scholarly journals Teleological and referential understanding of action in infancy

2003 ◽  
Vol 358 (1431) ◽  
pp. 447-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gergely Csibra
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Gaze Following ◽  
Motion Cues ◽  
Social Agents ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
Young Infants ◽  
Second Mode ◽  
Pointing Gesture

There are two fundamentally different ways to attribute intentional mental states to others upon observing their actions. Actions can be interpreted as goal–directed , which warrants ascribing intentions, desires and beliefs appropriate to the observed actions, to the agents. Recent studies suggest that young infants also tend to interpret certain actions in terms of goals, and their reasoning about these actions is based on a sophisticated teleological representation. Several theorists proposed that infants rely on motion cues, such as self–initiated movement, in selecting goal–directed agents. Our experiments revealed that, although infants are more likely to attribute goals to self–propelled than to non–self–propelled agents, they do not need direct evidence about the source of motion for interpreting actions in teleological terms. The second mode of action–based mental state attribution interprets actions as referential , and allows ascription of attentional states, referential intents, communicative messages, etc., to the agents. Young infants also display evidence of interpreting actions in referential terms (for example, when following others' gaze or pointing gesture) and are very sensitive to the communicative situations in which these actions occur. For example, young infants prefer faces with eye–contact and objects that react to them contingently, and these are the very situations that later elicit gaze following. Whether or not these early abilities amount to a ‘theory of mind’ is a matter of debate among infant researchers. Nevertheless, they represent skills that are vital for understanding social agents and engaging in social interactions.

Behavioral Assessment of Social Interactions in Natural Settings

1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Santoyo
Keyword(s):  
Social Skills ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Behavioral Assessment ◽  
Behavioral Observation ◽  
Social Responsiveness ◽  
Social Agents ◽  
Social Effectiveness ◽  
Natural Settings

The present paper deals with behavioral assessment of social interaction in natural settings. The design of observational systems that allow the identification of the direction, contents, quality and social agents involved in a social interchange is an aim of social interaction assessment and research. In the first part a description of a system of behavioral observation of social interaction is presented. This system permits the identification of the above mentioned aspects. Secondly a strategy for the behavioral assessment of social skills is described. This strategy is based on the consequences and effects of social interaction, and it is supported by three basic processes: social effectiveness, social responsiveness and reciprocity.

Dehumanization and Mentalizing Animals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.J. Kasperbauer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Phenomenal States

This chapter applies the psychological account from chapter 3 on how we rank human beings above other animals, to the particular case of using mental states to assign animals moral status. Experiments on the psychology of mental state attribution are discussed, focusing on their implications for human moral psychology. The chapter argues that attributions of phenomenal states, like emotions, drive our assignments of moral status. It also describes how this is significantly impacted by the process of dehumanization. Psychological research on anthropocentrism and using animals as food and as companions is discussed in order to illuminate the relationship between dehumanization and mental state attribution.

scholarly journals From Gaze Perception to Social Cognition: The Shared-Attention System

2021 ◽  
pp. 174569162095377
Author(s):  
Lisa J. Stephenson ◽  
S. Gareth Edwards ◽  
Andrew P. Bayliss
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Evaluation Agency ◽  
Gaze Following ◽  
Gaze Perception ◽  
Shared Attention ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Attention System ◽  
Sas Model

When two people look at the same object in the environment and are aware of each other’s attentional state, they find themselves in a shared-attention episode. This can occur through intentional or incidental signaling and, in either case, causes an exchange of information between the two parties about the environment and each other’s mental states. In this article, we give an overview of what is known about the building blocks of shared attention (gaze perception and joint attention) and focus on bringing to bear new findings on the initiation of shared attention that complement knowledge about gaze following and incorporate new insights from research into the sense of agency. We also present a neurocognitive model, incorporating first-, second-, and third-order social cognitive processes (the shared-attention system, or SAS), building on previous models and approaches. The SAS model aims to encompass perceptual, cognitive, and affective processes that contribute to and follow on from the establishment of shared attention. These processes include fundamental components of social cognition such as reward, affective evaluation, agency, empathy, and theory of mind.

