Kunskap genom bilder

The origin of this dissertation is an investigation of an academic course, Graphic Arts and Design for students of natural and social sciences. The benefits of attending the class were an increased ability to solve problems, new and different ways to observe the environment, better self confidence, and a higher esteem of the working process. The participants considered that the artistic activities affected their academic courses since the exercises were seen as creative and meaningful, which led to a changed attitude towards their studies. The exercises developed a comprehensive view and an ability to concentrate, which were conducive to problem solving. Research about transfer effects indicate a connection between artistic skills and academic results, but has found it impossible to state scientifically. In this dissertation these observations are the point of departure, with focus on a discussion of the act of drawing in connection with the cognitive approach of pragmatism, Michael Polanyi¹s concept of tacit knowing, and some theories on the function of metaphors. The result is an attempt at a theory of knowledge that includes artistic experiences. Creating a picture means turning imagination into a concrete object. This does not indicate a depiction of an idea, but a direction of imagination into an articulation other than verbal thoughts or ideas. The picture shows a moment in the ongoing process of imagination. The act of drawing transforms hitherto unarticulated forms of experience into artefacts possible to reflect upon. This act of drawing often requires that seemingly incompatible categories of experience are being connected, and the world thus being articulated in new shapes. This is done by overcoming the resistance to leave old and familiar categories. The range of imagination increases and, with more alternatives at hand and an enhanced ability to formulate and solve problems, the world appears more complex. Such a process entails that when the world is accepted in a new articulation, knowledge has grown and the relation to the world has changed

I närvarons och frånvarons text. En narratologisk analys av en skriven historia.

En hypotetiskt och teoretiskt utformad analys av historieskrivning i relation till läsarens samt textens villkor. Det empiriska materialet är begränsat till Peter Englunds debutroman "Poltava", och det teoretiska ramverket, i syftet eklektiskt, influerat av hermeneutik, dekonstruktion, post-klassisk narratologi, kognitionsvetenskap mm

Syntolken lånar ut sina ögon till den som inte ser

教育実践報

Lost in the Supermarket: Studying the effects of familiarity on consumer decision making

What are the effects of being familiar with a supermarket? Many of us do most of our shopping in one supermarket. By doing so we memorize the location of products and different categories in the supermarket. By memorizing we are able to reduce the amount of time and effort needed to go grocery shopping. Participants’ eye movements are recorded when shopping three products (pasta, yoghurt and cereal) in their regular supermarket. Then participants are moved to an unfamiliar supermarket within the same chain and asked to shop from the same three categories. This is used to compare how they evaluate and choose products between supermarkets. A control group familiar with the second supermarket is also recruited to determine if the different shelves cause for a difference in grocery shopping. By measuring the total time, evaluation time, number of products focused on and the amount of return fixations to a product in front of a shelf the study aims to see if familiarity with a supermarket causes participants to be faster and use less effort when choosing a product. It is also investigated whether familiar participants feel more satisficed with their grocery shopping, feel that making a choice was easier and whether they do better choices in a familiar supermarket. The results indicate that participants did make faster decisions in their familiar supermarket and seemed to use less effort. But the data did not indicate it with a high generalizability. It would appear that shopping in an unfamiliar supermarket affects the amount of time and effort consumers need to invest in choosing a product but participants do not perceive it as being more difficult or less satisfying. Participants did not report a difference in satisfaction between supermarkets nor did they seem to choose a better product in the familiar supermarket

Human Preference and Fractal Dimension

The objective of this study is to assess any connections between the fractal dimension of edges in images of pastoral landscapes in Sweden and preference rating of the images and preference ratings for the edge images respectively. 23 participants volunteered for the trial. The mean age was 29,95 years, six of the subjects where women. The study consited of analysis of fractal dimension in images of pastoral landscapes from an earlier study and an experiment with human participants. The subjects estimated their preference for manipulated images, edge images, of pastoral landscapes. Their results where compared to results from the earlier study on non manipulated images. The result show that significant connection exists and in a way that correlates well with earlier studies. The edge images did not have significant correlation. Results for the edge images: (rs = 0.015, p<0.0001), and the original images: (rs = -0.853, p<0.0001). Furthermore the study discuss the concept “preference” and however that concept needs to be more defined if it is to be useful.

The phenomenology of eye movement intentions and their disruption in goal-directed actions

Many modern psychological theories still assume that humans know about themselves to a wide and accurate extent, in line with the early classical cognitive frameworks. Other competing frameworks, such as dynamic cognition, propose that intelligent behavior can arise from an interaction between the brain, body, and environment, without the need of manipulating explicitly represented knowledge-states. Intentions, i.e. the dispositions to do a specific action, are one such type of mental events that is assumed to be internally monitored to an accurate extent, and is heavily involved in theories modeling goal-directed action. The dynamic framework suggests that there is no reason to assume that humans would naturally have high introspective access to intentions, or are in need of them when making goal-directed actions in the first place. In this study, the extent to which we monitor eye movement intentions, i.e. the intentions to shift one’s gaze towards a specific location, and whether they can be expressed in conscious experience, is investigated. A forced-choice decision task was developed where a pair of faces moved systematically across the screen. In some trials, the pair of faces moved additionally as soon as the participants attempted to gaze at the face which was in the front of the movement direction, such that the participants would never see the ’front’ face within the center of their gaze. The results of the experiment suggest that humans in general do not monitor their eye movement intentions in a way that allows for mismatches to be consciously experienced and expressed. It was also possible to bias participants into not choosing the alternative that escaped the center of their gaze, if both faces were highly attractive, and doing so without the participants being aware of the manipulation. The results suggest that oculomotor control is another cognitive domain that humans have low access to, and that theoretical models that assume intentions to be central in goal-directed action need to be revised

