Discovering Schema-based Action Sequences through Play in Situated Humanoid Robots

Exercising sensorimotor and cognitive functions allows humans, including infants, to interact with the environment and objects within it. In particular, during everyday activities, infants continuously enrich their repertoire of actions, and by playing, they experimentally plan such actions in sequences to achieve desired goals. The latter, reflected as perceptual target states, are built on previously acquired experiences shaped by infants to predict their actions. Imitating this, in developmental robotics, we seek methods that allow autonomous embodied agents with no prior knowledge to acquire information about the environment. Like infants, robots that actively explore the surroundings and manipulate proximate objects are capable of learning. Their understanding of the environment develops through the discovery of actions and their association with the resulting perceptions in the world. We extend the development of Dev-PSchema, a schema-based, open-ended learning system, and examine the infant-like discovery process of new generalised skills while engaging with objects in free-play using an iCub robot. Our experiments demonstrate the capability of Dev-PSchema to utilise the newly discovered skills to solve user-defined goals beyond its past experiences. The robot can generate and evaluate sequences of interdependent high-level actions to form potential solutions and ultimately solve complex problems towards tool-use

Developing an ontological sandbox : investigating multi-level modelling’s possible Metaphysical Structures

One of the central concerns of the multi-level modelling (MLM) community is the hierarchy of classifications that appear in conceptual models; what these are, how they are linked and how they should be organised into levels and modelled. Though there has been significant work done in this area, we believe that it could be enhanced by introducing a systematic way to investigate the ontological nature and requirements that underlie the frameworks and tools proposed by the community to support MLM (such as Orthogonal Classification Architecture and Melanee). In this paper, we introduce a key component for the investigation and understanding of the ontological requirements, an ontological sandbox. This is a conceptual framework for investigating and comparing multiple variations of possible ontologies – without having to commit to any of them – isolated from a full commitment to any foundational ontology. We discuss the sandbox framework as well as walking through an example of how it can be used to investigate a simple ontology. The example, despite its simplicity, illustrates how the constructional approach can help to expose and explain the metaphysical structures used in ontologies, and so reveal the underlying nature of MLM levelling

A learning theory approach to students' misconceptions in calculus

Bibliography: leaves 129-138.This study analyses students' errors in calculus through the lens of learning theories. The subjects in this study were 117 students enrolled in a calculus course for students from disadvantaged educational backgrounds at the University of Cape Town. A coding scheme to categorise the errors that these students made in the final examination was developed. This categorisation was supported by error data generated through the administration of a conceptual test and follow-up interviews. The pattern of errors in the coding scheme suggests that the students' perception of algebra is largely that of a "game of letters". As a result of this their construction of calculus knowledge is based on the rehearsal of algorithmic procedures. Their errors indicate that they develop linking and extending mechanisms to deal with the multiplicity of rules that are generated from this process of rehearsal

An investigation of parents' conceptual development in the context of dialogue with a community teacher

PhD Thesi

Investigating Functional Thinking Processes that Impact on Function Composition Problems in Indonesia

Background: Every student has the ability to think, especially the ability to think when solving mathematical problems. The teacher must explore this ability to determine student understanding of the material being taught. Functions are important material because they are the basis for understanding algebra. The way of thinking about function is called functional thinking. Objective: This study aims to investigate the functional thinking process of students in solving mathematical problems based on the APOS theory. Design: This type of research is qualitative through an exploratory descriptive approach. Setting and participants: Two out of 44 university students who can communicate fluently when working on questions using the think-aloud and interview methods. Data analysis: Analysis of students’ functional thinking processes using the triangulation method, namely comparing think-aloud data, student answer sheets, and interview results. Results: This study found two ways of student functional thinking processes, namely semi-compositional functional thinking processes and compositional functional thinking processes, where students can generalise the relationship between quantity variations in the form of a composition function. Conclusion: This study investigates the functional thinking process of students in exploring the understanding of the concept of function so that students are expected to be able to represent and generalise function forms

Leave truth alone: on deflationism and contextualism

According to deflationism, grasp of the concept of truth consists in nothing more than a disposition to accept a priori (non-paradoxical) instances of the schema:(DS) It is true that p if and only if pAccording to contextualism, the same expression with the same meaning might, on different occasions of use, express different propositions bearing different truth-conditions (where this does not result from indexicality and the like).On this view, what is expressed in an utterance depends in a non-negligible way on the circumstances. Charles Travis claims that contextualism shows that ‘deflationism is a mistake’, that truth is a more substantive notion than deflationism allows. In this paper, I examine Travis's arguments in support of this ‘inflationary’ claim and argue that they are unsuccessful

A narrative in three acts: Using combinations of image schemas to model events

Image schemas have been proposed as conceptual building blocks corresponding to the hypothesised most fundamental embodied experiences. We formally investigate how combinations of image schemas (or 'image schematic profiles') can model essential aspects of events, and discuss benefits for artificial intelligence and cognitive systems research, in particular concerning the role of such basic events in concept formation. More specifically, as exemplary illustrations and proof of concept the image schemas Object, Contact, and Path are combined to form the events Blockage, Bouncing, and Caused-Movement. Additionally, an outline of a proposed conceptual hierarchy of levels of modelling for image schemas and similar cognitive theories is given