I argue that so-called automatic actions – routine performances that we successfully and effortlessly complete without thinking such as turning a door handle, downshifting to 4th gear, or lighting up a cigarette – pose a challenge to causalism, because they do not appear to be preceded by the psychological states which, according to the causal theory of action, are necessary for intentional action. I argue that causalism cannot prove that agents are simply unaware of the relevant psychological states when they (...) act automatically, because these content-specific psychological states aren’t always necessary to make coherent rational sense of the agent’s behaviour. I then dispute other possible grounds for the attribution of these psychological states, such as agents’ own self-attributions. In the final section I introduce an alternative to causalism, building on Frankfurt’s concept of guidance. (shrink)

A structure is automatic if its domain, functions, and relations are all regular languages. Using the fact that every automatic structure is decidable, in the literature many decision problems have been solved by giving an automatic presentation of a particular structure. Khoussainov and Nerode asked whether there is some way to tell whether a structure has, or does not have, an automatic presentation. We answer this question by showing that the set of Turing machines that represent automata-presentable structures is ${\rm{\Sigma (...) }}_1^1 $-complete. We also use similar methods to show that there is no reasonable characterisation of the structures with a polynomial-time presentation in the sense of Nerode and Remmel. (shrink)

According to grounded cognition, words whose semantics contain sensory-motor features activate sensory-motor simulations, which, in turn, interact with spatial responses to produce grounded congruency effects. Growing evidence shows these congruency effects do not always occur, suggesting instead that the grounded features in a word's meaning do not become active automatically across contexts. Researchers sometimes use this as evidence that concepts are not grounded, further concluding that grounded information is peripheral to the amodal cores of concepts. We first review broad evidence (...) that words do not have conceptual cores, and that even the most salient features in a word's meaning are not activated automatically. Then, in three experiments, we provide further evidence that grounded congruency effects rely dynamically on context, with the central grounded features in a concept becoming active only when the current context makes them salient. Even when grounded features are central to a word's meaning, their activation depends on task conditions. (shrink)

Automatic imitation or “imitative compatibility” is thought to be mediated by the mirror neuron system and to be a laboratory model of the motor mimicry that occurs spontaneously in naturalistic social interaction. Imitative compatibility and spatial compatibility effects are known to depend on different stimulus dimensions—body movement topography and relative spatial position. However, it is not yet clear whether these two types of stimulus–response compatibility effect are mediated by the same or different cognitive processes. We present an interactive activation model (...) of imitative and spatial compatibility, based on a dual-route architecture, which substantiates the view they are mediated by processes of the same kind. The model, which is in many ways a standard application of the interactive activation approach, simulates all key results of a recent study by Catmur and Heyes (2011). Specifically, it captures the difference in the relative size of imitative and spatial compatibility effects; the lack of interaction when the imperative and irrelevant stimuli are presented simultaneously; the relative speed of responses in a quintile analysis when the imperative and irrelevant stimuli are presented simultaneously; and the different time courses of the compatibility effects when the imperative and irrelevant stimuli are presented asynchronously. (shrink)

Emotional facial expressions can inform researchers about an individual's emotional state. Recent technological advances open up new avenues to automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER). Based on machine learning, such technology can tremendously increase the amount of processed data. FER is now easily accessible and has been validated for the classification of standardized prototypical facial expressions. However, applicability to more naturalistic facial expressions still remains uncertain. Hence, we test and compare performance of three different FER systems (Azure Face API, Microsoft; Face++, (...) Megvii Technology; FaceReader, Noldus Information Technology) with human emotion recognition (A) for standardized posed facial expressions (from prototypical inventories) and (B) for non-standardized acted facial expressions (extracted from emotional movie scenes). For the standardized images, all three systems classify basic emotions accurately (FaceReader is most accurate) and they are mostly on par with human raters. For the non-standardized stimuli, performance drops remarkably for all three systems, but Azure still performs similarly to humans. In addition, all systems and humans alike tend to misclassify some of the non-standardized emotional facial expressions as neutral. In sum, emotion recognition by automated facial expression recognition can be an attractive alternative to human emotion recognition for standardized and non-standardized emotional facial expressions. However, we also found limitations in accuracy for specific facial expressions; clearly there is need for thorough empirical evaluation to guide future developments in computer vision of emotional facial expressions. (shrink)

