Sensory preconditioning in spatial learning using a touch screen task in pigeons

The authors used a touch screen-based visual-search task to investigate spatial integration in pigeons. First, pigeons were presented with a consistent spatial relationship between compound visual landmarks (LMs) A-X and B-Y, separately. Next, pigeons learned to find a hidden goal on the monitor in the presence of LMs A and B. The goal bore a consistent spatial relationship to LM A, but not to LM B. On nonreinforced probe tests, the peak and distribution of responses to LM X suggest that pigeons computed a novel X-goal spatial relationship on the basis of X-A and A-goal spatial vectors. Responses to LM Y, however, revealed no evidence of spatial integration. These results replicate and extend those of A. P. Blaisdell and R. G. Cook (2005) using an open-field task.     

Age-related changes in deferred imitation from television by 6- to 18-month-olds

During the second year of life, infants exhibit a video deficit effect. That is, they learn significantly less from a televised demonstration than they learn from a live demonstration. We predicted that repeated exposure to televised demonstrations would increase imitation from television, thereby reducing the video deficit effect. Independent groups of 6- to 18-month-olds were exposed to live or videotaped demonstrations of target actions. Imitation of the target actions was measured 24 hours later. The video segment duration was twice that of the live presentation. Doubling exposure ameliorated the video deficit effect for 12-month-olds but not for 15- and 18-month-olds. The 6-month-olds imitated from television but did not demonstrate a video deficit effect at all, learning equally well from a live and video demonstration. Findings are discussed in terms of the perceptual impoverishment theory and the dual representation theory.     

Infant screen media usage and social-emotional functioning

There has been little research on whether and how screen media usage affects social-emotional (SE) function prior to two years of age, even though early SE development is understood to be nurtured through interpersonal experience, mainly withthe primary caregiver. This study sought to characterise infant screen media usage and understand how it may link with concurrent SE function by testing associated effects on reducing parent-infant interaction and of parent psychological factors. Questionnaire responses from 327 UK-based parents of infants aged 6–24 months showed diverse usage in the amount of time spent on screen media (‘screen time’) and amount of parental involvement (co-sharing and co-referencing). Infants with possible SE delay experienced more screen time than those at low risk. The study tested three mediation models and found support for the displacement and not distancing hypothesis based on this community sample. While screen time predicted both SE competence and SE problems, reduced parent-infant play partially mediated the effect on SE competence. Parent depressed mood was positively linked with infant SE problems, but there was little evidence that increased screen time mediated this effect. Also, parent reflective function and attitudes toward parent-infant play were unrelated to screen time. Though longitudinal study is warranted, the findings implicate screen media usage as potentially directly and indirectly relevant when addressing infant mental health.     

Pigeons learn virtual patterned-string problems in a computerized touch screen environment

For many decades, developmental and comparative psychologists have used a variety of string tasks to assess the perceptual and cognitive capabilities of human children of different ages and different species of nonhuman animals. The most important and widely used of these problems are patterned-string tasks, in which the organism is shown two or more strings, only one of which is connected to a reward. The organism must determine which string is attached to the reward and pull it. We report a new way to implement patterned-string tasks via a computerized touch screen apparatus. Pigeons successfully learned such virtual patterned-string tasks and exhibited the same general performance profile as animals given conventional patterned-string tasks. In addition, variations in the length, separation, and alignment of the strings reliably affected the pigeons’ virtual string-pulling behavior. These results not only testify to the power and versatility of our computerized string task, but they also demonstrate that pigeons can concurrently contend with a broad range of demanding patterned-string problems, thereby eliminating many alternative interpretations of their behavior. The virtual patterned-string task may thus permit expanded exploration of other species and variables which would be unlikely to be undertaken either because of inadequacies of conventional methodology or sensorimotor limitations of the studied organisms.     

Reenactment of televised content by 2-year olds: toddlers use language learned from television to solve a difficult imitation problem

Parents commonly label objects on television and for some programs, verbal labels are also provided directly via voice-over. The present study investigated whether toddlers' imitation performance from television would be facilitated if verbal labels were presented on television via voice-over or if they were presented by parents who were co-viewing with their toddlers. Sixty-one 2-year olds were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups (voice-over video, parent video, parent video no label, parent live) or to a baseline control condition. Toddlers were tested with novel objects after a 24h delay. Although, all experimental groups imitated significantly more target actions than the baseline control group, imitation was facilitated by novel labels regardless of whether those labels were provided by parents or by voice-over on television. These findings have important implications for toddler learning from television.     

