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Highlights • Advices given by multiple agents may distract the user from getting the messages. • Proper timing and contents can be setup to prevent such distraction and confusion. • Adapting timing and contents can make more effective advice giving as persuasion. • Adapting the advices can be based on agents' shared intentions to persuade the user. Abstract Assistive agents have been used to give advices to the users regarding activities in daily lives. Although adviser bots are getting smarter and gaining more popularity these days they are usually developed and deployed independent from each other. When several agents operate together in the same context, their advices may no longer be effective since they may instead overwhelm or confuse the user if not properly arranged. Only little attentions have been paid to coordinating different agents to give different advices to a user within the same environment. However, aligning the advices on-the-fly with the appropriate presentation timing at the right context still remains a great challenge. In this paper, a coordination framework for advice giving and persuasive agents is presented. Apart from preventing overwhelming messages, the adaptation enables cooperation among the agents to make their advices more impactful. In contrast to conventional models that rely on natural language contents or direct multi-modal cues to align the dialogs, the proposed framework is built to be more practical allowing the agents to actively share their observation, goals, and plans to each other. This allows them to adapt the schedules, strategies, and contents of their scheduled advices or reminders at runtime with respect to each other's objectives. Challenges and issues in multi-agent adviser systems are identified and defined in this paper supported by a survey study about perceived usefulness and user comprehensibility of advices delivered by multiple agents. The coordination among the advice giving agents are investigated and exemplified with a simulation of activity of daily living in the context of aging in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at providing an interdisciplinary research into names of imaginary friends, in view of describing the particularity of the process of referring by means of such names. To this end, the study will use theoretical principles pertaining to psychology, referential semantics, onomastics and pragmatics. For illustrative purposes, character names in the American animated television series Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends (2004-2009) will be analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper informs therapeutic practices that use play, by providing a non-standard philosophical account of pretense: the enactive account of pretend play (EAPP). The EAPP holds that pretend play activity need not invoke mental representational mechanisms; instead, it focuses on interaction and the role of affordances in shaping pretend play activity. One advantage of this re-characterization of pretense is that it may help us better understand the role of shared meanings and interacting in systemic therapies, which use playing to enhance dialog in therapy rather than to uncover hidden meanings. We conclude with bringing together findings from therapeutic practice and philosophical considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks why adults play dress-up and investigates the role of object play in the making of magical thinking and the reforming of adult identity. The author looks at a wide spectrum of narratives and their genres—the fairy tale "Cinderella," the film comedy Some Like it Hot, the epistolary novel Pamela, the film melodrama Now, Voyager, the psychoanalytical case study of "Miss K.," and the memoir My Judy Garland Life. She asserts that these narratives help define what constitutes "a woman's story" as a story of transformation by setting its representation in relation to objects or aesthetic worlds, into which the woman changes or immerses herself with the same intensity and single-mindedness as a child at play. The author draws on the works of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas to explain the transformational object seeking and aesthetic moment of these narrative representations and argues they model a woman's longing for transformation and make it imaginable to the adult mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compared the incidence of imaginary companions and impersonated characters in 152 three- and four-year-old children (75 males and 77 females). Children and their parents were interviewed about role play [...]