It is not rare in philosophy and psychology to see theorists fall into dichotomous thinking about mental phenomena. On one side of the dichotomy there are processes that I will label “unintelligent.” These processes are thought to be unconscious, implicit, automatic, unintentional, involuntary, procedural, and non-cognitive. On the other side, there are “intelligent” processes that are conscious, explicit, controlled, intentional, voluntary, declarative, and cognitive. Often, if a process or behavior is characterized by one of the features from either of the (...) above lists, the process or behavior is classified as falling under the category to which the feature belongs. For example, if a process is implicit this is usually considered sufficient for classifying it as “unintelligent” and for assuming that the remaining features that fall under the “unintelligent” grouping will apply to it as well. Accordingly, if a process or behavior is automatic, philosophers often consider it to be unintelligent. It is my goal in this paper to challenge the conceptual slip from “automatic” to “unintelligent”. I will argue that there are a whole range of properties highlighted by the existing psychological literature that make automaticity a much more complex phenomenon than is usually appreciated. I will then go on to discuss two further important relationships between automatic processes and controlled processes that arise when we think about automatic processes in the context of skilled behavior. These interactions should add to our resistance to classifying automaticity as unintelligent or mindless. In Sect. 1, I present a few representative cases of philosophers classifying automatic processes and behaviors as mindless or unintelligent. In Sect. 2, I review trends in the psychology of automaticity in order highlight a complex set of features that are characteristic, though not definitive, of automatic processes and behaviors. In Sect. 3, I argue that at least some automatic processes are likely cognitively penetrable. In Sect. 4, I argue that the structure of skilled automatic processes is shaped diachronically by practice, training and learning. Taken together, these considerations should dislodge the temptation to equate “automatic” with “unintelligent”. (shrink)

Critics of appraisal theory have difficulty accepting appraisal (with its constructive flavor) as an automatic process, and hence as a potential cause of most emotions. In response, some appraisal theorists have argued that appraisal was never meant as a causal process but as a constituent of emotional experience. Others have argued that appraisal is a causal process, but that it can be either rule-based or associative, and that the associative variant can be automatic. This article first proposes empirically investigating whether (...) rule-based appraisal can also be automatic and then proposes investigating the automatic nature of constructive (instead of rule-based) appraisal because the distinction between rule-based and associative is problematic. Finally, it discusses experiments that support the view that constructive appraisal can be automatic. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of developments in a dual processing theory of automatic and controlled processing that began with the empirical and theoretical work described by Schneider and Shiffrin (1977) and Shiffrin and Schneider (1977) over a quarter century ago. A review of relevant empirical findings suggests that there is a set of core behavioral phenomena reflecting differences between controlled and automatic processing that must be addressed by a successful theory. These phenomena relate to: consistency in training, serial versus (...) parallel processing, level of effort, robustness to stressors, degree of control, effects on long‐term memory, and priority encoding. We detail a computational model of controlled processing, CAP2, that accounts for these phenomena as emergent properties of an underlying hybrid computational architecture. The model employs a large network of distributed data modules that can categorize, buffer, associate, and prioritize information. Each module is a connectionist network with input and output layers, and each module communicates with a central Control System by outputting priority and activity report signals, and by receiving control signals. The Control System is composed of five processors including a Goal Processor, an Attention Controller, an Activity Monitor, an Episodic Store, and a Gating & Report Relay. The transition from controlled to automatic processing occurs in this model as the data modules become capable of transmitting their output without mediation by the Control System. We describe recent progress in mapping the components of this model onto specific neuroanatomical substrates, briefly discuss the potential for applying functional neuroimaging techniques to test the model's predictions, and its relation to other models. (shrink)

A large part of the current debate among virtue ethicists focuses on the role played by phronesis, or wise practical reasoning, in virtuous action. The paradigmatic case of an action expressing phronesis is one where an agent explicitly reflects and deliberates on all practical options in a given situation and eventually makes a wise choice. Habitual actions, by contrast, are typically performed automatically, that is, in the absence of preceding deliberation. Thus they would seem to fall outside of the primary (...) focus of the current virtue ethical debate. By contrast, Bill Pollard has recently suggested that all properly virtuous actions must be performed habitually and therefore automatically, i.e. in the absence of moral deliberation. In this paper, Pollard’s suggestion is interpreted as the thesis that habitual automaticity is constitutive of virtue or moral excellence. By constructing an argument in favor of it and discussing several objections, the paper ultimately seeks to defend a qualified version of this thesis. (shrink)

De Neys argues against assigning exclusive capacities to automatic versus controlled processes. The dual implicit process model provides a theoretical rationale for the exclusivity of automatic threat processing, and corresponding data provide empirical evidence of such exclusivity. De Neys's dismissal of exclusivity is premature and based on a limited sampling of psychological research.

