<p>Savant syndrome is a rare condition in which some people have extraordinary talents despite some serious mental or physical disability. It is a syndrome with remarkable features, standing in stark contrast to a person’s overall character. The term savant, or idiot savant, describes a person who, in spite of low intelligence, has a skill in some specific narrow area. Savants can have a specific talent in, for instance, music, art, calendar calculation or foreign language but whatever the specific talent is, it is always connected to extraordinary memory. Savant syndrome seems to be also connected to autism or autistic characteristics. In this paper I aim to give a clear description of the savant syndrome and explain its connection to autism. Further, I present how specific theories try to describe the causes of savant syndrome, and connect the theories to results of empirical research in order to give an overall view of the syndrome’s appearance. I will also compare the theories and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses with respect to the discoveries and progress that has been made within the area of savant syndrome research.</p>

<p>Denna rapport syftar till att undersöka i vilken utsträckning stridsvagnskompanichefer skiljer och/eller liknar ”commanders” (i spelet ”Battlefield 2”) i sitt sätt att skapa och upprätthålla situationsmedvetenhet med avseende på riskbedömning kopplat till fiendens position i slagfältet. Studien grundar sig på en tanke om att utnyttja positiva effekter från datorspelande, i morgondagens ledningssystem genom att bygga ledningssystem grundade på en kommersiell spelplattform. Resultaten pekar bland annat på skillnader mellan de båda aktörernas metoder för att uppnå full situationsmedvetenhet, men även på vissa likheter som till exempel att se på en situation med fiendens ögon för att bedöma hur denna kommer att agera.</p>

<p>In this thesis report we conducted research study on driver's behavior in T-Intersections using simulated environment. This report describes and discusses correlation analysis of driver's personality traits and style while driving at T-Intersections.</p><p>The experiments were performed on multi user driving simulator under controlled settings, at Linköping University. A total of forty-eight people participated in the study and were divided into groups of four, all driving in the same simulated world.</p><p>During the experiments participants were asked to fill a series of well-known self-report questionnaires. We evaluated questionnaires to get the insight in driver's personality traits and driving style. The self-report questionnaires consist of Schwartz's configural model of 10 values types and NEO-five factor inventory. Also driver's behavior was studied with the help of questionnaires based on driver's behavior, style, conflict avoidance, time horizon and tolerance of uncertainty. Then these 10 Schwartz's values are correlated with the other questionnaires to give the detail insight of the driving habits and personality traits of the drivers.</p>

This dissertation challenges the standard view that fifteenth-century poets wrote irregular meters in artless imitation of Chaucer. On the contrary, I argue that Chaucer’s followers deliberately misread his meter in order to challenge his authority as a laureate. Rather than reproduce that meter, they reformed it, creating three distinct meters that vied for dominance in the first decades of the fifteenth century. In my analysis of 40,655 decasyllables written by poets other than Chaucer, I show that the fifteenth century was not the metrical wasteland so often depicted by editors and critics but an age of radical experimentation, nuance, and prosodic cunning. In Chapter One I present evidence against the two standard explanations for a fifteenth-century metrical collapse: cultural depression and linguistic instability. Chapter Two outlines an alternative framework to the statistical and linguistic methods that have come to dominate metrical studies. In their place I propose an interdisciplinary approach that combines the two techniques with cognitive science, using a reader-oriented, brain-based model of metrical competence to reframe irregular rhythms as problems that readers solve. Chapter Three applies this framework to Chaucer’s meter to show that the poets who inherited his long line exploited its soft structure in order to build competing meters; in that chapter I also argue that Chaucer did not write in iambic pentameter, as is generally assumed, but in a “footless” decasyllabic line modeled on the Italian endecasillibo. Chapter Four explores metrical reception; by probing scribal responses to Chaucer’s meter we can gain insight into how fifteenth-century readers heard it. Chapters Five through Seven investigate three specific acts of reception by poets: those of John Walton, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. I conclude the dissertation by tracing the influence of Hoccleve and Lydgate on the later fifteenth-century poets George Ashby, Osbern Bokenham, and John Metham, and by identifying the eclipse of fifteenth-century meter with the Tudor poets Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barclay, who replaced a misreading of Chaucer’s meter with a misreading of Lydgate’s, inadvertently returning sixteenth-century poets to an alternating decasyllable reminiscent of Chaucer’s own meter. / text

Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary field that ties together the curricula of liberal arts and technical fields of study. However, it is de-emphasized in technical undergraduate studies such as Engineering. Cognitive Science is essentially the study of the human mind and how humans process information. It is the study of human responses, thinking, and perception. Human behavior and a person’s reaction are undetermined, but it can be better understood. Although human behavior and interaction is a routine part of life, engineers are taught to decipher code and not how to decipher a human’s behavior. Cognitive Science affects all aspects in the work environment. Organizational practices can be improved by understanding common biases and motivational theories in people. Having a cognitive awareness of typical human behavior will help to promote improved communication and positive reactions from people in the workplace. Human behavior is inevitable in any field but more crucial in technical fields especially when there is lack of communication or ambiguous guidelines and definitions. In technical fields, miscommunication or ambiguity can be a matter of life or death. In many situations, miscommunication can drive ambiguity. Although some people are happy with flexible guidelines, others seek to have well defined expectations. How do people react in situations surrounding miscommunication or ambiguity? In both situations, some people create opportunities and others become a hindrance. Processes and procedures can be put in place to alleviate ambiguous situations, but human performance and psychological factors still play a role as well. Human error can result from psychological factors, but the environment can be improved to limit those factors. As with any situation, mishaps are still prone to happen. Although human error is preventable in most cases, it’s never completely unavoidable. Human error continues to be a deep-rooted cause that can lead to negative outcomes. As stated by Alexander Pope, “to err is human…” (Moncur). This paper will explore underlying human behavior in daily activities. By understanding common biases and motivational theories driving human behavior, one can address negative behavior in a technical field in order to create opportunities. / text

This dissertation models the relationship between symptoms of heart rhythm fluctuations and cardiac measurements in order to better identify the probabilities of either a primarily organic or psychosomatic cause, and to better understand cognition of the internal body. The medical system needs to distinguish patients with actual cardiac problems from those who are misperceiving benign heart rhythms due to psychosomatic conditions. Cognitive neuroscience needs models showing how the brain processes sensations of palpitations. Psychologists and philosophers want data and analyses that address longstanding controversies about the validity of introspective methods. I therefore undertake a series of measurements to model how well patient descriptions of heartbeat fluctuations correspond to cardiac arrhythmias. First, I employ a formula for Bayesian inference and an initial probability for disease. The presence of particular phrases in symptom reports is shown to modify the probability that a patient has a clinically significant heart rhythm disorder. A second measure of body knowledge accuracy uses a corpus of one hundred symptom reports to estimate the positive predictive value for arrhythmias contained in language about palpitations. This produces a metric representing average predictivity for cardiac arrhythmias in a population. A third effort investigates the percentage of patients with palpitations report actually diagnosed with arrhythmias by examining data from a series of studies. The major finding suggests that phenomenological reports about heartbeats are as or are more predictive of clinically significant arrhythmias than non-introspection-based data sources. This calculation can help clinicians who must diagnose an organic or psychosomatic etiology. Secondly, examining a corpus of reports for how well they predict the presence of cardiac rhythm disorders yielded a mean positive predictive value of 0.491. Thirdly, I reviewed studies of palpitations reporters, half of which showed between 15% and 26% of patients had significant or serious arrhythmias. In addition, evidence is presented that psychosomatic-based palpitation reports are likely due to cognitive filtering and processing of cardiac afferents by brainstem, thalamic, and cortical neurons. A framework is proposed to model these results, integrating neurophysiological, cognitive, and clinical levels of explanation. Strategies for developing therapies for patients suffering from identifiably psychosomatic-based palpitations are outlined. / text

