scholarly journals The Embodied Crossmodal Self Forms Language and Interaction: A Computational Cognitive Review

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Röder ◽  
Ozan Özdemir ◽  
Phuong D. H. Nguyen ◽  
Stefan Wermter ◽  
Manfred Eppe

Human language is inherently embodied and grounded in sensorimotor representations of the self and the world around it. This suggests that the body schema and ideomotor action-effect associations play an important role in language understanding, language generation, and verbal/physical interaction with others. There are computational models that focus purely on non-verbal interaction between humans and robots, and there are computational models for dialog systems that focus only on verbal interaction. However, there is a lack of research that integrates these approaches. We hypothesize that the development of computational models of the self is very appropriate for considering joint verbal and physical interaction. Therefore, they provide the substantial potential to foster the psychological and cognitive understanding of language grounding, and they have significant potential to improve human-robot interaction methods and applications. This review is a first step toward developing models of the self that integrate verbal and non-verbal communication. To this end, we first analyze the relevant findings and mechanisms for language grounding in the psychological and cognitive literature on ideomotor theory. Second, we identify the existing computational methods that implement physical decision-making and verbal interaction. As a result, we outline how the current computational methods can be used to create advanced computational interaction models that integrate language grounding with body schemas and self-representations.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Röder ◽  
Ozan Özdemir ◽  
Phuong D. H. Nguyen ◽  
Stefan Wermter ◽  
Manfred Eppe

Human language is inherently embodied and grounded in sensorimotor representations of the self and the world around it. This suggests that the body schema and ideomotor action-effect associations play an important role in language understanding, language generation, and verbal/physical interaction with others. There are computational models that focus purely on non-verbal interaction between humans and robots, and there are computational models for dialog systems that focus only on verbal interaction. However, there is a lack of research that integrates these approaches. We hypothesize that the development of computational models of the self is very appropriate for considering joint verbal and physical interaction. Therefore, they provide the substantial potential to foster the psychological and cognitive understanding of language grounding, and they have significant potential to improve human-robot interaction methods and applications. This review is a first step toward developing models of the self that integrate verbal and non-verbal communication. To this end, we first analyze the relevant findings and mechanisms for language grounding in the psychological and cognitive literature on ideomotor theory. Second, we identify the existing computational methods that implement physical decision-making and verbal interaction. As a result, we outline how the current computational methods can be used to create advanced computational interaction models that integrate language grounding with body schemas and self-representations.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aubrieann Schettler ◽  
Ian Holstead ◽  
John Turri ◽  
Michael Barnett-Cowan

AbstractWe assessed how self-motion affects the visual representation of the self. We constructed a novel virtual reality experiment that systematically varied an avatar’s motion and also biological sex. Participants were presented with pairs of avatars that visually represented the participant (“self avatar”), or another person (“opposite avatar”). Avatar motion either corresponded with the participant’s motion, or was decoupled from the participant’s motion. The results show that participants identified with i) “self avatars” over “opposite avatars”, ii) avatars moving congruently with self-motion over incongruent motion, and importantly iii) identification with the “opposite avatar” over the “self avatar” when the opposite avatar’s motion was congruent with self-motion. Our results suggest that both self-motion and biological sex are relevant to the body schema and body image and that congruent bottom-up visual feedback of self-motion is particularly important for the sense of self and capable of overriding top-down self-identification factors such as biological sex.


Author(s):  
Minoru Asada

Proprioception is our ability to sense the position of our own limbs and other body parts in space, and body schema is a body representation that allows both biological and artificial agents to execute their actions based on proprioception. The proprioceptive information used by current artificial agents (robots) is mainly related to posture (and its change) and consists of joint angles (joint velocities) given a linked structure. However, the counterpart in biological agents (humans and other animals) includes more complicated components with associated controversies concerning the relationship between the body schema and the body image. A new trend of constructive approaches has been attacking this topic using computational models and robots. This chapter provides an overview of the biology of proprioception and body representation, summarizes the classical use of body schema in robotics, and describes a series of constructive approaches that address some of the mysteries of body representation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Aubrieann Schettler ◽  
Ian Holstead ◽  
John Turri ◽  
Michael Barnett-Cowan

