Estudio perceptual sobre cuestiones académicas y su relación con el rendimiento escolar.

Averiguar en qué medida influyen en el rendimiento académico, las percepciones elaboradas por los chicos acerca del interés, actitudes y expectativas mostradas por los padres hacia sus estudios. Esta cuestión se estudia atendiendo al diverso origen social y nivel cultural de las familias. Se divide la ciudad de Oviedo en dos zonas: alta y baja. Para la muestra se toman 97 alumnos de los colegios de la zona baja y 73 de dos colegios de la zona alta, todos ellos en séptimo de EGB en el curso 84-85. En total se trabajó con una muestra de 170 alumnos y sus respectivos padres. Se utiliza como variable dependiente el rendimiento escolar. Las variables independientes se agrupan en tres grandes bloques: interés, actitudes y expectativas. En el cuestionario sobre cada variable de las que integran los bloques mencionados se establecen dos preguntas que dan lugar a dos subvariables: la percepción elaborada por el niño acerca de la conducta de sus padres en un determinado tema; y lo que él considera oportuno sobre ese mismo tema. De cada par de subvariables se obtiene una nueva: la diferencia entre ellas, que permite medir el grado de acuerdo entre ambas percepciones. Calificaciones de Lengua y Matemáticas para la medida del rendimiento escolar. Cuestionario elaborado para esta investigación en el que se incluyen preguntas sobre percepción de intereses, actitudes y expectativas en los padres y las propias del niño. Correlación múltiple entre variables independientes de cada factor y las dependientes y a partir de ellas se elaboran las consiguientes ecuaciones de predicción tanto del rendimiento en Lengua como del rendimiento en Matemáticas el estudio de estas cuestiones se realiza tanto a nivel global y teniendo en cuenta las categorías culturales de pertenencia. Los valores del coeficiente de regresión entre el factor interés y el rendimiento en las materias de Lengua y Matemáticas ascienden a medida que se eleva el nivel cultural del padre y lo mismo ocurre con el factor actitudes y el factor expectativas. El rendimiento escolar es diferencial de unos a otros estratos sociales siendo más elevado en aquellos niños con padres de mayor nivel cultural. El rendimiento académico aumenta cuando los chicos tienen sus propios criterios es decir a medida que los desacuerdos en las percepciones elaboradas acerca de sus padres y las propias son amplios y negativos. Existe un alto grado de acuerdo entre las percepciones elaboradas por el chico respecto a la conducta paterna en determinados problemas escolares y la propia sobre los mismos problemas, lo cual demuestra la importancia de las actitudes, intereses y expectativas de los padres respecto a la actividad escolar ya que éstas mediatizan las de sus hijos si los padres se encuentran en una línea de acercamiento a las cuestiones escolares, los niños se comportan también según esa línea, favoreciéndose la consecución de un buen rendimiento.

From First Contact to Close Encounters: A Developmentally Deep Perceptual System for a Humanoid Robot

This thesis presents a perceptual system for a humanoid robot that integrates abilities such as object localization and recognition with the deeper developmental machinery required to forge those competences out of raw physical experiences. It shows that a robotic platform can build up and maintain a system for object localization, segmentation, and recognition, starting from very little. What the robot starts with is a direct solution to achieving figure/ground separation: it simply 'pokes around' in a region of visual ambiguity and watches what happens. If the arm passes through an area, that area is recognized as free space. If the arm collides with an object, causing it to move, the robot can use that motion to segment the object from the background. Once the robot can acquire reliable segmented views of objects, it learns from them, and from then on recognizes and segments those objects without further contact. Both low-level and high-level visual features can also be learned in this way, and examples are presented for both: orientation detection and affordance recognition, respectively. The motivation for this work is simple. Training on large corpora of annotated real-world data has proven crucial for creating robust solutions to perceptual problems such as speech recognition and face detection. But the powerful tools used during training of such systems are typically stripped away at deployment. Ideally they should remain, particularly for unstable tasks such as object detection, where the set of objects needed in a task tomorrow might be different from the set of objects needed today. The key limiting factor is access to training data, but as this thesis shows, that need not be a problem on a robotic platform that can actively probe its environment, and carry out experiments to resolve ambiguity. This work is an instance of a general approach to learning a new perceptual judgment: find special situations in which the perceptual judgment is easy and study these situations to find correlated features that can be observed more generally.

Perceptual Evaluation of Video-Realistic Speech

abstract With many visual speech animation techniques now available, there is a clear need for systematic perceptual evaluation schemes. We describe here our scheme and its application to a new video-realistic (potentially indistinguishable from real recorded video) visual-speech animation system, called Mary 101. Two types of experiments were performed: a) distinguishing visually between real and synthetic image- sequences of the same utterances, ("Turing tests") and b) gauging visual speech recognition by comparing lip-reading performance of the real and synthetic image-sequences of the same utterances ("Intelligibility tests"). Subjects that were presented randomly with either real or synthetic image-sequences could not tell the synthetic from the real sequences above chance level. The same subjects when asked to lip-read the utterances from the same image-sequences recognized speech from real image-sequences significantly better than from synthetic ones. However, performance for both, real and synthetic, were at levels suggested in the literature on lip-reading. We conclude from the two experiments that the animation of Mary 101 is adequate for providing a percept of a talking head. However, additional effort is required to improve the animation for lip-reading purposes like rehabilitation and language learning. In addition, these two tasks could be considered as explicit and implicit perceptual discrimination tasks. In the explicit task (a), each stimulus is classified directly as a synthetic or real image-sequence by detecting a possible difference between the synthetic and the real image-sequences. The implicit perceptual discrimination task (b) consists of a comparison between visual recognition of speech of real and synthetic image-sequences. Our results suggest that implicit perceptual discrimination is a more sensitive method for discrimination between synthetic and real image-sequences than explicit perceptual discrimination.

