[Coggroup] "The observer’s grounding problem in human-robot interaction" (Tom Ziemke, Sweden) Zoom Thursday 10:30am
The observer’s grounding problem in human-robot interaction
Tom Ziemke Computer and Information Department, Linköping University, Sweden
UQÀM ISC DIC CRIA Cognitive Informatics Seminar /Séminaire en informatique cognitive
Thursday, November 17 10:30 am ZOOM: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/88481835073 Abstract: People commonly attribute intentional mental states, such as beliefs and goals, to robots (Thellman et al., 2022; Ziemke, 2020). In a recent paper we formulated the perceptual belief attribution problem (Thellman & Ziemke, 2021): How can people interacting with robots understand what they know about the shared physical environment without knowing much about those robots’ sensors, perception, memory, etc.? In this talk I’ll focus on the observer’s grounding problem, which is the other side of the same coin, i.e., the fact that in interaction with a robot people tend to make anthropomorphic, folk-psychological attributions, based on their own grounding rather than the robot’s
[Tom ZIEMKE | Professor | PhD | Linköping University, Linköping | LiU | Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA)]Bio: Tom Ziemke is Professor of Cognitive Systems at Linkoping University, Sweden. His main research interests are in situated/embodied cognition and social interaction, with a current focus on people’s interaction with different types of autonomous technologies, ranging from social robots to automated vehicles. A long-standing research interest is the relation between cognition and computation – and the resulting (mis-) conceptions of AI among both researchers and the general public
References: Understanding robots https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abe2987 Explainability in Social Robotics https://doi.org/10.1145/3461781 Mental State Attribution to Robots https://doi.org/10.1145/3526112
Neural Basis of Empathy and Prosociality Across Species
Christian Keysers & Valeria Gazzola Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, KNAW, Amsterdam, NL Dept of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NL
UQÀM ISC DIC CRIA Séminaire en informatique cognitive/Cognitive Informatics Seminar
Thursday, 10:30 am November 24, 2022 Zoom: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/88481835073
Abstract: How does our brain make us feel what others feel? How does it motivate us to help others? In humans, the somatosensory, insular and cingulate cortices are activated both when feeling pain and while witnessing others feeling pain. Altering brain activity in these brain regions alters emotional contagion and prosociality. In humans, activity in the somatosensory cortex of observers predicts helping; perturbing that activity perturbs helping. Single cell recordings in rats show that neurons involved in an animal’s own pain become reactivated while the animal witnesses another animal in pain. This occurs in area 24, the rodent homologue of the anterior cingulate cortex in which humans show activation while witnessing the pain of others. This region plays a causal role in sharing the emotions of others. The data show the existence of an evolutionarily conserved mechanism that maps the pain of others onto an observer’s own pain circuitry and triggers emotional contagion. When a rat can choose between a lever that produces food for herself, and one that produces food for herself but triggers a foot-shock to another rat, she learns to avoid the shock-lever. Deactivating area 24 abolishes this harm aversion, suggesting a causal link between emotional contagion and helping. These experiments suggest that emotion-sharing is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism that allows humans and other animals to better prepare for unseen dangers by tuning into the state of those that have already detected them. This selfishly beneficial mechanism can promote prosociality, but it does so in fewer animals and situations than does the emotional contagion itself. I will close with evidence that humans can voluntarily regulate how strongly they recruit their empathy, allowing us to leverage this ability when it is most helpful, and to downregulate it when it would be harmful.
Christian Keysers studied how mirror neurons process the actions of others with Giacomo Rizzolatti. With Valeria Gazzola, he built the Social Brain Lab, Groningen, where their human fMRI work showed that participants activate their own actions, emotions and sensations while they witness those of others; this neural marker of empathy is reduced in patients with psychopathy. Since 2010, he leads the comparative social neuroscience effort in the Social Brain Lab, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam where he investigates the neural basis of empathy and prosociality across species:
Keysers, C. (2011). The empathic brain https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.05.005
Keysers, C., & Gazzola, V. (2014). Hebbian learning and predictive mirror neurons for actions, sensations and emotions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1644), 20130175. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4006178/
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Stevan R. Harnad, Dr.