Pim Haselager

Radboud University | RU · Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour

The proliferation of generative AI in the past two years raises complicated ethical and philosophical questions about the nature of AI systems, their potential, and the challenges and opportunities they bring about. The religious sphere is not immune from such concerns. In fact, it may be the arena where the status and role of AI unfolds in some of...

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems paradoxically combine high levels of certain types of intelligence and cognitive capacities (pattern recognition, reasoning, learning, memory, perception, etc.) with an absence of understanding and sentience (feeling, emotion). Apparently, it is possible to make great progress in modeling smartness without makin...

The rise of neurotechnologies, especially in combination with artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods for brain data analytics, has given rise to concerns around the protection of mental privacy, mental integrity and cognitive liberty - often framed as "neurorights" in ethical, legal, and policy discussions. Several states are now looking at inc...

Background: Intelligent artificial agents ('agents') have emerged in various domains of human society (healthcare, legal, social). Since using intelligent agents can lead to biases, a common proposed solution is to keep the human in the loop. Will this be enough to ensure unbiased decision making? Methods: To address this question, an experiment...

The rise of neurotechnologies, especially in combination with AI-based methods for brain data analytics, has given rise to concerns around the protection of mental privacy, mental integrity and cognitive liberty - often framed as 'neurorights' in ethical, legal and policy discussions. Several states are now looking at including 'neurorights' into t...

Human decisions are increasingly supported by decision support systems (DSS). Humans are required to remain “on the loop,” by monitoring and approving/rejecting machine recommendations. However, use of DSS can lead to overreliance on machines, reducing human oversight. This paper proposes “reflection machines” (RM) to increase meaningful human cont...

Could robots be religious? Philosophical, theological, and ethical perspectives on the future of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is achieving evermore impressive milestones, but it is often confusing to orientate between the media hype and the reality of what technology can actually do. Recently, a Google engineer sparked controver...

Trust constitutes a fundamental strategy to deal with risks and uncertainty in complex societies. In line with the vast literature stressing the importance of trust in doctor–patient relationships, trust is therefore regularly suggested as a way of dealing with the risks of medical artificial intelligence (AI). Yet, this approach has come under cha...

Are the cognitive sciences relevant for law? How do they influence legal theory and practice? Should lawyers become part-time cognitive scientists? The recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of human decision-making and behavior. Many claim, for instance, that we can no longer view ourselves as purely rational agent...

Passive BCIs can be used to measure brain processes that take place without necessarily having the intention to communicate, or even while being unaware that specific information about mental states is being collected. This type of symbiotic neurotechnology has the potential to create new and philosophically fascinating cases where the question of...

We propose that virtue ethics can be used to address ethical issues central to discussions about sex robots. In particular, we argue virtue ethics is well equipped to focus on the implications of sex robots for human moral character. Our evaluation develops in four steps. First, we present virtue ethics as a suitable framework for the evaluation of...

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descripti...

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descripti...

In this paper we introduce the temporally factorized 3D convolution (3TConv) as an interpretable alternative to the regular 3D convolution (3DConv). In a 3TConv the 3D convolutional filter is obtained by learning a 2D filter and a set of temporal transformation parameters, resulting in a sparse filter where the 2D slices are sequentially dependent...

The human species is combining an increased understanding of our cognitive machinery with the development of a technology that can profoundly influence our lives and our ways of living together. Our sciences enable us to see our strengths and weaknesses, and build technology accordingly. What would future historians think of our current attempts to...

Objective: The interpretation of neurophysiological measurements has a decades-long history, culminating in current real-time brain-computer interfacing (BCI) applications for both patient and healthy populations. Over the course of this history, one focus has been on the investigation of cortical responses to specific stimuli. Such responses can...

To investigate the neural preparation and awareness of an intention to act, neuroscientists typically examine spontaneous movements: self-paced flexions of the hand or foot. However, these movements may not present a straightforward case of intended action as they are performed in absence of reasons to act and without the evaluation of action conse...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Contemporary brain reading technologies promise to provide the possibility to decode and interpret mental states and processes. Brain reading could have numerous societally relevant implications. In particular, the private character of mind might be affected, generating ethical and legal concerns. This paper aims at equipping ethicists and policy m...

Having an intention to act is commonly operationalized as the moment at which awareness of an urge or decision to act arises. Measuring this moment has been challenging due to the dependence on first-person reports of subjective experience rather than objective behavioral or neural measurements. Commonly, this challenge is met using (variants of) L...

Greater safeguards are needed to address the personal safety, security and privacy risks arising from increasing adoption of neurotechnology in the consumer realm.

Robots’ ability to learn and show autonomous/intelligent behavior is expected to bring a breakthrough in usage of robots in education and assistive technologies. We compared a fully remotely operated robot (e. g. a robot with low autonomy) with one that could recognize cards and develop a playing strategy (i.e. highly autonomous) in a quartet game....

