This study explored the state of art education in Turkey as revealed by pre-service art education university instructors, and the potential of incorporating visual culture studies in pre-service art education in Turkey. The instructors' ideas about visual culture, and popular culture, the impact it might have, the content (objects), and the practices within the context of Turkey were examined. Visual culture was examined from an art education perspective that focuses on a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the perception and critique of popular culture and everyday cultural experiences, and the analysis of media including television programs, computer games, Internet sites, and advertisements. A phenomenological human science approach was employed in order to develop a description of the perception of visual culture in pre-service art education in Turkey as lived by the participants. In-person interviews were used to collect the data from a purposive sample of 8 faculty members who offered undergraduate and graduate art education pedagogy, art history, and studio courses within four-year public universities. This empirical approach sought to obtain comprehensive descriptions of an experience through semi-structural interviews. These interviews employed open-ended questions to gather information about the following: their educational and professional background; their definitions of art education and art teacher education and what it means for them to teach pre-service art education; critical reflections on the educational system of Turkey; perceptions of visual and popular culture; and finally individual approaches to teaching art education. This study was conducted for the purpose of benefiting pre-service art teacher education in general and specifically in Turkey. It provided the rationale, the nature, and pedagogy of visual culture as well as the why and how of visual culture art education in the context of Turkey. Furthermore, it provided insights into the potential contribution of the concept of visual culture to the understanding of art and improvement of art teacher training in the context of Turkey.

Infants begin to learn important skills, such as contingency learning, social referencing, and joint attention through everyday interactions with their environment. When infants learn that their behavior produces a change in the environment (e.g., attention from others), infants engage in behavior that produces that effect (e.g., increases in smiling sustained engagement. When mothers and other caregivers respond immediately to infant behavior, they help their infant learn that the infant’s own behavior is effective, producing a change in the environment. The current investigation evaluated the effect of a computer-based training that aimed at teaching mothers to play a vocal-imitation contingency-learning game. The training included observer-effect methodology, meaning the mothers engaged in observation and evaluation of other mothers engaging in vocal imitation but did not themselves receive any direct coaching or feedback. All mothers completed the training during one session and in less than 45 min. Results indicate that all mothers increased their use of vocal imitation post training and maintained their performance at a two-week follow-up. Results are discussed in terms of how computer training may facilitate dissemination of responsive caregiver training.

Across two experiments I sought to determine the relation between the Imitation developmental cusp and the emulative echoic cusp in preschoolers classified with a learning disability. In Experiment I, the participants were 36 preschoolers selected via a convenience sample, where the goal was to test for relations between the preverbal developmental cusp and foundational learning capability of Imitation, the preverbal and emulative verbal developmental cusps in the participant’s repertoire, and the reinforcement value of age-appropriate toys and activities. Results showed significant correlations between Imitation and conditioned reinforcement for observing adult faces and voices, parroting, echoics, and listener literacy, as well as significant relations between Imitation and conditioned reinforcement for playing with toys, puzzles, coloring materials, and Play-Doh. Findings show that Imitation is either a prerequisite or a corequisite to emulative verbal developmental cusps. Experiment II had two goals. The first was to determine whether educationally classified preschoolers with a disability can emit various imitative responses when the researcher presents instruction through a smart device using the mirror training protocol. The second was to determine whether the echoic behavior and observing responses of the participants would change as a result of undergoing the synchronous mirror training protocol. Results show a functional relation between the acquisition of the verbal foundational Imitation cusp and increases in emission of various imitative responses and emulative echoic responses, across both in-person and virtual conditions.

AbstractSyftet med studien är att bidra med kunskap och förståelse om barns användning av populärkultur i förskolan, samt visa vilken betydelse barns kunskaper om populärkultur har i skapandet av barns kamratkulturer. Studien besvarar tre frågeställningar: Hur använder sig barn av populärkultur i förskolan? Vilken betydelse har populärkultur i barns lek? Hur ser relationen mellan barns populärkulturella kunskaper och delaktighet i lek ut? Studien utgår ifrån teorier kring sociokulturell teori, populärkultur, mediering, imitation och representation samt tidigare forskning inom forskningsområdet.Empirin består av semi-strukturerade intervjuer av barn både enskilt och i små grupper i åldern 3 - 5 år. Samt av observationer ute på förskolans gård med barn i åldern 3 - 5 år. Det förekommer likaledes en inomhusobservation på en avdelning med barn i 3 – 5 årsåldern. Resultatet av studien visar att barn har intresse av att använda sig av populärkulturen de tar del av i media, i andra sammanhang då barnen använder sig av populärkulturen bland annat i samband med lek i förskolan. När barnen leker med inslag av populärkultur med varandra, använder sig barnen av olika begrepp såsom mediering och imitation för att få förståelse över populärkulturen de tar del av i media. Barnen byter även erfarenheter med varandra i samtal om populärkultur. I samband med lek och samtal med och om populärkultur skapas nya kamratkulturer på förskolan efter barns intresse och kunskaper av populärkultur. / The purpose of this study is to contribute with knowledge and understanding about children use of popular culture in preeschool. The study will also show the meaning of childrens knowledge of popular culture in their creation of peer culture. The study answers to three questions: How does children use popular culture in preeschool? What is the meaning of popular culture in preeschool ?How does the relation between childrens knowledge of popular culture and participation in play show? The study proceeds from theories about socio culture, popular culture, meditation, imitation, representation and in earlier research within this field. The empiri consists of semi structured interviews with children, both individual and in small groups.The age of the children interviewed are between 3 to 5 years old. The empiri also consists of observations in the school yard and inside the classroom of the children in the same age group.The results of this study shows that children show an interest in using popular culture they see in media, in other contexts then children uses popular culture for example in their play in preeschool. When children plays with element of popular culture with each other, they use concepts like meditation and imitation to understand the popular culture they see in media. Children also exchange experiences with each other when they discuss popular culture. In connection with play and conversation with and about popular culture, children creates new peer culture in preeschool according to their interest and knowledge about popular culture.

