Ingo Wolf

Sociotopy in the temporoparietal cortex: common versus distinct processes

A major controversy in the social cognitive neurosciences evolved around the question whether activity in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and adjacent temporoparietal junction (pSTS/TPJ-region) evoked by various tasks represents a common process or distinct processes. To investigate this question, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants performed Biological Motion (BM), Theory-of-Mind (ToM) and Moral Judgment (MJ) tasks. Importantly, for each task we used the same newly developed animated stimuli. Indicative of a common process, we identified small clusters of overlapping activity for BM and ToM in right pSTS and for ToM and MJ in bilateral pSTS and left TPJ. Indicative of distinct processes, on the contrary, we detected extensive dissociable activity for BM in right pSTS, for ToM in bilateral pSTS and left TPJ, and for MJ in bilateral pSTS and TPJ. Thus, our data provide strong evidence for a combined two-staged process account: (i) the parsing of a stream of visual-spatial information, represented by activity in right pSTS, where neighboring and overlapping clusters of increased responses were found for all three tasks; (ii) increasingly more complex processing of the communicative significance of other peoples behavior, represented by hierarchically increasing activity in left pSTS and bilateral TPJ elicited by ToM and MJ.

Wechselwirkung Mensch und autonomer Agent

Menschen reprasentieren Wissen und Lernerfahrungen in Form von mentalen Modellen. Dieses aus der Kognitionspsychologie stammende Konzept ist eines der zentralen theoretischen Paradigmen fur das Verstandnis und die Gestaltung der Interaktion von Menschen mit technischen Systemen [1]. Mentale Modelle dienen in diesem Kontext einerseits der Beschreibung menschlicher Informationsverarbeitung, z. B.

The Interaction Between Humans and Autonomous Agents

Humans represent knowledge and learning experiences in the form of mental models. This concept from the field of cognitive psychology is one of the central theoretical paradigms for understanding and designing the interaction between humans and technical systems.

Grounding Social Interaction with Affective Intelligence

Symbolic interactionist principles of sociology are based on the idea that human action is guided by culturally shared symbolic representations of identities, behaviours, situations and emotions. Shared linguistic, paralinguistic, or kinesic elements allow humans to coordinate action by enacting identities in social situations. Structures of identity-based interactions can lead to the enactment of social orders that solve social dilemmas e.g., by promoting cooperation. Our goal is to build an artificial agent that mimics the identity-based interactions of humans. This paper describes a study in which humans played a repeated prisoners dilemma game against other humans or one of three artificial agents bots. One of the bots has an explicit representation of identity and demonstrates more human-like behaviour than the other bots.

Psychologische Aspekte nachhaltiger Mobilität: Struktur und Dynamik von Einstellungen zu Mobilitätsinnovationen

Technologische und soziale Innovationen scheinen derzeit viele Perspektiven fur eine Transformation des Mobilitatssektors hin zu mehr Nachhaltigkeit zu eroffnen. Ob und wie sich das menschliche Mobilitatsverhalten den neuen Moglichkeiten anpasst, ist allerdings eine offene Frage, die psychologischer Forschung bedarf. Wir stellen in unserem Beitrag eine neue Theorie der Mobilitatseinstellungen vor, die Ansatze zur emotionalen Koharenz menschlicher Entscheidungen aus der Kognitionswissenschaft mit soziologischen Theorien der Informationsdiffusion in sozialen Netzwerken kombiniert. Daten aus einer aktuellen, gros angelegten empirischen Studie zeigen, dass die emotionale Verankerung des Autos mit Verbrennungsmotor im individuellen Privatbesitz immer noch gros ist. Fur die erfolgreiche Verbreitung innovativer und nachhaltiger Mobilitatskonzepte in der Gesellschaft wird entscheidend sein, ob neben technologischen Entwicklungen auch eine breite Transformation von Einstellungen in der Bevolkerung erreicht werden kann.