The purpose of the present research is to shed light on whether and how migrants’ goal pursuit relates to their acculturation and well-being. Previous research has demonstrated the beneficial role that striving for and attaining intrinsic goals has for well-being. Yet, the relationship between the pursuit of intrinsic goals and acculturation has hardly been addressed. To fill this void, we investigated whether migrants’ acculturation and well-being can be seen as a function of their pursuit of intrinsic goals. (...) We posited that the attainment of intrinsic goals would positively predict migrants’ level of acculturation and subsequent well-being, particularly when migrants deemed these goals to be important. We tested our hypotheses in two scenario studies and two field-studies. In all four studies we confirmed our hypothesis that migrants’ intrinsic goal attainment and well-being (measured by satisfaction with life and by anxiety is mediated by their acculturation level. However, in only two of the four studies did we find support for our hypothesis that the relationship between intrinsic goal attainment and acculturation is moderated by intrinsic goal importance. We discuss the theoretical importance and the practical consequences of our findings. Furthermore, we outline future research directions that could deepen understanding of the relationship between migrants’ goal pursuit and their acculturation. (shrink)

The current study examined the additive and interactive effects of early adolescents’ social achievement goals and perceived relational support from teachers and peers on their social behavior. Adolescents’ social achievement goals, perceived relational support from teachers and peers, and social behavior were assessed in a sample of fifth and sixth graders nested within 26 classrooms. Multilevel modeling results indicated that social goals and relational support from teachers and peers made additive contributions to adolescents’ social behavior. Results also (...) indicated the evidence of interactive effects, such that relational support from teachers was negatively associated with overt and relational aggression primarily among adolescents who had high social demonstration-approach goals. Findings underscore the need to consider adolescents’ social goals in conjunction with their perceived relational support for educators and practitioners. (shrink)

We urge caution in generalising from content words to function words, in which lexical-to-phonemic feedback might be more likely. Speech perception involves more than word recognition; feedback might be outside the narrow logic of word identification but still be present for other purposes. Finally, we raise the issue of evidence from imaging studies of auditory hallucination.

In three experiments we tested hypotheses derived from the goal specificity literature using a real-world physics task. In the balance-scale paradigm participants predict the state of the apparatus based on a configuration of weights at various distances from the fulcrum. Non-specific goals (NSG) have been shown to encourage hypothesis testing, which facilitates rule discovery, whereas specific goals (SG) do not. We showed that this goal specificity effect depends on task difficulty. The NSG strategy led to rule induction among (...) some participants. Among non-discoverers, SG participants were faster and more accurate on difficult problems than NSG participants. The use of misleading exemplars (scale configurations that obscured the rule governing outcomes) led to fixation on inappropriate hypotheses for NSG but not SG participants. When more diagnostic learning exemplars were used, NSG non-discoverers still performed worse than SG participants on difficult problems. SG participants also outperformed NSG participants on a post-test of difficult problems. These findings qualify the generality of goal specificity effects. (shrink)

Using data on submitted and published manuscripts in Feminist Economics from 1995 to 2019, we examine differences in method and scope used by authors residing in the Global North and Global South. We specifically focus on research methods, intersectional analyses, region of analysis, and co-authorship status. Further, using logistic regression models, we examine the relationship between authors’ location and use of research methods. We find authors in the Global South are more likely to engage in empirical and mixed-methods papers compared (...) to Global North authors in our sample. Moreover, a greater share of Global South authors engage in intersectional analysis and exhibit geographical focus on developing countries. Drawing insights from the Feminist Economics manuscripts data, we argue that encouraging Global South research can contribute to the goals of the field of feminist economics – aimed at inclusivity, diversity of standpoints, and plurality in research methods, thereby improving overall economic research. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the nature of the emerging purpose ecosystem and its role in transforming and supporting business to help address the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We argue that interactions among its ‘private actors’, who share efforts and belief in changing and redefining the purpose and nature of business by advocating broader non-financial performance outcomes, have the potential to contribute to a wider sustainability-oriented transformation of the business sector. Through interview data collected in the UK and Australia, (...) we identify six main roles that characterise the activities and interactions among its actors and their stakeholders. Our research contributes to expanding knowledge on the emerging phenomenon of the purpose ecosystem and how its actors support the achievement of the UN SDGs by seeking to change the purpose of business and integrating the goals into their operations and engagements with stakeholders. (shrink)

A paramount, yet unresolved issue in personalised medicine is that of automated reasoning with clinical guidelines in multimorbidity settings. This entails enabling machines to use computerised generic clinical guideline recommendations and patient-specific information to yield patient-tailored recommendations where interactions arising due to multimorbidities are resolved. This problem is further complicated by patient management desiderata, in particular the need to account for patient-centric goals as well as preferences of various parties involved. We propose to solve this problem of automated reasoning (...) with interacting guideline recommendations in the context of a given patient by means of computational argumentation. In particular, we advance a structured argumentation formalism ABA+G (short for Assumption-Based Argumentation with Preferences (ABA+) and Goals) for integrating and reasoning with information about recommendations, interactions, patient’s state, preferences and prioritised goals. ABA+G combines assumption-based reasoning with preferences and goal-driven selection among reasoning outcomes. Specifically, we assume defeasible applicability of guideline recommendations with the general goal of patient well-being, resolve interactions (conflicts and otherwise undesirable situations) among recommendations based on the state and preferences of the patient, and employ patient-centered goals to suggest interaction-resolving, goal-importance maximising and preference-adhering recommendations. We use a well-established Transition-based Medical Recommendation model for representing guideline recommendations and identifying interactions thereof, and map the components in question, together with the given patient’s state, prioritised goals, and preferences over actions, to ABA+G for automated reasoning. In this, we follow principles of patient management and establish corresponding theoretical properties as well as illustrate our approach in realistic personalised clinical reasoning scenaria. (shrink)

