Eye-tracking in the wild and in film by Tim Smith InteractingMindsAU 2016-02-18 | IMC Bootcamp: Attention workshopInteracting Minds Centre, Aarhus University
Pascale Moreira and Yuri Bizzoni - Between Text and Story: Insights from the Fabula-NET Project InteractingMindsAU 2024-07-02 | AbstractDoes successful literature have certain properties? This question is highly contested in research, between the position that reader appreciation is subjective and context-dependent, and a work-intrinsic position, i.e., that readers react to work-internal features that are relatively stable across time and space. Over the last three years, the Fabula-NET project has focused on exploring both extrinsic and intrinsic features to gauge the reception of narrative texts. In this talk, we will be presenting on the evolution of the project, starting with our initial focus on a balance between unpredictability and predictability in the reading experience, which we measured via the dynamics of texts’ sentiment arcs.While sentiment arcs are relatively coarse representations – a simplification of diverse narrative emotions – our findings indicate that in simpler domains, such as in fairy tales, there is a linear relationship between sentiment arcs' self-similarity and their reception. In contrast, more complex and diverse texts, like Nobel prize-winning literature, exhibit a "sweet spot" between predictability and unpredictability. While points of balance vary depending on the text type and reception dimension or quality proxy chosen, controlled experiments reveal significant relationships between sentiment arcs' self-similarity and their appreciation across different audiences. Moreover, our research also underscores that the text which sentiment arcs are conveyed through affects novels’ reception. We show that combining deep narrative and sentiment features with surface-level stylistic features – such as how ‘readable’ a text is – enhances the prediction of a book's reception, with semantic categories providing additional insights.So while the coherence of sentiment arcs varies among different appraisal groups, the interplay between stylistic and semantic levels in narrative novels significantly impacts their reception. We observe that different quality proxies tend to strike a balance of affective and linguistic unpredictability, reflecting, perhaps, a certain literary way of optimizing communication strategies with readers.About the speakersPascale Feldkamp Moreira, Research Assistant, Center for Humanities Computing, Aarhus UniversityYuri Bizzoni, Postdoc, Center for Humanities Computing, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held June 18th, 2024.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Melanie Rosen: Remembering dreams and dreaming of memories InteractingMindsAU 2024-06-12 | AbstractWhat makes a dream memory genuine? We generally think that when we wake up, we remember having hallucinatory experiences in our sleep. But what is it that we are remembering? One skeptical view would be to say that dream memories are not memories at all but some other kind of mental state. Under the causal theory of memory, a mental state is a memory if there is a causal connection between the mental state and the remembered event. Experiences lay down memory traces in the brain, known as engrams, which are reactivated when remembering, known as ecphory. Dreams pose two problems for this view. Firstly, our waking memory of our dreams is very poor and prone to confabulation. Dreams themselves are mental states and it is not clear what we should say about these kind of memories as opposed to memories of events that occur in the world external to the mind. Secondly, we have exceedingly poor access to our waking memories while we dream and yet dreams can play out waking experience. What should we say of such a dream when, unlike normal cases of memory, dreams allow you to relive events and these replayings are often experienced not as memories? Dreams will be discussed in relation to the causalist and anticausalist debate of memory.About the speakerMelanie Rosen, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Trent UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held May 28th, 2024.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovat InteractingMindsAU 2024-06-12 | Roope Kaaronen: A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovationAbstractFew cultural practices beyond language are as widespread as string figure games. Their global distribution and potential to yield insights into cultural transmission and cognition have long been noted. Yet, it remains unknown how or when this behavior originated and to what extent shared motifs are signals of repeated innovations or deep cultural transmission. Here, we combined a global cross-cultural inventory of string figures with a novel methodology based on knot theory, which enables the unequivocal numerical coding of string figures. We performed a computational analysis of a sample of 826 figures from 92 societies around the world. Across these societies, we found 83 recurring string figure designs, some of which are regionally restricted while others display a global distribution. The cognitively opaque nature of string figure designs and their clear geographic distribution reveals processes of cultural transmission, innovation, and convergent evolution. Most strikingly, the global distribution of some figures raises the possibility of shared ancient origins.About the speakerRoope KaaronenPostdoctoral Researcher, Ecosystems and Environment Research ProgrammeHelsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS)Past Present Sustainability (PAES)IMC Tuesday Seminar held April 23rd, 2024.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Ingvi Örnolfsson: The impact of background noise on collaborative triadic decision making InteractingMindsAU 2024-06-11 | AbstractCurrent paradigms of diagnosing hearing loss rely heavily on passive listening tests, where no conversational partner is present. While such tests allow the audiologist to diagnose hearing-related issues, they do not directly inform about the capacity for successful communication, which inherently requires interaction. Communication of course relies on hearing, but not entirely, and can in fact be entirely non-verbal.In my work, I am exploring the possibilities of developing methods for quantifying communication ability using a group decision making paradigm. I will present an exploratory study in which triads solve a collaborative general-knowledge task with and without the presence of loud background noise. I use a group decision-making model along with individual pre- and post-conversation decision responses to evaluate how group members influence each other during the conversation. The results show an interaction between background noise and metacognition, such that more confident members have a stronger impact on post-conversation decisions. There is also some indication that groups' post-conversation decisions are generally less coherent when conversing in noise.About the speakerIngvi Örnolfsson, PhD student, Department of Health Technology, Danish Technical UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held March 12th, 2024.
On islands and bridges: Working at the intersection of anthropology and clinical medicine InteractingMindsAU 2024-02-09 | On August 18th, 2023, Mette Terp Høybye delivered her inaugural lecture at the Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University. She was appointed as a professor of medical anthropology, and the lecture was titled "On islands and bridges: Working at the intersection of anthropology and clinical medicine". The event featured a blend of lecture and performance, which was recorded and can be found on the IMC website.The lecture aimed to explore the intersection of anthropology and clinical medicine and highlighted how they can complement each other. The lecture traced how social science methodologies and theories provide a way to critically understand illness and the practice of medicine. By engaging with clinical practices from within, it can also inform and develop theories and methodologies in anthropology and the medical humanities.As part of the lecture, Marie Hallager Andersen, a dance artist and choreographer, performed "6570 Pills & 43 Clips, " an ongoing project about diagnoses, hospitalizations, and the physical and mental scars of the body. The performance raises questions about the porous borderlands of the body, self, and environment during illness and medical treatment. The artistic work creates a bridge to approach, debate, and understand such experiences.Mette Terp Høybye and Marie Hallager Andersen are long-time collaborators on the project “Fieldwork in the Body”.
