A new methodological approach to nonverbal behavior analysis in cultural perspective

The measurement of human behavior is a complex task, both for psychologists and human sciences researchers and with respect to technology, since advanced and sophisticated instruments may have to be implemented to manage the plurality of variables involved. In this article, an observational study is presented in which a quantitative procedure, theexternal variables method (Duncan & Fiske, 1977), was integrated with a structural analysis (Magnusson, 1993, 2000) in order to detect the hidden organization of nonverbal behavior in Italian and Icelandic interactions. To this aim, Theme software was introduced and employed. The results showed that both the frequency and the typology of gestures deeply change as a function of culture. Moreover, a high number of patterns was detected in both Italian and Icelandic interactions: They appeared to be complex sequences in which a huge number of events were constantly happening and recurring. In this domain, Theme software provides a methodological progression from the quantitative to the structural approach.     

An algebra of human concept learning

An important element of learning from examples is the extraction of patterns and regularities from data. This paper investigates the structure of patterns in data defined over discrete features, i.e. features with two or more qualitatively distinct values. Any such pattern can be algebraically decomposed into a spectrum of component patterns, each of which is a simpler or more atomic “regularity.” Each component regularity involves a certain number of features, referred to as its degree. Regularities of lower degree represent simpler or more coarse patterns in the original pattern, while regularities of higher degree represent finer or more idiosyncratic patterns. The full spectral breakdown of a pattern into component regularities of minimal degree, referred to as its power series, expresses the original pattern in terms of the regular rules or patterns it obeys, amounting to a kind of “theory” of the pattern. The number of regularities at various degrees necessary to represent the pattern is tabulated in its power spectrum, which expresses how much of a pattern's structure can be explained by regularities of various levels of complexity. A weighted mean of the pattern's spectral power gives a useful numeric summary of its overall complexity, called its algebraic complexity. The basic theory of algebraic decomposition is extended in several ways, including algebraic accounts of the typicality of individual objects within concepts, and estimation of the power series from noisy data. Finally some relations between these algebraic quantities and empirical data are discussed.     

Metrical information load of lines and angles in line patterns

Summary Acute angles and long lines are more complex than obtuse angels and short lines. This source of complexity is called metrical information, for which a measure was proposed by Leeuwenberg (1982). According to this measure, the metrical information of a static pattern is specified as the sum of the mechanical impulses necessary to move an object according to this pattern. The perceptual relevance of this metrical load was tested in an experiment in which judged complexities were gathered for a number of simple line patterns.     

Data processing in music performance research: Using structural information to improve score-performance matching

In order to study aspects of music performance, one has to find correspondences between the performance data and a score. Locating the corresponding score note for every performance note, calledmatching, is therefore a common task. An algorithm that automates this procedure is called amatcher. Automated matching is difficult because performers make errors, performers use expressive timing, and scores are frequently underspecified. To find the best match, most matchers use information about pitch, temporal order, and the number of matched notes. We show that adding information about the musical structure of the score gives better results. However, we found that even this information was insufficient to identify some types of performance errors and that a definition of best match based only on the number of matched notes is sometimes problematic. We provide some suggestions about how to achieve greater improvements.     

Subitizing and its subprocesses

 When people are presented with small sets of elements such as dots they can very easily determine their number. This ability has been called subitizing. The present paper reports results from four experiments. The discussion focuses on the question whether one or two psychological processes have to be assumed for this task of subitizing. Taken together our results support the two-process theories. In particular, a distinction between a process of separation and a process of enumeration is suggested. Experiments 3 and 4 support the canonical pattern hypothesis. Canonical patterns are processed substantially faster than noncanonical patterns. Furthermore, if a complex pattern can be broken down into small canonical patterns, then participants follow a partition and add strategy. Accepted: 22 December 1999     

Brown

In Remarks on Colour Wittgenstein discusses a number of puzzling propositions about brown, e.g. that it cannot be pure and that there cannot be a brown light. He does not actually answer the questions he asks, and the status of his projected ‘logic of colour concepts’ remains unclear. I offer a real definition of brown from which the puzzle propositions follow logically. It is based on two experiments from Helmholtz. Brown is shown to be logically complex in the sense that the concept of brown can be ‘unpacked’ or resolved into simpler concepts. If my solutions to Wittgenstein's puzzles are the right ones, then science does bear upon the ‘logic of colour concepts’, and the contrast between logic and science which Wittgenstein sets up is a false one. At best it will appear as the contrast between the demands of logic and the demands of a particular kind of scientific theory and a particular mode of scientific theorizing. The solutions to the puzzles about brown are distinguished from psychological explanations, and the paper ends by suggesting what it was in his own doctrine that prevented Wittgenstein from answering the questions he had set himself.     

