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Making Sense of Human Behavior: Action Parsing and Intentional Inference
Abstract
Social interaction requires social cognition—the ability to perceive, interpret, and explain the actions of others. This ability fundamentally relies on the concepts of intention and intentionality. For example, people distinguish sharply between intentional and unintentional behavior; identify the intentions underlying others' behavior; explain completed actions with reference to intentions, beliefs, and desires; and evaluate the social worth of actions using the concepts of intentionality and responsibility.
Intentions and Intentionality highlights the roles these concepts play in social cognition. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it offers cutting-edge work from researchers in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and in philosophy, primatology, and law. It includes both conceptual and empirical contributions.
Bradford Books imprint
... The detection and use of these regularities does not necessarily imply a system for understanding mental states, but it might provide the means by which they could maximally exploit their caregivers. That there are statistical regularities in the behavior of others is not particularly controversial; indeed, it can be shown that not only must such regularities exist, they must be detectable in many social species who use such information in their interactions with each other (see Povinelli, 2001), and in the case of human development, some researchers are now demonstrating precisely such abilities (Baird & Baldwin, 2001). That these regularities are detectable by infants might not be, from the perspective we have outlined here, altogether surprising. ...
... Furthermore, to the extent that there was additional selection pressure on infants during human evolution to act as if they possessed a mentalistic type of social understanding, then infants might have further elaborated upon this ability. They might have latched onto a specific class of regularities in the behavior of their caregivers that could be exploited -ones precisely coinciding with the intentional parsing of action made by our adult folk psychology (Baird & Baldwin, 2001). ...
... Compounding the problem is the likelihood that at least two systems, or perhaps more precisely, two kinds of systems, might be operating in parallel in adult humans: one for detecting the statistical regularities in the behavior of others, and another system which maps intentional ascriptions onto that behavior (see Povinelli & Giambrone, 2000;Povinelli & Prince, 1998; from a human developmental point of view, see Baird & Baldwin, 2001). The difficulty arises in that independent of any selection for human infants to either actually understand (or act as if they understand) the intentional states of others, socially competent primates will have already evolved systems for detecting and analyzing many of the statistical regularities that exist in the behavior of others -precisely those regularities, in fact, upon which humans now map their intentional understandings (see Povinelli, 2001;Baird & Baldwin, 2001). ...
This chapter begins with a brief review of the theory of parent-offspring conflict and considers the role of this conflict in the cognitive development of human infants. It then discusses the evolution of theory of mind - which is taken to have its origins in human evolution - and considers how this human cognitive specialization might have interacted with existing parent-offspring dynamics. How the epigenetic systems of infants might have responded is shown by elaborating upon existing cognitive and behavioural systems, or by canalizing later developing ones earlier into development, in order to recruit higher degrees of parental investment. The merits of this framework is assessed in the context of the development of behaviours considered by some researchers to be indicative of a certain degree of social understanding, namely, gaze-following, pointing, social smiling, and neonatal imitation. The chapter concludes by showing how this proposal makes several longstanding theoretical and methodological difficulties for the field of cognitive development even more vexing.
... Newtson concluded that the different units all contained different "meanings" and correspond to distinctive changes on the screen, such as bodily shifts in the actor's position. Later experiments (Baird & Baldwin, 2001) on segmentation of ongoing action, explained the difference between the units in terms of different inferred intentionse.g. when the actor stands up to reach for a box of matches, people do not place a breakpoint because of the changed bodily position of the actor but because of a changed intention of the actor (wanting to get the box of matches). ...
... Newtson (1973;Newtson & Enquist, 1976) showed that people can easily demarcate events in a film displaying ongoing character behavior. In addition, Baird and Baldwin (2001) showed that viewers base their points of demarcation on their interpretation of the presented intentional actions of the characters. When an event has been demarcated, it is fitted in story schemas (e.g. ...
KIJKEN NAAR GENRES het effect van bewegingen van filmkarakters op genre herkenning In dit proefschrift worden drie empirische experimenten gepresenteerd die onderzoeken hoe filmkijkers in hun genre categorisatie van een fragment beïnvloed worden door waargenomen bewegingen. De theoretische context van dit proefschrift is
tweeledig: genre theorie aan de ene, en cognitieve categorisatietheorie aan de andere kant. Samengevat heeft dit proefschrift aangetoond dat gemiddelde kijkers sterk beïnvloed worden in hun genre categorisatie door waargenomen bewegingscues.
Daarbij is aangetoond dat de validiteit van beeldcues, i.e. filmische realisatie cues, zeker zo sterk is als die van verhaalcues, i.e. event cues. Bovendien blijken kijkers over zeer gedetailleerde, impliciete, genre kennis te beschikken die zij gebruiken in
categorisatie taken en om onderscheid te maken tussen de vier basis genres: non-fictie, komedie, actie, en drama. De resultaten suggereren tenslotte dat de kennis van fictie genres bij de kijker georganiseerd is als een specifieke afwijking van de kennis
van non-fictie genres.
... Similarly, Schwan and Garsoffky (2004) provided evidence that both recall and recognition were better for movies that include event boundaries compared to movies that omitted event boundaries. Furthermore, evidence that event boundaries have an effect on long-term memory show similar to findings of the role of event segmentation in short-term memory (Baird & Baldwin, 2001;Newtson & Engquist, 1976;Schwan & Garsoffky, 2004). When provided at event boundaries rather than nonboundaries, information was more effectively encoded and later remembered. ...
We engage with at least one type of visual media on a daily basis. Among those, there is a growing interest in the perception of cinematic events among cognitive psychologists. The current study investigated how event boundaries and pace affect recognition memory for movie scenes. We presented participants with brief clips composed out of six shots which either included a boundary or not and whether the average shot length was long or short. The results indicated that slower paced scenes were remembered better than faster paced scenes. More interestingly, there was a significant interaction between event boundary and pace. For fast-paced scenes, lower accuracy as well as longer reaction times were observed for scenes that involved an event boundary compared to those without an event boundary. Analysis of the serial position of the individual shots further indicated that people remember information in the new scene compared to the old scene only for fast-paced scenes. Event segmentation theory states that we form an active model of an event in working memory, which is updated when there is a significant change that violates predictions. Our experiment adds to event segmentation theory suggesting that the role of event boundaries is conditional on the exposure duration. When information is consolidated with enough exposure, the experience of an event boundary does not hinder memory. The current study provides new evidence showing that in complex visual scenes, memory operates economically to rely on the current model when the resources are limited.
... Changes in various dimensions of ongoing experience (e.g., locations, characters, objects, actions, and goals) trigger the perception of event boundaries (Zacks et al., 2007), which determine the chunking of information into discrete units (Clewett et al., 2019;Radvansky & Zacks, 2017). This structure of event perception has direct consequence for memory: parts of the sensory stream that correspond to event boundaries are better retained (Baird & Baldwin, 2001;Newtson & Engquist, 1976;Swallow et al., 2009) and serve as anchors for memory organization (Dubrow & Davachi, 2013;Horner et al., 2016;Radvansky & Copeland, 2006). ...
