919 research outputs found
Mindblind eyes: an absence of spontaneous theory of mind in Asperger syndrome
Adults with Asperger syndrome can understand mental states such as desires and beliefs (mentalizing) when explicitly prompted to do so, despite having impairments in social communication. We directly tested the hypothesis that such individuals nevertheless fail to mentalize spontaneously. To this end, we used an eye-tracking task that has revealed the spontaneous ability to mentalize in typically developing infants. We showed that, like infants, neurotypical adults’ (n = 17 participants) eye movements anticipated an actor’s behavior on the basis of her false belief. This was not the case for individuals with Asperger syndrome (n = 19). Thus, these individuals do not attribute mental states spontaneously, but they may be able to do so in explicit tasks through compensatory learning
Brief report: how adolescents with ASD process social information in complex scenes. Combining evidence from eye movements and verbal descriptions
We investigated attention, encoding and processing of social aspects of complex photographic scenes. Twenty-four high-functioning adolescents (aged 11–16) with ASD and 24 typically developing matched control participants viewed and then described a series of scenes, each containing a person. Analyses of eye movements and verbal descriptions provided converging evidence that both groups displayed general interest in the person in each scene but the salience of the person was reduced for the ASD participants. Nevertheless, the verbal descriptions revealed that participants with ASD frequently processed the observed person’s emotion or mental state without prompting. They also often mentioned eye-gaze direction, and there was evidence from eye movements and verbal descriptions that gaze was followed accurately. The combination of evidence from eye movements and verbal descriptions provides a rich insight into the way stimuli are processed overall. The merits of using these methods within the same paradigm are discussed
Learning nominal automata
We present an Angluin-style algorithm to learn nominal automata, which are acceptors of languages over infinite (structured) alphabets. The abstract approach we take allows us to seamlessly extend known variations of the algorithm to this new setting. In particular we can learn a subclass of nominal non-deterministic automata. An implementation using a recently developed Haskell library for nominal computation is provided for preliminary experiments
Layer by layer - Combining Monads
We develop a method to incrementally construct programming languages. Our
approach is categorical: each layer of the language is described as a monad.
Our method either (i) concretely builds a distributive law between two monads,
i.e. layers of the language, which then provides a monad structure to the
composition of layers, or (ii) identifies precisely the algebraic obstacles to
the existence of a distributive law and gives a best approximant language. The
running example will involve three layers: a basic imperative language enriched
first by adding non-determinism and then probabilistic choice. The first
extension works seamlessly, but the second encounters an obstacle, which
results in a best approximant language structurally very similar to the
probabilistic network specification language ProbNetKAT
Can people guess what happened to others from their reactions?
Are we able to infer what happened to a person from a brief sample of his/her behaviour? It has been proposed that mentalising skills can be used to retrodict as well as predict behaviour, that is, to determine what mental states of a target have already occurred. The current study aimed to develop a paradigm to explore these processes, which takes into account the intricacies of real-life situations in which reasoning about mental states, as embodied in behaviour, may be utilised. A novel task was devised which involved observing subtle and naturalistic reactions of others in order to determine the event that had previously taken place. Thirty-five participants viewed videos of real individuals reacting to the researcher behaving in one of four possible ways, and were asked to judge which of the four ‘scenarios’ they thought the individual was responding to. Their eye movements were recorded to establish the visual strategies used. Participants were able to deduce successfully from a small sample of behaviour which scenario had previously occurred. Surprisingly, looking at the eye region was associated with poorer identification of the scenarios, and eye movement strategy varied depending on the event experienced by the person in the video. This suggests people flexibly deploy their attention using a retrodictive mindreading process to infer events
Reverse Bisimulations on Stable Configuration Structures
The relationships between various equivalences on configuration structures,
including interleaving bisimulation (IB), step bisimulation (SB) and hereditary
history-preserving (HH) bisimulation, have been investigated by van Glabbeek
and Goltz (and later Fecher). Since HH bisimulation may be characterised by the
use of reverse as well as forward transitions, it is of interest to investigate
forms of IB and SB where both forward and reverse transitions are allowed. We
give various characterisations of reverse SB, showing that forward steps do not
add extra power. We strengthen Bednarczyk's result that, in the absence of
auto-concurrency, reverse IB is as strong as HH bisimulation, by showing that
we need only exclude auto-concurrent events at the same depth in the
configuration
Bisimulation of Labeled State-to-Function Transition Systems of Stochastic Process Languages
Labeled state-to-function transition systems, FuTS for short, admit multiple
transition schemes from states to functions of finite support over general
semirings. As such they constitute a convenient modeling instrument to deal
with stochastic process languages. In this paper, the notion of bisimulation
induced by a FuTS is proposed and a correspondence result is proven stating
that FuTS-bisimulation coincides with the behavioral equivalence of the
associated functor. As generic examples, the concrete existing equivalences for
the core of the process algebras ACP, PEPA and IMC are related to the
bisimulation of specific FuTS, providing via the correspondence result
coalgebraic justification of the equivalences of these calculi.Comment: In Proceedings ACCAT 2012, arXiv:1208.430
Rewriting Logic Semantics of a Plan Execution Language
The Plan Execution Interchange Language (PLEXIL) is a synchronous language
developed by NASA to support autonomous spacecraft operations. In this paper,
we propose a rewriting logic semantics of PLEXIL in Maude, a high-performance
logical engine. The rewriting logic semantics is by itself a formal interpreter
of the language and can be used as a semantic benchmark for the implementation
of PLEXIL executives. The implementation in Maude has the additional benefit of
making available to PLEXIL designers and developers all the formal analysis and
verification tools provided by Maude. The formalization of the PLEXIL semantics
in rewriting logic poses an interesting challenge due to the synchronous nature
of the language and the prioritized rules defining its semantics. To overcome
this difficulty, we propose a general procedure for simulating synchronous set
relations in rewriting logic that is sound and, for deterministic relations,
complete. We also report on two issues at the design level of the original
PLEXIL semantics that were identified with the help of the executable
specification in Maude
A Fully Abstract Symbolic Semantics for Psi-Calculi
We present a symbolic transition system and bisimulation equivalence for
psi-calculi, and show that it is fully abstract with respect to bisimulation
congruence in the non-symbolic semantics.
A psi-calculus is an extension of the pi-calculus with nominal data types for
data structures and for logical assertions representing facts about data. These
can be transmitted between processes and their names can be statically scoped
using the standard pi-calculus mechanism to allow for scope migrations.
Psi-calculi can be more general than other proposed extensions of the
pi-calculus such as the applied pi-calculus, the spi-calculus, the fusion
calculus, or the concurrent constraint pi-calculus.
Symbolic semantics are necessary for an efficient implementation of the
calculus in automated tools exploring state spaces, and the full abstraction
property means the semantics of a process does not change from the original
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