Over the last few decades, a number of reinforcement learning techniques have emerged, and different reinforcement learning-based applications have proliferated. However, such techniques tend to specialize in a particular field. This is an obstacle to their generalization and extrapolation to other areas. Besides, neither the reward-punishment (r-p) learning process nor the convergence of resul...

Some people who attempt to learn a second language in adulthood meet with greater success than others. The causes driving these individual differences in second language learning skill continue to be debated. In particular, it remains controversial whether robust auditory perception can provide an advantage for non-native speech perception. Here, we tested English speech perception in native Ja...

Machine perception plays an important role in any intelligent system, and in particular, guiding an autonomous mobile agent. Machine perception techniques have progressed significantly in recent years, however perception systems are still plagued by a lack of flexibility and an inadequacy in performance speed for use in real-time tasks. To overcome these problems, we have applied integrated kar...

PURPOSE The objective of this study was to assess student perceptions of the environment in this medical college using the Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure (DREEM). METHODS Cross-sectional study; 348 medical student volunteers (68.1%) of all semesters participated (511 enrolled). DREEM has 50 items, each rated from 0-4 (Likert scale: 0, strongly disagree to 4, strongly agree), tha...

This study compared cross-language speech perception of vowel length contrasts in Arabic and Japanese by two groups of listeners whose first language (L1) was either Cantonese (C) or Korean (K). Unlike Arabic or Japanese, C and K do not use vowel length contrastively. One group (CK+J) had experience learning Japanese as a foreign language while the other (CK) did not. The question of interest w...