Why does it take less time to remember an event than to experience it? Recent evidence suggests that the dynamic unfolding of events is temporally compressed in memory representations, but the exact nature of this compression mechanism remains unclear. The present study tested two possible mechanisms. First, it could be that memories compress the course of events into a sequence of moments or slices of prior experience, while omitting other segments, akin to edited films that give condensed accounts of events using sequences of separate shots (referred to as the discontinuity hypothesis). Alternatively, it may be that the entire stream of information is represented but is mentally replayed at a faster speed than the original experience (referred to as the acceleration hypothesis). In two experiments, these hypotheses were tested by comparing mental replay times for continuous movies depicting naturalistic events and edited versions of the same movies in which less informative parts were removed to mimic the presumed structure of memory representations according to the discontinuity hypothesis. We found that memories for videos in which less informative segments were replaced by temporal ellipses (Experiment 1) or by black screens of the same duration as removed segments (Experiment 2) were less compressed and contained a higher density of recalled units than did memories for complete videos. These results support the discontinuity hypothesis and suggest that segments of time that are redundant and predictable are omitted in episodic memory, while more informative segments are selectively retained to represent the unfolding of events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... For instance points where the actor accelerates or changes direction are associated with boundaries between events, particularly at the fine-grained level (Hard, Recchia & Tversky 2011;Zacks 2004). Secondly, event boundaries frequently occur at points of goal-attainment (Baird & Baldwin 2001). Whether or not the perceiver understands the goals of the actor also matters: when people do not understand the goals they tend to segment activity more finely (Wilder 1978a;Zacks 2004). ...
... Because inference often occurs unconsciously (Von Wright, 1963), philosophers find it difficult to categorize such reasoning (Gjelsvik, 2014). Yet, precisely because the inference process is so natural, it has unique purchase within our discussion of sense-making around the work of social actors like journalists, who work to produce knowledge about the everyday social world (Baird & Baldwin, 2001). In doing so, the casting of likely implications, explanations, and intentions into a news narrative which seeks to explain a set of activities is central to the production of news. ...
This monograph addresses the question of how journalistic knowledge work, and in particular inferential reasoning, as a process of uncertainty reduction is manifested in news texts. We argue this takes place both in and in-between news media within a community of practice. The main premise is that journalistic texts reveal communal processes of knowledge creation and it is within these texts that we see the contours of what we term an “inferential community.” The backdrop to this, is that the digital (news) landscape, political developments, and global issues produce an environment rife with uncertainty. We focus on three contemporary cases around the current U.S. presidency. We are, however, not arguing that the processes we study are altogether new; journalists have always, alone or together, grappled with uncertainty. Rather, we present here a conceptualization based on the premise that current circumstances offer a window into the more fundamental processes of journalistic knowledge work based on inference.
... An intriguing question is how processes operating over distinct types of event information work together (e.g., Hard, Tversky, & Lang, 2006;Levine, Hirsh-Pasek, Pace, & Golinkoff, 2017;Zacks, 2004). It is possible that higher level knowledge can affect the way people select and allocate attention to various perceptual features (Zacks, 2004; see also Baird & Baldwin, 2003). In our own ongoing work, we have found that the way people place event boundaries depends partly on how people interpret the goals of the agent within an event (A. ...
A fundamental aspect of human cognition is the ability to parse our constantly unfolding experience into meaningful representations of dynamic events and to communicate about these events with others. How do we communicate about events we have experienced? Influential theories of language production assume that the formulation and articulation of a linguistic message is preceded by preverbal apprehension that captures core aspects of the event. Yet the nature of these preverbal event representations and the way they are mapped onto language are currently not well understood. Here, we review recent evidence on the link between event conceptualization and language, focusing on two core aspects of event representation: event roles and event boundaries. Empirical evidence in both domains shows that the cognitive representation of events aligns with the way these aspects of events are encoded in language, providing support for the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and cognitive event structure.
... This, however, hardly seems to be the best interpretation of the evidence. According to some theorists (Baird and Baldwin 2001;Povinelli 2001), the dishabituation effect may reflect the operation of low-level mechanisms that detect physical and temporal regularities in actions and enable observers to identify relevant units in the behavior stream. As Povinelli remarks, "the early detection of structural regularities of behavior are not, strictly speaking, the early manifestation of the uniquely human system for reasoning about intentions" (Povinelli 2001, pp. ...
Recently, a number of experimental philosophers have converged on the position that the ordinary concept of weakness of will does not solely consist in "judgment" or "intention" violation but is more like a cluster concept in which each factor plays contributory roles in the application of the concept. This, however, raises the question as
to which factor is more central or plays a more signifcant role in
folk's understanding of the concept. I contend that the
ordinary concept of weakness of will is primarily constituted by the
"executive commitment" rather than the "evaluative commitment"
practices. Drawing on extensive evidence from developmental psychology, I will argue that the executive commitment, which, as I will
show, involve intention recognition and metarepresentation, is developmentally prior and more fundamental in our exercise and intuitive understanding of the concept.
... In primary intersubjectivity, then, there is continuous interaction with caregivers from birth. At 6 months infants start to perceive grasping as goal directed; at 10-11 months infants are able to parse some kinds of continuous action according to intentional boundaries Baird and Baldwin 2001;Woodward and Sommerville 2000). Infants start to perceive various movements of the head, the mouth, the hands, and more general body movements as meaningful, goal-directed movements (Senju et al. 2006). ...
In this chapter I focus on the relationship between embodied intersubjective interactions and the kind of spaces that shape and are shaped by such interactions. After clarifying some of the theoretical background involved in questions about social cognition, I review several empirical studies that suggest that social interactions and social relations can change our perceptions of the reachable (peripersonal) space around us, as well as the more distant (extrapersonal) space beyond our immediate reach. These perceptions operate within the framework of material culture and impact our experience of space as it is organized by cultural artifacts and practices. In this respect, the analysis provided by Material Engagement Theory (Malafouris L, How things shape the mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013) helps us understand the role of material arrangements as they define affordances for action and interaction, correlated to transformations from individual body-schematic processes to intercorporeal processes in joint action. These same processes can be carried over into discussions of space and place as experienced on the larger stages of social-cultural activities.
... Previous studies have shown that event segmentation has important consequences for long-term memory. In particular, there is evidence that event boundaries are more richly encoded (Baird & Baldwin, 2001;Newtson & Enquist, 1976;Swallow, Zacks, & Abrams, 2009) and determine the organization of events in episodic memory (Dubrow & Davachi, 2013;Ezzyat & Davachi, 2011;Horner et al., 2016;Radvansky & Copeland, 2006). Thus, the grain size of event segmentation during encoding modulates what is retained, such that increasing the number of event boundaries enhances memory (Lassiter, Stone & Rogers, 1988;Pettijohn, Thompson, Tamplin, Krawietz, & Radvansky, 2016). ...
