BACKGROUND Procedural memory allows acquisition, consolidation and use of motor skills and cognitive routines. Automation of procedures is achieved through repeated practice. In children, improvement in procedural skills is a consequence of natural neurobiological development and experience. METHODS The aim of the present research was to make a preliminary evaluation and description of repeti...

Knowledge acquisition is frequently cited as the greatest bottleneck in the development of expert systems. Two primary approaches to knowledge acquisition are elicitation of knowledge from experts (traditional knowledge acquisition) and machine learning. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. Experts can draw upon practical experience and both domain specific and general knowledge. In a...

Learning curves have been described for different health technologies, mainly new surgical or diagnostic procedures, but learning curves for a new hospital's laboratory procedures have not been systematically studied. To monitor the timeliness (turnaround time) of stat tests from the Emergency Department as a marker of laboratory quality and to address the issue of a learning curve for procedur...

E-Learning frameworks are conceptual tools to organize networks of elearning services. Most frameworks cover areas that go beyond the scope of e-learning, from course to financial management, and neglects the typical activities in everyday life of teachers and students at schools such as the creation, delivery, resolution and evaluation of assignments. This paper presents the Ensemble framework...

Surrogate constraint analysis has been applied effectively to a variety of combinatorial optimization problems, as a foundation for both exact and heuristic methods. In the heuristic domain, surrogate constraint methods are particularly suited to the creation of associated learning procedures and to the application of probabilistic decisions. We show that these approaches are natural and effect...

This paper describes a unifying framework for five highly influential but disparate theories of natural learning and behavioral action selection. These theories are normally considered independently, with their own experimental procedures and results. The framework presented builds on a structure of connection types, propagation rules and learning rules, which are used in combination to integra...

Although there is now substantial evidence that developmental change occurs in implicit learning abilities over the lifespan, disparate results exist regarding the specific developmental trajectory of implicit learning skills. One possible reason for discrepancies across implicit learning studies may be that younger children show an increased sensitivity to variations in implicit learning task ...