Motion, identity and the bias toward agency

Fields, Chris

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00597

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 129 publications

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“…Typically infants perceive human action as volitional and intentional in nature, and are less likely to perceive the actions of non-human entities as intentional (Fields, 2014). Although it is possible that the infants in the present study interpreted the actions of the human hand, but not the mechanical hand, as intentional in nature we consider this explanation unlikely, for the following reason.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, with sufficient cues to establish goal intention, such as self-propulsion, clear action-effects, and equifiniality (Biro & Leslie, 2007; Király et al, 2003) or with experience with the claw (Boyer et al, 2011; Gerson & Woodward, 2012; Hofer et al, 2005) infants as young as 7 to 9 months will attribute goal-directedness to non-human agents. These and related findings suggest that infants have a bias to assign intentional agency to humans but not mechanical devices (Fields, 2014), a bias that is malleable with salient goal-related cues and motor experience.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

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On the other hand: Increased cortical activation to human versus mechanical hands in infants

2016

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There is a large body of work demonstrating that infants are sensitive to the distinction between human and mechanical entities from the early months of life, and have different expectations for the way these entities move and interact. The current work investigates the extent to which the functional organization of the immature brain reflects these early emerging sensitivities. Infants aged 8 months watched two kinds of hands (human or mechanical) engage in two kinds of events (one with a functional outcome and one without). Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we assessed hemodynamic activation in the left and right temporal and temporal-occipital cortex in response to these events. The neuroimaging data revealed a significantly greater increase in activation in the right middle-posterior temporal cortex to events executed by the human than the mechanical hand; the event in which the hand engaged (function or non-function) did not significantly influence hemodynamic responses. In comparison, the left middle-temporal cortex showed significantly greater activation to events executed by the human than mechanical hand, but only when the events were functionally relevant. That is, the left middle-posterior temporal cortex responded selectively to human (as compared to mechanical) agents, but only in the context of functionally relevant actions on objects. These results reveal that the immature brain is functionally specialized to support infants’ processing of human and non-human agents as distinct entities. These results also shed light on the cognitive and cortical mechanisms that guide infants’ learning about agentive action and object function.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

On the other hand: Increased cortical activation to human versus mechanical hands in infants

2016

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“…Persistent objects are instances, first, of the types representing their visually-identified features. They are, second, classified automatically by threat detection, agency detection and animacy detection systems active beginning in early infancy (Fields, 2014); the presence of a face alone indicates agency to human infants. They are also classified, when possible, into entry-level and then more abstract cognitive categories, an ability also developed in infancy (Rakison and Yermoleva, 2010).…”

Section: From Object Files To Object Tokens and Object Historiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A mosaic of Chu spaces and Channel Theory II: applications to object identification and mereological complexity

Fields

Glazebrook

2018

Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligen

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Chu Spaces and Channel Theory are well established areas of investigation in the general context of category theory. We review a range of examples and applications of these methods in logic and computer science, including Formal Concept Analysis, distributed systems and ontology development. We then employ these methods to describe human object perception, beginning with the construction of uncategorized object files and proceeding through categorization, individual object identification and the tracking of object identity through time. We investigate the relationship between abstraction and mereological categorization, particularly as these affect object identity tracking. This we accomplish in terms of information flow that is semantically structured in terms of local logics, while at the same time this framework also provides an inferential mechanism towards identification and perception. We show how a mereotopology naturally emerges from the representation of classifications by simplicial complexes, and briefly explore the emergence of geometric relations and interactions between objects.The first part of the paper addresses the initial aim of the tool assembly. We begin by defining and reviewing some of the basic properties of Chu spaces in §2. Although Chu spaces have been traditionally applied to fields such as those listed above, they also have a number of other significant applications of interest here. How Chu spaces can be implemented within Formal Concept Analysis and Domain Theory (e.g. to represent information systems and approximable concepts following Hitzler and Zhang (2004); Krötzsch, Hitzler and Zhang (2005); Scott (1982); Zhang and Shen (2006)) is reviewed in §3. In §4 we discuss representations of spaces (and representations by spaces), spatial coarse-graining and finite sampling of information (Gratus and Porter, 2006; Sorkin, 1991a); we then review the representation of sampled information by simplicial complexes constructed "above" the sampled space in §5. The following two sections, §6 and §7 establish a similar working account of Channel Theory. We survey a number of motivating examples and applications, including Distributed Systems (The category-theoretic concepts of cocone and colimit (e.g. Awodey (2010)) naturally arise in both Chu space and Channel Theory descriptions; we review these concepts in §8 with illustrative examples.The second part of the paper presents new results. We begin in §9 with brief reviews of perception, categorization and attention as neurocognitive processes and of multi-layer recurrent network models (e.g. Friston (2010); Grossberg (2013)) of these processes. In §10, we re-describe perception and categorization, using the Chu space and Channel Theory tools assembled in the first part, in a way that makes explicit the dualities between dynamic and static properties, individuals and categories, and states and events. We capture these dualities in a "cone-cocone diagram" that formalizes the inferential steps required to link object tokens together to produce a "...

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“…One can hypothesize, therefore, that before 4 years of age, any causal models used to infer individual identity across feature changes or in the presence of identically featured competitors are based exclusively on causation by agents, and that even in older children, such identity-preservation models remain biased toward causation by agency. If this is the case, the human representation of individual identity over time is strongly developmentally coupled to the representation of agency, and may be expected to remain so throughout the lifespan (Fields 2014).…”

Section: Motion Detection Categorization and Causal Reasoning In Indmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual re-identification of individual objects: a core problem for organisms and AI

Fields

2015

Cogn Process

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Two open questions about the visual re-identification of individual objects over extended time periods are briefly reviewed: (1) How much a priori information about the nature of objects, identity and time is required to support robust individual object re-identification abilities? and (2) how do epistemic feelings, such as the feeling of familiarity, contribute both to object re-identification and to the perception of opportunities and risks associated with individual objects and their affordances? The ongoing interplay between experiments that can be carried out with human subjects and experiments made possible with robotic systems is examined. It is suggested that developmental robotics, including virtual-reality simulations of robot-environment interactions, may provide the best route to understanding both the implementation of epistemic feelings in humans and their functional contribution to the identification of persistent individual objects.

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Motion, identity and the bias toward agency

Cited by 10 publications

References 129 publications

On the other hand: Increased cortical activation to human versus mechanical hands in infants

On the other hand: Increased cortical activation to human versus mechanical hands in infants

A mosaic of Chu spaces and Channel Theory II: applications to object identification and mereological complexity

Visual re-identification of individual objects: a core problem for organisms and AI

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