Anthropomorphism and Intentionality Improve Memory for Events

Baker, Lewis; Hymel, Alicia M.; Levin, Daniel T.

doi:10.1080/0163853x.2016.1223517

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Another aspect relevant to this account concerns the way the content of stories is adapted to the constraints of human memory (Baker, Hymel, & Levin, ). Stories are highly memorable (Scalise Sugiyama, ; Sperber, ).…”

Section: Adaptive Functions Of Storytellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking

Bietti

Tilston

Bangerter

2018

Topics in Cognitive Science

141

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Storytelling represents a key element in the creation and propagation of culture. Three main accounts of the adaptive function of storytelling include (a) manipulating the behavior of the audience to enhance the fitness of the narrator, (b) transmitting survival-relevant information while avoiding the costs involved in the first-hand acquisition of that information, and (c) maintaining social bonds or group-level cooperation. We assess the substantial evidence collected in experimental and ethnographic studies for each account. These accounts do not always appeal to the specific features of storytelling above and beyond language use in general. We propose that the specific adaptive value of storytelling lies in making sense of non-routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling the collaborative development of previously acquired skills and knowledge, but also promoting social cohesion by strengthening intragroup identity and clarifying intergroup relations.

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Section: Adaptive Functions Of Storytellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking

Bietti

Tilston

Bangerter

2018

Topics in Cognitive Science

141

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“…However, the authors also note that the default system theorized by Samson and Apperly might simply be promiscuous. Given that participants viewed scenes with both avatars and arrows, and given the proclivity of human beings to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, ranging from clouds (Guthrie, 1993) to robots (Baker, Hymel, & Levin, in review; Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007), it is possible that the self-judgment interference effect readily generalizes to perceptual and symbolic forms of agency.…”

Section: The Scope Of Default Perspective Takingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The extent of default visual perspective taking in complex layouts.

Baker¹,

Levin²,

Saylor³

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Emerging research suggests that visual perspective taking might be based in part on a default, early developing cognitive process. This hypothesis receives support from experiments demonstrating that adults experience interference from task-irrelevant perspectives of depicted agents even when participants are making judgments about their own perspective. However, a number of recent articles conclude that this self-judgment interference effect may be because of simple directional cues alone, and might, therefore, not reflect processes specific to visual perspective taking. In 3 studies, we demonstrate that self-judgment interference is constrained by agents' apparent line-of-sight access to subspaces in realistic rendered scenes. Participants displayed processing costs when their perspective conflicted with that of an avatar, who faced in the direction of all possible targets but could not see some of the targets because of occlusion. This interference effect occurred using 2 different configurations of occluders, and disappeared when windows were added to the occluders, allowing avatars line of sight access to all of the targets visible to the participant. These results demonstrate that default perspective taking is not attributable to directional cues alone but instead reflects a relatively sophisticated calculation of an agent's line of sight. (PsycINFO Database Record

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“…Students also completed a property attribution questionnaire, which was created for this study but drew upon similar questionnaires used by Baker et al (2016) and Epley, Akalis, Ways, and Cacioppo (2008). This questionnaire assessed students’ beliefs about the capabilities of a computer—whether it can see, think, remember, count, feel (emotionally), know things, have intelligence, and understand a person’s desires.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, if people cannot judge the subset of skills that a software agent is likely to exhibit in a given setting, they may become frustrated with agents that lack expected skills, or, conversely, with agents that do more than expected (de Graaf, Ben Allouch, & van Dijk, 2016; Scheeff, Pinto, Rahardja, Snibbe, & Tow, 2002). Further, even in the absence of a negative emotional response, poor pragmatic understanding of agents may cause cognitive inefficiencies, either as a result of engaging in capacity-absorbing social responses that do not facilitate problem solving (Herberg, Levin, & Saylor, 2012), or by engaging in cognitive elaborations on agents that interfere with more basic information processing (Baker, Hymel, & Levin, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The interrelationship between concepts about agency and students’ use of teachable-agent learning technology

et al. 2019

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To successfully interact with software agents, people must call upon basic concepts about goals and intentionality and strategically deploy these concepts in a range of circumstances where specific entailments may or may not apply. We hypothesize that people who can effectively deploy agency concepts in new situations will be more effective in interactions with software agents. Further, we posit that interacting with a software agent can itself refine a person’s deployment of agency concepts. We investigated this reciprocal relationship in one particularly important context: the classroom. In three experiments we examined connections between middle school students’ concepts about agency and their success learning from a teachable-agent-based computer system called “Betty’s Brain”. We found that the students who made more intentional behavioral predictions about humans learned more effectively from the system. We also found that students who used the Betty’s Brain system distinguished human behavior from machine behavior more strongly than students who did not. We conclude that the ability to effectively deploy agency concepts both supports, and is refined by, interactions with software agents. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s41235-019-0163-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Anthropomorphism and Intentionality Improve Memory for Events

Cited by 16 publications

References 55 publications

Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking

Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking

The extent of default visual perspective taking in complex layouts.

The interrelationship between concepts about agency and students’ use of teachable-agent learning technology

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