Seed42Lab/en_gum-ud-train · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 6 580	label class label 2 classes
How do people look at and experience art?	1clean
Which elements of specific artworks do they focus on?	1clean
Do museum labels have an impact on how people look at artworks?	1clean
This paper describes a collaborative pilot project focusing on a unique collection of 17th Century Zurbarán paintings.	1clean
While studies of the psychology of art have focused on individual works and distinctions between representative / non-representative topics, no work has been completed on the aesthetic appreciation of collections or of devotional themes.	1clean
In this paper, we report upon the novel insights eye-tracking techniques have provided into the unconscious processes of viewing the unique collection of Zurbarán artworks.	1clean
The project brings together established research strengths in Spanish art history, experimental psychology, digital humanities, and museum studies to explore, using eye-tracking techniques, aesthetic reactions to digital representations of the individual Zurbarán artworks as well as the significance of the collection as a whole.	1clean
Our experience of art develops from the interaction of several cognitive and affective processes; the beginning of which is a visual scan of the artwork.	1clean
When regarding an artwork, a viewer gathers information through a series fixations, interspersed by rapid movements of the eye called saccades.	1clean
Previous eye tracking research has highlighted the potential to transform the ways we understand visual processing in the arts (see for example Brieber 2014; Binderman et al., 2005) and at the same time offers a direct way of studying several important factors of a museum visit (Filippini Fantoni et al., 2013; Heidenreich & Turano 2011; Milekic 2010).	1clean
Zurbarán ’s cycle of Jacob and his Sons has been on display in the Long Room at Auckland Castle for over 250 years.	1clean
It has a long history in scholarship (Baron & Beresford 2014), but many key aspects of its production and significance have not yet been fully understood.	1clean
In this study we used eye-tracking in the first stage of exploring audience experience of the extensive Spanish art collections of County Durham, of which the 13 Zurbarán artworks (there are actually only 12 Zurbarán artworks, the 13th Benjamin, is a copy by Arthur Pond) are a key part of, to investigate the ways in which audiences look at Spanish art, how aesthetic experience is evaluated and whether audiences can be encouraged to approach art in different ways.	1clean
This pilot project primarily investigated how participants visually explore artworks and provides new insights into the potential eye-tracking has to transform the ways we understand visual processing in arts and culture and at the same time offer a direct way of studying several important factors of a museum visit, namely to assess the effects of label characteristics on visitor visual behaviour.	1clean
Past studies establish that each of these efforts is strongly and positively influenced through various forms of faculty diversity, including ethnic, racial, and gender diversity.	1clean
As an example, research shows that greater diversity within a community or group can lead to improved critical thinking [1] and more creative solutions to complex tasks [2, 3] by pairing together individuals with unique skillsets and perspectives that complement and often augment the abilities of their peers.	1clean
Additionally, diversity has been shown to produce more supportive social climates and effective learning environments [4], which can facilitate the mentoring of young scientists.	1clean
For many scientific fields, however, there is no central listing of all tenure-track faculty, making it difficult to define a rigorous sample frame for analysis.	1clean
Further, rates of adoption of services like GoogleScholar and ResearchGate vary within, and across disciplines.	1clean
Most fields, on the other hand, including computer science, lack a single all-encompassing organization and membership information is instead distributed across many disjoint lists, such as web-based faculty directories for individual departments.	1clean
Because assembling such a full census is difficult, past studies have tended to avoid this task and have instead used samples of researchers [8 – 11], usually specific to a particular field [12 – 16], and often focused on the scientific elite [17, 18].	1clean
This data set has shed considerable light on dramatic inequalities in faculty training, placement, and scholarly productivity [6, 19, 20].	1clean
In computer science, the Computing Research Association (CRA) documents trends in the employment of PhD recipients through the annual Taulbee survey of computing departments in North America (cra.org/resources/taulbee-survey).	1clean
Second, aggregate information provides only a high-level view of a field, which can make it difficult to investigate causality [23].	1clean
Here, we present a novel system, based on a topical web crawler, that can quickly and automatically assemble a full census of an academic field using digital data available on the public World Wide Web.	1clean
We begin by detailing the design and implementation of our web crawler framework.	1clean
Next, we present the results of our work in two sections.	1clean
The second provides an example of the type of research enabled by our system and uses the 2011 and 2017 censuses to investigate the “leaky pipeline” problem in faculty retention.	1clean
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, we have witnessed the return of institutions to economic analysis.	1clean
The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to its main representatives (Douglass North, Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Elinor Ostrom) has contributed to its greater recognition.	1clean
Coase [13,14] argues that economic transactions involve costs, and where these costs outweigh the gains, the exchange will not take place.	1clean