Providing an inclusive and quality education for all contributes toward the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. High-quality learning environments based on what works in education benefit all students and can be particularly beneficial for children with disabilities. This article contributes to advance knowledge to enhance the quality of education of students with disabilities that are educated in special schools. This research analyses in which ways, if any, interactive learning environments can be developed in special schools and create (...) better learning opportunities for children with disabilities. A case study was conducted with students with disabilities (N = 36) and teaching staff in a special school, involving interviews and focus groups. We argue that rethinking the learning context by introducing instruction models based on interaction benefit children with disabilities and provide high-quality learning and safe and supportive relationships for these students, thereby promoting their educational and social inclusion. (shrink)

Interactions between an intelligent software agent and a human user are ubiquitous in everyday situations such as access to information, entertainment, and purchases. In such interactions, the ISA mediates the user’s access to the content, or controls some other aspect of the user experience, and is not designed to be neutral about outcomes of user choices. Like human users, ISAs are driven by goals, make autonomous decisions, and can learn from experience. Using ideas from bounded rationality, we frame these (...) interactions as instances of an ISA whose reward depends on actions performed by the user. Such agents benefit by steering the user’s behaviour towards outcomes that maximise the ISA’s utility, which may or may not be aligned with that of the user. Video games, news recommendation aggregation engines, and fitness trackers can all be instances of this general case. Our analysis facilitates distinguishing various subcases of interaction, as well as second-order effects that might include the possibility for adaptive interfaces to induce behavioural addiction, and/or change in user belief. We present these types of interaction within a conceptual framework, and review current examples of persuasive technologies and the issues that arise from their use. We argue that the nature of the feedback commonly used by learning agents to update their models and subsequent decisions could steer the behaviour of human users away from what benefits them, and in a direction that can undermine autonomy and cause further disparity between actions and goals as exemplified by addictive and compulsive behaviour. We discuss some of the ethical, social and legal implications of this technology and argue that it can sometimes exploit and reinforce weaknesses in human beings. (shrink)

The purpose of the present study was to predict and explain the academic cheating behaviors of elementary school students with learning disabilities by applying the cusp catastrophe model. Participants were 32 students with identified LD from state governmental agencies although all both them and the typical students participated in the experimental manipulation. Academic cheating was assessed using an empirical paradigm where true achievement was subtracted from achievement in a test without proper invigilation. Data analysis supported the proposed cusp catastrophe models, (...) where mastery-related motives acted as asymmetry and performance goals as bifurcation variables respectively. These findings were confirmed with application of the interactive goal hypothesis, where the interactive approach and avoidance performance goal term functioned as a splitting factor in the relationship between adaptive motivation and performance. (shrink)

In this paper, I review and compare major literature on goals in argumentation scholarship, aiming to answer the question of how to take the different goals of arguers into account when analysing and evaluating public political arguments. On the basis of the review, I suggest to differentiate between the different goals along two important distinctions: first, distinguish between goals which are intrinsic to argumentation and goals which are extrinsic to it and second distinguish between (...) class='Hi'>goals of the act of arguing and goals of argumentative interactions. Furthermore, I propose to analyse public political arguments as multi-purposive activity types and reconstruct the argumentative exchanges as a series of simultaneous discussions. This enables us to examine public political arguments from a perspective in which the intrinsic goals of argumentation are in principle instrumental for the achievement of the socio-political purposes of argumentation, and consequently, it makes our assessment of the argumentative quality of the argument also indicative of the quality of the socio-political processes to which the arguments contribute. (shrink)

Human control of action in routine situations involves a flexible interplay between (a) task-dependent serial ordering constraints; (b) top-down, or intentional, control processes; and (c) bottom-up, or environmentally triggered, affordances. In addition, the interaction between these influences is modulated by learning mechanisms that, over time, appear to reduce the need for top-down control processes while still allowing those processes to intervene at any point if necessary or if desired. We present a model of the acquisition and control of goal-directed (...) action that goes beyond existing models by operationalizing an interface between two putative systems—a routine and a non-routine system—thereby demonstrating how explicitly represented goals can interact with the emergent task representations that develop through learning in the routine system. The gradual emergence of task representations offers an explanation for the transfer of control with experience from the non-routine goal-based system to the routine system. At the same time it allows action selection to be sensitive both to environmental triggers and to biasing from multiple levels within the goal system. (shrink)

Could interacting mindreaders be in a position to know things which they would be unable to know if they were manifestly passive observers? This paper argues that they could. Mindreading is sometimes reciprocal: the mindreader’s target reciprocates by taking the mindreader as a target for mindreading. The paper explains how such reciprocity can significantly narrow the range of possible interpretations of behaviour where mindreaders are, or appear to be, in a position to interact. A consequence is that revisions and extensions (...) are needed to standard theories of the evidential basis of mindreading. The view also has consequences for understanding how abilities to interact combined with comparatively simple forms of mindreading may explain the emergence, in evolution or development, of sophisticated forms of social cognition. (shrink)

