Zusammenfassung Unklar ist, ob jungere Kinder vom regelmasigen Austausch mit alteren Kindern hins... more Zusammenfassung Unklar ist, ob jungere Kinder vom regelmasigen Austausch mit alteren Kindern hinsichtlich ihrer Sprachentwicklung profitieren. Hierfur wurden Kinder getestet, die im Rahmen des Modellprojekts „Bildungshaus 3–10“ (Land Baden-Wurttemberg) an regelmasigen altersubergreifenden Aktivitaten teilnahmen. Positive Effekte fanden sich hinsichtlich grammatischer Fertigkeiten. Bessere Sprachfertigkeiten hingen zudem zusammen mit dem freien Zugang zu Buchern und Sprachspielen und mit sprachspezifischen Qualitatsmerkmalen im Kindergarten. Abstract It is unclear whether younger children can profit from interactions with older peers regarding language development. This was examined within the project „Bildungshaus 3 – 10“ (Baden-Wurttemberg) where children participated in regular mixed-age activities. Positive effects were found for grammar skills. Additionally, better language competence was related to access to books and language games and to language-specific indications of kind...
The present study aimed at creating a database of standardized pairs of semantically associated a... more The present study aimed at creating a database of standardized pairs of semantically associated and unassociated everyday objects for the use in research in experimental developmental psychology. We had a large sample of 289 German school-aged children rate a set of 300 single objects, 150 semantically related, and 150 unrelated pairs. In a first step, the participants had to name the presented single objects to indicate the experienced level of familiarity for each item. The second part of the study focused on the rating of association strength of the pairs of objects. Here, we used a three-point rating scale to have the participants decide on the magnitude of semantic relatedness. For each single object, a familiarity score and a naming agreement ratio were calculated to quantify the degree of the children's conceptual knowledge and familiarity with the selected objects. The relatedness scores computed for the pairs of objects can be used to divide the pairs into separate categories according to the strength semantic association. These rating procedures yielded a large and well controlled database of modern pictorial material for experimenters to choose from. It may be helpful for designing experiments in developmental psychology research with clinical and non-clinical populations.
Abstract Research shows that teachers can develop competencies necessary for teaching practices t... more Abstract Research shows that teachers can develop competencies necessary for teaching practices through reflective dialog about shared practice. In this regard we surveyed 310 teachers participating in a collaboration pilot project between kindergartens and elementary schools to scrutinize the impacts of reflective dialog in a cross-institutional context. The results indicate benefits condensing in complemented child-perception and a more student-centered practice. Furthermore, teachers' experience and a practice of documentation seem to mediate impacts. Ultimately, the approach of learning communities gives reason to expect benefits in such cross-institutional contexts and thus could contribute to an early childhood education and care policy.
This paper presents results of the plausibility evaluation of computergenerated emotions and mood... more This paper presents results of the plausibility evaluation of computergenerated emotions and moods. They are generated by ALMA (A Layered Model of Affect), a real-time computational model of affect, designed to serve as a modular extension for virtual humans. By a unique integration of psychological models of affect, it provides three major affect types: emotions, moods and personality that cover short, medium, and long term affect. The evaluation of computer-generated affect is based on textual dialog situations in which at least two characters are interacting with each other. In this setup, elicited emotions or the change of mood are defined as consequences of dialog contributions from the involved characters. The results indicate that ALMA provides authentic believable emotions and moods. They can be used for modules that control cognitive processes and physical behavior of virtual humans in order to improve their lifelikeness and their believable qualities.
Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 2011
We investigate how lighting can be used to influence how the personality of virtual characters is... more We investigate how lighting can be used to influence how the personality of virtual characters is perceived. We propose a character-centric lighting system composed of three dynamic lights that can be configured using an interactive editor. To study the effect of character-centric lighting on observers, we created four lighting configurations derived from the photography and film literature. A user study with 32 subjects shows that the lighting setups do influence the perception of the characters' personality. We found lighting effects with regard to the perception of dominance. Moreover, we found that the personality perception of female characters seems to change more easily than for male characters.