For its part, North defined the institutions as the “rules of the game”: they determine the structure of the economy, establish incentives for economic behavior, and affect social interaction [12].	1clean
Thus, institutions also determine the level of uncertainty to which individuals are subject, stimulating or discouraging transactions.	1clean
A viable economy requires an institutional structure that reduces existing uncertainty and guarantees property rights.	1clean
Of course, the state takes a lead role in promoting this type of institution.	1clean
Inclusive institutions guarantee the right to private property, to an impartial legal system and promote a society based on equal conditions.	1clean
These institutions benefit not only the elites, but society as a whole.	1clean
In governments with extractive policies, the group in power usually extracts resources from the rest of the population for its own enrichment and well-being.	1clean
Those in power have little interest in their power devolving to a greater number of agents, as would occur under political institutions that were more pluralistic [16].	1clean
All these questions have a place in this case analysis.	1clean
The country ’s unequal economic growth originated in the colonial era and reflects how the Spanish metropolis influenced the establishment of extractive institutions [7].	1clean
Enjambment takes place when a syntactic unit is broken up across two lines of poetry (Domínguez Caparrós, 2000: 103), giving rise to different stylistic effects (e.g. increased emphasis on elements of the broken-up phrase, or contrast between those elements), or creating double interpretations for the enjambed lines (García-Paje, 1991).	1clean
In Spanish poetry, the syntactic configurations under which enjambment takes place have been described extensively, and detailed studies on the use of enjambment by individual authors exist (see Martínez Cantón, 2011 for an overview) including, among others Quilis (1964), Domínguez Caparrós, (2000), Paraíso, (2000), Spang (1983) for a description of enjambment, and Alarcos (1966), Senabre (1982), Luján (2006), Martínez Fernández (2010) for case-studies on a single author.	1clean
Given that need, we have developed software, based on Natural Language Processing, that automatically identifies enjambment in Spanish, and applied it to a corpus of approx. 3750 sonnets by ca. 1000 authors, from the 15th to the 19th century.	1clean
First, the literature shows a debate about which specific syntactic units can be considered to trigger enjambment, if split across two lines, and whether lexical and syntactic criteria are sufficient to identify enjambment.	1clean
Finally, our study complements Navarro ’s (2016) automatic metrical analyses of Spanish Golden Age sonnets, by covering a wider period and focusing on enjambment.	1clean
First we provide the definition of enjambment adopted.	1clean
The project ’s website provides details omitted here for space reasons, including samples for the corpus, results, and other details.	1clean
Syntactic and metrical units often match in poetry.	1clean
However, this trend has been broken since antiquity for various reasons (Parry (1929) on Homer, or Flores Gómez (1988) on early classical poetry).	1clean
Quilis (1964) performed poetry reading experiments, proposing that the following strongly connected elements give rise to enjambment, should a poetic-form pause break them up:	1clean
We translated "lexical enjambment" from Quilis ’s terms "encabalgamiento léxico" or "tmesis".	1clean
We translated "phrase-bounded enjambment" from "encabalgamiento sirremático".	1clean
We translated "cross-clause enjambment" from Quilis ’s "encabalgamiento oracional".	1clean
The project site includes Quilis ’s complete list of syntactic environments that can trigger enjambment, as well as the types identified by our system.	1clean
Besides the enjambment types above, Spang (1983) noted that if a subject or direct object and their related verbs occur in two different lines of poetry, this can also feel unusual for a reader, even if the effect is less pronounced than in the environments identified by Quilis.	1clean
To differentiate these cases from enjambment proper, Spang calls these cases "enlace", translated here as "expansion".	1clean
Our system identifies Quilis’ types, besides Spang ’s expansion cases.	1clean
In fact, many, if not all, the markers of expertise identified by philosophers enjoy widespread recognition.	1clean
The fact that these criteria are widely known, however, offers an opportunity to those who would use them for deception, witting or unwitting.	1clean
We live in an epistemic environment that is heavily and deliberately polluted by agents who use mimicry and other methods as a means of inflating their pretense to expertise.	1clean
This fact, together with the fact that such deception is widely known to occur, reduces ordinary people ’s trust in expert authority and diminishes their capacity to distinguish reliable from unreliable sources.	1clean
There are some egregious examples of this practice in the field of health care.	1clean
Thus, when ACPeds issued a statement condemning gender reassignment surgery in 2016 [21], many people mistook the organization ’s political beliefs for the consensus view among United States pediatricians — although the peak body for pediatric workers, the American Academy of Pediatrics, has a much more positive view of gender dysphoria [22].	1clean
When ACPeds allows or encourages the impression that it speaks for the profession, it introduces an epistemic pollutant.	1clean
A yet more egregious example of such pollution involved collaborative efforts by pharmaceutical companies and the publishing giant Elsevier to produce publications mimicking peer-reviewed journals in the interest of promoting the companies’ commercial products [23].	1clean
The companies hoped to leverage the prestige of Elsevier with these fake journals to endow their promotional “research” with an air of reliability.	1clean
