Differential brain activity during emotional versus nonemotional reversal learning

The ability to change an established stimulus–behavior association based on feedback is critical for adaptive social behaviors. This ability has been examined in reversal learning tasks, where participants first learn a stimulus–response association (e.g., select a particular object to get a reward) and then need to alter their response when reinforcement contingencies change. Although substantial evidence demonstrates that the OFC is a critical region for reversal learning, previous studies have not distinguished reversal learning for emotional associations from neutral associations. The current study examined whether OFC plays similar roles in emotional versus neutral reversal learning. The OFC showed greater activity during reversals of stimulus–outcome associations for negative outcomes than for neutral outcomes. Similar OFC activity was also observed during reversals involving positive outcomes. Furthermore, OFC activity is more inversely correlated with amygdala activity during negative reversals than during neutral reversals. Overall, our results indicate that the OFC is more activated by emotional than neutral reversal learning and that OFC's interactions with the amygdala are greater for negative than neutral reversal learning.

Regional response differences across the human amygdaloid complex during social conditioning

The amygdala is consistently implicated in biologically relevant learning tasks such as Pavlovian conditioning. In humans, the ability to identify individual faces based on the social outcomes they have predicted in the past constitutes a critical form of associative learning that can be likened to “social conditioning.” To capture such learning in a laboratory setting, participants learned about faces that predicted negative, positive, or neutral social outcomes. Participants reported liking or disliking the faces in accordance with their learned social value. During acquisition, we observed differential functional magnetic resonance imaging activation across the human amygdaloid complex consistent with previous lesion, electrophysiological, and functional neuroimaging data. A region of the medial ventral amygdala and a region of the dorsal amygdala/substantia innominata showed signal increases to both Negative and Positive faces, whereas a lateral ventral region displayed a linear representation of the valence of faces such that Negative > Positive > Neutral. This lateral ventral locus also differed from the dorsal and medial loci in that the magnitude of these responses was more resistant to habituation. These findings document a role for the human amygdala in social learning and reveal coarse regional dissociations in amygdala activity that are consistent with previous human and nonhuman animal data.

Working with Dyslexic Learners: Authoring in a Multimedia Environment

The fundamental principles of the teaching methodology followed for dyslexic learners evolve around the need for a multisensory approach, which would advocate repetition of learning tasks in an enjoyable way. The introduction of multimedia technologies in the field of education has supported the merging of new tools (digital camera, scanner) and techniques (sounds, graphics, animation) in a meaningful whole. Dyslexic learners are now given the opportunity to express their ideas using these alternative media and participate actively in the educational process. This paper discussed the preliminary findings of a single case study of two English monolingual dyslexic children working together to create an open-ended multimedia project on a laptop computer. The project aimed to examine whether and if the multimedia environment could enhance the dyslexic learners’ skills in composition. Analysis of the data has indicated that the technological facilities gave the children the opportunity to enhance the style and content of their work for a variety of audiences and to develop responsibilities connected to authorship.

Effects of pramipexole on the processing of rewarding and aversive taste stimuli

Rationale: Pramipexole, a D2/D3 dopamine receptor agonist, has been implicated in the development of impulse control disorders in patients with Parkinson's disease. Investigation of single doses of pramipexole in healthy participants in reward-based learning tasks has shown inhibition of the neural processing of reward, presumptively through stimulation of dopamine autoreceptors. Objectives: This study aims to examine the effects of pramipexole on the neural response to the passive receipt of rewarding and aversive sight and taste stimuli. Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural responses to the sight and taste of pleasant (chocolate) and aversive (mouldy strawberry) stimuli in 16 healthy volunteers who received a single dose of pramipexole (0.25 mg) and placebo in a double-blind, within-subject, design. Results: Relative to placebo, pramipexole treatment reduced blood oxygen level-dependent activation to the chocolate stimuli in the areas known to play a key role in reward, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex, striatum, thalamus and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Pramipexole also reduced activation to the aversive condition in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. There were no effects of pramipexole on the subjective ratings of the stimuli. Conclusions: Our results are consistent with an ability of acute, low-dose pramipexole to diminish dopamine-mediated responses to both rewarding and aversive taste stimuli, perhaps through an inhibitory action of D2/3 autoreceptors on phasic burst activity of midbrain dopamine neurones. The ability of pramipexole to inhibit aversive processing might potentiate its adverse behavioural effects and could also play a role in its proposed efficacy in treatment-resistant depression.

Negative correlations between control performance and verbalizable knowledge: indicators for implicit learning in process control tasks?

Negative correlations between task performance in dynamic control tasks and verbalizable knowledge, as assessed by a post-task questionnaire, have been interpreted as dissociations that indicate two antagonistic modes of learning, one being “explicit”, the other “implicit”. This paper views the control tasks as finite-state automata and offers an alternative interpretation of these negative correlations. It is argued that “good controllers” observe fewer different state transitions and, consequently, can answer fewer post-task questions about system transitions than can “bad controllers”. Two experiments demonstrate the validity of the argument by showing the predicted negative relationship between control performance and the number of explored state transitions, and the predicted positive relationship between the number of explored state transitions and questionnaire scores. However, the experiments also elucidate important boundary conditions for the critical effects. We discuss the implications of these findings, and of other problems arising from the process control paradigm, for conclusions about implicit versus explicit learning processes.

Learning how older adults undertake computer tasks [poster]

This paper describes a study that was conducted to learn more about how older adults use the tools in a GUI to undertake tasks in Windows applications. The objective was to gain insight into what people did and what they found most difficult. File and folder manipulation, and some aspects of formatting presented difficulties, and these were thought to be related to a lack of understanding of the task model, the correct interpretation of the visual cues presented by the interface, and the recall and translation of the task model into a suitable sequence of actions.

