823 research outputs found
Teaching by art therapy
AbstractCombining design with music and photography can unbound imagination, improve memory and thinking skills and achieve specific school competences. Knowing and using groups of letters (ce, ci, ge, gi, che, chi, ghe, ghi) is a touchstone for primary students in Romania.. We applied a combined art therapy program (photography, music, drawing) to a group of 2nd grade students (N = 36, average age = 9.25 years) out of which nine pupils had SEN, with the aim to improve the recognition of these groups of letters. A knowledge test designed for the 2nd grade was used pre and post intervention. We assumed that by using the combined arts we shall improve the knowledge and use of groups of letters and increase the integration of pupils with SEN. As expected, we have observed an increase in the qualifiers from 44.5% to 89%, for all children, including those with SEN. These pilot findings encourage the wider use of diverse teaching materials (music, film) for a variety of topics, e.g. mathematical sciences
Current-induced magnetic vortex core switching in a Permalloy nanodisk
We report on the switching of a magnetic vortex core in a sub-micron
Permalloy disk, induced by a short current pulse applied in the film plane.
Micromagnetic simulations including the adiabatic and non-adiabatic spin-torque
terms are used to investigate the current-driven magnetization dynamics. We
predict that a core reversal can be triggered by current bursts a tenth of a
nanosecond long. The vortex core reversal process is found to be the same as
when an external field pulse is applied. The control of a vortex core's
orientation using current pulses introduces the technologically relevant
possibility to address individual nanomagnets within dense arrays.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure
Gaze following, gaze reading, and word learning in children at-risk for autism
We investigated gaze following abilities as a prerequisite for word learning, in a population expected to manifest a wide range of individual variability – children with a family history of autism. Three-year-olds with or without a family history of autism took part in a word-learning task that required following gaze to find the correct referent of a novel word. Using an eye-tracker to monitor children’s gaze behavior we show that the ability to follow an adult’s gaze was necessary but not sufficient for successful word learning. Those children that had poor social and communicative skills could follow gaze to the correct object, but did not then learn the word associated with that object. These findings shed light on the conditions that lead to successful or less successful word learning in typical and atypical populations
Failure to learn from feedback underlies word learning difficulties in toddlers at risk for autism
Children’s assignment of novel words to nameless objects, over objects
whose names they know (mutual exclusivity; ME) has been described
as a driving force for vocabulary acquisition. Despite their ability to use
ME to fast-map words (Preissler & Carey, 2005), children with autism
show impaired language acquisition. We aimed to address this puzzle
by building on studies showing that correct referent selection using
ME does not lead to word learning unless ostensive feedback is
provided on the child’s object choice (Horst & Samuelson, 2008). We
found that although toddlers aged 2;0 at risk for autism can use ME to
choose the correct referent of a word, they do not benefit from feedback
for long-term retention of the word–object mapping. Further, their
difficulty using feedback is associated with their smaller receptive
vocabularies. We propose that difficulties learning from social feedback,
not lexical principles, limits vocabulary building during development
in children at risk for autism
Infants learn what they want to learn: responding to infant pointing leads to superior learning
The majority of current developmental models prioritise a pedagogical approach to knowledge acquisition in infancy, in which infants play a relatively passive role as recipients of information. In view of recent evidence, demonstrating that infants use pointing to express interest and solicit information from adults, we set out to test whether giving the child the leading role in deciding what information to receive leads to better learning. Sixteen-month-olds were introduced to pairs of novel objects and, once they had pointed to an object, were shown a function for either the object they had chosen, or the object they had ignored. Ten minutes later, infants replicated the functions of chosen objects significantly more than those of un-chosen objects, despite having been equally visually attentive during demonstrations on both types of objects. These results show that offering information in response to infants’ communicative gestures leads to superior learning (Experiment 1) and that this difference in performance is due to learning being facilitated when infants’ pointing was responded to, not hindered when their pointing was ignored (Experiment 2), highlighting the importance of infants’ own active engagement in acquiring information
Tomographic reconstruction of a three-dimensional magnetization vector field
Using x-ray magnetic nanotomography the internal magnetization structure within extended samples can be determined with high spatial resolution and element specificity, without the need for assumptions or prior knowledge of the magnetic properties of a sample. Here we present the details of a new algorithm for the reconstruction of a three-dimensional magnetization vector field, discussing both the mathematical description of the problem, and details of the gradient-based iterative reconstruction routine. To test the accuracy of the algorithm the method is demonstrated for a complex simulated magnetization configuration obtained from micromagnetic simulations. The reconstruction of the complex three-dimensional magnetic nanostructure, including the surroundings of magnetic singularities (or Bloch points), exhibits an excellent qualitative and quantitative agreement with the simulated magnetic structure. This method provides a robust route for the reconstruction of internal three-dimensional magnetization structures obtained from x-ray magnetic tomographic datasets, which can be acquired with either hard or soft x-rays, and can be applied to a wide variety of three-dimensional magnetic systems
Social touch: a new vista for developmental cognitive neuroscience?
open3siopenGliga T.; Farroni T.; Cascio C.J.Gliga, T.; Farroni, T.; Cascio, C. J
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