FB1 Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaften
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This paper presents an exploratory study conducted to understand how audio-visual prompts are understood by people on an emotional level as a first step towards the more challenging task of designing emotionally aligned prompts for persons with cognitive disabilities such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). Persons with ADRD often need assistance from a caregiver to complete daily living activities such as washing hands, making food, or getting dressed. Artificially intelligent systems have been developed that can assist in such situations. This paper presents a set of prompt videos of a virtual human ‘Rachel’, wherein she expressively communicates prompts at each step of a simple hand washing task, with various human-like emotions and behaviors. A user study was conducted for 30 such videos with respect to three basic and important dimensions of emotional experience: evaluation, potency, and activity. The results show that, while people generally agree on the evaluation (valence: good/bad) of a prompt, consensus about power and activity is not as socially homogeneous. Our long term aim is to enhance such systems by delivering automated prompts that are emotionally aligned with individuals in order to help with prompt adherence and with long-term adoption.
Post-digital fairy tales
(2021)
How can Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) be employed to reflect on and understand post-digital society and its challenges? To discuss such a complex matter, object of our investigation through the years, we rely on the results of an experimentation that used fairy tales as a starting point for opening up imagination and increasing the distance to everyday life and typical media usage behavior. The activity “Postdigital Fairy Tales” was conducted at Politecnico di Milano, bringing together 45 students in Communication Design for five full days of intensive experimentation. We explored the practice of crafting and developing interactive narratives that analyze societal twists and shifts due to digitalization by remixing traditional fairy tale narratives with aspects of our post-digital era. For this reason we chose to focus on Instagram and to exploit its affordances. The results show how IDNs can be used to question digital media usage with regard to patterns of aesthetics and interaction modes, and to analyse the wicked problems associated with digitalization.
Infants show impressive speech decoding abilities and detect acoustic regularities that highlight the syntactic relations of a language, often coded via non-adjacent dependencies (NADs, e.g., is singing). It has been claimed that infants learn NADs implicitly and associatively through passive listening and that there is a shift from effortless associative learning to a more controlled learning of NADs after the age of 2 years, potentially driven by the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To investigate if older children are able to learn NADs, Lammertink et al. (2019) recently developed a word-monitoring serial reaction time (SRT) task and could show that 6–11-year-old children learned the NADs, as their reaction times (RTs) increased then they were presented with violated NADs. In the current study we adapted their experimental paradigm and tested NAD learning in a younger group of 52 children between the age of 4–8 years in a remote, web-based, game-like setting (whack-a-mole). Children were exposed to Italian phrases containing NADs and had to monitor the occurrence of a target syllable, which was the second element of the NAD. After exposure, children did a “Stem Completion” task in which they were presented with the first element of the NAD and had to choose the second element of the NAD to complete the stimuli. Our findings show that, despite large variability in the data, children aged 4–8 years are sensitive to NADs; they show the expected differences in r RTs in the SRT task and could transfer the NAD-rule in the Stem Completion task. We discuss these results with respect to the development of NAD dependency learning in childhood and the practical impact and limitations of collecting these data in a web-based setting.
Virtual Reality (VR) applications play an increasingly important role in the context of mental health. While VR-based therapeutic interventions are increasingly well-established, the application of VR in the field of mental health awareness represents a novel and promising development. We present our mental health awareness VR application “hopohopo”, in which the user takes the perspective of a person suffering from social anxiety. Through the VR journey, the user experiences what it could feel like to suffer from constant fear of being negatively judged by others in everyday social situations. The aim of the application is to allow nonaffected users to expand their knowledge and to raise mental health awareness. In this paper, we report our findings on the potential of this immersive VR application for psychoeducation and destigmatization of social anxiety. In this respect, we provide the scope of our VR application and first results of its ongoing usability and usefulness evaluation process.
This chapter looks at children ‘out of place’ as a category, focusing on the example of the sexually abused and thus sexually exposed child as experiencing an ‘out of place’ childhood. It focuses on the child who has been sexually abused and exploited, in contexts involving no compensation – monetary or otherwise. A code for childhood sexuality also developed in the West, with the focus on the innocence and malleability of young people. The projection onto children by adults, in terms of what they should be, can thus eventually be damaging. Children are presented as incapable of being responsible subjects with their own agency in the context of sexuality. Children’s agency in the context of their sexuality is highly restricted through laws dictating minimum ages of sexual activity and consent, as well as social expectations of a child as a non-sexual and innocent being.
