Rule violations are a ubiquitous in human societies, and they are studied from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. Most prior research on deliberate rule violations has adopted a third-person perspective, asking whether or not agents decide to violate rules based on contextual factors and moral considerations. By contrast, little is known about the cognitive, affective, and motivational dynamics that occur in the rule-breaking agent right at the moment that he or she violates a rule. In order to approach such an agent-centred, first-person perspective on deliberate rule violations, I will present a series of behavioural experiments that show how committing a rule violation bears cognitive conflict for the rule breaker: Analyses of movement trajectories reveal that the rule representation seems to be continually active during the entire course of action, leaving a trace on observable behaviour. These findings open up a new theoretical approach to violation behaviour that shifts the focus from precursors and consequences of this ubiquitous behaviour to the actual cognitive processes that occur right at the moment a rule violation takes place.

Burkart, Judith (Zurich University)

Human cognitive evolution – how cooperative breeding shaped our minds

Humans have evolved from a great ape-like ancestor, who lived 5-7 mio years ago and from whom we have inherited big brains and impressive cognitive skills. During this time, however, we not only evolved our uniquely human cognitive abilities, but also started to systematically share offspring care in the social group (i.e. engage in cooperative breeding). Cooperative breeding is rare in primates and absent in extant great apes such as chimpanzees or gorillas. In fact, besides humans, it is only present in callitrichid monkeys. In these monkeys, shared infant care coevolved with high levels of social tolerance and proactive prosociality. These psychological adaptations not only scaffold behaviors necessary to share infant care, but also improve performance in a set of socio-cognitive tasks, including social learning or cooperative problem solving. We argue that during human evolution, the adoption of cooperative breeding was likewise accompanied by a suite of psychological adaptations. In contrast to callitrichids, however, these psychological adaptations were added to an already very powerful, great ape-like cognitive system, resulting in cascading effects on subsequent cognitive evolution. A situated and embodied cognition framework may be particularly useful for modelling this role of cooperative breeding for human cognitive evolution.

Vollmer, Anna-Lisa (Bielefeld University)

Towards flexible interaction protocols for human-robot interaction

Human-robot interaction (HRI) today largely suffers from a rigidity that requires the human user to learn and adapt to artificial protocols of interaction, preprogrammed into the robot system by the developers, within which the robot system can operate. Enabling the robot to flexibly adapt to the human and to co-construct patterns of interaction together with the individual human user would mean advances in system usability as interactions become more natural and efficient. In this talk, I will demonstrate this issue, which is especially important for robot learning, and present work towards rendering interaction protocols for HRI more flexible. HRI studies and studies with humans designed to model HRI, where humans learn to communicate when they do not share a protocol of interaction beforehand, shed light on the cognitive underpinnings of communication in humans that are missing in robots.

Rohlfing, Katharina (Paderborn University - Universität Bielefeld)

Pragmatic Frames—a multimodal and interpersonal alternative to mapping a word onto a concept in language acquisition

So far in the research, the problem of learning a word was presented mostly in an intrapersonal way: a child has to map a word onto a concept. In this presentation, I will present an alternative to this approach: Word learning is not only a matter of the learner. Instead, it is a joint and collaborative endeavor. Consequently, words are used for specific action goals—especially in early development. This view affords not only a change of theoretically conceptualizing word learning but also a change of methods. Departing from the theory summarized in Rohlfing et al., (2016), I will exemplify the methodological challenge on turn-taking, which – so far – was investigated mostly as unimodal but should be considered as a multimodal phenomenon. Analyzing a corpus of mother-child dyads applying Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis and frequent pattern mining, solutions to the assessment of human sequential behavior will be presented with respect to the questions of (i) how multimodal turn-taking spreads across different modalities and (ii) how it is co-constructed with a partner.

28th June

Vallverdú, Jordi (Autonomous University of Barcelona)

Ponzi Cognition and Epistemic Norms: Lessons from Ubiquitous Practices