Perceptual Studies

Politeness is at the core of the common set of behavioral norms that regulate human communication and is therefore of significant interest in the design of Human-Robot Interactions. In this paper, we investigate how the politeness behaviors of a humanoid robot impact human decisions about where to join a group of two robots. We also evaluate the resulting impact on the perception of the robot's politeness. In a study involving 59 participants, the main (Pepper) robot in the group invited participants to join using six politeness behaviors derived from Brown and Levinson's politeness theory. It requests participants to join the group at the furthest side of the group which involves more effort to reach than a closer side that is also available to the participant but would ignore the request of the robot. We evaluated the robot's effectiveness in terms of persuasiveness, politeness, and clarity. We found that more direct and explicit politeness strategies derived from the theory have a higher level of success in persuading participants to join at the furthest side of the group. We also evaluated participants' adherence to social norms i.e. not walking through the center, or o-space, of the group when joining it. Our results showed that participants tended to adhere to social norms when joining at the furthest side by not walking through the center of the group of robots, even though they were informed that the robots were fully automated.

In this article, we evaluate the effects of position, orientation, and camera viewpoint on the plausibility of pedestrian formations. In a set of three perceptual studies, we investigated how humans perceive characteristics of virtual crowds in static scenes reconstructed from annotated still images, where the orientations and positions of the individuals have been modified. We found that by applying rules based on the contextual information of the scene, we improved the perceived realism of the crowd formations when compared to random formations. We also examined the effect of camera viewpoint on the plausibility of virtual pedestrian scenes, and we found that an eye-level viewpoint is more effective for disguising random behaviors, while a canonical viewpoint results in these behaviors being perceived as less realistic than an isometric or top-down viewpoint. Results from these studies can help in the creation of virtual crowds, such as computer graphics pedestrian models or archi...

This paper examines the development of a crowd simulation in a virtual city, and a perceptual experiment to identify features of behaviour which can be linked to perceived realism. This research is expected to feedback into the development processes of simulating inhabited locations, by identifying the key features which need to be implemented to achieve more perceptually realistic crowd behaviour. The perceptual experimentation methodologies presented can be adapted and potentially utilised to test other types of crowd simulation, for application within computer games or more specific simulations such as for urban planning or health and safety purposes.

Simulating vast crowds of autonomous agents within a procedurally generated virtual environment is a challenging endeavour from a technical perspective, however it becomes even more difficult when the subjective nature of perception is also taken into account. Agent behaviour is the product of artificial intelligence systems working in tandem, however the sophistication of these systems is not a guarantee of achieving believable behaviour. Within locations based upon reality such as an urban environment, the perceived realism of agent behaviour becomes even harder to achieve. This paper presents the development of a crowd simulation that is based upon a real-life urban environment, which is then subjected to perceptual experimentation to identify features of behaviour which can be linked to perceived realism. This research is predicted to feedback into the development processes of inhabited cities, especially those attempting to simulate perceptually realistic agents as it will highlight features of behaviour that are important to implement. The perceptual experimentation methodologies presented can also be adapted and potentially utilised to test other types of crowd simulation, whether it be for the purposes of computer games or even urban planning and health and safety.

When children encounter objects, design constrains and affords action and cognition. An observational study in the wild revealed how manipulable objects afforded greater complexity of cognitive outcomes, including testing causeand-effect and expressing abstract ideas about phenomena in the natural world. Evidence comes from video analysis of children’s speech, gesture, and action when using a wide range of natural history exhibits. In the museum—an environment expressly designed for learning—children sought information with their moving bodies, eyes and hands. They explored sensorimotor contingencies, looking while touching, pushing, and pulling; they probed the perceptual affordances of different types of museum media, including graphic panels, specimens, models, and interactive exhibits. Children spoke more about the museum’s content when they touched the exhibits, but the content of their speech changed depending on the object’s affordances for interaction. With static specimens ...

