The shape-sorter puzzle is a quintessential toy that children play with to learn how to fit objects in holes. Psychology research shows that human children learn object fitting during an early developmental period. We implemented similar developmental learning in our robot using random exploratory behaviors and proprioceptive feedback with the shape sorter puzzle. Analysis shows that successful...

Modeling depression in animals is based on the observation of behaviors interpreted as analog to human symptoms. Typical tests used in experimental depression research are designed to evoke an either-or outcome. It is known that explorative and coping strategies are relevant for depression, however these aspects are generally not considered in animal behavioral testing. Here we investigate the ...

The advent of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) has led to the availability of large educational datasets collected from diverse international audiences. Little work has been done on the impact of cultural and geographic factors on student performance in MOOCs. In this paper, we analyze national and cultural differences in students’ performance in a large-scale MOOC. We situate our analysis i...

Touch is one of the first senses to develop and one of the earliest modalities for infant-caregiver communication. While studies have explored the benefits of infant touch in terms of physical health and growth, the effects of social touch on infant behavior are relatively unexplored. Here, we investigated the influence of neonatal handling on a variety of domains, including memory, novelty see...

Gail Herrera is Assistant Dean for Technical Services & Automation and Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi Libraries; e-mail: [email protected]. The University of Mississippi Library created a profile to provide linking from Google Scholar (GS) to library resources in 2005. Although Google Scholar does not provide usage statistics for institutions, use of Google Scholar is c...

Over the years, studies have been conducted on mice to determine a link between the behaviors of mice with autism and the behavior of individuals with autism. A recent study conducted by Li-Feng Jiang-Xie et al. (2014), aimed to clarify the disturbance of synaptic balance arising from the loss of function of Dlgap2, a gene that has gained the title as a candidate gene in autism spectrum disord...

This paper proposes a novel framework that enables a robot to learn ordinal object relations. While most related work focuses on classifying objects into discrete categories, such approaches cannot learn object properties (e.g., weight, height, size, etc.) that are context-specific and relative to other objects. To address this problem, we propose that a robot should learn to order objects base...

The exploratory behaviors of a sample of 11 infants with Down syndrome and 11 nondelayed infants, matched on Bayley mental raw scores and gender, were analyzed. Transitional probabilities and z scores were computed for each possible behavior change as well as frequencies of each behavior. The analyses revealed significant differences in how the 2 samples distribute their exploratory activities....

How do infants plan and guide locomotion under challenging conditions? This experiment investigated the real-time process of visual and haptic exploration in 14-month-old infants as they decided whether and how to walk over challenging terrain - a series of bridges varying in width. Infants' direction of gaze was recorded with a head-mounted eye tracker and their haptic exploration and locomoto...