Context: Distributed language and interactivity are central members of a set of concepts that are rapidly developing into rigorous, exciting additions to 4E cognitive science. Because they share certain assumptions and methodological commitments with enactivism, the two have sometimes been confused; additionally, while enactivism is a well-developed paradigm, interactivity has relied more on methodological development and on a set of focal examples. Problem: The goal of this article is to clarify the core conceptual commitments of both interactivity-based and enactive approaches (...) to cognitive science by contrasting the two and highlighting their differences in assumptions, focus, and explanatory strategies. Method: We begin with the shared commitments of interactivity and enactivism - e.g., antirepresentationalism, naturalism, interdisciplinarity, the importance of biology, etc. We then give an overview of several important varieties of enactivism, including sensorimotor and anti-representationalist enactivism, and then walk through the history of the “core” varieties, taking care to contrast Maturana’s approach with that of Varela and the current researchers following in Varela’s footsteps. We then describe the differences between this latter group and interactivity-based approaches to cognitive science. Results: We argue that enactivism’s core concepts are explanatorily inadequate in two ways. First, they mis-portray the organization of many living systems, which are not operationally closed. Second, they fail to realize that most epistemic activity depends on engagement with non-local resources. Both problems can be dealt with by adopting an interactivity-based perspective, in which agency and cognition are fundamentally distributed and involve integration of non-local resources into the local coupling of organism and environment. Implications: The article’s primary goal is theoretical clarification and exposition; its primary implication is that enactive concepts need to be modified or extended in some way in order to explain fully many aspects of cognition and directed biological activity. Or, read another way, the article’s primary implication is that interactivity already provides a rich set of concepts for doing just that, which, while closely allied with enactivism in several ways, are not enactivist concepts. Constructivist content: The article consists entirely of a comparison between two constructivist fields of theory. Key Words: Interactivity, enactivism, distributed language, radical embodied cognitive science, ecological psychology, autonomy. (shrink)

Complex work in teams requires coordination across team members and their technology as well as the ability to change and adapt over time to achieve effective performance. To support such complex interactions, recent efforts have worked toward the design of adaptive human-autonomy teaming systems that can provide feedback in or near real time to achieve the desired individual or team results. However, while significant advancements have been made to better model and understand the dynamics of team interaction and its (...) relationship with task performance, appropriate measures of team coordination and computational methods to detect changes in coordination have not yet been widely investigated. Having the capacity to measure coordination in real time is quite promising as it provides the opportunity to provide adaptive feedback that may influence and regulate teams’ coordination patterns and, ultimately, drive effective team performance. A critical requirement to reach this potential is having the theoretical and empirical foundation from which to do so. Therefore, the first goal of the paper is to review approaches to coordination dynamics, identify current research gaps, and draw insights from other areas, such as social interaction, relationship science, and psychotherapy. The second goal is to collate extant work on feedback and advance ideas for adaptive feedback systems that have potential to influence coordination in a way that can enhance the effectiveness of team interactions. In addressing these two goals, this work lays the foundation as well as plans for the future of human-autonomy teams that augment team interactions using coordination-based measures. (shrink)

Systematic semantic ambiguities result from the interaction of the two operations that are involved in resolving ellipsis in the presence of scoping elements such as quantifiers and intensional operators: scope determination for the scoping elements and resolution of the elided relation. A variety of problematic examples previously noted - by Sag, Hirschbüihler, Gawron and Peters, Harper, and others - all have to do with such interactions. In previous work, we showed how ellipsis resolution can be stated and solved in (...) equational terms. Furthermore, this equational analysis of ellipsis provides a uniform framework in which interactions between ellipsis resolution and scope determination can be captured. As a consequence, an account of the problematic examples follows directly from the equational method. The goal of this paper is merely to point out this pleasant aspect of the equational analysis, through its application to these cases. No new analytical methods or associated formalism are presented, with the exception of a straightforward extension of the equational method to intensional logic. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of two organizational variables, budget goal difficulty and promotion availability, on employee fraud. Limited research shows that difficult, specific goals result in more unethical behavior than general goals :422–432, 2004). We predict that goal difficulty and promotion availability will interact to affect employee fraud. Specifically, we contend that the availability of promotions will have little, if any, effect on employee fraud under easy goals but have a substantial (...) effect on fraud under extremely difficult goals. To test this prediction, we use an experiment in which participants play the role of production employees. All participants are assigned cost goals and are responsible for reporting costs to the organization. Information asymmetry exists such that the organization is unable to assess whether costs have been reported accurately, and any overstatement of costs directly increases the employee’s compensation at the expense of the organization. The results of our experiment support the prediction, even though the cost goal is not tied to current period compensation. Our results have implications for academics and practitioners concerned with factors that affect fraud in organizations. (shrink)

In the past decade, the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have seen unprecedented developments that raise human-machine interactions (HMI) to the next level.Smart machines, i.e., machines endowed with artificially intelligent systems, have lost their character as mere instruments. This, at least, seems to be the case if one considers how humans experience their interactions with them. Smart machines are construed to serve complex functions involving increasing degrees of freedom, and they generate solutions not fully anticipated by humans. (...) Consequently, their performances show a touch of action and even autonomy. HMI is therefore often described as a sort of “cooperation” rather than as a mere application of a tool. Some authors even go as far as subsuming cooperation with smart machines under the label ofpartnership, akin to cooperation between human agents sharing a common goal. In this paper, we explore how far the notion of shared agency and partnership can take us in our understanding of human interaction with smart machines. Discussing different topoi related to partnerships in general, we suggest that different kinds of “partnership” depending on the form of interaction between agents need to be kept apart. Building upon these discussions, we propose a tentative taxonomy of different kinds of HMI distinguishing coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and social partnership. (shrink)

