Although gaze can be directed at any location, different locations in the visual environment vary in terms of how likely they are to draw another person’s attention. One could therefore weigh incoming perceptual signals (e.g., eye cues) against this prior knowledge (the relative visual saliency of locations in the scene) in order to infer the true target of another person’s gaze. This Bayesian ...

Some firms say they care about the happiness and ‘well-being’ of their employees. But are such claims hype? Or might they be scientific good sense? This study provides evidence that happiness makes people more productive. First, we examine fundamental real-world shocks (bereavement and family illness) imposed by Nature. We show that lower happiness is associated with lower productivity. Second,...

Recent neuroscientific models of human behavior distinguish between different cognitive controllers: two instrumental systems (goal-directed and habitual) that maximize utility through learned actions, and a so-called Pavlovian system, which implements innate reactive responses. Although the interaction between instrumental and Pavlovian controllers has been suggested as a key process underlyin...

OBJECTIVE Quantify the effect of thermal stressors on human performance. BACKGROUND Most reviews of the effect of environmental stressors on human performance are qualitative. A quantitative review provides a stronger aid in advancing theory and practice. METHOD Meta-analytic methods were applied to the available literature on thermal stressors and performance. A total of 291 references wer...

Vectors derived from patterns of co-occurrence of words in large bodies of text have often been used as representations of some aspects of the meanings of different words. Generally, the distance between such vectors is used as a measure of the semantic similarity between the word meanings they represent. One important way of evaluating the performance of these vectors has been to use them to a...

This paper presents a computational approach to modelling pragmatic and semantic aspects of multi-issue bargaining dialogues. The model accounts for actions that shape negotiation structure and actions that express negotiation strategies. The model also accepts a number of negotiation moves as specifications of the semantic content of the performed taskrelated dialogue acts. The designed dialog...

We describe a probabilistic approach to content selection for meeting summarization. We use skipchain Conditional Random Fields (CRF) to model non-local pragmatic dependencies between paired utterances such as QUESTION-ANSWER that typically appear together in summaries, and show that these models outperform linear-chain CRFs and Bayesian models in the task. We also discuss different approaches ...

Study no. 1 for PAM and MADI explores a machine aesthetic. Rather than attempting to replicate the intricacies of human performance, the work emphasizes the novel musical capabilities of these machines. This composition features complex rhythmic relationships, rapid changes in density and timbre, and dynamic contrast. It consists of three sections. The first and third sections use PAM, MADI and...

We describe the Degrees of Grounding model, which tracks the extent to which material has reached mutual belief in a dialogue, and conduct experiments in which the model is used to manage grounding behavior in spoken dialogues with a virtual human. We show that the model produces improvements in virtual human performance as measured by post-session questionnaires.