scholarly journals Feline communication strategies when presented with an unsolvable task: the attentional state of the person matters

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lingna Zhang ◽  
Katie B. Needham ◽  
Serena Juma ◽  
Xuemei Si ◽  
François Martin
Keyword(s):  
Social Communication ◽  
Significant Interaction ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Social Referencing ◽  
Attentional State ◽  
Domestic Cats ◽  
Sequential Behavior ◽  
Gaze Alternation ◽  
Visual Interaction ◽  
Unsolvable Task

AbstractResearch on social cognitive ability in domestic cats is limited. The current study investigated social referencing in cats when exposed to first, a solvable, and then, an unsolvable scenario (i.e., reachable and unreachable treats) in the presence of either an attentive or an inattentive caregiver. Cats expressed more gaze alternation (P = 0.013), but less interaction with the caregiver (P = 0.048) and approached the treat container less frequently (P = 0.017) during the unsolvable test, compared to the solvable test. When in the presence of an attentive caregiver, cats initiated first gaze at the caregiver faster (P = 0.001); gazed at the caregiver for longer (P = 0.034); and approached the treat more frequently (P = 0.040), compared to when the caregiver was inattentive. Significant interaction was observed between test and caregiver’s attentional state on the expression of sequential behavior, a type of showing behavior. Cats exhibited this behavior marginally more with attentive caregivers, compared to inattentive caregivers, but only during the unsolvable test. There was a decrease in sequential behavior during the unsolvable test, compared to solvable test, but this was only seen with inattentive caregivers (P = 0.018). Our results suggest that gaze alternation is a behavior reliably indicating social referencing in cats and that cats’ social communication with humans is affected by the person’s availability for visual interaction.

"Do I Know What I Need to Do?" A Social Communication Intervention for Children With Complex Clinical Profiles

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geralyn R. Timler ◽  
Lesley B. Olswang ◽  
Truman E. Coggins
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Treatment Phase ◽  
Communication Intervention ◽  
Social Scripts ◽  
Treatment Data ◽  
Social Communication Intervention ◽  
Clinical Profiles

Purpose:Speech-language pathologists frequently address social communication difficulties in children with diverse clinical profiles. The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of a social communication intervention for a school-age child with a complex cognitive and behavioral profile secondary to diagnosis of a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.Method:A case study is presented to describe the implementation of the intervention targeting mental state verb production and social cognitive skills. The intervention included group role play of social scripts and a checklist to elicit the participant’s statements about others’ perspectives and strategies for completing the social script. Treatment data monitored the participant’s responses to the checklist questions. Probe sessions, consisting of theory of mind false belief tasks, were used to examine mental state verb use.Results:Treatment data demonstrated that the participant stated more strategies in response to checklist questions. The participant did not produce any mental state verbs during baseline probes, but did produce mental state verbs during the treatment phase.Clinical Implications:The results support use of this intervention to change children’s linguistic and social cognitive skills. Suggestions for extending this intervention to include a generalization plan targeting classroom social communication interactions are provided.

scholarly journals Early deprivation is linked to long-term social communication difficulties

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Early Deprivation ◽  
Maltreated Children ◽  
Communication Difficulties

Maltreatment affects a staggering 1 billion children worldwide. Most of these maltreated children, but particularly those raised in institutions that are characterized by deprivation, experience some form of neglect. These children seem to be at risk of developing social, cognitive and psychiatric difficulties later in life.

Information Seeking and Processing in the Context of Vaccine Scandals

2020 ◽  
pp. 107554702098358
Author(s):  
Janet Z. Yang ◽  
Zhuling Liu
Keyword(s):  
Information Seeking ◽  
Significant Interaction ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
Information Quality ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Cognitive Variables ◽  
Systematic Processing ◽  
Childhood Vaccine ◽  
Practical Implications

This study employs the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model to examine social cognitive variables that motivate active information seeking and systematic processing. The research context is the recent childhood vaccine scandals in China. As a novel contribution to the RISP literature, a significant interaction between relevant channel beliefs and perceived information gathering capacity is unveiled. This result suggests that both information quality and accessibility to information channels influence information seeking, which is an important finding with theoretical and practical implications for other science communication issues.

scholarly journals Determining the Function of Social Referencing: The Role of Familiarity and Situational Threat

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Ehli ◽  
Julia Wolf ◽  
Albert Newen ◽  
Silvia Schneider ◽  
Babett Voigt
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Information Seeking ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Situational Factors ◽  
Social Referencing ◽  
Behavioral Regulation ◽  
Ambiguous Situation ◽  
Interaction Partners ◽  
Cognitive Information

In ambiguous situations, infants have the tendency to gather information from a social interaction partner to regulate their behavior [social referencing (SR)]. There are two main competing theories concerning SR’s function. According to social-cognitive information-seeking accounts, infants look at social interaction partners to gain information about the ambiguous situation. According to co-regulation accounts, infants look at social interaction partners to receive emotional support. This review provides an overview of the central developments in SR literature in the past years. We focus on the role of situational aspects such as familiarity of SR partners and situational threat, not only for SR (looking), but also for subsequent behavioral regulation (exploration, affect). As the competing accounts make different predictions concerning both contextual factors, this approach may reveal novel insights into the function of SR. Findings showed that a higher familiarity of SR partners consistently resulted in decreased looking (cf. social-cognitive accounts) and that higher threat remains largely understudied, but seemed to increase looking in the first few studies (cf. co-regulation accounts). Concerning behavioral regulation (exploration, affect) findings are mixed. We point out that moving toward a more complex situatedness may help to disentangle the heterogeneous results by considering the interaction between familiarity and threat rather than investigating the factors in isolation. From a general perspective, this review underlines the importance of situational factors and their interaction in eliciting a phenomenon, such as SR, but also in determining the nature of the phenomenon itself.