The detection of a human’s intended behavior is one of the most important skills that a social robot should have in order to become acceptable as a part of human society, because humans are used to understand the actions of other humans in a goal-directed manner and they will expect the social robot to behave similarly. A breakthrough in this area can advance several research branches related to social intelligence such as learning by imitation and mutual adaptation. To achieve this (...) goal the robot needs to integrate all possible evidence of intention and neglect the unintended behavior, and a complete solution should use low-level signal processing and high-level reasoning. This work explores the low-level signal processing part of the solution by proposing an interactive adaptive perception scheme that uses four important features of human behavior to amplify the signals originating from intended behavior with respect to signals originating from unintended behavior and other noise sources such as instrumental noise. This work follows the vision that intelligence is not only a function of a centralized sophisticated artificial brain, but can be presented in different forms in the entire robot including its perception and motion systems (the mind is not contained in the brain, but distributed in every cell in the body). A simple example of using the proposed scheme was implemented and the results of two experiments with it are also presented. (shrink)

I applaud Huang & Bargh's theory that places goals at the center of cognition, and I discuss two ingredients missing from that theory. First, I argue that the brains of organisms much simpler than those of humans are already configured for goal achievement in situated interactions. Second, I propose a mechanistic view of the “reconfiguration principle” that links the theory with current views in computational neuroscience.

_Clinical Interaction and the Analysis of Meaning_ evinces a therapeutic vitality all too rare in works of theory. Rather than fleeing from the insights of other disciplines, Dorpat and Miller discover in recent research confirmation of the possibilities of psychoanalytic treatment. In Section I, "Critique of Classical Theory," Dorpat proposes a radical revision of the notion of primary process consonant with contemporary cognitive science. Such a revised conception not only enlarges our understanding of the analytic process; it also provides (...) analysis with a conceptual language that can articulate meaningful connections with a growing body of empirical research about the development and nature of human cognition. In Section II, "Interactional Theory," Miller reverses the direction of inquiry. He begins with the literature on cognitive development and functioning, and proceeds to mine it for concepts relevant to the clinical process. He shows how a revised understanding of the operation of cognition and affect can impart new meaning to basic clinical concepts such as resistance, transference, and level of psychopathology. In Section III, "Applications and Exemplifications," Dorpat concludes this exemplary collaboration by exploring select topics from the standpoint of his and Miller's new psychoanalytic theory. At the heart of the authors' endeavor it "meaning analysis," a concept that integrates an up-to-date model of human information processing with the traditional goals of psychoanalysis. The patient approaches the clinical encounter, they argue, with cognitive-affective schemas that are the accumulatice product of his life experience to date; the manifold meanings ascribed to the clinical interaction must be understood as the product of these schemas rather than as distortions deriving from unconscious, drive-related fantasies. The therapist's goal is to make the patient's meaning-making conscious and thus available for introspection. (shrink)

For a number of years it has been recognized that the social dynamics of group interaction is an import factor in the origin of accidents and in the way how accidents or accident-prone situations are handled in aviation (cf. Helmreich 1997a, 1997b). Factors related to interpersonal communication have been implicated in up to 80% of all aviation accidents over the past 20 years. As a reaction to this, Crew Resource Management (CRM) has been developed with the goal of rating (...) and improving crew performance in aviation and in other fields in which professional groups interact in situations of high taskload and potential risk (cf. Helmreich ea. 1999). As far as this can be estimated at all, installing CRM techniques in the major American and European airlines has resulted in a definite improvement in the safety of commercial aviation. In spite of this success of CRM, practitioners in the field feel that, beyond the general social dynamics of group interaction, there might be potential problems relating to language and communication in such settings. (shrink)

The digital computational technologies that over the past decades have come to be fully integrated into nearly all aspects of human life have varying forms, scales, interactive mechanisms, functions, configurations, and interconnections. Much of this complexity and associated implications for human experience are, however, hidden by prevalent notions of ‘the computer’ as an object. In this paper, we consider how everyday digital technologies collectively mediate human experience, arguing that these technologies are better understood as fluid assemblages that have as many (...) similarities with the infra-structural as they have properties typical for objects. We characterize these aspects in terms of ‘wicked interactions,’ drawing on and adapting the classic theory of wicked problems in design discourse that has similarly considered the complexity of interactions with and within other types of social infrastructure. In doing this we emphasize the need and the potential for building up connections between philosophy of technology and design discourse, with the hope that this might further the shared goals of understanding digital technologies and their consequences and determining how to act in relation to them and their design. (shrink)

Evidence suggests that men are more confident and less risk averse in financial decision making. Researchers did not address how men and women respond differently to goals in financial decision situations, however. In the present study, men set more challenging personal goals and risked more resources than women in a complex financial decision task. Men did not report higher self-efficacy versus women. As expected, gender interacted with assigned goals to predict self-efficacy, risk behavior, and personal goals. (...) Results concur with recent financial decision research that suggests men and women differ in their use of externally-provided information such as assigned goals. Suggestions for future research are offered and limitations are discussed. (shrink)