This paper addresses automatic partitioning in complex reinforcement learning tasks with multiple agents, without a priori domain knowledge regarding task structures. Partitioning a state/input space into multiple regions helps to exploit the di erential characteristics of regions and di erential characteristics of agents, thus facilitating learning and reducing the complexity of agents especially when function approximators are used. We develop a method for optimizing the partitioning of the space through experience without the use of a priori domain knowledge. The method (...) is experimentally tested and compared to a number of other algorithms. As expected, we found that the multi-agent method with automatic partitioning outperformed single-agent learning. (shrink)

Using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), recent experiments have demonstrated a strong and automatic positive evaluation of White Americans and a relatively negative evaluation of African Americans. Interpretations of this finding as revealing pro-White attitudes rest critically on tests of alternative interpretations, the most obvious one being perceivers’ greater familiarity with stimuli representing White Americans. The reported experiment demonstrated that positive attributes were more strongly associated with White than Black Americans even when (a) pictures of equally unfamiliar Black and White (...) individuals were used as stimuli and (b) differences in stimulus familiarity were statistically controlled. This experiment indicates that automatic race associations captured by the IAT are not compromised by stimulus familiarity, which in turn strengthens the conclusion that the IAT measures automatic evaluative associations. © 2000 Academic Press.. (shrink)

We survey various aspects of the problem of automatic continuity of homomorphisms between Polish groups.

Perceptual processes, in particular modular processes, have long been understood as being mandatory. But exactly what mandatoriness amounts to is left to intuition. This paper identifies a crucial ambiguity in the notion of mandatoriness. Discussions of mandatory processes have run together notions of automaticity and ballisticity. Teasing apart these notions creates an important tool for the modularist's toolbox. Different putatively modular processes appear to differ in their kinds of mandatoriness. Separating out the automatic from the ballistic can help the modularist (...) diagnose and explain away some putative counterexamples to multimodal and central modules, thereby helping us to better evaluate the evidentiary status of modularity theory. (shrink)

(2009). How automatic is “automatic vigilance”? The role of working memory in attentional interference of negative information. Cognition & Emotion: Vol. 23, No. 6, pp. 1106-1117.

Automaticity is rapid and effortless cognition that operates without conscious awareness or deliberative control. An action is virtuous to the degree that it meets the requirements of the ethical virtues in the circumstances. What contribution does automaticity make to the ethical virtue of an action? How far is the automaticity discussed by virtue ethicists consonant with, or even supported by, the findings of empirical psychology? We argue that the automaticity of virtuous action is automaticity not of skill, but of motivation. (...) Automatic motivations that contribute to the virtuousness of an action include not only those that initiate action, but also those that modify action and those that initiate and shape deliberation. We then argue that both goal psychology and attitude psychology can provide the cognitive architecture of this automatic motivation. Since goals are essentially directed towards the agent’s own action whereas attitudes are not, we argue that goals might underpin some virtues while attitudes underpin others. We conclude that consideration of the cognitive architecture of ethical virtue ought to engage with both areas of empirical psychology and should be careful to distinguish among ethical virtues. (shrink)

Social psychologists tell us that much of human behavior is automatic. It is natural to think that automatic behavioral dispositions are ethically desirable if and only if they are suitably governed by an agent’s reflective judgments. However, we identify a class of automatic dispositions that make normatively self-standing contributions to praiseworthy action and a well-lived life, independently of, or even in spite of, an agent’s reflective judgments about what to do. We argue that the fundamental questions for the "ethics of (...) automaticity" are what automatic dispositions are (and are not) good for and when they can (and cannot) be trusted. (shrink)

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom-up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top-down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations (...) between those individuals. We administered a multi-gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture. (shrink)

