In the last decades neuroscience provided so many important contributions to philosophy of mind that nowadays the latter is inconceivable without the former in every topic this philosophical branch deals with. The studies connected to action understanding provided great advances in the field of developmental psychology for what concerns social learning abilities grounded on imitation. All information received by the infants are transmitted through actions. It would be impossible to conceive infant imitation without action interpretation. According to Meltzoff’s (...) “like-me” hypothesis, imitation is possible in human infants already at birth in virtue of an identification mechanism with the adults supported by mirror neurons (MNs) based simulation system. However, if we split the types of actions into two general categories, instrumental and communicative actions, we will see, according to an alternative account, how infants modulate differently the comprehension of observed scenarios, depending on whether they are passive observers (in the case of instrumental actions) or actively involved (in the case of communicative actions). Such a recognition of action features seems to be evident through different degrees of motor activation, as ERP techniques applied to infants and young adults revealed. Neuroscientific evidence highlight the crucial role of brain areas connected to motor activation for action interpretation, but at the same time, they allow both a bottom-up process and a top-down process interpretation whereby the motor activation is seen as a product of action understanding rather than its determining causal factor. The aim of the present study is to examine such epistemological conflicting perspectives underlying action interpretation, and their repercussions on different social learning theories. (shrink)

The visual world of adults consists of objects at various distances, partly occluding one another, substantial and stable across space and time. The visual world of young infants, in contrast, is often fragmented and unstable, consisting not of coherent objects but rather surfaces that move in unpredictable ways. Evidence from computational modeling and from experiments with human infants highlights three kinds of learning that contribute to infants’ knowledge of the visual world: learning via association, learning via (...) class='Hi'>active assembly, and learning via visual-manual exploration. Infants acquire knowledge by observing objects move in and out of sight, forming associations of these different views. In addition, the infant’s own self-produced behavior—oculomotor patterns and manual experience, in particular—is an important means by which infants discover and construct their visual world. (shrink)

Based on studies with infants, we expand on Stoffregen & Bardy's explanation of perceptual motor errors, given the global array. Information pick-up from the global array is not sufficient without adequate exploratory movements and learning to support perceptually guided activity.

Objective: The aim of this research was to study the mediation of body dissatisfaction, physical self-concept, and body mass index (BMI) on the relationship between physical activity and self-concept in adolescents. Materials and Methods: A sample of 652 Spanish students between 12 and 17 years participated in a cross-sectional study. Physical self-concept and general self-concept were assessed with the Physical Self-Concept Questionnaire (CAF), body dissatisfaction with the Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ), and physical activity was estimated with the International Physical Activity (...) Questionnaire (IPAQ-SF). BMI was utilized as a measurement of body composition. Structural equation modeling was used to assess the results. Results: The resulting models showed good fit indexes. Physical activity had a positive and indirect effect on self-concept (β = 0.29, p < 0.01) and direct effects on dissatisfaction (β = -0.26, p < 0.01) and physical self-concept (β = 0.20, p < 0.01). BMI had a direct effect on dissatisfaction (β = 0.31, p < 0.01) and on physical self-concept (β = -0.10, p < 0.01) and an indirect effect on general self-concept (β = -0.24, p < 0.01). However, it was only associated with physical activity in males, playing a mediating role between physical activity and body dissatisfaction. Conclusion: Physical activity can help individuals to achieve a positive self-concept and promote psychological well-being in adolescents through the improvement of physical perceptions and body satisfaction. The importance of BMI, body dissatisfaction, and physical self-concept on the configuration of the self-concept are also emphasized. Educational policymakers and Physical Education teachers should implement strategies to promote physical activity in the schools and provide a Quality Physical Education programs to increase physical activity during adolescence. (shrink)