Abstract We assessed how self-motion affects the visual representation of the self. We constructed a novel virtual-reality experiment that systematically varied an avatar’s motion and also biological sex. Participants were presented with pairs of avatars that visually represented the participant (‘self-avatar’), or another person (‘opposite avatar’). Avatar motion either corresponded with the participant’s motion, or was decoupled from the participant’s motion. The results show that participants identified with (i) ‘self-avatars’ over ‘opposite-avatars’, (ii) avatars moving congruently with self-motion over incongruent motion, and importantly (iii) with the ‘opposite avatar’ over the ‘self-avatar’ when the opposite avatar’s motion was congruent with self-motion. Our results suggest that both self-motion and biological sex are relevant to the body schema and body image and that congruent bottom-up visual feedback of self-motion is particularly important for the sense of self and capable of overriding top-down self-identification factors such as biological sex.


1960 ◽  
Vol 106 (442) ◽  
pp. 17-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. E. Weckowicz ◽  
R. Sommer

Disturbances of ego, self-concept and body-image have always been regarded as central in the psychopathology of schizophrenia. The passivity phenomena, automatisme superieur of the French authors, are indeed very common in this disease. There is a disturbance of the self which is shown in depersonalization and in feelings of influence and passivity. The boundaries of the self become loose or blurred and the patient may feel, for example, that parts of his body do not belong to him or that he is part of the plants, animals, clouds, other people or of the whole world and that they are part of him. He may feel at one with the whole of mankind. Self-concept is closely related to what has been termed “body image” or “perceived body”. Head (29, 30) has shown that what he called “body schema” is very important for motor co-ordination and performance of purposeful movements and also for orientation in space. Schilder (53) in his monograph has analysed the problem of body-image in great detail. He has found in the idea of the body image the basis for the body or physical ego. He follows Head in stating that the body image consists of the proprioceptions of the whole body and that it changes with the body's varying postures. Yet neither Head's body schema nor Schilder's body image are identical with the body ego. The body schema represents the constant mental knowledge of one's body; the body image is the changing presentation of the body in one's mind. Throughout the changes of the body image there is an awareness of continuity of one's body, a sense of basic identity and oneness. This constitutes the bodily or physical ego. The body ego in its turn is the basis of a wider “self” which can be called self-concept or selfhood. This self-concept or selfhood contains, in addition to the awareness of the continuity and the identity of one's own body in spite of its constant change, the awareness of the continuity of one's self as a person in spite of constantly changing relationship with the external world, and in spite of the playing and taking different “roles” in social interactions. According to Mead (38) and Coutu (16), selfhood is a social phenomenon and emerges only through interaction with other people, through “taking their roles” and viewing oneself from their point of view.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 565-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lidong Wang ◽  
Ruijun Zhang

Ubiquitination is an important post-translational modification (PTM) process for the regulation of protein functions, which is associated with cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases. Recent initiatives have focused on the detection of potential ubiquitination sites with the aid of physicochemical test approaches in conjunction with the application of computational methods. The identification of ubiquitination sites using laboratory tests is especially susceptible to the temporality and reversibility of the ubiquitination processes, and is also costly and time-consuming. It has been demonstrated that computational methods are effective in extracting potential rules or inferences from biological sequence collections. Up to the present, the computational strategy has been one of the critical research approaches that have been applied for the identification of ubiquitination sites, and currently, there are numerous state-of-the-art computational methods that have been developed from machine learning and statistical analysis to undertake such work. In the present study, the construction of benchmark datasets is summarized, together with feature representation methods, feature selection approaches and the classifiers involved in several previous publications. In an attempt to explore pertinent development trends for the identification of ubiquitination sites, an independent test dataset was constructed and the predicting results obtained from five prediction tools are reported here, together with some related discussions.


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