Empirical evidence indicates that much of human behavior is unconscious and automatic. This has led some philosophers to be skeptical of responsible agency or personhood in the moral sense. I present two arguments defending agency from these skeptical concerns. My first argument, the “margin of error” argument, is that the empirical evidence is consistent with the possibility that our automatic behavior deviates only slightly from what we would do if we were in full conscious control. Responsible agency requires only that (...) our actions more or less express our conscious goals and values. My second argument is a non-realist defense of moral agency. If we are willing to reject metaethical realism about agents, then there may be good reasons why we should retain the concept of agency in our moralizing, even if automaticity undermines the belief that we are really in conscious control of our behavior. We can do this by adopting a “reactive attitudes” approach to moral responsibility. On this view, agency is determined not by actual features of human psychology but by the attitudes and practices that we ought to adopt in response to the actions and motivations of individuals. (shrink)

We investigated whether motivationally determined stimulus valence can be processed in an automatic way, as is assumed in many appraisal theories (e.g., Frijda, 1986, 1993; Lazarus, 1991; Scherer, 1993a). Whereas appraisal theorists typically use conscious self-report methods to investigate their assumptions, our experiments used indirect experimental methods that leave less room for deliberate, conscious reflections of the participants. Using variants of the affective priming and Simon paradigms, we demonstrated that intrinsically neutral, but wanted stimuli facilitated responses with a positive valence, (...) whereas intrinsically neutral, but unwanted stimuli facilitated negative responses. In addition, the second experiment proved to be supportive of another assumption made by appraisal theorists according to which a relation exits between different (automatic) outcomes of motivational appraisal (positive-negative) and different action tendencies (approach-withdrawal). (shrink)

Driven by the increasing availability and deployment of ubiquitous computing technologies across our private and professional lives, implementations of automatically processable regulation (APR) have evolved over the past decade from academic projects to real-world implementations by states and companies. There are now pressing issues that such encoded regulation brings about for citizens and society, and strategies to mitigate these issues are required. However, _comprehensive yet practically operationalizable_ frameworks to navigate the complex interactions and evaluate the risks of projects that implement (...) APR are not available today. In this paper, and based on related work as well as our own experiences, we propose a framework to support the conceptualization, implementation, and application of _responsible_ APR. Our contribution is twofold: we provide a holistic characterization of what responsible APR means; and we provide support to operationalize this in concrete projects, in the form of leading questions, examples, and mitigation strategies. We thereby provide a scientifically backed yet practically applicable way to guide researchers, sponsors, implementers, and regulators toward better outcomes of APR for users and society. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have long noted that automated behavior is the rule, while consciousness acts of self-regulation are the exception to the rule. On the face of it automated actions appear to be immune to moral appraisal because they are not subject to conscious control. Conventional wisdom suggests that sleepwalking exculpates, while the mere fact that a person is performing a well-versed task unthinkingly does not. However, our apparent lack of conscious control while we are undergoing automaticity challenges the idea that (...) there is a relevant moral difference between these two forms of unconscious behavior. In both cases the agent lacks access to information that might help them guide their actions so as to avoid harms. In response it is argued that the crucial distinction between the automatic agent and the agent undergoing an automatism, such as somnambulism or petit mal epilepsy, lies in the fact that the former can preprogram the activation and interruption of automatic behavior. Given that, it is argued that there is elbowroom for attributing responsibility to automated agents based on the quality of their will. (shrink)

A classical definition of automaticity establishes that automatic processing occurs without attention or consciousness, and cannot be controlled. Previous studies have demonstrated that semantic priming can be reduced if attention is directed to a low-level of analysis. This finding suggests that semantic processing is not automatic since it can be controlled. In this paper, we present two experiments that demonstrate that semantic processing may occur in the absence of attention and consciousness. A negative semantic priming effect was found when a (...) low-level prime-task was required and when a masked lexical decision prime-task was performed . This paper also discusses the limitations of the inhibitory mechanism involved in negative semantic priming effect. (shrink)

Created as a poetic and visual journey, Touchless Automatic Wonder spans twenty-five years and four continents. These striking photographs capture “found text”: the sometimes mysterious, occasionally humorous, often cryptic presence of words in the everyday landscape. In Koch’s lyrical sequencing, the images reveal obscure and eccentric voices in their various and distinctive roles on the daily stage of the world around us. This intriguing approach at the intersection of language, image, and the social landscape will appeal to readers interested in (...) contemporary art and photography, popular culture, and conceptual concerns both literary and visual. (shrink)