Recent studies suggest that episodic memory represents the continuous flow of information that constitutes daily life events in a temporally compressed form, but the nature and determinants of this compression mechanism remain unclear. In the present study, we used wearable camera technology to investigate whether the temporal compression of experience in episodic memory depends on event segmentation. Participants experienced a series of events during a walk on a university campus and were later asked to mentally replay these events. The temporal compression of events in memory and grain size of event segmentation were estimated based on records of participants' experience taken by the camera. The results showed that the temporal compression of events in memory (i.e., the density of recalled moments of experience per unit of time of the actual event duration) closely corresponded to the grain size of event segmentation. Specifically, grain sizes of event segmentation and temporal compression rates were four to five times lower when remembering events that involved goal-directed actions compared to other kinds of events (e.g., spatial displacements). Furthermore, temporal compression rates in memory were significantly predicted by the grain size of event segmentation and event boundaries were more than five times more likely to be remembered than other parts of events. Together, these results provide new insights into the mechanism of temporal compression of events in episodic memory.
... The mind represents experience as a series of events that are organized into part-whole structures (DuBrow & Davachi, 2013;Kurby & Zacks, 2008). The process by which experience is divided into events, event segmentation, plays an important role in everything from language acquisition (Friend & Pace, 2011), to the recognition of other's intentions (Baird & Baldwin, 2001;Buchsbaum, Griffiths, Plunkett, Gopnik, & Baldwin, 2015), to episodic memory (Ezzyat & Davachi, 2010;Swallow, Zacks, & Abrams, 2009), and consequently to the ability to imagine future events (Buckner & Carroll, 2007). Despite its importance to cognition, the types of information observers use to divide continuous experience into meaningful events are underspecified. ...
People divide their ongoing experience into meaningful events. This process, event segmentation, is strongly associated with visual input: when visual features change, people are more likely to segment. However, the nature of this relationship is unclear. Segmentation could be bound to specific visual features, such as actor posture. Or, it could be based on changes in the activity that are correlated with visual features. This study distinguished between these two possibilities by examining whether segmentation varies across first- and third-person perspectives. In two experiments, observers identified meaningful events in videos of actors performing everyday activities, such as eating breakfast or doing laundry. Each activity was simultaneously recorded from a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. These videos presented identical activities but differed in their visual features. If segmentation is tightly bound to visual features then observers should identify different events in first- and third-person videos. In addition, the relationship between segmentation and visual features should remain unchanged. Neither prediction was supported. Though participants sometimes identified more events in first-person videos, the events they identified were mostly indistinguishable from those identified for third-person videos. In addition, the relationship between the video's visual features and segmentation changed across perspectives, further demonstrating a partial dissociation between segmentation and visual input. Event segmentation appears to be robust to large variations in sensory information as long as the content remains the same. Segmentation mechanisms appear to flexibly use sensory information to identify the structure of the underlying activity.
... However, the structure of the argument means that it could, at least in principle, extend more widely. For instance, the Problem straightforwardly extends to attributing reasoning about mental states to pre-verbal infants (see Baird & Baldwin 2001, Gergely and Csibra 2003, Perner and Raffman 2005. Since preverbal infants are not in a position to tell us that they are engaging in mental state attributions, and since we can, ex hypothesi, explain all of their predictive success without positing mental state attribution, perhaps we should refrain from treating them as reasoning about unobservable mental states at all and instead accord them the more concrete skill of smart behaviour-reading. ...
A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with how subjects understand the actions of others. The suggestion emerging from both arenas is that the default mechanism for understanding action involves only a sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) features of a situation. This kind of ‘smart behaviour reading’ thus suggests that, typically, predicting or explaining the behaviour of conspecifics does not require seeing the other through the lens of mental state attribution. This paper aims to explore and assess this deflationary move. In §1 I clarify what might be involved in a smart behaviour reading account via looking at some concrete examples. Then in §2 I critically assess the deflationary move, arguing that, at least in the human case, it would in fact be a mistake to assume that our default method of action understanding proceeds without appeal to mental state attribution. Finally in §3 I consider briefly how the positive view proposed here relates to discussions about standard two-system models of cognition.
... The third is the capacity to understand directedness, or information based on the orientation of the eyes and hand. This capacity to understand directedness is dependent on the fourth precursor, which is the ability to parse behavior into units based on intention, such as fast or slow rate of movement (Baird & Baldwin, 2001). The final precursor is the capacity for shared attention, or the recognition that the self and other are both exhibiting directedness towards a single object. ...
... Mother-child behavioral synchrony has been shown to be individually stable from infancy to adolescence (Feldman, 2007(Feldman, , 2010, and thus, the longitudinal design enabled us to filter out momentary fluctuations in the relationship and highlight its stable aspects, yet, it exposed partners to stimuli that were easily identifiable and were not reminiscent of a distant past. We selected to videotape mothers and children at 8-9 years as by this age children have already developed theory-of-mind abilities (Baird and Baldwin, 2001;Sommerville, 2010) and have undergone the first maturation of mentalizing brain structures (Decety, 2010). ...
The recent call to move from focus on one brain's functioning to two-brain communication initiated a search for mechanisms that enable two humans to coordinate brain response during social interactions. Here, we utilized the mother-child context as a developmentally salient setting to study two-brain coupling. Mothers and their 9-year-old children were videotaped at home in positive and conflictual interactions. Positive interactions were microcoded for social synchrony and conflicts for overall dialogical style. Following, mother and child underwent magnetoencephalography while observing the positive vignettes. Episodes of behavioral synchrony, compared to non-synchrony, increased gamma-band power in the superior temporal sulcus (STS), hub of social cognition, mirroring and mentalizing. This neural pattern was coupled between mother and child. Brain-to-brain coordination was anchored in behavioral synchrony; only during episodes of behavioral synchrony, but not during non-synchronous moments, mother's and child's STS gamma power was coupled. Importantly, neural synchrony was not found during observation of unfamiliar mother-child interaction Maternal empathic/dialogical conflict style predicted mothers' STS activations whereas child withdrawal predicted attenuated STS response in both partners. Results define a novel neural marker for brain-to-brain synchrony, highlight the role of rapid bottom-up oscillatory mechanisms for neural coupling and indicate that behavior-based processes may drive synchrony between two brains during social interactions.
