Digital Assistive Technology: The Online Assistance for a Peaceful Driving in Automated and Connected Vehicles.

In line with the progressive development of digital technologies, this theoretical article is about the conception of a digital twin - based assistant to increase the serenity of the journey of the occupants of a connected car, automated or not. Its main functions are (i) to manage the Human (driver and/or passenger) - Machine (vehicle) Interaction, (ii) to inform the occupants and support decision-making by avoiding stressful situations. This is done by appropriate prevention and remediation. We advocate that the virtual assistant functions for being empathetic can be done by taking the user's point of view. Thanks to the knowledge about tasks, practices, needs and constraints, we describe how car-user's individual features can be used to get her digital twin description. Based on ontologies, this features model, providing assistance is then to simulate online the next steps of the task realization, informing about conditions, prerequisites, post-requites and subtasks to be fulfilled. Expected effects of this cognitive technology dedicated to personalized assistance are a decrease in stress, in frequency of incident and accident situations, according to a monitoring, as complete as possible, of the car-driver's conditions and situations dedicated to a serene driving.

"Who Are the Cyka Blyat?" How Empathy, Impulsivity, and Motivations to Play Predict Aggressive Behaviors in Multiplayer Online Games.

Prior studies have mainly focused on the controversial issue of whether violent video games lead to aggressive behavior in real life. However, data regarding antisocial behavior while playing online are still scarce. In this study, we examined the relationship between toxicity (a form of verbal aggressive behavior directed against other players) in multiplayer online video games and several potential predictors such as personality traits, emotion reactivity, and motivations to play. A large-scale survey (n = 816) was conducted among French-speaking adult gamers, assessing video game habits, impulsivity, empathy, emotion reactivity, and motivations to play (i.e., socialization, achievement, immersion). Results showed that younger age, being male, spending a lot of time playing per week, and being highly achieving increased the likelihood of reporting toxicity and change of behavior in game. High emotional reactivity and being high in two dimensions of impulsivity (negative urgency and sensation seeking) increased the likelihood of toxic behavior. In contrast, individuals who are more empathic tended to report nontoxic behavior and individuals who play to socialize reported little change in behavior in game. Future research should address the complexity of behaviors displayed during online games-notably through experimental studies allowing direct observation of gamers while they play-and the functional connection between toxicity and several psychological, emotional, and motivational dimensions in further detail. Scientific research would also benefit from the creation and validation of a scale measuring in game, the social and antisocial behaviors.

Morphing technique reveals intact perception of object motion and disturbed perception of emotional expressions by low-functioning adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

A morphing procedure has been designed to compare directly the perception of emotional expressions and of moving objects. Morphing tasks were presented to 12 low-functioning teenagers with Autism Spectrum Disorder (LF ASD) compared to 12 developmental age-matched typical children and a group presenting ceiling performance. In a first study, when presented with morphed stimuli of objects and emotional faces, LF ASD showed an intact perception of object change of state together with an impaired perception of emotional facial change of state. In a second study, an eye-tracker recorded visual exploration of morphed emotional stimuli displayed by a human face and a robotic set-up. Facing the morphed robotic stimuli, LF ASD displayed equal duration of fixations toward emotional regions and toward mechanical sources of motion, while the typical groups tracked the emotional regions only. Altogether the findings of the two studies suggest that individuals with ASD process motion rather than emotional signals when facing facial expressions.

Young children's mapping between arrays, number words, and digits.

This study investigates when young children develop the ability to map between three numerical representations: arrays, spoken number words, and digits. Children (3, 4, and 5 years old) had to map between the two directions (e.g., array-to-digit vs. digit-to-array) of each of these three representation pairs, with small (1-3) and large numbers (4-6). Five-year-olds were at ceiling in all tasks. Three-year-olds succeeded when mapping between arrays and number words for small numbers (but not large numbers), and failed when mapping between arrays and digits and between number words and digits. The main finding was that four-year-olds performed equally well when mapping between arrays and number words and when mapping between arrays and digits. However, they performed more poorly when mapping between number words and digits. Taken together, these results suggest that children first learn to map number words to arrays, then learn to map digits to arrays and finally map number words to digits. These findings highlight the importance of directly exploring when children acquire digits rather than assuming that they acquire digits directly from number words.