Data Smoothing: Prediction of Human Behavior, Detection of Behavioral Patterns, and Monitoring Treatment Effectiveness in Single-Subject Behavioral Studies

Data-smoothing can be particularly useful in predicting human behavior, detecting behavioral patterns, and monitoring treatment effectiveness in highly variable single-subject behavioral experiments that cannot be determined by only visual inspection of their graphs. Using an example from the applied behavior analytic literature, the use of moving-average and exponential data-smoothing aided the detection of the unique behavioral patterns of a child with autism across different treatments. Furthermore, the utility of the data-smoothing procedures to monitor and control the effectiveness of an intervention is discussed. The ease of their calculations suggest use of data-smoothing by behavior analysts whenever the effects of particular interventions are questionable.     

Auditory temporal pattern learning by songbirds using maximal stimulus diversity and minimal repetition

The sequential patterning of complex acoustic elements is a salient feature of bird song and other forms of vocal communication. For European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), a songbird species, individual vocal recognition is improved when the temporal organization of song components (called motifs) follows the normal patterns of each singer. This sensitivity to natural motif sequences may underlie observations that starlings can also learn more complex, unnatural motif patterns. Alternatively, it has been proposed that the apparent acquisition of abstract motif patterning rules instead reflects idiosyncrasies of the training conditions used in prior experiments. That is, that motif patterns are learned not by recognizing differences in temporal structures between patterns, but by identifying serendipitous features (e.g., acoustical cues) in the small sets of training and testing stimuli used. Here, we investigate this possibility, by asking whether starlings can learn to discriminate between two arbitrary motif patterns, when unique examples of each pattern are presented on every trial. Our results demonstrate that abstract motif patterning rules can be acquired from trial-unique stimuli and suggest that such training leads to better pattern generalization compared with training with much smaller stimulus subsets.     

A Logic For Inductive Probabilistic Reasoning

Inductive probabilistic reasoning is understood as the application of inference patterns that use statistical background information to assign (subjective) probabilities to single events. The simplest such inference pattern is direct inference: from “70% of As are Bs” and “a is an A” infer that a is a B with probability 0.7. Direct inference is generalized by Jeffrey’s rule and the principle of cross-entropy minimization. To adequately formalize inductive probabilistic reasoning is an interesting topic for artificial intelligence, as an autonomous system acting in a complex environment may have to base its actions on a probabilistic model of its environment, and the probabilities needed to form this model can often be obtained by combining statistical background information with particular observations made, i.e., by inductive probabilistic reasoning. In this paper a formal framework for inductive probabilistic reasoning is developed: syntactically it consists of an extension of the language of first-order predicate logic that allows to express statements about both statistical and subjective probabilities. Semantics for this representation language are developed that give rise to two distinct entailment relations: a relation ⊨ that models strict, probabilistically valid, inferences, and a relation that models inductive probabilistic inferences. The inductive entailment relation is obtained by implementing cross-entropy minimization in a preferred model semantics. A main objective of our approach is to ensure that for both entailment relations complete proof systems exist. This is achieved by allowing probability distributions in our semantic models that use non-standard probability values. A number of results are presented that show that in several important aspects the resulting logic behaves just like a logic based on real-valued probabilities alone.     

Dialogue-Games: Metacommunication structures for natural language interaction

Our studies of naturally occurring human dialogue have led to the recognition of a class of regularities which characterize impoltant aspects of communication. People appear to interact according to established patterns which span several turns in a dialogue and which recur frequently. These patterns appear to be organized around the goals which the dialogue serves for each participant. Many things which are said later in a dialogue can only be interpreted as pursuit of these goals, established by earlier dialogue. These patterns have been represented b) a set of knowledge structures called Dialogue-Games, capturing shared, conventional knowledge that people have about communication and how it can be used to achieve goals. A Dialogue-Game has Parameters, which represent those elements that vary across instances of a particular pattern-the particular dialogue participants and the content topic. The states of the world which must be in effect for a particular Dialogue-Game to be employed successfully are represented by Specifications of these Parameters. Finally, the expected sequence of intermediate states that occur during instances of a particular conventional pattern are represented by the Components of the corresponding Dialogue-Game. Representations for several Dialogue-Games are presented here, based on our analyses of different kinds of naturally occurring dialogue. A process model is discussed, showing Dialogue-Game identification, pursuit, and termination as part of the comprehension of dialogue utterances. This Dialogue-Game model captures some of the important functional aspects of language, especially indirect uses to achieve implicit communication.     

Ego Development and a General Model for Counseling and Psychotherapy

Swensen describes a general model within which various techniques of counseling and psychotherapy may be integrated. This model is based on Lewin's formula, B = f (P, E), that is, behavior is a function of the person and the environment. Therapists should assess both the personality of the client and the environment. Client assessment is based on the concept of ego development. The behavior of clients who are at simpler levels of ego development is determined largely by reward and punishment in the environment. As a consequence, professionals should direct therapy with these clients toward changing the reinforcement contingencies in the environment. On the other hand, behavior of clients at more complex levels of ego development is more self-controlled. Therefore, therapy with these clients should concentrate on self-directed and self-controlled change.     