Michael Lee: Using cognitive models to understand how semantic memory changes with impairment InteractingMindsAU 2024-01-15 | AbstractUnderstanding how semantic memory changes because of impairment is a basic challenge for cognitive science, and an important question for society. A rich source of real-world behavioral evidence to address this challenge is provided by memory tests routinely administered in clinical care settings. We use tens of thousands of test results from two tasks in the Mild Cognitive Impairment Screen (MCIS). These tests were taken by thousands of people ranging from healthy controls to patients with different levels of impairment and dementia. The first memory task requires people to identify the “odd one out” of a set of three animal names. The second task is a surprise free recall of all of the animal names presented in the first task. We develop novel cognitive models of both the odd-one-out choices and the free recall behavior. This model-based approach allows us to test different hypotheses about whether and how semantic memory changes as impairment increases. For the odd-one-out task, contrary to previous claims, we find no evidence that the semantic representation of the animals changes. Instead, changes in performance can be explained in terms of worsening access to memory and the use of compensating response strategies. For the free recall task, we find that access to episodic information worsens with mild cognitive impairment but semantic information remains relatively more intact. As impairment progresses to dementia, however, access to semantic information is also lost. We emphasize how the use of cognitive models increases the theoretical insight into the changes in semantic memory, and provides a fine-grained clinical measurement capability that can be used in detection, diagnosis, and treatment.About the speakerMichael Lee, Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California Irvine (joint work with Holly Westfall)IMC Tuesday Seminar held December 5th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Rajiv Vaid Basaiawmoit: Gamification of the reflective exercise in the Entrepreneurship classroom InteractingMindsAU 2024-01-15 | Gamification of the reflective exercise in the Entrepreneurship classroom: Can a mountain goat really prod you to make better reflections – Tales of a "SavvyGoat"AbstractEntrepreneurship Education (EEd) in HEI’s is generally a practice based education (Neck & Greene, 2014). However, the fast-paced nature of EEd today from mapping the market needs to creating compelling pitches may unintentionally undermine the reflective component in experiential EEd. Educators who understand and value reflective learning try and incorporate reflections into an entrepreneurial process either by deploying reflective journals or diaries (Jones, 2019; Lundmark et. al., 2019, Hagg, 2021). The use of reflective logs, diaries, journals, post-course reflection essays are the most common form of reflection exercises in the EEd classroom today. However, I have identified 3 weaknesses of these current methods: Perception of value of the reflection log: Most students find reflection logs as a cumbersome activity. A reflection log is often expected to be between 500-1000 words while a reflective essay may easily be over 1500 words (Hagg, 2021). This can be a challenge in an action-based entrepreneurship course where the focus is on doing and getting results as well as the time challenges that such a course offers. Experiential entrepreneurship courses are time-demanding, and rightfully so as there is a significant amount of ground to cover (if one assumes the standard experiential module to cover opportunity identification all through to value extraction and communication). This leads to students under-estimating the time and effort required when also juggling other courses at the same time which can lead to the reflection logs becoming a “job-to-be-done” and inevitably being a log devoid of true reflection. Understanding what "reflection" really means: Yeoh (2017) in a study of 140 reflection logs, found that self-confessional writing was a very challenging and unfamiliar (in an academic environment) task for most students and the study found that students not only need guidance in terms of how-to-do a good reflection but also to instill the confidence that it is OK to voice their personal opinion, own thinking, and sensitivity into their journal. Thus, one has the challenge of also improving the reflective ability of the student (Greene, 2014).Reflections as a solitary activity: Most reflective journals are by their nature individual. However, if Entrepreneurship is viewed and encouraged as a team activity, why should the reflective journals also not be team-reflections? If the act of doing reflections is viewed as boring/challenging (points 1&2) maybe it is less so as a team?To address these weaknesses and to also improve the quality of reflections in especially science and engineering students, I have partnered up with a startup from London – called SavvyGoat – who have developed a tool that tries to gamify the journalling and reflection activity. In a very practice-oriented approach – this talk will ask if we can make the reflection task modular sprinkled throughout a course rather than at the very end? Are team reflections more effective than individual reflections or complementary? Do competition and reflection go hand-in-hand? About the speakerRajiv Vaid Basaiawmoit, Head of SciTech Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held November 28th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Julian Schüssler: Compensating Discrimination in Danish Schools InteractingMindsAU 2024-01-15 | AbstractDiscriminatory practices among decision-makers aren't uniform; they can differ quite substantially. This isn't just a bland statement; it allows us to delve into the complex mechanisms behind discrimination. We study this in the context of biased grading in Danish schools. We argue that teacher biases are influenced by specific classroom experiences with demographic (gender/migrant) groups. This can lead to inequality-reinforcing biases, and other times, to compensating ones. Examining large-scale administrative data on Danish students, we show that there is wide variation in biases across teachers and a robust compensation effect. Teachers who have seen a particular demographic group under-perform display more positive biases towards that group than teachers who have witnessed over-performance. Methodologically, the analysis illustrates the utility of causal directed acyclic graphs when analyzing observational data in the social sciences. Link to paperosf.io/preprints/socarxiv/5zm87 About the speakerJulian Schüssler, Postdoc, Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination (CEPDISC), Department of Political Science, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held November 21st, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Arnault-Quentin Vermillet: The path-dependence of caregiving InteractingMindsAU 2023-11-17 | AbtractAlthough child rearing in humans is fundamentally cooperative, the bulk of carework of families in WEIRD countries majoritarily falls on women. Biases in caregiving are reflected in and influenced by social policies, like the unequal distribution of parental leave, and ideas about traditional family structures, gender and sex norms. Moreover, the landscape of theories and practices in child development research focuses primarily on mother-infant dyads, relying on an evolutionary framework to explain the development of differentiated behaviours between men and women. In this IMC Tuesday Talk, I will present some of the work I did during my PhD. I will propose a social, behavioural and cognitive framework for studying caregiving organisation in parents, emphasising the importance of studying the dynamic behaviour of the family as a whole. Focusing on crying, an infant signalling behaviour that affords care, I will discuss 3 studies. In the first study, I evaluated the prevalence and development of cry duration in early infancy. In the second one, I investigated the extent of fathers’ and mothers’ engagement in nighttime caregiving when mothers are on leave, and when fathers are on leave. Finally, in the last study, I assessed the existence of gender differences in sensitivity to infant signals in two different experimental contexts: while asleep at night, and while engaged in a dyadic non-cooperative setting. Does sensitivity to infant cries drive the gendered division of care work? Come to find out!About the speakerArnault-Quentin Vermillet, postdoc, Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held November 14th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Bahador Bahrami: Shared responsibility in collective decisions InteractingMindsAU 2023-11-17 | AbstractResearch investigating collective decision-making has focused primarily on the improvement of accuracy in collective decisions and less on the motives that drive individuals to make these decisions. We argue that a strong but neglected motive for making collective decisions is minimizing the material and psychological burden of an individual’s responsibility. Making difficult decisions with others shields individuals from the consequences of negative outcomes by reducing regret, punishment and stress. Considering shared responsibility as a key motivation to join groups helps understand behaviours with societal implications such as political voting, committing norm violations, predicting natural disasters and making health-related decisions.About the speakerBahador Bahrami is from Tehran, Iran. He got his MD from Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 2003 and then moved to London to do a PhD in cognitive neuroscience of consciousness in the human brain which he finished in 2008. After his PhD, Bahador came to Aarhus (2008-10) to work with Andreas Roepstorff and Chris Frith. This period had a very profound impact on his research and has shaped his work ever since. He went back to London in 2010 where he founded the Crowd