PURPOSE The effect of e-learning on practical skills in medicine has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Today's multimedia learning environment and access to e-books provide students with more knowledge than ever before. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of online demonstrations concerning the quality of orthodontic appliances manufactured by undergraduate dental students. MA...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The most remarkable behavioral asymmetry is handedness. The preferred hand often has better performance, motor strength, nonpreferred hand. However, whether these components are associated with skill learning is not clear. METHODS We evaluated healthy right-handers by setting a series of motor-performance tasks including skill learning, grip strength, and speed. RESUL...

This article presents a generalization of the equilibrium analysis for the simple two-player poker game with alternate bidding of Von Neumann and Morgenstern. It approximates optimal play for this game if it is played with a regular deck of 52 cards and it discusses some strategic insights. In addition, the paper studies the relative skill level of this game.

We propose an approach to control learning from demonstration that first segments demonstration trajectories to identify subgoals, then uses model-based control methods to sequentially reach these subgoals to solve the overall task. Using this approach, we show that a mobile robot is able to solve a combined navigation and manipulation task robustly after observing only a single successful traj...

Automated task planning for robots is usually implemented on a motion primitive domain, where the focus is on constructing meaningful, general motion primitives. In this work we propose planning on the higher abstraction level of robot skills. In this context, skills are general, functional blocks that contain both sensing and action, have a welldefined expected outcome and set of preconditions...

In 2013, Canadian scholars delivered a 1-week workshop to 30 junior public health professionals in Rwanda. The goal was to improve the Rwandans' skills and confidence with respect to writing scientific papers for submission to international peer-reviewed global health journals. As a result of the workshop, there was a statistically significant improvement in participants' reported confidence in...

There are differences in the way infants learn, perceive, and understand the environment as compared to adults (Bornstein, 1989; Nelson, 2000; Craik and Bialystok, 2006). While an adult has an established, clear perception of his environment, infants are still forming perceptions of the world (Hall et al., 1989; Holt, 1991; Zitelli and Davis, 2007). The mechanisms underlying these differences a...

Novel experience and learning new skills are known as modulators of brain function. Advances in non-invasive brain imaging have provided new insight into structural and functional reorganization associated with skill learning and expertise. Especially, significant imaging evidences come from the domains of sports and music. Data from in vivo imaging studies in sports and music have provided vit...

This paper examines how, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the appreciation of skill in surgery shifted in characteristic ways. Skill is a problematic category in surgery. Its evaluation is embedded into wider cultural expectations and evaluations, which changed over time. The paper examines the discussions about surgical skill in a variety of contexts: the highly...

Synchronized action is considered as a manifestation of shared skill. Most synchronized behaviors in humans and other animals are based on periodic repetition. Aperiodic synchronization of complex action is found in the experimental task of synchronous speaking, in which naive subjects read a common text in lock step. The demonstration of synchronized behavior without a periodic basis is presen...