UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    MAKING SENSE: AN EXPLORATION IN MULTI-SENSORY DESIGN
    (2024) Bullock, Abigail Leigh; Noonan, Peter V.; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    People view Architecture through a lens of sight. Often we learn from architecture from print media, the internet and other visual sources. This thesis aims to explore how one experiences architecture, not views it. To experience architecture, one needs to explore a work through all five senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound. To create architecture, one must sculpt these sensory inputs. This experiential quality is especially important when considering people witedh sensory loss. Through this thesis one aims to help create independence for users of a space with hearing and/or vision loss through the incorporation of other sensory aspects within design. People with sensory loss often report feeling less satisfied in life and less independent than their peers. They also report higher degrees of loneliness and isolation. Through this work, one aims to help create a sense of community and independence. This is important to improve overall reports of life satisfaction for individuals with various degrees and types of sensory loss.
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    Multi-Level Audio-Visual Interactions in Speech and Language Perception
    (2011) Rhone, Ariane E.; Idsardi, William J; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    That we perceive our environment as a unified scene rather than individual streams of auditory, visual, and other sensory information has recently provided motivation to move past the long-held tradition of studying these systems separately. Although they are each unique in their transduction organs, neural pathways, and cortical primary areas, the senses are ultimately merged in a meaningful way which allows us to navigate the multisensory world. Investigating how the senses are merged has become an increasingly wide field of research in recent decades, with the introduction and increased availability of neuroimaging techniques. Areas of study range from multisensory object perception to cross-modal attention, multisensory interactions, and integration. This thesis focuses on audio-visual speech perception, with special focus on facilitatory effects of visual information on auditory processing. When visual information is concordant with auditory information, it provides an advantage that is measurable in behavioral response times and evoked auditory fields (Chapter 3) and in increased entrainment to multisensory periodic stimuli reflected by steady-state responses (Chapter 4). When the audio-visual information is incongruent, the combination can often, but not always, combine to form a third, non-physically present percept (known as the McGurk effect). This effect is investigated (Chapter 5) using real word stimuli. McGurk percepts were not robustly elicited for a majority of stimulus types, but patterns of responses suggest that the physical and lexical properties of the auditory and visual stimulus may affect the likelihood of obtaining the illusion. Together, these experiments add to the growing body of knowledge that suggests that audio-visual interactions occur at multiple stages of processing.