Unfamiliar Agents Research Articles

Immunology of Modern Society Humans [IMSH

Humans lives in modern society are subjected to an array of factors that impacts the cellularity and functionality of their immune systems. These IMSH factors were ensemble as; Global changes, liberal spread of mental influencing drugs, war warfare ,terrorism ,environmental mutagens and carcinogens as well as environmental allergens .So they are being at risk for both enhancing or dampening effects on their immune systems. Workers have been documenting four main categories of targeted human immune system living at risk of modern society .The IMSH categories are; intravenous drug users, intensive care patients, tumor patients , war warfare and terrorism. The intravenous drug users have shown increase in their humoral B cell immune responses through the elevation of B cell counts and activities and increase in activation markers of T cell subsets. Intensive care patients were mainly showing functionality of cellular immunity like that of ageing immune cells. Tumor patients, however, were found expressing diversity and compositional heterogeneity of immune cell type reaching 33 subsets and marked functional alterations. Tumor microenvironment have shown at least six dominant pan-cancer-classes of dominant immune cells as compared to normal human subjects immune cellularity. Biological warfare and bioterrorism insults were being accompanied by emergence and re-emergence of unfamiliar agent pathogenicity ,seasonality and marked host susceptibility to the terrorism agent necessary need for individual therapy and management ,as well as for pre and post exposure mass vaccination .Each IMSH category have expressed shared and distinctive features. The unified functional insight to the immune systems of human living in modern society is that formed cellular elements of these immune systems behave to different insults in different ways and different elements reacts differently to the same insult.

Emergent Goal-Anticipatory Gaze in Infants via Event-Predictive Learning and Inference.

From about 7 months of age onward, infants start to reliably fixate the goal of an observed action, such as a grasp, before the action is complete. The available research has identified a variety of factors that influence such goal-anticipatory gaze shifts, including the experience with the shown action events and familiarity with the observed agents. However, the underlying cognitive processes are still heavily debated. We propose that our minds (i) tend to structure sensorimotor dynamics into probabilistic, generative event-predictive, and event boundary predictive models, and, meanwhile, (ii) choose actions with the objective to minimize predicted uncertainty. We implement this proposition by means of event-predictive learning and active inference. The implemented learning mechanism induces an inductive, event-predictive bias, thus developing schematic encodings of experienced events and event boundaries. The implemented active inference principle chooses actions by aiming at minimizing expected future uncertainty. We train our system on multiple object-manipulation events. As a result, the generation of goal-anticipatory gaze shifts emerges while learning about object manipulations: the model starts fixating the inferred goal already at the start of an observed event after having sampled some experience with possible events and when a familiar agent (i.e., a hand) is involved. Meanwhile, the model keeps reactively tracking an unfamiliar agent (i.e., a mechanical claw) that is performing the same movement. We qualitatively compare these modeling results to behavioral data of infants and conclude that event-predictive learning combined with active inference may be critical for eliciting goal-anticipatory gaze behavior ininfants.

The Early Start Denver Model Intervention and Mu Rhythm Attenuation in Autism Spectrum Disorders.

We examined the relationship between the Early start Denver model (ESDM) intervention and mu rhythm attenuation, an EEG paradigm reflecting neural processes associated with action perception and social information processing. Children were assigned to either receive comprehensive ESDM intervention for two years, or were encouraged to pursue resources in the community. Two years after intervention, EEG was collected during the execution and observation of grasping actions performed by familiar and unfamiliar agents. The ESDM group showed significantly greater attenuation when viewing a parent or caregiver executing a grasping action, compared with an unfamiliar individual executing the same action. Our findings suggest that the ESDM may have a unique impact on neural circuitry underlying social cognition and familiarity.

Mitigating belief projection in explainable artificial intelligence via Bayesian teaching

State-of-the-art deep-learning systems use decision rules that are challenging for humans to model. Explainable AI (XAI) attempts to improve human understanding but rarely accounts for how people typically reason about unfamiliar agents. We propose explicitly modelling the human explainee via Bayesian teaching, which evaluates explanations by how much they shift explainees’ inferences toward a desired goal. We assess Bayesian teaching in a binary image classification task across a variety of contexts. Absent intervention, participants predict that the AI’s classifications will match their own, but explanations generated by Bayesian teaching improve their ability to predict the AI’s judgements by moving them away from this prior belief. Bayesian teaching further allows each case to be broken down into sub-examples (here saliency maps). These sub-examples complement whole examples by improving error detection for familiar categories, whereas whole examples help predict correct AI judgements of unfamiliar cases.