scholarly journals Human agency beliefs influence behaviour during virtual social interactions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Caruana ◽  
Dean Spirou ◽  
Jon Brock
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Eye Contact ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
Agency Beliefs ◽  
The Impact

In recent years, with the emergence of relatively inexpensive and accessible virtual reality technologies, it is now possible to deliver compelling and realistic simulations of human-to-human interaction. Neuroimaging studies have shown that, when participants believe they are interacting via a virtual interface with another human agent, they show different patterns of brain activity compared to when they know that their virtual partner is computer-controlled. The suggestion is that users adopt an “intentional stance” by attributing mental states to their virtual partner. However, it remains unclear how beliefs in the agency of a virtual partner influence participants’ behaviour and subjective experience of the interaction. We investigated this issue in the context of a cooperative “joint attention” game in which participants interacted via an eye tracker with a virtual onscreen partner, directing each other’s eye gaze to different screen locations. Half of the participants were correctly informed that their partner was controlled by a computer algorithm (“Computer” condition). The other half were misled into believing that the virtual character was controlled by a second participant in another room (“Human” condition). Those in the “Human” condition were slower to make eye contact with their partner and more likely to try and guide their partner before they had established mutual eye contact than participants in the “Computer” condition. They also responded more rapidly when their partner was guiding them, although the same effect was also found for a control condition in which they responded to an arrow cue. Results confirm the influence of human agency beliefs on behaviour in this virtual social interaction context. They further suggest that researchers and developers attempting to simulate social interactions should consider the impact of agency beliefs on user experience in other social contexts, and their effect on the achievement of the application’s goals.

scholarly journals Mental states modulate gaze following, but not automatically

Cognition ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 180 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustav Kuhn ◽  
Ieva Vacaityte ◽  
Antonia D.C. D'Souza ◽  
Abbie C. Millett ◽  
Geoff G. Cole
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Gaze Following

Development and validation of the Mental-Physical Verb Norms (MPVN): A Text Analysis Measure of Mental State Attribution

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ram Isaac Orr ◽  
michael gilead
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
Text Content ◽  
Normative Ratings ◽  
Development And Validation

Attribution of mental states to self and others, i.e., mentalizing, is central to human life. Current measures are lacking in ability to directly gauge the extent of individuals engage in spontaneous mentalizing. Focusing on natural language use as an expression of inner psychological processes, we developed the Mental-Physical Verb Norms (MPVN). These norms are participant-derived ratings of the extent to which common verbs reflect mental (opposite physical) activities and occurrences, covering ~80% of all verbs appearing within a given English text. Content validity was assessed against existing expert-compiled dictionaries of mental states and cognitive processes, as well as against normative ratings of verb concreteness. Criterion Validity was assessed through natural text analysis of internet comments relating to mental health vs. physical health. Results showcase the unique contribution of the MPVN ratings as a measure of the degree to which individuals adopt the intentional stance in describing targets, by describing both self and others in mental, opposite physical terms. We discuss potential uses for future research across various psychological and neurocognitive disciplines.

Parameterizing mental model ascription across intelligent agents

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 404-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie McShane
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Intelligent Agents ◽  
Mental Model ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Virtual Patient ◽  
Prototype System ◽  
Virtual Patients ◽  
Artificial Intelligent ◽  
Value Sets ◽  
Real Patients

Mental model ascription – also called mindreading – is the process of inferring the mental states of others, which happens as a matter of course in social interactions. But although ubiquitous, mindreading is presumably a highly variable process: people mindread to different extents and with different results. We hypothesize that human mindreading ability relies on a large number of personal and contextual features: the inherent abilities of specific individuals, their current physical and mental states, their knowledge of the domain of discourse, their familiarity with the interlocutor, the risks associated with an incorrect assessment of intent, and so on. This paper presents a theory of mindreading that models diverse artificial intelligent agents using an inventory of parameters and value sets that represent traits of humans and features of discourse contexts. Examples are drawn from Maryland Virtual Patient, a prototype system that will permit medical trainees to diagnose and treat cognitively modeled virtual patients with the optional assistance of a virtual tutor. Since real patients vary greatly with respect to physiological and cognitive features, so must a society of virtual patients. Modeling such variation is one of the goals of the overall OntoAgent program of research and development.

