• In this paper we combine motion captured data with linguistic notions in a game-like intelligent tutoring system, in order to help elementary school students to better differentiate literal from metaphorical uses of motion verbs, based on embodied information. In addition to the thematic goal, we intend to improve young students’ attention and spatiotemporal memory, by presenting sensorimotor data experimentally collected from thirty two participants in our motion capturing labs. Furthermore, we examine the accomplishment of game’s goals and compare them (...) to curriculum’s approach. Sixty nine elementary school students were randomly divided in two experimental groups (game and traditional) and one control group, which did not undergo any intervention. All groups were tested in pre and posttests. Even though the diagnostic pretests present a uniform picture, two way analysis of variance suggests that the experimental groups showed progress in posttests and, more specifically, game group remarkably progressed in the verbs/actions presented during the intervention. Furthermore, in the game condition the participants needed gradually shorter period of time to identify the avatar’s actions. This finding was considered as a first indication of attentional and spatiotemporal memory’s improvement, while the game’s assistance features cultivated students’ metacognitive perception. (shrink)

Cognitive impenetrability (CI) of a large part of visual perception is taken for granted by those of us in the field of computational vision who attempt to recover descriptions of space using geometry and statistics as tools. These tools clearly point out, however, that CI cannot extend to the level of structured descriptions of object surfaces, as Pylyshyn suggests. The reason is that visual space – the description of the world inside our heads – is a nonEuclidean curved space. As (...) a consequence, the only alternative for a vision system is to develop several descriptions of space–time; these are representations of reduced intricacy and capture partial aspects of objective reality. As such, they make sense in the context of a class of tasks/actions/plans/purposes, and thus cannot be cognitively impenetrable. (shrink)