A socially-based distributed self-organizing algorithm for holonic multi-agent systems: Case study in a task environment

Holonic multi-agent systems (HMASs) have recently attracted many researches in multi-agent systems community. Inspired from the multi-level and self-similar structures of social and biological system, holonic multi-agent systems have been widely used to model and solve complex real-world problems. The main concern in deploying HMASs is the problem of building the hierarchical holonic structure, called holarchy, and dynamically managing it during its lifetime. The way an HMAS is organized has a great impact on its applicability and performance. This paper proposes a self-organizing algorithm to build and manage the holoic structures in multi-agent systems. This algorithm is based on the local information of the agents about other agents they can communicate with. Using common social concepts, like skills, diversity, social exchange theory, and norms in definition of the algorithm, the outcomes of this research can be used in wide ranges of distributed applications. The proposed model is extensively tested in a task allocation problem; and its performance based on various design parameters is studied. Empirical results show that the proposed model properly increases the performance of the system in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.     

r p and other coefficients of pattern similarity

A pattern consists of fundaments and relations. Its similarity to other patterns can be expressed either in terms of relations alone—in which case a modified correlation coefficient,r _s , suffices—or in terms of fundaments and relations, where new coefficients,r _p andr' _p are required. The derivation of acoefficient of pattern similarity, r _p , is presented and its properties are investigated, both deductively and in terms of actual data on culture patterns.     

The measurement of visual attention in infants: a comparison of two methodologies

Twenty-four infants were tested at 8 and 12 weeks of age—12 at each age—to determine fixation times to three checkerboard patterns of equal area, a 2 × 2, 8 × 8, and 24 × 24. Each infant was tested twice, once with a single stimulus method of presentation and once with a paired-comparisons. Both methods were similar in depicting age and sex differences. The older infants looked longer at the more complex patterns while the female infants fixated complex patterns longer, relative to simpler patterns, than than did the males. However, the paired-comparisons method was superior in distinguishing between what McCall (1970) has called “blank looking” from meaningful perceptual-cognitive interaction with a stimulus. The data were interpreted as showing that because females are more able to process information from static stimuli, as suggested by McCall, they are ahead of their male age peers in their perceptual-cognitive development within this age range.     

Superstitious behavior in humans

Twenty undergraduate students were exposed to single response-independent schedules of reinforcer presentation, fixed-time or variable-time, each with values of 30 and 60 s. The reinforcer was a point on a counter accompanied by a red lamp and a brief buzzer. Three color signals were presented, without consistent relation to reinforcer or to the subjects' behavior. Three large levers were available, but the subjects were not asked to perform any particular behavior. Three of the 20 subjects developed persistent superstitious behavior. One engaged in a pattern of lever-pulling responses that consisted of long pulls after a few short pulls; the second touched many things in the experimental booth; the third showed biased responding called sensory superstition. However, most subjects did not show consistent superstitious behavior. Reinforcers can operate effectively on human behavior even in the absence of a response-reinforcer contingency and can, in some cases, shape stable superstitious patterns. However, superstitious behavior is not a consistent outcome of exposure of human subjects to response-independent reinforcer deliveries.     

“Prototypes” and “fuzziness” in the logic of concepts

Prototypes and fuzziness are regarded in this paper as fundamental phenomena in the inherent logic of concepts whose relationship, however, has not been sufficiently clarified. Therefore, modifications are proposed in the definition of both. Prototypes are defined as the elements possessing maximal degree of membership in the given category such thatthis membership has maximal cognitive efficiency in representing theelement. A modified fuzzy set (m-fuzzy set) is defined on aclass (possibly self-contradictory collection) such that its core (the collection of elements with full membership) is aset (self-consistent collection) comprising the finite set of the prototypes. In this scheme of recursive representation the possibility of contradictions, which has been proven to be inevitable in the logic of concepts, islocalized. Finally a related model of the brain's pattern recognition mechanism is briefly summarized.     

Causes,Conditions and Counterfactuals

The article deals with one particular problem created by the counterfactual analysis of causality à la Lewis, namely the context-sensitivity problem or, as I prefer to call it, the background condition problem. It appears that Lewis’ counterfactual definition of causality cannot distinguish between proper causes and mere causal conditions – i.e. factors necessary for the effect to occur, but commonly not seen as causally efficacious. The proposal is put forward to amend the Lewis definition with a condition, based on the notion of cotenability, which would eliminate the problem. It is shown that the corrected definition of causality leads to the transitivity of the causal relation. Possible objections to the proposed solution, involving the assumption of indeterminism and the preemption cases, are given a thorough consideration.     

Symmetry and selective attention: A dissociation between effortless perception and serial search

It is widely assumed that symmetry is an important visual primitive, probably encoded without the need for attention. Julesz’s (1981) definition ofeffortless perception, which states that any stimulus property perceived for exposure durations of 160 msec or less is detected preattentively, contributed greatly to this belief.Single pattern studies confirm that symmetry is detected within this limit. In the present study, however, Julesz’s operationalization is compared with themultiple pattern visual search task, to see whether symmetry as a wholistic property is detected in parallel. The results show that symmetry detection times are highly dependent on the number of distractor patterns. The findings are similar for dot patterns, wire polygons, solid block shapes, and simple parentheses. We conclude that symmetry detection per se requires selective attention, but that some related grouping or segmentation mechanism may operate preattentively.