Background Significant numbers of studies struggle to recruit to target and request extension of time or additional funding. PREP is a study to develop a prediction model for adverse maternal and fetal outcomes in women with early onset pre-eclampsia. Pre-eclampsia is a condition in pregnancy associated with raised blood pressure and proteinuria and is one of the main causes of maternal and fet...

This study compared the effects of problem-focused and solution-focused coaching questions on positive and negative affect, self-efficacy, goal approach, and action planning. A total of 225 participants were randomly assigned to either a problem-focused or solution-focused coaching condition. All participants described a real-life problem that they wanted to solve and set a goal to solve that p...

Learning progressively more abstract stimulus-response mappings requires progressively more anterior regions of the lateral frontal cortex. Using an individual differences approach, we studied subjects with frontal lesions performing a hierarchical reinforcement-learning task to investigate how frontal cortex contributes to abstract rule learning. We predicted that subjects with lesions of the ...

For large numbers of targets, path planning is a complex and computationally expensive task. Humans, however, usually solve such tasks quickly and efficiently. We present experiments studying human path planning performance and the cognitive processes and heuristics involved. Twenty-five places were arranged on a regular grid in a large room. Participants were repeatedly asked to solve travelin...

Plan generation is important in a number of agent applications, but such applications generally require elaborate domain models that include not only the definitions of the actions that an agent can perform in a given domain, but also information about the most effective ways to generate plans for the agent in that domain. Such models typically take a large amount of human effort to create. To ...

Humans continuously receive and integrate information from several sensory modalities. However, attentional resources limit the amount of information that can be processed. It is not yet clear how attentional resources and multisensory processing are interrelated. Specifically, the following questions arise: (1) Are there distinct spatial attentional resources for each sensory modality? and (2)...

Planning and readiness for action are associated with pre-movement brain activity reflected in the readiness potential (RP). Previous research suggests that RP is affected by higher-order cognitive functions. The present study investigated the relationship between arousal and RP. Twenty participants performed a RP paradigm in which they executed self-paced movements approximately every 4-5s. Pa...

Low-level motion planning techniques must be combined with high-level task planning formalisms in order to generate realistic plans that can be carried out by humans and robots. Previous attempts to integrate these two planning formalisms mostly used either Classical Planning or HTN Planning. Recently, we developed Hierarchical Goal Networks (HGNs), a new hierarchical planning formalism that co...

This study compared English L2 writers’ (N = 111) performance on an integrated writing task from the Canadian Academic Language (CAEL) Assessment under three prewriting planning conditions: required self-timed fixed time planning, and suggested (i.e., optional) planning. The participants’ essays were scored according to CAEL bands by raters at Paragon Testing Inc. effect of condition participan...

Hierarchies are the most common structure used to understand the world better. In galaxies, for instance, multiple-star systems are organised in a hierarchical system. Then, governmental and company organisations are structured using a hierarchy, while the Internet, which is used on a daily basis, has a space of domain names arranged hierarchically. Since Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning p...