“Improvisation ≠ Randomness”: a Study on Playful Rule-Based Human-Robot Interactions

To develop and sustain rich social interactions between humans and robots, previous research has mostly looked at task-oriented performance metrics or the ability for a robot to adequately express messages, emotions, or intents. In contrast, our research starts from the premise that movement, as a nonverbal modality of social interaction, can cover other essential aspects of social interaction that do not have to do with the expression of messages, inner states, or drives but that nonetheless contribute to improving the quality of interaction. These aspects have to do with interaction dynamics and highly depend on appropriate action choice. Drawing inspiration from rule-based improvisation, this paper seeks to show that there exists implicit expert knowledge that can be used to inform these movement action choices, contributing to rich, playful, and non goal-oriented interactions between humans and robots. We present an experimental study conducted at a performing arts festival, in which participants interacted with a robot in three simple rule-based movement games, in two conditions: one where the robot was fully controlled by an improvisation expert (Improv Timing/Improv Action) and one where the timing of the actions was controlled by the expert but the robot’s action choices were drawn randomly (Improv Timing/Random Action). This was done in order to focus on action choice, beyond the timing of a response. Our results show that the Improv Timing/Improv Action condition not only performs better in terms of anthropomorphism and animacy, but also increases the interest of people in interacting with the robot for longer periods of time. These results serve as preliminary evidence of how improvisational knowledge in this context contributes to improving the quality of an interaction, and point at the value of further work in this field

THE SOUND OF LEADERSHIP: THE SELF-LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES OF LOCAL ACTIVIST MUSICIANS

Within this dissertation I focused on the examination of local activist musicians’ self-leadership strategies and the method in which they lead social change movements. Additionally, I sought to increase the understanding of charismatic leadership, self-leadership strategies of local activist musicians, and the method in which local activist musicians lead social movements. To my knowledge, no published studies have explored local activist musicians’ self-leadership strategies. Therefore, this study is significant because I (a) explored a term which lacks a unifying definition, charismatic leadership, (b) provided theoretical foundations for activist musicians and social change, and (c) explored the self-leadership strategies of local activist musicians and the method in which activist musicians share knowledge in order to foster positive community change. A proposition offered in the dissertation is that activist musicians use their musical competencies to enhance their social change strategies within the local community. However, it is unclear what self-leadership strategies are being utilized by local activist musicians in order to reach collective action and achieve social and political change. A self-developed framework, the Framework for Activist Musicians (FAM), portrays how an activist musician utilizes their social experiences, behaviors, and influence to enact social change. The framework delineates how a musician utilizes their music making involvement and status to enhance their charisma and authenticity as an activist to establish social change. The findings in this dissertation indicate the importance of one’s music making experiences and status as a musician in fostering social change initiatives in addition to his or her self-leadership strategies. The findings display the methods in which local activist musicians share knowledge were instrumental in their ability to encourage others, mobilize people, recruit members, and share knowledge in social change movements and how the unique qualities of an individual who is a musician and activist are well-prepared to be an influential community leader

Emergent coordination between humans and robots

Emergent coordination or movement synchronization is an often observed phenomenon in human behavior. Humans synchronize their gait when walking next to each other, they synchronize their postural sway when standing closely, and they also synchronize their movement behavior in many other situations of daily life. Why humans are doing this is an important question of ongoing research in many disciplines: apparently movement synchronization plays a role in children’s development and learning; it is related to our social and emotional behavior in interaction with others; it is an underlying principle in the organization of communication by means of language and gesture; and finally, models explaining movement synchronization between two individuals can also be extended to group behavior. Overall, one can say that movement synchronization is an important principle of human interaction behavior. Besides interacting with other humans, in recent years humans do more and more interact with technology. This was first expressed in the interaction with machines in industrial settings, was taken further to human-computer interaction and is now facing a new challenge: the interaction with active and autonomous machines, the interaction with robots. If the vision of today’s robot developers comes true, in the near future robots will be fully integrated not only in our workplace, but also in our private lives. They are supposed to support humans in activities of daily living and even care for them. These circumstances however require the development of interactional principles which the robot can apply to the direct interaction with humans. In this dissertation the problem of robots entering the human society will be outlined and the need for the exploration of human interaction principles that are transferable to human-robot interaction will be emphasized. Furthermore, an overview on human movement synchronization as a very important phenomenon in human interaction will be given, ranging from neural correlates to social behavior. The argument of this dissertation is that human movement synchronization is a simple but striking human interaction principle that can be applied in human-robot interaction to support human activity of daily living, demonstrated on the example of pick-and-place tasks. This argument is based on five publications. In the first publication, human movement synchronization is explored in goal-directed tasks which bare similar requirements as pick-and-place tasks in activities of daily living. In order to explore if a merely repetitive action of the robot is sufficient to encourage human movement synchronization, the second publication reports a human-robot interaction study in which a human interacts with a non-adaptive robot. Here however, movement synchronization between human and robot does not emerge, which underlines the need for adaptive mechanisms. Therefore, in the third publication, human adaptive behavior in goal-directed movement synchronization is explored. In order to make the findings from the previous studies applicable to human-robot interaction, in the fourth publication the development of an interaction model based on dynamical systems theory is outlined which is ready for implementation on a robotic platform. Following this, a brief overview on a first human-robot interaction study based on the developed interaction model is provided. The last publication describes an extension of the previous approach which also includes the human tendency to make use of events to adapt their movements to. Here, also a first human-robot interaction study is reported which confirms the applicability of the model. The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the presented findings in the light of human-robot interaction and psychological aspects of joint action research as well as the problem of mutual adaptation.Spontan auftretende Koordination oder Bewegungssynchronisierung ist ein häufig zu beobachtendes Phänomen im Verhalten von Menschen. Menschen synchronisieren ihre Schritte beim nebeneinander hergehen, sie synchronisieren die Schwingbewegung zum Ausgleich der Körperbalance wenn sie nahe beieinander stehen und sie synchronisieren ihr Bewegungsverhalten generell in vielen weiteren Handlungen des täglichen Lebens. Die Frage nach dem warum ist eine Frage mit der sich die Forschung in der Psychologie, Neuro- und Bewegungswissenschaft aber auch in der Sozialwissenschaft nach wie vor beschäftigt: offenbar spielt die Bewegungssynchronisierung eine Rolle in der kindlichen Entwicklung und beim Erlernen von Fähigkeiten und Verhaltensmustern; sie steht in direktem Bezug zu unserem sozialen Verhalten und unserer emotionalen Wahrnehmung in der Interaktion mit Anderen; sie ist ein grundlegendes Prinzip in der Organisation von Kommunikation durch Sprache oder Gesten; außerdem können Modelle, die Bewegungssynchronisierung zwischen zwei Individuen erklären, auch auf das Verhalten innerhalb von Gruppen ausgedehnt werden. Insgesamt kann man also sagen, dass Bewegungssynchronisierung ein wichtiges Prinzip im menschlichen Interaktionsverhalten darstellt. Neben der Interaktion mit anderen Menschen interagieren wir in den letzten Jahren auch zunehmend mit der uns umgebenden Technik. Hier fand zunächst die Interaktion mit Maschinen im industriellen Umfeld Beachtung, später die Mensch-Computer-Interaktion. Seit kurzem sind wir jedoch mit einer neuen Herausforderung konfrontiert: der Interaktion mit aktiven und autonomen Maschinen, Maschinen die sich bewegen und aktiv mit Menschen interagieren, mit Robotern. Sollte die Vision der heutigen Roboterentwickler Wirklichkeit werde, so werden Roboter in der nahen Zukunft nicht nur voll in unser Arbeitsumfeld integriert sein, sondern auch in unser privates Leben. Roboter sollen den Menschen in ihren täglichen Aktivitäten unterstützen und sich sogar um sie kümmern. Diese Umstände erfordern die Entwicklung von neuen Interaktionsprinzipien, welche Roboter in der direkten Koordination mit dem Menschen anwenden können. In dieser Dissertation wird zunächst das Problem umrissen, welches sich daraus ergibt, dass Roboter zunehmend Einzug in die menschliche Gesellschaft finden. Außerdem wird die Notwendigkeit der Untersuchung menschlicher Interaktionsprinzipien, die auf die Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion transferierbar sind, hervorgehoben. Die Argumentation der Dissertation ist, dass die menschliche Bewegungssynchronisierung ein einfaches aber bemerkenswertes menschliches Interaktionsprinzip ist, welches in der Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion angewendet werden kann um menschliche Aktivitäten des täglichen Lebens, z.B. Aufnahme-und-Ablege-Aufgaben (pick-and-place tasks), zu unterstützen. Diese Argumentation wird auf fünf Publikationen gestützt. In der ersten Publikation wird die menschliche Bewegungssynchronisierung in einer zielgerichteten Aufgabe untersucht, welche die gleichen Anforderungen erfüllt wie die Aufnahme- und Ablageaufgaben des täglichen Lebens. Um zu untersuchen ob eine rein repetitive Bewegung des Roboters ausreichend ist um den Menschen zur Etablierung von Bewegungssynchronisierung zu ermutigen, wird in der zweiten Publikation eine Mensch-Roboter-Interaktionsstudie vorgestellt in welcher ein Mensch mit einem nicht-adaptiven Roboter interagiert. In dieser Studie wird jedoch keine Bewegungssynchronisierung zwischen Mensch und Roboter etabliert, was die Notwendigkeit von adaptiven Mechanismen unterstreicht. Daher wird in der dritten Publikation menschliches Adaptationsverhalten in der Bewegungssynchronisierung in zielgerichteten Aufgaben untersucht. Um die so gefundenen Mechanismen für die Mensch-Roboter Interaktion nutzbar zu machen, wird in der vierten Publikation die Entwicklung eines Interaktionsmodells basierend auf Dynamischer Systemtheorie behandelt. Dieses Modell kann direkt in eine Roboterplattform implementiert werden. Anschließend wird kurz auf eine erste Studie zur Mensch- Roboter Interaktion basierend auf dem entwickelten Modell eingegangen. Die letzte Publikation beschreibt eine Weiterentwicklung des bisherigen Vorgehens welche der Tendenz im menschlichen Verhalten Rechnung trägt, die Bewegungen an Ereignissen auszurichten. Hier wird außerdem eine erste Mensch-Roboter- Interaktionsstudie vorgestellt, die die Anwendbarkeit des Modells bestätigt. Die Dissertation wird mit einer Diskussion der präsentierten Ergebnisse im Kontext der Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion und psychologischer Aspekte der Interaktionsforschung sowie der Problematik von beiderseitiger Adaptivität abgeschlossen

