in the central nervous system appear to have a strong modulatory influence on mental chronometry , particularly interval timing. Sense of agency refers to

6272-536: The case that it is not necessary (maybe not even possible) for a listener to recognize phonemes before recognizing higher units, such as words. In an experiment, professor Richard M. Warren replaced one phoneme of a word with a cough-like sound. His subjects restored the missing speech sound perceptually without any difficulty. Moreover, they were not able to accurately identify which phoneme had even been disturbed. Facial perception refers to cognitive processes specialized in handling human faces (including perceiving

6384-479: The constructs of tranquillity and preference as affective qualities of natural environments. Motivated by ART, from which they took tranquillity as a reasonable term to describe soft fascination, they produced definitions for each component. Tranquillity they defined as "how much you think this setting is a quiet, peaceful place, a good place to get away from everyday life", and preference as "how much you like this setting for whatever reason". Subjects were asked to score

6496-590: The development of northern French culture in and around Île-de-France , which slowly but firmly asserted its ascendency over the more southerly areas of Aquitaine and Tolosa ( Toulouse ); however, the Capetians ' langue d'oïl , the forerunner of modern standard French, did not begin to become the common speech of all of France until after the French Revolution . In the Late Middle Ages,

6608-413: The distal stimulus is the percept . To explain the process of perception, an example could be an ordinary shoe. The shoe itself is the distal stimulus. When light from the shoe enters a person's eye and stimulates the retina, that stimulation is the proximal stimulus. The image of the shoe reconstructed by the brain of the person is the percept. Another example could be a ringing telephone. The ringing of

6720-675: The emphasis has been placed on understanding the role of vision in the perception of natural environments. People can very quickly form an impression of a landscape upon viewing it. The speed with which people process complex natural images was tested by using colour photographs of a wide range of animals (mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish) in their natural environments, mixed with distracters that included pictures of forests, mountains, lakes, buildings, and fruit. During this experiment, subjects were shown an image for 20ms and asked to determine whether it contained an animal or not. The electrophysiological brain responses obtained in this study showed that

6832-451: The extent and mystery that allows the imagination to wander, thereby enabling people to engage effortlessly with their surroundings. According to the theory, the amount of reflection possible within such an environment depends upon the type of cognitive engagement (fascination) that the environment holds . "Soft fascination" is deemed to occur when there is enough interest in the surroundings to hold attention but not so much that it compromises

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6944-754: The first such text. At the beginning of the 13th century, Jean Bodel , in his Chanson de Saisnes , divided medieval French narrative literature into three subject areas: the Matter of France or Matter of Charlemagne ; the Matter of Rome ( romances in an ancient setting); and the Matter of Britain ( Arthurian romances and Breton lais ). The first of these is the subject area of the chansons de geste ("songs of exploits" or "songs of (heroic) deeds"), epic poems typically composed in ten-syllable assonanced (occasionally rhymed ) laisses . More than one hundred chansons de geste have survived in around three hundred manuscripts. The oldest and most celebrated of

7056-444: The following visual settings: mountains, deserts, fields / forests, and waterscapes against those two target variables (tranquillity and preference) and four descriptor variables: mistiness, unstructured openness, focus, and surface calmness. Tranquillity and preference were positively correlated across all settings with tranquillity scoring higher ratings in the field / forest, waterscape, and mountain categories, whilst rushing water had

7168-757: The gender of the corresponding word in Gaulish. The pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Roman Gaul in late antiquity were modified by the Old Frankish language , spoken by the Franks who settled in Gaul from the 5th century and conquered the future Old French-speaking area by the 530s. The name français itself is derived from the name of the Franks. The Old Frankish language had

7280-423: The haptic system as "the sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to his body by use of his body." Gibson and others emphasized the close link between body movement and haptic perception, where the latter is active exploration . The concept of haptic perception is related to the concept of extended physiological proprioception according to which, when using a tool such as a stick, perceptual experience

7392-517: The highest rating in the preference category. Analysis of the results identified three physical features that help explain the apparent split between tranquillity and preference: mistiness, unstructured openness (how open the scene is and how difficult it is to establish a sense of depth or distance), and surface calmness. Mistiness and unstructured openness tended to depress preference relative to tranquillity whilst surface calmness tended to enhance it. A follow-up study included deserts and waterscapes in

