publications
2022
2021
- CogSciUnderstanding Mental Representations Of Objects Through Verbs Applied To ThemKa Chun Lam, Francisco Pereira, Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam, and 2 more authors2021
In order to interact with objects in our environment, we rely on an understanding of the actions that can be performed on them, and the extent to which they rely or have an effect on the properties of the object. This knowledge is called the object “affordance”. We propose an approach for creating an embedding of objects in an affordance space, in which each dimension corresponds to an aspect of meaning shared by many actions, using text corpora. This embedding makes it possible to predict which verbs will be applicable to a given object, as captured in human judgments of affordance, better than a variety of alternative approaches. Furthermore, we show that the dimensions learned are interpretable, and that they correspond to typical patterns of interaction with objects. Finally, we show that the dimensions can be used to predict a state-of-the-art mental representation of objects, derived purely from human judgements of object similarity.
- JoVThe ability to predict actions of others from distributed cues is still developing in 6- to 8-year-old childrenEmalie McMahon, Daniel Kim, Samuel A. Mehr, and 3 more authorsJournal of Vision May 2021
Adults use distributed cues in the bodies of others to predict and counter their actions. To investigate the development of this ability, we had adults and 6- to 8-year-old children play a competitive game with a confederate who reached toward one of two targets. Child and adult participants, who sat across from the confederate, attempted to beat the confederate to the target by touching it before the confederate did. Adults used cues distributed through the head, shoulders, torso, and arms to predict the reaching actions. Children, in contrast, used cues in the arms and torso, but we did not find any evidence that they could use cues in the head or shoulders to predict the actions. These results provide evidence for a change in the ability to respond rapidly to predictive cues to others’ actions from childhood to adulthood. Despite humans’ sensitivity to action goals even in infancy, the ability to read cues from the body for action prediction in rapid interactive settings is still developing in children as old as 6 to 8 years of age.
2019
- JoVSubtle predictive movements reveal actions regardless of social contextEmalie G. McMahon, Charles Y. Zheng, Francisco Pereira, and 3 more authorsJournal of Vision Jul 2019
Humans have a remarkable ability to predict the actions of others. To address what information enables this prediction and how the information is modulated by social context, we used videos collected during an interactive reaching game. Two participants (an “initiator” and a “responder”) sat on either side of a plexiglass screen on which two targets were affixed. The initiator was directed to tap one of the two targets, and the responder had to either beat the initiator to the target (competition) or arrive at the same time (cooperation). In a psychophysics experiment, new observers predicted the direction of the initiators’ reach from brief clips, which were clipped relative to when the initiator began reaching. A machine learning classifier performed the same task. Both humans and the classifier were able to determine the direction of movement before the finger lift-off in both social conditions. Further, using an information mapping technique, the relevant information was found to be distributed throughout the body of the initiator in both social conditions. Our results indicate that we reveal our intentions during cooperation, in which communicating the future course of actions is beneficial, and also during competition despite the social motivation to reveal less information.
2018
- Kin RevThe Embodied Origins of Infant Reaching: Implications for the Emergence of Eye-Hand CoordinationDaniela Corbetta, Rebecca F. Wiener, Sabrina L. Thurman, and 1 more authorKinesiology Review Jul 2018
This article reviews the literature on infant reaching, from past to present, to recount how our understanding of the emergence and development of this early goal-directed behavior has changed over the decades. We show that the still widely-accepted view, which considers the emergence and development of infant reaching as occurring primarily under the control of vision, is no longer sustainable. Increasing evidence suggests that the developmental origins of infant reaching is embodied. We discuss the implications of this alternative view for the development of eye-hand coordination and we propose a new scenario stressing the importance of the infant body-centered sensorimotor experiences in the months prior to the emergence of reaching as a possible critical step for the formation of eye-hand coordination.