scholarly journals Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Social Communication Dysfunction in Primary Progressive Aphasia

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 1600
Author(s):  
Zoë-Lee Goldberg ◽  
Hashim El-Omar ◽  
David Foxe ◽  
Cristian E. Leyton ◽  
Rebekah M. Ahmed ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Communication ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Brain Mri ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Brain Network ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Complex Information ◽  
Communication Difficulties

Mounting evidence suggests that, in parallel with well-defined changes in language, primary progressive aphasia (PPA) syndromes display co-occurring social cognitive impairments. Here, we explored multidimensional profiles of carer-rated social communication using the La Trobe Communication Questionnaire (LCQ) in 11 semantic dementia (SD), 12 logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA) and 9 progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA) cases and contrasted their performance with 19 Alzheimer’s disease (AD) cases, 26 behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) cases and 31 healthy older controls. Relative to the controls, the majority of patient groups displayed significant overall social communication difficulties, with common and unique profiles of impairment evident on the LCQ subscales. Correlation analyses revealed a differential impact of social communication disturbances on functional outcomes in patient and carer well-being, most pronounced for SD and bvFTD. Finally, voxel-based morphometry analyses based on a structural brain MRI pointed to the degradation of a distributed brain network in mediating social communication dysfunction in dementia. Our findings suggest that social communication difficulties are an important feature of PPA, with significant implications for patient function and carer well-being. The origins of these changes are likely to be multifactorial, reflecting the breakdown of fronto-thalamic brain circuits specialised in the integration of complex information.

Invisible Mind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lasana T. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Rules ◽  
Athletic Competition ◽  
Fitness Advantage

Why do people engage in pro and anti-social behaviour? Invisible Mind takes an interdisciplinary approach to address this question, among others, by focussing on the spontaneous psychological ability social cognition, and its inherent flexibility. People get inside the minds—infer the mental states—of others, including non-human agents and animals. Such social cognition is necessary for recognising another as a full human being, deserving of being included in the boundaries of moral protection, encouraging obedience to moral and social rules during social interactions. People can also withhold social cognition from other people, resulting a dehumanized perception, or extend it to non-human agents, resulting anthropomorphism. Harris argues that this flexibility is functional; social cognition evolved when people lived in much smaller groups, suggesting flexibility provided a fitness advantage specific to such a social environment, but may be occasionally maladaptive in modern societies. He reviews social, cognitive, evolutionary, and developmental psychology that supports this claim, before considering the implications of flexible social cognition for economics, legal theories, practice, and policy, international disputes, and athletic competition. He then explores what might be the consequences of flexible social cognition in modern societies where technology facilitates social communication and interaction.

scholarly journals Smiling and use of first-name by a healthcare receptionist robot: Effects on user perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah L. Johanson ◽  
Ho Seok Ahn ◽  
Craig J. Sutherland ◽  
Bianca Brown ◽  
Bruce A. MacDonald ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Communication Skills ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Repeated Measures ◽  
Significant Interaction ◽  
User Perceptions ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Repeated Measures Design ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Social Communication Skills ◽  
Health Applications

AbstractRobots are now starting to be developed and used as receptionists in health applications. In this regard, it is important that robots’ behavioural skills are developed and researched so that people have appropriate and comfortable interactions. Smiling and use of first name are two more important social communication skills used during human interactions. While smiling and use of first name are often employed by robots in human interactions, the effect of these behaviours on perceptions of receptionist robots has not yet been experimentally investigated. This study explored the effects of robot smiling and robot use of the participant’s first name on perceptions of robot friendliness, mind, and personality, as well as attitudes and smiling behaviour. Forty participants interacted with a medical receptionist robot four times, in a two by two repeated measures design. Both smiling and use of first name had significant positive effects on participants’ perceptions of robot personality. Robot smiling also showed significant effects on participants’ overall attitudes towards robots, ratings of robot friendliness, and perceptions of the robot’s mind, and increased the frequency of participants’ own smiling. There were no significant interaction effects. Robot smiling in particular can enhance user perceptions of robots and increase reciprocal smiling.

scholarly journals Using Smiles, Frowns, and Gaze to Attribute Conscious States to Others: Testing Part of the Attention Schema Theory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Branden J. Bio ◽  
Michael S. A. Graziano
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Schema Theory ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Schematic Model ◽  
Attentional State ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Face ◽  
Standard Tests

In the attention schema theory, people attribute the property of consciousness to themselves and others because it serves as a schematic model of attention. Most of the existing literature on monitoring the attention of others assumes that people primarily use the gaze direction of others. In that assumption, attention is not represented by a deeper model, but instead limited mainly to a single, externally visible parameter. Here we presented subjects with two cues about the attentional state of a face: direction of gaze and emotional expression. We tested whether people relied predominantly on one cue, the other, or both when deciding if the face was conscious of a nearby object. If the traditional view is correct, then the gaze cue should dominate. Instead, some people relied on gaze, some on expression, and some on an integration of cues, suggesting that a variety of surface strategies could inform a deeper model. We also assessed people’s social cognitive ability using two, independent, standard tests. If the traditional view of attention monitoring is correct, then the degree to which people use gaze to judge attention should correlate best with their social cognitive ability. Instead, social cognitive ability correlated best with the degree to which people successfully integrated the cues together. The results strongly suggest that when people attribute a specific state of consciousness to another, rather than simply tracking gaze, they construct a model of attention, or an attention schema, that is informed by a combination of surface cues.

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