Barrier-breaking body movements in the after-school programme: Children's imitation through play

This article investigates how children learn body movements in informal social situations, and is based upon close observation and qualitative research interviews undertaken among eightand nine-year-old children in an after-school programme (ASP) in Oslo. The learning process is described and discussed in relation to the concepts of imitation, joint attention and turn-taking. The study shows that learning body movements is usual during child-managed activities in the ASP, and occurs frequently as imitation. The imitation process is characterized by joint attention and turn-taking. In best-friend groups, joint attention, characterized by shared involvement along with intuitive turn-taking, is predominant. In activity groups that come together occasionally, considerable initiative is required on the part of the imitator in order to become an active part of a mutual process. It is recommended to encourage child-managed activities in ASP, and emphasize the ASP’s complimentary role in contrast to the school

Neural oscillatory insight into the endogenous cognitive processes and inter-personal contingencies that drive infant attention and support joint action during early infant-caregiver interaction

Infants’ ability to engage in joint attention with others towards the end of the first year is fundamental to language acquisition and shared cognition. Despite this, our understanding of the endogenous cognitive mechanisms that drive infant attention during shared caregiver-infant interaction, and support dynamic inter-personal co-ordination is, at the moment, limited. Traditional approaches to joint attention development centred on understanding how caregivers didactically structure infant learning through ostensive communication. More recent perspectives, however, drawing on dynamic systems views of early cognition, have emphasised the role of fast-acting, multi-level, sensorimotor processes that operate across the dyad to support joint action and social learning. Newly developed micro-analysis approaches to studying early interaction have shown that infants use sensory cues to rapidly coordinate their attention with an adult partner, and statistical regularities in these cues are thought to extend infant attention and support word learning. To fully understand the contribution of joint interactions to early cognitive development however, we need to examine the mechanisms, endogenous to the infant, that support infant engagement and interpersonal contingency on a moment-by-moment basis. One way we can examine this is through the application of neurocognitive methods, such as electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, to studying the dynamics of naturalistic, free-flowing interactions. Analysing time-locked and continuous associations between infants’ neural activity, infant attention, and inter-dyadic behavioural coordination, this thesis assesses the sub-second cognitive processes that influence how infants allocate their attention during triadic caregiver-infant play. First, neural evidence is presented to show that, whilst infants do not play a proactive role in creating episodes of mutual attention, they are sensitive to when their gaze is followed by an adult partner. Second, extended infant attention episodes are shown to be influenced, jointly, by attentional processes endogenous to the infant and reactive modulations in caregiver behaviour in response to changes in infant attention and cognitive engagement. Finally, the applicability of continuous methods to assessing speech-brain tracking by infants to their caregivers’ speech signal during naturalistic interactions is examined, and the role of behaviour-brain entrainment in creating and maintaining episodes of joint attention considered. Discussion focusses on the contribution of the findings to our understanding of active learning processes that operate across the dyad during early interaction, and that support the development of shared cognition. Models of early language learning in the context of the findings are considered, and directions for future work put forward

Tablets for two: how dual tablets can facilitate other-awareness and communication in learning disabled children with autism

Learning-disabled children with autism (LDA) are impaired in other-awareness, joint attention and imitation, with a poor prognosis for developing language competence. However, better joint attention and imitation skills are predictors of increased language ability. Our study demonstrates that a collaborative activity delivered on a novel dual-tablet configuration (two wifi-linked tablets) facilitates active other-awareness, incorporating imitation and communicative behaviour, in 8 LDA boys with limited or no language, aged 5 - 12 years. LDA children did a picture-sequencing activity using single and linked dual tablets, partnered by an adult or by an LDA peer. Overall, the dual-tablet configuration generated significantly more active other-awareness than children sharing a single tablet. Active other-awareness was observed in LDA peer partnerships using dual tablets, behaviour absent when peer partnerships shared a single tablet. Dual tablets facilitated more communicative behaviour in adult-child partnerships than single tablets. Hence, supporting collaborative activities in LDA children can facilitate other-awareness and communicative behaviour and adult and peer partnerships make different, but essential contributions to social-cognitive development through the collaborative process

FOREIGN LANGUAGE ABSORPTION FOR ELEMENTARY STUDENTS THROUGH ENGLISH NARRATIVE TEXT

The use of narrative text is used to increase understanding of English for elementary  students who participate in this joint learning activity. The use of learning materials in schools is also used to help students better understand the lessons in their schools. The results of observations made by the author before starting research show that students lack motivation in learning English because they rarely use it actively in everyday life. Therefore, activities are filled with involving motoric activities that can attract their attention. The results of the activities were very positive, including students becoming more active language learners, having good learning motivation, and being confident in using simple English expressions to their peers

Converting Your Thoughts to Texts: Enabling Brain Typing via Deep Feature Learning of EEG Signals

An electroencephalography (EEG) based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) enables people to communicate with the outside world by interpreting the EEG signals of their brains to interact with devices such as wheelchairs and intelligent robots. More specifically, motor imagery EEG (MI-EEG), which reflects a subjects active intent, is attracting increasing attention for a variety of BCI applications. Accurate classification of MI-EEG signals while essential for effective operation of BCI systems, is challenging due to the significant noise inherent in the signals and the lack of informative correlation between the signals and brain activities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network based learning framework that affords perceptive insights into the relationship between the MI-EEG data and brain activities. We design a joint convolutional recurrent neural network that simultaneously learns robust high-level feature presentations through low-dimensional dense embeddings from raw MI-EEG signals. We also employ an Autoencoder layer to eliminate various artifacts such as background activities. The proposed approach has been evaluated extensively on a large- scale public MI-EEG dataset and a limited but easy-to-deploy dataset collected in our lab. The results show that our approach outperforms a series of baselines and the competitive state-of-the- art methods, yielding a classification accuracy of 95.53%. The applicability of our proposed approach is further demonstrated with a practical BCI system for typing.Comment: 10 page