Inferring Learners' Knowledge From Their Actions

Watching another person take actions to complete a goal and making inferences about that person's knowledge is a relatively natural task for people. This ability can be especially important in educational settings, where the inferences can be used for assessment, diagnosing misconceptions, and providing informative feedback. In this paper, we develop a general framework for automatically making such inferences based on observed actions; this framework is particularly relevant for inferring student knowledge in educational games and other interactive virtual environments. Our approach relies on modeling action planning: We formalize the problem as a Markov decision process in which one must choose what actions to take to complete a goal, where choices will be dependent on one's beliefs about how actions affect the environment. We use a variation of inverse reinforcement learning to infer these beliefs. Through two lab experiments, we show that this model can recover people's beliefs in a simple environment, with accuracy comparable to that of human observers. We then demonstrate that the model can be used to provide real‐time feedback and to model data from an existing educational game.     

动允直接知觉的共鸣原理

传统认知理论认为我们只能间接知觉动允,而生态认知心理学则认为对动允的知觉是个体与环境信息直接共鸣的过程。生态认知心理学首先判定动允并不是存在于我们头脑中的认识,而是实际存在于个体-环境系统中的事实,对动允的直接知觉就是对动允的检测而非推测,是对动允信息的拾取而非对记忆内容的提取。这种直接知觉表现为身体的相关动作机制（动作神经元、肌肉组织等）与环境中动允信息的共鸣。进化与学习在共鸣的形成与发展中具有重要作用。     

Sociomotor action control

Our actions affect the behavior of other people in predictable ways. In the present article, we describe a theoretical framework for action control in social contexts that we call sociomotor action control. This framework addresses how human agents plan and initiate movements that trigger responses from other people, and we propose that humans represent and control such actions literally in terms of the body movements they consistently evoke from observers. We review evidence for this approach and discuss commonalities and differences to related fields such as joint action, intention understanding, imitation, and interpersonal power. The sociomotor framework highlights a range of open questions pertaining to how representations of other persons’ actions are linked to one’s own motor activity, how specifically they contribute to action initiation, and how they affect the way we perceive the actions of others.     

Visual space perception and action: Introductory remarks

Vision evolved from the vital necessity to act in a dynamic environment. Following this view it is clear that perceptual processes and action planning are much more interlocked than is evident at first sight. This is especially evident in visual space perception; actions are performed in space and are guided and controlled by objects in spatial positions. Here we shortly introduce the three research camps dealing with the relationship between space perception and action: the ecological camp, the two‐visual‐systems camp, and the constructivist camp. We show that these camps emphasize and open different theoretical and empirical perspectives, but that they can be seen to complement each other. We end with an overview of the papers in this special issue.     

Evaluations of pro-environmental behaviors by 7-month-old infants

Environmental morality is the foundation of a sustainable future, yet its ontogenetic origin remains unknown. In the present study, we asked whether 7-month-olds have a sense of ‘environmental morality’. Infants’ evaluations of two pro-environmental actions were assessed in both visual and reaching preferential tasks. In Experiment 1, the overt behavior of protecting (i.e., collecting artificial objects spread on a lawn) was compared with the action of harming the environment (i.e., by disregarding the objects). In Experiment 2, the covert behavior of protecting the environment (i.e., maintaining artificial objects inside a container) was compared with the action of harming the environment (i.e., littering the artificial objects on a lawn). The results showed infants’ reaching preference for the agent who performed overt pro-environmental actions (Experiment 1), and no preference for the agent who performed covert pro-environmental actions (Experiment 2). These findings reveal a rudimentary ecological sense and suggest that infants require different abilities to evaluate overt impact-oriented and covert intend-oriented pro-environmental behaviors.     

Community Gardening: A Parsimonious Path to Individual, Community, and Environmental Resilience

The goal of this paper is to introduce community gardening as a promising method of furthering well-being and resilience on multiple levels: individual, social group, and natural environment. We examine empirical evidence for the benefits of gardening, and we advocate the development and testing of social ecological models of community resilience through examination of the impact of community gardens, especially in urban areas. The definition of community is extended beyond human social ties to include connections with other species and the earth itself, what Berry (1988) has called an Earth community. We discuss the potential contribution of an extensive network of community gardens to easing the global climate change crisis and address the role of community psychologists in community gardening research and policy-oriented action.     