Concept learning by monkeys with video picture images and a touch screen.

Two rhesus monkeys were trained in a same/different task to discriminate digitized computer-stored picture stimuli. The pictures were digitized from 35-mm slides and presented in pairs on a computer monitor. The monkeys were required to touch the pictures and then make a choice response to indicate whether the pictures were identical or nonidentical. The response areas and stimuli were located to the sides of the picture stimuli. Responses were defined and monitored by an infrared matrix touch screen. After learning the same/different task, both monkeys showed performance accuracy with novel picture stimuli similar to that with training picture stimuli. This accurate novel-picture transfer indicates that a same/different concept had been learned, a concept similar to the one they had previously demonstrated in a different apparatus with rear-projected slide stimuli and a response lever.     

Perceiving object motion using vision and touch

In a previous experiment, we showed that bistable visual object motion was partially disambiguated by tactile input. Here, we investigated this effect further by employing a more potent visuotactile stimulus. Monocular viewing of a tangible wire-frame sphere (TS) rotating about its vertical axis produced bistable alternations of direction. Touching the TS biased simultaneous and subsequent visual perception of motion. Both of these biases were in the direction of the tactile stimulation and, therefore, constituted facilitation or priming, as opposed to interference or adaptation. Although touching the TS biased visual perception, tactile stimulation was not able to override the ambiguous visual percept. This led to periods of sensory conflict, during which visual and tactile motion percepts were incongruent. Visual and tactile inputs can sometimes be fused to form a coherent percept of object motion but, when they are in extreme conflict, can also remain independent.     

The touch screen system in the pigeon laboratory: An initial evaluation of its utility

The touch screen system has been employed as a device for the measurement of responses and presentation of stimuli in pigeon laboratories for 4 years. Its contributions to the study of the pigeon’s behavior include the addition of response location information and an increase in the versatility of stimulus presentation. Along with the advantages of this system come some cautions. Limitations on response registration and time to construct stimuli are both concerns. Using response location as a dependent variable and distance of response registration from the pecking surface as an independent variable, the affordance of the touch screen system is investigated.     

Infrared touch technology as a response detector in animal research

The construction of a computerized research system is described. Stimuli are presented to a pigeon on a color television monitor. Pecks at the television screen are detected by a network of multiplexed infrared emitters and detectors; the coordinates of the peck are transmitted to the host computer. Computer graphics allows the experimenter to simultaneously present a variety of forms and colors as stimuli. The system accommodates innovative research methodology in animal cognition, animal psychophysics, comparative psychology, and other research interests. With modification, the system can be used with other species, including humans.     

Infant brain responses to felt and observed touch of hands and feet: an MEG study

There is growing interest concerning the ways in which the human body, both one's own and that of others, is represented in the developing human brain. In two experiments with 7‐month‐old infants, we employed advances in infant magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain imaging to address novel questions concerning body representations in early development. Experiment 1 evaluated the spatiotemporal organization of infants’ brain responses to being touched. A punctate touch to infants’ hands and feet produced significant activation in the hand and foot areas of contralateral primary somatosensory cortex as well as in other parietal and frontal areas. Experiment 2 explored infant brain responses to visually perceiving another person's hand or foot being touched. Results showed significant activation in early visual regions and also in regions thought to be involved in multisensory body and self–other processing. Furthermore, observed touch of the hand and foot activated the infant's own primary somatosensory cortex, although less consistently than felt touch. These findings shed light on aspects of early social cognition, including action imitation, which may build, at least in part, on infant neural representations that map equivalences between the bodies of self and other.     

The effects of motion on in-vehicle touch screen system operation: A battle management system case study

The use of in-vehicle touch screen devices is currently common in both military and civilian vehicles; despite this, the effects of motion on touch screen device operation within vehicles remains largely unexplored. This article describes a study that examined, using driving simulation, the influences of motion on performance, workload and usability when using a touch screen in-vehicle battle management system. Acting in the role of battle management system operator, 20 participants undertook four simulated drives, two under high motion (representative of an unsealed road) and two under normal motion (representative of a sealed road), whilst performing various battle management tasks. In the high motion condition, lower accuracy and longer task completion times were found, along with greater levels of subjective and physiological workload and lower levels of perceived device usability, when compared to the normal motion condition. The findings indicate that, compared to normal motion, the high motion condition impaired key aspects of battle management system operation. In closing, the importance of considering motion and its effects during touch screen system design is discussed.     

