Title

Interacting like a human being: how humans and non-humans calibrate requests during social interactions

Bio

Federico Rossano is an associate professor in the Cognitive Science department at UC San Diego and the director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory. His work is highly interdisciplinary. He has conducted studies on cooperation and communication in all great apes, baboons and macaques, dogs, cats, goats horses and rats. He has studied the development of joint attention and social norms (in particular property/ownership concerns) in young children from all continents and has published several papers on multimodal communication in adult humans (gaze, gestures, posture) and on how knowledge is negotiated in conversation (epistemics). He has collected the largest video longitudinal dataset of baby apes (4000 hours of videos from 31 animals ) and hundreds of hours of video footage of preschoolers interacting with peers. He conducts both observational and experimental work in several countries. He is the PI of How.TheyCanTalk, the largest citizen science study ever attempted on Animal Communication, collecting longitudinal data on 5000 dogs and 1000 cats (from 47 countries) learning to communicate with humans through a soundboard. He has published in Science Advances, Science Robotics, PNAS, Psychological Science, Cognition, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Animal Behavior, Animal Cognition, Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Linguistics, etc.

Abstract

In his paper on the “human interaction engine”, Levinson famously asserted that, in social interaction, people’s responses “are to actions and intentions, not to behaviors” (2006: 45). Indeed human beings attribute intentions/goals to the production of signals and parsing other’s signals means simulating others’ mental worlds, at least to some degree. But how do speakers calibrate their interactional moves in first position so that they are more likely to elicit their preferred response? Which variables do they take into account?

In this lecture I present observational and experimental data on how human and non-human animals (chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, dogs) calibrate requests for actions and for objects. I will discuss the role of prospection, entitlement, epistemic asymmetries and accountability in the calibration of adult requests. I will show how children’s request format changes over time, and finally when and how we pursue responses when they are missing. In doing so, I will provide an overview of factors to consider in the design of agents/machines that are supposed to interact with humans.

推荐语

Federico师从Stephen Levinson教授（Conversational Analysis 领域的开创人）和Michael Tomasello教授（发展心理学和人类学专家），两位均是所在领域的全球领军人物（Google Scholar引用加起来有30W）。Federico可以说是全球中青年一代学者中最懂灵长类动物的男人，研究涉猎人和非人猿类（黑猩猩、倭黑猩猩、狒狒、日本猕猴等），其研究主要关注人类眼神交流的动态和涵义、非人猿类如何发展手势技能集用以彼此的合作和协调、人类和猿类婴儿对物体所有权和个人财产的产生。他近期的一项工作调查了猫和狗等宠物是否可以通过使用声板灵活地学习与主人进行交流，被《纽约时报》《英国卫报》等国际媒体广泛报道，其中一只叫Bunny的会“说话”的狗在抖音走红。最近，Federico开始将可穿戴传感器和计算机算法应用到黑猩猩上，以理解其社群中的交互过程。由于其在研究领域和动物保护方向做出的巨大贡献，他的课题组是目前唯一能到访全球各大灵长类动物保护基地的实验室，创造了多项世界第一和唯一。希望大家能在此次讲座中能对我们的人类近亲有所了解，掌握一些comparative psychology的研究手段，并理解我们人类独有的沟通与交流方式（这也是使得我们在这个星球上独特的根源）。