7504-421: The identity of an individual) and facial expressions (such as emotional cues.) The somatosensory cortex is a part of the brain that receives and encodes sensory information from receptors of the entire body. Affective touch is a type of sensory information that elicits an emotional reaction and is usually social in nature. Such information is actually coded differently than other sensory information. Though

7616-539: The incipient Middle French period was Guillaume de Machaut . Discussions about the origins of non-religious theater ( théâtre profane )—both drama and farce—in the Middle Ages remain controversial, but the idea of a continuous popular tradition stemming from Latin comedy and tragedy to the 9th century seems unlikely. Most historians place the origin of medieval drama in the church's liturgical dialogues and "tropes". Mystery plays were eventually transferred from

7728-477: The information contained in" a target and a situation to form "perceptions of ourselves and others based on social categories." This model is composed of three states: According to Alan Saks and Gary Johns, there are three components to perception: Stimuli are not necessarily translated into a percept and rarely does a single stimulus translate into a percept. An ambiguous stimulus may sometimes be transduced into one or more percepts, experienced randomly, one at

7840-462: The information they process. Perceptual issues in philosophy include the extent to which sensory qualities such as sound , smell or color exist in objective reality rather than in the mind of the perceiver. Although people traditionally viewed the senses as passive receptors, the study of illusions and ambiguous images has demonstrated that the brain 's perceptual systems actively and pre-consciously attempt to make sense of their input. There

7952-544: The intensity of affective touch is still encoded in the primary somatosensory cortex, the feeling of pleasantness associated with affective touch is activated more in the anterior cingulate cortex . Increased blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) contrast imaging, identified during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), shows that signals in the anterior cingulate cortex, as well as the prefrontal cortex , are highly correlated with pleasantness scores of affective touch. Inhibitory transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of

8064-424: The intensity, color, and position of incoming light. Some processing of texture and movement occurs within the neurons on the retina before the information is sent to the brain. In total, about 15 differing types of information are then forwarded to the brain proper via the optic nerve. The timing of perception of a visual event, at points along the visual circuit, have been measured. A sudden alteration of light at

8176-470: The landscape such as traditional farm buildings that directly contribute to the visual context of the natural environment. Lastly, moderating factors (MF) also occur that can influence the perception of tranquillity. The moderating factors are not large; because they are relatively difficult to quantify they are the subject of ongoing research. The TR of an area is then a function of noise, NCF, and MF. One potentially effective solution to improving tranquillity

8288-548: The left occipital-temporal channel, over the left occipital lobe and temporal lobe. Hearing (or audition ) is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations (i.e., sonic detection). Frequencies capable of being heard by humans are called audio or audible frequencies , the range of which is typically considered to be between 20  Hz and 20,000 Hz. Frequencies higher than audio are referred to as ultrasonic , while frequencies below audio are referred to as infrasonic . The auditory system includes

8400-639: The loss of an intervening consonant. Manuscripts generally do not distinguish hiatus from true diphthongs, but modern scholarly transcription indicates it with a diaeresis , as in Modern French: Presented below is the first laisse of The Song of Roland along with a broad transcription reflecting reconstructed pronunciation c.  1050 . Charles li reis, nostre emperedre magnes, Set anz toz pleins at estét en Espaigne. Tres qu'en la mer conquist la tere altaigne, Chastel n'i at ki devant lui remaignet. Murs ne citét n'i est remés

8512-570: The love of God and for the Christian people, and our common salvation, from this day forward, as God will give me the knowledge and the power, I will defend my brother Karlo with my help in everything ...) The second-oldest document in Old French is the Eulalia sequence , which is important for linguistic reconstruction of Old French pronunciation due to its consistent spelling. The royal House of Capet , founded by Hugh Capet in 987, inaugurated

8624-406: The mid-14th century, paving the way for early French Renaissance literature of the 15th century. The earliest extant French literary texts date from the ninth century, but very few texts before the 11th century have survived. The first literary works written in Old French were saints' lives . The Canticle of Saint Eulalie , written in the second half of the 9th century, is generally accepted as