Infants’ ability to monitor “sensorimotor contingencies,” i.e., the sensory effects of their own actions, is an important mechanism underlying learning. One method that has been used to investigate this is the “mobile paradigm,” in which a mobile above an infant’s crib is activated by motion of one of the infant’s limbs. Although successfully used in numerous experiments performed in infants’ homes to investigate memory and other types of learning, the paradigm seems less robust for demonstrating sensitivity (...) to sensorimotor contingencies when used in the laboratory. One purpose of the present work was to show that certain changes to the mobile paradigm would make it easier for infants to show their sensitivity to the contingency in the lab. In particular, we used proximal stimulation on infants’ wrists instead of the usual mobile, and our stimulation was coincident with the limbs that caused it. Our stimulation was either on or off, i.e., not modulated by the amount the infant moved. Finally, we used a “shaping” procedure to help the infant discover the contingency. In addition to these changes in the paradigm, by analyzing infants’ limb activity at 10-s resolution instead of the usual 1-min resolution, we were able to show that infants’ sensitivity to the contingency became apparent already within the first minute of establishment of the contingency. Finally, we showed how two alternate measures of sensitivity to contingency based on probability of repeated movements and on “stop and go” motion strategies may be of interest for future work. (shrink)

Taking a distributed view of language, this paper naturalizes symbol grounding. Learning to talk is traced to — not categorizing speech sounds — but events that shape the rise of human-style autonomy. On the extended symbol hypothesis, this happens as babies integrate micro-activity with slow and deliberate adult action. As they discover social norms, intrinsic motive formation enables them to reshape co-action. Because infants link affect to contingencies, dyads develop norm-referenced routines. Over time, infant doings become analysis amenable. (...) The caregiver of a nine-month-old may, for example, prompt the baby to fetch objects. Once she concludes that the baby uses ‘words’ to understand what she says, the infant can use this belief in orienting to more abstract contingencies. New cognitive powers will develop as the baby learns to act in ways that are consistent with a caregiver’s false belief that her baby uses ‘words.’. (shrink)

There are many theories surrounding infant imitation; however, there is no research to our knowledge evaluating the reliability of listener perception of vocal imitation in prelinguistic infants. This paper evaluates intra- and inter-rater judgments on the degree of “imitativeness” in utterances of infants below 12 months of age. 18 listeners were presented audio segments selected from naturalistic recordings to represent in each case a parent vocal model followed by an infant utterance ranging from low to high degrees of (...) imitativeness. The naturalistic data suggested vocal imitation occurred rarely across the first year, but strong intra- and inter-rater correlations were found for judgments of imitativeness. Our results suggest salience of the infant’s vocal imitation despite its rare occurrence as well as active perception by listeners of the imitative signal. We discuss infant vocal imitation as a potential signal of well-being and as an indicator of language learning and vocal communication skills as perceived by caregivers. (shrink)

In the present study, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated a group of participants on a grammaticality classification task after they had been exposed to well-formed consonant strings generated from an artificial regular grammar. We used an implicit acquisition paradigm in which the participants were exposed to positive examples. The objective of this studywas to investigate whether brain regions related to language processing overlap with the brain regions activated by the grammaticality classification task used in the present study. (...) Recent meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies indicate that syntactic processing is related to the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann's areas 44 and 45) or Broca's region. In the present study, we observed that artificial grammaticality violations activated Broca's region in all participants. This observation lends some support to the suggestions that artificial grammar learning represents a model for investigating aspects of language learning in infants [TICS 4 (2000) 178] and adults [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of United States of America 99 (2002) 529]. (shrink)

In the present study, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated a group of participants on a grammaticality classification task after they had been exposed to well-formed consonant strings generated from an artificial regular grammar. We used an implicit acquisition paradigm in which the participants were exposed to positive examples. The objective of this studywas to investigate whether brain regions related to language processing overlap with the brain regions activated by the grammaticality classification task used in the present study. (...) Recent meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies indicate that syntactic processing is related to the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann's areas 44 and 45) or Broca's region. In the present study, we observed that artificial grammaticality violations activated Broca's region in all participants. This observation lends some support to the suggestions that artificial grammar learning represents a model for investigating aspects of language learning in infants [TICS 4 (2000) 178] and adults [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of United States of America 99 (2002) 529]. (shrink)