... can be a powerful user interface because they are capable of multimodal interaction: they ...... more ... can be a powerful user interface because they are capable of multimodal interaction: they ... We used objective measures (eg subjective perception of time) for assessing effects of agent ... To investigate the potential benefits of embodied agents in the learning environ-ments we ...
Virtual humans still lack naturalness in their nonverbal behaviour. We present a data-driven solu... more Virtual humans still lack naturalness in their nonverbal behaviour. We present a data-driven solution that moves towards a more natural synthesis of hand and arm gestures by recreating gestural behaviour in the style of a human performer. Our algorithm exploits the concept of gesture units to make the produced gestures a continuous flow of movement. We empirically validated the use of gesture units in the generation and show that it causes the virtual human to be perceived as more natural.
Prematurity may cause hippocampal compromise. Therefore, hippocampus-dependent memory processes (... more Prematurity may cause hippocampal compromise. Therefore, hippocampus-dependent memory processes (recollection-based retrieval) may be more impaired than hippocampus-independent processes (familiarity-based retrieval). The memory of 18 children born preterm with reduced hippocampal volumes, without neonatal complications (weeks of gestation < 34, weight < 1,600 g), and 15 controls (8-10 years) was tested using an item recognition task. While groups were equal in memory performance, dissociation was found: The event-related potential (ERP) correlate of familiarity was intact in the preterm group, whereas the correlate of recollection was attenuated. A follow-up experiment ruled out that this was due to general cognitive deficits. Furthermore, gestational age correlated with the ERP index of recollection. Thus, recognition memory in preterm children may be characterized by a compensation of attenuated recollection by familiarity.
Febrile seizures (FS) are assumed to not have adverse long-term effects on cognitive development.... more Febrile seizures (FS) are assumed to not have adverse long-term effects on cognitive development. Nevertheless, FS are often associated with hippocampal sclerosis which can imply episodic memory deficits. This interrelation has hardly been studied so far. In the current study 13 children who had suffered from FS during infancy and 14 control children (7 to 9-years-old) were examined for episodic and semantic memory with standardized neuropsychological tests. Furthermore, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we studied neuronal activation while the children performed a continuous recognition memory task. The analysis of the behavioral data of the neuropsychological tests and the recognition memory experiment did not reveal any between-group differences in memory performance. Consistent with other studies fMRI revealed repetition enhancement effects for both groups in a variety of brain regions (e.g., right middle frontal gyrus, left parahippocampal gyrus) and a repetiti...
When using virtual characters in the human-computer interface the question arises of how useful t... more When using virtual characters in the human-computer interface the question arises of how useful this kind of interface is: whether the human user accepts, enjoys and profits from this form of interaction. Thorough system evaluations, however, are rarely done. We propose a post-questionnaire evaluation for a virtual character system that we apply to COHIBIT, an interactive museum exhibit with virtual characters. The evaluation study investigates the subjects' experiences with the exhibit with regard to informativeness, entertainment and virtual character perception. Our subjects rated the exhibit both entertaining and informative and gave it a good overall mark. We discuss the detailed results and identify useful factors to consider when building and evaluating virtual character applications.
Single-process models of recognition memory posit that recognizing is based on a unidimensional v... more Single-process models of recognition memory posit that recognizing is based on a unidimensional value of global memory strength. By contrast, dual-process models propose the existence of two independent processes subserving the explicit recognition of previously encountered episodes, namely ''familiarity'' and ''recollection.'' Familiarity represents a noncontextual form of recognition that may only support the retrieval of associative information when the to-beassociated information can be unitized, such as when two photographs depicting the same person are memorized (intra-item associations). Conversely, recollection enables retrieving associations between arbitrarily linked information, such as associations between photographs of different persons (inter-item associations). By measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we obtained a double dissociation of familiarity and recollection that strongly favors dual-process accounts of recognition memory: the electrophysiological correlate of familiarity was significantly larger for intra-than for inter-item associations. Conversely, the electrophysiological correlate of recollection was significantly larger for inter-than for intra-item associations.