Cognition research lab. In 2018 he moved his lab to Ludwig Maximilian Universität in Munich Germany where he is now. Bahador's research focuses on the cognitive and neurobiological basis of interactive decision making between human-human and more recently, human-AI agents. IMC Tuesday Seminar held November 7th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Ophelia Deroy - Co-Perception: Sharing experience without coordination InteractingMindsAU 2023-11-17 | AbstractThis talk explores the concept of co-perception, which differs from the traditional notions of joint attention and action. Co-perception encompasses the ability to discern objects and spaces perceived by others from those kept private, without relying on complex mind-reading or mutual coordination. This concept provides a new understanding of social scenarios, from shared contexts to competitive interactions, and the talk will present evidence on how sharing experiences extends beyond affective responses to impact perceptual processes.About the speakerOphelia Deroy is professor of Philosophy of Mind and Neuroscience at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and a member of the Faculty of Philosophy and the Munich Center for Neuroscience. She directs an research group combining philosophical, behavioural and computational methods, and has published widely on perception, metacognition and social cognition. She is also involved in work with museums, including Tate Galleries, Biotopia, Getty, the Museum of tomorrow, and policy-makers to evaluate and improve collective experiences and access to science.IMC Tuesday Seminar held November 7th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Armin Stefanović: Yer a Wizard! A Biocultural Approach to Supernatural Storytelling InteractingMindsAU 2023-11-02 | AbstractSupernatural storytelling is as old as the story itself. From myths and legends all the way to modern fantasy fiction, humans all around the world are attracted to various supernatural agents, magical powers, fantastic beasts, and imaginary worlds. Stories about the supernatural have always been an important aspect of human culture that we can trace from the Upper Paleolithic cave art, around 40,000 years ago. I argue that stories that have supernatural elements are an extension of our magical thinking capabilities. I hypothesize that they facilitate a cognitive play that helps us process and regulate emotions. Furthermore, I see supernatural stories, religious and fantasy alike, as playgrounds for magical thinking. They transmit this evolutionary significant tool to the new generation. I apply this theory to the understanding of the Harry Potter stories.About the speakerArmin Stefanović is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School for Literatures and Cultures in English, University of Szeged, Hungary. He was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina where he studied Bosnian Literature and Language. He studied History at the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna. His main research interest is supernatural storytelling from a biocultural perspective. In 2020 he published a book of poetry, Nemo i plovidba za srećom [Nemo and the Sail for Happyness].IMC Tuesday Seminar held October 31st, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Giada Pistilli: The Role of Ethics in Interdisciplinary Research in Artificial Intelligence InteractingMindsAU 2023-10-25 | AbstractAs Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, its governance cannot be left to STEM disciplines alone. This talk aims to shed light on the indispensable role of ethics in the interdisciplinary research landscape of AI. We will journey through the complexities that arise when ethical considerations intersect with legal frameworks and technical capabilities. We will then delve into the role of philosophy and, more specifically, ethics in guiding AI research and governance. We will scrutinize different facets of compliance and understand how moral values serve as its backbone. Following this, we will discuss a pragmatic approach to values through the lens of John Dewey's philosophy and contemplate the intrinsic nature of these values. The conversation will then pivot from ethics to law, examining the transition from the AI Act to the development and use of Model Cards. In an effort to bridge theory and practice, we will explore the governance of AI through the collaboration of ethics, law, and computer science. We will illustrate these relationships through a practical case study — the BigScience workshop and its multilingual Large Language Model, BLOOM.About the speakerGiada Pistilli is a philosophy researcher specializing in ethics applied to Conversational AI. Her research mainly focuses on ethical frameworks, value theory, applied and descriptive ethics. After obtaining a master’s degree in ethics and political philosophy at Sorbonne University, she pursued her doctoral research in the same faculty. Giada is also the Principal Ethicist at Hugging Face, where she conducts philosophical and interdisciplinary research on AI Ethics and content moderation.IMC Tuesday Seminar held October 24th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Amalie Pauli: Measuring Persuasion in Text InteractingMindsAU 2023-10-11 | AbstractIn a time, characterised by information and communication, the ability to persuade through text holds a new importance. We encounter text in news, advertisements and political debates, which holds an inherent agenda of convincing, persuading, or even misleading readers. We posit that language plays a role in this, and pose the question: How to computationally measure or quantify how persuasive the language use is in a text - or in a generative model? I don't have a convincing answer to this yet, but this is a focal point of my ongoing PhD-project. Methodologically, I am working with semantic representations of text with a focus on efficient settings. In this talk, I will both motivate the problem of detecting ‘persuasion’, and present my latest work on few-shot text classification using sentence embeddings and semantic label information in an efficient setting, that even runs on personal PCs.About the speakerAmalie Pauli, PhD student, Department of Computer Science, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held October 3rd, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Chris Frith - Explicit metacognition: our human superpower InteractingMindsAU 2023-10-11 | AbstractExplicit metacognition is the uniquely human ability to reflect on the workings of our minds and to share these reflections with others. Through this sharing we learn how to interpret our feelings and how to manipulate our reports of them to gain advantage. For example, we can express our feeling of confidence in different ways depending on whether we want to cooperate with others or to compete with them. Explicit metacognition also allows us to learn from the experiences of others rather than through our own direct experience. Through this process lower-level cognitive processes can be changed, and new habits formed. This process is fundamental for enhancing social cohesion and for the creation of cumulative culture.About the speakerChris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology, Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL and Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of Philosophy, University of LondonIMC Tuesday Seminar held September 26th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Uta Frith - Alignment: a universal mechanism for social creatures InteractingMindsAU 2023-10-09 | AbstractSocial creatures align with each other spontaneously. They move together and learn together without needing a director to tell them what to do. Alignment occurs at many different levels. At the physical level the direction and synchrony of movement is copied as observed in flocks of birds or shoals of fish. At the goal level, alignment goes beyond copying to allow for complementary movements, a critical aspect of successful joint action. In humans only, there is a higher level still in the form of mental alignment. This has a critical role in communication and joint decision-making. A desirable consequence of alignment with others is an increase in affiliation and liking, which creates opportunities for altruism. Problems can arise from choosing the wrong level of alignment. Such problems are monitored and can often be solved by metacognitive processes.About the speakerUta Frith, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development, UCL Institute of Cognitive NeuroscienceIMC Tuesday Seminar held September 19th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Frants Havmand Jensen: Investigating the Ecology of Communication in Wild Spotted Hyenas InteractingMindsAU 2023-10-09 | AbstractSpotted hyenas are highly social carnivores that live in fluid fission-fusion societies called clans. Hyena clans are typically composed of multiple unrelated matrilines that cooperate to defend territory from other clans, and to defend resources within their territory from other megacarnivores. Yet hyenas also live in a strict matrilineal system where social rank determines access to resources, which means that lower ranking animals are better off finding and catching food on their own rather than sharing with conspecifics. Here we investigate the role that acoustic communication plays in mediating long-range interactions between individuals. We use a combination of machine learning approaches as well as traditional playback experiments to investigate how long-range contact signals - termed whoops - function in hyena societies, I will also go through some of the recent technological innovations we have implemented to investigate the role of communication in coordination and collective action on an unprecedented scale, and how we have just recently been able to tag an entire spotted hyena clan with sound and movement recording collars that allow for quantifying every single acoustic interaction within this complex social network.About the speakerFrants Havmand Jensen, Senior