8736-528: The monastery church to the chapter house or refectory hall and finally to the open air, and the vernacular was substituted for Latin. In the 12th century one finds the earliest extant passages in French appearing as refrains inserted into liturgical dramas in Latin, such as a Saint Nicholas (patron saint of the student clercs) play and a Saint Stephen play. An early French dramatic play is Le Jeu d'Adam ( c.  1150 ) written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets with Latin stage directions (implying that it

8848-555: The most famous characters of which were Renaud de Montauban and Girart de Roussillon . A fourth grouping, not listed by Bertrand, is the Crusade cycle , dealing with the First Crusade and its immediate aftermath. Jean Bodel 's other two categories—the "Matter of Rome" and the "Matter of Britain"—concern the French romance or roman . Around a hundred verse romances survive from the period 1150–1220. From around 1200 on,

8960-427: The most positive feature of the countryside. In contrast to "soft fascination", "directed attention" requires a significant amount of cognitive effort. Prolonged periods of sustained mental activity can lead to directed attention fatigue. This can affect performance and bring about negative emotions, irritability, and decreased sensitivity to interpersonal cues. As the incidence of mental illness continues to rise, there

9072-402: The percentage of natural and contextual features (NCF) contained within the visual scene. The latter includes the percentage area in the visual scene occupied by natural features in the landscape such as vegetation, water, and geological features (for example, exposure of rock), and contextual features such as listed buildings, religious and historic buildings, landmarks, monuments, and elements of

9184-483: The perception of events and objects in the world. Chronoception refers to how the passage of time is perceived and experienced. Although the sense of time is not associated with a specific sensory system , the work of psychologists and neuroscientists indicates that human brains do have a system governing the perception of time, composed of a highly distributed system involving the cerebral cortex , cerebellum , and basal ganglia . One particular component of

9296-420: The phone is the distal stimulus. The sound stimulating a person's auditory receptors is the proximal stimulus. The brain's interpretation of this as the "ringing of a telephone" is the percept. The different kinds of sensation (such as warmth, sound, and taste) are called sensory modalities or stimulus modalities . Psychologist Jerome Bruner developed a model of perception, in which people put "together

9408-461: The primary somatosensory cortex inhibits the perception of affective touch intensity, but not affective touch pleasantness. Therefore, the S1 is not directly involved in processing socially affective touch pleasantness, but still plays a role in discriminating touch location and intensity. Multi-modal perception refers to concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality and the effect such has on

9520-625: The production of a set of Tranquil Area maps covering England, produced by Rendel and ASH Consulting and published by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and the former Countryside Commission . In these maps tranquil areas were defined as "places sufficiently far from the visual or noise intrusion of development or traffic to be considered unspoilt by urban influences". More sophisticated mapping techniques are now available following work by researchers at Northumbria University , Newcastle University , and CPRE. Maps have been produced for

9632-560: The psychology of people suffering from stress . For example, one study found that stress (as measured by blood pressure, muscle tension, and skin conductance response), induced by showing videos of workplace injuries, improved significantly more quickly if further videos viewed included natural surroundings rather than busy traffic or shopping scenes. Another study demonstrated the benefits of simulating such environments for pain relief during bone marrow aspirate and biopsy. The presence of tranquil areas helps boost rural tourism. Rural tourism in

9744-504: The replacement [b] > [f] and in turn the final -se of framboise added to OF fraie to make freise , modern fraise (≠ Wallon frève , Occitan fraga , Romanian fragă , Italian fragola , fravola 'strawberry'). Mildred Pope estimated that perhaps still 15% of the vocabulary of Modern French derives from Germanic sources. This proportion was larger in Old French, because Middle French borrowed heavily from Latin and Italian. The earliest documents said to be written in

9856-431: The rise of experimental psychology in the 19th century, psychology's understanding of perception has progressed by combining a variety of techniques. Psychophysics quantitatively describes the relationships between the physical qualities of the sensory input and perception. Sensory neuroscience studies the neural mechanisms underlying perception. Perceptual systems can also be studied computationally , in terms of

9968-414: The same exploration behavior normally associated with novelty. Recent studies on lesions in the area concluded that rats with a damaged perirhinal cortex were still more interested in exploring when novel objects were present, but seemed unable to tell novel objects from familiar ones—they examined both equally. Thus, other brain regions are involved with noticing unfamiliarity, while the perirhinal cortex

10080-418: The sense of familiarity in humans and other mammals. In tests, stimulating this area at 10–15 Hz caused animals to treat even novel images as familiar, and stimulation at 30–40 Hz caused novel images to be partially treated as familiar. In particular, stimulation at 30–40 Hz led to animals looking at a familiar image for longer periods, as they would for an unfamiliar one, though it did not lead to

10192-509: The sense that drives the most basic of human survival skills. As such, it can be a catalyst for human behavior on a subconscious and instinctive level. Social perception is the part of perception that allows people to understand the individuals and groups of their social world. Thus, it is an element of social cognition . Speech perception is the process by which spoken language is heard, interpreted and understood. Research in this field seeks to understand how human listeners recognize

10304-584: The setting types. Another study investigated the relationship between tranquillity and danger in urban and rural settings. The key results were 1) that "setting care", which relates to how safe we feel in a particular setting, is more salient for judgments of danger in urban settings than natural ones, and 2) that openness was a significant predictor of danger but not of tranquillity. The authors concluded that tranquillity and danger should not be viewed as polar opposites, but, like preference and tranquillity, as distinct constructs. Within tranquillity studies, much of

10416-430: The skin surface (e.g., edges, curvature, and texture) and proprioception of hand position and conformation. People can rapidly and accurately identify three-dimensional objects by touch. This involves exploratory procedures, such as moving the fingers over the outer surface of the object or holding the entire object in the hand. Haptic perception relies on the forces experienced during touch. Professor Gibson defined

10528-439: The sound is produced, can also have a considerable impact on perception. Experiments have shown that people automatically compensate for this effect when hearing speech. The process of perceiving speech begins at the level of the sound within the auditory signal and the process of audition . The initial auditory signal is compared with visual information—primarily lip movement—to extract acoustic cues and phonetic information. It

10640-415: The sound of speech (or phonetics ) and use such information to understand spoken language. Listeners manage to perceive words across a wide range of conditions, as the sound of a word can vary widely according to words that surround it and the tempo of the speech, as well as the physical characteristics, accent , tone , and mood of the speaker. Reverberation , signifying the persistence of sound after

10752-494: The south of France. The mid-14th century witnessed the emergence of Middle French , the language of the French Renaissance in the Île-de-France region; this dialect was a predecessor to Modern French . Other dialects of Old French evolved themselves into modern forms ( Poitevin-Saintongeais , Gallo , Norman , Picard , Walloon , etc.), each with its linguistic features and history. The region where Old French

10864-547: The spoken language). Vulgar Latin was the ancestor of the Romance languages , including Old French. By the late 8th century, when the Carolingian Renaissance began, native speakers of Romance idioms continued to use Romance orthoepy rules while speaking and reading Latin. When the most prominent scholar of Western Europe at the time, English deacon Alcuin , was tasked by Charlemagne with improving

10976-404: The standards of Latin writing in France, not being a native Romance speaker himself, he prescribed a pronunciation based on a fairly literal interpretation of Latin spelling. For example, in a radical break from the traditional system, a word such as ⟨viridiarium⟩ ' orchard ' now had to be read aloud precisely as it was spelled rather than */verdʒjær/ (later spelled as OF 'vergier' ). Such

11088-436: The subjective feeling of having chosen a particular action. Some conditions, such as schizophrenia , can cause a loss of this sense, which may lead a person into delusions, such as feeling like a machine or like an outside source is controlling them. An opposite extreme can also occur, where people experience everything in their environment as though they had decided that it would happen. Even in non- pathological cases, there

11200-514: The tendency was increasingly to write the romances in prose (many of the earlier verse romances were adapted into prose versions), although new verse romances continued to be written to the end of the 14th century. The most important romance of the 13th century is the Romance of the Rose , which breaks considerably from the conventions of the chivalric adventure story. Medieval French lyric poetry

11312-574: The terrain of the land. For example, the tranquillity increases gradually the further one is from a busy road, but increases more sharply if the road is hidden in a cutting. This cartographic study showed that tranquillity is not the absence of all noise, activity, and buildings. Indeed, it found that many rural activities, such as farming and hiking, and natural noises such as birdsong and cows lowing, enhance people’s experience of tranquillity. Old French language Old French ( franceis , françois , romanz ; French : ancien français )