People with early-to-mid stage dementia frequently attend groups that provide opportunities for socialising and engaging in group activities, such as quizzes. This article uses conversation analysis to investigate the interactional strategies that the staff use to initiate and keep these quizzes ‘on track’, and what they orient to as impediments and facilitators of quiz progression. Specifically, we outline how staff deal with incorrect or ‘non-answers’, and what happens when players have their own goals or ‘projects’ that do not align (...) with staff members’ orientations to the overarching activity completion. We reflect on the tensions that arise between doing interactional work to progress through the quiz, and how that goal can conflict with attending to the needs or wishes expressed by the person living with dementia, potentially resulting in threats to the ‘face’ of the quiz players. Data are taken from a corpus of 10 quizzes recorded in 4 different group settings in England. (shrink)

A closer look at the three areas of action in communication permits us to conclude that the discipline faces a serious crisis. First, an epistemological review shows a fragmented body of theories. Secondly, there is a plurality of separate traditions within academia. Third, the professional field is technology-centered and lacks expertise since there is little connection between theory and practice. Our goal is to analyze the three-fold state of the discipline and to propose a conciliatory model. The Interactive Communication Process (...) is based on an interactive process in which a human subsystem, conditioned by his or her psychological and social and cultural state, interacts with another communicative subsystem to elaborate or process a message conveyed through some space in a certain time. (shrink)

Research studying the effects of non-financial goals on stakeholder relationships remains inconclusive, with scholars disagreeing on which goals increase or decrease a firm’s proactive stakeholder engagement (PSE). Instead of examining which goals act as forces for good or evil, we shift the focus of recent discussions by emphasizing the mechanisms that can explain the positive and negative stakeholder outcomes of non-financial goals under the umbrella of one theoretical lens. We do so by introducing an ethics of (...) care perspective. Specifically, we first show that four of the five most distinctive non-financial goals of family owners jointly stipulate care-based morality, which likely enhances PSE. However, we subsequently argue that one goal, namely, the wish to exert power and influence, interacts with other goals and related care-based morality to lower PSE. Finally, we show how female family directors temper these interactions. Our insights into the additive and interactive effects of non-financial goals on PSE contribute to corporate social responsibility research, to the organizational goal literature, to family business studies and to work drawing on care ethics in management studies. (shrink)

Speech perception under adverse conditions is a multistage process involving a dynamic interplay among acoustic, cognitive, and linguistic factors. Nevertheless, prior research has primarily focused on factors within this complex system in isolation. The primary goal of the present study was to examine the interaction between processing depth and the acoustic challenge of noise and its effect on processing effort during speech perception in noise. Two tasks were used to represent different depths of processing. The speech recognition task involved (...) repeating back a sentence after auditory presentation, while the tiredness judgment task entailed a subjective judgment of whether the speaker sounded tired. The secondary goal of the study was to investigate whether pupil response to alteration of dynamic pitch cues stems from difficult linguistic processing of speech content in noise or a perceptual novelty effect due to the unnatural pitch contours. Task-evoked peak pupil response from two groups of younger adult participants with typical hearing was measured in two experiments. Both tasks were implemented in both experiments, and stimuli were presented with background noise in Experiment 1 and without noise in Experiment 2. Increased peak pupil dilation was associated with deeper processing, particularly in the presence of background noise. Importantly, there is a non-additive interaction between noise and task, as demonstrated by the heightened peak pupil dilation to noise in the speech recognition task as compared to in the tiredness judgment task. Additionally, peak pupil dilation data suggest dynamic pitch alteration induced an increased perceptual novelty effect rather than reflecting effortful linguistic processing of the speech content in noise. These findings extend current theories of speech perception under adverse conditions by demonstrating that the level of processing effort expended by a listener is influenced by the interaction between acoustic challenges and depth of linguistic processing. The study also provides a foundation for future work to investigate the effects of this complex interaction in clinical populations who experience both hearing and cognitive challenges. (shrink)

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) is a multidisciplinary area that involves a diverse body of knowledge and a complex landscape of concepts, which can lead to semantic problems, hampering communication and knowledge transfer. Ontologies have been successfully used to solve semantics and knowledge-related problems in several domains. This paper presents a systematic literature review that investigated the use of ontologies in the HCI domain. The main goal was to find out how HCI ontologies have been used and developed. 35 ontologies were (...) identified. As a result, we noticed that they cover different HCI aspects, such as user interface, interaction phenomenon, pervasive computing, user modeling / profile, HCI design, interaction experience and adaptive interactive system. Although there are overlaps, we did not identify reuse among the 35 analyzed ontologies. The ontologies have been used mainly to support knowledge representation and reasoning. Although ontologies have been used in HCI for more than 25 years, their use became more frequent in the last decade, when ontologies address a higher number of HCI aspects and are represented as both conceptual and computational models. Concerning how ontologies have been developed, we noticed that some good practices of ontology engineering have not been followed. Considering that the quality of an ontology directly influences the quality of the solution built based on it, we believe that there is an opportunity for HCI and ontology engineering professionals to get closer to build better and more effective ontologies, as well as ontology-based solutions. (shrink)