In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. This process of early phonetic learning has traditionally been framed as phonetic category acquisition. However, recent studies have hypothesized that the attunement may instead reflect a perceptual space learning process that does not involve categories. In this article, we explore the idea of perceptual space learning by implementing five different perceptual space learning models and testing them on three (...) phonetic contrasts that have been tested in the infant speech perception literature. We reproduce and extend previous results showing that a perceptual space learning model that uses only distributional information about the acoustics of short time slices of speech can account for at least some crosslinguistic differences in infant perception. Moreover, we find that a second perceptual space learning model, which benefits from word‐level guidance. performs equally well in capturing crosslinguistic differences in infant speech perception. These results provide support for the general idea of perceptual space learning as a theory of early phonetic learning but suggest that more fine‐grained data are needed to distinguish between different formal accounts. Finally, we provide testable empirical predictions of the two most promising models and show that these are not identical, making it possible to independently evaluate each model in experiments with infants in future research. (shrink)

Infants' own activities create and actively select their learning experiences. Here we review recent models of embodied information seeking and curiosity-driven learning and show that these mechanisms have deep implications for development and evolution. We discuss how these mechanisms yield self-organized epigenesis with emergent ordered behavioral and cognitive developmental stages. We describe a robotic experiment that explored the hypothesis that progress in learning, in and for itself, generates intrinsic rewards: The robot learners probabilistically selected experiences according to (...) their potential for reducing uncertainty. In these experiments, curiosity-driven learning led the robot learner to successively discover object affordances and vocal interaction with its peers. We explain how a learning curriculum adapted to the current constraints of the learning system automatically formed, constraining learning and shaping the developmental trajectory. The observed trajectories in the robot experiment share many properties with those in infant development, including a mixture of regularities and diversities in the developmental patterns. Finally, we argue that such emergent developmental structures can guide and constrain evolution, in particular with regard to the origins of language. (shrink)

Beginning in earnest in the late 1990s, educational researchers devoted increasing attention to the study of “active learning,” leading to a robust literature on the topic in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, during largely the same period, political theorists discovered the radical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, which soon after began to ripple through more radical forms of philosophy of education. While both the SoTL works on active learning and writings of “Agambenian” philosophers of (...) education have offered new insights into their respective fields, active learning has not yet received a systematic philosophical reflection and the community of Agambenian philosophy of education has not yet been systematized. This article addresses both gaps, first through an outline of existing Agambenian approaches to the philosophy of education and second by theorizing active learning as a form of “destituent potential.” The systematic reflection on the three threads of Agambenian philosophy of education—whatever, potentiality, and study—offers an introduction to less familiar readers, and the second section offers a model for how philosophical concepts can become theoretical tools for SoTL analysis. (shrink)

Transformative unlearning: safety, discernment and communities of learning This paper aims to stimulate awareness about the intellectual and emotional work of ‘unlearning’ in knowledge workers in the emerging learning age. The importance of providing a safe space for dialogue to promote transformative learning, through building ‘communities of learning’, is highlighted. Unlearning is conceptualized within a transformative education paradigm, one whose primary orientation is discernment, a personal growth process involving the activities of receptivity, recognition and grieving. The (...) author utilizes the metaphor of an unfolding spiral path to explore her experience of needing to ‘unlearn’ a trusted nursing practice prior to ‘learning’ new best caring practices related to infant sleep positions. Macro and micro approaches to facilitating unlearning in organizations, in learners and in nurses are suggested. (shrink)