Transparency seems to represent a solution to many ethic issues generated by systems that collect implicit data from users to model the user themselves based on programmed criteria. However, making such systems transparent – besides being a major technical challenge - risks raising more issues than it solves, actually reducing the user’s ability to...

Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have made it possible to decode or interpret mental states of human beings by measuring brain activity. This is often referred to as ‘brain reading’: using brain measurements for mind reading. The concept of ‘brain reading’ is often used, but complex. In this paper, we will examine aspects of its meaning, a...

Issues regarding explainable AI involve four components: users, laws & regulations, explanations and algorithms. Together these components provide a context in which explanation methods can be evaluated regarding their adequacy. The goal of this chapter is to bridge the gap between expert users and lay users. Different kinds of users are identified...

The ability to generate novel hypotheses is an important problem solving capacity of humans. This ability is vital for making sense of the complex and unfamiliar world we live in. Often, this capacity is characterized as an inference to the best explanation—selecting the ‘best’ explanation from a given set of candidate hypotheses. However, it remai...

Issues regarding explainable AI involve four components: users, laws and regulations, explanations and algorithms. Together these components provide a context in which explanation methods can be evaluated regarding their adequacy. The goal of this chapter is to bridge the gap between expert users and lay users. Different kinds of users are identifi...

An important topic in the field of social and developmental psychology is how humans attribute mental traits and states to others. With the growing presence of robots in society, humans are confronted with a new category of social agents. This paper presents an empirical study demonstrating how psychological theory may be used for the human interpr...

Personalization of educational and behavioral training to the developmental stage of the individual child is common practice in educational and therapeutic settings. Research on robot-based education training is only just starting to adopt this approach. We present a pilot study on a behavioral intervention design in which Pivotal Response Training...

Research on human interaction has shown that considering an agent’s actions related to either effort or ability can have important consequences for attributions of responsibility. In this study, these findings have been applied in a HRI context, investigating how participants’ interpretation of a robot failure in terms of effort -as opposed to abil...

The present research was aimed at investigating whether human-robot interaction (HRI) can be improved by a robot’s nonverbal warning signals. Ideally, when a robot signals that it cannot guarantee good performance, people could take preventive actions to ensure the successful completion of the robot’s task. In two experiments, participants learned...

Coevolving systems are notoriously difficult to understand. This is largely due to the Red Queen effect that dictates heterospecific fitness interdependence. In simulation studies of coevolving systems, master tournaments are often used to obtain more informed fitness measures by testing evolved individuals against past and future opponents. Howeve...

An intention to act has different onsets when it is measured in different ways. When participants provide a self-initiated report on the onset of their awareness of intending to act, the report occurs around 150 ms prior to action. However, when the same participants are repeatedly asked about their awareness of intending at different points in tim...

Brain–computer interfacing technologies are used as assistive technologies for patients as well as healthy subjects to control devices solely by brain activity. Yet the risks associated with the misuse of these technologies remain largely unexplored. Recent findings have shown that BCIs are potentially vulnerable to cybercriminality. This opens the...

Personalization of the educational and behavioral training to the developmental stage of the individual child is common practice in educational and therapeutic settings. Research on robot-based education training is only just starting to adopt this approach. We present a pilot study on a behavioral intervention design in which Pivotal Response Trai...

Deep Brain Stimulation is one of the latest promising and widely discussed therapeutic neurotechnologies. Yet, along with its remarkable efficacy comes a number of complications. Besides surgical operative and post–operative difficulties, behavioral/psychological alterations can occur. In a recent paper we suggested the idea that patients’ endorsem...

Recent Libet-style experiments are of limited relevance to the debate about free action and free will, and should be understood as investigations of arbitrary actions or guesses. In Libet-style experiments, the concept of 'free action' is commonly taken to refer to a 'self-initiated voluntary act', where the self prompts an action without being pro...

Our think tank tasked by the Dutch Health Council, consisting of Radboud University Nijmegen Honours Academy students with various backgrounds, investigated the implications of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for psychiatric patients. During this investigation, a number of methodological, ethical and societal difficulties were identified. We consider...

In 1983 Libet et al. found that the Readiness Potential (RP) precedes the intention to act by 350ms and the actual movement by 500ms on average. Using our own replication study, we illustrate how seemingly innocuous technical details are actually crucially relevant to the debate surrounding the interpretation of Libet-style experiments. For instanc...

In social dilemmas punishment costs resources, not just from the one who is punished but often also from the punisher and society. Reciprocity on the other side is known to lead to cooperation without the costs of punishment. The questions at hand are whether punishment brings advantages besides its costs, and how its negative side-effects can be r...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is generally considered to have great practical potential. Yet along with its remarkable efficacy, which is currently being tested in application to many pathologies, come a certain number of complications. In particular, there seem to be several adverse psychological implications behind a relevant number of postoperati...

