1,510,890 research outputs found
Control Changes the Way We Look at the World
The feeling of control is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and accompanies our voluntary actions all the time. However, it remains poorly understood how the sense of control interacts with wider perception, cognition, and behaviour. The present study focused on how controlling an external object influences the allocation of attention. Experiment 1 examined attention to an object that is under a different level of control from the others. Participants searched for a target among multiple distractors on screen. All the distractors were partially under the participantâs control (50% control level), and the search target was either under more or less control than the distractors. The results showed that, against this background of partial control, visual attention was attracted to an object only if it was more controlled than other available objects, and not if it was less controlled. Experiment 2 examined attention allocation in contexts of either perfect control or no control over most of the objects. Specifically, the distractors were under either perfect (100%) control or no (0%) control, and the search target had one of six levels of control varying from 0% to 100%. When differences in control between the distractors and the target were small, visual attention was now more strongly drawn to search targets that were less controlled than distractors, rather than more controlled, suggesting attention to objects over which one might be losing control. Experiment 3 studied the events of losing or gaining control as opposed to the states of having or not having control. ERP measures showed that P300 amplitude proportionally encoded the magnitude of both increases and decreases in degree of control. However, losing control had more marked effects on P170 and P300 than gaining an equivalent degree of control, indicating high priority for efficiently detecting failures of control. Overall, our results suggest that controlled objects preferentially attract attention in uncontrolled environments. However, once control has been registered, the brain becomes highly sensitive to subsequent loss of control. Our findings point towards careful perceptual monitoring of degree of oneâs own agentic control over external objects. We suggest that control has intrinsic cognitive value, since perceptual systems are organized to detect it, and, once it has been acquired, to maintain it
The Impact of Generational Experiences on Anti-Immigration Sentiments
Immigration is one of the most important issues in our increasingly globalized world. Every year, millions of people relocate to Europe and United States in an effort to improve the quality of life for themselves and their family. With this increase in immigration, there has been an emergence of anti-immigration sentiments which have in turn allowed far right political parties to gain more power, evident in the British referendum to leave the European Union and Donald Trumpâs election as President of the United States. While most works of literature look at the current work status, education level and income of an individual in explaining how anti-immigration sentiments occur, I want to look in more detail at the generational factors that cause individuals to think this way.
Within The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman offers a theory that people constitute their happiness on comparing it to âbenchmark of their own prior experiences or their parentsâ. Thus when they believe that their own lives are better, they feel less need to get ahead and they develop a more open view towards immigrants. Building off of Friedmanâs argument, I ran regressions using GSS data together with several control variable, to see if Friedmanâs argument that anti-immigration sentiments rise as a product of generational experiences rather than based on current socio-economic status, explains the rise that we have seen in anti-immigration sentiments. Our results supported some of Friedmanâs theory that individuals who receive a higher education and make more money than their parents are more tolerant to immigrants however it also revealed that generational changes do not reflect the entire story as some generational variables had no impact on our dependent variable
Presentation of self on a decentralised web
Self presentation is evolving; with digital technologies, with the Web and
personal publishing, and then with mainstream adoption of online social media.
Where are we going next? One possibility is towards a world where we log and
own vast amounts of data about ourselves. We choose to share - or not - the data
as part of our identity, and in interactions with others; it contributes to our day-to-day personhood or sense of self. I imagine a world where the individual is
empowered by their digital traces (not imprisoned), but this is a complex world.
This thesis examines the many factors at play when we present ourselves
through Web technologies. I optimistically look to a future where control over
our digital identities are not in the hands of centralised actors, but our own, and
both survey and contribute to the ongoing technical work which strives to make
this a reality. Decentralisation changes things in unexpected ways. In the
context of the bigger picture of our online selves, building on what we already
know about self-presentation from decades of Social Science research, I
examine what might change as we move towards decentralisation; how people
could be affected, and what the possibilities are for a positive change. Finally I
explore one possible way of self-presentation on a decentralised social Web
through lightweight controls which allow an audience to set their expectations
in order for the subject to meet them appropriately.
I seek to acknowledge the multifaceted, complicated, messy, socially-shaped
nature of the self in a way that makes sense to software developers. Technology
may always fall short when dealing with humanness, but the framework outlined
in this thesis can provide a foundation for more easily considering all of the
factors surrounding individual self-presentation in order to build future systems
which empower participants
Innovation dialogue - Being strategic in the face of complexity - Conference report
The Innovation Dialogue on Being Strategic in the Face of Complexity was held in Wageningen on 31 November and 1 December 2009. The event is part of a growing dialogue in the international development sector about the complexities of social, economic and political change. It builds on two previous events hosted the Innovation Dialogue on Navigating Complexity (May 2009) and the Seminar on Institutions, Theories of Change and Capacity Development (December 2008). Over 120 people attended the event coming from a range of Dutch and international development organizations. The event was aimed at bridging practitioner, policy and academic interests. It brought together people working on sustainable business strategies, social entrepreneurship and international development. Leading thinkers and practitioners offered their insights on what it means to "be strategic in complex times". The Dialogue was organized and hosted by the Wageningen UR Centre for Development Innovation working with the Chair Groups of Communication & Innovation Studies, Disaster Studies, Education & Competence Studies and Public Administration & Policy as co; organisers. The theme of the Dialogue aligns closely with Wageningen URâs interest in linking technological and institutional innovation in ways that enable âscience for impactâ
Changing the Environment Based on Empowerment as Intrinsic Motivation
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 3.0 which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.One aspect of intelligence is the ability to restructure your own environment so that the world you live in becomes more beneficial to you. In this paper we investigate how the information-theoretic measure of agent empowerment can provide a task-independent, intrinsic motivation to restructure the world. We show how changes in embodiment and in the environment change the resulting behaviour of the agent and the artefacts left in the world. For this purpose, we introduce an approximation of the established empowerment formalism based on sparse sampling, which is simpler and significantly faster to compute for deterministic dynamics. Sparse sampling also introduces a degree of randomness into the decision making process, which turns out to beneficial for some cases. We then utilize the measure to generate agent behaviour for different agent embodiments in a Minecraft-inspired three dimensional block world. The paradigmatic results demonstrate that empowerment can be used as a suitable generic intrinsic motivation to not only generate actions in given static environments, as shown in the past, but also to modify existing environmental conditions. In doing so, the emerging strategies to modify an agentâs environment turn out to be meaningful to the specific agent capabilities, i.e., de facto to its embodiment.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio
Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models for Predicting Concurrent Percept-driven Robot Behavior
This article develops Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models (PHAMs), a realistic
causal model for predicting the behavior generated by modern percept-driven
robot plans. PHAMs represent aspects of robot behavior that cannot be
represented by most action models used in AI planning: the temporal structure
of continuous control processes, their non-deterministic effects, several modes
of their interferences, and the achievement of triggering conditions in
closed-loop robot plans.
The main contributions of this article are: (1) PHAMs, a model of concurrent
percept-driven behavior, its formalization, and proofs that the model generates
probably, qualitatively accurate predictions; and (2) a resource-efficient
inference method for PHAMs based on sampling projections from probabilistic
action models and state descriptions. We show how PHAMs can be applied to
planning the course of action of an autonomous robot office courier based on
analytical and experimental results
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