More recently, institutions of academic expertise have been subject to a large and growing outbreak of so-called predatory journals — journals that will publish almost anything for a fee.	1clean
Once again, this phenomenon has the effect of making peer-reviewed journals appear less legitimate.	1clean
For example, the Frontiers contingent of journals appears legitimate — at least to me — despite the fact that authors are expected to pay a publication fee. 8	1clean
Yet some Frontiers journals appear to have engaged in bad behavior, whether for profit or for some other motive.	1clean
Frontiers in Public Health controversially published articles linking vaccines and autism [24] and questioning the link between HIV and AIDS [25].	1clean
Whether due to this behavior or not, Jeffrey Beall decided to add the publisher to his influential (but now sadly unavailable) list of questionable journals [26].	1clean
The controversy surrounding Beall ’s decision indicates how difficult it is to make such judgments — even for professionals.	1clean
These institutions do not exist solely to credential experts.	1clean
They have other functions, and these functions may come into conflict, creating pressures to inflate credentials.	1clean
For example, universities have a financial incentive to inflate the expertise of their academic staff, thereby increasing their rankings, bringing in grant money, and attracting students.	1clean
Cognitive games involve a number of different games working aspects of human cognition, while proposing the intersection between the sets of concepts, fun and cognition, for the improvement of cognitive functions.	1clean
With respect to the contributions of digital games to improvement of cognitive processes, researchers suggest that regular practice has a significant influence on improving the performance related to basic visual skills (Li, Polat, Scalzo, & Bavelier, 2010); on the ability to perceive objects simultaneously (Dye & Bavelier, 2010; Feng, Spence, & Pratt, 2007); and on the ability to do more than one task at the same time (Boot, Kramer, Simons, Fabiani, & Gratton, 2008).	1clean
Other studies specifically investigate the use of digital games in the school context and suggest potential for digital game use to improve of student's attention span at preschool age (Rueda, Checa, & Cómbita, 2012), to improve overall intelligence capacity of elementary school children (Miller & Robertson, 2010), and to better performance of working memory ability (Klingberg et al., 2005; Thorell, Lindqvist, Nutley, Bohlin, & Klingberg, 2009).	1clean
The study in question focuses on the attention, proposing and evaluation in the context of the classroom.	1clean
Thus, it suggests the use of digital games in an integrated way the school activities in the classroom.	1clean
The games have features like increasing challenges, rules that establish what can and can not be done, and involvement of the player in the quest to gain skills and win the game (Kirriemuir & McFarlane, 2004; Prensky, 2005).	1clean
We aim to investigate the contributions of the use of a system that integrates cognitive digital games to a database, of the Escola do Cérebro, for monitoring and improvement of cognitive skills, highlighting the attention.	1clean
The games involve challenges and rules involving the exercise of cognitive functions, especially the working memory, attention and capacity of solving problems.	1clean
The study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches.	1clean
It collects the data based on the observation of the proposed interventions as well as interviews conducted with participating teachers and students to identify their perceptions of digital games’ contributions to the learning process.	1clean
Furthermore, before and after the implementation of the intervention, we performed a D2 Test of attention that measures selective and sustained attention, as well as visual scanning accuracy and speed.	1clean
The intervention consisted in the use of the Escola do Cérebro, using tablets in the classroom, daily for a period of five weeks.	1clean
The sample consisted of 71 students of the Application School of Basic Education, Federal University of Santa Catarina, aged 7 and 9 years old (M = 7.64 ± 1.12), which were divided into two groups: participant and control.	1clean
The application allows visualization of the player's performance and offers the possibility of monitoring by teachers.	1clean
Students have their scores measured by four variables: time, speed, stability and accuracy.	1clean
The result indicates significant improvement in the performance of the sustained attention in the test, as well as a high dispersion, which reveals a variation in relation to the performance.	1clean
In addition, students participating in the interview reported a preference for games that involve problem solving, recognize the need to plan actions in relation to their importance for the game and for daily activities, and realize improvements in the ability to sustain attention.	1clean
The teachers observed changes after the intervention, emphasizing the greater persistence and involvement in school activities, and in some students, improvement in the ability to sustain attention.	1clean
From this, we conclude that an intervention based on cognitive digital games offers contributions to the learning process and improvement of sustained attention.	1clean
A fundamental tenet of linguistic science is that the sound of a word has a purely arbitrary connection to the word's meaning [1], [2].	1clean
While the possibility space for sound systems of the world's language is enormous, any given language makes use of only a restricted portion of the possible sounds [3], [4].	1clean
But in this study we present a striking exception to this otherwise robust rule.	1clean
From a systematic comparison of 10 spoken languages from 5 continents we find evidence suggesting that a word like ‘Huh?’ – used as a ‘repair initiator’ when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said [5], [6] – is a universal word.	1clean

