When Preschoolers Interact with an Educational Robot, Does Robot Feedback Influence Engagement?

In this paper, we examine to what degree children of 3–4 years old engage with a task and with a social robot during a second-language tutoring lesson. We specifically investigated whether children’s task engagement and robot engagement were influenced by three different feedback types by the robot: adult-like feedback, peer-like feedback and no feedback. Additionally, we investigated the relation between children’s eye gaze fixations and their task engagement and robot engagement. Fifty-eight Dutch children participated in an English counting task with a social robot and physical blocks. We found that, overall, children in the three conditions showed similar task engagement and robot engagement; however, within each condition, they showed large individual differences. Additionally, regression analyses revealed that there is a relation between children’s eye-gaze direction and engagement. Our findings showed that although eye gaze plays a significant role in measuring engagement and can be used to model children’s task engagement and robot engagement, it does not account for the full concept and engagement still comprises more than just eye gaze.

Do interoception and attending to the upper limbs affect body ownership and body representation in the grasp illusion?

Passively grasping an unseen artificial finger induces ownership over this finger and an illusory coming together of one’s index fingers: a grasp illusion. Here we determine how interoceptive ability and attending to the upper limbs influence this illusion. Participants passively grasped an unseen artificial finger with their left index finger and thumb for 3 min while their right index finger, located 12 cm below, was lightly clamped. Experiment 1 (n = 30) investigated whether the strength of the grasp illusion (perceived index finger spacing and perceived ownership) is related to a person’s level of interoceptive accuracy (modified heartbeat counting task) and sensibility (Noticing subscale of the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness). Experiment 2 (n = 30) investigated the effect of providing verbal or tactile cues to guide participants’ attention to their upper limbs. On their own, neither interoceptive accuracy and sensibility or verbal and tactile cueing had an effect on the grasp illusion. However, verbal cueing increased the strength of the grasp illusion in individuals with lower interoceptive ability. Across the observed range of interoceptive accuracy and sensibility, verbal cueing decreased perceived index spacing by 5.6 cm [1.91 to 9.38] (mean [95%CI]), and perceived ownership by ∼3 points on a 7-point Likert scale (slope -0.93 [-1.72 to -0.15]). Thus, attending to the upper limbs via verbal cues increases the strength of the grasp illusion in a way that is inversely proportional to a person’s level of interoceptive accuracy and sensibility.

Predicting mind wandering episodes quarter hours in advances from EEG

Mind wandering occurs when spontaneous thought generation is increased while cognitive control is decreased, presumably in response to antagonistic effects of default mode- (DMN) and goal-directed network (GDN) activity. Previous studies assumed that DMN or GDN activity manifests in behavior with minimal delays and has rigid effects, i.e., DMN always facilitates generation of spontaneous thought and inhibits cognitive control. With those static response functions, the antagonism of DMN and GDN could explain the alternation of task focused and mind wandering states. But it rules out others, such as multi-tasking, where spontaneous thought and cognitive control are both increased, or rumination, where both are decreased. However, shifts from task focused to mind wandering have been shown to occur via a multi-tasking state. We therefore propose dynamic response functions, allowing delay or reversal of DMN and GDN effects. Dynamic response functions enabled us to stochastically predict mind wandering up to at least 30 min in advance from EEG measures of DMN and GDN activity in a tone counting task. Experimental results show both considerable delays and switches between task-positive and negative effects. Mind wandering was initiated by a barrage of DMN activity more than 20 minutes prior a report of mind wandering, directing the mental focus inward. Critically, facilitation of spontaneous thoughts occurred several minutes prior to the report. These thoughts sustained up to 10 min, after which a rebound to task-focused behavior was effectuated, notably without intervention from the GDN. Repeated GDN interventions, however, secured a basic level of task performance.

Bipartite Matching for Crowd Counting with Point Supervision

For crowd counting task, it has been demonstrated that imposing Gaussians to point annotations hurts generalization performance. Several methods attempt to utilize point annotations as supervision directly. And they have made significant improvement compared with density-map based methods. However, these point based methods ignore the inevitable annotation noises and still suffer from low robustness to noisy annotations. To address the problem, we propose a bipartite matching based method for crowd counting with only point supervision (BM-Count). In BM-Count, we select a subset of most similar pixels from the predicted density map to match annotated pixels via bipartite matching. Then loss functions can be defined based on the matching pairs to alleviate the bad effect caused by those annotated dots with incorrect positions. Under the noisy annotations, our method reduces MAE and RMSE by 9% and 11.2% respectively. Moreover, we propose a novel ranking distribution learning framework to address the imbalanced distribution problem of head counts, which encodes the head counts as classification distribution in the ranking domain and refines the estimated count map in the continuous domain. Extensive experiments on four datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and performs better crowd localization.

