Papers about Psychology

This paper attempts to formalize and to address the ‘leakproofing’ of the Singularity problem presented by David Chalmers. The paper begins with the definition of the Artificial Intelligence Confinement Problem. After analysis of existing solutions and their shortcomings, a protocol is proposed aimed at making a more secure confinement environment which might delay potential negative effect from the technological singularity while allowing humanity to benefit from the superintelligence. Read more

Empathy is seen as the capacity to perceive, understand and experience others' emotions. This notion is often considered as one of the major elements in social interactions between humans. As such, when creating social agents, that are believable and able to engage users in social interactions, empathy needs to be addressed. Indeed, for the past few years, many researchers have been looking at this problem, not only in trying to find ways to perceive the user's... Read more

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are designed to provide natural and intuitive communication with a human user. One major current topic in agent design consequently is to enhance their believability, often by incorporating internal models of emotions or motivations. As psychological theories often lack the necessary details for direct implementation, many agent modelers currently rely on models that are rather marginal in current psychological research, or models that are created ad hoc with little theoretical and... Read more

We present the broad outlines of a roadmap toward humanlevel artificial general intelligence (henceforth, AGI). We begin by discussing AGI in general, adopting a pragmatic goal for its attainment and a necessary foundation of characteristics and requirements. An initial capability landscape will be presented, drawing on major themes from developmental psychology and illuminated by mathematical, physiological and information processing perspectives. The challenge of identifying appropriate tasks and environments for measuring AGI will be addressed, and... Read more

The purpose of this article is to discuss medication nonadherence and the use of relational agent technology as an aid in treating patients with schizophrenia. A team of mental health faculty—specialists in adherence, computer science, and statistics—collaborated to design the agent technology. This computerized virtual health counselor named “Laura” provides seven education modules about schizophrenia. Using preliminary data, two individual examples demonstrate the use of this technology. Implications for behavioral health nurses using this relational... Read more

Electrocorticography (ECoG) has emerged as a new signal platform for brain–computer interface (BCI) systems. Classically, the cortical physiology that has been commonly investigated and utilized for device control in humans has been brain signals from the sensorimotor cortex. Hence, it was unknown whether other neurophysiological substrates, such as the speech network, could be used to further improve on or complement existing motor-based control paradigms. We demonstrate here for the first time that ECoG signals associated... Read more

Affect sensitivity is an important requirement for artificial companions to be capable of engaging in social interaction with human users. This paper provides a general overview of some of the issues arising from the design of an affect recognition framework for artificial companions. Limitations and challenges are discussed with respect to other capabilities of companions and a real world scenario where an iCat robot plays chess with children is presented. In this scenario, affective states... Read more

This paper describes an approach used to build a practical AI solution for a 3D boxing simulation game. The features of the designed AI agent are based on our deliberate concentration on believability, i.e. human-likeness of agent's behavior. We show how learning by observation and case-based reasoning techniques can be used to create an AI decision-making system for an industrial-level computer game. The chosen AI design principles support high usability and maintainability, which is important... Read more

For centuries artists have been exploring color to express emotions. Following this insight, the paper describes an approach to learn how to use color to influence the perception of emotions in virtual humans. First, a model of lighting and filters inspired on the visual arts is integrated with a virtual human platform to manipulate color. Next, an evolutionary model, based on genetic algorithms, is created to evolve mappings between emotions and lighting and filter parameters.... Read more

Robots and agents are becoming increasingly prominent in everyday life, taking on a variety of roles, including helpers, coaches, and even social companions. A core requirement for these social agents is the ability to establish and maintain long-term trusting and engaging relationship with their human users. Much research has already been done on the prerequisites for these types of social agents and robots, in affective computing, social computing and affective HCI. A number of disciplines... Read more