Mental causation, idea that it is us – via our minds – who cause bodily actions is as commonsensical as it is indispensable for our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. Somewhat less uncontroversial, but nonetheless widespread (at least among ordinary people) is the idea that the mind is non-physical, following the intuition that what is physical can neither act nor think nor judge morally. Taken together, and cast into a metaphysical thesis, the two intuitions yield interactive dualism: the view (...) that human persons and their minds are non-physical but can nonetheless interact with their bodies, most notably through their brains. This thesis has two main objectives: first, to defend interactive dualism against objections, and second, to show how it can blend in with a physical world in which laws of nature hold. The first part (chapter 1) consists in a brief motivation of interactive dualism as opposed to non-interactive dualism. I argue that non-interactive, epiphenomenalist dualism sacrifices so many crucial aspects of our human existence that interactive dualism is highly to be preferred to it, barring even stronger counterarguments against the latter. It is those putative counterarguments I address in parts II and III. Part II takes on the philosophical objections from the causal closure of the physical and from causal heterogeneity. The former takes the success of physics and physiology as basis for the doctrine of the causal closure of the physical (CCP). I argue against this that there is not only no convincing argument for CCP, but also that any science-based belief in CCP cannot be epistemically justified. As regards the causal heterogeneity objection, it is ‘weighed and found wanting’, because it relies on unwarranted assumptions about causation. In part III, I examine the objection from energy conservation. It roughly says that if interactive dualism were true, then energy would not be conserved, which physics taught us cannot be the case. My reply is that the underlying conception of energy (and momentum) conservation is wrong-headed and not the one that actual physicists use. Instead of being categorical and global, conservation laws are conditional and local, thereby making natural room for mental interaction. Some dualists, however, have sought to make interactive dualism conservation-friendly, notably by invoking quantum physics; I show that these attempts are unnecessary and create more problems than they solve. Finally, in chapter 9, I turn the tables on non-interactionists by investigating current neurophysiological literature on volitional actions, which, though not addressing the question directly, still encourages the interactive dualist picture more than a non-interactionist one. Part IV is about the interplay between interactive dualism and the laws of nature. The ultimate goal is, if possible, to come up with a theory of the laws of nature that explains the lawlike behavior of nature and at the same time makes room for interaction. I begin by pointing out that the laws of nature are or at least should be what physicalists worry about (chapter 10). I then proceed with a historical survey on the development of the notion of laws of nature (chapter 11) that sheds light on its theistic origin. This is followed by an inquiry into the question how a law of nature could possibly be broken (chapter 12) and a survey of the extant metaphysical theories of the laws of nature with special regard to their receptivity to interaction (chapter 13). Finally, in chapter 14 I develop a theory of the laws of nature both faithful to their divine origin and the possibility of mental interaction: dispositionalist divine decretalism, a synthesis of dispositionalism and Jeffrey Koperski’s divine decretalism. (shrink)

The United States National Preparedness System has evolved significantly in the recent past. These changes have affected the system structures and goals for disaster response. At the same time, actors such as private businesses have become increasingly involved in disaster efforts. In this paper, we begin to fill the gap in the cross-sector literature regarding interactions that have systemic impacts by investigating how the simultaneous processes of systemic change and intensifying cross-sector interaction worked and interacted in the context (...) of the preparedness system. We examine these inter-linkages through a qualitative study in the setting of Hurricane Sandy. Drawing from systems theory, we develop a grounded model that provides an explanation for the system change and highlights how cross-sector interaction relates to the changes observed in the system. (shrink)

Telos is in vogue in biosemiotic researches, which present the teleological solution as anti-Darwinian, while it is more often, for biologists, only ante-Darwinian. The assimilation of structuring contents to a “function”, and of the function to a “goal”, in an irreversible temporality, is the most frequent basis of this methodological creepage. The teleology is based on a projective and ascending epistemic orientation, to which we can oppose a retrojective, descending and achronic one, including modal and sensitive interactional semiotics. For semiotics, (...) the challenge lies in the nature of its relationships with other disciplines, particularly biology. Indeed, we see that the temptation is great for semioticians to dwell precisely in the shadows and shams of other disciplines, and to call “sign” or “semiosis” what other sciences seem to have still some trouble to explain, with the risk of only confronting problems that will soon be obsolete. We propose here the theoretical and methodological principles of structural biosemiotics, and precisely attentive to the problems that biologists face, solve and renew. (shrink)

Various theories on personal goal striving rely on the assumption that failure raises doubts about the goal. Yet, empirical evidence for an association between objective failure experiences and doubts about personal long-term goals is still missing. In a longitudinal field study, applicants for a job as a police trainee (n = 172, Mage = 25.15, 55 females and 117 males) were accompanied across three measurement times over a period of five months. We investigated the effects of failure and initial (...) expectation of success (in the standardized selection process) on doubts regarding the superordinate goal of becoming a police officer. As hypothesized, both failure and low initial expectation of success as well as their interaction led to increased goal-related doubts over time. The findings provide first empirical evidence for the role of failure in the emergence of goal-related doubts in personal long-term goals and, therefore, the disengagement process as it is hypothesized in various theories on goal striving and life-span development. (shrink)

We explored the consequences for learning through interaction with an educational microworld called Electric Field Hockey (EFH). Like many microworlds, EFH is intended to help students develop a qualitative understanding of the target domain, in this case, the physics of electrical interactions. Through the development and use of a computer model that learns to play EFH, we analyzed the knowledge the model acquired as it applied the game‐oriented strategies we observed physics students using. Through learning‐by‐doing on the standard sequence (...) of tasks, the model substantially improved its EFH playing ability; however, it did so without acquiring any new qualitative physics knowledge. This surprising result led to an experiment that compared students' use of EFH with standard‐goal tasks against two alternative instructional conditions, specific‐path and no‐goal, each justified from a different learning theory. Students in the standard‐goal condition learned less qualitative physics than did those in the two alternative conditions, which was consistent with the model. The implication for instructional practice is that careful selection and analysis of the tasks that frame microworld use is essential if these programs are to lead to the learning outcomes imagined for them. Theoretically, these results suggest a new interpretation for numerous empirical findings on the effectiveness of no‐goal instructional tasks. The standing “reduced cognitive load” interpretation is contradicted by the success of the specific‐path condition, and we offer an alternative knowledge‐dependent interpretation. (shrink)