Malongen consists of two volumes containing housing, a gallery, and a restaurant. The design language of the base comes from a 3D scan of the rock 30 meters north of the plot. The buildings are a design interaction to explore the tension between the historical mountain cut and a design interaction. With a digital imitation of the rock the buildings intend to mimic the surrounding area. The rock, that is the historical imprint of the place, is now translated into buildingelements, as a result of my manipulation of the file. This project has investigated how we can create a contemporary buidling that refer to a historical site and keep telling a story about time.

L'Imitation par observation (IPO) est un paradigme d'apprentissage qui consiste à entraîner des agents autonomes dans un processus de décision markovien (PDM) en observant les démonstrations d'un expert et sans avoir accès à ses actions. Ces démonstrations peuvent être des séquences d'états de l'environnement ou des observations visuelles brutes de l'environnement. Bien que le cadre utilisant des états à dimensions réduites ait permis d'obtenir des résultats convaincants avec des approches récentes, l'utilisation d'observations visuelles reste un défi important en IPO. Une des procédures très adoptée pour résoudre le problème d’IPO consiste à apprendre une fonction de récompense à partir des démonstrations, toutefois la nécessité d’analyser l'environnement et l'expert à partir de vidéos pour récompenser l'agent augmente la complexité du problème. Nous abordons ce problème avec une méthode basée sur la représentation des comportements de l'agent dans un espace vectoriel en utilisant des vidéos démonstratives. Notre approche exploite les techniques récentes d'apprentissage contrastif d'images et vidéos et utilise un algorithme de bootstrapping pour entraîner progressivement une fonction d'encodage de trajectoires à partir de la variation du comportement de l'agent. Simultanément, cette fonction récompense l'agent imitateur lors de l'exécution d'un algorithme d'apprentissage par renforcement. Notre méthode utilise un nombre limité de vidéos démonstratives et nous n'avons pas accès à comportement expert. Nos agents imitateurs montrent des performances convaincantes sur un ensemble de tâches de contrôle et démontrent que l'apprentissage d'une fonction de codage du comportement à partir de vidéos permet de construire une fonction de récompense efficace dans un PDM. / Imitation from observation (IfO) is a learning paradigm that consists of training autonomous agents in a Markov Decision Process (MDP) by observing an expert's demonstrations and without access to its actions. These demonstrations could be sequences of environment states or raw visual observations of the environment. Although the setting using low-dimensional states has allowed obtaining convincing results with recent approaches, the use of visual observations remains an important challenge in IfO. One of the most common procedures adopted to solve the IfO problem is to learn a reward function from the demonstrations, but the need to understand the environment and the expert's moves through videos to appropriately reward the learning agent increases the complexity of the problem. We approach this problem with a method that focuses on the representation of the agent’s behaviors in a latent space using demonstrative videos. Our approach exploits recent techniques of contrastive learning of image and video and uses a bootstrapping algorithm to progressively train a trajectory encoding function from the variation of the agent’s policy. Simultaneously, this function rewards the imitating agent through a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm. Our method uses a limited number of demonstrative videos and we do not have access to any expert policy. Our imitating agents in experiments show convincing performances on a set of control tasks and demonstrate that learning a behavior encoding function from videos allows for building an efficient reward function in MDP.

Elicited Imitation (EI), which is a way of assessing language learners' speaking, has been used for years. Furthermore, there have been many studies done showing rater bias (variance in test ratings associated with a specific rater and attributable to the attributes of a test taker) in language assessment. In this project, I evaluated possible rater bias, focusing mostly on bias attributable to raters' and test takers' language backgrounds, as seen in EI ratings. I reviewed literature on test rater bias, participated in a study of language background and rater bias, and produced recommendations for reducing bias in EI administration. Also, based on possible rater bias effects discussed in the literature I reviewed and on results of the research study I participated in, I created a registration tool to collect raters' background information that might be helpful in evaluating and reducing rater bias in future EI testing. My project also involved producing a co-authored research paper. In that paper we found no bias effect based on rater first or second language background.

This research study aimed to create an alternative method of measuring the language proficiency of English as a Second Language (ESL) missionaries at the Missionary Training Center (MTC). Elicited imitation (EI) testing was used as this measure of language proficiency and an instrument was designed and tested with 30 ESL missionaries at the MTC. Results from the EI test were compared with an existing Language Speaking Assessment (LSA) currently in use at the MTC. EI tests were rated by human raters and also by a computer utilizing automatic speech recognition technology. Scores were compared across instruments and across scoring types. The EI test correlated highly with the LSA using both scoring methods providing initial validity for future testing and use of the instrument in measuring language proficiency at the MTC.

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