Previous studies showed that the movements of another person's eyes and head guides infants' attention and promotes social learning by leading to enhanced encoding of cued objects. However, it is an open question whether social features like eyes are required or if the lateral movement of any arbitrary stimulus can elicit similar effects. The current experiments investigate the effects of the movement of a nonsocial cue and a perceptually similar social cue on object processing in 4-month-olds using event-related potentials (ERPs). Infants were presented with one of two central cues, either a box with a checkerboard pattern or a box with eye-like features on the front, which turned to one side. The cue thereby either turned toward a novel object or turned away from it. Afterwards, the object was presented again and ERPs in response to these previously cued or uncued objects were compared. When the nonsocial box served as the cue, no difference in neural processing of previously cued and uncued objects was found. In contrast, when the box with eyes served as the cue, we found an enhanced positive slow wave (PSW) for uncued as compared to cued objects. While the turning of the box with eyes promoted the encoding of cued objects, uncued objects needed enhanced activity for processing when presented for a second time. Results suggest that not every dynamic cue can influence infants’ object processing but that the presence of a basic social characteristic like isolated schematic eyes is sufficient to enhance social learning processes in early infancy. This hints on a specific sensitivity of the infant brain to social information which helps infants to focus on relevant information in the environment during social learning.
I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ (or ‘ToM’) are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk.
We review Affect Control Theory (ACT) as a promising basis for equipping computational agents in social simulations with a sense of sociality. ACT is a computational theory that integrates sociological insights about the symbolic construction of the social order with psychological knowledge about cognitive-affective mechanisms. After explaining the theoretical foundations of ACT and applications of the theory at the dyadic and group level, we describe a case study applying the theory from an ongoing research project examining self-organized online collaboration in software development.
Using two phenomena of violence against children and intimate partner violence and based on two case studies, we explore the extent to which social processes of interpreting and negotiating violence contribute to further theorization efforts. The central unifying element is that both forms of violence are enabled and performed in power relations and have long been socially, legally, and politically legitimized. Therefore, our study’s focus is not on violence as a subject but rather on the social negotiation and construction of meanings of actions framed as violent. This perspective is exemplified by two independent case studies and data material that illustrate how such microscopic arguments are developed empirically. The methods used for the two case studies include qualitative analyses of interviews and organizational documents. Hence, we also discuss the researchers’ involvement and challenges in these processes. Based on our analytical findings, we argue for the use of an approach of a subject appropriated theorizing violence rather than a formal theory formation of violence. The procedural analysis of violence revealed its importance in making non-public and socially taboo forms of violence analytically accessible.
The origin of pointing
(2019)
Pointing gestures play a foundational role in human language, but up to now, we have not known where these gestures come from. Here, we investigated the hypothesis that pointing originates in touch. We found, first, that when pointing at a target, children and adults oriented their fingers not as though trying to create an “arrow” that picks out the target but instead as though they were aiming to touch it; second, that when pointing at a target at an angle, participants rotated their wrists to match that angle as they would if they were trying to touch the target; and last, that young children interpret pointing gestures as if they were attempts to touch things, not as arrows. These results provide the first substantial evidence that pointing originates in touch.
The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting damage is often portrayed in staggering numbers and statistics. This article offers, by contrast, a personal and qualitative account of employees, volunteers, and young residents at a refugee home in Berlin, Germany. Through the story of a boy who has spent the past 4 years in several of Berlin’s 84 remaining refugee accommodations, we examine the inequalities that already existed in Germany and how the pandemic has exacerbated them. To provide ample context, we critically assess the so-called Welcome Classes that children and teens have been attending since their arrival to the country in or around 2015 and argue that the segregation experienced at school mirrors the isolation from the host society that refugees and people seeking asylum are subjected to residentially. We then present an emergency response to school closures: A digital homework mentorship program designed to mitigate the heightened barriers to social interaction and access to education brought about by the pandemic. We explore the sociocultural theory underpinning the program, describe its methods, and offer a qualitative evaluation of the results. Finally, we discuss how the informal education intervention helps fill gaps in the system, offering an approach that can be used going forward to promote learning, social-emotional development, and inclusion of young people with migration and refugee backgrounds.