The left-lateralized N170 component of ERPs for words compared with various control stimuli is co... more The left-lateralized N170 component of ERPs for words compared with various control stimuli is considered as an electrophysiological manifestation of visual expertise for written words. To understand the information sensitivity of the effect, researchers distinguish between coarse tuning for words (the N170 amplitude difference between words and symbol strings) and fine tuning for words (the N170 amplitude difference between words and consonant strings). Earlier developmental ERP studies demonstrated that the coarse tuning for words occurred early in children (8 years old), whereas the fine tuning for words emerged much later (10 years old). Given that there are large individual differences in reading ability in young children, these tuning effects may emerge earlier than expected in some children. This study measured N170 responses to words and control stimuli in a large group of 7-year-olds that varied widely in reading ability. In both low and high reading ability groups, we obse...
Improvement in source memory performance throughout development is thought to be mediated by stra... more Improvement in source memory performance throughout development is thought to be mediated by strategic processes that facilitate the retrieval of task-relevant information. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we examined developmental changes in these processes during adolescence. Adolescents (13-14 years) and adults (19-29 years) completed a memory exclusion task which required the discrimination between words studied in one color (&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;targets&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;) and words studied in the alternative color (&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;non-targets&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;) under two conditions that put different demands on strategic control. Memory accuracy improved with age and also increased with decreasing control demands in both age groups. The parietal old/new effect, an ERP correlate of recollection, was reliable for targets across conditions in both age groups. By contrast, ERP correlates of non-target recollection were present in adolescents across conditions but not in adults. This suggests that adults implemented a strategy to prioritize recollection of target information with greater success than adolescents regardless of control demands, presumably reflecting maturational differences in cognitive control. In support of this view, the ERP amplitude difference between targets and non-targets was positively correlated with a measure of working memory capacity (WMC) in adults but not in adolescents. A further age-related difference was that ERP correlates of post-retrieval processing, including late right-frontal old/new effects and late posterior negativities, were observed in adults only. Together, our data suggest protracted maturation in the strategic processes that underlie selective recollection and post-retrieval control.
Zusammenfassung Unklar ist, ob jungere Kinder vom regelmasigen Austausch mit alteren Kindern hins... more Zusammenfassung Unklar ist, ob jungere Kinder vom regelmasigen Austausch mit alteren Kindern hinsichtlich ihrer Sprachentwicklung profitieren. Hierfur wurden Kinder getestet, die im Rahmen des Modellprojekts „Bildungshaus 3–10“ (Land Baden-Wurttemberg) an regelmasigen altersubergreifenden Aktivitaten teilnahmen. Positive Effekte fanden sich hinsichtlich grammatischer Fertigkeiten. Bessere Sprachfertigkeiten hingen zudem zusammen mit dem freien Zugang zu Buchern und Sprachspielen und mit sprachspezifischen Qualitatsmerkmalen im Kindergarten. Abstract It is unclear whether younger children can profit from interactions with older peers regarding language development. This was examined within the project „Bildungshaus 3 – 10“ (Baden-Wurttemberg) where children participated in regular mixed-age activities. Positive effects were found for grammar skills. Additionally, better language competence was related to access to books and language games and to language-specific indications of kind...
The present study aimed at creating a database of standardized pairs of semantically associated a... more The present study aimed at creating a database of standardized pairs of semantically associated and unassociated everyday objects for the use in research in experimental developmental psychology. We had a large sample of 289 German school-aged children rate a set of 300 single objects, 150 semantically related, and 150 unrelated pairs. In a first step, the participants had to name the presented single objects to indicate the experienced level of familiarity for each item. The second part of the study focused on the rating of association strength of the pairs of objects. Here, we used a three-point rating scale to have the participants decide on the magnitude of semantic relatedness. For each single object, a familiarity score and a naming agreement ratio were calculated to quantify the degree of the children's conceptual knowledge and familiarity with the selected objects. The relatedness scores computed for the pairs of objects can be used to divide the pairs into separate categories according to the strength semantic association. These rating procedures yielded a large and well controlled database of modern pictorial material for experimenters to choose from. It may be helpful for designing experiments in developmental psychology research with clinical and non-clinical populations.
