Impact of decision-making system in social navigation

Facing human activity-aware navigation with a cognitive architecture raises several difficulties integrating the components and orchestrating behaviors and skills to perform social tasks. In a real-world scenario, the navigation system should not only consider individuals like obstacles. It is necessary to offer particular and dynamic people representation to enhance the HRI experience. The robot’s behaviors must be modified by humans, directly or indirectly. In this paper, we integrate our human representation framework in a cognitive architecture to allow that people who interact with the robot could modify its behavior, not only with the interaction but also with their culture or the social context. The human representation framework represents and distributes the proxemic zones’ information in a standard way, through a cost map. We have evaluated the influence of the decision-making system in human-aware navigation and how a local planner may be decisive in this navigation. The material developed during this research can be found in a public repository (https://github.com/IntelligentRoboticsLabs/social_navigation2_WAF) and instructions to facilitate the reproducibility of the results.

Sex-Dependent Social and Repetitive Behavior and Neurochemical Profile in Mouse Model of Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by deficits in social interaction, impaired communication, and repetitive behaviors. ASD presents a 3:1 ratio of diagnosed boys and girls, raising the question regarding sexual dimorphic mechanisms underlying ASD symptoms, and their molecular basis. Here, we performed in vivo proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy in juvenile male and female Tsc2+/− mice (an established genetic animal model of ASD). Moreover, behavior and ultrasonic vocalizations during social and repetitive tasks were analyzed. We found significant sexual dimorphisms in the levels of metabolites in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Further, we observed that female mutant animals had a differential social behavior and presented an increase in repetitive behavior. Importantly, while mutant females displayed a more simplified communication during social tasks, mutant males exhibited a similar less complex vocal repertoire but during repetitive tasks. These results hint toward sex-dependent alterations in molecular and metabolic pathways, which can lead to the sexual dimorphic behaviors and communication observed in social and repetitive environments.

Interactions within the social brain: Co-activation and connectivity among networks enabling empathy and Theory of Mind

While empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) have classically been studied as separate social functions, recent advances demonstrate the need to investigate the two in interaction: Naturalistic settings often blur the distinction of affect and cognition and demand the simultaneous processing of such different stimulus dimensions. Here, we investigate how empathy and ToM related brain networks interact in contexts wherein multiple cognitive and affective demands must be processed simultaneously. Building on the findings of a recent meta-analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis, we perform meta-analytic connectivity modeling to determine patterns of task-context specific network changes. We analyze 140 studies including classical empathy and ToM tasks, as well as complex social tasks. For studies at the intersection of empathy and ToM, neural co-activation patterns included areas typically associated with both empathy and ToM. Network integration is discussed as a means of combining mechanisms across unique behavioral domains. Such integration may enable adaptive behavior in complex, naturalistic social settings that require simultaneous processing of a multitude of different affective and cognitive information.

In Vitro Rearing Changes Social Task Performance and Physiology in Honeybees

In vitro rearing of honeybee larvae is an established method that enables exact control and monitoring of developmental factors and allows controlled application of pesticides or pathogens. However, only a few studies have investigated how the rearing method itself affects the behavior of the resulting adult honeybees. We raised honeybees in vitro according to a standardized protocol: marking the emerging honeybees individually and inserting them into established colonies. Subsequently, we investigated the behavioral performance of nurse bees and foragers and quantified the physiological factors underlying the social organization. Adult honeybees raised in vitro differed from naturally reared honeybees in their probability of performing social tasks. Further, in vitro-reared bees foraged for a shorter duration in their life and performed fewer foraging trips. Nursing behavior appeared to be unaffected by rearing condition. Weight was also unaffected by rearing condition. Interestingly, juvenile hormone titers, which normally increase strongly around the time when a honeybee becomes a forager, were significantly lower in three- and four-week-old in vitro bees. The effects of the rearing environment on individual sucrose responsiveness and lipid levels were rather minor. These data suggest that larval rearing conditions can affect the task performance and physiology of adult bees despite equal weight, pointing to an important role of the colony environment for these factors. Our observations of behavior and metabolic pathways offer important novel insight into how the rearing environment affects adult honeybees.

The Kids are Alright: Middle-Level Students’ Perceptions of School during COVID-19

This research sought to determine middle school students’ perceptions of the academic year they experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic in a district in South Carolina. The students were surveyed three times throughout the year (beginning, midyear, and end of year), and their responses were disaggregated by the instructional model choice (face-to- face, in-person instruction, and online, virtual instruction via webcam technology). Families of students in this district were offered a choice of these two instructional models throughout the year, and the reasons for their family’s choice were surveyed. Students who were face-to-face for the entire year were more likely to perceive their school year as a positive experience than their online peers, but both groups identified that despite the circumstances, they mostly felt positive about the year, except in the case of being able to make friends, in which face-to-face students’ responses were significantly more positive. Also, students reported spending time during the previous school year’s shutdown (March 2020 to the end of the school year in June) completing many different academics and social tasks in which they were able to develop skills and direct their free time. The results of this research suggest that consistent with previous research suggesting that offering a few options results in people feeling satisfied, this research suggests that in the future, when faced with difficult choices at the district level on how to handle student experiences in unprecedented circumstances, offering choice to the students and families may benefit the outcomes of those students and the district overall.

