Listening to the inner child in social cognition: the ontogeny of the dual architecture of social information processing

Studies conducted with children may be highly valuable for the advancement of social cognitive theory testing and building, beyond a strictly developmental scope, and particularly under the framework of the dual-architecture of social information processing. The arguments favouring this thesis are presented through the implementation of 7 studies, grouped in 2 sets. The first set of studies illustrates how research with differently-aged participants (preschoolers to ninth-graders) is useful for testing and informing dual-process theories, such as the three-stage model of person perception (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988). Studies 1 and 2 tested, and corroborated, the ontogenetic prediction derived from the model that the situational correction process has a later ontogenetic onset than the dispositional characterization process. Study 3 examined the impact of prior expectancies on the dispositional characterization process, and the ways the obtained results inform the threestage model were discussed. The second set of studies illustrates how research with children is valuable for gathering knowledge about the operation of the more automatic processes, such as the ones involved in incongruency processing in impression formation settings. Studies 4 and 5 investigated participants’ willingness to know more about either a congruently or an incongruently described target-person. Study 6 examined whether participants conceived of a target-person described in incongruent terms as a real person. Finally, Study 7 tested differential recall of expectancy-congruent and incongruent information in 4- to 10-years-old children. Based on these results, hypotheses were generated about the more automatic processing of incongruent information, namely of incongruencyneglect and avoidance.Estudos com crianças podem ser valiosos para o teste e construção de teorias sóciocognitivas, para além dum âmbito estritamente desenvolvimentista, particularmente sob o enquadramento da arquitectura dualista do processamento de informação social. Sete estudos, agrupados em 2 conjuntos, servem a apresentação de argumentos a favor desta tese. O primeiro conjunto ilustra a utilidade de investigação com participantes de diferentes idades (pré-escolar até 9º ano) para testar e informar teorias de processamento dualista, como o modelo das três-etapas da percepção social (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988). Os Estudos 1 e 2 testaram, e corroboraram, a predição ontogenética derivada do modelo de que a correcção situacional é um processo ontogeneticamente mais tardio do que a caracterização disposicional. O Estudo 3 examinou o impacto das expectativas prévias na caracterização disposicional e discutiu-se o modo como os resultados informam o modelo. O segundo conjunto de estudos ilustra o valor de investigação com crianças na acumulação de conhecimento sobre processos mais automáticos, tais como os envolvidos no processamento de incongruência em contextos de formação de impressões. Os Estudos 4 e 5 investigaram a preferência dos participantes por saber mais sobre uma pessoa-alvo congruente ou incongruentemente descrita. O Estudo 6 examinou se os participantes concebiam como real uma pessoa-alvo descrita de forma incongruente. Finalmente, o Estudo 7 testou a recordação diferencial de informação congruente e incongruente com expectativas em crianças de 4 a 10 anos. Com base nestes resultados geraram-se hipóteses sobre o processamento mais automático de informação incongruente, nomeadamente sobre negligência e evitação de incongruência

An Automatized Heider-Simmel Story Generation Tool

The social psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel have shown in the 1950s that movies about very simple object interactions are typically interpreted in a very social manner, quickly perceiving motivations and emotions. We have developed a tool to generate Heider-Simmel-like videos. In contrast to the Heider-Simmel Interactive Theater project by Andrew Gordon and colleagues, though, our tool enables the generation of story-lines. The user is offered a manifold of individual object behaviors, such as approaching, avoiding, or circling around another object, and a manifold of perceptual events, such as the detection of another object, the touch of another object, etc. Behavior-event complexes can be chosen and concatenated by an intuitive user interface. The resulting story lines are then played-out by the tool in different scenarios, yielding different videos about socially similar interactions. The tool may be very useful for conducting future social- and object-interaction-related cognitive science projects

Perspectives on Science and Culture

"Edited by Kris Rutten, Stefaan Blancke, and Ronald Soetaert, Perspectives on Science and Culture explores the intersection between scientific understanding and cultural representation from an interdisciplinary perspective. Contributors to the volume analyze representations of science and scientific discourse from the perspectives of rhetorical criticism, comparative cultural studies, narratology, educational studies, discourse analysis, naturalized epistemology, and the cognitive sciences. The main objective of the volume is to explore how particular cognitive predispositions and cultural representations both shape and distort the public debate about scientific controversies, the teaching and learning of science, and the development of science itself

New approaches to the emerging social neuroscience of human-robot interaction

Prehistoric art, like the Venus of Willendorf sculpture, shows that we have always looked for ways to distil fundamental human characteristics and capture them in physically embodied representations of the self. Recently, this undertaking has gained new momentum through the introduction of robots that resemble humans in their shape and their behaviour. These social robots are envisioned to take on important roles: alleviate loneliness, support vulnerable children and serve as helpful companions for the elderly. However, to date, few commercially available social robots are living up to these expectations. Given their importance for an ever older and more socially isolated society, rigorous research at the intersection of psychology, social neuroscience and human-robot interaction is needed to determine to which extent mechanisms active during human-human interaction can be co-opted when we encounter social robots. This thesis takes an anthropocentric approach to answering the question how socially motivated we are to interact with humanoid robots. Across three empirical and one theoretical chapter, I use self-report, behavioural and neural measures relevant to the study of interactions with robots to address this question. With the Social Motivation Theory of Autism as a point of departure, the first empirical chapter (Chapter 3) investigates the relevance of interpersonal synchrony for human-robot interaction. This chapter reports a null effect: participants did not find a robot that synchronised its movement with them on a drawing task more likeable, nor were they more motivated to ask it more questions in a semi-structured interaction scenario. As this chapter heavily relies on self-report as a main outcome measure, Chapter 4 addresses this limitation by adapting an established behavioural paradigm for the study of human-robot interaction. This chapter shows that a failure to conceptually extend an effect in the field of social attentional capture calls for a different approach when seeking to adapt paradigms for HRI. Chapter 5 serves as a moment of reflection on the current state-of-the-art research at the intersection of neuroscience and human-robot interaction. Here, I argue that the future of HRI research will rely on interaction studies with mobile brain imaging systems (like functional near-infrared spectroscopy) that allow data collection during embodied encounters with social robots. However, going forward, the field should slowly and carefully move outside of the lab and into real situations with robots. As the previous chapters have established, well-known effects have to be replicated before they are implemented for robots, and before they are taken out of the lab, into real life. The final empirical chapter (Chapter 6), takes the first step of this proposed slow approach: in addition to establishing the detection rate of a mobile fNIRS system in comparison to fMRI, this chapter contributes a novel way to digitising optode positions by means of photogrammetry. In the final chapter of this thesis, I highlight the main lessons learned conducting studies with social robots. I propose an updated roadmap which takes into account the problems raised in this thesis and emphasise the importance of incorporating more open science practices going forward. Various tools that emerged out of the open science movement will be invaluable for researchers working on this exciting, interdisciplinary endeavour