The effects of operating a touch screen smartphone and other common activities performed while bicycling on cycling behaviour

Although it has been shown that making phone calls or sending text messages while riding a bicycle can have a negative impact on bicyclist’s behaviour, in countries such as the Netherlands the operation of a mobile phone while cycling on a bicycle is not illegal and is actually quite common. In recent years conventional mobile phones with a physical keypad are increasingly being replaced by smartphones with a touch screen. The operation of a touch screen phone ironically cannot be done purely ‘by touch’ due to the lack of tactile feedback, and instead requires fixations on a relatively small screen. The question therefore can be asked whether the operation of touch screen telephones deteriorates cycling behaviour more than operation of a conventional mobile phone.Twenty-four participants completed a track on their own bicycle while sending a text message from a conventional and a touch screen mobile phone. In addition the effects of other common activities that can accompany bicycling were studied, including texting at the same time as listening to music, talking on a mobile phone or cycling next to someone and speaking with this companion, and playing a game on a touch screen phone while bicycling. The impacts of all the above conditions on cycling performance and visual detection performance were compared with control conditions in which participants cycled with either one or two hands on the handlebars and were not required to perform any secondary tasks.Bicycle speed was reduced in all telephone conditions and in the condition when cycling next to someone. Lateral position variation increased in all telephone conditions. Use of the touch screen led to a more central position in the cycle lane and resulted in worse visual detection performance compared with the operation of a conventional mobile phone. The main effect of listening to music was that an auditory signal to stop cycling was missed by 83% of the participants. In conclusion, while all investigated types of phone deteriorated cycling performance, the use of a touch phone has a larger negative effect on cycling performance than a conventional mobile phone. With touch screen smartphones taking the place of conventional mobile phones and being used for other purposes than verbal communication, these effects on cycling performance pose a threat to traffic safety.     

Prolactin in rats is attenuated by conspecific touch in a novel environment

Prolactin is released in response to physical and psychological stress, the latter of which involves an animal’s interpretation of its environment as potentially dangerous. This interpretation might be altered by social buffering, as defined by the presence of a social partner. In support of this claim, I previously found that the presence of a conspecific during exposure to the open field caused lower levels of prolactin in juvenile rats than did exposure to the open field alone. Because testing with a conspecific allowed the animals to touch, physical contact may have been necessary for the reduction of prolactin. To test this hypothesis, juvenile male and female rats in the present study were exposed to the open field (1) alone, (2) with a conspecific separated by a Plexiglas partition, or (3) with a conspecific without a partition. Touch was necessary to reduce stress as measured by prolactin levels.     

Situated robotics: from learning to teaching by imitation

This paper presents an approach to imitation learning in robotics focusing on low level behaviours, so that they do not need to be encoded into sets and rules, but learnt in an intuitive way. Its main novelty is that, rather than trying to analyse natural human actions and adapting them to robot kinematics, humans adapt themselves to the robot via a proper interface to make it perform the desired action. As an example, we present a successful experiment to learn a purely reactive navigation behaviour using robotic platforms. Using Case Based Reasoning, the platform learns from a human driver how to behave in the presence of obstacles, so that no kinematics studies or explicit rules are required.     

Similarity and categorization: from vision to touch

Even though human perceptual development relies on combining multiple modalities, most categorization studies so far have focused on the visual modality. To better understand the mechanisms underlying multisensory categorization, we analyzed visual and haptic perceptual spaces and compared them with human categorization behavior. As stimuli we used a three-dimensional object space of complex, parametrically-defined objects. First, we gathered similarity ratings for all objects and analyzed the perceptual spaces of both modalities using multidimensional scaling analysis. Next, we performed three different categorization tasks which are representative of every-day learning scenarios: in a fully unconstrained task, objects were freely categorized, in a semi-constrained task, exactly three groups had to be created, whereas in a constrained task, participants received three prototype objects and had to assign all other objects accordingly. We found that the haptic modality was on par with the visual modality both in recovering the topology of the physical space and in solving the categorization tasks. We also found that within-category similarity was consistently higher than across-category similarity for all categorization tasks and thus show how perceptual spaces based on similarity can explain visual and haptic object categorization. Our results suggest that both modalities employ similar processes in forming categories of complex objects.     