Communicative mind-reading in preverbal infants

Pragmatic theories of communication assume that humans evolved a species-unique inferential capacity to express and recognize intentions via communicative actions. We show that 13-month-old non-verbal infants can interpret the turn-taking exchange of variable tone sequences between unfamiliar agents as indicative of communicative transfer of goal-relevant information from a knowledgeable to a naïve agent pursuing the goal. No such inference of information transfer was drawn by the infants, however, when a) the agents exchanged fully predictable identical signal sequences, which does not enable transmission of new information, or b) when no goal-relevant contextual change was observed that would motivate its communicative transmission. These results demonstrate that young infants can recognize communicative interactions between third-party agents and possess an evolved capacity for communicative mind-reading that enables them to infer what contextually relevant information has been transmitted between the agents even without language.

Overcoming The Uncanny Valley Through Shared Stressful Experience with a Humanoid Robot

Previous research has shown that people sometimes feel uncomfortable in the presence of objects that appear almost, but not quite, human-like. This phenomenon, known as the Uncanny Valley effect, may present an impediment to the widespread acceptance of humanoid robots in everyday life, e.g. as school teachers, nurses, nannies, or clerks. It is therefore important for the field of human-robot interaction to identify ways in which the Uncanny Valley effect can be overcome. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that sharing a stressful experience with a robot may serve to establish rapport with that specific robot, leading to a boost in people’s willingness to interact with the robot. To this end, we conducted an experiment in which participants underwent a pleasant experience with one virtual agent and a mildly stressful experience with a second virtual agent (the Induction Phase). Next (the Test Phase), they carried out a new series of tasks, before each of which they selected one virtual agent (either one of the two familiar agents or one of two unfamiliar agents) to be their partner for that task. The results indicate that participants chose to partner with the virtual agent with whom they had shared the stressful experience more often than the virtual agent with whom they had shared the pleasant experience, and more often than either of the other two agents. This finding, as well as the results of questionnaires that were administered at the end of the experiment, support the hypothesis that shared stressful experiences help overcome the Uncanny Valley effect.

Shortage of Digitoxin and Switching to Digoxin in Norway: A Retrospective Study of Blood Samples Submitted to a Clinical Pharmacology Laboratory.

Drug shortages occur frequently and they can affect patient safety [1-3]. Shortage involves medicines used in cancer, anaesthesia and in the treatment and prevention of chronic diseases and life-threatening conditions [1-3]. The potential for medication errors increases during drug shortages due to prescribing of unfamiliar agents [4]. This problem was highlighted with digitalis glycosides in Norway 2012. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Automatic cueing of covert spatial attention by a novel agent in preschoolers and adults

Both infants and adults exhibit rapid, automatic reorienting of covert spatial attention in the direction indicated by familiar biological signals, such as another individual’s gaze, reaches, or points. Recent evidence in adults suggests that these cued responses can be influenced by representations of the other individual’s perceptual experiences and capacity for intentional action. However, current developmental results and theoretical accounts of the acquisition and specialization of cued responses are consistent with a cueing mechanism based on leaner representations of perceptually familiar directional signals. The influence of mentalistic attributions on cueing during early childhood is thus unknown. We investigated whether or not abstract attributions of agency to an unfamiliar entity would modulate cueing in 4- to 6-year-old children and adults. When induced to construe a faceless novel entity as an agent, both age groups fixated targets more rapidly when they appeared in locations consistent with the agent’s directional orientation; they did not do so when they had no reason to view the entity as an agent. This result provides evidence that 1) the intentional actions of a perceptually unfamiliar agent can guide attentional cueing in adults, and 2) this influence of conceptual assessment on reflexive social attention is present by early childhood.

Overview on experimental models of interactions between nanoparticles and the immune system.

Nanotechnology increasingly plays a significant role in modern medicine development. The clear benefits of using nanomaterials in various biomedical applications are often challenged by concerns about the lack of adequate data regarding their toxicity. Two decades of nanotoxicology research have shown that the interactions between nanoparticles (NPs) and biosystem are remarkably complex. This complexity derives from NPs' ability to bind and interact with biological cells and change their surface characteristics. One area of interest involves the interactions between NPs and the immune component. Immune system's function in the maintenance of tissue homeostasis is to protect the host from unfamiliar agents. This is done through effective surveillance and elimination of foreign substances and abnormal self cells from the body. Research shows that nanomaterials can stimulate and/or suppress the immune responses, and that their compatibility with the immune system is largely determined by their surface properties. NP size, shape, composition, protein binding and administration routes seem to be the main factors that contribute to the interactions of NPs with the immune system. In the present article, we focus on the relationship between effective physiochemical properties of NPs and their immunogenic effects. In addition, we review more details about immunological responses of different types of NPs. Understanding the interactions of nanomaterials with the immune system is essential for the engineering of new NP-based systems for medical applications.