It is well documented that the language skills of preschool children differ substantially and that these differences are highly predictive of their later academic success and achievements. Especially in the early phases of children’s lives, the importance of different structural and process characteristics of the home learning environment has been emphasized and research results have documented that process characteristics such as the quality of parental interaction behavior and the frequency of joint activities vary according to the socio-economic status of (...) the family. Further, both structural and process characteristics are associated with children’s language development. As most of the studies focus on single indicators or didn’t take the dynamics of parenting behavior across age into account, the present paper aims to investigate the associations of different characteristics of the home learning environment as well as their potentially changing impact on the language skills of 2-year-old children. Using data of 2.272 families of the infant cohort study of the German National Educational Panel Study, longitudinally assessed process characteristics and structural characteristics were considered. Language skills of the children at the age of two were measured by a standardized and validated parent report instrument. Results showed that all three process characteristics of the home learning environment are associated with the family’s SES; across three assessment waves nearly all process characteristics predicted children’s vocabulary and grammar skills with some process-specific changes across waves; despite separate direct effects of nearly all HLE-process characteristics in each wave, the amount of explained variance in a joint model including the HLE facets from each wave is hardly higher than in the separate models; and socioeconomic background predicted both language facets of the children in each model even when controlling for the assessed process characteristics of the home learning environment. (shrink)

Previous research shows that people can use the co-occurrence of words and objects in ambiguous situations (i.e., containing multiple words and objects) to learn word meanings during a brief passive training period (Yu & Smith, 2007). However, learners in the world are not completely passive but can affect how their environment is structured by moving their heads, eyes, and even objects. These actions can indicate attention to a language teacher, who may then be more likely to name the attended objects. (...) Using a novel active learning paradigm in which learners choose which four objects they would like to see named on each successive trial, this study asks whether active learning is superior to passive learning in a cross-situational word learning context. Finding that learners perform better in active learning, we investigate the strategies and discover that most learners use immediate repetition to disambiguate pairings. Unexpectedly, we find that learners who repeat only one pair per trial—an easy way to infer this pair—perform worse than those who repeat multiple pairs per trial. Using a working memory extension to an associative model of word learning with uncertainty and familiarity biases, we investigate individual differences that correlate with these assorted strategies. (shrink)

In two separate experiments, we examined 17-month-olds’ imitation in a third-party context. The aim was to explore how seeing another person responding to a model’s novel action influenced infant imitation. The infants watched while a reliable model demonstrated a novel action with a familiar (Experiment 1) or an unfamiliar (Experiment 2) object to a second actor. The second actor either imitated or did not imitate the novel action of the model. Fewer infants imitated the model’s novel behavior in the (...) non-imitation condition than in the imitation condition in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, infants’ likelihood of imitating was not influenced by whether they had watched the second actor imitating the model’s novel action with the unfamiliar object. The findings indicate that infants take into account a second adult’s actions in a third party context when infants receive information that contradicts their existing knowledge and when it corresponds with their own experiences. If infants do not have prior knowledge about how to handle a certain object, then the second adult’s actions do not seem to matter. (shrink)

Six experiments investigated 7-month-old infants’ capacity to learn about the self-propelled motion of an object. After observing 1 wind-up toy animal move on its own and a second wind-up toy animal move passively by an experimenter’s hand, infants looked reliably longer at the former object during a subsequent stationary test, providing evidence that infants learned and remembered the mapping of objects and their motions. In further experiments, infants learned the mapping for different animals and retained it over a 15-min delay, (...) providing evidence that the learning is robust and infants’ expectations about self-propelled motion are enduring. Further experiments suggested that infants’ learning was less reliable when the self-propelled objects were novel or lacked faces, body parts, and articulated, biological motion. The findings are discussed in relation to infants’ developing knowledge of object categories and capacity to learn about objects in the first year of life. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the advantages and challenges of using active learning, when teaching an accounting ethics course offered in higher education . The willingness of an instructor to use active learning in an accounting ethics course may be influenced at least in part by that instructor’s assessment of the advantages and challenges of using active learning. Consequently, my paper may be of assistance to instructors with experience in teaching an accounting ethics course (...) and to instructors who are preparing to teach their initial accounting ethics course. (shrink)

Closing the research‐practice gap cannot be achieved by one of the most promising methods, which is to distill and synthesize decades of research to see how the robust findings can work in practice. An alternative approach is proposed, which is to translate a theory of active learning for practitioners.