How do people look at and experience art?

1clean

Which elements of specific artworks do they focus on?

1clean

Do museum labels have an impact on how people look at artworks?

1clean

This paper describes a collaborative pilot project focusing on a unique collection of 17th Century Zurbarán paintings.

1clean

While studies of the psychology of art have focused on individual works and distinctions between representative / non-representative topics, no work has been completed on the aesthetic appreciation of collections or of devotional themes.

1clean

In this paper, we report upon the novel insights eye-tracking techniques have provided into the unconscious processes of viewing the unique collection of Zurbarán artworks.

1clean

The project brings together established research strengths in Spanish art history, experimental psychology, digital humanities, and museum studies to explore, using eye-tracking techniques, aesthetic reactions to digital representations of the individual Zurbarán artworks as well as the significance of the collection as a whole.

1clean

Our experience of art develops from the interaction of several cognitive and affective processes; the beginning of which is a visual scan of the artwork.

1clean

When regarding an artwork, a viewer gathers information through a series fixations, interspersed by rapid movements of the eye called saccades.

1clean

Previous eye tracking research has highlighted the potential to transform the ways we understand visual processing in the arts (see for example Brieber 2014; Binderman et al., 2005) and at the same time offers a direct way of studying several important factors of a museum visit (Filippini Fantoni et al., 2013; Heidenreich & Turano 2011; Milekic 2010).

1clean

Zurbarán ’s cycle of Jacob and his Sons has been on display in the Long Room at Auckland Castle for over 250 years.

1clean

It has a long history in scholarship (Baron & Beresford 2014), but many key aspects of its production and significance have not yet been fully understood.

1clean

In this study we used eye-tracking in the first stage of exploring audience experience of the extensive Spanish art collections of County Durham, of which the 13 Zurbarán artworks (there are actually only 12 Zurbarán artworks, the 13th Benjamin, is a copy by Arthur Pond) are a key part of, to investigate the ways in which audiences look at Spanish art, how aesthetic experience is evaluated and whether audiences can be encouraged to approach art in different ways.

