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Aim: The aim with this literature review was to describe how task-specific training effects the ADL-capacity for people affected by stroke within occupational therapy intervention. Method: The data collection was conducted in two databases in medicine and health with a focus on occupational therapy and rehabilitation. The literature search was carried out in the databases CINAHL with full text and Pubmed. The inclusion criteria and quality review resulted in twelve quantitative studies. The studies were analyzed through the three steps regarding study analysis described in Friberg (2017). The analysis ended in five categories which report the result. Results: The results are reported in the categories; The definition and the nature of task-specific training, The context of the intervention and the choice of task or activity, Task-specific training in combination with another measure, The result of the task-specific training's impact on functional ability, The result of the task-specific training's impact on performance capacity. The results showed that task-specific training was defined, performed and combined in different ways in the studies. The task-specific training improved the function of the upper extremity and increased mobility and coordination. The task-specific training improved the participants performance capacity where the occupational performance and self-perceived performance capacity improved. Conclusion: The results showed that task-specific training had a positive impact on ADL-capacity since functional and performance capacity had improved for people affected by stroke. The authors believe that more research is needed on how task-specific training should be carried out as there is currently no constant description of the method. More studies should be conducted where participants exersice in activities.

This thesis uses a multi-tasking long short-term memory (LSTM) model to investigate the correlation between containment strategies, climate change, and the number of COVID-19 transmissions and deaths. The study focuses on examining the accuracy of different factors in predicting the number of daily confirmed cases and deaths cases to further explore the correlation between different factors and cases. The initial assessment results suggest that containment strategies, specifically vaccination policies, have a more significant impact on the accuracy of predicting daily confirmed cases and deaths from COVID-19 compared to climate factors such as the daily average surface 2-meter temperature. Additionally, the study reveals that there are unpredictable effects on predictive accuracy resulting from the interactions among certain impact factors. However, the lack of interpretability of deep learning models poses a significant challenge for real-world applications. This study provides valuable insights into understanding the correlation between the number of daily confirmed cases, daily deaths, containment strategies, and climate change, and highlights areas for further research. It is important to note that while the study reveals a correlation, it does not imply causation, and further research is needed to understand the trends of the pandemic.

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This study looked at how antipathies and the attributions made to our enemies concerning the outcomes of important life events affect one‟s self-esteem, self-efficacy, and task persistence. The results did not support either of the two hypotheses studied. However, it was found that those who succeeded persisted longer on the provided task when attributing the success to their enemy. This could be due to participants believing that they could show up the antipathy, giving them someone to compete against, which in turn lead to higher task persistence. Also, it was found that those who made external attributions while involved with an antipathy got more items correct on the task provided. Making external attributions for events could lead to a desire to prove oneself and in turn increase task persistence.

Next to practice itself, feedback provided to a learner from an external source such as a coach or therapist is considered the most important factor facilitating skill acquisition. Past research has suggested that punishment and reward feedback have dissociable effects on learning and retention, respectively. However, other studies have suggested a more reliable effect of punishment feedback while failing to replicate the benefit of reward on retention. This discrepancy across experiments may be the result of seemingly innocuous methodological differences. Here, I ran a pre-registered online experiment to test the replicability of the supposed dissociable effects of punishment and reward on learning during training and retention, respectively. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either punishment feedback (n = 34) or reward feedback (n = 34) during the training period as they learned a repeating 12-element sequence in a serial reaction time task. Feedback consisted of participants either seeing a red (Punishment group) or green (Reward group) box flash on their computer screen and, unbeknownst to them, either a corresponding loss (Punishment group) or gain (Reward group) of points from their starting total. Participants were informed that a good final point score (i.e., the higher the better) could earn them extra entries into a gift card lottery. Contrary to what much of the literature has found, our results revealed no statistically significant differences between groups in either the training or retention phases of the experiment. In conclusion, the findings of this experiment failed to replicate the previously found dissociable effects of punishment and reward feedback on learning and retention, respectively. The data instead suggests that providing participants with punishment or reward feedback may affect learning and retention in a similar manner. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / The information that you get from your senses, along with the comments and criticisms given to you by others, are all forms of feedback that may or may not be available in your environment. Feedback can often be given to you in the form of a punishment or a reward in an effort to facilitate your performance of a motor skill, such as learning to juggle a soccer ball. In this thesis, I explored whether punishment and reward feedback have dissociable effects on the way people learn and retain a new motor skill. Some individuals received punishment feedback by seeing a red box flash on their screen and losing points, while others received reward feedback by seeing a green box flash on their screen and gaining points. Although the participants learned the new motor skill in the experiment, the results showed that reward and punishment feedback did not differentially impact motor learning. These results suggest that either reward or punishment feedback may be a useful feedback strategy for promoting motor learning.