scientist, Department of Ecoscience, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held June 27th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Disentangling bottom-up versus top-down influences of shared food experience on social affiliation InteractingMindsAU 2023-07-14 | The taste of cooperation – Disentangling bottom-up versus top-down influences of shared food experience on social affiliationAbstractSharing food is a culturally universal bonding experience. Emerging evidence suggests that eating the same food, or even sharing from the same plate, can promote trust and cooperation between strangers. However, the sensory and cognitive mechanisms by which food sharing facilitates social affiliation are still unknown. The present project aims to disentangle sensory (shared food experience) from cognitive (knowledge of sharing) contributions to social outcomes of food sharing. Two lab-based food-sharing studies will be conducted where, by manipulating what participants are told about the shared foods and what they actually eat, we can disassociate the cognitive knowledge of food-sharing from the sensory experience. Partners will subsequently complete a social coordination game that either requires cognitive cooperation (Study 1, economic game) or sensorimotor coordination (Study 2, synchronization of dyadic finger-tapping). Thus, the present project will elucidate how different pathways to social affiliation via food-sharing (sensory versus cognitive) impact coordination across distinct domains of social behavior. About the speakersQian Janice Wang, assistant professor, Department of Food Science, University of CopenhagenAnna Zamm, assistant professor, Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held June 20th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Voice- and speech-based markers of neuropsychiatric conditions InteractingMindsAU 2023-07-14 | Voice- and speech-based markers of neuropsychiatric conditions: assessing methodological and ethical foundations for clinical applicationAbstractPromising ML applications have shown great potential to identify vocal and speech markers of the most important neuropsychiatric conditions (e.g., Hitczenko et al., 2021; Cohen et al., 2021; Corcoran et al., 2020) and to develop systems able to monitor patients' symptoms and assist clinicians during the assessment process. However, these efforts face important limitations: the limited replicability and generalizability of previous results (Parola et al., 2022; Fusaroli et al., 2021), few attempts to explicitly account for the heterogeneity of the disorders (Mittal, 2021), and no concrete translation into effective clinical applications yet. What is critically lacking is an explicit reflection on the risks and limitations of ML applications that can support the development of robust, effective, and ethically grounded translational work. In this project, we will explore avenues to improve the clinical impact of ML applications in speech and voice research, focusing primarily on applicability and ethical concerns. To this end, we draw on an already collected large dataset of voice and speech samples from the Danish High Risk and Resilience Study - VIA7 study (Gantriis et al., 2019), which examined 522 children born to parents diagnosed with schizophrenia (SZ) or bipolar disorder (BP). Our goal is to develop conservative (i.e., more robust and generalizable) ML and NLP pipelines to identify vocal and language markers of clinical symptoms in children at high-risk, that can serve as a reference for future studies. In addition, we aim to assess the impact of heterogeneity (e.g., socioeconomic, demographic, and clinical differences) and the presence of potential methodological biases and limitations, and robustly test the reliability of the results against various preprocessing and analytical procedure. Finally, we will explore how ML techniques can concretely support the development of robust, effective, and ethically founded clinical applications, and evaluate how to include from the very design of a study a consideration of risks, limitations, and ethical practices. The final outcome is to provide a first solid effort - both conceptually and methodologically - for the development of better practices in ML, SSP and NLP clinical research.About the speakerAlberto Parola, postdoc, Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held June 20th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
A fine ear for messiness and contradictions: Literariness at work in interdisciplinary collaboration InteractingMindsAU 2023-07-13 | A ‘fine ear for messiness and contradictions’: ‘Literariness’ at work in interdisciplinary collaborationAbstractOver the last ten years, the UK has seen a sharp increase in the number of intellectually ambitious, humanities-led research investigations of health and human experience. These projects have both responded to and helped define a ‘critical’ turn in medical humanities characterised by more ‘entangled’ and experimental ways of working. In my roles as Co-Director of Hearing the Voice (a large, interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing based at Durham University from 2012-2022), Director of the UK’s Institute for Medical Humanities, and collaborator and advisor to other research teams, I have become fascinated by the way projects in our field imagine, actualise and value the contributions of particular disciplines. This talk will share findings of an interview study Dr Jamie Rákóczi and I conducted with literary studies academics who had worked on two or more critical medical humanities projects. What happens to literature, literariness, the literary text, and the literary scholar as they get caught up in collaborative, interdisciplinary, critical, and health-related projects? What are the theories of literature and of interdisciplinarity that emerge—not in abstraction, contemplation, or op-ed rhetoric but on the ground: in negotiation with funders, colleagues, managers, clinical and community collaborators? This talk will, I hope, be an invitation to wider discussion of some of the specific challenges and critical potential of research in and beyond the critical medical humanities. About the speakerAngela WoodsProfessor of Medical HumanitiesDepartment of English Studies, Durham UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held June 13th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
The Creative Potential of Evolving Constraints in Peer-to-Peer Reciprocal Coaching InteractingMindsAU 2023-07-11 | The Creative Potential of Evolving Constraints in Peer-to-Peer Reciprocal Coaching – A Three-way InvestigationAbstractHow can the use of evolving creative constraints in interdisciplinary peer-to-peer reciprocal coaching contribute to the effective development of creative and creative-critical projects?This presentation is a report of the experience and outcomes of the project ‘The Creative Potential of Evolving Constraints in Peer-to-Peer Reciprocal Coaching: A Three-way Investigation’, supported by IMC seed funding. The project was designed to gauge the utility of evolving creative constraints in the development of projects by the three participants (referred to as ‘makers’): a songwriter and doctoral researcher (Høybye), an academic video-essayist (O’Leary), and a dance artist and filmmaker (Hallager Andersen). The term creative constraints refers to deliberately adopted restrictions to choices in a given creative or creative-critical project. Constraint-based procedures are commonly employed and recognised as generative in artistic and design contexts, but they are also used in experimental academic work and have obvious relevance for practice research projects in an academic context. The modifier evolving refers to the adaptation of a constraint or set of constraints, or the application of further/different constraints, as a project proceeds, i.e., in response to work in progress. Three-way Investigation employed peer-to-peer reciprocal coaching to feed into the development of the three makers’ projects through the generation of evolving (sets of) constraints. This reciprocal coaching was peer to peer because each maker was expert in their own field and engaged in a project being offered for discussion and feedback even as each offered formative feedback on the other two makers’ projects. The presentation will set out the design of Three-way Investigation, and its theoretical coordinates. It will assess the utility of evolving constraint-setting by sharing the progress made in the four makers’ projects over a the series of peer-to-peer coaching meetings. About the speakers- Alan O’Leary, Associate Professor in Film and Media in Digital Contexts, School of Communication and Culture, Dept of Media and Journalism Studies, Aarhus University- Martin Høybye, PhD Student, School of Culture and Society, Dept of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University- Marie Hallager Andersen, dance artist and filmmakerIMC Tuesday Seminar held May 30th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Ingela Visuri: Social interaction in cool costumes InteractingMindsAU 2023-06-02 | AbstractIt is widely acknowledged that education promotes well-being, but we also know that many autistic pupils struggle to participate in school. This presentation provides an overview of the outcomes achieved through an action research project conducted in two special educational schools for autistic pupils (10-19 years old) where we implemented a play-based approach to encourage and enhance participation in school activities. The initial aim was to support social learning through live action roleplay (larp), but as our understanding of participation was widened, we incorporated additional elements such as collaborative world-building, storyline development, character creation, costume design, and a workshop where the pupils crafted magical support animals. This promoted increased agency among the pupils as they got to choose between various activities and determine in what way they preferred to participate. In this presentation, I will primarily highlight two