Mutual interaction between literature and architectural space

Examples of the interaction of literature and architectural space are considered in this article. The considered examples demonstrate the role of literature in solving various architectural problems. For example, social tasks related to the safety of the urban environment, in the creation of a unique image of the city, the development of stylistic trends, environmental problems. Human perception of architectural space, described in the literature, can make an invaluable contribution to scientific research in the social and humanitarian direction. The description of architectural spaces allows us to identify the level of comfort, the influence of architectural objects and landscape on people, the correspondence of the urban environment to the worldview of the townspeople. Both directions have huge scientific potential in research activities. The result of this research is the interpretation of the literary description of the subject environment of applied folk art in a modern interior. The architectural space has a scenic character reflecting the literary descriptions of the yurt's interior. This approach can be used as the main direction in the development of the concept of architectural spaces for different functional purposes. This article examines an example of a kindergarten organized according to the principle of "the walls teach".

Development of Communicative Foreign Language Competency in Management Students for Effective Business Communication

Managers have to coordinate various production, economic, technical, and social tasks in order to achieve common goals. As a result, they need to be able to communicate with a wide net of diverse contacts in this country and abroad. Therefore, intercultural communication plays a very important role in the business sphere. The present research featured the development of communicative competency in students of management for effective business communication. Readiness for business communication in a foreign language is an important indicator of professionalism. The authors defined the concepts of communication, effective business communication, and communicative competency. They focused on the interdisciplinary approach to the development of competencies in future managers as part of such disciplines as Management, Organization, Personnel Management, Economic theory, World Economy, and Business Foreign Language. The competency of business foreign language communication is both the purpose of training and a quality indicator. The article introduces an effective technology of developing the communicative competency in students that major in management. It is an interdisciplinary complex of interactive methods, techniques, Internet sources, and training tools.

TYPES INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS AN ELEMENT OF CIVIL SOCIETY

This article explores the typology of social entrepreneurship as an element of civil society. The article formulates the author's definition of social entrepreneurship, reflecting the essential characteristics of the institution under study. Based on the analysis of international standards of the rights of socially vulnerable categories of population and based on the social orientation of the Belarusian state, the author specifies a list of persons who should be covered by the norms of social entrepreneurship. As a result of the comparative legal research of models of the institute of social entrepreneurship in such areas as structural forms (share of commercial component in the activity), level of integration of social program and business processes, scale of solution of social tasks, directions of solution of social tasks, availability of state support, the author systematizes types of the institute of social entrepreneurship. The conclusion is argued that the analysis of the essential characteristics (signs) of social entrepreneurship, its types (typology) acts as an indispensable condition for the development of the concept of the Belarusian model of social entrepreneurship and will be the key to its effectiveness.

Falling in Love With Work: The Effect of Enterprise Social Media on Thriving at Work

Using a survey of 300 employees in different types of enterprises and different positions, this study verified that the use of enterprise social media has a positive effect on employees’ work exuberance. The study separately examined the effects of social media applications for work tasks and social tasks. Both types of applications had a positive impact on employees’ work exuberance. The study also identified the mediating role of challenge and obstructive stressors in this relationship. Work-related social media applications enhanced employees’ exuberance by reducing obstructive stressors, and social-related social media applications enhanced employees’ exuberance by reducing challenge stressors. The implications of these findings are that managers should pay attention to the use of enterprise social media, especially for social tasks, as this can enhance employees’ sense of exuberance.

Variations in EEG predicts the individual differences in social tasks

People experience events and form an impression of others in a way that is affected by social influence every day. In the present study, we designed a series of experiments centered on social influence to investigate people's bias in following others' opinions and its underlying neural predictors. Our results showed social conformity and proved that social influence-induced change can be predicted by the amount of electroencephalogram (EEG) variations when people view others' faces. This prediction effect is robust in the alpha-band over the right frontal and left occipital electrodes for negative influence. EEG variations can also predict the subsequent trust difference between negatively and positively influenced faces. Our findings suggest that higher EEG variations in the pre-influence task may serve as a predictor of high vulnerability to social influence. The present study provides a novel approach that considers both the stability of one's endogenous EEG and the variations in external task components to predict human social behaviors.