... The infant, even at 9 months, follows the other person's eyes (Senju, Johnson and Csibra 2008), and starts to perceive various movements of the head, the mouth, the hands, and more general body movements as meaningful and goal-directed. Baldwin and colleagues, for example, have shown that infants at 10-11 months are able to parse some kinds of continuous action according to intentional boundaries Baird and Baldwin 2001). Such perceptions give the infant, by the end of the first year of life, a non-mentalizing, perceptually-based embodied understanding of the intentions and dispositions of other persons (Allison, Puce, and McCarthy 2000;Baldwin, 1993;Johnson 2000;Johnson et al. 1998). ...
... A recurring theme of this chapter has been the distinction between predicting events versus reasoning about and explaining the underlying causal forces involved in such events. As many scholars have noted, the world itself has an immense amount of information contained within it; systems that perceive and reason about these observable features have a large (and currently largely unspecifi ed) power to predict future events (for examinations of how these systems might develop and operate in humans, see Baird & Baldwin, 2001 ;Zacks & Tversky, 2001 ). A critical question arises, then, as to when is it necessary to posit that a system is representing and utilizing concepts that refer to underlying (unobservable) causes of an event or behavior. ...
... Knowledge of an agent's intentions also facilitates prediction of future behavior (Massad, Hubbard & Newtson, 1979;Baird & Baldwin, 2001;Waytz et al., 2010). Readers parse narratives into units segmented by predictable transitions in time, space, cause or intention (Kurby & Zacks, 2012). ...
Several studies have explored the determinants of anthropomorphism: the tendency to endow nonhuman agents with human features, goals, and intentions. Less is known of the cognitive benefits that may arise from anthropomorphism. Following research in narrative comprehension, we explored how the attribution of human-like features and intentional goals to nonhuman agents might benefit memory for events. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that anthropomorphic descriptions and intentional goals independently contributed to improved narrative memory. A third experiment revealed that these effects were mediated by participants' attributions of agency. We conclude that anthropomorphic descriptions and intentional behavior jointly support a schematic framework for remembering events.
... At 5-7 months, infants are able to detect correspondences between visual and auditory information that specify the expression of emotions (Walker 1982;Hobson 1993;2002). At 6 months infants start to perceive grasping as goal directed, and at 10-11 months infants are able to parse some kinds of continuous action according to intentional boundaries Baird and Baldwin 2001;Woodward, & Sommerville 2000). They start to perceive various movements of the head, the mouth, the hands, and more general body movements as meaningful, goal-directed movements (Senju, Johnson and Csibra 2006). ...
Enactive approaches in cognitive science propose that perception, and more generally cognitive experience, are strongly mediated by embodied (sensory–motor) processes, and that our primary experience of the world is action-oriented or pragmatic (Noë, 2004; Thompson, 2007; Varela et al., 1991). Extended mind theorists propose that cognition supervenes on embodied and environmental processes such as gestures and the use of various technologies (Clark, 2008; Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Menary, 2010). Both enactive and extended conceptions of cognition suggest that the mind is not “in the head”–that cognitive processes are distributed over brain, body, and environment – but they also differ on a number of issues. Extended mind theorists defend a functionalist account of cognition and downplay the role of the body (e.g., Clark, 2008), and they argue that cognition and action can involve mental representations (e.g., Clark, 1997; Clark and Grush, 1999; Rowlands, 2006; Wheeler, 2005). In contrast, enactive theorists argue for radical embodiment (e.g., Thompson and Varela, 2001) and defend an antirepresentationalist view (e.g., Gallagher, 2008b; Hutto, in press; Thompson, 2007). There are also debates about how to define the boundaries, or lack of boundaries, involved in cognitive processes (e.g., Di Paolo, 2009; Wheeler, 2008).
... possible responses to the question of movement notation at different levels of 48 abstraction and related to psychological properties. Our project has only just gotten 1 We call "behavioral objects" the moving artifacts that a human observer perceives as acting in a meaningful way. Those artifacts need not necessarily be robotic, although their "behavioral" potential is of course reinforced by their ability to react to certain events. ...
Among robots, non-anthropomorphic robotic artifacts are in an interesting position: the fact that they do not resemble living beings, yet impart a sense of agency through the way they move, motivates to consider motion as a source of expressivity in itself, independently of any morphological cues. This problematic is considered in parallel to the question of movement notation and the different levels of abstraction that one may consider when reflecting on movement and its relation to a spatial, temporal and social context. This is through a twofold perspective, drawing on both dance notation and cognitive psychology, that we consider the question of movement notation, and its relation to expressive gestures and psychological attributes. To progress in the direction of a system of notation that could integrate the qualitative, relational, and behavioral aspects of movement, we propose different typologies and a model of constraints to analyze, conceive and implement behaviors in robotic artifacts.
... Although there is considerable debate about the extent to which infants and nonhuman primates develop concepts of intentionality (Baird & Baldwin, 2001;Povinelli, 2001;Wellman & Phillips, 2001), studies have found that these concepts start to develop early in life. Beginning with his classic work on children and moral judgments, Jean Piaget (1932Piaget ( /1965 observed that young children used the severity of an outcome as basis for ascribing moral judgment and later transitioned into forming judgments that also included concepts of 12 LARSON intentionality. ...
Debates about moral judgments have raised questions about the roles of reasoning, culture, and conflict. In response, the cognitive prototype model explains that over time, through training, and as a result of cognitive development, people construct notions of blameworthy and praiseworthy behavior by abstracting out salient properties that lead to an ideal representation of each. These properties are the primary features of moral prototypes and include social context interpretation, intentionality, consent, and outcomes. According to this model, when the properties are uniform and coherent, they depict a promoral or immoral prototype, relative to the orientations of the properties. A promoral prototype is represented by an action that is supported by the culture, intentionally benevolent or other-regarding, consensual, and resulting in positive outcomes. An immoral prototype is an action that is condemned by the culture, intentionally malevolent or self-serving, lacking consent, and resulting in negative outcomes. It is hypothesized that moral prototypes will result in a high level of agreement and require effortless processing. Alternatively, when properties conflict or the situation deviates from the prototype, a nonprototype will result. It is hypothesized that nonprototypical situations will act as a source of moral disagreement and may require more effortful processing.
... Actors typically prepare for the next action as they finish the current one, shifting their gaze to the next object to be acted on (Mennie, Hayhoe, & Sullivan, 2007). Directing the gaze to an object is an early cue of intention to act on that object (Baird & Baldwin, 2001;Pierno et al., 2006). Experienced observers of human action are likely to notice those subtle yet reliable cues to an upcoming transition and may increase attention in anticipation of the next set of actions. ...
How do people understand the everyday, yet intricate, behaviors that unfold around them? In the present research, we explored this by presenting viewers with self-paced slideshows of everyday activities and recording looking times, subjective segmentation (breakpoints) into action units, and slide-to-slide physical change. A detailed comparison of the joint time courses of these variables showed that looking time and physical change were locally maximal at breakpoints and greater for higher level action units than for lower level units. Even when slideshows were scrambled, breakpoints were regarded longer and were more physically different from ordinary moments, showing that breakpoints are distinct even out of context. Breakpoints are bridges: from one action to another, from one level to another, and from perception to conception.
