Esta dissertação investiga os efeitos da imersão física em jogos sérios com propósitos de aprendizado perceptivo. O principal objetivo é identificar um conjunto de orientações de design para ajudar desenvolvedores a escolher o nível apropriado de imersão a ser usado em jogos sérios a fim de assegurar que o jogo seja efetivo e confortável para os usuários. A hipótese principal é que altos níveis de imersão melhoram os resultados dos jogos sérios, mas níveis de imersão moderados também podem ser adequados com a vantagem de que causa menos mal-estar nos usuários. Nós organizamos uma revisão da literatura para melhor entender como a imersão física está sendo usada atualmente em jogos sérios, como a efetividade tem sido avaliada, e como a imersão afeta os resultados do jogo e a usabilidade. Então, nós conduzimos dois estudos de usuário empíricos para investigar os efeitos da fidelidade de display, interação e locomoção na percepção dos usuários e retenção de conhecimento. Para os experimentos, nós adaptamos um jogo sério previamente desenvolvido para análise de percepção de riscos, e desenvolvemos um novo jogo para educar trabalhadores sobre procedimentos de segurança que precisam ser seguidos durante instalações elétricas na linha de manutenção elétrica. Os resultados mostraram que, em geral, a fidelidade de display tem impacto na percepção de riscos quando procurando por riscos que não são óbvios. Alta fidelidade de display tem melhor desempenho na identificação de riscos complexos. A fidelidade de locomoção e interação não apresentou diferenças significantes no aprendizado perceptivo. Alta fidelidade também apresentou maior workload, mas nas mesmas condições a corretividade das tarefas foi maior e os participantes lembraram dos procedimentos tanto no pós-teste quanto no teste de retenção. Portanto, a retenção de conhecimento não foi afetada pelo workload introduzido pela técnica interativa. A partir destes experimentos, nós elaboramos e discutimos um conjunto de orientações de design que podem ser considerados para a escolha do nível apropriado de imersão física para ser usado no desenvolvimento de novos jogos sérios. / Nowadays, several application areas are adopting serious games as an ethical, safe and low-cost alternative to performing dangerous tasks, such as training of firefighters, and for medical surgeries. The employment of Virtual Reality in serious games helps to provide virtual environments much more realistic and better immersive experiences to the user. However, some VR systems can still cause sickness symptoms, such as nausea and headaches, and some of them can be expensive, such as CAVEs. This thesis investigates the effects of physical immersion on serious games with perceptual learning purposes. Its main goal is to identify a set of design guidelines to help developers on choosing the appropriate level of immersion to be used in serious games in order to assure it is effective and comfortable for users. The main hypothesis is that higher levels of immersion improve serious games outcomes, but moderate immersion may be also adequate with the advantage of causing less simulation sickness on users. We organized a survey of the literature to better understand how physical immersion is being currently used on serious games, how its effectiveness has been assessed, and how immersion impacts on the game outcomes and usability. Then, we conducted two empirical user studies looking for investigating the effects of the display, interaction and locomotion fidelity on users’ perception and knowledge retention. For the experiments, we adapted a serious game previously developed for risk assessment and developed a new one to educate workers in electricity-line maintenance on safety procedures that need to be followed during electric installations. Results showed that, in general, display fidelity has an effect on risk perception when searching for non-obvious risks. Higher display fidelity has better performance on complex risks identification. Interaction and locomotion fidelity did not show a significant difference in perceptual learning. Naturalness also presented higher workload, but in the same conditions the correctness of tasks was high and subjects recall the procedures in both post- and retention-test. Therefore, knowledge retention is not impacted by the workload imposed by the interactive technique. From these experiments, we elaborated and discussed a set of design guidelines that can be considered for the choice of the appropriate physical immersion to be used on the development of new serious games.

