As in human speech acquisition, songbird vocal learning depends on early auditory experience. During development, juvenile songbirds listen to and form auditory memories of adult tutor songs, which they use to shape their own vocalizations in later sensorimotor learning. The higher-level auditory cortex, called the caudomedial nidopallium (NCM), is a potential storage site for tutor song memory...

Auditory neurons of the anterior forebrain (AF) of zebra finches become selective for song during song learning. In adults, these neurons respond more to the bird's own song (BOS) than to the songs of other zebra finches (conspecifics) or BOS played in reverse. In contrast, AF neurons from young birds (30 d) respond equally well to all song stimuli. AF selectivity develops rapidly during song l...

• This experiment uses mains-powered equipment. If you suspect the equipment is not operating correctly, turn it off at the mains switch and consult a tutor. • The main apparatus for this experiment is fully self-contained; the samples are in small sealed glass tubes, which should be replaced in their holder when not in use. The experiment involves low magnetic fields and low-power radio freque...

While intelligent tutoring has been applied to collaborative learning environments, it has met with little success so far because of the complexity involved in adding a tutoring component to a collaborative environment. We propose to tackle this problem by using Cognitive Tutors as the basis for our approach and by applying a technique we call Bootstrapping Novice Data (BND). The BND approach i...

Although problem solving supported by Cognitive Tutors has been shown to be successful in fostering initial acquisition of cognitive skills, this approach does not seem to be optimal with respect to focusing the learner on the domain principles to be learned. In order to foster a deep understanding of domain principles, we developed a Cognitive Tutor that contained, on the basis of the theoreti...

In virtual training scenarios, agent technology can be used to build a virtual tutor that assists a student during training. In a dialogue using argumentation schemes, the virtual tutor provides reasons to the students to explain why a particular action is the most sensible. The tutor determines the best action using practical reasoning. The justification of this action is selected based on the...

1 Amruth Kumar, Ramapo College of New Jersey, [email protected] Abstract – We have developed a web-based tutor for teaching and testing counter-controlled loop concepts in C++. The tutor is designed to promote problem-based learning. It repeatedly generates problems, grades user’s answers and provides feedback about the correct answers. This paper describes the design of the tutor, outlines a t...

Conventional wisdom has maintained that while LISP is suitable for the development of experimental software, it does not support production-quality systems well. This report describes a building-block approach where a complex system (an intelligent Chinese language tutor) was built in a LISP environment out of a series of powerful tools. The resulting system does not in any way sacrifice perfor...

In this paper, we describe how we have integrated Steve, an intelligent tutor based on Soar, and HeSPI, a human simulation tool for planning and simulating maintenance tasks in nuclear power plants. The objectives of this integration were to test Steve’s flexibility to be used in different applications and environments and to extend HeSPI to use it as a virtual environment for training. We disc...

Juveniles sometimes learn behaviors that they cease to express as adults. Whether the adult brain retains a record of experiences associated with behaviors performed transiently during development remains unclear. We addressed this issue by studying neural representations of song in swamp sparrows, a species in which juveniles learn and practice many more songs than they retain in their adult v...