644 research outputs found
The Mind in Motion
The Mind in Motion
Shayan Gates
Faculty Sponsor: Galen Johnson, Philosophy
The origin of most scientific disciplines can be traced back to a few philosophical insights posed by a few curious thinkers throughout time, and cognitive science is no exception.While intrigue has nearly always surrounded the human mind and its relation to the brain, validation of this relationship has not been so easy to come by, and there are still areas of contention during this time of advancement in neurological sciences and related technologies.
This topic is very broad (to say the least) so I decided to confine this paper to some of the philosophers whose work I enjoyed reading most during my time at URI. In this sense, it will be somewhat of a āGreatest Hitsā of my undergraduate career which, while certainly appealing to my nostalgic sensibilities, will also parlay nicely into medical school where I hope to become a neurologist. Some of the philosophers included in this project are Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, David Hume, John Locke, Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Renee Descartes and Plato (American Transcendentalists, Pragmatists, British Empiricists, Phenomenologists, and Rationalists).
Overall, there are four topics of discussion, and they pertain to Experience, Emotion, Memory, and Imagination. These will conclude with a fifth section written in the spirit of Pragmatism, which aims to sum up the overall value or takeaway from everything that was previously said. Ultimately, the goal is to create an interesting, yet palatable, discussion about the way our minds and brains work, and how knowing these things about ourselves can work to our benefit
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Exposing piaget's scheme: Empirical evidence for the ontogenesis of coordination in learning a mathematical concept
The combination of two methodological resources-natural-user interfaces (NUI) and multimodal learning analytics (MMLA)-is creating opportunities for educational researchers to empirically evaluate seminal models for the hypothetical emergence of concepts from situated sensorimotor activity. 76 participants (9-14 yo) solved tablet-based non-symbolic manipulation tasks designed to foster grounded meanings for the mathematical concept of proportional equivalence. Data gathered in task-based semi-structured clinical interviews included action logging, eye-gaze tracking, and videography. Successful task performance coincided with spontaneous appearance of stable dynamical gaze-path patterns soon followed by multimodal articulation of strategy. Significantly, gaze patterns included uncued non-salient screen locations. We present cumulative results to argue that these 'attentional anchors' mediated participants' problem solving. We interpret the findings as enabling us to revisit, support, refine, and elaborate on central claims of Piaget's theory of genetic epistemology and in particular his insistence on the role of situated motor-action coordination in the process of reflective abstraction
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Eye-tracking the emergence of attentional anchors in a mathematics learning tablet activity
Little is known about micro-processes by which sensorimotor interaction gives rise to conceptual development. Per embodiment theory, these micro-processes are mediated by dynamical attentional structures. Accordingly this study investigated eye-gaze behaviors during engagement in solving tablet-based bimanual manipulation tasks designed to foster proportional reasoning. Seventy-six elementary- and vocational-school students (9-15 yo) participated in individual task-based clinical interviews. Data gathered included action-logging, eye-tracking, and videography. Analyses revealed the emergence of stable eye-path gaze patterns contemporaneous with first enactments of effective manipulation and prior to verbal articulations of manipulation strategies. Characteristic gaze patterns included consistent or recurring attention to screen locations that bore non-salient stimuli or no stimuli at all yet bore invariant geometric relations to dynamical salient features. Arguably, this research validates empirically hypothetical constructs from constructivism, particularly reflective abstraction
Clinical application of ceramics in anterior cervical discectomy and fusion: A review and update
Study Design: Narrative review. Objectives: Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) is a reliable procedure, commonly used for cervical degenerative disc disease. For interbody fusions, autograft was the gold standard for decades; however, limited availability and donor site morbidities have led to a constant search for new materials. Clinically, it has been shown that calcium phosphate ceramics, including hydroxyapatite (HA) and tricalcium phosphate (TCP), are effective as osteoconductive materials and bone grafts. In this review, we present the current findings regarding the use of ceramics in ACDF. Methods: A review of the relevant literature examining the clinical use of ceramics in anterior cervical discectomy and fusion procedures was conducted using PubMed, OVID and Cochrane. Result: HA, coralline HA, sandwiched HA, TCP, and biphasic calcium phosphate ceramics were used in combination with osteoinductive materials such as bone marrow aspirate and various cages composed of poly-ether-ether-ketone (PEEK), fiber carbon, and titanium. Stand-alone ceramic spacers have been associated with fracture and cracks. Metallic cages such as titanium endure the risk of subsidence and migration. PEEK cages in combination with ceramics were shown to be a suitable substitute for autograft. Conclusion: None of the discussed options has demonstrated clear superiority over others, although direct comparisons are often difficult due to discrepancies in data collection and study methodologies. Future randomized clinical trials are warranted before definitive conclusions can be drawn. Ā© The Author(s) 2017
The use of variable coil pitch of helical tube on the hydro-thermal performance improvement