Despite revisions to curriculum in ethics education in business schools, there continues to be high profile examples of unethical decision making regularly spotlighted in the media. Rather than simply teaching about behaviors and how they might impact decision makers and stakeholders, we describe a suite of activities used to highlight various behaviors and biases that impact the decisions individuals might make. These activities are intertwined with course materials regarding ethics and corporate governance to remind and help students better understand how (...) decision making can be influenced and challenged by personal ethics. We provide lesson planning suggestions including adapting to remote delivery, and student handouts. This suite of activities can be incorporated into any undergraduate or graduate level course that has content dealing with ethical decision making. (shrink)

Ample attention is being paid in the higher education literature to promoting active learning among students. However, critical examination of educational purposes and ends is largely lacki...

With the increasing prevalence of Internet usage, Internet-Delivered Psychological Treatment (IDPT) has become a valuable tool to develop improved treatments of mental disorders. IDPT becomes complicated and labor intensive because of overlapping emotion in mental health. To create a usable learning application for IDPT requires diverse labeled datasets containing an adequate set of linguistic properties to extract word representations and segmentations of emotions. In medical applications, it is challenging to successfully refine such datasets since emotion-aware labeling is time consuming. (...) Other known issues include vocabulary sizes per class, data source, method of creation, and baseline for the human performance level. This paper focuses on the application of personalized mental health interventions using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and attention-based in-depth entropy active learning. The objective of this research is to increase the trainable instances using a semantic clustering mechanism. For this purpose, we propose a method based on synonym expansion by semantic vectors. Semantic vectors based on semantic information derived from the context in which it appears are clustered. The resulting similarity metrics help to select the subset of unlabeled text by using semantic information. The proposed method separates unlabeled text and includes it in the next active learning mechanism cycle. Our method updates model training by using the new training points. The cycle continues until it reaches an optimal solution, and it converts all the unlabeled text into the training set. Our in-depth experimental results show that the synonym expansion semantic vectors help enhance training accuracy while not harming the results. The bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture with an attention mechanism achieved 0.85 Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC curve) on the blind test set. The learned embedding is then used to visualize the activated word's contribution to each symptom and find the psychiatrist's qualitative agreement. Our method improves the detection rate of depression symptoms from online forum text using the unlabeled forum texts. (shrink)

The present study focuses on the observation of learning processes as they emerge in the context of conversations among two students in three successive tasks designed to foster conceptual change in proportional reasoning. The three tasks were set according to a pre-test treatment post-test paradigm. In the pre-test and the post-test tasks, the two students solved individually several items in the presence of an experimenter. In the treatment task, the two students worked as a dyad to solve similar items; (...) they used a balance to check their conclusions and subsequently continued solving the items when the weighing did not match their expectations. We adopt a micro-genetic approach and develop new analytical tools to observe what happened in the conversation. Throughout the three successive tasks, we observed the interplay between tools, peers, experimenter, and task demands and how they are managed through the rules of conversation. We identified four processes that involved the emergence of new high-order strategies from coordinated actions distributed among peers, the guidance of the experimenter in coordinating actions, and ways the participation in solving a previous task was actualized in a successive one. (shrink)

Infants have been described as 'statistical learners' capable of extracting structure (such as words) from patterned input (such as language). Here, we investigated whether prior knowledge influences how infants track transitional probabilities in word segmentation tasks. Are infants biased by prior experience when engaging in sequential statistical learning? In a laboratory simulation of learning across time, we exposed 9- and 10-month-old infants to a list of either disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words, followed by a pause-free speech stream composed (...) of a different set of disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words. Listening times revealed successful segmentation of words from fluent speech only when words were uniformly disyllabic or trisyllabic throughout both phases of the experiment. Hearing trisyllabic words during the pre-exposure phase derailed infants' abilities to segment speech into disyllabic words, and vice versa. We conclude that prior knowledge about word length equips infants with perceptual expectations that facilitate efficient processing of subsequent language input. (shrink)

