From attire to assault: clothing, objectification, and de-humanization - a possible prelude to sexual violence?

In the context of objectification and violence, little attention has been paid to the perception neuroscience of how the human brain perceives bodies and objectifies them. Various studies point to how external cues such as appearance and attire could play a key role in encouraging objectification, dehumanization and the denial of agency. Reviewing new experimental findings across several areas of research, it seems that common threads run through issues of clothing, sexual objectification, body perception, dehumanization, and assault. Collating findings from several different lines of research, this article reviews additional evidence from cognitive and neural dynamics of person perception (body and face perception processes) that predict downstream social behavior. Specifically, new findings demonstrate cognitive processing of sexualized female bodies as object-like, a crucial aspect of dehumanized percept devoid of agency and personhood. Sexual violence is a consequence of a dehumanized perception of female bodies that aggressors acquire through their exposure and interpretation of objectified body images. Integrating these findings and identifying triggers for sexual violence may help develop remedial measures and inform law enforcement processes and policy makers alike

Hitting is male, giving is female. Automatic imitation and complementarity during action observation

Is somebody going to hurt us? We draw back. The present study investigates using behavioral measures the interplay between imitative and complementary actions activated while observing female/male hands performing different actions. Female and male participants were required to discriminate the gender of biologically and artificially colored hands that displayed both individual (grasping) and social (giving and punching) actions. Biological hands evoked automatic imitation, while hands of different gender activated complementary mechanisms. Furthermore, responses reflected gender stereotypes: giving actions were more associated to females, punching actions to males. Results have implications for studies on social stereotyping, and for research on action observation, showing that the mirror neuron system resonates in both an imitative and complementary fashion

Toward a social psychophysics of face communication

As a highly social species, humans are equipped with a powerful tool for social communication—the face, which can elicit multiple social perceptions in others due to the rich and complex variations of its movements, morphology, and complexion. Consequently, identifying precisely what face information elicits different social perceptions is a complex empirical challenge that has largely remained beyond the reach of traditional research methods. More recently, the emerging field of social psychophysics has developed new methods designed to address this challenge. Here, we introduce and review the foundational methodological developments of social psychophysics, present recent work that has advanced our understanding of the face as a tool for social communication, and discuss the main challenges that lie ahead

The distracted robot: what happens when artificial agents behave like us

In everyday life, we are frequently exposed to different smart technologies. From our smartphones to avatars in computer games, and soon perhaps humanoid robots, we are surrounded by artificial agents created to interact with us. Already during the design phase of an artificial agent, engineers often endow it with functions aimed to promote the interaction and engagement with it, ranging from its \u201ccommunicative\u201d abilities to the movements it produces. Still, whether an artificial agent that can behave like a human could boost the spontaneity and naturalness of interaction is still an open question. Even during the interaction with conspecifics, humans rely partially on motion cues when they need to infer the mental states underpinning behavior. Similar processes may be activated during the interaction with embodied artificial agents, such as humanoid robots. At the same time, a humanoid robot that can faithfully reproduce human-like behavior may undermine the interaction, causing a shift in attribution: from being endearing to being uncanny. Furthermore, it is still not clear whether individual biases and prior knowledge related to artificial agents can override perceptual evidence of human-like traits. A relatively new area of research emerged in the context of investigating individuals\u2019 reactions towards robots, widely referred to as Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). HRI is a multidisciplinary community that comprises psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers as well as roboticists, and engineers. However, HRI research has been often based on explicit measures (i.e. self-report questionnaires, a-posteriori interviews), while more implicit social cognitive processes that are elicited during the interaction with artificial agents took second place behind more qualitative and anecdotal results. The present work aims to demonstrate the usefulness of combining the systematic approach of cognitive neuroscience with HRI paradigms to further investigate social cognition processes evoked by artificial agents. Thus, this thesis aimed at exploring human sensitivity to anthropomorphic characteristics of a humanoid robot's (i.e. iCub robot) behavior, based on motion cues, under different conditions of prior knowledge. To meet this aim, we manipulated the human-likeness of the behaviors displayed by the robot and the explicitness of instructions provided to the participants, in both screen-based and real-time interaction scenarios. Furthermore, we explored some of the individual differences that affect general attitudes towards robots, and the attribution of human-likeness consequently