Cette étude s'inscrit dans le cadre théorique de l'énonciation impliquant des aspects sociolinguistiques et communicatifs. Elle constitue un croisement du domaine de la linguistique avec celui des sciences de l'information, de la sociologie et de l'anthropologie. Elle est axée sur la communication médiatique, particulièrement la question de responsabilité dans l'écriture de presse. L'analyse concerne plus précisément l'exploitation d'un fait de langue (le discours rapporté) dans l'écriture de presse et l'impact que cela peut avoir sur la prise de position du locuteur rapportant. C'est une analyse des formes linguistiques de la subjectivité dans les textes journalistiques, l'objectif étant de déceler jusqu'à quel point la forme du discours rapporté influe sur la construction du point de vue du journaliste énonciateur. Il s'agit de distinguer, à travers des textes, que l'on pourrait qualifier d'objectifs en tant qu'écrits journalistiques répondant à la déontologie, des mécanismes par lesquels s'expriment des points de vue débouchant sur des prises de position subjectives. De manière transversale, l'analyse apporte des éléments de réponse à deux questions essentielles : qu'est-ce que c'est que le subjectif ? Comment ce concept est-il rendu dans le discours rapporté au sein des faits divers des quotidiens sénégalais ? Vu ses dimensions sociolinguistique, communicative et interactionnelle, l'analyse porte sur trois pôles principaux : le sujet énonciateur (traces évaluatives, axiologiques et socio-affectives de sa présence), le contenu (aspects morphosyntaxique et sémantique) et le contrat de communication médiatique (dispositif de production médiatique).

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Une interface cerveau-ordinateur permet d'interagir avec un système, comme un système d'écriture, uniquement par l'activité cérébrale. Un des phénomènes neurophysiologiques permettant cette interaction est le potentiel évoqué cognitif P300, lequel correspond à une modification du signal 300 ms après la présentation d'une information attendue. cette petite réaction cérébrale est difficile à observer par électroencéphalographie car le signal est bruité. Dans cette thèse, de nouvelles techniques basées sur la théorie des ondelettes sont développées pour améliorer la détection des P300 en utilisant des mesures de similarité entre les canaux électroencéphalographiques. Une technique présentée dans cette thèse débruite les signaux en considérant simultanément la phase des signaux. Nous avons également étendu cette approche pour étudier la localisation du P300 dans le but de sélectionner automatiquement la fenêtre temporelle à étudier et faciliter la détection.

Sequential structure imposed by the forward linear progression of time is omnipresent in all cognitive behaviors. This thesis proposes a novel model to store sequences of any length, scalar or vectorial, in binary neural networks. Particularly, the model that we introduce allows resolving some well known problems in sequential learning, such as error intolerance, catastrophic forgetting and the interference issue while storing complex sequences, etc. The quantity of the total sequential information that the network is able to store grows quadratically with the number of nodes. And the efficiency - the ratio between the capacity and the total amount of information consumed by the storage device - can reach around 30%. This work could be considered as an extension of the non oriented clique-based neural networks previously proposed and studied within our team. Those networks composed of binary neurons and binary connections utilize the concept of graph redundancy and sparsity in order to acquire a quadratic learning diversity. To obtain the ability to store sequences, connections are provided with orientation to form a tournament-based neural network. This is more natural biologically speak- ing, since communication between neurons is unidirectional, from axons to synapses. Any component of the network, a cluster or a node, can be revisited several times within a sequence or by multiple sequences. This allows the network to store se- quences of any length, independent of the number of clusters and only limited by the total available resource of the network. Moreover, in order to allow error correction and provide robustness to the net- work, both spatial assembly redundancy and sequential redundancy, with or without anticipation, may be combined to offer a large amount of redundancy in the activation of a node. Subsequently, a double layered structure is introduced with the purpose of accurate retrieval. The lower layer of tournament-based hetero-associative network stores sequential oriented associations between patterns. An upper auto-associative layer of mirror nodes is superposed to emphasize the co-occurrence of the elements belonging to the same pattern, in the form of a clique. This model is then extended to a hierarchical structure, which helps resolve the interference issue while storing complex sequences. This thesis also contributes in proposing and assessing new decoding rules with respect to sparse messages in order to fully benefit from the theoretical quadratic law of the learning diversity. Besides the performance aspect, the biological plausibility is also a constant concern during this thesis work.