In his The Construction of Social Reality, Searle presents an account of rights, responsibilities, obligations, duties, and similar entities in terms of the formula X counts as Y in context C, where “X” refers in the simplest case to some physical object or event and “Y ” to the result of imposing upon X some deontic power or function. Smith attempts to show the limitations of this formula, foc...

The procurement of media literacy is an educational challenge that has to be met in order to cope successfully with the prevailing complex technological social reality. Pedagogical approaches concerning the implementation of digital technologies in the classroom require careful and continuous evaluation. The present paper introduces the “Kids in Media and Motion” (KiMM) Initiative, an ongoing r...

Attention to media has been widely studied. Often when studying attention, researchers have not distinguished to what the participants are attending – media form or media content of the presentation. This is also true of many studies on telepresence where the interaction of media form and content has been found to influence the sub-dimensions of telepresence reported by participants. However, s...

Although the architecture of mixed reality spaces are becoming increasingly more complex, our understanding of human behavior in such spaces is still limited. Despite the sophisticated models deployed in psychology and behavioral biology to track and analyze the actions and movements of animals, we rarely find studies that focus on the understanding of human social behavior using such instrumen...

Few evidence-based social interventions exist for young adults with high-functioning autism, many of whom encounter significant challenges during the transition into adulthood. The current study investigated the feasibility of an engaging Virtual Reality Social Cognition Training intervention focused on enhancing social skills, social cognition, and social functioning. Eight young adults diagno...

Traditionally, social interaction research has concentrated on either fully virtually embodied agents (e.g. embodied conversational agents) or fully physically embodied agents (e.g. robots). For some time, however, both areas have started augmenting their agents’ capabilities for social interaction using ubiquitous and intelligent environments. We are placing different agent systems for social ...

In this article contemporary Brazilian society is charted as a product of the complementary, as well as conflictive, co-existence of seven institutions: 1) patrimonialism; 2) the rationalizing state; 3) capitalism; 4) social inequality and heterogeneity; 5) the non-cumulative logic of organizations; 6) citizenship; 7) patterns of sociability. These institutions may overlap, complement each othe...