Training social cognition: from imitation to Theory of Mind

Evidence for successful socio-cognitive training in typical adults is rare. This study attempted to improve Theory of Mind (ToM) and visual perspective taking in healthy adults by training participants to either imitate or to inhibit imitation. Twenty-four hours after training, all participants completed tests of ToM and visual perspective taking. The group trained to inhibit their tendency to imitate showed improved performance on the visual perspective-taking test, but not the ToM test. Neither imitation training, nor general inhibition training, had this effect. These results support a novel theory of social cognition suggesting that the same self-other discrimination process underlies imitation inhibition and perspective taking. Imitation, perspective taking and ToM are all pro-social processes--ways in which we reach out to others. Therefore, it is striking that perspective taking can be enhanced by suppressing imitation; to understand another, sometimes we need, not to get closer, but to pull away.     

Music interferes with learning from television during infancy

Infants are frequently exposed to music during daily activities, including free play, and while viewing infant‐directed videotapes that contain instrumental music soundtracks. In Experiment 1, an instrumental music soundtrack was played during a live or televised demonstration to examine its effects on deferred imitation by 6‐, 12‐, and 18‐month‐old infants. Transfer of information was indexed via deferred imitation of the target actions following a 24‐h delay. For half the infants, the music context was also reinstated at the time of test. Performance by experimental groups was compared to that of a baseline control group that participated in the test session without prior exposure to the demonstration. Imitation performance was above baseline for the live groups but not for the video groups regardless of age or the music context at test. In Experiment 2, we added matched sound effects to the video demonstration and infants performed above baseline. We conclude that the music track creates additional cognitive load, disrupts selective attention to the target actions and inhibits transfer of learning from television of the imitation task. Music may impair an infant's ability to translate information from a two‐dimensional to three‐dimensional world even if the auditory context remains the same. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prolonged touch screen device usage is associated with emotional and behavioral problems,but not language delay,in toddlers

BackgroundTouch screen devices are now ubiquitous, and their usage by young children is increasing. However, the effects of these devices on young children are still unknown. Therefore, this study aimed to address the associations of touch screen device exposure with symptomatic emotional and behavioral problems and language development in children between the ages of 18 and 36 months.MethodA total of 161 primary caregivers of children between the ages of 18 and 36 months were recruited from the pediatric ward and outpatient clinic at a medical center in southern Taiwan. All caregivers were asked to fill out the Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 1½–5 (CBCL 1½–5) and a questionnaire on basic personal information and touch screen device usage, and they were also interviewed with the Communication and Language Screening Test for Birth to Three Chinese-Speaking Infant-Toddlers (CLST). Independent t-test and one-way ANOVA were used to examine the differences among the categories in the demographic variables and to characterize the touch screen device usage behaviors. Pearson’s correlation was used to analyze the relationship between language delay and the extent of touch screen device exposure. After primary univariate analysis, we used multiple regression models to examine the relationships among the effects of touch screen device usage behaviors on children's emotional and behavioral problems and language development.ResultThe children’s mean age was 25.63 months (SD = 5.35). Children who spent more time on touch screen devices were more likely to have emotional problems (β = .219, p < .010, 95 % CI: .279–1.518), anxious/depressive symptoms (β = .206, p < .050, 95 % CI: .170–1.244), somatic complaints (β = .291, p < .001, 95% CI: .455–1.462), social withdrawal symptoms (β = .194, p < .050, 95 % CI: 0.133–1.150), attention problems (β = .300, p < .001, 95 % CI: .432–1.267), and aggressive behaviors (β = .247, p < .010, 95 % CI: .967–3.983). The effects were not noted on language development (β = −.136, p < .100, 95 % CI: −2.595–.147).ConclusionYoung children who spent more time on touch screen devices were more likely to have emotional problems, anxious/depressive symptoms, somatic complaints, social withdrawal symptoms, attention problems, and aggressive behaviors, but not language delay.