Partners in Play: How Children Organise their Participation in Sociodramatic Play

In Ireland, early childhood learning and the role of play in children’s lives is receiving unprecedented recognition in national policy documents (Ireland, 1999c, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2004, N.C.C.A., 2004, C.E.C.D.E., 2006b). This thesis links learning and play and proposes to contribute to our understanding of both. The purpose of the research is to explicate the significant processes and outcomes of children’s participation in sociodramatic play. It takes a qualitative, ethnographic, interpretive approach which follows logically from the aim and the sociocultural discourse of learning constructed. This sociocultural discourse frames the observation and analysis of sociodramatic play in the study. Three key elements of sociocultural theory become the themes that are explored. They are (1) that children’s participation in play is mediated by culture, (2) that the processes and outcomes of sociodramatic play are negotiated on the intermental plane at the micro level of face to face interaction and at the macro level of transaction with cultural goals, values, artefacts and practices and (3) that in the process of participation in sociodramatic play, both culture and participants are transformed towards ongoing participation. The study is conducted primarily through participant observation in a suburban preschool playgroup with a cohort of 22 children ranging in age from 2 years and 8 months to 4 years and 9 months, over an academic year. The data consists of play episodes and field notes documented with the support of video recordings and analysed using Rogoff’s (1995) three planes of analysis. These planes align with the three themes of the research and provide the structure for the analysis chapters. The Community or Apprenticeship Plane is used to demonstrate the cultural nature of sociodramatic play. The Interpersonal or Guided Participation Plane serves to identify the interactive processes and outcomes in which children participate, while on the Individual or Participatory Appropriation Plane, outcomes in terms of cultural and personal transformations are considered. The findings of this research emerge from both the explication of sociocultural theory and the dialectic between the theoretical perspective and the play episodes. The theoretical perspective itself is a key contribution, with implications for early childhood education and the place of sociodramatic play. The study further explicates the processes of learning on the intermental plane and thereby informs the role of the early childhood pedagogue. Key play competencies, particularly emotional intersubjectivity, are identified. The ethnographic approach allows us to follow children’s transformations as they reconstruct, through their sociodramatic play roles and stories, their ways of belonging, contributing and communicating within the peer culture. The findings propose an individual-in-social activity centred pedagogy – a pedagogy of connection - with philosophical and practical implications for the practice of pedagogy

Rural Teachers’ Perceptions Of School Principals’ Leadership Behaviors Affecting Motivation To Improve Professional Practice.

School principals and teachers being a powerful force of social change is a well-established argument. While literature confirms the substantial impact school leaders and teachers have on improving organizations and student outcomes, there is a dearth of granular knowledge related to how rural school principals in China influence teachers\u27 motivation to improve professional practice. Thus, by engaging in a qualitative study leveraging the Interpretative Phenomenological Approach (IPA) this study aimed to illuminate the principals\u27 behaviors that teachers perceived as having significant impact on their motivation to improve practice. As part of its conceptual framework, the study incorporated a theoretical framework that combined the Behavioral Theory of Leadership with Social Contagion Theory. Seven participants from various rural schools in mainland China participated in the study and in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in two rounds over a two-month timescale in the Fall of 2020. The findings revealed that rural school leaders’ behaviors most germane to teachers’ motivation to improve professional practice were genuine care and concern for teachers’ well-being, accessibility and tempered friendliness, consequential dialogical discourse, articulated communication of school-based expectations and initiatives, avoidance of dogmatic micromanagement on classroom-based matters, perceptible consistency, and appreciable predictability. Recommendations for further study center on future longitudinal studies aimed at investigating the observed phenomenon over time and in different settings and a deeper investigation into the nature of principal friendliness to ascertain degrees to which teachers deem it to be appropriate

Embodied Cognitive Science of Music. Modeling Experience and Behavior in Musical Contexts

Recently, the role of corporeal interaction has gained wide recognition within cognitive musicology. This thesis reviews evidence from different directions in music research supporting the importance of body-based processes for the understanding of music-related experience and behaviour. Stressing the synthetic focus of cognitive science, cognitive science of music is discussed as a modeling approach that takes these processes into account and may theoretically be embedded within the theory of dynamic systems. In particular, arguments are presented for the use of robotic devices as tools for the investigation of processes underlying human music-related capabilities (musical robotics)