Abstract Research shows that teachers can develop competencies necessary for teaching practices t... more Abstract Research shows that teachers can develop competencies necessary for teaching practices through reflective dialog about shared practice. In this regard we surveyed 310 teachers participating in a collaboration pilot project between kindergartens and elementary schools to scrutinize the impacts of reflective dialog in a cross-institutional context. The results indicate benefits condensing in complemented child-perception and a more student-centered practice. Furthermore, teachers' experience and a practice of documentation seem to mediate impacts. Ultimately, the approach of learning communities gives reason to expect benefits in such cross-institutional contexts and thus could contribute to an early childhood education and care policy.
This paper presents results of the plausibility evaluation of computergenerated emotions and mood... more This paper presents results of the plausibility evaluation of computergenerated emotions and moods. They are generated by ALMA (A Layered Model of Affect), a real-time computational model of affect, designed to serve as a modular extension for virtual humans. By a unique integration of psychological models of affect, it provides three major affect types: emotions, moods and personality that cover short, medium, and long term affect. The evaluation of computer-generated affect is based on textual dialog situations in which at least two characters are interacting with each other. In this setup, elicited emotions or the change of mood are defined as consequences of dialog contributions from the involved characters. The results indicate that ALMA provides authentic believable emotions and moods. They can be used for modules that control cognitive processes and physical behavior of virtual humans in order to improve their lifelikeness and their believable qualities.
Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 2011
We investigate how lighting can be used to influence how the personality of virtual characters is... more We investigate how lighting can be used to influence how the personality of virtual characters is perceived. We propose a character-centric lighting system composed of three dynamic lights that can be configured using an interactive editor. To study the effect of character-centric lighting on observers, we created four lighting configurations derived from the photography and film literature. A user study with 32 subjects shows that the lighting setups do influence the perception of the characters' personality. We found lighting effects with regard to the perception of dominance. Moreover, we found that the personality perception of female characters seems to change more easily than for male characters.
... can be a powerful user interface because they are capable of multimodal interaction: they ...... more ... can be a powerful user interface because they are capable of multimodal interaction: they ... We used objective measures (eg subjective perception of time) for assessing effects of agent ... To investigate the potential benefits of embodied agents in the learning environ-ments we ...
Virtual humans still lack naturalness in their nonverbal behaviour. We present a data-driven solu... more Virtual humans still lack naturalness in their nonverbal behaviour. We present a data-driven solution that moves towards a more natural synthesis of hand and arm gestures by recreating gestural behaviour in the style of a human performer. Our algorithm exploits the concept of gesture units to make the produced gestures a continuous flow of movement. We empirically validated the use of gesture units in the generation and show that it causes the virtual human to be perceived as more natural.
Prematurity may cause hippocampal compromise. Therefore, hippocampus-dependent memory processes (... more Prematurity may cause hippocampal compromise. Therefore, hippocampus-dependent memory processes (recollection-based retrieval) may be more impaired than hippocampus-independent processes (familiarity-based retrieval). The memory of 18 children born preterm with reduced hippocampal volumes, without neonatal complications (weeks of gestation < 34, weight < 1,600 g), and 15 controls (8-10 years) was tested using an item recognition task. While groups were equal in memory performance, dissociation was found: The event-related potential (ERP) correlate of familiarity was intact in the preterm group, whereas the correlate of recollection was attenuated. A follow-up experiment ruled out that this was due to general cognitive deficits. Furthermore, gestational age correlated with the ERP index of recollection. Thus, recognition memory in preterm children may be characterized by a compensation of attenuated recollection by familiarity.
Febrile seizures (FS) are assumed to not have adverse long-term effects on cognitive development.... more Febrile seizures (FS) are assumed to not have adverse long-term effects on cognitive development. Nevertheless, FS are often associated with hippocampal sclerosis which can imply episodic memory deficits. This interrelation has hardly been studied so far. In the current study 13 children who had suffered from FS during infancy and 14 control children (7 to 9-years-old) were examined for episodic and semantic memory with standardized neuropsychological tests. Furthermore, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we studied neuronal activation while the children performed a continuous recognition memory task. The analysis of the behavioral data of the neuropsychological tests and the recognition memory experiment did not reveal any between-group differences in memory performance. Consistent with other studies fMRI revealed repetition enhancement effects for both groups in a variety of brain regions (e.g., right middle frontal gyrus, left parahippocampal gyrus) and a repetiti...
