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Sensory Spaces in Emergencies. Sense Perception and Space Usage in Early Modern Town Fires. Fire was an omnipresent element of premodern daily life, yet also an existential threat for urban communities. Drawing on a wide range of sources from contemporary eyewitness accounts to urban regulations from early modern Germany, this paper analyses town fires as multisensory events. It argues that urban dwellers' senses were used to monitor the city space for potential outbreaks, alert the population to a fire, and move within a burning city. In connection with this, it discusses in which way urban spaces were constituted differently in an emergency situation. The contribution shows how positioning and movement shaped sensory perception and how perception, in turn, influenced the ways people perceived and used space. Town fires were not simply a time of disorder and sensory overload but situations when sensory and spatial ordering was tested and negotiated within political and social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to answer the question which phonetic parameters are particularly responsible for the sound of German. In particular, the accent-rhythmic structures are discussed. In doing so, we reflect on which factors also shape attitudes and perception of German [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the first of a series of three experiments, two groups of 10 subjects judged either the bottom half or the top half of a series of 16 squares according to their size. After two presentations with the pretraining series, 10 trials with the total series followed. The initial judgments of the pretraining stimuli showed a marked tendency to persist all through the experiment, thus demonstrating a primacy effect. The effect was not completely removed by instructions to modify the judgment scale (Experiment 2). In the third experiment, the number of categories was varied. With a larger number of categories the primacy effect tended to wear off after a few postshift trials. The results are interpreted as providing an alternative explanation of the frequency effect and the number-of-categories effect discovered by Parducci. The present paper considers the frequency effect a special case of the primacy effect. The explanation is based on the fact that ordinarily stimulus frequency and time of first occurrence are confounded.

In a preceding paper with the same title the result was represented by curves which enable factors used in calculating the true diameter to be determined. Instead of the curves a quadratic equation is used to produce the same factors. The data for the equation are given in two tables.

This paper describes a method of supraliminal pattern perimetry for use with a Goldmann perimeter. In this method, the stimuli are adjusted in stages in accordance with the normal physiological sensitivity gradient. The threshold is determined on four meridians located 10 degrees and 30 degrees from the center. These threshold values are used to define three different levels of brightness which exceed the threshold by approximately the same amounts in three sectors of the field of vision extending from 2 degrees to 10 degrees, 10 degrees to 20 degrees and 20 degrees to 30 degrees. The points arranged in a rectangular pattern at intervals of 3 1/3 degrees are used to check for relative and absolute defects in the patient's field of vision. Supraliminal pattern perimetry can be performed manually on the Goldmann perimeter in a manner similar to automatic supraliminal perimetry to detect small defects in the field of vision. Manual perimetry, though, allows the physician to use his clinical experience directly and also makes it possible to combine screening and detection into a single procedure, since it is then possible to alter pattern density and to switch from supraliminal pattern perimetry to kinetic and free static threshold determination during the actual course of the examination. The flexibility of the manual method may well save both physician and patient time and effort, especially in difficult cases. With automatic perimetry, however, such flexibility is hampered by the fact that programs must be run through in succession (with the exception of the Octopus Program 4).