This paper explores how field and indoor based students can be connected so that their contrasting circumstances and capabilities are used as a basis for learning. We describe the design of the ‘Out There and In Here’ system and activity. Using naturalistic evaluations in the context of higher education earth science, we find evidence that this approach can be beneficial in developing essential...

Several recent studies report how laboratory-raised, non-human primates exposed to tool use can exhibit intelligent behaviors, such as imitation and reference vocal control, that are never seen in their wild counterparts. Tool-use training appears to forge a novel cortico-cortical connection that underlies this boost in capacity, which normally exists only as latent potential in lower primates....

This paper presents a novel application of speech processing research, classification of African elephant vocalizations. Speaker identification and call classification experiments are performed on data collected from captive African elephants in a naturalistic environment. The features used for classification are 12 Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients plus log energy computed using a shifted fi...

Short and common web queries are aptly supported by stateof-the-art search engines but performance and user experience are degraded when web queries are longer and less common. Extending previous solutions that automatically shorten queries, we introduce searchAssist: a novel search interface that provides interactive support for difficult web queries. The query logs and questionnaires from a n...

This paper provides a novel argument against conceptualism, the claim that the content of human experience, including perceptual experience, is entirely conceptual. Conceptualism entails that the content of experience is limited by the concepts that we possess and deploy. I present an argument to show that such a view is exceedingly costly—if the nature of our experience is entirely conceptual,...

Response reliability is complementary to more conventional measurements of response amplitudes, and can reveal phenomena that response amplitudes do not. Here we review studies that measured reliability of cortical activity within or between human subjects in response to naturalistic stimulation (e.g. free viewing of movies). Despite the seemingly uncontrolled nature of the task, some of these ...

(September 7, 2012) I have argued that the Kuhn of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions promotes a naturalistic study of science. The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge is also seen by many of its proponents as a naturalistic approach to science, and as such may be seen as part of the Kuhnian legacy. Nonetheless, I argue that it has been an inadequate successor to Kuhn. In particular, its emp...

This paper provides an overview of an approach to developing computational models of fatigue, which has been used to develop detailed accounts of laboratory phenomena, and to make a priori predictions in more naturalistic tasks. The research has led to novel theories and mechanisms that help to build bridges between integrated theories of human cognition from cognitive science and theoretical a...

In naturalistic settings, it is sometimes ambiguous whether or not a particular exemplar exhibits various properties indicative of category membership. We show that individuals prefer to group exemplars into categories that have a narrower latent scope – categories that specify fewer unobserved features – to those with a broader scope. In Experiment 1, participants classified suspects with fewe...