Giving feedback during active learning is an important, though difficult, task for teachers. In the present study, the problems elementary school teachers perceive and the beliefs they hold regarding this task were investigated. It appeared that teachers believe conditional teacher skills, especially time management, hinder them most from giving good feedback. The most widely held belief was that ?feedback should be positive?. Teachers also believed that it is important to adopt a facilitative way of giving feedback, but they (...) found this difficult to implement. Only some teachers believed goal-directedness and a focus on student meta-cognition were important during active learning and teachers did not perceive problems regarding these aspects. It was discussed whether teachers? feedback behaviour was in line with these perceived problems and beliefs. The results give directions for the professional development of teachers to improve their feedback during active learning. (shrink)

The present study focuses on the observation of learning processes as they emerge in the context of conversations among two students in three successive tasks designed to foster conceptual change in proportional reasoning. The three tasks were set according to a pre-test treatment post-test paradigm. In the pre-test and the post-test tasks, the two students solved individually several items in the presence of an experimenter. In the treatment task, the two students worked as a dyad to solve similar items; (...) they used a balance to check their conclusions and subsequently continued solving the items when the weighing did not match their expectations. We adopt a micro-genetic approach and develop new analytical tools to observe what happened in the conversation (both socially and cognitively). Throughout the three successive tasks, we observed the interplay between tools, peers, experimenter, and task demands and how they are managed through the rules of conversation. We identified four processes that involved the emergence of new high-order strategies from coordinated actions distributed among peers, the guidance of the experimenter in coordinating actions, and ways the participation in solving a previous task was actualized in a successive one. (shrink)

The importance of enchancing metacognition and encouraging active learning in philosophy teaching has been increasingly recognised in recent years. Yet traditional teaching methods have not always centralised helping students to become reflectively and critically aware of the quality and consistency of their own thinking. This is particularly relevant when teaching moral philosophy, where apparently inconsistent intuitions and responses are common. In this paper I discuss the theoretical basis of the relevance of metacognition and active learning for (...) teaching moral philosophy. Applying recent discussions of metacognition, intuition conflicts and survey-based teaching techniques, I then outline a strategy for encouraging metacognitive awareness of tensions in students’ pretheoretical beliefs, and developing a critical self-awareness of their development as moral thinkers. (shrink)

This study aims to critique the concept of active learning in childhood education based on Hegelian Bildung. We have defined childhood education from the perspective of Hegel’s Bildung in The Phenomenology of Spirit. We describe childhood education as a ‘primary Bildung’ having the aim of ‘entering into the conceptual world’. This aim indicates that children can and are required to express their experiences in conceptual language. Finally, we critique the conceptual components of active learning from the (...) Hegelian point of view and suggest three alternative components: ‘child-educator interaction’, ‘understanding historical knowledge’, and ‘addressing concrete-abstract affairs.’ We suggest that the concept of active learning needs to be replaced by ‘Communicative-Interactive Learning (CIL)’. CIL takes both objectivity and subjectivity into account during the process of knowledge formation in education. (shrink)

This study aims to critique the concept of active learning in childhood education based on Hegelian Bildung. We have defined childhood education from the perspective of Hegel’s Bildung in The Phenomenology of Spirit. We describe childhood education as a ‘primary Bildung’ having the aim of ‘entering into the conceptual world’. This aim indicates that children can and are required to express their experiences in conceptual language. Finally, we critique the conceptual components of active learning from the (...) Hegelian point of view and suggest three alternative components: ‘child-educator interaction’, ‘understanding historical knowledge’, and ‘addressing concrete-abstract affairs.’ We suggest that the concept of active learning needs to be replaced by ‘Communicative-Interactive Learning (CIL)’. CIL takes both objectivity and subjectivity into account during the process of knowledge formation in education. (shrink)