Previous research has documented that type 2 diabetes mellitus is associated with cognitive impairment. Psychological variables were repeatedly investigated to understand why T2DM patients are poorly active, despite standards of medical care recommends performing aerobic and resistance exercise regularly and reducing the amount of time spent sitting. This exploratory study aims to investigate how affective variables as thoughts, feelings, and individuals’ stage of exercise adoption can modulate low cognitive performances during an experimental procedure based on exercise. The Exercise Thoughts Questionnaire, (...) Exercise-Induced Feeling Scale, and Physical Activity Stage of Change were administered to a sample of 12 T2DM patients. The Bivalent Shape Task alone, BST with exercise [control exercise recovery + BST], and BST with metaboreflex [post-exercise muscle ischemia + BST] were used as mental task, and response time to congruent, incongruent, and neutral stimuli was recorded. Concomitant cerebral oxygenation was evaluated by near-infrared spectroscopy. As expected, T2DM patients performed significantly better when the stimulus was presented in congruent trials. In the CER + BST session, T2DM patients showed longer reaction time to incongruent trials than in the PEMI + BST and BST alone sessions. Positive feelings toward exercise seem to modulate cognitive performances in high challenging task only if T2DM patients were conscious to play exercise. These results could provide some insights for health intervention targeting exercise for patients with T2DM in order to enhance cognitive performances. (shrink)

The capacity to search for information effectively by asking informative questions is crucial for self-directed learning and develops throughout the preschool years and beyond. We tested the hypothesis that explaining observations in a given domain prepares children to ask more informative questions in that domain, and that it does so by promoting the identification of features that apply to multiple objects, thus supporting more effective questions. Across two experiments, 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 168) were prompted to explain observed (...) evidence or to complete a control task prior to a 20-questions game. We found that prior prompts to explain led to a decrease in the number of questions needed to complete the game, but only for older children (ages 6-7). Moreover, we found that effects of explanation manifested as a shift away from questions that targeted single objects. These findings shed light on the development of question asking in childhood and on the role of explanation in learning. (shrink)

One way to learn about the world is by asking questions. We investigate how younger children (7- to 8-year-olds), older children (9- to 11-year-olds), and young adults (17- to 18-year-olds) ask questions to identify the cause of an event. We find a developmental shift in children’s reliance on hypothesis-scanning questions (which test hypotheses directly) versus constraint-seeking questions (which reduce the space of hypotheses), but also that all age groups ask more constraint-seeking questions when hypothesis-scanning questions are least likely to pay (...) off: When the solution is one among equally likely alternatives (Study 1) or when the problem is difficult (Studies 1 and 2). These findings are the first to demonstrate that even young children dynamically adapt their strategies for inquiry to increase the efficiency of information search. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the informativeness of 4- to 6-year-old children’s questions using a combined qualitative and quantitative approach. Children were presented with a hierarchical version of the 20-questions game, in which they were given an array of objects that could be organized into three category levels based on shared features. We then tested whether it is possible to scaffold children’s question-asking abilities without extensive training. In particular, we supported children’s categorization performance by providing the object-related features needed to (...) ask effective constraint-seeking questions. We found that with both age and scaffolding children asked more effective questions, targeting higher category levels and therefore reaching the solution with fewer questions. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these results. (shrink)

Ces dernières années, l’avortement et l’accès à l’interruption volontaire de grossesse (IVG) ont de nouveau été au centre du débat public et politique. Si la proximité temporelle de ces changements rend difficile l’élaboration de leurs chronologies, certains événements marquants peuvent déjà être soulignés. Pensons par exemple aux attaques des droites populistes contre les droits reproductifs des femmes en Europe et aux États-Unis, telles que les tentatives d’affaiblir la loi sur l’IVG en Pol...

Human motor skills are exceptional compared to other species, no less than their cognitive skills. In this perspective paper, we suggest that “movement matters!,” implying that motor development is a crucial driving force of cognitive development, much more impactful than previously acknowledged. Thus, we argue that to fully understand and explain developmental changes, it is necessary to consider the interaction of motor and cognitive skills. We exemplify this argument by introducing the concept of “embodied planning,” which takes an embodied cognition (...) perspective on planning development throughout childhood. From this integrated, comprehensive framework, we present a novel climbing paradigm as the ideal testbed to explore the development of embodied planning in childhood and across the lifespan. Finally, we outline future research directions and discuss practical applications of the work on developmental embodied planning for robotics, sports, and education. (shrink)