1clean

This pilot project primarily investigated how participants visually explore artworks and provides new insights into the potential eye-tracking has to transform the ways we understand visual processing in arts and culture and at the same time offer a direct way of studying several important factors of a museum visit, namely to assess the effects of label characteristics on visitor visual behaviour.

1clean

Past studies establish that each of these efforts is strongly and positively influenced through various forms of faculty diversity, including ethnic, racial, and gender diversity.

1clean

As an example, research shows that greater diversity within a community or group can lead to improved critical thinking [1] and more creative solutions to complex tasks [2, 3] by pairing together individuals with unique skillsets and perspectives that complement and often augment the abilities of their peers.

1clean

Additionally, diversity has been shown to produce more supportive social climates and effective learning environments [4], which can facilitate the mentoring of young scientists.

1clean

For many scientific fields, however, there is no central listing of all tenure-track faculty, making it difficult to define a rigorous sample frame for analysis.

1clean

Further, rates of adoption of services like GoogleScholar and ResearchGate vary within, and across disciplines.

1clean

Most fields, on the other hand, including computer science, lack a single all-encompassing organization and membership information is instead distributed across many disjoint lists, such as web-based faculty directories for individual departments.

1clean

Because assembling such a full census is difficult, past studies have tended to avoid this task and have instead used samples of researchers [8 – 11], usually specific to a particular field [12 – 16], and often focused on the scientific elite [17, 18].

1clean

This data set has shed considerable light on dramatic inequalities in faculty training, placement, and scholarly productivity [6, 19, 20].

1clean

In computer science, the Computing Research Association (CRA) documents trends in the employment of PhD recipients through the annual Taulbee survey of computing departments in North America (cra.org/resources/taulbee-survey).

1clean

Second, aggregate information provides only a high-level view of a field, which can make it difficult to investigate causality [23].

1clean

Here, we present a novel system, based on a topical web crawler, that can quickly and automatically assemble a full census of an academic field using digital data available on the public World Wide Web.

1clean

We begin by detailing the design and implementation of our web crawler framework.

1clean

Next, we present the results of our work in two sections.

1clean

The second provides an example of the type of research enabled by our system and uses the 2011 and 2017 censuses to investigate the “leaky pipeline” problem in faculty retention.

1clean

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, we have witnessed the return of institutions to economic analysis.

1clean

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to its main representatives (Douglass North, Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Elinor Ostrom) has contributed to its greater recognition.

1clean

Coase [13,14] argues that economic transactions involve costs, and where these costs outweigh the gains, the exchange will not take place.

1clean

For its part, North defined the institutions as the “rules of the game”: they determine the structure of the economy, establish incentives for economic behavior, and affect social interaction [12].

1clean

Thus, institutions also determine the level of uncertainty to which individuals are subject, stimulating or discouraging transactions.

1clean

A viable economy requires an institutional structure that reduces existing uncertainty and guarantees property rights.

1clean

Of course, the state takes a lead role in promoting this type of institution.

1clean

Inclusive institutions guarantee the right to private property, to an impartial legal system and promote a society based on equal conditions.

1clean

These institutions benefit not only the elites, but society as a whole.

1clean

In governments with extractive policies, the group in power usually extracts resources from the rest of the population for its own enrichment and well-being.

1clean

Those in power have little interest in their power devolving to a greater number of agents, as would occur under political institutions that were more pluralistic [16].

1clean

All these questions have a place in this case analysis.

1clean

The country ’s unequal economic growth originated in the colonial era and reflects how the Spanish metropolis influenced the establishment of extractive institutions [7].

1clean

Enjambment takes place when a syntactic unit is broken up across two lines of poetry (Domínguez Caparrós, 2000: 103), giving rise to different stylistic effects (e.g. increased emphasis on elements of the broken-up phrase, or contrast between those elements), or creating double interpretations for the enjambed lines (García-Paje, 1991).

1clean

In Spanish poetry, the syntactic configurations under which enjambment takes place have been described extensively, and detailed studies on the use of enjambment by individual authors exist (see Martínez Cantón, 2011 for an overview) including, among others Quilis (1964), Domínguez Caparrós, (2000), Paraíso, (2000), Spang (1983) for a description of enjambment, and Alarcos (1966), Senabre (1982), Luján (2006), Martínez Fernández (2010) for case-studies on a single author.