Learning from risks: A tool for post-project risk assessment

Risk management (RM) comprises of risk identification, risk analysis, response planning, monitoring and action planning tasks that are carried out throughout the life cycle of a project in order to ensure that project objectives are met. Although the methodological aspects of RM are well-defined, the philosophical background is rather vague. In this paper, a learning-based approach is proposed. In order to implement this approach in practice, a tool has been developed to facilitate construction of a lessons learned database that contains risk-related information and risk assessment throughout the life cycle of a project. The tool is tested on a real construction project. The case study findings demonstrate that it can be used for storing as well as updating risk-related information and finally, carrying out a post-project appraisal. The major weaknesses of the tool are identified as, subjectivity of the risk rating process and unwillingness of people to enter information about reasons of failure.

Auditory distraction from low-intensity noise: a review of the consequences for learning and workplace environments

The 'irrelevant sound effect' in short-term memory is commonly believed to entail a number of direct consequences for cognitive performance in the office and other workplaces (e.g. S. P. Banbury, S. Tremblay, W. J. Macken, & D. M. Jones, 2001). It may also help to identify what types of sound are most suitable as auditory warning signals. However, the conclusions drawn are based primarily upon evidence from a single task (serial recall) and a single population (young adults). This evidence is reconsidered from the standpoint of different worker populations confronted with common workplace tasks and auditory environments. Recommendations are put forward for factors to be considered when assessing the impact of auditory distraction in the workplace. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Relating computer tasks to existing knowledge to improve accessibility for older adults

Routine computer tasks are often difficult for older adult computer users to learn and remember. People tend to learn new tasks by relating new concepts to existing knowledge. However, even for 'basic' computer tasks there is little, if any, existing knowledge on which older adults can base their learning. This paper investigates a custom file management interface that was designed to aid discovery and learnability by providing interface objects that are familiar to the user. A study was conducted which examined the differences between older and younger computer users when undertaking routine file management tasks using the standard Windows desktop as compared with the custom interface. Results showed that older adult computer users requested help more than ten times as often as younger users when using a standard windows/mouse configuration, made more mistakes and also required significantly more confirmations than younger users. The custom interface showed improvements over standard Windows/mouse, with fewer confirmations and less help being required. Hence, there is potential for an interface that closely mimics the real world to improve computer accessibility for older adults, aiding self-discovery and learnability.

An overview of the use of neural networks for data mining tasks

In the recent years, the area of data mining has been experiencing considerable demand for technologies that extract knowledge from large and complex data sources. There has been substantial commercial interest as well as active research in the area that aim to develop new and improved approaches for extracting information, relationships, and patterns from large datasets. Artificial neural networks (NNs) are popular biologically-inspired intelligent methodologies, whose classification, prediction, and pattern recognition capabilities have been utilized successfully in many areas, including science, engineering, medicine, business, banking, telecommunication, and many other fields. This paper highlights from a data mining perspective the implementation of NN, using supervised and unsupervised learning, for pattern recognition, classification, prediction, and cluster analysis, and focuses the discussion on their usage in bioinformatics and financial data analysis tasks. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Experiences of learning French: a snapshot at Years 11, 12 and 13

This paper considers the attitudes of students in Years 11, 12 and 13 towards French and, in particular, how they view the reasons behind their level of achievement. It reports findings from a small-scale pilot study, conducted in four schools and colleges, involving 83 students in Year 11, 26 in Year 12 and 14 in Year 13. The findings indicate that French is perceived by many Year 11 students to be difficult and uninteresting. These students, furthermore, do not consider that French is of much benefit in terms of their future career. The data suggest that there is a tendency among students in all three year groups to attribute their lack of success in French to their own low ability and to the difficulty of tasks set, which, it is argued, may affect their levels of motivation in a negative way. Few students in the study have any insight into the importance of learning strategies in overcoming difficulties experienced in language learning. Students' attitudes are then discussed in relation to learning strategy training. It is argued that if learners are encouraged to explore the possibility that their achievement in French may be related to the efficacy of the learning strategies they use, rather than to factors such as low ability or task difficulty, their self-concept, motivation and language learning achievements can be enhanced. A brief outline is given of a planned research project which proposes to address these issues further.

L2 performance and context of language learning: a comparative study of learners in Tehran and London

The importance of learning context has stirred debates in the field of second language acquisition over the past two decades since studying a second language (L2) abroad is believed to provide authentic opportunities that facilitate L2 acquisition and development. The present paper examines whether language performance of learners studying English in a formal language classroom context at home (AH) is different from performance of learners who study English abroad (SA) where they would have to use English for a range of communicative purposes. The data for this comparative study is part of a larger corpus of L2 performance of 100 learners of English, 60 in Tehran and 40 in London, on four oral narrative tasks. The two groups’ performances are compared on a range of different measures of fluency, accuracy, syntactic complexity and lexical diversity. The results of the analyses indicate that learners in the two contexts are very similar with respect to the grammatical accuracy and aspects of the oral fluency of their performance. However, the SA group appears to have benefited from living and studying abroad in producing language of higher syntactic complexity and lexical diversity. These results have significant implications for language teaching in AH contexts.

Deficits in orthographic knowledge in children poor at rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks?

The degree to which orthographic knowledge accounts for the link between Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) and reading is contested, with mixed results reported. This longitudinal study compared two groups of 10-11 year old children, a low RAN group (N=69) and matched controls (N=74) on various measures of orthographic knowledge. The low RAN group showed a deficit in orthographic knowledge, both at the level of sub-word letter sequences and of whole words, as well as an unexpected strength in orthographic learning. Our findings underline the persistence of RAN-related reading problems, and raise questions about reading strategies in this group.