Interaction Studies - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2024

As children grow, they increasingly encounter situations requiring them to follow multiple steps to manipulate objects or perform actions. This study examines how caregivers adjust their instructional behavior when a child fails to correctly execute part of a multi-step procedure. Thirty-two mothers demonstrated to their 2–3-year-old children how to use a novel toy with three action sequences. A motion capture system measured the movements of each mother’s hand during demonstrations to assess whether mothers modulated their motions during each manipulation phase. Analyses revealed that mothers changed their demonstrations depending on their children’s imitation task performance. Specifically, mothers shortened their demonstrations for the parts that the children could perform and emphasized their movements for the parts that the children could not perform. This study reveal that, unlike in previous studies, infant-directed actions may contain strategies that are more understandable to children depending on the purpose of the action.

Dog play bows are recognized as indicating play motivation in dog-dog play, but have never been examined in dog-human play. Twenty-seven dogs and 26 humans engaged in interspecific interactions with familiar and unfamiliar cross-species partners to play; videotapes of the resulting 50 play interactions were examined for play bows. Fifty play bows were detected, enacted by 10 dogs playing with their owner, 6 of whom also enacted play bows with an unfamiliar player. Play bows occurred only infrequently before or after pauses (or non-play activities) by the dog or the human, or before escape during play. Play bows appeared to be integral to dogs’ play activities, usually when the dog was playing object-keepaway and tug o’ war, or the dog was reacting to the human engaging in frustration games like object-keepaway or fakeout. Play bows appear to be multi-purpose actions indicating play motivation within dog-human play.

Eye contact constitutes a strong social signal in humans and affects various attentional processes. However, eye contact with another human evokes different responses compared with a direct gaze of an image on a screen. The question of interest is whether this holds also for eye contact with a robot. Previous experiments with physically present iCub humanoid robot showed that eye contact affects participants’ orienting of attention. In the present study, we investigated whether a robot’s eye contact on the screen could show similar effects. Specifically, in two experiments we examined the impact of eye contact on the gaze-cueing effect (orienting of attention in response to a directional gaze shift) while we varied the timing of the events within a trial sequence. Our results showed that the robot’s eye contact did not modulate the gaze-cueing effect (gaze-cueing effect present in all conditions), thereby suggesting that eye contact gaze presented in a 2D format on the screen has less impact on observers than its 3D embodied version in a physically present robot. Overall, our findings stress the importance of embodied interactions for understanding the mechanisms of social cognition.

This paper seeks to explore what happens when research methods predominantly reserved for the human animal are applied to study behavior of other animals. Specifically, we apply conversation analysis to investigate play fighting behavior of piglets in industrial-rearing conditions through three case studies. The analysis shows how play fighting is a mutually and continually (re-)established activity that relies on monitoring the other party’s continued willingness to engage. We show this orientation to continued willingness distinguishes the activity from more serious fighting. Maintaining mutual willingness is sequentially achieved through mutually constructed opening and closing sequences, floor yielding, and locally negotiating the rules for play. The head toss, a known play marker for pigs, was used flexibly by these piglets. These findings add to or reframe findings from behavioral studies of pig play. In conclusion, applying conversation analysis to pig interaction proves not only possible but fruitful as an additional approach to methods in the field of animal communication.

Research about explanation processes is gaining relevance because of the increased popularity of artificial systems required to explain their function or outcome. Following an interactive approach, not only explainers, but also explainees contribute to successful interactions. However, little is known about how explainees actively guide explanation processes and how their involvement relates to learning. We explored the occurrence and type of explainees’ questions in 20 adult — adult explanation dialogues about unknown present and absent objects. Crucially, we related the question types to the explainees’ subsequent recall of the unknown object labels. We found that explainees asked different types of questions, especially about the object’s label and facts. Questions about the object’s function were asked more when objects were present. In addition, requests for labelling were linked to better recall. The results contribute to designing explainable AI that aims to provide relevant and adaptive explanations and to further experimental approaches to study explanations.