The use of helical tubes in heat transfer appliances is desirable due to their better heat transfer characteristics, but the higher pressure drop decreases the overall performance. The variation of pitch design of a helical tube is proposed to alleviate this situation so that the pitch number does not remain constant in the total tube length. A total of six variable pitch numbers with three different diameters are proposed and investigated on the thermal and fluid characteristics. To better understand the helical tube efficiency, PEC (performance evaluation criteria) is selected as a performance indicator in the present work and simulations are performed in a laminar regime (100 ā¤ Re ā¤ 1600) at a constant heat flux boundary condition using computational fluid dynamics. The numerical results show that variable radial pitch has higher effects on the overall performance than variable axial pitch, and it can intensify the helical tube performance by up to 10%. The results also indicate that increasing the tube diameter leads to heat transfer and friction factor increment while increasing the Reynolds number deteriorates the overall performance
Algorithm- Versus Human-Generated Academic Plans: Determining Optimality from Community College Articulation Agreements
We developed a low-fidelity prototype of a report that contains an
algorithmically-generated optimal academic plan. Optimal is defined as the
minimal set of community college courses that satisfy the transfer requirements
for multiple universities a student is preparing to apply to. We recruited 24
California community college transfer students to participate in a research
session, consisting of an experiment, survey, and interview. We experimentally
compared the prototype to ASSIST, California's official statewide database of
articulation agreement reports. Compared to students who used the prototype,
students assigned to use ASSIST reports to manually create an optimal academic
plan underperformed in optimality mistakes, time required, and usability
scores. Moving to our non-experimental results, a sizable minority of students
had a negative assessment of counselors' ability and willingness to manually
create optimal academic plans using ASSIST. Our last results revolved around
students' recommendations for supplemental software features to improve the
optimization prototype
A backward pre-stressing algorithm for efficient finite element implementation of in vivo material and geometrical parameters into fibril-reinforced mixture models of articular cartilage.
Classical continuum mechanics has been widely used for implementation of the material models of articular cartilage (AC) mainly with the aid of the finite element (FE) method, which, in many cases, considers the stress-free configuration as the initial configuration. On the contrary, the AC experimental tests typically begin with the pre-stressed state of both material and geometrical properties. Indeed, imposing the initial pre-stress onto AC models with the in vivo values as the initial state would result in nonphysiologically expansion of the FE mesh due to the soft nature of AC. This change in the model configuration can also affect the material behavior kinematically in the mixture models of cartilage due to the intrinsic compressibility of the tissue. Although several different fixed-point backward algorithms, as the most straightforward pre-stressing methods, have already been developed to incorporate these initial conditions into FE models iteratively, such methods focused merely on the geometrical parameters, and they omitted the material variations of the anisotropic mixture models of AC. To address this issue, we propose an efficient algorithm generalizing the backward schemes to restore stress-free conditions by optimizing both the involving variables, and we hypothesize that it can affect the results considerably. To this end, a comparative simulation was implemented on an advanced and validated multiphasic model by the new and conventional algorithms. The results are in support of the hypothesis, as in our illustrative general AC model, the material parameters experienced a maximum error of 16% comparing to the initial in vivo data when the older algorithm was employed, and it led to a maximum variation of 44% in the recorded stresses comparing to the results of the new method. We conclude that our methodology enhanced the model fidelity, and it is applicable in most of the existing FE solvers for future mixture studies with accurate stress distributions
Does sentence structure boost early word learning?:An artifical language learning study
This paper examines the semantic consequences of the presence and absence of the verbal particle in Hungarian sentences containing a verb of creation. Since these verbs are Definiteness-Effect verbs, the aspectual interpretation does not depend merely on the verbal particleās position ā or even presence ā in the sentence, as in other cases, but rather on the specific/non-specific interpretation of the object. The main claim of the paper is that the verbal particleās role in such sentences can be defined in terms of collectivity and distributivity: the Definiteness-Effect constructions ā the ones without verbal particle ā can only refer to collective events, and the non-Definiteness-Effect-constructions ā the ones containing a verbal particle ā can refer to both collective and distributive events
Evaluation of Benzimidazole Resistance in Haemonchus contortus Using Comparative PCR-RFLP Methods
Background: In order to deworm the ruminants especially of sheep in Iran, consumption of benzimiĀdazoles has more than 2 decades history and today farmers are using imidazothiazoles, macrocyclic lactones and mostly benzimidazole compounds (BZs) to treat infected farm animals. It has been demonstrated that the most common molecular mechanism leading to BZsresistance in Haemonchus contortus is a single mutation at amino acid 200 (phenylalanine to tyrosine) of the isotype 1 of beta tubulin gene. According to the report of such mutations in Iranian TeladorĀsagia circumcincta isolates with Restriction Site Created PCR-RFLP, we decided to evaluate the frequency of such mutations in H. contortus in three different geographical areas of Iran.Methodes: A total of 102 collected adult male H. contortus were evaluated with PCR-RFLP (usĀing PSP1406I as restriction enzyme). By means of a second step to compare function of different methods and to increase sensitivity of detection mechanism, a third of samples were examined by another PCR-RFLP method (using TaaI as restriction enzyme) and finally beta tubulin gene of two samples was sequenced.Results: All of samples were detected as BZss homozygote. Finally, beta tubulin gene sequencĀing of two samples showed no point mutation at codon 200.Conclusion: It seems that BZresistance of H. contortus in Iran is not a serious problem as anticiĀpated before
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