Supporting the learner's playfulness and creativity as learning mechanisms: design specifications for interactive interfaces in arts museums.

The goal of this research is to present design specifications for (digital) interfaces that intend to teach artistic concepts to learners through their playful and creative engagement, and are intended to be situated in arts museums. The aim of such an interface is that learners can develop insights in regard to presented artistic concepts through their playful or creative engagement. The proposed benefit of insight development as a mechanism for learning about the creative arts is that it allows the learner to discover uses of the presented materials that are self-relevant, therefore demonstrating utility in regard to their subjective cognitive style. Artistic concepts are defined as a subjective idea for art creation that an artist has developed through the qualitative and subjective attention to his environment, which he then expresses using his creative process into an artefact. This dissertation presents a "Cognitive Model for Learning through Creative Engagement with Artefacts" that delineates how perception and interaction mediates learning during creative activities. This process operates on two principles that describe how a learner’s perception of, and, interaction with, man-made objects are processed in the human brain, namely as action representations, or as intentional agents. The way that a learner’s playful and creative engagement operates as a mode of learning is explained on the basis of the available literature in the cognitive and neurosciences. Learning is understood in this explanation as a process of formation and consolidation of insights in Long-Term Memory, which in turn informs the changes in the behaviour of the learner. In order to further clarify how play and creativity activities facilitate learning, children’s museums that are specialized in the arts have been inquired about their education practices. They produce theme-based play exhibitions, and have developed an expertise in conveying an exhibition’s theme through active, experiential and playful means. For the purpose of demonstrating how installations can be designed that teach an artistic concept by means of a learner‘s creative engagement, two conceptual interfaces have been designed and discussed. One teaches “Len Lye’s Discovery Process for Novel Figures of Motion“, and the other teaches the “Matisse’s Composition Process behind his Paper Cut-Outs“

Méthodes d'apprentissage inspirées de l'humain pour un tuteur cognitif artificiel

Les systèmes tuteurs intelligents sont considérés comme un remarquable concentré de technologies qui permettent un processus d'apprentissage. Ces systèmes sont capables de jouer le rôle d'assistants voire même de tuteur humain. Afin d'y arriver, ces systèmes ont besoin de maintenir et d'utiliser une représentation interne de l'environnement. Ainsi, ils peuvent tenir compte des évènements passés et présents ainsi que de certains aspects socioculturels. Parallèlement à l'évolution dynamique de l'environnement, un agent STI doit évoluer en modifiant ses structures et en ajoutant de nouveaux phénomènes. Cette importante capacité d'adaptation est observée dans le cas de tuteurs humains. Les humains sont capables de gérer toutes ces complexités à l'aide de l'attention et du mécanisme de conscience (Baars B. J., 1983, 1988), et (Sloman, A and Chrisley, R., 2003). Toutefois, reconstruire et implémenter des capacités humaines dans un agent artificiel est loin des possibilités actuelles de la connaissance de même que des machines les plus sophistiquées. Pour réaliser un comportement humanoïde dans une machine, ou simplement pour mieux comprendre l'adaptabilité et la souplesse humaine, nous avons à développer un mécanisme d'apprentissage proche de celui de l'homme. Ce présent travail décrit quelques concepts d'apprentissage fondamentaux implémentés dans un agent cognitif autonome, nommé CTS (Conscious Tutoring System) développé dans le GDAC (Dubois, D., 2007). Nous proposons un modèle qui étend un apprentissage conscient et inconscient afin d'accroître l'autonomie de l'agent dans un environnement changeant ainsi que d'améliorer sa finesse. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Apprentissage, Conscience, Agent cognitif, Codelet

The Pharmacological Significance of Mechanical Intelligence and Artificial Stupidity

By drawing on the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler, the phenomena of mechanical (a.k.a. artificial, digital, or electronic) intelligence is explored in terms of its real significance as an ever-repeating threat of the reemergence of stupidity (as cowardice), which can be transformed into knowledge (pharmacological analysis of poisons and remedies) by practices of care, through the outlook of what researchers describe equivocally as “artificial stupidity”, which has been identified as a new direction in the future of computer science and machine problem solving as well as a new difficulty to be overcome. I weave together of web of “artificial stupidity”, which denotes the mechanic (1), the human (2), or the global (3). With regards to machine intelligence, artificial stupidity refers to: 1a) Weak A.I. or a rhetorical inversion of designating contemporary practices of narrow task-based procedures by algorithms in opposition to “True A.I.”; 1b) the restriction or employment of constraints that weaken the effectiveness of A.I., which is to say a “dumbing-down” of A.I. by intentionally introducing mistakes by programmers for safety concerns and human interaction purposes; 1c) the failure of machines to perform designated tasks; 1d) a lack of a noetic capacity, which is a lack of moral and ethical discretion; 1e) a lack of causal reasoning (true intelligence) as opposed to statistical associative “curve fitting”; or 2) the phenomenon of increasing human “stupidity” or drive-based behaviors, which is considered as the degradation of human intelligence and/or “intelligent human behavior” through technics; and finally, 3) the global phenomenon of increasing entropy due to a black-box economy of closed systems and/or industry consolidation

