Human Cognition

As we have noticed from our own classroom experiences, children often find it difficult to identify the adequate operations learned in mathematics class when they are solving mechanical-operators problems in Technology class. We wanted to design a project that exploits the idea of a hands-on relationship between mathematics and technology to teach students the concept of "transmission coefficient" in schools. Our purpose was to bridge mathematical knowledge and mechanical parts in technological devices. Our belief was that visual-tangible representations enhance human cognition by scaffolding the information process. We supplied a kit with rubber foam ("Fomi") and balsa wood parts to construct an analogical clock. This included a series of gears to work with three different ratios. The project was conducted in 2007 and 2008, with 38 students ranging from 10 to 14 years of age. The students were from the 5th and 7th grades in two different schools. The project inc...

After researching the many conceptual and technical qualities of metaphor, it still remained to reason the process by which metaphors impact actual buildings, professional practice, design, perception, and actual use. Was there a cause and effect relationship between the making and the reading of metaphors, and, architectural metaphors?  Because it was no accident that architecture is a metaphor, it was reasonable  to seek its cause. Otherwise it would only be a correlation, [a] where architecture was a metaphor without any consequent cause and would then would be unreliable and inconsistent.
Actually, architecture is the result of both technical and conceptual metaphors. The challenge was to articulate metaphors into the design process so they achieve the goal of the product for the end user. Since cause is an inference that one factor somehow exerts influence on another; the inference not only asserts a predictable relationship between the factors but also accounts for it.
After introducing the general cause and effect of ideas and metaphors, I present specific cause and effect relationships between the technical architectural tools, such as programs, drawings, models, and contacts, as well as the conceptual metaphoric tools of analogies, ideas, and culture.

In an attempt to illustrate the application of cognitive science principles to hard AI problems in machine learning we propose the LIDA technology, a cognitive science based architecture capable of more human-like learning. A LIDA based software agent or cognitive robot will be capable of three fundamental, continuously active, humanlike learning mechanisms: 1) perceptual learning, the learning of new objects, categories, relations, etc., 2) episodic learning of events, the what, where, and when, 3) procedural learning, the ...

As discussed in Chapter 3, the Smart Internet consists of both smart interactions and smart services. Part 2 of this book covers smart interactions, which are briefly introduced here. Since the requirements for user interaction are driven by human needs and the properties of human cognition, we will also consider research requirements relating to smart interaction in this introduction, and a brief roadmap of the remaining chapters in this section will also be provided.