Humans are biased toward social interaction. Behaviorally, this bias is evident in the rapid effects that self-relevant communicative signals have on attention and perceptual systems. The processing of communicative cues recruits a wide network of brain regions, including mentalizing systems. Relatively less work, however, has examined the timing of the processing of self-relevant communicative...

A comprehensive approach for describing the functional and behavioral aspects of communicative actions, e.g. facial, manual, and vocal tract actions, has been established for face-to-face-communication (Cogn Process 11:187-205, 2010). Within the speech domain, this approach will now be extended in two ways: (i) by introducing level actions such as turn, breath group, phrase, stress group, sylla...

This paper considers the semantics of the agent communication language KQML. By using this language for communication, agents will be able to request and provide services. Indeed, numerous projects have shown how the language can pro tably support interoperation among distributed agents. However, before becoming a widely-accepted standard, it would be worthwhile to examine the language in detai...

We present a computational semantics of communicative actions for rational agent programming languages. Three indicators are used to differentiate declarative, interrogative and imperative messages which replace the usual labels to identify socalled speech acts. We introduce a multi-agent verification logic based on the computational semantics that facilitates reasoning about communicative acti...

Olive baboons (Papio anubis) do acquire and use intentional requesting gestures in experimental contexts. Individual's hand preference for these gestures is consistent with that observed for typical communicative gestures, but not for manipulative actions. Here, we examine whether the strength of hand preference may also be a good marker of hemispheric specialization for communicative gestures,...

Although language is a key tool for communication in social interaction, most studies in the neuroscience of language have focused on language structures such as words and sentences. Here, the neural correlates of speech acts, that is, the actions performed by using language, were investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants were shown videos, in which the same c...

Despite the ambiguity inherent in human communication, people are remarkably efficient in establishing mutual understanding. Studying how people communicate in novel settings provides a window into the mechanisms supporting the human competence to rapidly generate and understand novel shared symbols, a fundamental property of human communication. Previous work indicates that the right posterior...

One of the main problems to be solved while assisting inter-human conflict resolution is how to reuse the previous experience with similar agents. A machine learning technique for handling scenarios of interaction between conflicting human agents is proposed. Scenarios are represented by directed graphs with labelled vertices (for communicative actions) and arcs (for temporal and causal relatio...