Principi e metodi della robotica evolutiva

L’intelligenza artificiale, ovvero lo studio e la progettazione di sistemi intelligenti, mira a riprodurre alcuni aspetti dell’intelligenza umana, come il linguaggio e il ragionamento deduttivo, nei computer. La robotica, invece, cerca spesso di ricreare nei robot comportamenti adattativi, come l’abilità di manipolare oggetti o camminare, mediante l’utilizzo di algoritmi in grado di generare comportamenti desiderati. Una volta realizzato uno di questi algoritmi specificamente per una certa abilità, si auspica che tale algoritmo possa essere riutilizzato per generare comportamenti più complessi fino a che il comportamento adattativo del robot non si mostri ad un osservatore esterno come intelligente; purtroppo questo non risulta sempre possibile e talvolta per generare comportamenti di maggiore complessità è necessario riscrivere totalmente gli algoritmi. Appare quindi evidente come nel campo della robotica l’attenzione sia incentrata sul comportamento, perché le azioni di un robot generano nuove stimolazioni sensoriali, che a loro volta influiscono sulle sue azioni future. Questo tipo di intelligenza artificiale (chiamata propriamente embodied cognition) differisce da quella propriamente detta per il fatto che l’intelligenza non emerge dall’introspezione ma dalle interazioni via via più complesse che la macchina ha con l’ambiente circostante. Gli esseri viventi presenti in natura mostrano, infatti, alcuni fenomeni che non sono programmati a priori nei geni, bensì frutto dell’interazione che l’organismo ha con l’ambiente durante le varie fasi del suo sviluppo. Volendo creare una macchina che sia al contempo autonoma e adattativa, si devono affrontare due problemi: il primo è relativo alla difficoltà della progettazione di macchine autonome, il secondo agli ingenti costi di sviluppo dei robot. Alla fine degli anni ’80 nasce la robotica evolutiva che, traendo ispirazione dall’evoluzione biologica, si basa sull’utilizzo di software in grado di rappresentare popolazioni di robot virtuali e la capacità di farli evolvere all’interno di un simulatore, in grado di rappresentare le interazioni tra mente e corpo del robot e l’ambiente, per poi realizzare fisicamente solo i migliori. Si utilizzano algoritmi evolutivi per generare robot che si adattano, anche dal punto di vista della forma fisica, all’ambiente in cui sono immersi. Nel primo capitolo si tratterà di vita ed evoluzione artificiali, concetti che verranno ripresi nel secondo capitolo, dedicato alle motivazioni che hanno portato alla nascita della robotica evolutiva, agli strumenti dei quali si avvale e al rapporto che ha con la robotica tradizionale e le sue declinazioni. Nel terzo capitolo si presenteranno i tre formalismi mediante i quali si sta cercando di fornire un fondamento teorico a questa disciplina. Infine, nel quarto capitolo saranno mostrati i problemi che ancora oggi non hanno trovato soluzione e le sfide che si devono affrontare trattando di robotica evolutiva.

The structuring body : a critical study in the description & explanation of perceptual experience

The aims of the dissertation are to find the right description of the structure of perceptual experience and to explore the ways in which the structure of the body might serve to explain it. In the first two parts, I articulate and defend the claim that perceptual experience seems direct and the claim that its objects seem real. I defend these claims as integral parts of a coherent metaphysically neutral conception of perceptual experience. Sense-datum theorists, certain influential perceptual psychologists, and early modern philosophers (most notably Berkeley) all disputed the claim that perceptual experience seems direct. In Part I, I argue that the grounds on which they did so were poor. The aim is then, in Part II, to give a proper appreciation of the distinctive intentionality of perceptual experience whilst remaining metaphysically neutral. I do so by drawing on the early work of Edmund Husserl, providing a characterisation of the perceptual experience of objects as real, qua mind-independent particulars. In Part III, I explore two possible explanations of the structure characterising the intentionality of perceptual experience, both of which accord a distinctive explanatory role to the body. On one account, perceptual experience is structured by an implicit pre-reflective consciousness of oneself as a body engaged in perceptual activity. An alternative account makes no appeal to the metaphysically laden concept of a bodily self. It seeks to explain the structure of perceptual experience by appeal to anticipation of the structural constraints of the body. I develop this alternative by highlighting the conceptual and empirical basis for the idea that a first-order structural affordance relation holds between a bodily agent and certain properties of its body. I then close with a discussion of the shared background assumptions that ought to inform disputes over whether the body itself (in addition to its representation) ought to serve as an explanans in such an account.

Shadowing: imitazione e apprendimento. Dagli Interpreting Studies alle neuroscienze

Scopo di questa tesi è argomentare l’utilità dello shadowing nella formazione degli interpreti, basandosi sulla Teoria motoria della percezione del linguaggio di Alvin Liberman e muovendosi all’interno del quadro teorico della più ampia embodied cognition, che include teorie sullo sviluppo del linguaggio e sull’acquisizione di seconde lingue. Nella formazione degli interpreti, lo shadowing è un esercizio che consiste nell’immediata ripetizione di quanto udito in cuffia, parola per parola e nella medesima lingua del testo di partenza ed è generalmente utilizzato come esercizio propedeutico alla simultanea, in quanto permette sia di “imparare” ad ascoltare e a parlare contemporaneamente, sia di migliorare la pronuncia e la fluidità in lingua straniera. Tuttavia, all’interno degli Interpreting Studies, ci sono studiosi che lo ritengono un esercizio inutile e, per certi versi, pericoloso poiché porrebbe l’accento su un processo eccessivamente “meccanico” dell’interpretazione. Per argomentare la sua utilità nella didattica dell’interpretazione, in questa tesi, dopo aver presentato le principali teorie sullo sviluppo del linguaggio e sull’acquisizione di seconde lingue, si passeranno in rassegna i risultati di ricerche condotte non solo all’interno degli Interpreting Studies, ma anche nella più ampia prospettiva della didattica delle lingue straniere/seconde, e soprattutto in neurolinguistica e psicologia cognitiva, dove lo shadowing è utilizzato per analizzare i processi cognitivi che sono alla base della ricezione e produzione del linguaggio (articolazione motoria, memoria di lavoro, attenzione selettiva, ecc.). L’ultimo capitolo di questo lavoro sarà dedicato alla descrizione di un approccio estremamente recente sulla percezione e sulla produzione del linguaggio, che coniuga la Teoria motoria della percezione del linguaggio di Liberman (1967) con la recente scoperta dei neuroni specchio, e che getta una luce nuova sull’utilità dello shadowing nella formazione degli interpreti.

Embodiment und Körperpsychotherapie

Wenn der Körper in der Psychotherapie stärker gewichtet werden soll, stellt sich die Frage, wie dieses Ziel mit psychologischer Theoriebildung vereinbar ist. Nach unserer Auffassung kann dies eine Theorie des „Embodiment“ leisten. Entsprechende Ansätze werden seit einiger Zeit in den Kognitionswissenschaften („embodied cognition“) diskutiert. An die Beschreibung dieser Theorie schließt sich eine Diskussion an, wie sich Embodiment auf die soziale Interaktion auswirkt, denn dies ist essenziell für die therapeutische Interaktion. Abschließend wird an einem Beispiel gezeigt, wie sich der Embodiment-Ansatz in einer Psychotherapie umsetzen lässt.

The subjective present and its modulation in clinical contexts

Time is a basic dimension in psychology, underlying behavior and experience. Timing and time perception constitute implicit processes that are often inaccessible to the individual person. Research in this field has shown that timing is involved in many areas of clinical significance. In the projects presented here, we combine timing with seemingly different fields of research, such as psychopathology, perceptual grouping, and embodied cognition. Focusing on the time scale of the subjective present, we report findings from three different clinical studies: (1) We studied perceived causality in schizophrenia patients, finding that perceptual grouping (‘binding’, ‘Gestalt formation’), which leads to visual causality perceptions, did not distinguish between patients and healthy controls. Patients however did integrate context (provided by the temporal distribution of auditory context stimuli) less into perceptions, in significant contrast to controls. This is consistent with reports of higher inaccuracy in schizophrenia patients’ temporal processing. (2) In a project on auditory Gestalt perception we investigated auditory perceptual grouping in schizophrenia patients. The mean dwell time was positively related to how much patients were prone to auditory hallucinations. Dwell times of auditory Gestalts may be regarded as operationalizations of the subjective present; findings thus suggested that patients with hallucinations had a shorter present. (3) The movement correlations of interacting individuals were used to study the non-verbal synchrony between therapist and patient in psychotherapy sessions. We operationalized the duration of an embodied ‘social present’ by the statistical significance of such associations, finding a window of roughly 5.7 seconds in conversing dyads.We discuss that temporal scales of nowness may be modifiable, e.g., by mindfulness. This yields promising goals for future research on timing in the clinical context: psychotherapeutic techniques may alter binding processes, hence the subjective present of individuals, and may affect the social present in therapeutic interactions.