Orientador: Luis Antonio Violin Dias Pereira / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Biologia / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-05T12:45:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Moraes_SuzanaGuimaraes_D.pdf: 50010658 bytes, checksum: fd19532640ee16db1a01334371893f0f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / Resumo: As disciplinas tradicionais de embriologia humana exigem do aluno um rápido entendimento de uma série de mudanças que ocorrem simultaneamente em uma escala macro e microscópica no embrião. Os estudantes têm dificuldade em compreender os conceitos apresentados e criar mentalmente imagens tridimensionais dos processos envolvidos. O estudo do desenvolvimento humano normal e anormal é importante para facilitar o entendimento da anatomia humana e para fornecer a base fisiopatológica da correção cirúrgica ou tratamento clínico dos defeitos congênitos. No presente trabalho foi desenvolvida uma metodologia de ensino para ilustrar e aumentar a compreensão da embriologia humana normal e os defeitos congênitos. A estratégia elaborada envolve a produção e utilização de filmes de técnicas em reprodução assistida e de correção cirúrgica de malformações congênitas, animações desenvolvidas em Flash MX (Macromedia) e a documentação digital macro e microscópica de embriões, fetos e neonatos encaminhados para autópsia. Recém-nascidos e crianças portadores de defeitos congênitos, submetidos à tratamento clínico e cirúrgico também foram documentados. Todas estas imagens obtidas, incluindo os ultra-sons e radiografias, foram cuidadosamente descritas, editadas, catalogadas e organizadas em um banco digital de imagens e dados. Os achados da autópsia, história clínica e outras informações relevantes também foram inseridos no banco de dados. Estas ferramentas de ensino foram utilizadas nos módulos Morfofisiologia Humana I e II do curso de Medicina da Universidade Estadual de Campinas. As aulas de embriologia foram divididas em dois momentos. No primeiro foi descrito o desenvolvimento normal das estruturas corporais, utilizando-se dos esquemas e animações produzidas. No segundo momento, histórias clínicas, imagens de autópsias, de exames imaginológicos e cirurgias corretivas foram apresentadas aos alunos, encorajando-os a identificar as malformações e discutir as histórias clínicas, diagnóstico e terapêutica. O material didático também foi organizado e disponibilizado em um ambiente interativo, o qual foi usado pelos alunos como um complemento às aulas. No final do módulo tanto o material didático quanto a metodologia de ensino desenvolvidos neste trabalho foram avaliados através de instrumentos quantitativos e qualitativos. A maioria dos alunos aprovou a metodologia e enfatizaram a importância da integração entre as disciplinas básicas e clínicas. Esta metodologia se mostrou útil para solucionar uma dificuldade importante associada às metodologias de ensino em instituições médicas, ou seja, a falta de integração entre disciplinas básicas e clínicas / Abstract: Traditional human embryology courses are demanding in that they require students to rapidly understand the various changes that occur simultaneously on a macro and on a microscopic scale in embryos. Students have difficulty in grasping the concepts presented and in creating three-dimensional mental images of the processes invblved. Knowledge of normal and abnormal human development is important for understanding the pathophysiology, clinical treatment and surgical repair of malformations. In this study, we developed a teaching methodology to illustrate and enhance the comprehension of normal human embryology and of birth defects. The strategy involved movies of the assisted reproduction techniques, congenital malformations correction surgeries, the Flash MX (Macromedia) animation development and the macro- and microscopical digital documentation of embryos, fetuses and neonates following autopsy. Newborn babies were also photographed in a nursery. The ultrasound and macro- and microscopic images were carefully described, computer edited, catalogued and organized into a digital image database. The autopsy findings, clinical history and other relevant data were aiso stored in the database. These teaching tools were used in the Human Morpho-Physiology course of the medical curriculum at State University of Campinas. The embryology lectures were divided into two parts. During the first part, the development of the body's structures was explained, while in the second, images of selected autopsies were shown to the students, who were also encouraged to find and discuss the malformations and their clinical history, diagnosis and therapeutics. The teaching materiais were also organized on an educational software used by the students as a complement to the lectures. At the end of the course, research methodology was used aiming at evaluating the developed teaching material and method via an attitudinal measuring scale instrument. Most of the students approved of the method and emphasized the importance of integration between basic and clinical disciplines. This approach proved useful for solving an important difficulty associated with teaching methods in many medical institutions, namely, the lack of integration between basic and clinical disciplines / Doutorado / Histologia / Doutor em Biologia Celular e Estrutural

Listeners use perceptual learning to rapidly adapt to manipulated speech input. Examination of this learning process can reveal the pathways used during speech perception. By assessing generalization of perceptually learned categorization boundaries, others have used perceptual learning to help determine whether abstract units are necessary for listeners and models of speech perception. Here we extend this approach to address the inverse issue of specificity. In these experiments we have sought to discover the levels of specificity for which listeners can learn variation in phonetic contrasts. We find that (1) listeners are able to learn multiple voicing boundaries for different pairs of phonemic contrasts relying on the same feature contrast. (2) Listeners generalize voicing boundaries to untrained continua with the same onset as the trained continua, but generalization to continua with different onsets depends on previous experience with other continua sharing this different onset. (3) Listeners can learn different voicing boundaries for continua with the same CV onset, which suggests that boundaries are lexically-specific. (4) Listeners can learn different voicing boundaries for multiple talkers even when they are not given instructions about talkers and their task does not require talker identification. (5) Listeners retain talker-specific boundaries after training on a new boundary for a second talker, but generalize boundaries across talkers when they have no previous experience with a talker. These results were obtained using a new paradigm for unsupervised perceptual learning in speech. They suggest that models of speech perception must be highly flexible in order to accommodate both specificity and generalization of perceptually learned categorization boundaries.

