Using minimal human-computer interfaces for studying the interactive development of social awareness

Abstract

According to the enactive approach to cognitive science, perception is essentially a skillful engagement with the world. Learning how to engage via a human-computer interface (HCI) can therefore be taken as an instance of developing a new mode of experiencing. Similarly, social perception is theorized to be primarily constituted by skillful engagement between people, which implies that it is possible to investigate the origins and development of social awareness using multi-user HCIs. We analyzed the trial-by-trial objective and subjective changes in sociality that took place during a perceptual crossing experiment in which embodied interaction between pairs of adults was mediated over a minimalist haptic HCI. Since that study required participants to implicitly relearn how to mutually engage so as to perceive each other's presence, we hypothesized that there would be indications that the initial developmental stages of social awareness were recapitulated. Preliminary results reveal that, despite the lack of explicit feedback about task performance, there was a trend for the clarity of social awareness to increase over time. We discuss the methodological challenges involved in evaluating whether this trend was characterized by distinct developmental stages of objective behavior and subjective experience.

A Sensorimotor Signature of the Transition to Conscious Social Perception: Co-regulation of Active and Passive Touch

“…A diachronic re-analysis of that original study by Froese et al (2014b) confirmed the expected relevance of the perceptual crossing paradigm for understanding the development of social perceptual awareness. It seems that the unfamiliar experimental setup forced the adults to implicitly re-learn the embodied skill of social perception, which may provide researchers with an opportunity to study a recapitulation of its original development in adults.…”

Joint Action of a Pair of Rowers in a Race: Shared Experiences of Effectiveness Are Shaped by Interpersonal Mechanical States

“…The procedure involved first scrutinizing the phenomenological data (i.e., the rowers’ course-of-experience) to delineate the samples of behavioral data to be compared (i.e., various ways of experiencing the strokes give rise to various delineated sections within the race that will be further processed/compared). Such a subjectivity-based sampling method has been well developed in enactivist neuroscience (e.g., Rodriguez et al, 1999 ; Lutz et al, 2002 ; Lutz and Thompson, 2003 ; Froese et al, 2014a , b ). To our knowledge, this has not been used in the field of human movement or sports science.…”

How do Co-agents Actively Regulate their Collective Behavior States?

“…This device puts two actors in situations where they have to move an avatar in a virtual environment populated by different entities (avatars of humans and various lures), visually empty but providing tactile stimulation at each encounter through the mouse used by the participants. Interestingly, what helps participants to succeed in finding each other, and subsequently to experience social connectedness, is the occurring co-regulation process they both perceived simultaneously at some instances (Froese et al, 2014a,b), regardless of the extent to which each actor was satisfied by the unfolding interaction, since they were not informed of their current effectiveness in the task. In agreement with the co-regulation requirement for interpersonal co-ordination emergence, most of the studies testing this regulation process have been experimental and have focused on the co-ordination within dyads, providing reiterated evidence of the interpersonal benefits related to co-regulation processes (Schmidt and Richardson, 2008).…”