Die Integration von Tanz, Bewegung und Psychotherapie durch den Embodimentansatz

Die AutorInnen diskutieren die Frage der Integration von Tanz und Bewegung in die Psychotherapie. Wenn man die Entwicklungen in der Psychologie und Psychotherapieforschung betrachtet, insbesondere die neuere Forschung zum Embodiment der Kognition und die Wirkfaktorendiskussion in der Psychotherapie, eröffnen sich verschiedene solche Möglichkeiten. Unser Überblick macht deutlich, dass mit Tanz und Bewegung allgemeine psychotherapeutische Wirkmechanismen angesprochen werden können und die Forderungen, die sich aus der Embodimentperspektive ergeben, berücksichtigt würden. Ein Praxisbericht zur integrativen Therapie nach dem Zürcher Ressourcen Modell ZRM belegt die Machbarkeit und das Potenzial einer um Tanz und Bewegung erweiterten Psychotherapie.

EPA-1380 – Coordinated body-movement reflects psychotherapy outcome

Social interaction is a core aspect of human life that affects individuals’ physical and mental health. Social interaction usually leads to mutual engagement in diverse areas of mental, emotional, physiological and physical activity involving both interacting persons and subsequently impacting the outcome of interactions. A common approach to the analysis of social interaction is the study of the verbal content transmitted between sender and receiver. However, additional important processes and dynamics are occurring in other domains too, for example in the area of nonverbal behaviour: In a series of studies, we have looked at nonverbal synchrony – the coordination of two persons’ movement patterns – and it‘s association with relationship quality and with the outcome of interactions. Using a computer-based algorithm (Motion Energy Analysis, MEA: Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2011), which automatically quantifies a person‘s body-movement, we were able to objectively calculate nonverbal synchrony in a large number of dyads interacting in various settings. In a first step, we showed that the phenomenon of nonverbal synchrony exists at a level that is significantly higher than expected by chance. In a second step, we ascertained that across different settings – including patient-therapist dyads and healthy dyads – more synchronized movement was associated with better relationship quality and better interactional outcomes. The quality of a relationship is thus embodied by the synchronized movement patterns emerging between partners. Our studies suggest that embodied cognition is a valuable approach to research in social interaction, providing important clues for an improved understanding of interaction dynamics.

Quantifying epistemic actions in human-computer interaction

As digital systems move away from traditional desktop setups, new interaction paradigms are emerging that better integrate with users’ realworld surroundings, and better support users’ individual needs. While promising, these modern interaction paradigms also present new challenges, such as a lack of paradigm-specific tools to systematically evaluate and fully understand their use. This dissertation tackles this issue by framing empirical studies of three novel digital systems in embodied cognition – an exciting new perspective in cognitive science where the body and its interactions with the physical world take a central role in human cognition. This is achieved by first, focusing the design of all these systems on a contemporary interaction paradigm that emphasizes physical interaction on tangible interaction, a contemporary interaction paradigm; and second, by comprehensively studying user performance in these systems through a set of novel performance metrics grounded on epistemic actions, a relatively well established and studied construct in the literature on embodied cognition. The first system presented in this dissertation is an augmented Four-in-a-row board game. Three different versions of the game were developed, based on three different interaction paradigms (tangible, touch and mouse), and a repeated measures study involving 36 participants measured the occurrence of three simple epistemic actions across these three interfaces. The results highlight the relevance of epistemic actions in such a task and suggest that the different interaction paradigms afford instantiation of these actions in different ways. Additionally, the tangible version of the system supports the most rapid execution of these actions, providing novel quantitative insights into the real benefits of tangible systems. The second system presented in this dissertation is a tangible tabletop scheduling application. Two studies with single and paired users provide several insights into the impact of epistemic actions on the user experience when these are performed outside of a system’s sensing boundaries. These insights are clustered by the form, size and location of ideal interface areas for such offline epistemic actions to occur, as well as how can physical tokens be designed to better support them. Finally, and based on the results obtained to this point, the last study presented in this dissertation directly addresses the lack of empirical tools to formally evaluate tangible interaction. It presents a video-coding framework grounded on a systematic literature review of 78 papers, and evaluates its value as metric through a 60 participant study performed across three different research laboratories. The results highlight the usefulness and power of epistemic actions as a performance metric for tangible systems. In sum, through the use of such novel metrics in each of the three studies presented, this dissertation provides a better understanding of the real impact and benefits of designing and developing systems that feature tangible interaction.