Multisensory Sensemaking: Children’s Exploratory Behavior has Organizing Structure at Micro- and Macro-scales Nancy Owens Renner ([email protected]) Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA USA 92093-0515 Abstract • situated, i.e. physical, social, cultural, and historical contexts all play a role in cognition; • distributed, i.e. cognition at every scale manifests in nested systems with interacting parts. People live and act in cognitive ecosystems, in which brains, bodies, cultural and material worlds all exert mutual cognitive influence in any given moment and as they change over time (Hutchins, 2010). Distributed cognition provides a unifying principle. When children encounter museum exhibits, they find rich opportunities for action, perception, learning, and other forms of cognition. Can we see systematic organization in the children’s behavior, and by extension, their cognition? What would count as evidence of this orga...

This article discusses the research relevance of benefit sharing and its implications for natural resource policy research in developing countries. It argues that the research challenge is how to improve understanding of benefit sharing policies by way of identifying the basic principles which underlie these policies. While benefit sharing is to a large extent context dependent, the central question we raise is whether we can identify a set of principles to enable one to describe, explain, understand and predict outcomes in relevant policy settings.

Sensorimotor functions decrease in old age. The well-documented loss of tactile acuity in elderly is accompanied by deterioration ofhaptic performance and fine manipulative movements. Physical training and exercise can maintain sensorimotor fitness into high age. However, regular schedules of training require discipline and physical fitness. We here present an alternative interventional paradigm to enhance tactile, haptic, and fine motor performance based on passive, sensory stimulation by means of tactile coactivation. This approach is based on patterned, synchronous tactile stimulation applied to the fingertips for 3 hours. The stimulation drives plastic reorganizational changes in somatosensory cortex that affect perception and behavior: We demonstrate that following 3 hours of coactivation tactile acuity as well as haptic object exploration and fine motor performance are improved for at least 96 hours. Because this kind of intervention does not require active participation or at...

This paper addressed what matters most in research. These include choice of appropriate statistic and data interpretation. It also provided explanation to some confusing terminologies including those whose use in some contexts are subject of debate.

Are fairness concerns of relevance to environmental economics and, if so, are they sufficiently structured to improve analysis in this field? On both of these questions, we answer in the affirmative, arguing that people's fairness views are based on both general rules and the context, where context refers to the set of variables and persons employed to interpret and apply the principles. The fairness rules analyzed are accountability (i.e., rewards that are proportional to contributions individuals control), efficiency, need and equality. We conclude that stakeholders typically exhibit a "fairness bias", i.e., they tend, consciously or not, to interpret and apply fairness principles in a self-serving manner, whereas the views of spectators, or impartial third parties, tend to converge significantly more. Further, we argue that fairness considerations are relevant to both descriptive and prescriptive analysis in environmental economics. These fairness concerns are reflected in the behavior of private and public decision-makers and have potentially important policy implications through the overall social objective function.

This article discusses the research relevance of benefit sharing and its implications for natural resource policy research in developing countries. It argues that the research challenge is how to improve understanding of benefit sharing policies by way of identifying the basic principles which underlie these policies. While benefit sharing is to a large extent context dependent, the central question we raise is whether we can identify a set of principles to enable one to describe, explain, understand and predict outcomes in relevant policy settings.

Illusions provide a window into the brain’s perceptual strategies. In certain illusions, an ostensibly task-irrelevant variable influences perception. For example, in touch as in audition and vision, the perceived distance between successive punctate stimuli reflects not only the actual distance but curiously the inter-stimulus time. Stimuli presented at different positions in rapid succession are drawn perceptually towards one another. This effect manifests in several illusions, among them the startling cutaneous rabbit, in which taps delivered to as few as two skin positions appear to hop progressively from one position to the next, landing in the process on intervening areas that were never stimulated. Here we provide an accessible step-by-step exposition of a Bayesian perceptual model that replicates the rabbit and related illusions. The Bayesian observer optimally joins uncertain estimates of spatial location with the expectation that stimuli tend to move slowly. We speculate that this expectation – a Bayesian prior – represents the statistics of naturally occurring stimuli, learned by humans through sensory experience. In its simplest form, the model contains a single free parameter, tau: a time constant for space perception. We show that the Bayesian observer incorporates both pre- and post-dictive inference. Directed spatial attention affects the prediction-postdiction balance, shifting the model’s percept towards the attended location, as observed experimentally in humans. Applying the model to the perception of multi-tap sequences, we show that the low-speed prior fits perception better than an alternative, low-acceleration prior. We discuss the applicability of our model to related tactile, visual, and auditory illusions. To facilitate future model-driven experimental studies, we present a convenient freeware computer program that implements the Bayesian observer; we invite investigators to use this program to create their own testable predictions.