Individual differences in sensory and expectation driven interoceptive processes: a novel paradigm with implications for alexithymia, disordered eating and obesity

Those with disordered eating and/or obesity often express difficulties in sensing or interpreting what is happening in the body (interoception). However, research is hindered by conceptual confusion, concerns surrounding domain specificity, and an inability to distinguish sensory (bottom-up) and expectation driven (top-down) interoceptive processes. A paradigm was therefore developed from an active inference perspective. Novel indices were computed and examined in those with alexithymia: a personality associated with interoceptive deficits and disordered eating. The paradigm successfully identified individuals driven by sensations rather than expectations: alexithymia was characterized by attenuated prior precision (a larger divergence between pre-prandial and post-prandial satiety, and low expectation confidence), and increased prediction error (a higher correlation between changes in hunger and blood glucose, and greater rebound hunger after a sensory incongruent drink). In addition, those with a higher BMI were less confident and had a larger anticipated satiety divergence. These findings demonstrate the need to move beyond existing paradigms such as the Satiety Quotient and Heartbeat Counting Task which may have limited our understanding of eating behaviour.

Shared Developmental Trajectories for Fractional Reasoning and Fine Motor Ability in 4 and 5 Year Olds

We investigated preschool-aged children’s understanding of early fractional tasks and how that performance correlates with fine motor skills and use of gestures while counting. Participants were 33 preschoolers aged 4 to 5 in two Southeastern public elementary schools. Children were tested individually in an interview-like setting. Mathematics tasks were presented in a paper and pencil format and the Grooved Pegboard test assessed fine motor skills. Finally, utilization of gestures was evaluated by taking a behavioral rating of the child’s hand morphology, accuracy of gestures, and synchrony of gestures and spoken word while performing a counting task. Results indicate that performance on fractional reasoning tasks significantly predicts both fine motor ability and accuracy of gestures.

Shared Developmental Trajectories for Fractional Reasoning and Fine Motor Ability in 4 and 5 Year-Olds

We investigated preschool-aged children’s understanding of early fractional tasks and how that performance correlates with fine motor skills and use of gestures while counting. Participants were 33 preschoolers aged 4 to 5 in two Southeastern public elementary schools. Children were tested individually in an interview-like setting. Mathematics tasks were presented in a paper and pencil format and the Grooved Pegboard test assessed fine motor skills. Finally, utilization of gestures was evaluated by taking a behavioral rating of the child’s hand morphology, accuracy of gestures, and synchrony of gestures and spoken word while performing a counting task. Results indicate performance on fractional reasoning tasks significantly predicts both fine motor ability and accuracy of gestures.

Aberrant interoceptive accuracy in patients with schizophrenia performing a heartbeat counting task

Introduction Although self-disturbances and emotional disturbances are common in schizophrenia, there is no integrated understanding to explain these symptoms. Interoception has a crucial role in the development of self and emotion, and interoceptive abnormality could lead to such symptoms. Methods We compared interoceptive accuracy between controls and patients with schizophrenia. Forty-two patients and thirty healthy controls were recruited and their interoceptive accuracy was assessed using a heartbeat counting task. Participants were instructed to count the number of times they felt their own heartbeat during various measurement periods. Interoceptive accuracy was calculated based on the discrepancy between the number of reported and actual heartbeats during the measurement period. Participants also performed a time estimation task and were instructed to count the number of seconds there were during the same period. Time accuracy was calculated in a similar manner to that for the heartbeat. Participants also completed a questionnaire regarding interoception to assess their subjective experiences. Results Interoceptive accuracy was significantly lower among patients with schizophrenia than in healthy controls (p = 0.017), even after controlling for age, sex, time accuracy, anxiety, depression, and heart rate (HR). In addition, patients’ positive and negative symptoms were significantly associated with their HR-adjusted interoceptive accuracy, especially hallucination. The discrepancy between HR-adjusted interoceptive accuracy and the score of the questionnaire was significantly associated with positive symptoms, especially delusion; but not negative symptoms. Discussion These findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia have aberrant interoception. Aberrant interoception in schizophrenia could be a novel therapeutic target in future.