A model for production, perception, and acquisition of actions in face-to-face communication

The concept of action as basic motor control unit for goal-directed movement behavior has been used primarily for private or non-communicative actions like walking, reaching, or grasping. In this paper, literature is reviewed indicating that this concept can also be used in all domains of face-to-face communication like speech, co-verbal facial expression, and co-verbal gesturing. Three domain-specific types of actions, i.e. speech actions, facial actions, and hand-arm actions, are defined in this paper and a model is proposed that elucidates the underlying biological mechanisms of action production, action perception, and action acquisition in all domains of face-to-face communication. This model can be used as theoretical framework for empirical analysis or simulation with embodied conversational agents, and thus for advanced human–computer interaction technologies.     

论情绪的生态理性

生态理性强调环境对人的塑造作用,强调人在适应环境过程中获得的功能作用.该文在全面解读生态理性内涵的基础上,从两个方面寻找证据论证情绪具有生态理性：（1）情绪是环境自然塑造的结果,携带着丰富的环境信息;（2）情绪的功能反映环境结构,自动调节人类行为。在上述论证的基础上,我们尝试提出情绪影响个体行为的工作机制,并在一定范围内分析了不良情绪与生态理性之间的关系。     

身体活动的双系统理论:一种强化学习的视角

以理性决策为基础的锻炼行为理论被认为是理解身体活动的主导体系, 它提供了与身体活动相关的认知构念作为有价值的信息。基于社会生态模型设计的行为干预措施, 因表现出了更好的效果而备受关注。近期研究表明, 积极的运动认知和当前体育环境都没能很好地促进个人锻炼习惯的养成, 因此有必要探索新的理论体系来阐明个人锻炼习惯的形成机制。解释身体活动的最新体系是双系统理论, 由于其考虑了身体活动的无意识和快乐决定因素, 有望提供一个更广泛的动机视角。一方面, 多个有代表性的身体活动双系统模型, 从简单的自发路径, 到情境线索与锻炼习惯, 再到突出自动情感评价作用的复杂概念模型, 阐明了系统1的构建, 结合锻炼行为理论所关注的系统2, 为模型的构建提供了依据。另一方面, 通过对双系统的竞争、协调和层级控制原则的分析, 为模型的控制提供了建议。经典的强化学习框架解释了双系统模型的构建与控制原则:在模型的构建方面, 无模型与基于模型的强化学习分别表示系统1和系统2。在模型的控制方面, Dyna协作架构与分层强化学习, 为身体活动可能是一种相互协作、分层执行的复杂行动组合提供了合理解释。最后提出强化学习视角下锻炼者-体育环境的互动模式, 试图从一个全新的角度探讨锻炼行为。     

ECOLOGICAL SAINTS: ADOPTING A GREEN GAZE OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF SAINT MARGUERITE BOURGEOYS

During this time of ecological crisis, spiritual guides are needed to provide inspiration and impel action. In the Roman Catholic tradition, saints act as role models and are associated with particular causes, locations, or professions. Who, then, are the ecological saints, whose witness can inspire hope and action in support of the environment? This article explores that question in two ways. First the writings and accounts of saints who are traditionally connected to the environment are examined to produce six indicators of the beliefs, characteristics, and actions of ecological saints. Second, a green gaze is applied to Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys, a seventeenth-century educator who lived in what would become Montreal, Canada, by comparing her writings and accounts of her life to the six indicators of an ecological saint. Identifying more ecological saints can promote environmental responsibility, and the six indicators of an ecological saint can be the lens through which beloved saints are re-examined.     

Faster Teaching via POMDP Planning

Human and automated tutors attempt to choose pedagogical activities that will maximize student learning, informed by their estimates of the student's current knowledge. There has been substantial research on tracking and modeling student learning, but significantly less attention on how to plan teaching actions and how the assumed student model impacts the resulting plans. We frame the problem of optimally selecting teaching actions using a decision‐theoretic approach and show how to formulate teaching as a partially observable Markov decision process planning problem. This framework makes it possible to explore how different assumptions about student learning and behavior should affect the selection of teaching actions. We consider how to apply this framework to concept learning problems, and we present approximate methods for finding optimal teaching actions, given the large state and action spaces that arise in teaching. Through simulations and behavioral experiments, we explore the consequences of choosing teacher actions under different assumed student models. In two concept‐learning tasks, we show that this technique can accelerate learning relative to baseline performance.     

