Interaction Studies
Volume 15, Issue 1, 2014
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Verb concepts from affordances
- Authors: Sinan Kalkan, Nilgün Dag, Onur Yürüten, Anna M. Borghi, and Erol Şahin
- pp.: 1–37 (37)
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- In this paper, we investigate how the interactions of a robot with its environment can be used to create concepts that are typically represented by verbs in language. Towards this end, we utilize the notion of affordances to argue that verbs typically refer to the generation of a specific type of effect rather than a specific type of action. Then, we show how a robot can form these concepts through interactions with the environment and how humans can use these concepts to ease their communication with the robots. We demonstrate that iCub, a humanoid robot, can use the concepts, which it has developed, to to understand what a human performs, perform multi-step planning for reaching a goal state as well as to specify a goal to the robot using symbolic descriptions.
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Infant-directed visual prosody: Mothers’ head movements and speech acoustics
- Authors: Nicholas A. Smith, and Heather L. Strader
- pp.: 38–54 (17)
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- Acoustical changes in the prosody of mothers’ speech to infants are distinct and near universal. However, less is known about the visible properties of mothers’ infant-directed (ID) speech, and their relation to speech acoustics. Mothers’ head movements were tracked as they interacted with their infants using ID speech, and compared to movements accompanying their adult-directed (AD) speech. Movement measures along three dimensions of head translation, and three axes of head rotation were calculated. Overall, more head movement was found for ID than AD speech, suggesting that mothers exaggerate their visual prosody in a manner analogous to the acoustical exaggerations in their speech. Regression analyses examined the relation between changing head position and changing acoustical pitch (F0) over time. Head movements and voice pitch were more strongly related in ID speech than in AD speech. When these relations were examined across time windows of different durations, stronger relations were observed for shorter time windows (< 5 sec). However, the particular form of these more local relations did not extend or generalize to longer time windows. This suggests that the multimodal correspondences in speech prosody are variable in form, and occur within limited time spans.
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Tutoring in adult-child interaction: On the loop of the tutor’s action modification and the recipient’s gaze
- Authors: Karola Pitsch, Anna-Lisa Vollmer, Katharina J. Rohlfing, Jannik Fritsch, and Britta Wrede
- pp.: 55–98 (44)
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- Research of tutoring in parent-infant interaction has shown that tutors – when presenting some action – modify both their verbal and manual performance for the learner (‘motherese’, ‘motionese’). Investigating the sources and effects of the tutors’ action modifications, we suggest an interactional account of ‘motionese’. Using video-data from a semi-experimental study in which parents taught their 8- to 11-month old infants how to nest a set of differently sized cups, we found that the tutors’ action modifications (in particular: high arches) functioned as an orienting device to guide the infant’s visual attention (gaze). Action modification and the recipient’s gaze can be seen to have a reciprocal sequential relationship and to constitute a constant loop of mutual adjustments. Implications are discussed for developmental research and for robotic ‘Social Learning’. We argue that a robot system could use on-line feedback strategies (e.g. gaze) to pro-actively shape a tutor’s action presentation as it emerges.
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Robot companions for children with down syndrome: A case study
- Authors: Hagen Lehmann, Iolanda Iacono, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Patrizia Marti, and Ben Robins
- pp.: 99–112 (14)
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- We describe an exploratory case study about the applicability of different robotic platforms in an educational context with a child with Down syndrome. The robotic platforms tested are the humanoid robot KASPAR and the mobile robotic platform IROMEC. During the study we observed the effects KASPAR and IROMEC had in helping the child with the development and improvement of her social skills while playing different interactive games with the robots. Conceptually similar play scenarios were performed with both robots and the behaviour of the child was monitored during her interactions with them.
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Novelty preference in face perception by week-old lambs (Ovis aries)
- Authors: Orsola Rosa Salva, Simona Normando, Antonio Mollo, and Lucia Regolin
- pp.: 113–128 (16)
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- An extensive literature has been accumulating, in recent years, on face-processing in sheep and on the relevance of faces for social interaction in this species. In spite of this, spontaneous preferences for face or non-face stimuli in lambs have not been reported. In this study we tested the spontaneous preference of 8-day-old lambs (N = 9) for three pairs of stimuli. In each pair, one stimulus was a face-like display, whereas the other presented the same inner features displaced in unnatural positions. One pair of stimuli was obtained from photographic images of ewes’ faces, the other two pairs were schematic face-like stimuli. Lambs could differentiate the two stimuli obtained by photos of conspecifics, looking longer at the non-face stimulus (p < 0.05). We interpret this as a novelty preference, proving that few day-old lambs have already encoded the structural properties that define a face and recognize violations of those general properties.
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Review of “The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution” (Eds. Maggie Tallerman and Kathleen R. Gibson)
- Author: Caroline Lyon
- pp.: 129–142 (14)
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