Emergence and collapse of reciprocity in semiautomatic driving coordination experiments with humans.

Forms of both simple and complex machine intelligence are increasingly acting within human groups in order to affect collective outcomes. Considering the nature of collective action problems, however, such involvement could paradoxically and unintentionally suppress existing beneficial social norms in humans, such as those involving cooperation. Here, we test theoretical predictions about such an effect using a unique cyber-physical lab experiment where online participants (N = 300 in 150 dyads) drive robotic vehicles remotely in a coordination game. We show that autobraking assistance increases human altruism, such as giving way to others, and that communication helps people to make mutual concessions. On the other hand, autosteering assistance completely inhibits the emergence of reciprocity between people in favor of self-interest maximization. The negative social repercussions persist even after the assistance system is deactivated. Furthermore, adding communication capabilities does not relieve this inhibition of reciprocity because people rarely communicate in the presence of autosteering assistance. Our findings suggest that active safety assistance (a form of simple AI support) can alter the dynamics of social coordination between people, including by affecting the trade-off between individual safety and social reciprocity. The difference between autobraking and autosteering assistance appears to relate to whether the assistive technology supports or replaces human agency in social coordination dilemmas. Humans have developed norms of reciprocity to address collective challenges, but such tacit understandings could break down in situations where machine intelligence is involved in human decision-making without having any normative commitments.

Investigating the impact of motion visual synchrony on self face recognition using real time morphing.

Face recognition is a crucial aspect of self-image and social interactions. Previous studies have focused on static images to explore the boundary of self-face recognition. Our research, however, investigates the dynamics of face recognition in contexts involving motor-visual synchrony. We first validated our morphing face metrics for self-face recognition. We then conducted an experiment using state-of-the-art video processing techniques for real-time face identity morphing during facial movement. We examined self-face recognition boundaries under three conditions: synchronous, asynchronous, and static facial movements. Our findings revealed that participants recognized a narrower self-face boundary with moving facial images compared to static ones, with no significant differences between synchronous and asynchronous movements. The direction of morphing consistently biased the recognized self-face boundary. These results suggest that while motor information of the face is vital for self-face recognition, it does not rely on movement synchronization, and the sense of agency over facial movements does not affect facial identity judgment. Our methodology offers a new approach to exploring the 'self-face boundary in action', allowing for an independent examination of motion and identity.

Control over self and others' face: exploitation and exploration.

The face serves as a crucial cue for self-identification, while the sense of agency plays a significant role in determining our influence through actions in the environment. The current study investigates how self-identification through facial recognition may influence the perception of control via motion. We propose that self-identification might engender a belief in having control over one's own face, leading to a more acute detection and greater emphasis on discrepancies between their actions and the sensory feedback in control judgments. We refer to the condition governed by the belief in having control as the exploitation mode. Conversely, when manipulating another individual's face, the belief in personal control is absent. In such cases, individuals are likely to rely on the regularity between actions and sensory input for control judgments, exhibiting behaviors that are exploratory in nature to glean such information. This condition is termed the explorative mode. The study utilized a face-motion mixing paradigm, employing a deep generative model to enable participants to interact with either their own or another person's face through facial and head movements. During the experiment, participants observed either their own face or someone else's face (self-face vs. other-face) on the screen. The motion of the face was driven either purely by their own facial and head motion or by an average of the participant's and the experimenter's motion (full control vs. partial control). The results showed that participants reported a higher sense of agency over the other-face than the self-face, while their self-identification rating was significantly higher for the self-face. More importantly, controlling someone else's face resulted in more movement diversity than controlling one's own face. These findings support our exploration-exploitation theory: When participants had a strong belief in control triggered by the self-face, they became highly sensitive to any sensorimotor prediction errors, leading to a lower sense of agency. In contrast, when the belief of control was absent, the exploration mode triggered more explorative behaviors, allowing participants to efficiently gather information to establish a sense of agency.

JackIn Head: Immersive Visual Telepresence System with Omnidirectional Wearable Camera.

Sharing one's own immersive experience over the Internet is one of the ultimate goals of telepresence technology. In this paper, we present JackIn Head, a visual telepresence system featuring an omnidirectional wearable camera with image motion stabilization. Spherical omnidirectional video footage taken around the head of a local user is stabilized and then broadcast to others, allowing remote users to explore the immersive visual environment independently of the local user's head direction. We describe the system design of JackIn Head and report the evaluation results of real-time image stabilization and alleviation of cybersickness. Then, through an exploratory observation study, we investigate how individuals can remotely interact, communicate with, and assist each other with our system. We report our observation and analysis of inter-personal communication, demonstrating the effectiveness of our system in augmenting remote collaboration.