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Psychology

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants’ and young children’s earliest emerging cognitive and social-cogni- tive skills. In the current monograph, we report a series of eight studies in which we systematically assessed the social-cognitive skills of 1- to 3-year-old children in three diverse cultural settings. One group of children was from a Western, middle-class cultural setting in rural Canada and the other two groups were from traditional, small-scale cultural settings in rural Peru and India. In a first group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children’s most basic social-cognitive skills for understanding the intentions and attention of others: imitation, helping, gaze following, and communicative pointing. Children’s performance in these tasks was mostly similar across cultural settings. In a second group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children’s skills in participating in interactive episodes of collaboration and joint at- tention. Again in these studies the general finding was one of cross-cultural similarity. In a final pair of studies, we assessed 2- to 3-year-old children’s skills within two symbolic systems (pretense and pictorial). Here we found that the Canadian children who had much more experience with such symbols showed skills at an earlier age. Our overall conclusion is that young children in all cultural settings get sufficient amounts of the right kinds of social experience to develop their most basic social-cognitive skills for interacting with others and participating in culture at around the same age. In contrast, children’s acquisition of more culturally specific skills for use in practices involving artifacts and symbols is more dependent on specific learning experiences., Psychology

This chapter discusses motivational factors and the contributors responsible for the empathic and prosocial behavior of young children. The reasons that people engage in prosocial behaviors, including self-benefit and society’s approval, are discussed. Empathy as an underlying prosocial behavior, along with its associated process sympathy, is studied to determine whether these are the factors responsible for young children’s prosocial behavior. The chapter discusses young children’s understanding of the situational cues and responding empathically to them. Instrumental helping acts of children aimed at helping other people in attaining their goals rather than looking for self-benefit are discussed, as is the role of culture and experience in influencing young children’s prosocial behavior., Psychology

In human-robot interaction, a robot must be prepared to handle possible ambiguities generated by a human partner. In this work we propose a set of strategies that allow a robot to identify the referent when the human partner refers to an object giving incomplete information, i.e. an ambiguous description. Moreover, we propose the use of an ontology to store and reason on the robot's knowledge to ease clarification, and therefore, improve interaction. We validate our work through both simulation and two real robotic platforms performing two tasks: a daily-life situation and a game., Psychology

Humans constantly generate and solve ambiguities while interacting with each other in their every day activities. Hence, having a robot that is able to solve ambiguous situations is essential if we aim at achieving a fluent and acceptable human-robot interaction. We propose a strategy that combines three mechanisms to clarify ambiguous situations generated by the human partner. We implemented our approach and successfully performed validation tests in several different situations both, in simulation and with the HRP-2 robot., Psychology