Asimetría en la amplitud perceptual: implicaciones para la presentación en parafóvea.

La amplitud perceptual, definida como la zona alrededor del punto de fijación de la que se extrae información funcional para el procesamiento, es mayor a la derecha que a la izquierda de éste, al menos cuando se procesa material verbal. Esta asimetría en la amplitud perceptual ha sido puesta de manifiesto con diferentes paradigmas experimentales que revisamos en este trabajo. Revisamos igualmente las distintas hipótesis que se han propuesto para su explicación, para concluir con algunas implicaciones que este dato pudiera tener para otros estudios que utilizan presentación de material verbal en parafóvea.

Factores que influyen en la comprensión temprana de imágenes : similitud perceptual y nivel socioeconómico.

Resumen basado en el de la publicación

Associative learning with and without perceptual awareness

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n

Applicability of the Test of Visual Perceptual Abilities (TVPA) in diagnosing learning disabilities in hearing-impaired children

This paper studies the validity of the Test of Visual Perceptual Abilities (TVPA) as an indicator of learning problems in hearing-impaired children and how it correlates with other measures of learning disabilities.

Perceptual aspects of a three-dimensional vowel space

This dissertation examines the auditory-perceptual theory of speech perception and the concept and validity of perceptual target zones for vowels.

Visual perceptual skills, reading ability and the young deaf child

This paper is a review of a study investigating the relationship between visual perceptual skills and reading abilities of young deaf children.

Perceptual correlates of spectral changes in complex tones

This paper reviews a study of tonal precepts such as pitch and timbre as a means of facilitating auditory discrimination tasks.

Reanalysis of perceptual confusion matrices

This paper presents a study reformatting and reanalyzing data collected in a 1955 study of the perception of sixteen different consonants in consonant-vowel combinations, by human listeners.

Perceptual validation of an acoustic metric for measuring vowel production by deaf children

This paper discusses a study to validate the metric developed in the Geers and Moog Cochlear Implant Study at CID to measure the speech production of hearing impaired children.

Changing state disruption of lip-reading by irrelevant sound in perceptual and memory tasks

Three experiments investigated irrelevant sound interference of lip-read lists. In Experiment 1, an acoustically changing sequence of nine irrelevant utterances was more disruptive to spoken immediate identification of lists of nine lip-read digits than nine repetitions of the same utterances (the changing-state effect; Jones, Madden, & Miles, 1992). Experiment 2 replicated this finding when lip-read items were sampled with replacement from the nine digits to form the lip-read lists. In Experiment 3, when the irrelevant sound was confined to the retention interval of a delayed recall task, a changing-state pattern of disruption also occurred. Results confirm a changing-state effect in memory for lip-read items but also point to the possibility that, for lip-reading, changing-state effects may occur at an earlier, perceptual stage.

Steady-spectrum contexts and perceptual compensation for reverberation in speech identification

Perceptual compensation for reverberation was measured by embedding test words in contexts that were either spoken phrases or processed versions of this speech. The processing gave steady-spectrum contexts with no changes in the shape of the short-term spectral envelope over time, but with fluctuations in the temporal envelope. Test words were from a continuum between "sir" and "stir." When the amount of reverberation in test words was increased, to a level above the amount in the context, they sounded more like "sir." However, when the amount of reverberation in the context was also increased, to the level present in the test word, there was perceptual compensation in some conditions so that test words sounded more like "stir" again. Experiments here found compensation with speech contexts and with some steady-spectrum contexts, indicating that fluctuations in the context's temporal envelope can be sufficient for compensation. Other results suggest that the effectiveness of speech contexts is partly due to the narrow-band "frequency-channels" of the auditory periphery, where temporal-envelope fluctuations can be more pronounced than they are in the sound's broadband temporal envelope. Further results indicate that for compensation to influence speech, the context needs to be in a broad range of frequency channels. (c) 2007 Acoustical Society of America.

Perceptual compensation for reverberation in speech identification: effects of single-band, multiple-band and wideband noise contexts

Perceptual effects of room reverberation on a "sir" or "stir" test-word can be observed when the level of reverberation in the word is increased, while the reverberation in a surrounding 'context I utterance remains at a minimal level. The result is that listeners make more "sit" identifications. When the context's reverberation is also increased, to approach the level in the test word, extrinsic perceptual compensation is observed, so that the number of listeners' "sir" identifications reduces to a value similar to that found with minimal reverberation. Thus far, compensation effects have only been observed with speech or speech-like contexts in which the short-term spectrum changes as the speaker's articulators move. The results reported here show that some noise contexts with static short-term spectra can also give rise to compensation. From these experiments it would appear that compensation requires a context with a temporal envelope that fluctuates to some extent, so that parts of it resemble offsets. These findings are consistent with a rather general kind of perceptual compensation mechanism; one that is informed by the 'tails' that reverberation adds at offsets. Other results reported here show that narrow-band contexts do not bring about compensation, even when their temporal-envelopes are the same as those of the more effective wideband contexts. These results suggest that compensation is confined to the frequency range occupied by the context, and that in a wideband sound it might operate in a 'band by band' manner.