11424-434: The two. The Old Low Franconian influence is also believed to be responsible for the differences between the langue d'oïl and the langue d'oc (Occitan), being that various parts of Northern France remained bilingual between Latin and Germanic for some time, and these areas correspond precisely to where the first documents in Old French were written. This Germanic language shaped the popular Latin spoken here and gave it

11536-412: The verb trobar "to find, to invent"). By the late 13th century, the poetic tradition in France had begun to develop in ways that differed significantly from the troubadour poets, both in content and in the use of certain fixed forms. The new poetic (as well as musical: some of the earliest medieval music has lyrics composed in Old French by the earliest composers known by name) tendencies are apparent in

11648-403: The whole of England that show the tranquillity score of Ordnance Survey Grid-derived 500m×500m squares. The tranquillity rating for each is based on 44 factors that add to or detract from people’s feelings of tranquillity. These factors were defined following extensive public consultations. The methodology examines the diffusion of the impact of these factors over distance, taking into account

11760-772: Was also spoken in the Kingdom of Sicily , and in the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Levant . As part of the emerging Gallo-Romance dialect continuum, the langues d'oïl were contrasted with the langues d'oc , at the time also called "Provençal", adjacent to the Old French area in the southwest, and with the Gallo-Italic group to the southeast. The Franco-Provençal group developed in Upper Burgundy, sharing features with both French and Provençal; it may have begun to diverge from

11872-414: Was constantly changing and evolving; however, the form in the late 12th century, as attested in a great deal of mostly poetic writings, can be considered standard. The writing system at this time was more phonetic than that used in most subsequent centuries. In particular, all written consonants (including final ones) were pronounced, except for s preceding non- stop consonants and t in et , and final e

11984-680: Was indebted to the poetic and cultural traditions in Southern France and Provence —including Toulouse and the Aquitaine region—where langue d'oc was spoken ( Occitan language ); in their turn, the Provençal poets were greatly influenced by poetic traditions from the Hispano-Arab world . Lyric poets in Old French are called trouvères – etymologically the same word as the troubadours of Provençal or langue d'oc (from

12096-590: Was pronounced [ ə ] . The phonological system can be summarised as follows: Notes: In Old French, the nasal vowels were not separate phonemes but only allophones of the oral vowels before a nasal consonant. The nasal consonant was fully pronounced; bon was pronounced [bõn] ( ModF [bɔ̃] ). Nasal vowels were present even in open syllables before nasals where Modern French has oral vowels, as in bone [bõnə] ( ModF bonne [bɔn] ). Notes: Notes: In addition to diphthongs, Old French had many instances of hiatus between adjacent vowels because of

12208-550: Was provided by the percentage of natural and contextual features present within the scene and the equivalent continuous sound pressure level ( LAeq ). Researchers at the Bradford Centre for Sustainable Environments developed a methodology with which the perceived tranquillity rating (TR) of an amenity area such as park, green, or urban square can be measured, on a 0–10 scale. The method involves assessing average daytime noise levels Lday (usually traffic noise) and measuring

12320-518: Was spoken natively roughly extended to the northern half of the Kingdom of France and its vassals (including parts of the Angevin Empire ), and the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine to the east (corresponding to modern north-eastern France and Belgian Wallonia ), but the influence of Old French was much wider, as it was carried to England and the Crusader states as the language of

12432-423: Was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th and the mid-14th century. Rather than a unified language , Old French was a group of Romance dialects , mutually intelligible yet diverse . These dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d'oïl , contrasting with the langues d'oc , the emerging Occitano-Romance languages of Occitania , now

12544-617: Was written by Latin-speaking clerics for a lay public). A large body of fables survive in Old French; these include (mostly anonymous) literature dealing with the recurring trickster character of Reynard the Fox . Marie de France was also active in this genre, producing the Ysopet (Little Aesop ) series of fables in verse. Related to the fable was the more bawdy fabliau , which covered topics such as cuckolding and corrupt clergy. These fabliaux would be an important source for Chaucer and for

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