Learning from multimedia: the locus of modality effects

Research in educational psychology has focused on facilitating learning by using two presentation modalities (auditory and visual) to convey information. Learning is theorized to improve through an increase in perceptual information flow. I hypothesized that presenting information in two modalities might also provide additional benefits that occur after information is perceived, and while it is being processed for learning. The present study explored whether perceptual effects and cognitive effects of multimedia presentation can be separated by presenting auditory and visual information sequentially or simultaneously. During simultaneous presentation, the typical multimedia effect (that is, facilitating learning by presenting information in two modalities) did not occur, suggesting that the multimedia effect might depend upon more than perceptual effects. Moreover, the manipulation showed significant effects of presentation type during sequential presentation, suggesting that effects previously thought to be a result of reducing perceptual overlap might actually occur after perception. Based on the results of this study, I recommend that information designers reconsider the sources assumed to influence the multimedia learning effect. This would have implications for determining the optimal presentation of information.M.S.Committee Chair: Catrambone, Richard; Committee Member: Rogers, Wendy; Committee Member: Walker, Bruc

Combating False Negatives in Adversarial Imitation Learning

In adversarial imitation learning, a discriminator is trained to differentiate agent episodes from expert demonstrations representing the desired behavior. However, as the trained policy learns to be more successful, the negative examples (the ones produced by the agent) become increasingly similar to expert ones. Despite the fact that the task is successfully accomplished in some of the agent's trajectories, the discriminator is trained to output low values for them. We hypothesize that this inconsistent training signal for the discriminator can impede its learning, and consequently leads to worse overall performance of the agent. We show experimental evidence for this hypothesis and that the 'False Negatives' (i.e. successful agent episodes) significantly hinder adversarial imitation learning, which is the first contribution of this paper. Then, we propose a method to alleviate the impact of false negatives and test it on the BabyAI environment. This method consistently improves sample efficiency over the baselines by at least an order of magnitude.Comment: This is an extended version of the student abstract published at 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligenc

Preliminary study of illumination levels in university and elementary classrooms in Campina Grande, Brazil

The purpose of our study was to provide preliminary data on light levels used in university and elementary school classrooms in Campina Grande, Brazil with the aim of providing Brazilian politicians and educators with data to support continued educational initiatives in northeast Brazil. The data were gathered at the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) and compared with a sample of classrooms at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in Stillwater Oklahoma. The results indicated that many seats within UFCG classrooms met or exceeded minimum standards but significant numbers did not. Moreover, compared to classrooms at OSU, UFCG classrooms are not as highly illuminated and the Brazilian elementary classrooms examined did not meet minimum illumination standards.Peer reviewedPsychologyZoolog