Learning can be defined with the following general situation: we have a system – the learner – that has (wishes) to perform a certain task. At the beginning the performance is poor. With practice, by imitating the teacher or by trial and error, the performance gradually becomes better. “Better” may mean faster, more accurate, cheaper etc., depending on the task. Practising, imitating the teache...

There is ample evidence that human understanding of ordinary language relies in part on a rich capacity for imagistic mental modeling. We argue that genuine language understanding in machines will similarly require an imagistic modeling capacity enabling fast construction of instances of prototypical physical situations and events, whose participants are drawn from a wide variety of entity type...

In this paper, the authors replicated previous work demonstrating that animating mechanical systems leads to more efficient knowledge acquisition and extended it by applying the same processes to human systems. Based on these data, it appears that using static images, rather than animated human relationships within a team structure, better supports learning of procedural and conceptual knowledg...

What constitutes learning in the 21st century will be contested terrain as our society strives toward post-industrial forms of knowledge acquisition and production without having yet overcome the educational contradictions and failings of the industrial age. Educational reformers suggest that the advent of new technologies will radically transform what people learn, how they learn, and where th...

As most of us subconsciously feel, it is a great difficulty to create a program which could imitate human’s way of thinking. Recently the importance of the relation between expressions “feel”, “create” and “way of thinking” used in the previous sentence is being noticed, what gave birth to so called “affective computing”. During our experiments within GENTA project, we have observed useful conn...

51 Chapter 1 emphasized the importance of knowledge acquisition as a cornerstone of human development. This chapter focuses on building human capabilities for knowledge acquisition in Arab countries through education. The assessment of the state of education using such indicators as enrolment and illiteracy rates and per capita expenditure reveals tangible achievements but also significant area...

In addition to doing own research and development, firms typically are engaged in the acquisition of knowledge on the technology market. Using data from the Community Innovation Survey on Belgian manufacturing firms, we provide econometric evidence consistent with complementarity between these different innovation activities, i.e. the marginal return to one activity increases with the level of ...

Although explicit and implicit knowledge of language learners are essential to theoretical and pedagogical debates in second language acquisition (SLA), little research has addressed the effects of instructional interventions on the two knowledge types (R. Ellis, 2005).This study examined the relative effectiveness of explicit and implicit types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisit...