title: Using minimal human-computer interfaces for studying the interactive development of social awareness.
abstract: According to the enactive approach to cognitive science, perception is essentially a skillful engagement with the world. Learning how to engage via a human-computer interface (HCI) can therefore be taken as an instance of developing a new mode of experiencing. Similarly, social perception is theorized to be primarily constituted by skillful engagement between people, which implies that it is possible to investigate the origins and development of social awareness using multi-user HCIs. We analyzed the trial-by-trial objective and subjective changes in sociality that took place during a perceptual crossing experiment in which embodied interaction between pairs of adults was mediated over a minimalist haptic HCI. Since that study required participants to implicitly relearn how to mutually engage so as to perceive each other's presence, we hypothesized that there would be indications that the initial developmental stages of social awareness were recapitulated. Preliminary results reveal that, despite the lack of explicit feedback about task performance, there was a trend for the clarity of social awareness to increase over time. We discuss the methodological challenges involved in evaluating whether this trend was characterized by distinct developmental stages of objective behavior and subjective experience.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación, Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad Universitaria Mexico ; Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad Universitaria Mexico.
authors.forename: Tom
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Froese
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Autonomous Systems Engineering, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University Hokkaido, Japan.
authors.forename: Hiroyuki
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Iizuka
authors.affiliation: Ikegami Laboratory, Department of General Systems Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: Takashi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ikegami
keywords: consciousness; developmental psychology; intersubjectivity; joint action; second-person perspective; social cognition; social interaction