Aspect semantically denotes two concepts: eventualities and their endpoints, or the speaker’s perspective of an event. These aspectual distinctions respectively refer to telicity and perfectively. Telicity specifically denotes the internal temporal organization of events in regards to their endpoint (telic) or lack thereof (atelic). The telic/atelic distinction has been studied in semantics using logical analysis, in particular mereological relations (the relation of parts to parts and parts within wholes) and scalar theory (a representation of measurement composed of degrees that are partially or totally ordered). This thesis presents a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the cognitive nature of one component of aspectual realization, namely telicity, in English. In accordance with the predictions made by mereological and scalar theories for the semantic composition of telicity, it is hypothesized that telic constructions are semantically more complex than atelic constructions. This complexity specifically refers to maximalization; a process which Filip (2008) predicts takes place exclusively in the derivation of telic events. This prediction is made under the assumption that a correlation exists between the number of derivational steps and cognitive complexity. Specifically, constructions which involve a greater number of steps in their derivation are hypothesized to also involve a greater amount of cognitive resources in order to be successfully computed. This correlation is supported by recent research investigating the role of working memory in sentence comprehension. Recent studies have found constructions with greater syntactic derivational complexity are susceptible to interference and processing trade-offs when processed under heavy memory loads. Based on this, if telic constructions involve a greater derivational complexity compared to atelic counterparts, they therefore can be hypothesized to be more susceptible to interference and processing trade-offs from increased memory loads. The results of the experiment provide evidence supporting this prediction, ultimately suggesting telicity is a grammatically more complex process than atelicity. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Task-based language teaching has received increasing attention in second language acquisition research over the past decade (Révész, 2007). However, the target form comprises conveyance of meaning in task-based classroom to some degree. In the area of Chinese acquisition as a second language the role of recasts and explicit feedback has not been the subject of much investigation, as two types of technique to compensate learners’ attention on form. Few empirical studies have explored their short-term and long-term effects on Chinese language acquisition in task-based classroom. To test the conclusions of some research about corrective feedback in the area of SLA, the present study examined the effects of these two techniques respectively. The study employed an immediate-test and posttest design. The participants were 53 adult, beginning level Chinese language learners who study Chinese as a second language, naturally assigned to one of the two comparison groups and a control group. The comparison groups differed as to whether they received recasts or explicit feedback while completing communicative tasks. The control group also practiced the tasks; however, they received neither recasts nor explicit feedback from their instructors in the process and they participated in the testing sessions. Results analysis of collected data yielded three main findings. First, learners receiving explicit feedback immediately outperformed those who received recasts for certain structures. Second, learners receiving explicit feedback sometimes yielded some long-term advantages over those who did not receive any feedback, followed by the recast group even after a period of time. Third, the performance of the participants varied according to the complexity of the target forms. The results imply that explicit feedback and recasts can facilitate the production of certain target language forms in beginning Chinese communicative class. The effects of explicit feedback and recasts depend on the chosen forms. It is congruent with Long’s (1998) and Ellis’s (2007) speculation that the roles of various feedbacks differ according to different linguistic features. It also provides further evidence for Leeman’s (2000) conclusion that recasts may be differentially effective when the learnabililty of the target linguistic feature vary. Finally, the findings lend some support to the insight derived from Long that focus-on-form should be integrated into task-based language teaching (Long, 1996, 2000; Long & Robinson, 1998).

This study investigated the impacts of dual task and time pressure conditions on the speech fluency of 60 neurotypical adults between the ages of 26 and 85. Participants retold short stories in baseline, time pressure, dual task, and combined dual task and time pressure conditions. Dependent variables included five measures of speech fluency: words per minute (WPM), fillers per verbalization, false starts and repetitions per verbalization, extended pauses per utterance, and speech naturalness. Each of these variables was compared between age groups of younger, older, and elderly adults and across conditions. Results reveal that time pressure causes speech rate to increase across age groups but combining time pressure with a dual task condition mitigates this effect in elderly speakers. Additionally, younger adults are perceived to have more natural speech compared to older and elderly adults. Speakers across age groups perform similarly in all other variables of speech fluency, with notable changes in fluency under the combined dual task and time pressure condition compared to other conditions. These findings suggest that while speakers do not always become less fluent as attentional demands increase, the combination of dual task and time pressure conditions can cause attentional demands to surpass capacity and/or resource allocation thresholds for fluent speakers. Future research should continue investigating the effect of time pressure and other divided attention conditions on typical speakers and those with communication disorders to establish methods for optimizing conditions for effective communication in everyday situations.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第24744号 / 情博第832号 / 新制||情||139(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科システム科学専攻 / (主査)准教授 深沢 圭一郎, 教授 田中 利幸, 教授 石井 信 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM