Are Our Genes Important for Cooperation?

Social cooperation is a state in which people work together on a shared activity from which they both benefit, and the success of each person is dependent on everyone doing their part. Imagine, for example, a basketball game in which all team members make a shared effort and cooperate to win the game. To study this kind of social cooperation in the lab, we used rats. We created a special maze in which two rats must coordinate their behavior as a pair, moving together through the sections of the maze. Using this maze, we found that a rat’s genes are more important than its environment in determining its level of social cooperation.

Presence and Communication in Hybrid Virtual and Augmented Reality Environments

The use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in connected environments is rarely explored but may become a necessary channel of communication in the future. Such environments would allow multiple users to interact, engage, and share multi-dimensional data across devices and between the spectrum of realities. However, communication between the two realities within a hybrid environment is barely understood. We carried out an experiment with 52 participants in 26 pairs, within two environments of 3D cultural artifacts: 1) a Hybrid VR and AR environment (HVAR) and 2) a Shared VR environment (SVR). We explored the differences in perceived spatial presence, copresence, and social presence between the environments and between users. We demonstrated that greater presence is perceived in SVR when compared with HVAR, and greater spatial presence is perceived for VR users. Social presence is perceived greater for AR users, possibly because they have line of sight of their partners within HVAR. We found positive correlations between shared activity time and perceived social presence. While acquainted pairs reported significantly greater presence than unacquainted pairs in SVR, there were no significant differences in perceived presence between them in HVAR.

Three Multimodal Action Packages in Responses to Proposals During Joint Decision-Making: The Embodied Delivery of Positive Assessments Including the Finnish Particle Ihan “Quite”

Joint decision-making is a thoroughly collaborative interactional endeavor. To construct the outcome of the decision-making sequence as a “joint” one necessitates that the participants constantly negotiate their shared activity, not only with reference to the content of the decisions to be made, but also with reference to whether, when, and upon what exactly decisions are to be made in the first place. In this paper, I draw on a dataset of video-recorded dyadic planning meetings between two church officials as data, investigating a collection of 35 positive assessments with the Finnish particle ihan “quite” occurring in response to a proposal (e.g., tää on ihan kiva “this is quite nice”). The analysis focuses on the embodied delivery of these assessments in combination with their other features: their sequential location and immediate interactional consequences (i.e., accounts, decisions, abandoning of the proposal), their auxiliary verbal turn-design features (i.e., particles), and the “agent” of the proposals that they are responsive to (i.e., who has made the proposal and whether it is based on some written authoritative material). Three multimodal action packages are described, in which the assessment serves 1) to accept an idea in principle, which is combined with no speaker movement, 2) to concede to a plan, which is associated with notable expressive speaker movement (e.g., head gestures, facial expressions) and 3) to establish a joint decision, which is accompanied by the participants’ synchronous body movements. The paper argues that the relative decision-implicativeness of these three multimodal action packages is largely based on the management and distribution of participation and agency between the two participants, which involves the participants using their bodies to position themselves toward their co-participants and toward the proposals “in the air” in distinct ways.

Navigating Shared Consumption Experiences: Clarity About a Partner’s Interests Increases Enjoyment

Consumers frequently engage in activities with others, such as visiting an art gallery with a friend or going to a sports match with a family member, and they tend to assume that sharing experiences with another person will make these activities more enjoyable. However, navigating a shared experience—making decisions about pacing, sequencing, and interacting with another person as the experience unfolds—can take consumers’ attention away from the activity, potentially reducing their enjoyment. In a series of studies in which consumers engage in real consumption experiences, the authors show that lack of clarity about a partner’s interests can distract consumers, making it difficult for them to focus on the shared activity and reducing their enjoyment of shared experiences relative to solo experiences. Notably, simple interventions can increase clarity of a partner’s interests and consumers’ enjoyment of shared activities, providing tools for service providers who want to retain customers and benefit from positive word of mouth.

