Is Maternal Touch Used Referentially?

Early social interactions are highly multimodal and include a wealth of cues (e.g., speech, facial expressions, motion, gestures and touch). Infant-directed speech (IDS) by itself may aid in language development. Touch by itself has been also shown to play an important role in dyadic interactions affecting both the infant and the caregiver. However, little is known about the impact of the combination of these two modes of communication on infant language development. In this thesis, I hypothesize that caregiver touch is provided in synchrony with speech, providing the language-learning infant with cues that may not only help her to find words in the continuous stream of speech, but also to map between words and their referents. I examined the naturalistic use of touch by having mother read books to their 5-month-old infants. Results suggest that caregivers temporally align touches with the production of target words. Thus, the infant is provided with yet another cue to segment the speech stream and pull out the words produced by the caregiver. In addition, results suggest that caregivers tend to touch in locations congruent with their speech (e.g., touch the belly while saying the word belly). This might highlight the meaning of target words to infants through the use of touch. Thus, results suggest that caregiver touch may be useful to the language learning infant for both segmentation and word learning

The multisensory body revealed through its cast shadows

One key issue when conceiving the body as a multisensory object is how the cognitive system integrates visible instances of the self and other bodies with one\u2019s own somatosensory processing, to achieve self-recognition and body ownership. Recent research has strongly suggested that shadows cast by our own body have a special status for cognitive processing, directing attention to the body in a fast and highly specific manner. The aim of the present article is to review the most recent scientific contributions addressing how body shadows affect both sensory/perceptual and attentional processes. The review examines three main points: (1) body shadows as a special window to investigate the construction of multisensory body perception; (2) experimental paradigms and related findings; (3) open questions and future trajectories. The reviewed literature suggests that shadows cast by one\u2019s own body promote binding between personal and extrapersonal space and elicit automatic orienting of attention toward the bodypart casting the shadow. Future research should address whether the effects exerted by body shadows are similar to those observed when observers are exposed to other visual instances of their body. The results will further clarify the processes underlying the merging of vision and somatosensation when creating body representations

Research regarding development and application of tactile sensing for robots

制度:新 ; 報告番号:甲3063号 ; 学位の種類:博士(工学) ; 授与年月日:2010/2/25 ; 早大学位記番号:新532

Machine Understanding of Human Behavior

A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. If this prediction is to come true, then next generation computing, which we will call human computing, should be about anticipatory user interfaces that should be human-centered, built for humans based on human models. They should transcend the traditional keyboard and mouse to include natural, human-like interactive functions including understanding and emulating certain human behaviors such as affective and social signaling. This article discusses a number of components of human behavior, how they might be integrated into computers, and how far we are from realizing the front end of human computing, that is, how far are we from enabling computers to understand human behavior