Although neuroimaging studies have consistently identified the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) as a key brain region involved in social cognition, the literature is far from consistent with respect to lateralization of function. For example, during theory-of-mind tasks bilateral TPJ activation is found in some studies but only right hemisphere activation in others. Visual perspective-taking and ...

This work was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) N000141512797 Minerva award for Dynamic Statistical Network Informatics, and the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organization Systems (CASOS). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or i...

Decisions made during social interaction are complex due to the inherent uncertainty about their outcomes, which are jointly determined by the actions of the decision maker and others. Game theory, a mathematical analysis of such interdependent decision making, provides a computational framework to extract core components of complex social situations and to analyze decision making in terms of t...

The CSCL community faces two main challenges with respect to learning and argumentation. The scientific challenge is to understand how argumentation produces learning, that is to discover which cognitive mechanisms, triggered by argumentative interactions, generate new knowledge and in which conditions. The engineering challenge is to determine how to trigger productive argumentation among stud...

For a socially intelligent robot, di erent levels of situation assessment are required, ranging from basic processing of sensor input to high-level analysis of semantics and intention. However, the attempt to combine them all prompts new research challenges and the need of a coherent framework and architecture. This paper presents the situation assessment aspect of Romeo2, a unique project aimi...

Social learning and adoption of new behavior govern the rise of a variety of behaviors: from actions as mundane as dance steps to those as dangerous as new ways to make IED detonators. However, agents in immersive virtual environments lack the ability to realistically simulate the spread of new behavior. To address this gap, a cognitive model was designed that represents the well-known socio-co...

Typical solutions for agents assessing trust relies on the circulation of information on the individual level, i.e. reputational images, subjective experiences, statistical analysis, etc. This work presents an alternative approach, inspired to the cognitive heuristics enabling humans to reason at a categorial level. The approach is envisaged as a crucial ability for agents in order to: (1) esti...

This study embarks upon uncovering the probable difference in willingness to communicate between Iranian male and female EFL learners. To undertake the present research, it was limited to socio-cognitive perspective. More precisely, it aimed to distinguish the types and frequency of socio-cognitive strategies used by Iranian students as far as their gender was concerned. In doing so, 32 advance...

In this study, we investigated the relationship between mothers' psychological lexicon and children's cognitive and socio-emotive development as assessed through conceptual and semantic understanding tasks, in addition to the traditional tasks of theory of mind. Currently, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the frequency of mothers' mental state words used in mother-child picture-bo...