Distinguishing Self, Other, and Autonomy From Visual Feedback: A Combined Correlation and Acceleration Transfer Analysis

In cognitive science, Theory of Mind (ToM) is the mental faculty of assessing intentions and beliefs of others and requires, in part, to distinguish incoming sensorimotor (SM) signals and, accordingly, attribute these to either the self-model, the model of the other, or one pertaining to the external world, including inanimate objects. To gain an understanding of this mechanism, we perform a computational analysis of SM interactions in a dual-arm robotic setup. Our main contribution is that, under the common fate principle, a correlation analysis of the velocities of visual pivots is shown to be sufficient to characterize "the self" (including proximo-distal arm-joint dependencies) and to assess motor to sensory influences, and "the other" by computing clusters in the correlation dependency graph. A correlational analysis, however, is not sufficient to assess the non-symmetric/directed dependencies required to infer autonomy, the ability of entities to move by themselves. We subsequently validate 3 measures that can potentially quantify a metric for autonomy: Granger causality (GC), transfer entropy (TE), as well as a novel “Acceleration Transfer” (AT) measure, which is an instantaneous measure that computes the estimated instantaneous transfer of acceleration between visual features, from which one can compute a directed SM graph. Subsequently, autonomy is characterized by the sink nodes in this directed graph. This study results show that although TE can capture the directional dependencies, a rectified subtraction operation denoted, in this study, as AT is both sufficient and computationally cheaper.

Structured Assessment on Learning Progress

This paper presented a novel technique and practice of the assessment of learning progress of university students in an engineering discipline. Instead of measuring the effectiveness of accumulation of specific knowledge, the newly developed assessment technique evaluates the development of the intelligence of the students. The key components of the proposed technique are a performance-based method for the estimation of the intelligence level and a cognitive mental faculty-oriented decomposition method to determine the intelligence contribution factors for learning subjects and exam questions. The proposed technique was applied to assess the learning progress of a group of university students in the field of automation, and the results from test agreed with the expectation well.

Is a meditation retreat the better vacation? effect of retreats and vacations on fatigue, emotional well-being, and acting with awareness

It is well established that leisure vacations markedly improve well-being, but that these effects are only of short duration. The present study aimed to investigate whether vacation effects would be more lasting if individuals practiced meditation during the leisure episode. Meditation is known to improve well-being durably, among others, by enhancing the mental faculty of mindfulness. In this aim, leisure vacations during which individuals practiced meditation to some extent were compared with holidays not including any formal meditation practice as well as with meditation retreats (characterized by intense meditation practice) utilizing a naturalistic observational design. Fatigue, well-being, and mindfulness were assessed ten days before, ten days after, and ten weeks after the stays in a sample of 120 individuals accustomed to meditation practices. To account for differences in the experience of these stays, recovery experiences were additionally assessed. Ten days after the stay, there were no differences except for an increase in mindfulness for those practicing meditation. Ten weeks after the stay, meditation retreats and vacations including meditation were associated with greater increases in mindfulness, lower levels of fatigue, and higher levels of well-being than an "ordinary" vacation during which meditation was not practiced. The finding suggests that the inclusion of meditation practice during vacation could help alleviate vacations’ greatest pitfall, namely the rapid decline of its positive effects.

Interrogating the Notion of Self, ‘Mind’ and Personhood in Tangkhul Naga Tradition

The article attempts to examine the conceptual foundation of the self, mind and personhood in the traditional thoughts of the Tangkhul Nagas and the social implications and cultural models that shaped these conceptualisations. Partly constrained by the scarcity of written accounts, I have closely looked at the language usage, etymology of words and cultural practices of the community. Ning (‘mind’) is the central concept. Rich embodied expressions associate thoughts and emotions with certain internal organs of human body. The soul resides in the liver, luck in the brain and feelings in the heart. Ning is said to be acquired. This raises the question of whether the acquisition of ‘mind’ strictly refers to an acquisition of the mental faculty or does it include social norms and other skills. Drawing from the philosophy of Mead, the central argument is that the self, mind and ‘significant symbols’ conflated in the idea of personhood.