Do 10- and 13-month-old infants provide informative gestures for their mothers in a hiding game?

Infants' abilities to request and to inform by gazing and pointing at 10 months and 13 months of age are studied. We expect that 10-month-old children may use more gazing than pointing and that 13-month-old children perform more pointing than gazing. We hypothesize further that10-month-olds and 13-month-olds perform imperative pointing similarly, they differ when informative pointing is requested: younger infants would fail to use it. The experimental setting tests acts of indicating in a hiding game during routine and de-routinized situation by unbalancing the accessibility of information available to mother. In routines, where the mother is present during hiding, 10-month-old have a high score of correct indications by gaze as well as by pointing. In a non-routine context, 10-month-old children fail to indicate by gazing and pointing whereas 13-month-old children succeed. Results are discussed in terms of infants' Theory of mind, more specifically the ability to represent one's partner epistemic intentions.

Ethical issues raised by the new orientations in ergonomics and living labs.

User Experience Theory (UXT) provides us with criteria for designing products and technical systems for everyday activities (playing, learning, working,…) so as to satisfy users. Living Labs (LL), are plateforms used for the design and evaluation of technical systems. As such, they constitute tools that bring to this process some constraints., However these constraints have to be articulated to the UXT. In other words, UXT should specify the place, the role and function LL should play in the design of new products, how it should contribute to satisfying UX, and how the methods and techniques should be conceived or borrowed from other disciplines. UXT also raises ethical issues: impartiality (independent, public, replicable) of research models in the context of economical constraints (dependant, private, secret prototypes) and of industrial pressure, the use of intrusive and persuasive techniques, even with the prior informed consent of participants, ergo-marketing, deontology codes, the use of specific participants, belonging of an UX innovative solution, confidentiality with ICT, and so on. Because the UX, as well as LL literature, have shown little concerns for ethical considerations, till now, we define LL-UX ethical issues as a new research topic, and we list a number of problems to be solved in order to have an ethical LL-UX methodology for open innovation.

The mere perception of eye contact increases arousal during a word-spelling task.

Eye contact is a highly salient and fundamentally social signal. This entails that the mere perception of direct gaze may trigger differentiated neurobehavioral responses as compared to other gaze directions. We investigated this issue using a visual word-spelling task where faces under different gaze directions and head orientations were displayed on-screen concomitantly with the words. We show evidence for automatic increase of skin conductance response (SCR), indicative of arousal, associated with the perception of direct gaze as compared to both averted gaze and closed eyes. Moreover, the perception of averted gaze was associated with an increase of electromyographic (EMG) corrugator activity. These effects were observed in two demanding word-spelling tasks, but not in a simple letter decision task. We propose to interpret these findings in terms of the social value of direct and averted gaze and conclude that some circumstances such as the task at hand may be essential for uncovering the neurobehavioral responses associated with the perception of others' gaze.

ACACIA: an agent-based program for simulating behavior to reach long-term goals.

We present ACACIA, an agent-based program implemented in Java StarLogo 2.0 that simulates a two-dimensional microworld populated by agents, obstacles and goals. Our program simulates how agents can reach long-term goals by following sensorial-motor couplings (SMCs) that control how the agents interact with their environment and other agents through a process of local categorization. Thus, while acting in accordance with this set of SMCs, the agents reach their goals through the emergence of global behaviors. This agent-based simulation program would allow us to understand some psychological processes such as planning behavior from the point of view that the complexity of these processes is the result of agent-environment interaction.

[BASETY: Meaning extension and typicality of examples for 21 categories of objects]. / BASETY: Extension et typicalité des exemplaires pour 21 catégories d'objets.