The recognition and incorporation of evidence-based neuroscientific concepts into creative arts therapeutic knowledge and practice seem valuable and advantageous for the purpose of integration and professional development. Moreover, exhilarating insights from the field of neuroscience coincide with the nature, conceptualization, goals, and methods of Creative Arts Therapies, enabling comprehensive understandings of the clinical landscape, from a translational perspective. This paper contextualizes and discusses dynamic brain functions that have been suggested to lie at the heart of intra- and inter-personal processes. (...) Touching upon fundamental aspects of the self and self-other interaction, the state-of-the-art neuroscientific-informed views will shed light on mechanisms of the embodied, predictive and relational brain. The conceptual analysis introduces and interweaves the following contemporary perspectives of brain function: firstly, the grounding of mental activity in the lived, bodily experience will be delineated; secondly, the enactive account of internal models, or generative predictive representations, shaped by experience, will be defined and extensively deliberated; and thirdly, the interpersonal simulation and synchronization mechanisms that support empathy and mentalization will be thoroughly considered. Throughout the paper, the cross-talks between the brain and the body, within the brain through functionally connected neural networks and in the context of agent-environment dynamics, will be addressed. These communicative patterns will be elaborated on to unfold psychophysiological linkage, as well as psychopathological shifts, concluding with the neuroplastic change associated with the formulation of CATs. The manuscript suggests an integrative view of the brain-body-mind in contexts relevant to the therapeutic potential of the expressive creative arts and the main avenues by which neuroscience may ground, enlighten and enrich the clinical psychotherapeutic practice. (shrink)

The study takes an interaction perspective to examine possible interaction effects of goal orientation, psychological capital, and organizational innovation climate aimed at enhancing employees’ innovation behavior. A total sample of 398 employees were selected in Chinese enterprises. The descriptive statistical analyses, multiple regression, and bootstrap approach are adopted to test the interactive effects after controlling for gender, age, years for work of employees, type of enterprises, and industry. Results indicate that learning goal orientation and proving goal orientation have (...) a positive effect on employees’ innovation behavior through psychological capital. The positive relationship between psychological capital and employees’ innovation behavior is stronger when employees perceive more organizational innovation climate. Additionally, the positive effect of learning goal orientation and proving goal orientation on employees’ innovation behavior is stronger in high organizational innovation climate through high-level psychological capital than in low organizational innovation climate. However, the negative effect of avoiding goal orientation on innovation behavior is not significant. Finally, implications and further research are discussed. (shrink)

The paper explores certain phenomena which arise in stories, conversations, and human activity in general when the plans of two individuals are formed and carried out in an interactive situation. A notation system for representing interacting plans is introduced and applied in the analysis of a small portion of “Hansel and Gretel.” The analysis illustrates how a single actor plan can be modified by the needs of cooperative interaction with others and how cooperative interactive episodes can be transformed and (...) used deceptively by one party in achieving his or her own covert goals. (shrink)

Equational reasoning arises in many areas of mathematics and computer science. It is a cornerstone of algebraic reasoning and results essential in tasks of specification and verification in functional programming, where a program is mainly a set of equations. The usual manipulation of identities while conducting informal proofs obviates many intermediate steps that are neccesary while developing them using a formal system, such as the equationally complete Birkhoff calculus ${\mathcal{B}}$. This deductive system does not fit in the common manner of (...) doing mathematical proofs, and it is not compatible with the mechanisms of proof assistants. The aim of this work is to provide a deductive system ${\mathcal{B}}^{\textrm{GOAL}}$ for equality, equivalent to ${\mathcal{B}}$ but suitable for constructing equational proofs in a backward fashion. This feature makes it adequate for interactive proof-search in the approach of proof assistants. This will be achieved by turning ${\mathcal{B}}^{\textrm{GOAL}}$ into a transition system of formal tactics in the style of Edinburgh LCF, such transformation allows us to give a direct formal definition of backward proof in equational logic. (shrink)

My goal in this paper 1 is, first, to collect together a number of themes and observations that have usually been kept apart, locked up in their respective disciplines. When these are brought together, some general and far reaching implications become really rather clear. In particular, I want to make a case for the implicit coherence of these themes in the idea that.