... A body of the cognitive psychology literature is devoted to understanding how people perceive human actions over time and, in particular, what brain mechanisms support the perception of human movements. In this context, it has been shown that activities are not perceived as a continuous input stream but rather as discrete action units within a behavioral sequence [1]. The segmentation of action streams and the detection of discrete boundaries between action units happens at different levels of granularity such that action segments get combined over time to form a holistic interpretation of perceived actions [47]. ...
As research on action recognition matures, the focus is shifting away from categorizing basic task-oriented actions using hand-segmented video datasets to understanding complex goal-oriented daily human activities in real-world settings. Temporally structured models would seem obvious to tackle this set of problems, but so far, cases where these models have outperformed simpler unstructured bag-of-word types of models are scarce. With the increasing availability of large human activity datasets, combined with the development of novel feature coding techniques that yield more compact representations, it is time to revisit structured generative approaches.
Here, we describe an end-to-end generative approach from the encoding of features to the structural modeling of complex human activities by applying Fisher vectors and temporal models for the analysis of video sequences.
We systematically evaluate the proposed approach on several available datasets (ADL, MPIICooking, and Breakfast datasets) using a variety of performance metrics. Through extensive system evaluations, we demonstrate that combining compact video representations based on Fisher Vectors with HMM-based modeling yields very significant gains in accuracy and when properly trained with sufficient training samples, structured temporal models outperform unstructured bag-of-word types of models by a large margin on the tested performance metric.
... ior, as when certain authors refer to action parsing (Baird and Baldwin 2001) or the chunking of perceptions (Swann Jr. et al. 1987), suggests that such overlapping terminology attempts to capture similar cognitive processes. ...
This article summarizes an evidence-based study that adapts a breakpoint approach to investigate how elements of television narratives (two half-hour episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “The Case of Mr. Pelham”) were considered
meaningful to viewers. Actions considered meaningful were found to be high in informational and emotional content, and primarily consisted of plot points where changes in narrative direction and protagonist's goals were perceived as interpretively salient. Viewers also registered as meaningful
those scenes that were character centered and provided subjective access to the main characters. The article reviews segmentation behavior in the relevant film theory literature to contextualize study, and concludes by summarizing other potential applications of an adapted breakpoint approach
beyond the investigation of dramatic structure.
... The extant research on the perception-action link has focused on relatively simple object-directed actions that do not require substantial interpretation. In most real-life circumstances, however, people interpret the meaning of another's behavior rather than merely observing the surface motor pattern (Baird & Baldwin, 2001). Likewise, perceiving and potentially adopting (or actively avoiding) other people's environmental actions is likely to involve the analysis of the action's meaning, which requires both the recognition of the behavior as intended to be environmental and the interpretation of the actor's relevant thoughts and goals in performing the behavior (Malle, 2004). ...
We explored how social perceivers detect and explain others' environmentally relevant behaviors (ERBs). Participants watched short videos in which an actor performed an ERB (e.g., composting) or a control behavior (e.g., setting the table); they were then asked to explain why the actor had performed this behavior. Participants "detected" an (a priori classified) ERB if their explanation made explicit reference to the environmental relevance of the action. In a comparison of self-identified environmentalists and nonenvironmentalists, environmentalists detected significantly more ERBs (d=1.3). Relying on a recently developed theory of behavior explanations, we also classified explanations into two modes: Explainers can offer reasons and thereby "mentalize" - citing the subjective mental states (e.g., beliefs, desires) in light of which the agent chose to act; explainers can also offer causal history factors, referring to the broader background of that choice (e.g., personality, culture). When perceivers identified a behavior as environmentally relevant, they used significantly more causal history explanations, overlooking the agent's subjective grounds for acting. This effect was stronger for self-identified environmentalists. One interpretation of these results is that actions framed as environmental are seen less as reflecting conscious choices and more as belonging to a broad category of behavior. Focusing on causal background rather than on the agent's reasons may present obstacles for social perceivers' adoption of other people's environmental behavior.
... Later studies using online monitoring tasks found that reaction times were faster to clicks placed between constituents than those within syntactic constituents, and faster to those within first constituents than second constituents (Abrams & Bever, 1969;Bond, 1972;Ford & Holmes, 1978). The success of this "structural disruption" technique as a method of examining grammatical structure in language has led to its use beyond the study of structure in language, to study structure in music (Berent & Perfetti, 1993;Kung, Tzeng, Hung, & Wu, 2011) and visual events (Baird & Baldwin, 2001). ...
Constituent structure has long been established as a central feature of human language. Analogous to how syntax organizes words in sentences, a narrative grammar organizes sequential images into hierarchic constituents. Here we show that the brain draws upon this constituent structure to comprehend wordless visual narratives. We recorded neural responses as participants viewed sequences of visual images (comics strips) in which blank images either disrupted individual narrative constituents or fell at natural constituent boundaries. A disruption of either the first or the second narrative constituent produced a left-lateralized anterior negativity effect between 500-700ms. Disruption of the second constituent also elicited a posteriorly-distributed positivity (P600) effect. These neural responses are similar to those associated with structural violations in language and music. These findings provide evidence that comprehenders use a narrative structure to comprehend visual sequences and that the brain engages similar neurocognitive mechanisms to build structure across multiple domains.
... 3 Behaviors instead relate human activities with the surrounding environment (people, objects, situations), inferring how and why a certain situation is occurring. 4 A behavior can be seen as the response of a human to the internal, external, conscious, or unconscious stimula he receives. 5 While the recognition of activities is syntactic, as it can be typically associated to a sequence of characteristic elements, behaviors imply a joint analysis of content and context, thus providing a semantically richer description of the event. ...
Automatic recognition of human activities and behaviors is still a challenging problem due to many reasons, including limited accuracy of the data acquired by sensing devices, high variability of human behaviors, gap between visual appearance and scene semantics. Symbolic approaches can significantly simplify the analysis, turning raw data into chains of meaningful patterns. This allows getting rid of most of the clutter produced by low-level processing operations, embedding significant contextual information into the data, as well as using simple syntactic approaches to perform the matching between incoming sequences and models. In this paper we propose a symbolic approach to learn and detect complex activities through sequences of atomic actions. Compared to previous methods based on Context Free Grammars (CFGs), we introduce several important novelties, like the capability to learn actions based on both positive and negative samples, the possibility of efficiently re-training the system in presence of misclassified or unrecognized events, the use of a parsing procedure that allows correctly detecting the activities also when they are concatenated and/or nested one with each other. An experimental validation on three datasets with different characteristics demonstrates the robustness of the approach in classifying complex human behaviors.