Basety is a French semantic database of exemplars of 21 categories of objects, with a typicality index associated with each exemplar. These 21 semantic categories are animals, trees, weapons, buildings, flowers, fruits, insects, instruments of music, games, toys, vegetables, mammals, furniture, birds, tools, fish, occupation, containers, sports, vehicles, and clothes. Basety was made up with two groups of 18-to-30 years old French participants, a first group of three subgroups of 100 participants producing exemplars for 7 x 3 categories while a second group of 80 participants evaluating membership of these exemplars. Typicality was computed as the number of occurrences of the exemplar within the set of the five exemplars participants were first producing. Cronbach's coefficient of reliability indicates an internally consistent scale and number of exemplars is correlated with membership ratings: the more the participants of the first group produced exemplars, the more the participants of the second group agreed on the degree of membership of these exemplars. BASETY appears to be a consistent and valid database for French semantic research.

The emergence of motor imagery in children.

A total of 80 children (40 5-year-olds and 40 7-year-olds) took part in an experiment to evaluate their capacity to mentally evoke a motor image of their own displacement. Using a chronometry paradigm, movement duration was compared in a task where children were asked to move in order to take a puppet back to its home (actual) and to think about themselves executing the same action (virtual). Movement durations for actual and virtual displacements were obtained in two conditions, where either no information was provided about the weight of the puppet to be displaced (standard situation) or the puppet was described as being heavy (informed situation). A significant correlation between actual and virtual walking durations was observed for 7-year-olds in the informed condition. This result provides evidence for a motor imagery process emerging in 7-year-olds when children are required to think about themselves in action.

When eye creates the contact! ERP evidence for early dissociation between direct and averted gaze motion processing.

Direct gaze or eye contact is a strong social signal, which triggers distinct processes as compared to other gaze directions. Thus, direct gaze could be early dissociated from averted gaze during the processing of gaze direction. In order to examine the processing of gaze contact relative to averted gaze, we studied evoked potentials in human adults in response to the apparent motion of gaze. Deviated and frontal faces were presented with a fixed gaze direction, followed by an apparent movement of the eyes either toward the subject or away from him/her. The results showed that the perception of direct relative to averted gaze evoked a greater, later and longer lasting N170, suggesting that gaze contact recruited more resources than averted gaze in the early stage of gaze direction processing. Furthermore, direct and averted motion of gaze elicited distinct ERP components between 160 and 210 ms, initiated over centro-parietal electrodes. Source reconstruction revealed the involvement of the Theory-of-Mind network, including the regions of the superior temporal sulcus, the medial prefrontal and the orbitofrontal cortices, in this early dissociation. In addition, the perception of gaze contact relative to averted gaze yielded increased fronto-central P3a and parieto-occipital P3b. All the results were significant whatever the head orientation. Our findings show that gaze contact, as compared to other gaze directions, is an essential social cue which recruits early specific processes. The dissociation between direct and averted gaze processing occurs as soon as 160 ms, involving the social brain network.

Searching for asymmetries in the detection of gaze contact versus averted gaze under different head views: a behavioural study.

Eye contact is a crucial social cue constituting a frequent preliminary to interaction. Thus, the perception of others' gaze may be associated with specific processes beginning with asymmetries in the detection of direct versus averted gaze. We tested this hypothesis in two behavioural experiments using realistic eye stimuli in a visual search task. We manipulated the head orientation (frontal or deviated) and the visual field (right or left) in which the target appeared at display onset. We found that direct gaze targets presented among averted gaze distractors were detected faster and better than averted gaze targets among direct gaze distractors, but only when the head was deviated. Moreover, direct gaze targets were detected very quickly and efficiently regardless of head orientation and visual field, whereas the detection of averted gaze was strongly modulated by these factors. These results suggest that gaze contact has precedence over contextual information such as head orientation and visual field.

Rapid iconic erasure without masking.

We report on the erasure of the iconic memory of an array of 12 black letters flashed on a continuously- present white field. Erasure is accomplished by replacing the 16 ms letter array (frame 1) with a blank white frame for 16 ms (frame 2). The letter array returns in frame 3, with from one to six letters missing. Report of the missing letters is accurate without the blank white frame but is impoverished with it, as if interposing the blank erases the icon. Erasure occurs without any obvious luminance masking, 'mud splashes', pattern masking (backward, forward, or metacontrast), lateral masking, or masking by object substitution. Erasure is greatly decreased if the blank is presented one frame earlier or later. We speculate that erasure is due to a rapid reset of the icon produced by an informational mis-match.