Since many educators and philosophers, including Montessori and Piaget, advocate training of the sense as a prerequisite to formal learning, and since two ERIC searches failed to turn up such research it was decided to test out it the use of a multi-sensory curriculum does influence the achievement level of young children.

No description available.

Purpose: This study was designed to investigate the effect of pairing cognitive training, developed from Piaget's theory, with perceptual training on reading achievement. Also investigated was the effect of cognitive and perceptual training by themselves, as well as that of a cont:col group on reading achievement. A second purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not perceptual errors would be reduced by pairing perceptual and cognitive training as opposed to perceptual, cognitive or control training alone.

The human visual system must quickly and accurately deploy task-and-object-specific processing to successfully navigate the environment, which suggests several interesting research questions: What is the nature of these strategies? Are they flexible? To what extent is this behaviour optimal given the natural statistics of the environment? In this thesis, I explored these questions using human faces, a complex and dynamic source of socially relevant information that we encounter throughout our lives. Specifically, I conducted several experiments examining the role of horizontally-oriented spatial frequency components in face identification. In Chapter 2, I use computational modelling to demonstrate that the structure conveyed by these components is maximally diagnostic for face identity, and show that selective processing of this structure predicts both face identification performance and the face inversion effect. In Chapter 3, I quantify the bandwidth utilized by human observers and relate this sampling strategy to the information structure of face stimuli. In Chapter 4, I show that the selective sampling described in Chapters 2 and 3 is driven by information from the eyes. Finally, in Chapter 5, I show that the impaired horizontal selectivity associated with face inversion is enhanced by practice identifying inverted faces. Together, these experiments characterize a stimulus with differentially diagnostic information sources that, through experience, becomes selectively processed in a manner associated with task performance. These results contribute to our understanding of expert object processing and may have implications for observers experiencing face perception deficits. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Learning and memory of recurring sound patterns play a crucial role for efficient perception of acoustic signals that dynamically unfold in time. Human listeners are remarkably sensitive to patterns, i.e., short sound segments that repeat within continuous auditory input, and can form robust memory representations for distinct patterns through repeated exposure. While there is compelling evidence for an exceptional perceptual learning capacity even for novel and meaningless acoustic patterns, less is known about whether and how the acquisition of memory representations at multiple time scales is modulated by the listening context. The present thesis comprises one behavioural and two EEG studies, which aimed to explore pattern repetition detection in continuous sounds as well as implicit memory formation for specific patterns that recur over a longer time scale (unbeknownst to the participants) under different listening conditions. More specifically, three aspects of the listening context were experimentally manipulated: presentation format of the repeating pattern (Study 1), listeners’ attentional focus, and temporal regularity of pattern repetition within a longer continuous sound sequence (Study 2 & 3). Combined results suggest that learning of acoustic patterns through repetition builds on a flexible mechanism that is robust against varying contextual demands, such as they often occur during naturalistic listening. Despite reliable pattern repetition detection and longer-term memory formation across all listening contexts, certain contextual features enhanced short-term perceptual representations, which in turn improved longer term memory formation. Together, these findings advance the understanding of (shorter- and longer-term) memory acquisition for novel acoustic patterns and suggest that auditory perceptual learning can be facilitated through targeted design of listening contexts.

No description available.

Perceptual learning occurs because observers become more sensitive to informative aspects of the stimuli. Learning the informative aspects of one stimulus set does not transfer to another stimulus set of the same class. In this dissertation, the argument will be made that if observers learn how to discover informative aspects, learning will be more generalizable. However, discovery requires that the informative aspects are not easily apparent. To this end, stimulus orientation structure can be manipulated to contain informative structure in one orientation band, and non-informative structure in the other orientation band. Such a manipulation was inspired by research on face perception: Faces are best identified when decisions are based more on the horizontal relative to the vertical facial structure. Hence, the first three chapters focus on understanding the horizontal bias during face identification, and the final two chapters introduce a novel stimulus set for which horizontal bias may be learned. Chapter 2 identifies a neural marker of horizontal bias that is correlated with face identification accuracy, suggesting that we can predict how well observers identify faces based on their neural sensitivity to horizontal relative to vertical structure. Chapter 3 shows that when face identification accuracy declines due to healthy ageing, so too do behavioural and neural horizontal bias, but Chapter 4 shows that perceptual learning can increase horizontal bias in healthy older adults. Chapter 5 uses texture stimuli and shows that observers can learn to discover informative horizontal structure embedded in uninformative vertical structure. Chapter 6 extends these findings to show that adequate practice results in learning that generalizes to novel textures for which the orientation-selective processing is relevant. The results presented inform our understanding of the neural representations associated with orientation-selective processing, and suggest that observers can learn to discover informative structure conveyed by a particular orientation band. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)