... As a consequence, perceptual input is temporarily processed more elaborately in order to build up a new event model. This deeper processing is very likely to result in better memory for information from event boundaries, as could be shown in several studies (e.g., Baird & Baldwin, 2001;Hanson & Hirst, 1989Huff, Papenmeier, & Zacks, 2012;Lassiter, 1988;Lassiter & Slaw, 1991;Lassiter et al., 1988;Newtson & Engquist, 1976;Schwan & Garsoffky, 2004;Zacks et al., 2006). Besides effects on memory, perception of an event boundary also impairs the ability to predict future developments of the observed action. ...
Philosophical orthodoxy has it that intentional action consists in one's intention appropriately causing a motion of one's body, placing the latter (conceptually and/or metaphysically) prior to the former. Here, I argue that this standard schema should be reversed: acting intentionally is at least conceptually prior to intending. The argument is modelled on a Williamsonian argument for the priority of knowledge developed by Jenifer Nagel. She argues that children acquire the concept KNOWS before they acquire BELIEVES, building on this alleged developmental priority of knowledge to establish its conceptual priority. I start by taking a closer look at Nagel's argument, canvassing extant objections todo both with the empirical adequacy of her claims and their philosophical implications. Doing so allows me, in the second part of the paper, to draw lessons that inform the construction of a revamped parallel argument for the priority of ACTS INTENTIONALLY.
In many everyday situations, we search our visual surroundings for any one of many memorized items held in memory, a process termed hybrid search. In some cases, only a portion of the memorized mental list is relevant within a specific visual context, thus, restricting memory search to the relevant subset would be desirable. Previous research had shown that participants largely fail to “partition” memory into several distinct subsets, on a trial-by-trial basis. However, given the known role of semantic content in long-term memory organization, we hypothesized that semantically defined subset categories might serve as a more powerful means for flexible memory selection in dynamic hybrid search situations. Experiment 1 revealed that, indeed, semantic characteristics (i.e., object category), but not perceptual features (e.g., arbitrary color), can provide a firm basis for flexible memory partitioning. Experiments 2 and 3 further showed that such memory partitioning is costless and is independent of the nature of the surrounding visual distractors (i.e., a categorically homogeneous or heterogeneous display). These findings demonstrate that confining one’s memory search to a currently relevant subset of items is highly effective when the different memory subsets are defined by clear semantic categories. The results underscore the importance of conceptual information in the organization of activated long-term memory and in forming the basis for a flexible trial-by-trial memory selection. Our findings further highlight the relationship between visual search and memory search, and they may shed light on the processes contributing to a successful construction of bounded episodes in long-term memory.
Phenomenologists have developed theories of empathy, intersubjective understanding, and communication. Notions of transcendental intersubjectivity (Husserl) and ‘being-with’ (Heidegger) help to explain how human subjects are social in their very being and in ways that impact not only their relations with others but also their experience of the objective world. Phenomenological explanations of how we understand others appeal to embodied notions of pairing and interaction. Together with studies in developmental psychology, and behavioral and cognitive science, phenomenology provides evidence for the importance of situated interaction starting early in infancy and continuing throughout the life span. The basic embodied interaction of primary intersubjectivity, together with the pragmatic and cultural/normative contexts of joint action, and communicative and narrative practices provide an alternative to standard theory of mind accounts.
Bu çalışmada, otizm spektrum bozukluğu (OSB) olan çocuklarda niyeti anlama yeterlikleri ile iletişim işlevleri, iletişim davranışları ve katılım becerileri arasındaki ilişkilerin incelemesi amaçlanmıştır. Araştırmanın çalışma grubu, amaçlı örnekleme yöntemi ile belirlenmiş olan ve yaşları 23-59 ay arasında değişen 30 OSB tanılı çocuktan oluşmaktadır. Çalışmaya dahil edilen çocukların aileleri tarafından demografik bilgi formu, OSB tanılarının doğrulanması amacıyla ise çocukların gözlemlenmesi ve öğretmenlerle görüşülerek Çocukluk Otizmi Derecelendirme Ölçeği (ÇODÖ) doldurulmuştur. Çalışmanın ilk aşamasında çocukların ebeveynleri ile etkileşimlerinin gözlemlenmesini amacıyla içerisinde çeşitli oyun sahneleri bulunan İletişimsel Oyun Protokolü (İOP) uygulanmıştır. İlgili sahnelerdeki ebeveyn çocuk etkileşimleri gözlemlenerek İletişimsel Davranışlar Gözlem Formu (İDGF) ve İletişimsel Oyun Protokolü Katılım Düzeyi Formu (İOPKDF) doldurulmuştur. Son aşamada ise OSB olan çocukların niyeti anlama yeterliklerini değerlendirmek amacıyla geliştirilmiş olan işlemler uygulanmış ve bu işlemler, Niyeti Anlama Düzeyi Değerlendirme Formu (NADDF) kullanılarak puanlanmıştır. İlgili değerlendirme araçlarından toplanan tüm veriler SPSS paket programına girilerek analiz edilmiştir. Araştırma kapsamında; a) niyeti anlama ile otizmin derecesi arasındaki ilişkiler, b) niyeti anlama ile iletişim işlevlerinden davranış düzenleme ve ortak dikkat arasındaki ilişkiler, c) niyeti anlama ile bakış, ses, jest, sözcük ve bakış-jest-ses birleşimleri arasındaki ilişkiler ve d) niyeti anlama ile destekli ortak katılım, koordineli ortak katılım ve sembol içeren ortak katılım arasında olan ilişkiler incelenmiştir. Analizlerde Pearson momentler çarpımı korelasyon katsayısı kullanılmıştır. Analiz sonuçlarından elde edilen bulgulara göre, ilk araştırma sorusuna yönelik olarak OSB olan çocukların niyeti anlama yeterlikleri ile otizm dereceleri arasında negatif yönlü bir ilişki olduğu bulunmuştur. İkinci araştırma sorusuna yönelik olarak niyeti anlama yeterlikleri ile iletişim işlevlerinden ortak dikkat arasında pozitif yönlü bir ilişki olduğu görülürken niyeti anlama yeterlikleri ile iletişim işlevlerinden davranış düzenleme arasında anlamlı bir ilişkiye rastlanmamıştır. Üçüncü araştırma sorusuna yönelik olarak niyeti anlama yeterlikleri ile iletişim davranışlarından bakışlar, sözcükler ve bakış-jest-ses birleşimleri arasında pozitif yönlü bir ilişki olduğu, niyeti anlama yeterlikleri ile iletişim davranışlarından sesler ve jestler arasında anlamlı bir ilişki olmadığı sonucu elde edilmiştir. Son araştırma sorusuna yönelik olarak ise niyeti anlama yeterlikleri ile koordineli ortak katılım ve sembol içeren ortak katılım performansları arasında pozitif yönlü bir ilişki olduğu sonucu elde edilirken niyeti anlama yeterlikleri ile destekli ortak katılım performansları arasında anlamlı bir ilişki olmadığı sonucu elde edilmiştir. / This study aimed to examine the relationships between the understanding intentions and communication functions, communication behaviors, and engagement skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The study group consisted of 30 children with ASD, aged between 23-59 months, selected by purposive sampling method. A demographic information form was filled in by the parent of the children included in the study, and the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) was filled in by teachers of participants in order to confirm the diagnosis of ASD. Research data were collected with children whose ASD diagnoses were confirmed and who met the inclusion criteria. In the first stage of the study, the Communication Play Protocol (CPP), in which children are involved with their parents, was applied. There are play scenes in the protocol that include parent-child interaction. Communicative Behaviors Observation Form and Communication Play Protocol Engagement Level Form were completed through parent-child interactions observed from the relevant scenes. In the last stage, Understanding Intention Level Assessment Form was used to assess the intention understanding skills of children with ASD. All data collected from the relevant tools were analyzed by using SPSS package program. In the scope of the research; a) the relationships between understanding intentions and the severity of autism; b) the relationships between understanding intentions, and behavior regulation and joint attention as functions of communication behavior; c) the relationships between understanding intentions and the gaze, voice, gesture, word and gaze-gesture-voice combination; and d) the relationships between understanding intentions and supported joint engagement, coordinated joint engagement and symbol-infused joint engagement were examined. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient was used in the analyses. According to the findings obtained from the analysis, for the first research question, it was found that there was a negative correlation between the ability to understand intentions of children with ASD and autism severity. For the second research question it was found that there was a positive relationship between the ability to understand intentions and joint attention as a communication function, while no significant relationship was found between the ability to understand intentions and behavior regulation as a communication function. For the third research question, it was determined that there was a positive relationship between the ability to understand intentions and communication behaviors such as gaze, words and gaze-gesture-sound combinations; but there was no significant relationship between ability to understand intentions and gestures. For the last research question it was found that there was a positive relationship between the ability to understand intentions and the performances of coordinated joint engagement and symbol-infused joint engagement, while there was no significant relationship between ability to understanding intention and supported joint engagement performances.
The present article proposes that the integration of the capacity to comprehend communicative intentions with hierarchical segmentation skills comprises the contribution from tool-making pedagogical interactions to the origins of the hierarchical character of language. The article also hypothesizes about which kind of representations language is mapped to, following Mandler's (1991) idea that language is not mapped directly to the “continuously varying physical parameters of the movement”, but to a “conceptual summary” of events. It is predicted that the inference of intentions – either communicative intentions or non-communicative ones – would result in peaks of brain activity in common brain areas whose functioning such inference processes would depend on.
The Phenomenological Mind, Third Edition, introduces fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. One of the outstanding books in the field, now translated into eight languages, this highly regarded exploration of phenomenology from a topic-driven standpoint examines the following key questions and issues:
• what is phenomenology?
• phenomenology and the cognitive sciences
• consciousness and self-consciousness
• time and consciousness
• intentionality and perception
• the embodied mind
• action
• knowledge of other minds
• situated and extended minds
• phenomenology and personal identity.
This third edition has been revised and updated throughout. The chapter on phenomenological methodologies has been significantly expanded to cover qualitative research, and there are new sections discussing important, recent research on topics such as critical phenomenology, imagination, social cognition, race and gender, collective intentionality, and selfhood.
Children learning a verb may benefit from hearing it across situations . At the same time, in everyday contexts, situations in which a verb is heard will be interrupted by distracting events. Using Structural Alignment theory as a framework, Study 1 asks whether children can learn a verb when irrelevant, interleaved events are present. Two½- and 3½-year-old children saw dynamic events and were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions (differing in orders of events) or one of two control conditions. They extended the verbs in the experimental conditions, and not the control conditions. Three ½-year-olds were more successful than 2½-year-olds, though the younger children could extend verbs. A more difficult task is segmenting dynamic action into subevents that could be relevant for a verb (e.g., finding “chopping” in a cooking scene). In Study 2, 2½-, 3½-, and 4½-year-old children were assigned to experimental conditions in which relevant events flowed into irrelevant events (or vice versa) or to a control. Two½-year-olds failed to extend the verbs at test, differing from the older children; children in experimental conditions extended the verbs while children in the control condition did not. Altogether, these results show children can ignore irrelevant events (and subevents), and extend new verbs by 3½ years. Results are important to understand learning in everyday contexts in which verbs are heard in varied situations over time.
The present article proposes that the language production difficulties of Broca's aphasics may be explained by damage to the brain action planning mechanism. More precisely, the impairment to the ability for performing what Koechlin and Jubaul (2006) called the “successive selection of subordinate segments that constitute” “hierarchically higher action plans” would hamper the capacity to hierarchically combine ideas and communicative goals in the context of language production. It is also proposed how such a hypothesis could be tested by using already existent cognitive tasks in combination to traditional treatments of aphasia. The hypothesis may be framed as an attempt to give an application for the body of knowledge about the connections between language and action as well as to collect more evidence on the matter – evidence which could potentially be of fundamental importance for the field of study concerned and for the elaboration of new rehabilitation programs.
Context • Challenges by embodied, enactive, extended and ecological approaches to cognition have provided good reasons to shift away from neurocentric theories. > Problem • Classic cognitivist accounts tend towards internalism, representationalism and methodological individualism. Such accounts not only picture the brain as the central and almost exclusive mechanism of cognition, they also conceive of brain function in terms that ignore the dynamical relations among brain, body and environment. > Method • I review four areas of research (perception, action/ agency, self, social cognition) where enactivist accounts have shown alternative ways of thinking about the brain. > Results • Taken together, such analyses form a comprehensive alternative to the classic conceptions of cognitivist, computational neuroscience. > I mplications • Such considerations motivate the need to re-think our understanding of how the brain itself works. They suggest that the best explanation of brain function may be found in the mixed vocabularies of embodied and situated cognition, developmental psychology, ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory, applied linguistics, the theory of affordances and material engagement, rather than the narrow vocabulary of computational neuroscience. > C onstructivist content • This account is consistent with an enactivist-constructivist approach to cognition.
In this chapter, after reviewing some of the traditional ToM models of social cognition, I outline an alternative model on the basis of evidence from developmental psychology and phenomenology. In this alternative model, embodied, second-person interaction plays a central (although not an exclusive) role in our ability to understand other people. Finally, I discuss a recent development of simulation theory (ST) that champions an embodied simulationist approach.