When using virtual characters in the human-computer interface the question arises of how useful t... more When using virtual characters in the human-computer interface the question arises of how useful this kind of interface is: whether the human user accepts, enjoys and profits from this form of interaction. Thorough system evaluations, however, are rarely done. We propose a post-questionnaire evaluation for a virtual character system that we apply to COHIBIT, an interactive museum exhibit with virtual characters. The evaluation study investigates the subjects' experiences with the exhibit with regard to informativeness, entertainment and virtual character perception. Our subjects rated the exhibit both entertaining and informative and gave it a good overall mark. We discuss the detailed results and identify useful factors to consider when building and evaluating virtual character applications.
Single-process models of recognition memory posit that recognizing is based on a unidimensional v... more Single-process models of recognition memory posit that recognizing is based on a unidimensional value of global memory strength. By contrast, dual-process models propose the existence of two independent processes subserving the explicit recognition of previously encountered episodes, namely ''familiarity'' and ''recollection.'' Familiarity represents a noncontextual form of recognition that may only support the retrieval of associative information when the to-beassociated information can be unitized, such as when two photographs depicting the same person are memorized (intra-item associations). Conversely, recollection enables retrieving associations between arbitrarily linked information, such as associations between photographs of different persons (inter-item associations). By measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we obtained a double dissociation of familiarity and recollection that strongly favors dual-process accounts of recognition memory: the electrophysiological correlate of familiarity was significantly larger for intra-than for inter-item associations. Conversely, the electrophysiological correlate of recollection was significantly larger for inter-than for intra-item associations.
The left-lateralized N170 component of ERPs for words compared with various control stimuli is co... more The left-lateralized N170 component of ERPs for words compared with various control stimuli is considered as an electrophysiological manifestation of visual expertise for written words. To understand the information sensitivity of the effect, researchers distinguish between coarse tuning for words (the N170 amplitude difference between words and symbol strings) and fine tuning for words (the N170 amplitude difference between words and consonant strings). Earlier developmental ERP studies demonstrated that the coarse tuning for words occurred early in children (8 years old), whereas the fine tuning for words emerged much later (10 years old). Given that there are large individual differences in reading ability in young children, these tuning effects may emerge earlier than expected in some children. This study measured N170 responses to words and control stimuli in a large group of 7-year-olds that varied widely in reading ability. In both low and high reading ability groups, we obse...
Improvement in source memory performance throughout development is thought to be mediated by stra... more Improvement in source memory performance throughout development is thought to be mediated by strategic processes that facilitate the retrieval of task-relevant information. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we examined developmental changes in these processes during adolescence. Adolescents (13-14 years) and adults (19-29 years) completed a memory exclusion task which required the discrimination between words studied in one color (&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;targets&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;) and words studied in the alternative color (&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;non-targets&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;) under two conditions that put different demands on strategic control. Memory accuracy improved with age and also increased with decreasing control demands in both age groups. The parietal old/new effect, an ERP correlate of recollection, was reliable for targets across conditions in both age groups. By contrast, ERP correlates of non-target recollection were present in adolescents across conditions but not in adults. This suggests that adults implemented a strategy to prioritize recollection of target information with greater success than adolescents regardless of control demands, presumably reflecting maturational differences in cognitive control. In support of this view, the ERP amplitude difference between targets and non-targets was positively correlated with a measure of working memory capacity (WMC) in adults but not in adolescents. A further age-related difference was that ERP correlates of post-retrieval processing, including late right-frontal old/new effects and late posterior negativities, were observed in adults only. Together, our data suggest protracted maturation in the strategic processes that underlie selective recollection and post-retrieval control.
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Papers by Kerstin Kipp