One major challenge in evolutionary/developmental robotics is constituted by the need to identify design principles that allow robots to acquire progressively more complex action skills by integrating them into their existing behavioral repertoire. In this paper, we present a novel method that address this objective, the theoretical background behind the proposed methodology, and the results ob...

We examine the ability of male immigrants to transfer their occupational human capital using information from the O*NET and a unique dataset that includes both the last source country occupation and the first four years of occupations in Canada. We first augment a model of occupational choice and skill accumulation to derive predictions about the cross-border transferability of occupational hum...

Humans are capable of accomplishing a variety of complex tasks in environments which have continu ously changing characteristics Robots however gen erally require highly structured environments which al low the programmer to make a large number of as sumptions making the robot s task easier to encode We propose a framework for programming robotic tasks using human to robot skill transfer We ass...

In an fMRI study, participants were trained to play a complex video game. They were scanned early and then again after substantial practice. While better players showed greater activation in one region (right dorsal striatum) their relative skill was better diagnosed by considering the sequential structure of whole brain activation. Using a cognitive model that played this game, we extracted a ...

Controlling a complex dynamic system such as a plane or a crane usually requires a skilled operator Such a control skill is typically hard to reconstruct through introspection There fore an attractive approach to the reconstruction of control skill involves machine learning from operators control traces also known as behavioural cloning In the most common approach to behavioural cloning a contr...

BACKGROUND Since motor learning is a key component for stroke recovery, enhancing motor skill learning is a crucial challenge for neurorehabilitation. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a promising approach for improving motor learning. The aim of this trial was to test the hypothesis that dual-tDCS applied bilaterally over the primary motor cortices (M1) improves online motor sk...

This note re-examines a finding by Crow et al. [Crow, T. J., Crow, L. R., Done, D. J., & Leask, S. (1998). Relative hand skill predicts academic ability: Global deficits at the point of hemispheric indecision. Neuropsychologia, 36(12), 1275-1281] that equal skill of right and left hands is associated with deficits in cognitive ability. This is consistent with the idea that failure to develop do...

We present a differentiable framework capable of learning a wide variety of compositions of simple policies that we call skills. By recursively composing skills with themselves, we can create hierarchies that display complex behavior. Skill networks are trained to generate skill-state embeddings that are provided as inputs to a trainable composition function, which in turn outputs a policy for ...

We present a learning-based method for the estimation of skill levels from sequences of complex movements in sports. Our method is based on a hierarchical algorithm for computing spatio-temporal correspondence between sequences of complex body movements. The algorithm establishes correspondence at two levels: whole action sequences and individual movement elements. Using Spatio-Temporal Morphab...

Parental investments in early childhood have been shown to have a large impact on skill acquisition. In this paper, we examine how beliefs about a child’s relative skill influences investment and how these beliefs are determined. Using data from the ECLS-K, we first show that parental beliefs about a child’s skill relative to children of the same age is distorted by a child’s skill relative to ...