Differential cognitive responses to guqin music and piano music in Chinese subjects： an event-related potential study

Objective To compare the cognitive effects of guqin （the oldest Chinese instrument） music and piano music. Methods Behavioral and event-related potential （ERP） data in a standard two-stimulus auditory oddball task were recorded and analyzed. Results This study replicated the previous results of culture-familiar music effect on Chinese subjects： the greater P300 amplitude in frontal areas in a culture-familiar music environment. At the same time, the difference between guqin music and piano music was observed in NI and later positive complex （LPC： including P300 and P500）： a relatively higher participation of right anterior-temporal areas in Chinese subjects. Conclusion The results suggest that the special features of ERP responses to guqin music are the outcome of Chinese tonal language environments given the similarity between Guqin＇s tones and Mandarin lexical tones.

Learning Robotic Hand-eye Coordination Through a Developmental Constraint Driven Approach

The skill of robotic hand-eye coordination not only helps robots to deal with real time environment,but also afects the fundamental framework of robotic cognition.A number of approaches have been developed in the literature for construction of the robotic hand-eye coordination.However,several important features within infant developmental procedure have not been introduced into such approaches.This paper proposes a new method for robotic hand-eye coordination by imitating the developmental progress of human infants.The work employs a brain-like neural network system inspired by infant brain structure to learn hand-eye coordination,and adopts a developmental mechanism from psychology to drive the robot.The entire learning procedure is driven by developmental constraint： The robot starts to act under fully constrained conditions,when the robot learning system becomes stable,a new constraint is assigned to the robot.After that,the robot needs to act with this new condition again.When all the contained conditions have been overcome,the robot is able to obtain hand-eye coordination ability.The work is supported by experimental evaluation,which shows that the new approach is able to drive the robot to learn autonomously,and make the robot also exhibit developmental progress similar to human infants.

From Biological Consciousness to Machine Consciousness:An Approach to Make Smarter Machines

Consciousness research has been of great concern to philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists in recent years. At the same time, consciousness has also attracted more and more interest of artificial intelligence （AI） researchers. In order to make more intelligent machines, many computing models of machine consciousness have been presented. Furthermore, self-consciousness has relevance to the level of intelligent functions. Hence, it is necessary to study self-consciousness in AI. This thesis, starting from biological consciousness, discusses some viewpoints of machine consciousness. Based on the discussions, we present a way to emulate self-consciousness and test this method via simulation experiments. Our results indicate that self-consciousness, which belongs to organisms, can he imitated by machines.

Electroencephalogram-based brain-computer interface for the Chinese spelling system: a survey

Electroencephalogram （EEG） based brain-computer interfaces allow users to communicate with the external environment by means of their EEG signals, without relying on the brain＇s usual output pathways such as muscles. A popular application for EEGs is the EEG-based speller, which translates EEG signals into intentions to spell particular words, thus benefiting those suffering from severe disabilities, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Although the EEG-based English speller （EEGES） has been widely studied in recent years, few studies have focused on the EEG-based Chinese speller （EEGCS）. The EEGCS is more difficult to develop than the EEGES, because the English alphabet contains only 26 letters. By contrast, Chinese contains more than 11000 logographic characters. The goal of this paper is to survey the literature on EEGCS systems. First, the taxonomy of current EEGCS systems is discussed to get the gist of the paper. Then, a common framework unifying the current EEGCS and EEGES systems is proposed, in which the concept of EEG-based choice acts as a core component. In addition, a variety of current EEGCS systems are investigated and discussed to highlight the advances, current problems, and future directions for EEGCS.