Sota Watanabe

With a technological development of the AI (artificial intelligence),how the AI relates to human jobs and what cooperation can be practical have been hotly debated. There is a nameless apprehension for its future existence of teaching profession because of that the AI would be substituted for teachers as an interactive AI will be developed within a decade or so. Using a 90-min university class,we investigated the attitude of the prospective teachers toward the issue through their essay papers,who would be the driving force of future education as anchor teachers and discussed the necessary grounding for teacher training. Before asking students to write a paper on the relation between the AI and the teaching profession,we gave them a short lecture about a recent AI development and then distributed two types of newspaper article,a positive and a negative stance. Based on the tone of opinions,133 papers are divided into affirmative (45.9%) and negative (54.1%) main categories. Positive views mostly emphasized an active role of the AI to lighten teachers' burden of various school matters. Those of negative revealed that the AI should be used as only a supplementary function since it could not meet educational needs which encompass sensitivity,sentiment and even human erroneousness. Since the Ministry of Education has proposed a policy recommending the school to utilize the AI,cognitive psychology should be included as one of the required subjects for teacher training course to learn the limitations and the characteristics of the AI.

We have reported an improvement in behavior in the dolphin assisted activity(DAA)applied to a child with developmental disorders such as autism. The present study examined the effect of the DAA program done in Kagawa particularly on the basis of the analyses of verbal behavior. The participant(H)joined in the 3-day-program(4 sessions a year)of DAA done in August 2012 and 2013(total of 8 sessions) showed asymptotic performance level in terms of average scores in the Behavior Evaluation Scales (BES) which consisted of 12 items with 4-point rating scale each. Quantitative analyses of utterance showed the significantly high correlations between the number of words uttered by H and that of observers who were attendant on the dolphin sessions. The results suggest that appropriate social settings which enable a participant to involve in a certain number of meaningful others would lead the development of verbal skills. Whether participation in the DAA program effectively brings out an improvement of communication skills is discussed in relation to the psychological concept of routine, script and schema.

In humans, visual processes use retinotopic coordinates. However, not all processes are strictly retinotopic. We used a variant of the Ternus-Pikler stimulus to examine whether pigeons, visually dominant vertebrates, share the same retinotopic and non-retinotopic processing as humans. Six humans and four pigeons were required to discriminate the rotational direction of target disks surrounded by other nonrotating disks. When all disks flickered in synchrony and moved in tandem back and forth, target localization in humans was hampered but that in pigeons was not affected. These results suggest that visual processes in humans can be accomplished with using non-retinotopic coordinates, but those in pigeons are strictly retinotopic.

We examined whether adult bantams (Gallus gallus domesticus) complete occluded parts of objects (amodal completion) using a visual search task. First, 3 bantams were trained to search for a punched red diamond (a target) among complete diamonds (distracters) displayed on a touch-sensitive monitor. Next, white squares accompanied each figure with a small gap of a fixed size. In the test, the location of the accompanying squares sometimes changed. In some trials, the white squares exactly covered, or "occluded", the punched portion of the target. All three bantams had no difficulty in searching for targets in this "occluded" condition. This result, and the demonstration by Forkman (1998) of hens' amodal completion of figures placed on a perspective background, suggest that the perspective cue may have an important role in amodal completion for this species, or perhaps for the avian species.