Measuring the noticing of an unexpected event in Magical Garden with a Teachable Agent using Eye-Tracking

Scientific views on what children are capable of have been revised through history again and again, usually when new methods of studying children’s capabilities are presented. What has often been concluded is that children are capable of more than what was previously thought. New technology has introduced a genre of educational games which utilize the captivating power of computer games which have shown a positive effect on learning and motivation. In this study, the educational game Magical Garden was used as a platform to train, teach, and test number sense. The pedagogical instrument Teachable Agent (TA) is a part of Magical Garden’s design which utilizes the protégé effect. A new method of measuring number sense, detecting an “unexpected event” by attending to it, is pro-posed and tested. The unexpected event was a tree elevator malfunction. The purpose of the unexpected event was to create a task where only the children who were attentive and knew which branch the elevator would go to would react to and detect the unexpected event. A model of detection of the unexpected event, looking back at the correct branch after the elevator passed the correct one, was proposed. Eye-tracking was used as the method of capturing detections of the unexpected event, as well as measuring the interaction between the children and the TA during the unexpected event. In this study, 42 preschoolers participated. The results show that children attend the TA significantly more when the TA was in charge of the decisions in the game. This indicates that preschoolers understand that the TA was in charge. The model of detection used in this study was not comprehensive. However, detecting an unexpected event could still be a promising method of measuring number sense. Therefore, future research could utilize this method to unveil more exciting capabilities of children with a more inclusive model of detection.Vetenskapliga synsätt på vad barn kan är kapabla till att klara av har reviderats om och om igen genom historien, oftast i samband med att nya metoder som undersöker barns förmågor uppkommit. Barn verkar gång på gång klara av mer än vad man tidigare hade trott. Lärspel utnyttjar datorspelens fängslande kraft, och har visat ha en positiv effekt för lärande och motivationen. I denna uppsats, kommer lärspelet Magical Garden användas som plattform för att träna, lära ut och testa förskolebarns taluppfattning. Det pedagogiska instrumentet Teachable Agent (TA) är en intrikat del av Magical Gardens design som försöker facilitera "protégé effect". I denna uppsats introduceras och testas en ny metod för att mäta taluppfattning, upptäcka en oväntad händelse genom att rikta uppmärksamhet mot händelsen. Den oväntade händelsen i spelet är att korghissen i ett träd åker fel. Den oväntade händelsen är utformad så att endast barn med tillräckligt god taluppfattning förstår att hissen åker till fel våning och kan uppmärksamma att hissen åker fel. Den modell som föreslogs var att barnen skulle uppmärksamma den korrekta våningen som hissen skulle stannat vid när de hade upptäckt att hissen åkte fel. En ögonrörelsekamera användes för att fånga upptäckterna och även för att mäta interaktionen mellan TA och barnen. Ett ögonrörelseexperiment utfördes på 42 förskolebarn på respektives förskola. Resultaten visade att barnen tittade i större utsträckning på TA när TAn styrde i spelet. En slutsats som kan dras från detta resultat är att förskolebarnen verkade förstå att det var TA som styrde när den styrde. Modellen för att upptäcka den oväntade händelsen var inte heltäckande. Men att upptäcka något oväntat kan fortfarande vara en lovande metod för att mäta taluppfattning. Därför borde framtida forskning använda denna metod för att avslöja fler förmågor hos barn och skapa en mer inkluderande modell för vad en upptäckt av något oväntat kan vara

MAIA: The role of innate behaviors when picking flowers in Minecraft with Q-learning

Recent advances in reinforcement learning research has achieved human level performance in playing video games (Mnih et al., 2015). This inspired me to understand the methods of reinforcement learning (RL) and investigate whether there is any basis for those methods in neurobiology and animal learning theories. The current study shows how RL is based on theories of animal conditioning and that there is solid evidence for neurobiological correlates with RL algorithms, primarily in the basal ganglia complex. This motivated a simple perceptron-based model of the basal ganglia called Q-tron, which utilizes the Q-learning algorithm. Additionally, I wanted to explore the hypothesis that adding an innate behavior to a Q-learning agent would increase performance. Thus four different agents were tasked with picking red flowers in the video game Minecraft where performance was measured as quantity of actions needed to pick a flower. A “pure” Q-learner called PQ used only the Q- tron model. MAIA (Minecraft Artificial Intelligence Agent) used the Q-tron model together with an innate behavior causing it to try picking when it saw red. Two mechanisms of the innate behavior were tested, creating MAIA1 and MAIA2, respectively. The fourth agent called random walker (RW) chose actions at random and acted as a baseline performance measure. We show that both MAIA versions have better performance than PQ, and MAIA1 has performance comparable to RW. Additionally, we show a difference in performance between MAIA1 and MAIA2 and argue that this shows the importance of investigations into the precise mechanisms underlying innate behaviors in animals in order to understand learning in general