Performing an action with the assistance of a BCI may affect a user’s judgment of agency, resulting in an illusion of control, or automatism. We analyze this possibility from a theoretical perspective and discuss various factors that might influence a user’s judgment of agency in a BCI context. We present two pilot experiments that illustrate how t...

An important aspect of a robot's social behavior is to convey the right amount of trustworthiness. Task performance has shown to be an important source for trustworthiness judgments. Here, we argue that factors such as a robot's behavioral style can play an important role as well. Our approach to studying the effects of a robot's performance and be...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a well-accepted treatment for movement disorders and is currently explored as a treatment option for various neurological and psychiatric disorders. Several case studies suggest that DBS may, in some patients, influence mental states critical to personality to such an extent that it affects an individual’s personal i...

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research and (future) applications raise important ethical issues that need to be addressed to promote societal acceptance and adequate policies. Here we report on a survey we conducted among 145 BCI researchers at the 4th International BCI conference, which took place in May–June 2010 in Asilomar, California. We asse...

Over the last decade, an increasing number of studies have focused on automated recognition of human emotions by machines. However, performances of machine emotion recognition studies are difficult to interpret because benchmarks have not been established. To provide such a benchmark, we compared machine with human emotion recognition. We gathered...

Brain–computer interfacing (BCI) aims at directly capturing brain activity in order to enable a user to drive an application such as a wheelchair without using peripheral neural or motor systems. Low signal to noise ratio’s, low processing speed, and huge intra- and inter-subject variability currently call for the addition of intelligence to the ap...

Students using Ritalin in preparation for their exams is a hotly debated issue, while meditating or drinking coffee before those same exams is deemed uncontroversial. However, taking Ritalin, meditating and drinking coffee or even education in general, can all be considered forms of cognitive enhancement. Although social acceptance might change in...

Humans have a remarkable capacity for tuning their communicative behaviors to different addressees, a phenomenon also known as recipient design. It remains unclear how this tuning of communicative behavior is implemented during live human interactions. Classical theories of communication postulate that recipient design involves perspective taking,...

The steadily growing field of brain-computer interfacing (BCI) may develop useful technologies, with a potential impact not only on individuals, but also on society as a whole. At the same time, the development of BCI presents significant ethical and legal challenges. In a workshop during the 4th International BCI meeting (Asilomar, California, 201...

In analyses of the motor system, two hierarchies are often posited: The first—the action hierarchy—is a decomposition of an action into subactions and sub-subactions. The second—the control hierarchy—is a postulated hierarchy in the neural control processes that are supposed to bring about the action. A general assumption in cognitive neuroscience...

Single cell recordings in monkeys provide strong evidence for an important role of the motor system in action understanding. This evidence is backed up by data from studies of the (human) mirror neuron system using neuroimaging or TMS techniques, and behavioral experiments. Although the data acquired from single cell recordings are generally consid...

We study the computational complexity of adapting a reactive architecture to meet task constraints. This computational problem has application in a wide variety of fields, including cognitive and evolutionary robotics and cognitive neuroscience. We show that-even for a rather simple world and a simple task-adapting a reactive architecture to perfor...

The marketability of current and future BCI applications may greatly influence the decisions of goverments, the industry and academia. In this paper we first explored with a survey when respondents (N=145), who were present at the 4th International BCI Meeting, expect that different BCI applications will become commercially available. Second, we su...

In this paper we introduce the Regulated Reactive approach to robotics, which adds regulation (local control) to the existing Reactive Approach. Furthermore, we present a formal framework for structure-level descriptions of systems and relate those to hardware requirements. We prove that for any given behavior there exists a regulated reactive syst...

This is a report on the 3-day workshop "The Neuroscience of Responsibility" that was held in the Philosophy Department at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands during February 11th-13th, 2010. The workshop had 25 participants from The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, UK, USA, Canada and Australia, with expertise in philosophy, neuroscience,...

Axonal conduction delays should not be ignored in simulations of spiking neural networks. Here it is shown that by using axonal conduction delays, neurons can display sensitivity to a specific spatio-temporal spike pattern. By using delays that complement the firing times in a pattern, spikes can arrive simultaneously at an output neuron, giving it...

The discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys, and the finding of motor activity during action observation in humans are generally regarded to support motor theories of action understanding. These theories take motor resonance to be essential in the understanding of observed actions and the inference of action goals. However, the notions of "resonance...

Axonal conduction delays should not be ignored in simulations of spiking neural networks. Here it is shown that by using axonal conduction delays, neurons can display sensitivity to a specific spatio-temporal spike pattern. By using delays that complement the firing times in a pattern, spikes can arrive simultaneously at an output neuron, giving it...