Prior research on infant reaching has shown that providing infants with repeated opportunities to reach for objects aids the emergence and progression of reaching behavior. This study investigated the effect of movement consequences on the process of learning to reach in pre-reaching infants. Thirty-five infants aged 2.9 months at the onset of the study were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups. ...

Rhodes and Brandone (2014) have shown evidence of limited theory of mind in 3-year old children. The study was based on a false belief procedure in which an observer [E1] saw a toy hidden in location 1, then it was moved to location 2. E1 observed the move in the true belief (TB) test but not in the false belief (FB) test. Then the child was assessed for understanding of E1’s belief about the t...

Behavioral researchers have investigated procedures for identifying preferred items for individuals with varying levels of developmental disabilities. Some researchers in this area have reported difficulties in identifying preferred items for individuals with severe to profound multiple disabilities (SPMD), in part because the individuals may not possess the motor skills needed to select and ma...

This paper describes the specification of requirements and the functionality, of a novel agricultural mechanisation system based on small smart machines. It separates the current mechanisation methods from the original plant requirements and in doing so allows a new specification to develop based on agronomic, economic and environmental needs that can lead to a more sustainable production syste...

In Dryer (1992a), I presented evidence from a sample of 625 languages on which pairs of elements correlate with the order of object and verb, and which do not (Greenberg 1963). I argued that the word order correlations reflect a tendency for languages to be consistently leftbranching or consistently right-branching, what I referred to as the Branching Direction Theory (the BDT), and proposed th...

Recent progress in developing cost-effective depth sensors has enabled new AIassisted solutions such as assisted driving vehicles and smart spaces. Machine learning techniques have been successfully applied on these depth signals to perceive meaningful information about human behavior. In this work, we propose to deploy depth sensors in hospital settings and use computer vision methods to enabl...

BACKGROUND Violence is a pervasive problem in the United States. Toys, far from trivial playthings, are a reflection of society, including its beliefs and values. The purpose of this study was to describe the extent to which violent toys are marketed in online weekly flyers of popular retailers, how the violence is manifested, and whether violent toys are marketed differentially to boys and gir...

In this paper, we describe our current work on bio-inspired locomotion systems using smart materials. The aim of this work is to investigate alternative actuation mechanisms based on smart materials, exploring the possibility of building motor-less and gear-less robots. A swimming underwater robot is being developed whose movements are generated using such materials, concretely Shape Memory All...

In this work, we improve the performance of a dialogue engine, Say Something Smart, using online learning. Given a request by a user, this engine selects an answer from a corpus of movie subtitles, weighting the quality of each candidate answer according to several criteria and selecting the one that is chosen by the most representative criteria. We contribute with an online approach, using seq...

This paper discusses the visual algebraic speciication (vas) formalism and its supporting interactive environment (vase). The vas formalism is intended for the deenition of visual syntax and semantics and is aimed at generating language speciic environments. The collection construct of vas is emphasized in that it supports the convenient speciication of language constructs involving arbitrarily...