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Effects Of Acute Synchronous Whole-Body Vibration Exercise, Tom J. Hazell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recently, whole-body vibration (WBV) exercise has been gaining interest in the health/fitness community for its reported beneficial outcomes. However, most of these have not been evaluated scientifically leading to some reservation in promoting this new exercise modality. The purpose of this dissertation was to assess the viability of WBV exercise to enhance several selected indices of health.

Study 1 demonstrated that the addition of WBV to an isometric semi-squat in young healthy men (n = 8, 25±2.6 y, 177±7.0 cm, 84±12.1 kg) resulted in increases in femoral artery blood flow and leg skin temperature vs the same exercise without vibration …

Mental Blocks: The Behavioural Effects And Neural Encoding Of Obstacles When Reaching And Grasping, Craig S. Chapman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The ability to adeptly interact with a cluttered and dynamic world requires that the brain simultaneously encode multiple objects. Theoretical frameworks of selective visuomotor attention provide evidence for parallel encoding (Baldauf & Deubel, 2010; Cisek & Kalaska, 2010; Duncan, 2006) where concurrent object processing results in neural competition. Since the end goal of object representation is usually action, these frameworks argue that the competitive activity is best characterized as the development of visuomotor biases. While some behavioural and neural evidence has been accumulated in favour of this explanation, one of the most striking, yet deceptively common, demonstrations of this capacity …