1clean

Given that need, we have developed software, based on Natural Language Processing, that automatically identifies enjambment in Spanish, and applied it to a corpus of approx. 3750 sonnets by ca. 1000 authors, from the 15th to the 19th century.

1clean

First, the literature shows a debate about which specific syntactic units can be considered to trigger enjambment, if split across two lines, and whether lexical and syntactic criteria are sufficient to identify enjambment.

1clean

Finally, our study complements Navarro ’s (2016) automatic metrical analyses of Spanish Golden Age sonnets, by covering a wider period and focusing on enjambment.

1clean

First we provide the definition of enjambment adopted.

1clean

The project ’s website provides details omitted here for space reasons, including samples for the corpus, results, and other details.

1clean

Syntactic and metrical units often match in poetry.

1clean

However, this trend has been broken since antiquity for various reasons (Parry (1929) on Homer, or Flores Gómez (1988) on early classical poetry).

1clean

Quilis (1964) performed poetry reading experiments, proposing that the following strongly connected elements give rise to enjambment, should a poetic-form pause break them up:

1clean

We translated "lexical enjambment" from Quilis ’s terms "encabalgamiento léxico" or "tmesis".

1clean

We translated "phrase-bounded enjambment" from "encabalgamiento sirremático".

1clean

We translated "cross-clause enjambment" from Quilis ’s "encabalgamiento oracional".

1clean

The project site includes Quilis ’s complete list of syntactic environments that can trigger enjambment, as well as the types identified by our system.

1clean

Besides the enjambment types above, Spang (1983) noted that if a subject or direct object and their related verbs occur in two different lines of poetry, this can also feel unusual for a reader, even if the effect is less pronounced than in the environments identified by Quilis.

1clean

To differentiate these cases from enjambment proper, Spang calls these cases "enlace", translated here as "expansion".

1clean

Our system identifies Quilis’ types, besides Spang ’s expansion cases.

1clean

In fact, many, if not all, the markers of expertise identified by philosophers enjoy widespread recognition.

1clean

The fact that these criteria are widely known, however, offers an opportunity to those who would use them for deception, witting or unwitting.

1clean

We live in an epistemic environment that is heavily and deliberately polluted by agents who use mimicry and other methods as a means of inflating their pretense to expertise.

1clean

This fact, together with the fact that such deception is widely known to occur, reduces ordinary people ’s trust in expert authority and diminishes their capacity to distinguish reliable from unreliable sources.

1clean

There are some egregious examples of this practice in the field of health care.

1clean

Thus, when ACPeds issued a statement condemning gender reassignment surgery in 2016 [21], many people mistook the organization ’s political beliefs for the consensus view among United States pediatricians — although the peak body for pediatric workers, the American Academy of Pediatrics, has a much more positive view of gender dysphoria [22].

1clean

When ACPeds allows or encourages the impression that it speaks for the profession, it introduces an epistemic pollutant.

1clean

A yet more egregious example of such pollution involved collaborative efforts by pharmaceutical companies and the publishing giant Elsevier to produce publications mimicking peer-reviewed journals in the interest of promoting the companies’ commercial products [23].

1clean

The companies hoped to leverage the prestige of Elsevier with these fake journals to endow their promotional “research” with an air of reliability.

1clean

More recently, institutions of academic expertise have been subject to a large and growing outbreak of so-called predatory journals — journals that will publish almost anything for a fee.

1clean

Once again, this phenomenon has the effect of making peer-reviewed journals appear less legitimate.

1clean

For example, the Frontiers contingent of journals appears legitimate — at least to me — despite the fact that authors are expected to pay a publication fee. 8

1clean

Yet some Frontiers journals appear to have engaged in bad behavior, whether for profit or for some other motive.

1clean

Frontiers in Public Health controversially published articles linking vaccines and autism [24] and questioning the link between HIV and AIDS [25].

1clean

Whether due to this behavior or not, Jeffrey Beall decided to add the publisher to his influential (but now sadly unavailable) list of questionable journals [26].

