How are goals represented in the brain? How are they learned? How do they activate actions? In this paper we describe and compare two of the most influential models of goal-orientedness: the ideomotor principle (IMP), which was introduced in the psychological literature, and the ‘test, operate, test, exit’ (TOTE) cybernetic model. It emerges from our discussion that the IMP and the TOTE highlig...

We outline the concept of domain engineering and explain the main stages of developing domain models. Requirements engineering is then seen as an intermediate stage where domain models are “transformed” into requirements prescriptions. Software Design concludes development — and we comment on software correctness with respect to both requirements prescriptions and domain descriptions. We finall...

This paper presents a novel approach to the problem of action selection for an autonomous agent. An agent is viewed as a collection of competence modules. Action selection is modelled as an emergent property of an activation/inhibition dynamics among these modules. A concrete action selection algorithm is presented and a detailed account of the results is given. This algorithm combines characte...

This study reports on whether students have the opportunity to acquire generic competencies when they work with knowledge-related assignments at upper secondary school. We investigated 30 assignments. The data included lesson observations and interviews teachers. main categories of teaching practices were theory-based, subcategories levels intensity based qualitative analysis data. most common ...

BACKGROUND A range of factors have been found to influence the onset and maintenance of smoking among adolescents. The aim was to explore interrelationships among adolescent smoking and certain personal influences (academic achievement, life satisfaction and future-orientedness) and social influences (hostility, social comparison and perceived friends' smoking) using a cultural perspective. M...

In the object-oriented extension of Ada 95 some constructs and connected type rules have been introduced that restrict the flexibility in using the whole set of features the object-oriented paradigm provides. Especially the introduction of tagged types leads to a loss of potential reuse if efficiency is of concern while the rules connected with dispatching disable full static type checking for ...