14,607 research outputs found

    Why we interact : on the functional role of the striatum in the subjective experience of social interaction

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    Acknowledgments We thank Neil Macrae and Axel Cleeremans for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Furthermore, we are grateful to Dorothé Krug and Barbara Elghahwagi for their assistance in data acquisition. This study was supported by a grant of the Köln Fortune Program of the Medical Faculty at the University of Cologne to L.S. and by a grant “Other Minds” of the German Ministry of Research and Education to K.V.Peer reviewedPreprin

    Against the Virtual: Kleinherenbrink’s Externality Thesis and Deleuze’s Machine Ontology

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    Drawing from Arjen Kleinherenbrink's recent book, Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze's Speculative Realism (2019), this paper undertakes a detailed review of Kleinherenbrink's fourfold "externality thesis" vis-à-vis Deleuze's machine ontology. Reading Deleuze as a philosopher of the actual, this paper renders Deleuzean syntheses as passive contemplations, pulling other (passive) entities into an (active) experience and designating relations as expressed through contraction. In addition to reviewing Kleinherenbrink's book (which argues that the machine ontology is a guiding current that emerges in Deleuze's work after Difference and Repetition) alongside much of Deleuze's oeuvre, we relate and juxtapose Deleuze's machine ontology to positions concerning externality held by a host of speculative realists. Arguing that the machine ontology has its own account of interaction, change, and novelty, we ultimately set to prove that positing an ontological "cut" on behalf of the virtual realm is unwarranted because, unlike the realm of actualities, it is extraneous to the structure of becoming-that is, because it cannot be homogenous, any theory of change vis-à-vis the virtual makes it impossible to explain how and why qualitatively different actualities are produced

    Procedural-Reasoning Architecture for Applied Behavior Analysis-based Instructions

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    Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental disability affecting as many as 1 in every 88 children. While there is no known cure for ASD, there are known behavioral and developmental interventions, based on demonstrated efficacy, that have become the predominant treatments for improving social, adaptive, and behavioral functions in children. Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA)-based early childhood interventions are evidence based, efficacious therapies for autism that are widely recognized as effective approaches to remediation of the symptoms of ASD. They are, however, labor intensive and consequently often inaccessible at the recommended levels. Recent advancements in socially assistive robotics and applications of virtual intelligent agents have shown that children with ASD accept intelligent agents as effective and often preferred substitutes for human therapists. This research is nascent and highly experimental with no unifying, interdisciplinary, and integral approach to development of intelligent agents based therapies, especially not in the area of behavioral interventions. Motivated by the absence of the unifying framework, we developed a conceptual procedural-reasoning agent architecture (PRA-ABA) that, we propose, could serve as a foundation for ABA-based assistive technologies involving virtual, mixed or embodied agents, including robots. This architecture and related research presented in this disser- tation encompass two main areas: (a) knowledge representation and computational model of the behavioral aspects of ABA as applicable to autism intervention practices, and (b) abstract architecture for multi-modal, agent-mediated implementation of these practices

    The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

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    This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

    Perceiving Sociable Technology: Exploring the Role of Anthropomorphism and Agency Perception on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

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    With the arrival of personal assistants and other AI-enabled autonomous technologies, social interactions with smart devices have become a part of our daily lives. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to understand how these social interactions emerge, and why users appear to be influenced by them. For this reason, I explore questions on what the antecedents and consequences of this phenomenon, known as anthropomorphism, are as described in the extant literature from fields ranging from information systems to social neuroscience. I critically analyze those empirical studies directly measuring anthropomorphism and those referring to it without a corresponding measurement. Through a grounded theory approach, I identify common themes and use them to develop models for the antecedents and consequences of anthropomorphism. The results suggest anthropomorphism possesses both conscious and non-conscious components with varying implications. While conscious attributions are shown to vary based on individual differences, non-conscious attributions emerge whenever a technology exhibits apparent reasoning such as through non-verbal behavior like peer-to-peer mirroring or verbal paralinguistic and backchanneling cues. Anthropomorphism has been shown to affect users’ self-perceptions, perceptions of the technology, how users interact with the technology, and the users’ performance. Examples include changes in a users’ trust on the technology, conformity effects, bonding, and displays of empathy. I argue these effects emerge from changes in users’ perceived agency, and their self- and social- identity similarly to interactions between humans. Afterwards, I critically examine current theories on anthropomorphism and present propositions about its nature based on the results of the empirical literature. Subsequently, I introduce a two-factor model of anthropomorphism that proposes how an individual anthropomorphizes a technology is dependent on how the technology was initially perceived (top-down and rational or bottom-up and automatic), and whether it exhibits a capacity for agency or experience. I propose that where a technology lays along this spectrum determines how individuals relates to it, creating shared agency effects, or changing the users’ social identity. For this reason, anthropomorphism is a powerful tool that can be leveraged to support future interactions with smart technologies

    Levels of naturalism in social neuroscience research

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    In order to understand ecologically meaningful social behaviors and their neural substrates in humans and other animals, researchers have been using a variety of social stimuli in the laboratory with a goal of extracting specific processes in real-life scenarios. However, certain stimuli may not be sufficiently effective at evoking typical social behaviors and neural responses. Here, we review empirical research employing different types of social stimuli by classifying them into five levels of naturalism. We describe the advantages and limitations while providing selected example studies for each level. We emphasize the important trade-off between experimental control and ecological validity across the five levels of naturalism. Taking advantage of newly emerging tools, such as real-time videos, virtual avatars, and wireless neural sampling techniques, researchers are now more than ever able to adopt social stimuli at a higher level of naturalism to better capture the dynamics and contingency of real-life social interaction

    From automata to animate beings: the scope and limits of attributing socialness to artificial agents

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    Understanding the mechanisms and consequences of attributing socialness to artificial agents has important implications for how we can use technology to lead more productive and fulfilling lives. Here, we integrate recent findings on the factors that shape behavioral and brain mechanisms that support social interactions between humans and artificial agents. We review how visual features of an agent, as well as knowledge factors within the human observer, shape attributions across dimensions of socialness. We explore how anthropomorphism and dehumanization further influence how we perceive and interact with artificial agents. Based on these findings, we argue that the cognitive reconstruction within the human observer is likely to be far more crucial in shaping our interactions with artificial agents than previously thought, while the artificial agent's visual features are possibly of lesser importance. We combine these findings to provide an integrative theoretical account based on the “like me” hypothesis, and discuss the key role played by the Theory‐of‐Mind network, especially the temporal parietal junction, in the shift from mechanistic to social attributions. We conclude by highlighting outstanding questions on the impact of long‐term interactions with artificial agents on the behavioral and brain mechanisms of attributing socialness to these agents

    Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

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    In this paper we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and 'real' politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined
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