Dogs (Canis familiaris) adjust their social behaviour to the differential role of inanimate interactive agents.

Dogs are able to flexibly adjust their social behaviour to situation-specific characteristics of their human partner's behaviour in problem situations. However, dogs do not necessarily detect the specific role played by the human in a particular situation: they may form expectations about their partners' behaviour based on previous experiences with them. Utilising inanimate objects (UMO-unidentified moving object) as interacting agents offers new possibilities for investigating social behaviour, because in this way we can remove or control the influence of previous experience with the partner. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether dogs are able to recognise the different roles of two UMOs and are able to adjust their communicative behaviour towards them. In the learning phase of the experiment, dogs were presented with a two-way food-retrieval problem in which two UMOs, which differed in their physical appearance and abilities, helped the dog obtain a piece of food in their own particular manner. After a short experience with both UMOs, dogs in the test phase faced one of the problems in the presence of both inanimate agents. Overall, dogs displayed similar levels of gazing behaviour towards the UMOs, but in the first test they looked, approached and touched the relevant partner first. This rapid adjustment of social behaviour towards UMOs suggests that dogs may generalise their experiences with humans to unfamiliar agents and are able to select the appropriate partner when facing a problem situation.

Do infants perceive the social robot Keepon as a communicative partner?

This study investigates if infants perceive an unfamiliar agent, such as the robot Keepon, as a social agent after observing an interaction between the robot and a human adult. 23 infants, aged 9–17 month, were exposed, in a first phase, to either a contingent interaction between the active robot and an active human adult, or to an interaction between an active human adult and the non-active robot, followed by a second phase, in which infants were offered the opportunity to initiate a turn-taking interaction with Keepon.The measured variables were: (1) the number of social initiations the infant directed toward the robot, and (2) the number of anticipatory orientations of attention to the agent that follows in the conversation. The results indicate a significant higher level of initiations in the interactive robot condition compared to the non-active robot condition, while the difference between the frequencies of anticipations of turn-taking behaviors was not significant.

Trust: An Integrative Review from a Person–Situation Perspective

Trust is a key aspect of various social interactions. Correspondingly, trust has been heavily studied across different scientific disciplines. However, an integration of the diverse research and literature is still missing. Addressing this issue, we review several hundred articles on interpersonal trust among strangers and integrate them into a coherent framework, explaining trust behavior among unfamiliar agents based on an interaction between situational features and distinct personality characteristics. Understanding trust as a decision under risk, we distill 3 core components of trust behavior from the extant literature: attitudes toward risky prospects (i.e., risk aversion and loss aversion), trustworthiness expectations, and betrayal sensitivity. Each of these refers to a distinct set of causal determinants, including personality characteristics (anxiety/fear, trustworthiness, and forgiveness) which can be localized in the space defined by models of basic personality structure (e.g., the Five-Factor Model and the HEXACO model of personality). In sum, the review contributes to the understanding of trust behavior by linking and integrating the findings from various fields of trust research. Additionally, it provides fruitful directions and implications for future research.

Do robots have goals? How agent cues influence action understanding in non-human primates

The capacity to understand goals and intentions emerges early and universally in humans and is a basic precondition for the interpretation and prediction of others’ actions, be it other humans, animals, or even robots. It is unclear, however, how this goal attribution system is acquired, in particular with regard to the role of prior experience with the actor and visual characteristics that are necessary. In four preferential looking time experiments we examined how familiarity, appearance, and movement of different agents influence the capability of marmosets to perceive the behavior of these agents as goal directed. To this end we compared the monkeys’ reactions to the same goal-directed actions performed by four different agents: a human actor, a conspecific, a monkey-like small robot, and a black box. The results showed that monkeys attributed goals to the human actor, the conspecific, and the robot, but not the box. Thus, the monkeys extended their capacity for goal attribution not only to familiar agents, but also to agents not previously encountered, provided that they had some conspecific-like features. Our results suggest that in non-human primates, the system for goal attribution does not require previous experience with a specific agent or agent-category, as long as it exhibits certain visual characteristics like face, body or legs. Furthermore, the results suggest that the capacity to attribute goals emerged very early during evolution and, at least in marmoset monkeys, does not necessarily require pre-learned associations in order to fulfill its function when dealing with unfamiliar agents.