scholarly journals Ontogenetic origins of infant pointing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulf Liszkowski ◽  
Johanna Rüther
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Cognitive Factors ◽  
Gaze Following ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Developmental Factors ◽  
Social Shaping ◽  
Pointing Gesture ◽  
Review Current ◽  
Human Pointing

Human pointing is foundational to language acquisition and sociality. The current chapter explores the ontogenetic origins of the human pointing gesture in infancy. First, the authors define infant pointing in terms of function, cognition, motivation, and morphology. Then, the authors review current evidence for predictors of infant pointing on child and caregiver levels, because any predictors provide insights into the basic developmental factors. From this review, the authors introduce and discuss a number of pertinent accounts on the emergence of pointing: social shaping accounts (pointing-from-reaching; pointing-from-non-communicative pointing) and social cognition accounts (pointing-from-imitation; pointing-from-gaze-following). The authors end by presenting a synthesis, which holds that child-level cognitive factors, specifically directedness and social motivation, interact with caregiver-level social factors, specifically responsiveness and assisting actions relevant to infants’ directed activity. The interaction of these factors creates social goals and formats that scale up to pointing acts expressing triadic relations between infant, caregiver, and entities at a distance in the context of joint activity and experience.

scholarly journals Modelling Social Embodiment in Social Robotic Companions: using Tamagotchi & NAO

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-582
Keyword(s):  
User Interface ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Graphical User Interface ◽  
Virtual Agent ◽  
Social Agents ◽  
Nao Robot ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Robotic

Social interactions with robots and agents have become increasingly popular as a way for humans to interact. To be able to provide these social interactions, the embodiment in particular social embodiment for the social agents are considered to be an important factor. In this paper, we introduce an experiment to measure the impor- tance of modelling of social embodiment in social agents. For which we decided to use Tamagotchi architecture in two different configurations as a virtual agent (Graphical user interface) and a physical robot (NAO robot). We then surveyed on interactions with these two different embodiment configurations using a questionnaire and a short interview. Which we then discussed in our results section, showing how modelling of social embodiment in social agents plays an important role in social interactions between humans androbots.

scholarly journals Attribution of mental states in glossolalia: a direct comparison with schizophrenia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Szabolcs Keri ◽  
Imre Kállai ◽  
Katalin Csigó
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Intrinsic Religiosity ◽  
Speaking In Tongues ◽  
Mental State Attribution ◽  
Control Subjects ◽  
Movement Condition ◽  
Altered Mental State ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Intentional Movement

Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) is a rhythmic utterance of pseudo-words without constant semantic and syntactic properties. Although glossolalia is a culturally embedded religious activity, its connection with psychopathology (e.g., psychotic thought disorder, and altered mental state attribution) is still a matter of debate. We investigated 31 glossolalists, 31 matched control subjects, and 31 patients with schizophrenia using the Animated Triangles Test (ATT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). The ATT can detect hypo- and hypermentalization using animations of two moving triangles. Healthy adults describe these as random movements (e.g., bouncing), willed actions (e.g., playing), or they mentalize (e.g., tricking). We found that glossolalists provided more mentalizing descriptions in the ATT random and intentional movement animations relative to the control subjects. They also recognized more mental states on the RMET than the controls. None of them had a diagnosis of mental disorders. In contrast, patients with schizophrenia hypermentalized only in the ATT random movement condition, whereas they showed hypomentalization in the intentional movement condition and RMET relative the control subjects. ATT hypermentalization in the glossolalia group selectively correlated with intrinsic religiosity. Our results therefore demonstrated a substantial difference in the mentalizing activity of glossolalists (generalized hypermentalization) and patients with schizophrenia (both hypo- and hypermentalization).

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