走进大自然：自然体验及其积极效应

自然体验是指个体通过各种感官感知自然或与源于自然界的刺激互动。学者通常使用问卷测量法、自然指标法或实验操纵法来量化操纵人们的自然体验,发现接触自然可以在心理、生理和行为等方面产生积极效应。且这些积极效应会受到物理环境、个体以及社会因素的影响。未来应突破“城市——自然”二元对立思想并加强积极效应的纵深研究;拓展研究群体;促进相关研究成果的实际应用。     

Action understanding as inverse planning

Humans are adept at inferring the mental states underlying other agents’ actions, such as goals, beliefs, desires, emotions and other thoughts. We propose a computational framework based on Bayesian inverse planning for modeling human action understanding. The framework represents an intuitive theory of intentional agents’ behavior based on the principle of rationality: the expectation that agents will plan approximately rationally to achieve their goals, given their beliefs about the world. The mental states that caused an agent’s behavior are inferred by inverting this model of rational planning using Bayesian inference, integrating the likelihood of the observed actions with the prior over mental states. This approach formalizes in precise probabilistic terms the essence of previous qualitative approaches to action understanding based on an “intentional stance” [Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] or a “teleological stance” [Gergely, G., Nádasdy, Z., Csibra, G., & Biró, S. (1995). Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition, 56, 165-193]. In three psychophysical experiments using animated stimuli of agents moving in simple mazes, we assess how well different inverse planning models based on different goal priors can predict human goal inferences. The results provide quantitative evidence for an approximately rational inference mechanism in human goal inference within our simplified stimulus paradigm, and for the flexible nature of goal representations that human observers can adopt. We discuss the implications of our experimental results for human action understanding in real-world contexts, and suggest how our framework might be extended to capture other kinds of mental state inferences, such as inferences about beliefs, or inferring whether an entity is an intentional agent.     

The Ecology of Human-Machine Systems I: Introduction

A symposium entitled, The Ecology of Human-Machine Systems, was held at the Fifth International Conference on Event Perception and Action. This sympo- sium examined the challenges that human-machine systems hold for an ecological approach to perception, cognition, and action and the promises that an ecological approach holds for problems that traditionally have been the domain of human factors psychology. The presenters from this symposium have been invited to submit articles about an applied ecological psychology to Ecological Psychology. Articles that are accepted for publication will be appearing in future issues of this journal. It is hoped that these articles will stimulate productive interaction between ecological and human factors psychology. This correspondence reflects the natural affinity between ecological and human factors psychology. It examines some of the issues that distinguish basic and applied research. It also considers the contribution that ecological physics can make for improving tradi- tional approaches to task analysis. Finally, this article speculates about emerging areas of research in which the ecological approach may contribute to the design of human-machine systems.     

When do we simulate non-human agents? Dissociating communicative and non-communicative actions

There is strong evidence that we automatically simulate observed behavior in our motor system. Previous research suggests that this simulation process depends on whether we observe a human or a non-human agent. Measuring a motor priming effect, this study investigated the question of whether agent-sensitivity of motor simulation depends on the specific action observed. Participants saw pictures depicting end positions of different actions on a screen. All postures featured either a human or non-human agent. Participants had to produce the matching action with their left or right hand depending on the hand presented on the screen. Three different actions were displayed: a communicative action (emblem), a transitive (goal-directed) action and an intransitive action. We found motor priming effects of similar size for human and non-human agents for transitive and intransitive actions. However, the motor priming effect for communicative actions was present for the human agent, but absent for the non-human agent. These findings suggest that biological tuning of motor simulation is highly action-selective and depends on whether the observed behavior appears to be driven by a reasonable goal.     

The dynamics of perception and action

How might one account for the organization in behavior without attributing it to an internal control structure? The present article develops a theoretical framework called behavioral dynamics that integrates an information-based approach to perception with a dynamical systems approach to action. For a given task, the agent and its environment are treated as a pair of dynamical systems that are coupled mechanically and informationally. Their interactions give rise to the behavioral dynamics, a vector field with attractors that correspond to stable task solutions, repellers that correspond to avoided states, and bifurcations that correspond to behavioral transitions. The framework is used to develop theories of several tasks in which a human agent interacts with the physical environment, including bouncing a ball on a racquet, balancing an object, braking a vehicle, and guiding locomotion. Stable, adaptive behavior emerges from the dynamics of the interaction between a structured environment and an agent with simple control laws, under physical and informational constraints.     

A sustainable future for humanity? How can psychology help?

The sustainability of human life on Earth in the future is in danger. Human actions are producing many harmful and possibly irreversible changes to the environmental conditions that support life on Earth. This article summarizes major threats to Earth's environment, including global warming, ozone layer destruction, exhaustion of fisheries and agricultural land, and widespread exposure to toxic chemicals. Unless they are overcome, these changes will make human life increasingly miserable and eventually may make Earth nearly uninhabitable for future generations. These threats are caused by patterns of human behavior, particularly over-population and over-consumption. Urgent changes to human lifestyles and cultural practices are required for the world to escape ecological disaster, and psychologists should lead the way in helping people adopt sustainable patterns of living. Specific steps toward that goal are proposed in this and the following four articles.     

Staying on or getting off the sidewalk? Testing the Mehrabian-Russell Model on pedestrian behavior

Social and environmental psychology provide a variety of models based on which to understand how built environments can elicit people’s behavioral responses. The Mehrabian-Russell model (MRM), initially presented in 1974, provides a framework that explains avoid–approach behavior towards a place based on a primary emotional response (PER) and affective states elicited by the perceived stimuli from the environment. However, despite the potential applications of the MRM in travel behavior studies, traditional models (e.g., discrete choice models and integrated choice latent variable) do not incorporate this specific psychological process that converts environmental stimuli into behavioral responses. Hence, this paper aims to test the applicability of MRM to urban sidewalks. To fulfill this objective, we developed a two-level structural equation model using latent variables (LV) identified from a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) based on 1056 in-person surveys on 30 different sidewalks in Bogotá, Colombia. We then evaluated the effect of the PER on declared avoidance as a proxy of behavioral intention. The CFA uncovered three LV equivalent to the three affective dimensions of the MRM—arousal, pleasure, and dominance—followed by a fourth LV, representing the PER, which explains the three previous LVs. This confirms the applicability of these kinds of psychological and environmental models in pedestrian behavior evaluation. We found that PER can explain the declared intention of avoidance towards the sidewalk in an urban setting. Proving that this kind of model can explain the way in which the built environment can elicit pedestrians’ emotional responses and subsequent behaviors, provides information that can be used as input in travel behavior studies focusing on the promotion of active traveling and mode change.     

A Graph-Dynamic Perspective on Coordinative Structures,the Role of Affordance-Effectivity Relations in Action Selection,and the Self-Organization of Complex Activities

Meaningful parallels exist between the coordinative structures (CSs) involved in planning and controlling complex actions of the body (limbs, torso, head, face, eyes) in service of both mechanical (e.g., manipulation and/or transport of environmental objects) and social (e.g., inter-agent coordination) functions. While early treatments focused on CS state-dynamics and parameter-dynamics, attention has focused more recently on CS graph-dynamics. We describe a coordinative structure graph (CSG) perspective that brings affordances and effectivities into a dynamical systems framework in which a) task-specific perceptual and physical links are created between an agent's end-effectors and environmental objects/surfaces during the graph-dynamics of CSG assembly; and b) these dynamics embed the agent in his/her environmental context such that the agent+environment system functions as a higher-order task-specific unit. Additionally, we describe a 3-tuple formalism for CSs that govern simple, single actions; such 3-tuples are viewed as modular planning graphs that can self-assemble under a compositional graph-dynamics into multi-action chains or hierarchical structures, and that may inform future developments of CS-based action grammars.     

绿色还是享乐?参与环保活动对消费行为的影响

以往对于环保问题的研究主要关注如何促进人们更多从事环保行为,较少有研究涉及参与环保行为后会产生怎样的影响,而且这方面的研究也没有一个一致的结论。通过3个实验发现当绿色消费和享乐消费是竞争关系时,对于认为环境价值观重要的个体来说,无论参与环保活动是出于内在动机还是外在动机都会增强消费者的环保自我担当,促进绿色消费,而对于认为环境价值观不重要的个体来说,只有参与环保活动是出于内在动机的时候才会增加消费者环保目标进展的感知,促进享乐消费,出于外在动机参与环保活动并不会促进享乐消费。