In touch as in vision, perceptual acuity improves with training to an extent that differs greatly across people: even individuals with similar initial acuity may undergo markedly different improvement with training. What accounts for this variability in perceptual learning? We hypothesized that a simple physical characteristic – fingertip surface area – might constrain tactile learning, because previous research suggests that larger fingers have more widely spaced mechanoreceptors. To test our hypothesis, we trained 10 human participants intensively on a tactile spatial acuity task. During four days, participants completed 1900 training trials (38 50-trial blocks) in which they discriminated the orientation of square-wave gratings pressed onto the stationary index or ring finger, with auditory feedback provided to signal correct and incorrect responses. We progressively increased task difficulty by shifting to thinner groove widths whenever participants achieved ≥ 90%-correct block performance. We took optical scans to measure surface area from the distal inter-phalangeal crease to the tip of the finger. Participants’ acuity improved markedly on the trained finger, and to a lesser extent on the untrained finger. Crucially, we found that participants’ tactile spatial acuity improved towards a theoretical optimum set by their finger size: participants with worse initial performance, relative to their finger size, improved more with training, and post-training performance correlated better than did pre-training performance with finger size. These results strongly support the hypothesis that tactile perceptual learning is limited by finger size. We suspect that analogous physical constraints on perceptual learning will be found in other sensory modalities.

In this article the problem of perception is highlighted from a philosophical, physiological and psychological point of view. The essay (second update) is followed by a list of publications, journals and websites about perception. The author would be delighted to receive comments. He can be contacted at j[underscore]kuijper[at]online[dot]nl.

Can genomics working with crop genetic resources, which can be relevant for
developing countries, contribute in reducing the gap between rich and poor
countries in using modern biotechnologies? In this paper we concentrate on
the extent to which benefit sharing of genetic resources can be a mechanism to harness genomics for development and to reduce the “biotechnology divide” or “genomics divide”. First we analyze the existing arrangements (Convention on Biological Biodiversity, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, FAO 2001) and we conclude that these presuppose predominantly a concept of commutative justice, which is at the basis of considerable drawbacks. Secondly we propose arrangements founded on another concept of justice, distributive justice, which forbids enhancing (existing) inequalities. Upstream benefit sharing of genetic resources is proposed as an interesting alternative, which connects with several coalitions of scientists and poor farmers in the third world. These alternatives offer good prospects to contribute to the reduction of the “genomics divide”.

This paper examines the implementation of the policy of adaptive management by the U.S.D.A. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S, and the role of bureaucracies and non-bureaucratic actors in producing policy change through both collaborative, and adversarial processes. Adaptive management is widely prescribed by ecologists and conservation theorists as a means of improving natural resource management by using designed experiments to test management hypotheses and improve management practice. Adaptive management was introduced by the US Government on public lands in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s in the aftermath of major controversy over the management of old-growth forest for spotted owl habitat. The Forest Service designated 10 areas as adaptive management areas, where experiments would be tried out, and further prescribed that the entire agency adopt adaptive management as a core part of management practice. Implementation of this goal has been poor: only two adaptive management projects have actually gotten off the ground, one in and one outside of a designated adaptive management area. In examining the overall failure, this paper shows that the Forest Service's vision of adaptive management as a process that could occur within the context of the existing bureaucracy was a major reason for the implementation failure. When adaptive management succeeded, it was the result of co-production between the bureaucracy, the scientific community, and other policy actors. While many recent authors have assumed that increased collaboration would improve management outcomes, this paper finds that adversarial politics can also play an important positive role.