An online world exists in which businesses have become burdened with managerial and legal duties regarding the seeking of informed consent and the protection of privacy and personal data, while growing public cynicism regarding personal data collection threatens the healthy development of marketing and e-commerce. This research seeks to address such cynicism by assisting organisations to devise ethical consent management processes that consider an individual’s attitudes, their subjective norms and their perceived sense of control during the elicitation of consent. It (...) does so by developing an original conceptual model for online informed consent, argued through logical reasoning, and supported by an illustrative example, which brings together the autonomous authorisation (AA) model of informed consent and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). Accordingly, it constructs a model for online informed consent, rooted in the ethic of autonomy, which employs behavioural theory to facilitate a mode of consent elicitation that prioritises users’ interests and supports ethical information management and marketing practices. The model also introduces a novel concept, the informed attitude, which must be present for informed consent to be valid. It also reveals that, under certain tolerated conditions, it is possible for informed consent to be provided unwillingly and to remain valid: this has significant ethical, information management and marketing implications. (shrink)

: The ability to respond to gaze cueing is essential for successful social interactions and social learning. An active area of research in human robot interactions focuses on the computational encoding of biologically realistic gaze cueing responses in robots. Studies of human development are a primary source of guidance for this field of research. The investigation of how perceived gazes constrain the developmental trajectories of visual attention in humans from childhood to adulthood might reveal important factors to implement realistic gaze (...) following in social robots. This study investigated spontaneous gaze following in 2 and 4-year-old children and adults. Participants saw faces of an adult gazing toward an object. We found that accuracy of gaze following improved significantly with age. The results are discussed considering the development of the executive control of visual attention in humans and its possible implication in implementing gaze following in social robotics. Keywords: Gaze Following; Eye Tracking; Visual Attention; Social Robotics; Developmental Trajectories Ispirare la robotica: traiettorie evolutive della capacità di seguire la direzione dello sguardo negli esseri umani Riassunto: La capacità di seguire la direzione dello sguardo è essenziale per il successo delle interazioni sociali e per l’apprendimento sociale. Un’area di ricerca particolarmente attiva nell’ambito dell’interazione uomo-robot si focalizza sulla codifica computazionale della capacità di seguire la direzione dello sguardo nei robot. Studiare come la capacità di seguire lo sguardo possa influenzare l’attenzione visiva negli esseri umani dall’infanzia all’età adulta può rivelare importanti informazioni per implementare la capacità di seguire lo sguardo nei robot sociali. Questo studio ha indagato la capacità spontanea di seguire la direzione dello sguardo in bambini di 2 e 4 anni e negli adulti. I partecipanti hanno osservato una serie di volti umani con lo sguardo rivolto verso un oggetto. I risultati hanno indicato che l’accuratezza nel gaze following migliora in modo significativo con l’età. I risultati sono stati discussi considerando il ruolo del controllo esecutivo dell’attenzione visiva negli esseri umani e le sue possibili implicazioni per implementare l’abilità di seguire la direzione dello sguardo nei robot sociali. Parole chiave: Seguire la direzione dello sguardo; Eye Tracking; Attenzione visiva; Robot sociali; Traiettorie evolutive. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 258-281, April 2022.

In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human–human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data‐hungry artificial neural networks. In this paper, we argue that datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on human behavior and language use. We present a method that leverages the recent development of powerful computational models to obtain the fine‐grained annotation required to apply metrics and techniques from (...) Cognitive Science to large datasets. Previous work in Cognitive Science has investigated the question‐asking strategies of human participants by employing different variants of the so‐called 20‐question‐game setting and proposing several evaluation methods. In our work, we focus on GuessWhat, a task proposed within the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities that is similar in structure to the 20‐question‐game setting. Crucially, the GuessWhat dataset contains tens of thousands of dialogues based on real‐world images, making it a suitable setting to investigate the question‐asking strategies of human players on a large scale and in a natural setting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of computational tools to automatically code how the hypothesis space changes throughout the dialogue in complex visual scenes. On the one hand, we confirm findings from previous work on smaller and more controlled settings. On the other hand, our analyses allow us to highlight the presence of “uninformative” questions (in terms of Expected Information Gain) at specific rounds of the dialogue. We hypothesize that these questions fulfill pragmatic constraints that are exploited by human players to solve visual tasks in complex scenes successfully. Our work illustrates a method that brings together efforts and findings from different disciplines to gain a better understanding of human question‐asking strategies on large‐scale datasets, while at the same time posing new questions about the development of conversational systems. (shrink)

Modernism has provided a strong case for technoprogressivism, innovation and speculation on future possibilities. However, drastic and often devastating consequences have followed modernism such as global warming and mass biodiversity loss. In Leonardo Caffo and Azzurra Muzzonigro’s new book, a case for posthumanism as a means for envisioning and rethinking futures studies is argued and practical means by which those futures can be realized are outlined.