Attention and orienting

This chapter describes the close relationship between the mental faculty of attention and the physical faculty of orienting, and the importance of this relationship to the construction of artificial biomimetic systems. It reviews the importance of physical orienting to natural motor behavior, which places attention management at the core of all behaviors (“orienting is acting”), and the concomitant social role of physical orienting both in expressing and revealing the focus of a mind. The article highlights the efficiency of top-down and bottom-up processing for behavioral control, using map-based saliency processing as a model, and the suitability of map-based algorithms for parallel or bespoke computation. Given this, and the similar nature of the challenges faced by artificial and natural sensorimotor systems, it is argued that attention management may be a, if not the, key component of future artificial motor control systems.

Dewey’s Radical Conception of Moral Cognition

Dewey’s conception of moral cognition as a natural problem-solving process of imaginative deliberation is . naturalistic insofar as it treats moral agents as embodied social animals operating in the natural world, without possessing anything like an eternal soul, transcendent ego, pure reason, or other disembodied mental faculty. Dewey’s view is social-psychological because it sees morality as arising from social embeddedness and interactions with others within communities of interdependent persons. It is reconstructive in that it regards moral appraisal and deliberation as part of an ongoing process of attempting to transform developing experience for the better. It is fallibilist in recognizing that there is no all-encompassing or transcendent standpoint from which to make moral judgments. Finally, Dewey sees moral deliberation neither as rule following nor as mere emotional response but rather as imaginative exploration of how people might reduce conflict and deepen and enrich meaning within situations rife with conflict and tension.

The Cultural Construction of Memory in Early Childhood

Research on memory from infancy through early childhood and the school years over the past four decades has dramatically changed our knowledge about the development of this important mental faculty. This chapter considers the important changes in memory during the preschool years, with emphasis on the emergence of autobiographical memory toward the end of that period, the significance of social and cultural contributions to this emergence in terms of the “mediated mind,” and the qualitative changes in memory and self-concept necessary for its mature operations. These developments are considered in relation to the evolutionary levels of human language and cognition described by Donald (see chapter 1).

Dynamic Networks in the Emotional Brain

Research on the emotional brain has often focused on a few structures thought to be central to this type of processing—hypothalamus, amygdala, insula, and so on. Conceptual thinking about emotion has viewed this mental faculty as linked to broader brain circuits, too, including early ideas by Papez and others. In this article, we discuss research that embraces a distributed view of emotion circuits and efforts to unravel the impact on emotional manipulations on the processing of several large-scale brain networks that are chiefly important for mental operations traditionally labeled with terms such as “perception,” “action,” and “cognition.” Furthermore, we describe networks as dynamic processes and how emotion-laden stimuli strongly affect network structure. As networks are not static entities, their organization unfolds temporally, such that specific brain regions affiliate with them in a time-varying fashion. Thus, at a specific moment, brain regions participate more strongly in some networks than others. In this dynamic view of brain function, emotion has broad, distributed effects on processing in a manner that transcends traditional boundaries and inflexible labels, such as “emotion” and “cognition.” What matters is the coordinated action that supports behaviors.

Review of Radu J. Bogdan’s Predicative Minds: The Social Ontogeny of Propositional Thinking

In this book, Bogdan offers an empirically informed theory of the emergence and nature of predication with unmistakable pragmatic and developmental overtones. While the emphasis on psycho-pragmatic and developmental factors is most welcome, and while the discussion is informed and informative, Bogdan’s thesis suffers from some major weaknesses, in particular philosophical ones. Chief among these is an insufficient clarity with regard to the problem domain being addressed: Bogdan professes to offer a theory of predication as a general mental faculty but in reality he focuses on a rather narrower phenomenon. This narrow delineation of the problem domain, and Bogdan’s insistence on the discontinuity between full-fledged human predication and animal thought patterns, leads to a theoretical impasse that renders the very coherence of his proposal dubitable.