1clean

The controversy surrounding Beall ’s decision indicates how difficult it is to make such judgments — even for professionals.

1clean

These institutions do not exist solely to credential experts.

1clean

They have other functions, and these functions may come into conflict, creating pressures to inflate credentials.

1clean

For example, universities have a financial incentive to inflate the expertise of their academic staff, thereby increasing their rankings, bringing in grant money, and attracting students.

1clean

Cognitive games involve a number of different games working aspects of human cognition, while proposing the intersection between the sets of concepts, fun and cognition, for the improvement of cognitive functions.

1clean

With respect to the contributions of digital games to improvement of cognitive processes, researchers suggest that regular practice has a significant influence on improving the performance related to basic visual skills (Li, Polat, Scalzo, & Bavelier, 2010); on the ability to perceive objects simultaneously (Dye & Bavelier, 2010; Feng, Spence, & Pratt, 2007); and on the ability to do more than one task at the same time (Boot, Kramer, Simons, Fabiani, & Gratton, 2008).

1clean

Other studies specifically investigate the use of digital games in the school context and suggest potential for digital game use to improve of student's attention span at preschool age (Rueda, Checa, & Cómbita, 2012), to improve overall intelligence capacity of elementary school children (Miller & Robertson, 2010), and to better performance of working memory ability (Klingberg et al., 2005; Thorell, Lindqvist, Nutley, Bohlin, & Klingberg, 2009).

1clean

The study in question focuses on the attention, proposing and evaluation in the context of the classroom.

1clean

Thus, it suggests the use of digital games in an integrated way the school activities in the classroom.

1clean

The games have features like increasing challenges, rules that establish what can and can not be done, and involvement of the player in the quest to gain skills and win the game (Kirriemuir & McFarlane, 2004; Prensky, 2005).

1clean

We aim to investigate the contributions of the use of a system that integrates cognitive digital games to a database, of the Escola do Cérebro, for monitoring and improvement of cognitive skills, highlighting the attention.

1clean

The games involve challenges and rules involving the exercise of cognitive functions, especially the working memory, attention and capacity of solving problems.

1clean

The study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches.

1clean

It collects the data based on the observation of the proposed interventions as well as interviews conducted with participating teachers and students to identify their perceptions of digital games’ contributions to the learning process.

1clean

Furthermore, before and after the implementation of the intervention, we performed a D2 Test of attention that measures selective and sustained attention, as well as visual scanning accuracy and speed.

1clean

The intervention consisted in the use of the Escola do Cérebro, using tablets in the classroom, daily for a period of five weeks.

1clean

The sample consisted of 71 students of the Application School of Basic Education, Federal University of Santa Catarina, aged 7 and 9 years old (M = 7.64 ± 1.12), which were divided into two groups: participant and control.

1clean

The application allows visualization of the player's performance and offers the possibility of monitoring by teachers.

1clean

Students have their scores measured by four variables: time, speed, stability and accuracy.

1clean

The result indicates significant improvement in the performance of the sustained attention in the test, as well as a high dispersion, which reveals a variation in relation to the performance.

1clean

In addition, students participating in the interview reported a preference for games that involve problem solving, recognize the need to plan actions in relation to their importance for the game and for daily activities, and realize improvements in the ability to sustain attention.

1clean

The teachers observed changes after the intervention, emphasizing the greater persistence and involvement in school activities, and in some students, improvement in the ability to sustain attention.

1clean

From this, we conclude that an intervention based on cognitive digital games offers contributions to the learning process and improvement of sustained attention.

1clean

A fundamental tenet of linguistic science is that the sound of a word has a purely arbitrary connection to the word's meaning [1], [2].

1clean

While the possibility space for sound systems of the world's language is enormous, any given language makes use of only a restricted portion of the possible sounds [3], [4].

1clean

But in this study we present a striking exception to this otherwise robust rule.

1clean

From a systematic comparison of 10 spoken languages from 5 continents we find evidence suggesting that a word like ‘Huh?’ – used as a ‘repair initiator’ when, for example, one has not clearly heard what someone just said [5], [6] – is a universal word.

1clean