Dialog is a joint action at different levels. At the highest level, the goal of interlocutors is to align their mental representations. This emerges from joint activity at lower levels, both concerned with linguistic decisions (e.g., choice of words) and nonlinguistic processes (e.g., alignment of posture or speech rate). Because of the high‐level goal, the interlocutors are particularly concerned with close coupling at these lower levels. As we illustrate with examples, this means that imitation and entrainment are particularly pronounced during (...) interactive communication. We then argue that the mechanisms underlying such processes involve covert imitation of interlocutors’ communicative behavior, leading to emulation of their expected behavior. In other words, communication provides a very good example of predictive emulation, in a way that leads to successful joint activity. (shrink)

This paper, along with the following paper by John McCarthy, introduces some of the topics to be discussed at the IJCAI95 event `A philosophical encounter: An interactive presentation of some of the key philosophical problems in AI and AI problems in philosophy.' Philosophy needs AI in order to make progress with many difficult questions about the nature of mind, and AI needs philosophy in order to help clarify goals, methods, and concepts and to help with several specific technical problems. (...) Whilst philosophical attacks on AI continue to be welcomed by a significant subset of the general public, AI defenders need to learn how to avoid philosophically naive rebuttals. (shrink)

Children's imitation of adults plays a prominent role in human cognitive development. However, few studies have investigated how children represent the complex structure of observed actions which underlies their imitation. We integrate theories of action segmentation, memory, and imitation to investigate whether children's event representation is organized according to veridical serial order or a higher level goal structure. Children were randomly assigned to learn novel event sequences either through interactive hands-on experience or via storybook. Results demonstrate that children's representation of (...) observed actions is organized according to higher level goals, even at the cost of representing the veridical temporal ordering of the sequence. We argue that prioritizing goal structure enhances event memory, and that this mental organization is a key mechanism of social-cognitive development in real-world, dynamic environments. It supports cultural learning and imitation in ecologically valid settings when social agents are multitasking and not demonstrating one isolated goal at a time. (shrink)

Natural dialogue does not proceed haphazardly; it has an easily recognized “episodic” structure and coherence which conform to a well developed set of conventions. This paper represents these conventions formally in terms related to speech act theory and to a theory of action.The major formal unit, the dialogue game, specifies aspects of the communication of both participants in a dialogue. We define the formal notion of dialogue games, and describe some of the important games of English. Dialogue games are conventions (...) of interactive goal pursuit. Using them, each participant pursues his own goals in a way which sometimes serves the goals of the other. The idea of dialogue games can thus be seen as a part of a broader theoretical perspective which characterizes virtually all communication as goal pursuit activity.We also define and exemplify the property of Motivational Coherence of dialogues. Motivational Coherence can be used as an interpretive principle in explaining language comprehension.Actual dialogue games have a kind of causal connectedness which is not a consequence of their formal properties. This is explained in terms of a theory of action, which is also seen to explain a similar attribute of speech acts. (shrink)

The human capacity for intersubjective engagement is present, even when one is limited in speaking, pointing, and coordinating gaze. This paper examines the everyday social interactions of two differently-disposed actors—a non-speaking autistic child and his speaking, neurotypical mother—who participate in shared attention through dialogic turn-taking. In the collaborative pursuit of activities, the participants coordinate across multiple turns, producing multi-turn constructions that accomplish specific goals. The paper asks two questions about these collaborative constructions: 1) What are their linguistic and discursive (...) structures? 2) How do embodied actions contribute to these constructions? Findings show that the parent and child repeatedly co-produced multi-turn constructions that had consistent structures, implying a sophisticated ability to anticipate the completion of action trajectories. Examining the embodied actions of interactants revealed that the child often accommodated to the parent’s demands for participation. Nonetheless, the child occasionally pursued his own goals by improvising with and within multi-turn constructions. He launched constructions to redirect parental attention, and otherwise produced surprising actions within the turn-taking structure of these constructions. The paper concludes that multi-turn constructions in the midst of activities are a primordial site in which to begin observing the competencies of non-speaking autistic children for intersubjective engagement. (shrink)

The necessity for introducing interactionist and parallelism approaches in different branches of cognitive science emerged as a reaction to classical sequential stage-based models. Functional psychological models that emphasized and explained how different components interact, dynamically producing cognitive and perceptual states, influenced multiple disciplines. Chiefly among them were experimental psycholinguistics and the many applied areas that dealt with humans’ ability to process different types of information in different contexts. Understanding how bilinguals represent and process verbal and visual input, how their neural (...) and psychological states facilitate such interactions, and how linguistic and nonlinguistic processing overlap, has now emerged as an important area of multidisciplinary research. In this article, we will review available evidence from different language-speaking groups of bilinguals in India with a focus on situational context. In the discussion, we will address models of language processing in bilinguals within a cognitive psychological approach with a focus on existent models of inhibitory control. The paper's stated goal will be to show that the parallel architecture framework can serve as a theoretical foundation for examining bilingual language processing and its interface with external factors such as social context. (shrink)

Effective doctor patient relationships are predicated on doctors' relational engagement and affective/holistic communication with the patients. On the contrary, the contemporary healthcare and patient-clinician communication are at odds with the desirable professional goals, often resulting in dehumanization and demoralization of patients. Besides denigrating the moral agency of a patient such apathetic interactions and unprofessional approach also affect the treatment and well-being of the sufferer. Foregrounding multifaceted doctor-patient relationships, graphic pathographies are a significant cultural resource which recreate the embodied moment (...) of clinical encounters as they also lay bare qualitative tensions between patient' illness experience with doctor's professional understanding of the same. Taking these cues, the present article drawing theoretical postulates of Rita Charon, Deborah Lupton, and Havi Carel close reads Peter Dunlap-Shohl's My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson's, Brian Fies' Mom's Cancer, and Stan Mack's Janet & Me: An Illustrated Story of Love and Loss to investigate the nature of doctor-patient relationship vis-à-vis communication and the implications of bad doctoring/communicative practices on patient identity and emotions. Furthermore, the article also examines the aesthetic and functional role of comics in bringing into relief the graphically mediated doctor-patient relationship. (shrink)