aspects: (1) the role of playfulness and humor in strengthening the relationships between pupils and educators, and (2) the recognition that participation can take various forms, of which some may not be immediately apparent. From a cognitive point of view, I will also propose that (a) larping provides a safe and brave space where autistic individuals can push their social boundaries, and (b) that narratives are particularly favorable in relation to autism, as they provide an interactional context that facilitates social interaction.About the speakerIngela VisuriSenior lecturer, Department of Religious Studies, Dalarna UniversityPostdoctoral researcher, Interacting Minds Centre, Department of Culture, Cognition and Computation, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held May 23rd, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Kyosuke Tanaka: Communication Structures, Knowledge Distribution, and Meta-Knowledge Updating InteractingMindsAU 2023-06-02 | AbstractTransactive memory systems (TMSs), colloquially known as ‘knowledge of who knows what,’ have been identified as a source of competitive advantage for organizations. To serve as a source of continuing competitive advantage, TMSs must be non-replicable across organizations but also adaptable to changing tasks and environmental conditions. This study investigates how a TMS updates when tasks change. Focusing on meta-knowledge—knowledge about the links between domains of knowledge and locations of that knowledge in a team, we develop a computer simulation where agents complete multiple decision-making tasks, with new task knowledge given to the team in between tasks. We vary the agents’ team communication network (centralized vs. decentralized) and the nature of knowledge distribution (generalized vs. specialized) to examine the extent to which new knowledge is incorporated into the team’s transactive memory, which in turn impacts team performance. From the simulation results, we derive testable hypotheses and propose an experimental design. Finally, by conducting an online group experiment, we test the hypotheses.About the speakerKyosuke Tanaka, postdoc, Department of Management, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held May 16th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Savhannah Schulz and Kirsi Tilk: Interacting Minds Interdisciplinary Research Podcast InteractingMindsAU 2023-06-02 | AbstractInteracting Minds is an interdisciplinary research podcast and science communication project hosted by Arnault Quentin Vermillet and Savhannah Schulz. In each episode ofthe podcast, the two are joined by fellow interdisciplinary researchers to explore and discuss the work they have been doing and share a glimpse of the journey that brought them there. Outside of the recording studio, the project attempts to understand how researchers can build and maintain sustainable science communication platforms to build meaningful knowledge sharing exchanges with the public.SpeakersSavhannah Schulz and Kirsi Tilk, Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held May 16th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Ruth Grossman - Faces, Voices, Social Expectations, and First Impressions: Insights from Autism InteractingMindsAU 2023-05-16 | AbstractDuring every face-to-face conversation, whether in person or on Zoom, we process a myriad of visual and auditory signals that lead us to form first impressions of our conversation partners within seconds. Research has shown that first impressions formed of autistic individuals tend to be less favorable than those formed of non-autistic individuals. This presentation will explore some of these findings, as well as various factors that lead to these less favorable impressions, including facial and vocal expressions, as well as the social expectations of the conversation partners.About the speakerRuth Grossman, Professor, Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, Emerson CollegeIMC Tuesday Seminar held May 9th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Barbara Berger: Functional connectivity patterns enabling working memory processes InteractingMindsAU 2023-05-16 | AbstractWorking memory (WM) is one of the three key components of executive functions (EF) along with inhibition and cognitive flexibility. EF are at the core of our everyday functioning enabling us to focus our attention, inhibit responses and allow updating of rules we follow. While these components are functionally distinct, they are also intertwined with often shared, partially overlapping cortical mechanisms and regions. Item maintenance in WM, for instance, also requires attention allocation, inhibition of unwanted sensory input and motor output as well as the ability to switch one’s focus. Hence it is not surprising that such complex set of operations are supported by a large distributed network of cortical areas. Our brain supports this chaotic mix of tasks by optimally aligning activation in various different regions apparently seamlessly. Unless something goes wrong.The impairment of EF processes in general and WM in particular can have devastating effects on people. Depending on the severity, it can make it impossible for patients to function autonomously.In this talk I will present findings from my research using non-invasive electrophysiology (EEG/MEG) combined with neurostimulation (TMS) identifying long-range network dynamics that can reliably predict behavioural outcome of higher cognitive operations that are part of the family of EF, like the allocation of cognitive resources for successful WM performance. I will present network disruptions manifested in disorders like for instance Schizophrenia that could underly WM impairment and a brief outlook why and how understanding basic mechanisms can directly translate to therapeutic interventions.About the speakerBarbara Berger, Postdoc, AIAS-COFUND Fellow, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held May 2nd, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Sarah Pini - Stage Presence in Dance: A Cognitive Ecological Ethnographic Approach InteractingMindsAU 2023-05-09 | AbstractThe concept of presence in Western culture informs a cluster of different connotations, encompassing metaphysical, existential, psychological, cognitive, and performative dimensions (Heidegger, 1996 [1927]; Merleau-Ponty, 2012 [1945]; Derrida, 1997 [1967]; Clark, 1997; Noë, 2012). Here I focus on the concept of stage presence in different dance and performance practices. The classic model of stage presence broadly relates to the performer’s individual quality to enchant audience’s attention, and by focusing primarily on the agency of the skilled performer, it neglects audience’s participation (Sherman, 2016). Scholars who adopted an enactive and phenomenological perspective (Pini 2021; Pini 2019; Sherman, 2016; Zarrilli, 2009, 2012; Macneill, 2014) have tackled this classic view, revealing and accounting for the complexities of such encounter. Through a cognitive ecological and ethnographic approach (Hutchins, 1995, 2010) I investigate variations of presence in different dance practices and choreographic contexts: the case of the Ballet National de Marseille and the re-creation of Emio Greco’s piece Passione (Pini and Sutton, 2021), improvising together and interkinaesthetic agency in Contact Improvisation (Deans & Pini, 2022; Pini, McIlwain & Sutton, 2016); environmental attunement and ecological agency in Body Weather, a radical movement ideology informing the short dance film AURA NOX ANIMA by Palestinian-Australian visual artist Lux Eterna (Pini, 2022; Pini & Deans 2021). By exploring how dancers articulate their lived experience of presence, and how different dance ecologies shape different enactments of presence, I suggest adopting an ecological notion of stage presence in dance and performing arts.About the speakerSarah PiniAssistant Professor, Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, Research Unit of Movement, Culture and Society, University of Southern DenmarkIMC Tuesday Seminar held April 18th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Johanne Nedergaard and Mikkel Wallentin: Heart Talk InteractingMindsAU 2023-05-09 | AbstractSpeech addressed to the self (self-talk) is a prominent part of most people’s conscious experience. This self-talk can have both beneficial (planning, self-regulation) and detrimental (anxiety, rumination) consequences. In this study, we focused specifically on physiological consequences of difference kinds of self-talk. We measured participants’ whole-body movements, respiration, and heart rate while they talked to themselves covertly in either a positive or a negative manner as well as during silent counting (the control condition). Our main hypothesis was that positive and especially negative self-talk would be associated with elevated heart rate in the absence of motor movement compared with the control condition. The relationship between inner speech, cognition, and the body has important implications for theories on rumination and depression.About the speakersJohanne Nedergaard, PhD student, Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus UniversityMikkel Wallentin, Professor, Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held April 25th, 2023.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
