Effects of reinforcement magnitude on spontaneous recovery.

Extinction of operant behavior has been associated with a number of undesirable effects. One such effect is the temporary reappearance of behavior after responding appears to be completely extinguished, known as spontaneous recovery. In this report, the occurrence of spontaneous recovery and its attenuation with large amounts of reinforcement were examined during the treatment of disruption.     

The Bursts and Lulls of Multimodal Interaction: Temporal Distributions of Behavior Reveal Differences Between Verbal and Non‐Verbal Communication

Recent studies of naturalistic face‐to‐face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non‐verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non‐verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal and non‐verbal behaviors depends on the level of analysis. In a reanalysis of a corpus of naturalistic multimodal communication (Louwerse, Dale, Bard, & Jeuniaux, 2012 ), we focus on measuring the temporal patterns of specific communicative behaviors in terms of their burstiness. We examined burstiness estimates across different roles of the speaker and different communicative modalities. We observed more burstiness for verbal versus non‐verbal channels, and for more versus less informative language subchannels. Using this new method for analyzing temporal patterns in communicative behaviors, we show that there is a complex relationship between verbal and non‐verbal channels. We propose a “temporal heterogeneity” hypothesis to explain how the language system adapts to the demands of dialog.     

Compensating for an Inattentive Audience

The common ground that conversational partners share is thought to form the basic context for language use. According to the classic view, inferences about common ground, or mutual knowledge, are guided by beliefs about the physical, cognitive, and attentional states of one's communicative partners. Here, we provide a first test of the attention assumption for common ground, the proposal that common ground for a co‐present entity—such as an object or an utterance—can only be formed if a person has evidence that his or her partner has also attended to it. In three experiments, a participant speaker and two partners learned names for novel monster pictures as a group. The speaker was then asked to describe the monsters to each partner separately in a referential communication task. The critical manipulation was the (in)attentiveness of one partner at different points in the study. Analysis of the speaker's referring expressions revealed that speakers assumed their partner shared common ground for the monster names only when that partner exhibited engaged attention as the names were learned. These findings provide key and novel support for the classic proposal that formation of common ground critically depends on assumptions about the attentional state of one's conversational partner.     

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.     

Effects of Nonverbal Behavior on Perceptions of a Female Employee's Power Bases

Abstract

The authors extended a previous examination of the effects of nonverbal behavior on perceptions of a male employee's power bases (H. Aguinis, M. M. Simonsen, & C. A. Pierce, 1998) by examining the effects of nonverbal behavior on perceptions of a female employee's power bases. U.S. undergraduates read vignettes describing a female employee engaging in 3 types of nonverbal behavior (i.e., eye contact, facial expression, body posture) and rated their perceptions of the woman's power bases (i.e., reward, coercive, legitimate, referent, expert, credibility). As predicted, (a) direct eye contact increased perceptions of coercive power, and (b) a relaxed facial expression decreased perceptions of all 6 power bases. Also as predicted, the present results differed markedly from those of Aguinis et al. (1998) regarding a male employee. The authors discuss implications for theory, future research, and the advancement of female employees.     

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.