In empirically informed research on action explanation, philosophers and developmental psychologists have recently proposed a teleological account of the way in which we make sense of people’s intentional behavior. It holds that we typically don’t explain an agent’s action by appealing to her mental states but by referring to the objective, publically accessible facts of the world that count in favor of performing the action so as to achieve a certain goal. Advocates of the teleological account claim that this strategy is our main way of understanding people’s actions. I argue that common motivations mentioned to support the teleological account are insufficient to sustain its generalization from children to adults. Moreover, social psychological studies, combined with theoretical considerations, suggest that we do not explain actions mainly by invoking publically accessible, reason-giving facts alone but by ascribing mental states to the agent.
Be unique, be open, be art
(2010)
We compared event-related potentials during sentence reading, using impression formation equations of a model of affective coherence, to investigate the role of affective content processing during meaning making. The model of Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise, 1979, 2007) predicts and quantifies the degree to which social interactions deflect from prevailing social norms and values - based on the affective meanings of involved concepts. We tested whether this model can predict the amplitude of brain waves traditionally associated with semantic processing. To this end, we visually presented sentences describing basic subject-verb-object social interactions and measured event-related potentials for final words of sentences from three different conditions of affective deflection (low, medium, high) as computed by a variant of the ACT model (Schröder, 2011). Sentence stimuli were closely controlled across conditions for alternate semantic dimensions such as contextual constraints, cloze probabilities, co-occurrences of subject-object and verb-object relations. Personality characteristics (schizotypy, Big Five) were assessed to account for individual differences, assumed to influence emotion-language interactions in information processing. Affective deflection provoked increased negativity of ERP waves during the P2/N2 and N400 components. Our data suggest that affective incoherence is perceived as conflicting information interfering with early semantic processing and that increased respective processing demands – in particular in the case of medium violations of social norms - linger on until the N400 time window classically associated with the integration of concepts into embedding context. We conclude from these results that affective meanings influence basic stages of meaning making.
Any-Cubes
(2019)
Here we present Any-Cubes, a prototype toy with which children can intuitively and playfully explore and understand machine learning as well as Internet of Things technology. Our prototype is a combination of deep learning-based image classification [12] and machine-to-machine (m2m) communication via MQTT. The system consists of two physical and tangible wooden cubes. Cube 1 ("sensor cube") is inspired by Google's teachable machine [14,15]. The sensor cube can be trained on any object or scenery. The machine learning functionality is directly implemented on the microcontroller (Raspberry Pi) by a Google Edge TPU Stick. Via MQTT protocol, the microcontroller sends its current status to Cube 2, the actuator cube. The actuator cube provides three switches (relays controlled by an Arduino board) to which peripheral devices can be connected. This allows simple if-then functions to be executed in real time, regardless of location. We envision our system as an intuitive didactic tool for schools and maker spaces.
This article critically examines the governing of ‘sustainable urban development’ through self-build cohousing groups in Gothenburg and Hamburg. The two case cities have been selected because both are currently involved in major urban restructuring, and have launched programmes to support self-build groups and cohousing as part of their emphasis on promoting urban sustainable development through this process. Departing from a theoretical discussion on advanced liberal urban governance, focusing in particular on the contemporary discourse on sustainable urban development, we examine the interaction between political institutions, civil society and private actors in the construction of cohousing as a perceived novel and alternative form of housing that may contribute to fulfilling certain sustainability goals. Questions centre on the socio-political contextualization of cohousing; concepts of sustainability; strategies of, and relations between, different actors in promoting cohousing; gentrification and segregation; and inclusion and exclusion. In conclusion we argue that, while self-build groups can provide pockets of cohousing as an alternative to dominant forms of housing, the economic and political logics of advanced liberal urban development make even such a modest target difficult, particularly when it comes to making such housing affordable.
Research-led teaching is designed to give students the opportunity to engage with their learning process and develop the skills needed to build their professional identity through active participation in the scientific cognitive process. Here in particular, social workers need research-oriented behavior, hermeneutic competencies and reflexivity in order to master the imminent requirements of case comprehension and case processing in a professional way.