The Handbook of Cognitive Science provides an overview of recent developments in cognition research, relying upon non-classical approaches. Cognition is explained as the continuous interplay between brain, body, and environment, without relying on classical notions of computations and representation to explain cognition. The handbook serves as a valuable companion for readers interested in foundational aspects of cognitive science, and neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. The handbook begins with an introduction to embodied cognitive science, and then breaks up the chapters into separate sections on conceptual issues, formal approaches, embodiment in perception and action, embodiment from an artificial perspective, embodied meaning, and emotion and consciousness. Contributors to the book represent research overviews from around the globe including the US, UK, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/tellingstories.html
The standard and dominant approaches to social cognition rarely emphasize intersubjective interaction, and even when they do mention interaction they frame the problem in terms of two minds that have to communicate across the seemingly thin air of an unbridgeable gap. From this viewpoint, interaction is not a solution but simply an another way to state the problem of other minds. On standard accounts of theory of mind (ToM) this gap between minds is bridged by some kind of cognitive processes in one mind providing the means to infer what is going on in the mind of the other, since the mind of the other is imperceptible. What one needs to bridge this gap is either theory (folk psychology), or simulation, or a combination of theory and simulation that will permit an inferential form of mind-reading or “mentalizing.” This chapter, after reviewing some of the traditional ToM models of social cognition, outlines an alternative model on the basis of evidence from developmental psychology and phenomenology. In this alternative model, embodied, second-person interaction plays a central (although not an exclusive) role in our ability to understand other people. Finally, the chapter discusses a recent development of simulation theory (ST) that champions an embodied simulationist approach. Traditional ToM accounts make little mention of how the body might fit into the process of understanding others.
This chapter examines how children's cognitive, social, and linguistic abilities interact to enable them to analyze action in events and learn novel verbs. It argues that "infants not only are competent in discriminating human actions and object motion but also understand that many different agents are capable of performing the same actions by the beginning of the second year." However, these achievements are insufficient for verb learning and extension because toddlers must become aware of the intentions of the actor. Verb learning and extension first occur based on a superficial perceptual analysis of how the action looks, followed by learning and extension based more on what the actor intends to do.
I evaluate several attempts to integrate standard theories of social cognition, either theory theory or simulation theory, with aspects of interaction theory, and especially with the concept of direct social perception. I refer to these as new hybrid theories of social cognition. One of the new hybrids accomplishes the integration only by weakening the concept of mindreading or by understanding mindreading as targeting the shared situation rather than the other's mental states. Hybrids that attempt to accommodate the idea of direct perception of mental states grant a phenomenological directness only by maintaining tacit (theory-based) inferences on the subpersonal level. If such inferential processes are thought to be extra-perceptual, then perception is neither sufficient nor direct for an understanding of intentions and emotions. Moreover, insistence on top-down inferential processes trades off against the possibility of plasticity in the perceptual system itself. I suggest that a better model than a hybrid theory would be a pluralist one. A pluralist approach to social cognition would treat theoretical inference, simulation, direct perception, interactive skills, etc. as different strategies. The real challenge is to work out a pluralist account of subpersonal processes.
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Automatic recognition of human activities and behaviors is still a challenging problem for many reasons, including limited accuracy of the data acquired by sensing devices, high variability of human behaviors, and gap between visual appearance and scene semantics. Symbolic approaches can significantly simplify the analysis and turn raw data into chains of meaningful patterns. This allows getting rid of most of the clutter produced by low-level processing operations, embedding significant contextual information into the data, as well as using simple syntactic approaches to perform the matching between incoming sequences and models. We propose a symbolic approach to learn and detect complex activities through the sequences of atomic actions. Compared to previous methods based on context-free grammars, we introduce several important novelties, such as the capability to learn actions based on both positive and negative samples, the possibility of efficiently retraining the system in the presence of misclassified or unrecognized events, and the use of a parsing procedure that allows correct detection of the activities also when they are concatenated and/or nested one with each other. An experimental validation on three datasets with different characteristics demonstrates the robustness of the approach in classifying complex human behaviors. (C) 2014 SPIE and IS&T
To survive in complex social communities humans have evolved and develop from birth a remarkable set of psychological tools that range from fundamental concepts to simple processes and complex inferences. This toolbox contains abstract concepts; processes of gaze following, automatic empathy, mimicry, and joint attention; and increasingly complex functions of imaginative simulation and mental state inference. These tools belong together not because they form a module or are implemented in the same brain areas; what unites them is their responsiveness to the social environment with its challenges of ambulant intentional agents - minded, intelligent, and unique individuals. This chapter discusses extant knowledge on each social-cognitive tool. Social living demands the use of all of these tools, and they in turn enable communication, relationships, and culture. The current evidence base suggests considerable universality of these social-cognitive tools, though research has also documented variations in their relative use. No less universal than this bright side of social cognition is the dark side that includes stereotyping, prejudice, and hostile intergroup perception. However, to triumph over this darker side, humans can only nurture their capacities to be cognitively engaged and emotionally moved by others, to appreciate and simulate their distinct mental states, and infer as best they can their values and character.
There has been a long-standing interest in the putative roles that various so-called ‘theory of mind’abilities might play in enabling us to understand and enjoy narratives. Of late, as our understanding of the complexity and diversity of everyday psychological capacities has become more nuanced and variegated, new possibilities have been articulated: (i) that our capacity for a sophisticated, everyday understanding of actions in terms of reason (our folk psychology) may itself be best characterized as a kind of narrative practice and (ii) that acquiring the capacity for supplying and digesting reasons explanations might (at least normally) depend upon having a special training with narratives. This introductory paper to the volume situates the claims of those who support the narrative approach to folk psychology against the backdrop of some traditional and new thinking about intersubjectivity, social cognition and ‘theory of mind’ abilities. Special emphasis is laid on the different reasons for being interested in these claims about narrative practice and folk psychology in light of various empirical and philosophical agendas.
It used to be thought that folk psychology is the only game in town. Focusing merely on what people do will not allow you to predict what they are likely to do next. For that, you must consider their beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Recent evidence from developmental psychology and fMRI studies indicates that this conclusion was premature. We parse motion in an environment as behavior of a particular type, and behavior thus construed can feature in systematizations that we know. Building on the view that folk psychological knowledge is knowledge of theoretical models, I argue that social knowledge is best understood as lying on a continuum between behavioral and full-blown psychological models. Between the two extremes, we have what I call social models. Social models represent social structures in terms of their overall purpose and circumscribe individuals' roles within them. These models help us predict what others will do or plan what we should do without providing information about what agents think or want. Thinking about social knowledge this way gives us a more nuanced picture of what capacities are engaged in social planning and interaction, and gives us a better tool with which to think about the social knowledge of animals and young children.
In the paper, I present Christopher Gauker's critique of the view that we talk to each other as a way to make ourselves understood (the received view of linguistic communication) and his alternative theory. I show that both his critique and his alternative fail, and defend the received view of linguistic communication.
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