A Sanchez: Towards a Phenomenology of the Sense of Belonging and the Emotional Impact of Migration InteractingMindsAU 2023-05-08 | AbstractIn this talk I seek to articulate a notion of "sense of belonging" that can shed light on the emotional impact of migration. Psychology research into the latter focuses on two complex phenomena, acculturation stress and migratory grief, but studies them in isolation from each other, and pays little attention to their common root: a challenged sense of belonging. The sense of belonging has recently been conceptualized in two ways. According to one account, it is an "existential feeling": a background affective orientation that shapes an individual’s space of possibilities (Ratcliffe 2008). As such, it amounts to a pre-reflective sense of togetherness that allows us to experience the world as a shared space (Wilde 2021). According to another proposal, the sense of group belonging is an episodic feeling, akin to other standard emotions, with an intentional target (the subject’s relation to the group), a formal object (the hedonically positive value of certain commonalities between oneself and the group) and a focus of concern (roughly, fitting in and being valued by other group members) (Szanto forthcoming). I argue that both notions are necessary. Episodic feelings of belonging arise against the backdrop of an existential feeling and respond to its disturbances and alterations, and these in turn shed light on the relations between acculturation stress and migratory grief.About the speakerAlba Montes SánchezPostdoc, Center for Subjectivity Research, Department of Communication, University of CopenhagenIMC Tuesday Seminar held March 28th, 2023Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
M Høeg - Past Fictions for the Posthuman Future: the Value of Literature for Consciousness Research InteractingMindsAU 2023-03-22 | AbstractIn this presentation, I argue for the value of integrating literary studies in consciousness research and ethics to develop a strong ethical and existential dimension in the field. More specifically, I consider the potential of fictional narrative for developing concepts of selfhood and personal identity that cohere with the reductionist explanations of human consciousness and self in modern empirical consciousness research and are sustainable in a posthuman future. My central claim is that looking to the literary representations of human consciousness and existence that reject or are free from conventional essentialist ideas of self, agency and anthropocentrism can help 'normalise' the reductionist scientific descriptions of humans and reduce their psychologically and socio-culturally disruptive impact. I use Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as an example and show how the novel’s non-anthropocentric and nonessentialist conceptions of self and consciousness overlap with materialist theories in neuroscience and -philosophy, but present these in a distinctive narrative framework and poetic terms that bring out the inherent emancipatory potential of the materialist explanation of human existence and offer the reader the possibility of relating to these experientially and emotionally.About the speakerMette Leonard HøegHosted Research Fellow, The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of OxfordIMC Tuesday Seminar held March 21st, 2023Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Patrick Cairns: Empathy maps: what are they and how could they contribute to medical education? InteractingMindsAU 2023-03-16 | AbstractMost people want their doctor to be empathetic, but to what degree should it be a part of a doctor’s education? Should doctors be expected to rely on their innate person skills when faced with finite time and resources, as well as a curriculum depicting a predominately biomedical view of people? In this talk, PhD student Patrick Cairns will explore the topic of empathy in healthcare in general, as well as the use of a novel and simple communication tool in medical education: an empathy map. He will do this through the lens of his own PhD journey.About the speakerPatrick Cairns, PhD student, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held March 14th, 2023Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Yngwie Nielsen: Adding Danish to the Semantic Priming Across Many Languages project InteractingMindsAU 2023-03-08 | AbstractSemantic priming - the facilitation of linguistic processing observed when a word follows a semantically related word - is a cornerstone within cognitive science, linguistics, and natural language processing. Large-scale databases on semantic priming have provided researchers with invaluable resources for designing experiments and developing computational models of language processing. However, the existing databases have insufficient sample sizes and are often restricted to a single language: English. In an extensive collaboration organized by the Psychological Science Accelerator, researchers from across the world will explore cross-linguistic differences in the semantic priming effect and build a new, highly-powered database spanning multiple languages. In this project, we will add Danish to a state-of-the-art resource openly available to linguists, cognitive scientists, and anyone interested in improving our understanding of language in general and Danish in particular.About the speakerYngwie Asbjørn Nielsen, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held March 7th, 2023. Short presentations of projects that received IMC Seed Funding in 2022.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Jonathan Doucette: Educational institutions and voter turnout during the long nineteenth century InteractingMindsAU 2023-03-08 | AbstractDanish democracy became consolidated during the long nineteenth century. Subsequently, political engagement has been consistently high and anti-democratic parties have received very little electoral support. However, this unique democratic experience has not been subject to quantitative examination due to a lack of data. Our project makes this possible by coding new data on turnout and electoral results for all elections between 1849 and 1915 at a geographically fine-grained level. In addition, we propose that Folk High Schools, which sought to teach civic skills to students, increased political engagement and democratic support. The project advances our understanding of Democratic consolidation in new democracies. About the speakerJonathan Stavnskær Doucette, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held March 7th, 2023. Short presentations of projects that received IMC Seed Funding in 2022.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Ella Paldam: Understanding learning through documentation – an implementation pilot InteractingMindsAU 2023-03-08 | AbstractSeveral projects at the IMC collaborate with external partners such as museums, libraries and schools to develop creative and constructionist learning environments. Educators are invaluable collaborators because they know the learners and the cultures at partner institutions. Yet, external partners also represent a challenge: when we collect data from children, we commit to a complicated set of ethical and legal data regulations. For some partner institutions, the work load of setting up secure data handling infrastructure and negotiating data agreements through state and municipal offices render this type of research unfeasible. This puts at risk opportunities to strengthen the learning potential at these institutions through collaborative research and development projects. When we implement creative learning environments, a key component is professional development of educators at partner institutions. Taking inspiration from international collaborators from Fondazione Reggio Children (Reggio Emilia, Italy), the Tinkering Studio (San Francisco Exploratorium), and Project Zero (Harvard Graduate School of Education), we invite educators to document learning using established practices and thinking routines. The documentation is designed to make learning visible in order to deepen learning. Yet, the potential of documentation as a research tool is still underdeveloped. This seed explores whether we can develop the educators’ documentation practices into a reliable source to deepen our understanding of children’s learning. Through systematic repeated interviews with educators that explore their documentation, we trace pedagogical changes caused by the implementation of new approaches to learning. By asking educators to point to and reflect on visible traces of learning from their own practice, we explore an aspect of documentation that holds potential for future IMC-based projects. About the speakerElla Paldam, Head of Learning, the Science Museums, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held March 7th, 2023. Short presentations of projects that received IMC Seed Funding in 2022.Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Simon Devylder: Polysemiotic kinship systems as instruments of cumulative cultural evolution InteractingMindsAU 2023-03-03 | AbstractWhen people talk about kinship systems, they often use co-speech gestures and other representations to elaborate (Enfield 2005, Gaby 2016). This paper investigates such polysemiotic (spoken, gestured, and drawn) descriptions of kinship relations, to see if they display recurring patterns of conventionalization that capture specific social structures. I present a case study from Paamese, a Melanesian ethnolinguistic community from Vanuatu, where 40 Paamese speakers were asked to talk about their family in semi-guided kinship interviews (Enfield & Levinson 2003). Analyses of the speech, gesture, and drawings produced during these interviews revealed that lineality (i.e. mother’s side vs. father’s side) is lateralized in the speaker’s gesture space. In other words, kinship members of the speaker’s matriline are placed on the left side of the speaker’s body and those of the patriline are placed on their right side, when they are mentioned in speech. Moreover, when Paamese speakers describe marital relations, they make a distinctive sagittal gesture on the left-diagonal axis or on the right-diagonal axis depending on the gender of the referred relative. Anecdotal evidence from the drawings performed on the ground during the interviews also appear to mark this contrast with crossed diagonals.We interpret these results as evidence for the existence of a Paamese ‘polysemiotic kinship system’ and make the broader claim that they are instruments of cumulative cultural evolution, used to conceptualize, capture, and transmit knowledge about the structure and practices of a society. About the speakerSimon Devylder is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Norway.IMC Tuesday Seminar held February 28th, 2023Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants.
