Acquisition of social referencing via discrimination training in infants

This experiment investigated social referencing as a form of discriminative learning in which maternal facial expressions signaled the consequences of the infant's behavior in an ambiguous context. Eleven 4- and 5-month-old infants and their mothers participated in a discrimination-training procedure using an ABAB design. Different consequences followed infants' reaching toward an unfamiliar object depending on the particular maternal facial expression. During the training phases, a joyful facial expression signaled positive reinforcement for the infant reaching for an ambiguous object, whereas a fearful expression signaled aversive stimulation for the same response. Baseline and extinction conditions were implemented as controls. Mothers' expressions acquired control over infants' approach behavior for all participants. All participants ceased to show discriminated responding during the extinction phase. The results suggest that 4- and 5-month-old infants can learn social referencing via discrimination training.     

Relational Message Interpretations of Nonverbal Matching Behavior: An Application of the Social Meaning Model

Abstract

The social meaning model asserts that some nonverbal behaviors have consensually recognized relational meanings within a given social community. According to this perspective, the interpretations made by encoders, decoders, and 3rd-party observers of the same nonverbal behavior should be congruent. The authors applied the model to the identification of relational message interpretations of nonverbal matching behavior. Confederates either matched or did not match the nonverbal behaviors of conversational participants while being watched by nonparticipant observers. All three nonconfederate participants provided interpretations of the confederates' relational messages. As the authors had expected, there were moderate correlations between the 3 perspectives, with observers usually providing less favorable assessments than the conversational participants. The authors also examined the influence of positive and negative stimulus behavior on relational message interpretations.     

Meaning,grounding, and the construction of social reality

Culture has become a critical concept for social psychology over the past quarter of a century. Yet, cultural dynamics, the process and mechanism of formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture, has begun to be investigated only recently. This article reports the current state of play of a research program that takes cultural dynamics as its central question. In this approach, humans are construed as meaning making animals that create, recreate, and exchange information, and turn it into a meaningful basis for action. The locus of meaning making and remaking is an everyday joint activity. The grounding model of cultural transmission describes how cultural information is deliberately or inadvertently transmitted in a joint activity. As we go about our business of living our daily lives, we ground information to our common ground, and construct a social reality that is mutually meaningful and yet only local. If locally grounded information is further generalized to a large collective and disseminated through social networks, repeated and iterative activations of the grounding process maintain the social reality of the collective that we take for granted. Implications of the grounding model of cultural transmission and future research directions are discussed.     

Two-step communication for the interaction between automated vehicles and pedestrians

An important challenge of automated vehicles (AV) will be the cooperative interaction with surrounding road users such as pedestrians. One solution to compensate for the missing driver-pedestrian interaction might be explicit communication via external human machine interfaces (eHMIs). Additionally, implicit communication such as a vehicle pitch motion might support AVs when interacting with pedestrians. While previous work explored various explicit and implicit communication cues, these concepts communicated the intention of the AV at one single time point. Currently, empirical findings on two-step communication lack so far. In this study, we empirically test the effect of a two-step AV communication that uses an implicit cue at a long distance and subsequently provides an implicit or explicit cues at a short distance. We compared its efficiency to single-step communication concepts providing implicit or explicit cues at the shorter distance only. To explore whether the right communication cue is used at the right distance, we analyzed pedestrians’ fixations while approaching an AV using an eye tracking device.We conducted a virtual reality study (N = 30) with AV communication concept that provided an active pitch motion or an eHMI and compared them with a two-step AV communication concept that provided an additional active pitch motion at a long distance when approaching the pedestrian. Furthermore, we recorded pedestrians’ fixation behavior while the AV approached.Consistently to previous work, single-step AV communication showed a beneficial effect on crossing behavior. Pedestrians initiated their crossing earlier while approaching an AV with an active pitch motion or an eHMI compared to the baseline condition. While active pitch motion reduced subjective safety feeling, eHMI increased it. However, the two-step communication concept did not further improve pedestrians’ crossing initiation times and their safety feeling. The pattern of fixation behavior differed as a function of AV distance. When the approaching AV was far away, pedestrians exclusively looked at the environment. During the approach, pedestrians gradually fixated the bumper and the hood and only then the windshield of the AV. Hence, it seems to be useful to present an AV intent communication at a certain distance from the pedestrian. These findings posit the importance of considering pedestrians’ fixation behavior when developing communication concepts between AVs and pedestrians.     