The Ivory Tower in a World of Trouble

This chapter introduces the authors' approach to university-community engagement as the process of collaborative learning among the young people engaged in afterschool activities run by University-Community Links (UC Links), along with the community and university people who have collectively engaged in designing, planning, and implementing those program activities. The prevalence of social displacement among community participants suggests a primary point for understanding the role that universities can play by engaging in the larger world. The chapter introduces the authors' ethnographic approach to the study of expansive learning among collaborating community and university partners as they confront dilemmas implicit in their engagement in joint activity and come to view their shared activity from an expanded perspective that transforms how they work together. The chapter then describes the historical emergence of UC Links, a California initiative that connects university and community partners in addressing pervasive social displacement and educational inequities.

Text selection proposals in dialogic reading in primary school

In dialogic reading during inquiry learning in primary school, pupils read, think and talk together about text fragments for answering their research questions. This paper demonstrates from a conversational analytic perspective, how the shared activity of text selection is constructed in a goal oriented conversation and how text selection proposals are used. Two main practices are identified depending on the situation: (1) when all participants are reading the text for the first time, a text selection proposal is constructed with reading-out-loud fragments, and (2) when only one of the participants is reading the text, a text selection proposal is constructed with an indexical text reference and indicative summary of the topic. In both practices, a separate utterance that functions as a proposal is required to accomplish the complete text selection proposal turn.

SISTERHOOD IN ANN M. MARTIN'S BELLE TEAL

A relationship called sisterhood has become an ordinary thing in society. The sisterhood docs not only happen to fellow women without blood tics but also occur between relationships across generations of which parents and children live. To examine the occurrence of sisterhood relationships by parents and children, the writer decided to do a study on a novel entitled Belle Teal by Ann M. Martin. Using qualitative method, the data are analysed descriptively. By applying feminist literary criticism the writer discusses several problem statements which include the sisterhood that occurs across generations and how sisterhood can be exposed to cross-generational relationships. From the analysis, it can be concludedthat sisterhood can occur across-generation. Mutual caring, intimacy and shared activity can enhance and expose sisterhood relationship among the perpetrators. Sisterhood also has a positive impact that can make a person have a more godly thought than before.

Icelandic Identities

Chapter 3 looks at ways in which sagas of Icelanders engage with and explore three broad aspects of identity: nationality (including the importance of feuds in medieval Icelandic law), gender and sexuality, and the distinction between human and non-human (including the supernatural). The sagas thus performed what is sometimes called “ideological work”: they gave expression to the common memories and ideals of a community, and they strengthened bonds within that community through the shared activity of reading the stories or hearing them read. By bringing the sagas into dialogue with approaches associated with the study of other periods and other literatures, this chapter sheds new light on the sagas and on thinking about identity today. Special attention is paid to Hrafnkels saga Freysgoði as a saga illustrating the exploration of different kinds of identity.

Shared neural codes for eye-gaze and valence

The eye-gaze of others is a prominent social cue in primates and crucial for communication1-7, and atypical processing occurs in several conditions as autism-spectrum-disorder (ASD)1,9-14. The neural mechanisms that underlie eye-gaze remain vague, and it is still debated if these computations developed in dedicated neural circuits or shared with non-social elements. In many species, eye-gaze signals a threat and elicits anxiety, yet can also serve as a predictor for the outcome of the encounter: negative or positive2,4,8. Here, we hypothesized and find that neural codes overlap between eye-gaze and valence. Monkeys participated in a modified version of the human-intruder-test8,15 that includes direct and averted eye-gaze and interleaved with blocks of aversive and appetitive conditioning16,17. We find that single-neurons in the amygdala encode gaze18, whereas neurons in the anterior-cingulate-cortex encode the social context19,20 but not gaze. We identify a shared amygdala circuitry where neural responses to averted and direct gaze parallel the responses to appetitive and aversive value, correspondingly. Importantly, we distinguish two shared coding mechanisms: a shared-intensity scheme that is used for gaze and the unconditioned-stimulus, and a shared-activity scheme that is used for gaze and the conditioned-stimulus. The shared-intensity points to overlap in circuitry, whereas the shared-activity requires also correlated activity. Our results demonstrate that eye-gaze is coded as a signal of valence, yet also as the expected value of the interaction. The findings may suggest new insights into the mechanisms that underlie the malfunction of eye-gaze in ASD and the comorbidity with impaired social skills and anxiety.