Renatas Berniunas: Culture and folk Theory of Mind InteractingMindsAU 2023-02-22 | AbstractIn this talk, before going to my fieldwork to study “Minds in the wild: conceptualising and attributing the mental among Mongolians” (MSCA project), I want to address some conceptual issues pertaining to the notion of “mind” and to the Theory of Mind at large. As a cognitive anthropologist, I will evaluate the role of culture in understanding the folk concept and theory of mind. Often, culture has been dismissed or neglected in theorising and empirically studying ToM (or social cognition at large) in cognitive sciences and philosophy. Moreover, the English term “mind” has been employed to represent a universal category of human thought. However, there is little systematic non-English cross-cultural data about the very concept of the “mind” or how the mental sphere is categorised and organised. To illustrate some points, I will provide an example from Mongolia – the indigenous mental term “setgel” and its connection to the wider cultural context. About the speakerRenatas BerniūnasMSCA Postdoctoral FellowInteracting Minds Centre, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held February 21st, 2023Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Christopher Cox: Models and Mechanisms of Turn-Taking in Human & Non-Human Animals InteractingMindsAU 2023-02-01 | AbstractWhat can we learn about human language from communicative exchanges in bush crickets and whales? Communicative sound exchanges play a crucial role in the lives of many biological organisms and take a mind-blowing variety of forms - bush crickets communicate with mates over short distances by producing sound pulses during the closing stage of their wing cycle, and elephants produce low-frequency vocalisations at such high amplitudes that they vibrate through the surface of the ground to be detected by other elephants up to 10 kilometres away. No matter the form, all of these types of exchanges need to take timing into account. Interacting animals have to account for when the others are communicating, in some cases to avoid overlap (e.g., cetacean and avian species) and in other cases to produce synchronous vocalisations (e.g., anuran and katydid species).In human communicative exchanges, timing is also key. A lot of research tries to disentangle how we learn to speak effortlessly to each other, shift rapidly between being talker and listener, and display a surprisingly low number of overlaps. In this talk, I will first systematically review the studies on how the ability to take turns develops in young human infants and identify crucial issues in the current way of investigating this capability. To provide alternative perspectives, I will then systematically review how turn-taking has been investigated and mathematically modeled in non-human animals - where researchers cannot rely as strongly on personal intuitions as to how turn-taking takes place. Finally, I will present a first exploratory analysis of child-caregiver turn-taking dynamics using models inspired by the non-human animal literature. About the speakerChristopher Cox, PhD studentDepartment of Linguistics, Cognitive Science & Semiotics and Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus UniversityDepartment of Language & Linguistic Science, University of YorkIMC Tuesday Seminar held January 31st, 2023Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Andreas Højlund: Cognitive adverse effects of Parkinson’s disease (and its treatments) InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-23 | AbstractRecently, we have seen an increased focus on the non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) – and for a good reason. Be it psychiatric or cognitive adverse effects of PD (and its treatments), PD patients’ quality of life is heavily affected by not only the cardinal motor symptoms of slowness of movement, rigidity and tremor, but also by detrimental implications to their executive and linguistic functions (as well as depressive or apathic symptoms). In this talk, I will give an overview of some of the interesting projects we have run and are running in our group to tackle the challenge of characterizing and investigating these cognitive adverse effects of PD: e.g. decreased verbal fluency and response inhibition as an effect of both PD and treatment with deep brain stimulation (DBS), and the potential effects of PD on action language. About the speakerI am an assistant professor at the Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus University. My background is in cognitive neuroscience and neurolinguistics with a strong focus on electrophysiology (i.e. EEG and MEG). Since 2015 I’ve been investigating the effect mechanism(s) of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Parkinson’s disease (PD) – with respect to both its effects on motor and cognitive functions and its direct electrical effects on the relevant neural circuits and architecture.IMC Tuesday Seminar held December 13th, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
N C Hansen: Positivity bias and functional bifurcation in the psychological use of coronamusic... InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-22 | Positivity bias and functional bifurcation in the psychological use of coronamusic during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020AbstractDuring the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020, musical engagement became the potentially most frequent leisure activity, beating exercise, sleep, and consumption of other media as the most effective strategy for enhancing mental health for at least half of the general population. In this talk, I draw on recent results from the global MUSICOVID research network and a brand-new special issue on the topic to demonstrate how corona-themed music was created and consumed to cultivate collective connections and seek solitary solace (Howlin & Hansen, in press; Hansen, in press A). Our international survey study (n=5,113) (Fink et al., 2021) showed that interest in coronamusic emerged as the strongest predictor of successful coping via music. People experiencing negative affect used music for solitary emotion regulation whereas positive-experiencers used it as a proxy for social interaction. Follow-up qualitative and quantitative studies of coronamusic videos from our crowdsourced database (Hansen et al., 2021; Hansen, in press B), and social-media data from Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, and YouTube largely support this functional bifurcation in the psychological use of music for coping. The originally hypothesized positivity bias—i.e., the tendency for corona-themed music to be governed by positive sentiment and humour in contrast to the negative impact of the global health crisis—was present in one of these strands of pandemic musicking. The great prominence and coping potential of topically tailored musical repertoires and modes of expression suggest that throughout human prehistory, topical musical innovations—such as the coronamusics of 2020—may have served to build psychological resilience when faced with societal crisis.About the speakerNiels Chr. Hansen is an Assistant Professor at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies & Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University. He is General Secretary of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, a member of the Danish Young Academy, and co-founded the global #MUSICOVID research network. His research has been published widely within the fields of psychology (e.g., Psychological Science, Frontiers in Psychology), music cognition (e.g., Musicae Scientiae, Music Perception, Music & Science), neuroscience (e.g., Neuroimage, Journal of Neuroscience, Human Brain Mapping), music theory (Dutch Journal of Music Theory, Danish Yearbook of Musicology), and the interdisciplinary sciences (e.g., Scientific Reports, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, PLOS ONE).IMC Tuesday Seminar held May 31st, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Janet Rafner - CREA: scalable AI-enhanced games for fostering and assessing creativity InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-22 | AbstractIn this talk I will present a subset of the work from my PhD dissertation which addresses human-AI interaction for fostering and assessing creativity in game environments. I will then demo and present initial results from two creativity games that I have led the design of; these games utilize ML methods for both fostering and assessing creativity. In particular, both games are casual creators which leverage generative models to allow the general public to playfully create interesting, complex images, while contributing to research and participating in public dialogues on important topics such as the sustainable development goals. About the speakerJanet Rafner, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus University; Center for Hybrid Intelligence, Department of Management, Aarhus University.IMC Tuesday Seminar held August 30th, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Julian Zubek: The dual meaning of movement coordination in interpersonal interactions InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-22 | AbstractIn this talk I want to discuss the dual meaning of movement coordination occurring in interpersonal interactions. First, movement coordination patterns become part of a context in which the interaction takes place and may help to scaffold it. Second, coordinated movement is a sign of the dynamics of the ongoing interaction. These two processes – movement scaffolding interaction and movement being shaped in interaction – occur simultaneously and are an example of circular causality. To illustrate this point I will bring examples from three different studies. In the first study we compared movement coordination in face-to-face conversations and those occurring remotely using a video conferencing software. With the change of medium coordination patterns were radically altered, which possibly made the interaction more difficult to maintain. The second study concerned movement coordination in dyads engaged in a joint action task in which they had to recognise complex stimuli (samples of red wine). In natural interactions there was no significant relation between coordination and dyad performance, but when the interaction became structured through the introduction of external cultural artifact (a Sommelier card) movement coordination became a predictor of task performance. In the third study we investigated the dynamics of interactions in parent-child dyads and children's social development. We found that a large portion of individual differences in social-cognitive skills can be explained through observed patterns of movement coordination, interpreted both as a scaffolding for skill development and a manifestation of already attained skills.About the speakerI am a member of Human Interactivity and Language Lab, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw. My background is in computer science and machine learning (MEng – Warsaw University of Technology, 2012, PhD – Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences, 2017), but I was always drawn towards social sciences. I work with computational models and data analysis techniques inspired by dynamical systems approach. My research interests include emergence of communication, study of unstructured interactions, interpersonal movement coordination.IMC Tuesday Seminar held November 29th, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Thomas Terkildsen: APEX of Fear: Enhancing User Experience of Horror through Affective Computing InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-22 | Affective Player Experience of Fear (APEX of Fear): Enhancing User Experience of Horror through Affective ComputingAbstractWhat if you could step into a horror simulation that adapted to your individual fears and feelings – a virtual world of pleasurable terror tailor-made just for you? Maybe that sounds like science fiction, but this is exactly what the team behind the APEX of Fear project is currently developing. In this lecture, the Principal Investigator Thomas Terkildsen will take us through the state-of-the-art technology underlying this next generation of horror media.About the speakerThomas Terkildsen, Msc.Psych, is an experienced user researcher, who has specialized in affective computing and physiological measurement of emotions. His main research interest is in the measurement of emotions, such as fear, and presence in games using psychophysiology.IMC Tuesday Seminar held February 22nd, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Dan Bang: Electrochemistry in the conscious human brain InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-22 | AbstractDisturbances in the brain’s major neuromodulators, such as dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline, represent an enormous mental health burden worldwide. Yet, our understanding of why these neurochemicals are crucial for mental health has been impeded by an inability to measure fast chemical changes in the human brain. High-precision methods for studying neuromodulators are available in animals, but these results can be hard to relate to the uniquely human experience of mental disorders. In this talk, I will present our recent work in which we perform electrochemical recordings of sub-second changes in dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline in the conscious human brain. This unique opportunity occurs in movement disorder patients who are undergoing implantation of a deep brain stimulating electrode or epilepsy patients who have had depth electrodes implanted for the localisation of epileptic foci. I will present our results on the roles of dopamine and serotonin in action regulation and sensory inference and the relationship between noradrenaline, pupil dilation and emotional states.About the speakerDan is a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at University College London (UCL). Before his Fellowship, Dan completed his PhD in the lab of Chris Summerfield at the University of Oxford, and he then worked for four years as a postdoc in the lab of Steve Fleming, also at UCL. Dan will start his own research group at Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital in 2023, funded by the Lundbeck Foundation Fellows programme. His group will use human electrochemistry to develop and test theories of the neuromodulatory basis of cognition and behaviour and apply these insights to the study and improvement of mental health.IMC Tuesday Seminar held June 21st, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Peter Keller: Music as Skilled Action and Social Interaction InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-22 | AbstractCollective music making showcases the remarkable human capacity for precise yet flexible interpersonal coordination. I will present the results of studies investigating the behavioural and brain bases of this ability using controlled laboratory paradigms and naturalistic musical tasks, as well as related computational modelling, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation approaches. Findings are informative about links between basic sensory-motor mechanisms that enable co-performers to anticipate and adapt to each other’s actions, aspects of personality including empathy, and social-cognitive processes that regulate the balance between psychological representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’. About the speakerPeter Keller holds degrees in Music and Psychology from the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is Professor of Neuroscience in the Center for Music in the Brain and the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University, with a joint appointment in the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University. Previously, he led a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig, Germany), held a European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and served as Editor of the interdisciplinary journal ‘Empirical Musicology Review.’ His research addresses the psychological and neurophysiological underpinnings of human interaction in musical contexts.IMC Tuesday Seminar held March 8th, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
T. Kratochvil - Play at work: Using game design to increase outcomes in school and work environment InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-22 | AbstractThe use of game design in serious context (i.e., gamification) has been used to tackle various obstacles and increase outcomes in recent years. In my ongoing research, I have examined gamification effect on various types of performance while taking work attitudes such as work engagement and job satisfaction into account. I hypothesized that various types of gamified design have different effects on these three outcomes. In my recent work, I have found out that redesigning work with achievement-based (i.e., challenges and rewards) or socialization-based (i.e., cooperative vs. competitive) gamification may lead to a difference in these outcomes in a short-term task when comparing to a control condition. In this talk, I will discuss the evidence supporting these findings, their implications, and possible future venues.About the speakerTomas Kratochvil is doing his PhD in work psychology at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia. His research focus on modern technologies in the context of work psychology, with a particular interest in experimental research, gamification, and positive psychology. Specifically, he is interested in what types of design help people in which situations and how to maximize and maintain such effects.IMC Tuesday Seminar held February 8th, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Kristian Tylén: Investigating collective creativity InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-22 | AbstractCreativity is a fundamental yet ill understood cognitive phenomenon. While creativity is typically thought of as an individual process, it often unfolds in socially interactive settings where individuals jointly explore and manipulate their environment to discover novel, interesting and useful objects, solutions, or experiences. Inspired by for instance Hills et al. (2008), we can characterize the creative process as a search through a possibility space, relying on mechanisms similar to those observed in animal foraging behavior (Buchanan, 2008). This framework allows us to study how a creative process balance exploitation of more accessible local solutions and exploration of less accessible, but perhaps more original, distal solutions. In this talk, I discuss recent experimental and agent-based simulation work that seek to uncover how social interaction affects cognitive search and in particular the balance between exploiting and exploring the solution space. The findings suggest that a number of properties of social interaction (e.g. diversity and coordination) modulates how collective creative search unfolds and impact aspects of the creative solutions. About the speakerKristian Tylén is an Associate Professor in Cognitive Science affiliated with the Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics and The Interacting Minds Centre. His research addresses various aspects of human meaning-making: language and cultural evolution, social interaction, dialogue and collective problem solving, creativity, and the role of material objects in human reasoning. He investigates applying a broad range of methods including behavioural experimentation, brain imaging, physiological measurements, agent-based/statistical modeling as well as conceptual/theoretical analysis. Besides, Kristian recently received an ERC consolidator grant for the project “The evolution of early symbolic behavior”, which will start in the fall 2022. IMC Tuesday Seminar held June 7th, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Susanne Ravn - The intersubjective dimension of skills: Couple-based expertise in aikido practice InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-22 | AbstractCouple-based activities, like for example couple dancing and martial art practices, offer a unique window for investigating intersubjective dimensions of practices and skills. In this presentation I turn to the case of aikido, to contribute understandings of how skills are incorporated and developed. Based on a critical auto-ethnographical approach, I firstly focus on the enabling and constraining structures that constitute the ecological environment of aikido, especially how these structures are part of a network of apprenticeship learning closely connected to a Japanese cultural heritage of martial art practices. On that basis I engage a phenomenological analysis of the interactional dynamics between the two practicing together to understand how the enculturated kind of meaning-making, expressed in the doxa of aikido, enables and constrains the specialised kind of participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007) unfolding in the couple-based interaction. I specify how the sense of movement extends to include the other and especially, how this extended sense of movement is exercised strategically by the experienced other. Accordingly, the analysis contributes enculturated as well as agential aspects to phenomenological descriptions of participatory sensemaking.About the speakerSusanne Ravn is Professor at the Department of Sports Science and Biomechanics at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research focuses on movement practices in sport, dance and health and the interdisciplinary challenge of integrating phenomenology and qualitative research methodologies. IMC Tuesday Seminar held November 1st, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Vibeke Asmussen Frank - Addiction: Beyond the individual InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-09 | AbstractAddiction has in general been characterized by individuals’ experience of loss of control over certain forms of behaviors (such as consumption of alcohol or drugs, gaming, or shopping) and manifested as intense craving. Most theories of addiction atomize the individual from social relationships and wider social and cultural contexts. In this talk, I will go beyond the individual and explore how social relationships, institutional contexts and society at large affects addictive behaviors. Using examples from my own research on illegal substance use, I will discuss how problems, harms and addiction related to illegal substance use is contextual and not solely embedded in the use of a particular substance. How institutional contexts, such as drug use treatment, shape the possibilities for individuals to recover from addiction. And lastly how policies on illegal substances affect the understanding of addiction. About the speakerVibeke Asmussen Frank, ProfessorDepartment of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences - Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held November 8th, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Roberta Rocca - Language as a fingerprint: modeling individual traits using large language models InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-09 | AbstractModern natural language processing techniques can be used to extract compact and transferable representations of text and audio at multiple levels of granularity. In this talk, I will present three studies using NLP methods to model individual traits for cognitive and social science applications. The first study explores applications of both traditional ML methods and more advanced text and audio encoding techniques in language-based inference of clinical conditions. The second study focuses on developing self-supervised methods to extract transferable author representations from text. The third study explores social science applications of text modeling techniques, especially focusing on the use of language models for text-based measurement of political identity.About the speakerRoberta Rocca, Postdoctoral Researcher, Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus UniversityIMC Tuesday Seminar held October 25th, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
Ida Selbing: Expression and perception of decisions in movement patterns InteractingMindsAU 2022-12-09 | AbstractDecisions are not necessarily easy to separate into a planning and an execution phase and the decision-making process can often be reflected in the movement associated with the decision. Since knowledge of the decision-making process or beliefs that underlie other individual’s decisions can be relevant in social interactions we have set out to study how relevant processes are expressed in movement patterns, and how these movement patterns are perceived by an observer. In this talk I will focus on the first part of this project, where we have investigated the expression of decision-making processes in spatiotemporal features of simple mouse-tracking paths using formalized definitions of concepts relevant to decision-making and social interactions. I will also discuss the second part, where we aim to investigate how decision related movement patterns are perceived by an observer.About the speakerIda SelbingDivision of Psychology, Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University IMC Tuesday Seminar held November 22nd, 2022Note: Talk is trimmed to ensure anonymity of informants