Where will the triangle look for it? Attributing false beliefs to a geometric shape at 17 months

Prior research on implicit mind-reading skills has focussed on how infants anticipate other persons' actions. This study investigated whether 11- and 17-month-olds spontaneously attribute false beliefs (FB) even to a simple animated geometric shape. Infants were shown a triangle chasing a disk through a tunnel. Using an eye-tracker, we found that 17-month-olds in a change-of-location true belief (TB) task anticipated that the triangle would search for the disk in the correct place while in a FB test they anticipated that it would search for it in the wrong, belief congruent place. These results suggest that 17-month-olds' psychological-reasoning system is applied to the actions of unfamiliar agents and it is employed to anticipate agents' actions even in the absence of any morphological features that are typical of natural agents. These findings provide support for theoretical accounts that emphasize continuity in the development of theory of mind core concepts and belief reasoning skills.

Point-Nonpoint Trading - Can It Work?1

Ribaudo, Marc O. and Jessica Gottlieb, 2011. Point-Nonpoint Trading – Can It Work? Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 47(1):5-14. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2010.00454.x Abstract: Water quality trading between point and nonpoint sources is of great interest as an alternative to strict command and control regulations on point sources for achieving water quality goals. The expectation is that trading will reduce the costs of water quality protection, and may speed compliance. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has issued guidance to the States on developing point-nonpoint trading programs, and United States Department of Agriculture is encouraging farmer participation. However, existing point-nonpoint trading programs have resulted in very few trades. Supply side and demand side impediments seem to be preventing trades from occurring in most trading programs. These include uncertainty over the number of discharge allowances different management practices can produce, high transactions costs of identifying trading partners, baseline requirements that eliminate low-cost credits, the reluctance of point sources to trade with unfamiliar agents, and the perception of some farmers that entering contracts with regulated point sources leads to greater scrutiny and potential future regulation. Many of these problems can be addressed through research and program design.

Calculating the attentional orientation of an unfamiliar agent in infancy

By the end of the first year, infants are able to recognize both goal-directed and perceptually guided behavior in the actions of non-human agents, even faceless ones. How infants derive the relevant orientation of an unfamiliar agent in the absence of familiar markers such as eyes, ears, or face is unknown. The current studies tested the hypothesis that infants’ calculate an agent's “front” from the geometry of its behavior in the spatial environment. In the first study, 14–15-month-old infants observed a symmetrical, faceless agent either interact contingently with a confederate or act randomly. It then turn toward one of two target objects. Infants were more likely to look in the direction the agent turned than the opposite direction, but only in the contingent condition. In the second study, the location of the confederate and target objects was varied, which in turn influenced which end of the agent infants interpreted as the front. Finally, implications for infants’ early gaze-following behaviors with humans are tested and implications for theory of mind development more broadly are discussed.

Actors and actions: The role of agent behavior in infants’ attribution of goals

Twelve-month-old infants attribute goals to both familiar, human agents and unfamiliar, non-human agents. They also attribute goal-directedness to both familiar actions and unfamiliar ones. Four conditions examined information 12-month-olds use to determine which actions of an unfamiliar agent are goal-directed. Infants who witnessed the agent interact contingently with a human confederate encoded the agent's actions as goal-directed; infants who saw a human confederate model an intentional stance toward the agent without the agent's participation, did not. Infants who witnessed the agent align itself with one of two potential targets before approaching that target encoded the approach as goal-directed; infants who did not observe the self-alignment did not encode the approach as goal-directed. A possible common underpinning of these two seemingly independent sources of information is discussed.

Infants' attribution of a goal to a morphologically unfamiliar agent.

How do infants identify the psychological actors in their environments? Three groups of 12-month-old infants were tested for their willingness to encode a simple approach behavior as goal-directed as a function of whether it was performed by (1) a human hand, (2) a morphologically unfamiliar green object that interacted with a confederate and behaved intentionally, or (3) the same unfamiliar green object that behaved in a matched, but apparently random manner. Using a visual habituation technique, only infants in the first two conditions were found to encode the approach behavior as goal-directed Thus infants appear able to attribute goals to non-human, even unfamiliar agents. These results imply that by the end of the first year of life infants have a broad notion of what counts as an agent that cannot easily be reduced to humans, objects that are perceptually similar to humans, or objects that display self-propulsion.