Active vehicle pitch motion for communication in automated driving

The number of automated vehicles (AVs) is expected to successively increase in the near future. This development has a considerable impact on the informal communication between AVs and pedestrians. Informal communication with the driver will become obsolete during the interaction with AVs. Literature suggests that external human machine interfaces (eHMIs) might substitute the communication between drivers and pedestrians. In the study, we additionally test a recently discussed type of communication in terms of artificial vehicle motion, namely active pitch motion, as an informal communication cue for AVs.N = 54 participants approached AVs in a virtual inner-city traffic environment. We explored the effect of three communication concepts: an artificial vehicle motion, namely active pitch motion, eHMI and the combination of both. Moreover, vehicle types (sports car, limousine, SUV) were varied. A mixed-method approach was applied to investigate the participantś crossing behavior and subjective safety feeling. Furthermore, eye movement parameters were recorded as indicators for mental workload.The results revealed that any communication concept drove beneficial effects on the crossing behavior. The participants crossed the road earlier when an active pitch motion was present, as this was interpreted as a stronger braking. Further, the eHMI and a combination of eHMI and active pitch motion had a positive effect on the crossing behavior. The active pitch motion showed no effect on the subjective safety feeling, while eHMI and the combination enhanced the pedestrianś safety feeling while crossing. The use of communication resulted in less mental workload, as evidenced by eye-tracking parameters. Variations of vehicle types did not result in significant main effects but revealed interactions between parameters. The active pitch motion revealed no learning. In contrast, it took participants several trials for the eHMI and the combination condition to affect their crossing behavior. To sum up, this study indicates that communication between AVs and pedestrians can benefit from the consideration of vehicle motion.     

Social eye gaze modulates processing of speech and co-speech gesture

In human face-to-face communication, language comprehension is a multi-modal, situated activity. However, little is known about how we combine information from different modalities during comprehension, and how perceived communicative intentions, often signaled through visual signals, influence this process. We explored this question by simulating a multi-party communication context in which a speaker alternated her gaze between two recipients. Participants viewed speech-only or speech + gesture object-related messages when being addressed (direct gaze) or unaddressed (gaze averted to other participant). They were then asked to choose which of two object images matched the speaker’s preceding message. Unaddressed recipients responded significantly more slowly than addressees for speech-only utterances. However, perceiving the same speech accompanied by gestures sped unaddressed recipients up to a level identical to that of addressees. That is, when unaddressed recipients’ speech processing suffers, gestures can enhance the comprehension of a speaker’s message. We discuss our findings with respect to two hypotheses attempting to account for how social eye gaze may modulate multi-modal language comprehension.     

ANALYTIC MIND USE AND INTERPSYCHIC COMMUNICATION: DRIVING FORCE IN ANALYTIC TECHNIQUE,PATHWAY TO UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL LIFE

Developed from established psychoanalytic knowledge among different psychoanalytic cultures concerning unconscious interpsychic communication, analysts' use of their receptive mental experience—their analytic mind use, including the somatic, unconscious, and less accessible derivatives—represents a significant investigative road to patients' unconscious mental life, particularly with poorly symbolized mental states. The author expands upon this tradition, exploring what happens when patients unconsciously experience and identify with the analyst's psychic functioning. The technical implications of the analyst's “instrument” are described, including the analyst's ego regression, creation of inner space, taking mind as object, bearing uncertainty and intense affect, and self‐analysis. Brief case vignettes illustrate the structure and obstacles to this work.     

First symbols in a girl with Down syndrome: A longitudinal study from 12 to 18 months

Symbolic uses of objects originate in communicative and triadic contexts (adult–child-object). In this longitudinal study we explore the emergence and development of the first symbolic uses in triadic interaction contexts in a girl with Down syndrome between 12 and 18-months of age. We conducted five sessions of video recording, at 12, 13½, 15, 16½, and 18 months chronological age. At each session we videotaped the girl and her mother interacting with different objects. Data were coded in semiotic categories used in previous studies (Rodríguez & Moro, 1999) and a microgenetic analysis was conducted for each session. The first symbolic uses by the girl appeared at 13½ months. Symbols were of different types and levels of complexity, and the adult had an important role in facilitating the production of these symbols.     

Collaborative mother–toddler communication and theory of mind development at age 4

Focusing on social pragmatics, this longitudinal study investigated the contribution of mother–toddler collaborative communication to theory of mind (ToM) development at age 4. At age 2½, 78 toddlers (42 boys) and their mothers were observed during pretend play. At age 4, children were tested using 4 false belief understanding tasks. Both mothers and toddlers engaged in more collaborative (inform, guide/request, and support/confirm) than non-collaborative communication acts. Other-focused collaborative acts of support/confirm by mothers and toddlers predicted children's false belief understanding, even after controlling for 5 covariates. In addition, as active agents in their own ToM development, the contribution of toddlers' collaborative acts to false belief understanding was independent of their mother's. Finally, the way toddlers and their mothers co-constructed their communication mattered. Only when toddlers engaged in high levels of collaborative acts, the mothers' high levels of collaborative acts demonstrated a positive effect on children's ToM development. The applied implications of these findings are discussed.