Thinking About, and Interacting with Living and Mechanical Agents

思考生命体和机械体并与之互动

• 批准号: 0826701
• 负责人: Daniel Levin
• 金额: $ 75万
• 依托单位: Vanderbilt University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-15 至 2014-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0826701&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Thinking; About; Interacting; Living; Mechanical

Recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are confronting individuals of all ages with a series of category-defying entities that combine features of living and nonliving things. As such, these entities increasingly challenge people's basic understanding of mind and intelligence. The goal in this project is to explore adults' and children's beliefs about a range of living and mechanical agents, and to test how these beliefs affect people's ability to track, remember, and understand mechanical agents in two specific computer interfaces. First, it will explore a computer interface designed to allow a human operator to interact with and control a set of semi-autonomous robots. The second environment will be a teachable agent system in which middle school children learn about complex science phenomena, such as river ecosystems, by actively teaching an animated software agent.This project represents one of the few research programs to empirically test people's understanding of living and artificial agents, and it will employ a conceptual framework that starts with naïve understandings of mind (e.g. "Theory of Mind") and applies them to engineered environments where these understandings are used. This framework describes the conditions under which participants apply different agent concepts, and can help understand how these beliefs might change over time as people interact with novel agents. Although the framework is not yet a complete theory, it represents a broadened approach to reasoning about both typical and novel living and mechanical agents that goes beyond existing dual-process models of Theory of Mind. These experiments also make links between concepts about agents, and the deployment of these concepts in realistic high-load perceptual tasks, so they can make an important contribution to our basic understanding of how knowledge affects vision.The findings from this project may have important implications for educating both children and adults to deal with novel intelligent decision making technologies that move beyond the simple command-and-response cycle inherent to most current computer applications. Previous research by the PIs has already documented ways in which different people vary in their approach to these technologies (e.g. older and younger adults seem to have subtly different beliefs about the nature of computer intelligence), so this project may help improve the accessibility of novel agent-technologies to a wide range of different populations. More generally, because this research uses interactive educational tools and realistic robot-command systems to explore agent-understanding, it has the potential to improve user interfaces supporting social learning environments that focus on self-regulated learning, and that facilitate the effectiveness of human-machine emergency response teams. These technologies confront users with challenges to their most basic understandings of intelligence and thinking, and our research has the potential to guide both children and adults as they become successful users and creators of the interactive technologies of the future.

人工智能和机器人技术的最新进展使各个年龄段的个人都面临着一系列结合了生物和非生物特征的挑战类别的实体。因此，这些实体日益挑战人们对思想和智力的基本理解。该项目的目标是探索成人和儿童对一系列活体和机械代理的信念，并测试这些信念如何影响人们在两个特定计算机界面中跟踪、记忆和理解机械代理的能力。 首先，它将探索一种计算机界面，旨在允许人类操作员与一组半自主机器人交互并控制它们。 第二个环境将是一个可教学的代理系统，其中中学生通过主动教授动画软件代理来学习复杂的科学现象，例如河流生态系统。该项目是少数几个以实证方式测试人们对生命和人工代理的理解的研究项目之一，它将采用一个概念框架，该框架从对心灵的朴素理解（例如“心灵理论”）开始，并将其应用到使用这些理解的工程环境中。该框架描述了参与者应用不同主体概念的条件，并且可以帮助理解当人们与新主体交互时这些信念如何随着时间的推移而变化。尽管该框架还不是一个完整的理论，但它代表了一种对典型和新颖的生命和机械主体进行推理的拓宽方法，超越了现有的心理理论双过程模型。这些实验还建立了有关代理的概念以及这些概念在现实高负载感知任务中的部署之间的联系，因此它们可以为我们对知识如何影响视觉的基本理解做出重要贡献。该项目的研究结果可能对教育儿童和成人处理新颖的智能决策技术产生重要影响，这些技术超越了大多数当前计算机应用程序固有的简单命令和响应循环。 PI 之前的研究已经记录了不同的人对这些技术的态度有所不同（例如，老年人和年轻人似乎对计算机智能的本质有着微妙的不同信念），因此该项目可能有助于提高新型代理技术对各种不同人群的可及性。更一般地说，由于这项研究使用交互式教育工具和现实的机器人命令系统来探索智能体的理解，因此有可能改进支持专注于自我调节学习的社交学习环境的用户界面，并提高人机应急响应团队的有效性。这些技术给用户带来了对智力和思维最基本理解的挑战，我们的研究有潜力指导儿童和成人成为未来交互技术的成功用户和创造者。