21 research outputs found
Talent in the taxi: a model system for exploring expertise
While there is widespread interest in and admiration of individuals with exceptional talents, surprisingly little is known about the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning talent, and indeed how talent relates to expertise. Because many talents are first identified and nurtured in childhood, it can be difficult to determine whether talent is innate, can be acquired through extensive practice or can only be acquired in the presence of the developing brain. We sought to address some of these issues by studying healthy adults who acquired expertise in adulthood. We focused on the domain of memory and used licensed London taxi drivers as a model system. Taxi drivers have to learn the layout of 25ā000 streets in London and the locations of thousands of places of interest, and pass stringent examinations in order to obtain an operating licence. Using neuropsychological assessment and structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we addressed a range of key questions: in the context of a fully developed brain and an average IQ, can people acquire expertise to an exceptional level; what are the neural signatures, both structural and functional, associated with the use of expertise; does expertise change the brain compared with unskilled control participants; does it confer any cognitive advantages, and similarly, does it come at a cost to other functions? By studying retired taxi drivers, we also consider what happens to their brains and behaviour when experts stop using their skill. Finally, we discuss how the expertise of taxi drivers might relate to the issue of talent and innate abilities. We suggest that exploring talent and expertise in this manner could have implications for education, rehabilitation of patients with cognitive impairments, understanding individual differences and possibly conditions such as autism where exceptional abilities can be a feature
Facial Electromyography-based Adaptive Virtual Reality Gaming for Cognitive Training.
Cognitive training has shown promising results for delivering improvements in human cognition related to attention, problem solving,
reading comprehension and information retrieval. However,
two frequently cited problems in cognitive training literature are a
lack of user engagement with the training programme, and a failure
of developed skills to generalise to daily life. This paper introduces
a new cognitive training (CT) paradigm designed to address these
two limitations by combining the benefits of gamification, virtual
reality (VR), and affective adaptation in the development of an engaging,
ecologically valid, CT task. Additionally, it incorporates
facial electromyography (EMG) as a means of determining user affect
while engaged in the CT task. This information is then utilised
to dynamically adjust the gameās difficulty in real-time as users play,
with the aim of leading them into a state of flow. Affect recognition
rates of 64.1% and 76.2%, for valence and arousal respectively, were
achieved by classifying a DWT-Haar approximation of the input
signal using kNN. The affect-aware VR cognitive training intervention
was then evaluated with a control group of older adults. The
results obtained substantiate the notion that adaptation techniques
can lead to greater feelings of competence and a more appropriate
challenge of the userās skills