A starter toolkit for affective cognition?

Members: Christiana Tsiourti [Project 1], Julia Espinosa [Project 1], Laurie Bayet [Project 1]

Summary:

This project proposes to explore cognitive tools that enable humans and other animals to communicate affects/emotions nonverbally, combining expertise in AI/modeling (e.g., Bayesian), animal cognition, and human cognition/development. At this time, we are collaborating to write a concept paper, with the intent to write a seed funding proposal next to conduct experiments with preverbal infants and non-human animals.

Relevant references include:

• Bliss-Moreau, E. (2017). Constructing nonhuman animal emotion. Current opinion in psychology, 17, 184-188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.011

• Filippi, P., Congdon, J. V., Hoang, J., Bowling, D. L., Reber, S. A., Pašukonis, A., ... & Güntürkün, O. (2017). Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284(1859), 20170990.

• Albuquerque, N., Guo, K., Wilkinson, A., Savalli, C., Otta, E., & Mills, D. (2016). Dogs recognize dog and human emotions. Biology letters, 12(1), 20150883. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0883

• Ong, D. C., Zaki, J. & Goodman, N. D. Computational Models of Emotion Inference in Theory of Mind: A Review and Roadmap. Top. Cogn. Sci. 11, 338–357 (2019). doi:10.1111/tops.12371

• Reschke, P. J., Walle, E. A. & Dukes, D. Interpersonal Development in Infancy: The Interconnectedness of Emotion Understanding and Social Cognition. Child Dev. Perspect. 11, 178–183 (2017)

• Skerry, A. E. & Spelke, E. S. Preverbal infants identify emotional reactions that are incongruent with goal outcomes. Cognition 130, 204–216 (2014). doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.11.002

Presentation: