Education Modules
There are five modules that CELEST Education is developing for use in classrooms ranging from middle school through undergraduate school. To access these modules, click "Login to Beta Site" (which requires a username and password). Please contact Dan Franklin or Paul Trunfio if you do not currently have access, by clicking on the Contact Us link on the left.
Each module contains:
- Teacher Instructions
- Class Presentation
- Background and Theory
- Software User's Guide
- Classroom Materials
- Neural Network Model for Advanced Studies
The five modules are:
Brightness Lab
This software teaches students about how we see bright and dark surfaces. Users perform a perceptual experiment in which they match the brightness of different regions on the screen. They are also able to analyze the results from the experiment in the program. This helps develop basic mathematical skills. Experiments are fully customizable to allow a wide range of uses.
Sequence Learning
The importance of maintaining temporal organization is well
established and ubiquitous. For instance, even in language tasks where
the order in which information is presented is seemingly irrelevant,
the need to retain order information for accurate comprehension
applies at the letter/word (e.g. distinguishing salt vs. last),
sentence (e.g. deciphering grammatical structure), and paragraph
levels (establishing logical progression and implying causality). Far
from being limited to deciphering sensory inputs from the world
correctly, order information is also essential for acting upon the
world appropriately. When executing sequences of movements (whether
typing on a keyboard or completing a maze) incorrect ordering of
movement sequences can lead to an entirely ineffective performance!
Associative Learning
This module uses eye-blink conditioning to develop an understanding of
types of memory. Most human brain activity and behavior require
precise timing: for example, sleep, perception, speech, writing,
walking, running, playing sports and video games of all types. In
addition, learning and memory about how the brain can form and
maintain associations over time intervals of variable duration is
fundamental. The ability to learn temporal conditioning is a critical
survival competence in normal adaptive behavior because it enables the
learning of which earlier events predict later consequences, and which
event combinations are not causative. In this way, the individual can
make the optimal choices for successful, adaptive behavior.
Associative learning is a basic form of animal and human cognition.
The classical conditioning paradigm includes two fundamental types of
association between two stimuli: delay and trace conditioning. The
learning measured in the classical conditioning paradigm is the
association of a heretofore neutral event, such as a tone or a light,
with an emotionally-charged, reflex-inducing event, such as a puff of
air to the eye or a shock to some part of the body. The first event is
called the conditioned stimulus (CS); the second is the unconditioned
stimulus (US). Delay conditioning is said to occur when the stimulus
events have a temporal overlap and coterminate so that the subject
associates concurrent sensations and learns to make an adaptive,
conditioned response (CR) in anticipation of the US. Trace
conditioning involves a temporal gap between the CS offset and the US
onset such that a memory trace is required to make a successful CR.
This module explores both of these paradigms.
Students begin with an interactive task: press the space bar before
the red circle appears. There are random, fixed trace schedule and
probabilistic trace schedule appearances of the red circle (US) as an
event that follows an initial blue circle (CS). Joined and separate
bar-graphs for each schedule allow a discussion of adaptive timing.
The student can see the learning curve in the fixed schedule trace
paradigm. There is a complete model layer based on published research
that simulates the eyeblink response as measured by the movement of
the nictitating membrane (NMR) in rabbits, including the cerebellar
response that support the behavior, for both delay or trace
conditioning.
Recognition
The exercises, instructions and software in this module teach the students how humans and machines learn to recognize objects and events. In one of the exercises the students categorize different geometrical shapes. This will not only help them develop their skills in geometry, but also persuades them to find what features they use for this recognition task. In the software, they are introduced to more elaborate uses of the features for recognition and how attention to a feature affects the recognition as well as other exercises. The software has the ability to accept other databases, and a “Cars” database is already developed for future uses.
Obstacle Avoidance
How do humans walk through a cluttered room without running into objects? Human navigation relies on our ability to visually detect where things are in the environment and plan a path through the environment without colliding with obstacles. This CELEST module explores several aspects of human navigation, using 3D interactive software. Students learn how steering and obstacle avoidance work by actually navigating a simulated 3D environment. Students are introduced to concepts like "optic flow" and "heading perception", building toward an understanding of how the brain controls navigation.click "Login to Beta Site" (which requires a username and password). Please contact Dan Franklin or Paul Trunfio if you do not currently have access, by clicking on the Contact Us link on the left.