An investigation into the tension arising between natural language and mathematical language experienced by mechanical engineering students

This investigation is grounded within the concept of embodied cognition where the mind is considered to be part of a biological system. A first year undergraduate Mechanical Engineering cohort of students was tasked with explaining the behaviour of three balls of different masses being rolled down a ramp. The explanations given by the students highlighted the cognitive conflict between the everyday interpretation of the word energy and its mathematical use. The results showed that even after many years of schooling, students found it challenging to interpret the mathematics they had learned and relied upon pseudo-scientific notions to account for the behaviour of the balls.

Compétences en littératie visuelle chez les étudiantEs en biologie au niveau collégial: bilan des apprentissages selon des activités digitales ou des activités de dessins à la main

This study examines the role of visual literacy in learning biology. Biology teachers promote the use of digital images as a learning tool for two reasons: because biology is the most visual of the sciences, and the use of imagery is becoming increasingly important with the advent of bioinformatics; and because studies indicate that this current generation of teenagers have a cognitive structure that is formed through exposure to digital media. On the other hand, there is concern that students are not being exposed enough to the traditional methods of processing biological information - thought to encourage left-brain sequential thinking patterns. Theories of Embodied Cognition point to the importance of hand-drawing for proper assimilation of knowledge, and theories of Multiple Intelligences suggest that some students may learn more easily using traditional pedagogical tools. To test the claim that digital learning tools enhance the acquisition of visual literacy in this generation of biology students, a learning intervention was carried out with 33 students enrolled in an introductory college biology course. The study compared learning outcomes following two types of learning tools. One learning tool was a traditional drawing activity, and the other was an interactive digital activity carried out on a computer. The sample was divided into two random groups, and a crossover design was implemented with two separate interventions. In the first intervention students learned how to draw and label a cell. Group 1 learned the material by computer and Group 2 learned the material by hand-drawing. In the second intervention, students learned how to draw the phases of mitosis, and the two groups were inverted. After each learning activity, students were given a quiz on the material they had learned. Students were also asked to self-evaluate their performance on each quiz, in an attempt to measure their level of metacognition. At the end of the study, they were asked to fill out a questionnaire that was used to measure the level of task engagement the students felt towards the two types of learning activities. In this study, following the first testing phase, the students who learned the material by drawing had a significantly higher average grade on the associated quiz compared to that of those who learned the material by computer. The difference was lost with the second “cross-over” trial. There was no correlation for either group between the grade the students thought they had earned through self-evaluation, and the grade that they received. In terms of different measures of task engagement, there were no significant differences between the two groups. One finding from the study showed a positive correlation between grade and self-reported time spent playing video games, and a negative correlation between grade and self-reported interest in drawing. This study provides little evidence to support claims that the use of digital tools enhances learning, but does provide evidence to support claims that drawing by hand is beneficial for learning biological images. However, the small sample size, limited number and type of learning tasks, and the indirect means of measuring levels of metacognition and task engagement restrict generalisation of these conclusions. Nevertheless, this study indicates that teachers should not use digital learning tools to the exclusion of traditional drawing activities: further studies on the effectiveness of these tools are warranted. Students in this study commented that the computer tool seemed more accurate and detailed - even though the two learning tools carried identical information. Thus there was a mismatch between the perception of the usefulness of computers as a learning tool and the reality, which again points to the need for an objective assessment of their usefulness. Students should be given the opportunity to try out a variety of traditional and digital learning tools in order to address their different learning preferences.

TEST:a tropic, embodied, and situated theory of cognition

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent's ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent's bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence, although we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage versus online generation as well as on representation-specific properties. © 2013 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.