Repositioning Neuroaesthetics Through Contemporary Art

Neuroaesthetics has tended to privilege neuroscientific understandings of art, eliding centuries of art historical research on perception and culture. Instead, this dissertation extends neuroaesthetic research to examine the specific social, sensorial and perceptual processes occurring as artworks are encountered in exhibition contexts. How does neuroaesthetic perception operate in contemporary artworks? What modes of cognitive address are involved? How can neuroaesthetic engagement facilitate embodied knowledges? This dissertation first inquires into the neuroaesthetic literature in order to establish its neuroscientific foundations, and then advances a perceptual standpoint stemming from art and art history. Drawing from feminist theories of embodiment, I reposition neuroaesthetics to incorporate art historical inquiries into body and mind through direct engagement with art. I argue that such a revised neuroaesthic perception must take into account post-humanist troublings of nature/culture dichotomies. I also suggest that the paradigm for embodied perception that has emerged from both cognitive neuroscience and affect theory can expand neuroaesthetic understanding. My investigation has led me to first-hand experience as a research subject of neuroscience experiments, which show that current fMRI contexts in fact delimit the perception of art and inhibit possible neuroaesthetic significance. Instead, I undertake neuroaesthetic research in exhibition contexts where self-reflexive awareness facilitates insights into perception and cognition that are inaccessible within the epistemological conditions of neuroscience labs. The first case study examines how an installation by the FASTWÜRMS collective reveals cognitive processes of abduction by inviting navigation through an infinitely complex web of objects and images. Turning from association to visual cognition, I consider how Olafur Eliasson’s immersive light installations manipulate colour perception thereby facilitating critical awareness of techno-mediated environments. Third, my analysis of a conceptual work by Kristin Lucas explores how the performance of digital and legal technology invites embodied transformations. Finally, I examine how the affective tensions produced in a video by Omer Fast activate an awareness of intersubjective communication that corresponds with recent neuroscientific developments in mirror-neuron theory. By taking contemporary artworks as its focus, the dissertation extends neuroaesthetic inquiry to demonstrate contextual understandings of how the cognitive processes of art constitute physiological engagements between body, brain and world

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Knowledge and Action

Human Geography; Psychology Research; Social Theory; Knowledge - Discours

Memory-based preferential choice in large option spaces

Whether adding songs to a playlist or groceries to a shopping basket, everyday decisions often require us to choose between an innumerable set of options. Laboratory studies of preferential choice have made considerable progress in describing how people navigate fixed sets of options. Yet, questions remain about how well this generalises to more complex, everyday choices. In this thesis, I ask how people navigate large option spaces, focusing particularly on how long-term memory supports decisions. In the first project, I explore how large option spaces are structured in the mind. A topic model trained on the purchasing patterns of consumers uncovered an intuitive set of themes that centred primarily around goals (e.g., tomatoes go well in a salad), suggesting that representations are geared to support action. In the second project, I explore how such representations are queried during memory-based decisions, where options must be retrieved from memory. Using a large dataset of over 100,000 online grocery shops, results revealed that consumers query multiple systems of associative memory when determining what choose next. Attending to certain knowledge sources, as estimated by a cognitive model, predicted important retrieval errors, such as the propensity to forget or add unwanted products. In the final project, I ask how preferences could be learned and represented in large option spaces, where most options are untried. A cognitive model of sequential decision making is proposed, which learns preferences over choice attributes, allowing for the generalisation of preferences to unseen options, by virtue of their similarity to previous choices. This model explains reduced exploration patterns behaviour observed in the supermarket and preferential choices in more controlled laboratory settings. Overall, this suggests that consumers depend on associative systems in long-term memory when navigating large spaces of options, enabling inferences about the conceptual properties and subjective value of novel options