this article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of english as a foreign language (efl). the study was designed to explore the effects of changing complexity dimensions on listening task performance and to achieve two aims: to see how listening comprehension task performance was aff...

In traditional cognitive science, cognition amounts to symbol manipulation (Newell and Simon, 1972). Symbol manipulation is the processing of symbolic descriptions to produce an output that benefits an objective. Moreover, embodied models of cognitive development concern situated robots that do not rely on symbolic descriptions or on their manipulation (see, e.g., (Schlesinger, 2003)). In this ...

Purpose: Comparing the effects of manipulating senses on relative phase transition bimanual coordination pattern of active and inactive women with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Methods: The methodology of this study was repeated-measures design. Study participants comprised 10 active women and 10 inactive women with multiple sclerosis who voluntarily participated in this experiment. The participant...

This paper presents a novel Intelligent Inference System (IIS) for the determination of an optimum preshape for multifingered robot hand grasping, given object under a manipulation task. The IIS is formed as hybrid agent architecture, by the synthesis of object properties, manipulation task characteristics, grasp space partitioning, lowlevel kinematical analysis, evaluation of contact wrench pa...

With collaborative robots and the recent developments in manufacturing technologies, physical interactions between humans represent a vital role performing tasks. Most previous studies have focused on robot motion planning control during execution of task. However, further research is required for direct contact human-robot or robot-robot interactions, such as co-manipulation. In co-manipulatio...

Equipped with a third hand under their direct control, surgeons may be able to perform certain surgical interventions alone; this would reduce the need for a human assistant and related coordination difficulties. However, does human performance improve with three hands compared to two hands? To evaluate this possibility, we carried out a behavioural study on the performance of naive adults catc...

We explore generic mechanisms to introduce structural hints into the method of Unsupervised Kernel Regression (UKR) in order to learn representations of data sequences in a semi-supervised way. These new extensions are targeted at representing a dextrous manipulation task. We thus evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms on appropriate toy data that mimic the characteristics of the...

Objective: There is a large theoretical literature regarding stock market manipulation. However, empirical evidence of manipulation remains scare especially in emerging markets like Iran. So, it is vital to detect and prevent. Manipulation distorts prices, thereby reducing market efficiency and harms public confidence. Distorted prices increase market volatility and risk. This study empirically...

In manipulation planning works like [Siméon et al., 2000], although two levels have been distinguished, calling “task level” to the higher one, actually everything has been formulated in geometric terms. However, when properly talking about task planning, an abstract symbolic formulation is generally meant. And complex manipulation tasks may require some kind of symbolic structuring in order to...

A framework of complementary behavior has been proposed which maintains that direct manipulation and speech interfaces have reciprocal strengths and weaknesses. This suggests that user interface performance and acceptance may increase by adopting a multimodal approach that combines speech and direct manipulation. This effort examined the hypothesis that the speed, accuracy, and acceptance of mu...