Robot Mindreading and the Problem of Trust

This paper raises three questions regarding the attribution of beliefs, desires, and intentions to robots. The first one is whether humans in fact engage in robot mindreading. If they do, this raises a second question: does robot mindreading foster trust towards robots? Both of these questions are empirical, and I show that the available evidence is insufficient to answer them. Now, if we assume that the answer to both questions is affirmative, a third and more important question arises: should developers and engineers promote robot mindreading in view of their stated goal of enhancing transparency? My worry here is that by attempting to make robots more mind-readable, they are abandoning the project of understanding automatic decision processes. Features that enhance mind-readability are prone to make the factors that determine automatic decisions even more opaque than they already are. And current strategies to eliminate opacity do not enhance mind-readability. The last part of the paper discusses different ways to analyze this apparent trade-off and suggests that a possible solution must adopt tolerable degrees of opacity that depend on pragmatic factors connected to the level of trust required for the intended uses of the robot

Effects of Victim Gendering and Humanness on People’s Responses to the Physical Abuse of Humanlike Agents

With the deployment of robots in public realms, researchers are seeing more cases of abusive disinhibition towards robots. Because robots embody gendered identities, poor navigation of antisocial dynamics may reinforce or exacerbate gender-based marginalization. Consequently, it is essential for robots to recognize and effectively head off abuse. Given extensions of gendered biases to robotic agents, as well as associations between an agent\u27s human likeness and the experiential capacity attributed to it, we quasi-manipulated the victim\u27s humanness (human vs. robot) and gendering (via the inclusion of stereotypically masculine vs. feminine cues in their presentation) across four video-recorded reproductions of the interaction. Analysis from 422 participants, each of whom watched one of the four videos, indicates that intensity of emotional distress felt by an observer is associated with their gender identification and support for social stratification, along with the victim\u27s gendering—further underscoring the criticality of robots\u27 social intelligence

Seeing things as people: anthropomorphism and common-sense psychology

This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, Baron- Cohen et al. 's (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare different theories of common-sense psychology. The second study, Searle's (1980) `Chinese Room', shows 'that this same model can reproduce the patterns of scientific intuitions taken to systems which pass the Turing test (Turing, 1950), suggesting that it is best seen as a common-sense test for a mind, not a scientific one. Finally, the thesis argues that scientific theories involving the ascription of mentality through a model or a metaphor are partly dependent on each individual scientist's common-sense psychology. To conclude, this thesis develops an interdisciplinary study of common-sense psychology and shows that its effects are more wide ranging than is commonly thought. This means that it affects science more than might be expected, but that careful study can help us to become mindful of these effects. Within this new framework, a proper understanding of common-sense psychology could lay important new foundations for the future of cognitive science

Mental content : consequences of the embodied mind paradigm

The central difference between objectivist cognitivist semantics and embodied cognition consists in the fact that the latter is, in contrast to the former, mindful of binding meaning to context-sensitive mental systems. According to Lakoff/Johnson's experientialism, conceptual structures arise from preconceptual kinesthetic image-schematic and basic-level structures. Gallese and Lakoff introduced the notion of exploiting sensorimotor structures for higherlevel cognition. Three different types of X-schemas realise three types of environmentally embedded simulation: Areas that control movements in peri-personal space; canonical neurons of the ventral premotor cortex that fire when a graspable object is represented; the firing of mirror neurons while perceiving certain movements of conspecifics. ..

Where is cognition? Towards an embodied, situated, and distributed interactionist theory of cognitive activity

In recent years researchers from a variety of cognitive science disciplines have begun to challenge some of the core assumptions of the dominant theoretical framework of cognitivism including the representation-computational view of cognition, the sense-model-plan-act understanding of cognitive architecture, and the use of a formal task description strategy for investigating the organisation of internal mental processes. Challenges to these assumptions are illustrated using empirical findings and theoretical arguments from the fields such as situated robotics, dynamical systems approaches to cognition, situated action and distributed cognition research, and sociohistorical studies of cognitive development. Several shared themes are extracted from the findings in these research programmes including: a focus on agent-environment systems as the primary unit of analysis; an attention to agent-environment interaction dynamics; a vision of the cognizer's internal mechanisms as essentially reactive and decentralised in nature; and a tendency for mutual definitions of agent, environment, and activity. It is argued that, taken together, these themes signal the emergence of a new approach to cognition called embodied, situated, and distributed interactionism. This interactionist alternative has many resonances with the dynamical systems approach to cognition. However, this approach does not provide a theory of the implementing substrate sufficient for an interactionist theoretical framework. It is suggested that such a theory can be found in a view of animals as autonomous systems coupled with a portrayal of the nervous system as a regulatory, coordinative, and integrative bodily subsystem. Although a number of recent simulations show connectionism's promise as a computational technique in simulating the role of the nervous system from an interactionist perspective, this embodied connectionist framework does not lend itself to understanding the advanced 'representation hungry' cognition we witness in much human behaviour. It is argued that this problem can be solved by understanding advanced cognition as the re-use of basic perception-action skills and structures that this feat is enabled by a general education within a social symbol-using environment

Consumption as Emotion Regulation

Products and services often provide value that goes beyond functional utility. Drawing from a compensatory consumption model, which suggests that consumption is a means to regulate self-discrepancies, the current research suggests that consumers are motivated to self-regulate their emotions and this self-regulation can be accomplished via consumption. Specifically, emotional and physiological deviations from a steady state motivate individuals to find balance in order to alleviate those deviations. Three papers provide evidence for this hypothesis. Utilizing an embodied cognition framework for chapter 2 and chapter 3, I demonstrate that individuals are motivated to reduce a perceived lack of interpersonal warmth by substituting physical warmth, and vice versa (chapter 2). Next, I argue that experiencing action regret results in self-conscious emotions (e.g. shame, guilt) associated with physical warmth, which in turn motivates individuals to ameliorate those emotional states via interaction with objects that are perceived to be physically or psychologically opposite in temperature (chapter 3). Finally, in chapter 4, I argue that sadness can serve as a regulatory mechanism to alleviate loneliness and achieve social connectedness

Volume 12, No. 1

Anih, Stan. “Moral Education in a Multicultural World.” 11­-17. Cosentino, Antonio. “Kant and the Pedagogy of Teaching Philosophy.” 2­-3. Heinegg, James. “Computers and Education for Thinking.” 45­-46. Holder, John J. Jr. “Philosophy for Children in the Philippines Project,” from “Final Report on Phase III Unistar Mission.” 41­-44. Kamara, Mohamed. “Grade­School Philosophy: The Role of the Text.” 20­-21. Laverty, Megan. “The Mill on the Floss: An Argument for Philosophy for Children.” 47­49. Matthews, Gareth. “Thinking in Stories: ‘The Hour of Letdown’ by E.B. White.” 1. Palsson, Hreinn. “Interpretive Research and Philosophy for Children.” 33-­40. Silver, Ruth E. “Thinking Together with the Whole Mind in The Whole Class.” 22­-23. Sutdiffe, Roger H. “Is Philosophical Inquiry Virtuous?” 4­-10. Toye, Nigel. “On the Relationship Between Philosophy for Children and Educational Drama”, 12(1), 1994, pp 24­-26. Turgeon, Wendy. “Pixie Problems: a Methodology Check.” 18­-19. Zesaguli, Josephine K.P.; “Philosophy for Children: An Exploratory Study of ‘Doing Philosophy’ With A Grade 7 Class and First­ and Third­Year Student­Teachers in Zimbabwe.” 27-­32

Children's perception and interpretation of robots and robot behaviour

The world of robotics, like that of all technology is changing rapidly (Melson, et al., 2009). As part of an inter-disciplinary project investigating the emergence of artificial culture in robot societies, this study set out to examine children’s perception of robots and interpretation of robot behaviour. This thesis is situated in an interdisciplinary field of human–robot interactions, drawing on research from the disciplines of sociology and psychology as well as the fields of engineering and ethics. The study was divided into four phases: phase one involved children from two primary schools drawing a picture and writing a story about their robot. In phase two, children observed e-puck robots interacting. Children were asked questions regarding the function and purpose of the robots’ actions. Phase three entailed data collection at a public event: Manchester Science Festival. Three activities at the festival: ‘XRay Art Under Your Skin’, ‘Swarm Robots’ and ‘Build-a-Bugbot’ formed the focus of this phase. In the first activity, children were asked to draw the components of a robot and were then asked questions about their drawings. During the second exercise, children’s comments were noted as they watched e-puck robot demonstrations. In the third exercise, children were shown images and asked whether these images were a robot or a ‘no-bot’. They were then prompted to provide explanations for their answers. Phase 4 of the research involved children identifying patterns of behaviour amongst e-pucks. This phase of the project was undertaken as a pilot for the ‘open science’ approach to research to be used by the wider project within which this PhD was nested. Consistent with existing literature, children endowed robots with animate and inanimate characteristics holding multiple understandings of robots simultaneously. The notion of control appeared to be important in children’s conception of animacy. The results indicated children’s perceptions of the location of the locus of control plays an important role in whether they view robots as autonomous agents or controllable entities. The ways in which children perceive robots and robot behaviour, in particular the ways in which children give meaning to robots and robot behaviour will potentially come to characterise a particular generation. Therefore, research should not only concentrate on the impact of these technologies on children but should focus on capturing children’s perceptions and viewpoints to better understand the impact of the changing technological world on the lives of children

Metaphors of the child's mind : teaching philosophy to young children

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