We present methods for automatically producing summary excerpts or thumbnails of music. To find the most representative excerpt, we maximize the average segment similarity to the entire work. After windowbased audio parameterization, a quantitative similarity measure is calculated between every pair of windows, and the results are embedded in a 2D similarity matrix. Summing the similarity matrix over the support of a segment results in a measure of how similar that segment is to the whole. This measure is maximized to (...) find the segment that best represents the entire work. We discuss variations on the method, and present experimental results for orchestral music, popular songs, and jazz. These results demonstrate that the method finds significantly representative excerpts, using very few assumptions about the source audio. (shrink)

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is considered a universal marker of developmental dyslexia (DD) and could also be helpful to identify a reading deficit in minority-language children (MLC), in which it may be hard to disentangle whether the reading difficulties are due to a learning disorder or a lower proficiency in the language of instruction. We tested reading and rapid naming skills in monolingual Good Readers (mGR), monolingual Poor Readers (mPR), and MLC, by using our new version of RAN, the RAN-Shapes, (...) in 127 primary school students (from 3rd to 5th grade). In line with previous research, MLC showed, on average, lower reading performances as compared to mGR. However, the two groups performed similarly to the RAN-Shapes task. On the contrary, the mPR group underperformed both in the reading and the RAN tasks. Our findings suggest that reading difficulties and RAN performance can be dissociated in MLC; consequently, the performance at the RAN-Shapes may contribute to the identification of children at risk of a reading disorder without introducing any linguistic bias, when testing MLC. (shrink)

We apply Dienes & Perner's (D&P's) framework to the automatic/nonautomatic processing contrast. Our analysis leads to the conclusion that automatic and nonautomatic processing result in representations that have explicit results. We propose equating consciousness with explicitness of aspects rather than with full explicitness as defined by D&P.

Interaction mining is about discovering and extracting insightful information from digital conversations, namely those human?human information exchanges mediated by digital network technology. We present in this article a computational model of natural arguments and its implementation for the automatic argumentative analysis of digital conversations, which allows us to produce relevant information to build interaction business analytics applications overcoming the limitations of standard text mining and information retrieval technology. Applications include advanced visualisations and abstractive summaries.

The objective of this paper is to characterize the rich interplay between automatic and cognitive control processes that we propose is the hallmark of skill, in contrast to habit, and what accounts for its flexibility. We argue that this interplay isn't entirely hierarchical and static, but rather heterarchical and dynamic. We further argue that it crucially depends on the acquisition of detailed and well-structured action representations and internal models, as well as the concomitant development of metacontrol processes that can be (...) used to shape and balance it. (shrink)

Brain monitoring combined with automatic analysis of EEGs provides a clinical decision support tool that can reduce time to diagnosis and assist clinicians in real-time monitoring applications (e.g., neurological intensive care units). Clinicians have indicated that a sensitivity of 95% with specificity below 5% was the minimum requirement for clinical acceptance. In this study, a high-performance automated EEG analysis system based on principles of machine learning and big data is proposed. This hybrid architecture integrates hidden Markov models (HMMs) for sequential (...) decoding of EEG events with deep learning-based postprocessing that incorporates temporal and spatial context. These algorithms are trained and evaluated using the Temple University Hospital EEG, which is the largest publicly available corpus of clinical EEG recordings in the world. This system automatically processes EEG records and classifies three patterns of clinical interest in brain activity that might be useful in diagnosing brain disorders: (1) spike and/or sharp waves, (2) generalized periodic epileptiform discharges, (3) periodic lateralized epileptiform discharges. It also classifies three patterns used to model the background EEG activity: (1) eye movement, (2) artifacts and (3) background. Our approach delivers a sensitivity above 90% while maintaining a specificity below 5%. We also demonstrate that this system delivers a low false alarm rate, which is critical for any spike detection application. (shrink)

Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that facilitates the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by machine. Speech recognition plays an important role in digital transformation. It is widely used in different areas such as education, industry, and healthcare and has recently been used in many Internet of Things and Machine Learning applications. The process of speech recognition is one of the most difficult processes in computer science. Despite numerous searches in this domain, (...) an optimal method for speech recognition has not yet been found. This is due to the fact that there are many attributes that characterize natural languages and every language has its particular highlights. The aim of this research is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the various techniques within the domain of Speech Recognition through a systematic literature review of the existing work. We will introduce the most significant and relevant techniques that may provide some directions in the future research. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the performance of baseline hidden Markov model (HMM) for segmentation of speech signals. It is applied on single-speaker segmentation task, using Hindi speech database. The automatic phoneme segmentation framework evolved imitates the human phoneme segmentation process. A set of 44 Hindi phonemes were chosen for the segmentation experiment, wherein we used continuous density hidden Markov model (CDHMM) with a mixture of Gaussian distribution. The left-to-right topology with no skip states has been selected as it is (...) effective in speech recognition due to its consistency with the natural way of articulating the spoken words. This system accepts speech utterances along with their orthographic “transcriptions” and generates segmentation information of the speech. This corpus was used to develop context-independent hidden Markov models (HMMs) for each of the Hindi phonemes. The system was trained using numerous sentences that are relevant to provide information to the passengers of the Metro Rail. The system was validated against a few manually segmented speech utterances. The evaluation of the experiments shows that the best performance is obtained by using a combination of two Gaussians mixtures and five HMM states. A category-wise phoneme error analysis has been performed, and the performance of the phonetic segmentation has been reported. The modeling of HMMs has been implemented using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (C++), and the system is designed to work on Windows operating system. The goal of this study is automatic segmentation of speech at phonetic level. (shrink)

The present study combined magnetoencephalography recordings with fast periodic visual stimulation to investigate automatic neural responses to morphemes in developing and skilled readers. Native English-speaking children and adults were presented with rapid streams of base stimuli interleaved periodically with oddballs. In a manipulation-check condition, tapping into word recognition, oddballs featured familiar words embedded in a stream of consonant strings. In the experimental conditions, the contrast between oddball and base stimuli was manipulated in order to probe selective stem and suffix identification (...) in morphologically structured pseudowords. Neural responses at the oddball frequency and harmonics were analyzed at the sensor level using non-parametric cluster-based permutation tests. As expected, results in the manipulation-check condition revealed a word-selective response reflected by a predominantly left-lateralized cluster that emerged over temporal, parietal, and occipital sensors in both children and adults. However, across the experimental conditions, results yielded a differential pattern of oddball responses in developing and skilled readers. Children displayed a significant response that emerged in a mostly central occipital cluster for the condition tracking stem identification in the presence of suffixes. In contrast, adult participants showed a significant response that emerged in a cluster located in central and left occipital sensors for the condition tracking suffix identification in the presence of stems. The present results suggest that while the morpheme identification system in Grade 5–6 children is not yet adult-like, it is sufficiently mature to automatically analyze the morphemic structure of novel letter strings. These findings are discussed in the context of theoretical accounts of morphological processing across reading development. (shrink)

In two experiments during the study phase participants read unrelated context-target word pairs presented below a line drawing of the context word. During test the strong cue group was presented with context words, line drawings, and stems of target words. The line drawings were not presented in the weak cue group. Stems were paired with the same context words as at study , paired with different context words , or corresponded to unstudied words . In Experiment 1 participants were instructed (...) to complete stems with the first word that came to mind . The priming effect for new associations was twice as large in the strong cue group. In Experiment 2 the process dissociation procedure was applied and participants completed stems with studied words or with unstudied words . Results indicated that consciously controlled and automatic retrieval processes mediated the associative effect in both groups. (shrink)

My reply to the comments of Parkinson (2010) and Kuppens (2010) is organized in three parts. The first part deals with Parkinson’s claim that the scope of our research is limited because no real emotions were elicited. I suggest that the outcomes in our studies are structurally similar to real emotions but that they lack intensity. In the second part, I try to correct three potential misunderstandings regarding the nature of the comparison process that I proposed. In the third part, (...) I respond to Kuppens’ suggestion that we also need to consider the transition of appraisal values into the other components of emotion (actions tendencies, responses, and subjective experience). (shrink)

The last couple of years have seen a rapid growth of interest in the study of crossmodal correspondences – the tendency for our brains to preferentially associate certain features or dimensions of stimuli across the senses. By now, robust empirical evidence supports the existence of numerous crossmodal correspondences, affecting people’s performance across a wide range of psychological tasks – in everything from the redundant target effect paradigm through to studies of the Implicit Association Test, and from speeded discrimination/classification tasks through (...) to unspeeded spatial localisation and temporal order judgment tasks. However, one question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer is whether crossmodal correspondences automatically affect people’s performance , as opposed to reflecting more of a strategic, or top-down, phenomenon. Here, we review the latest research on the topic of crossmodal correspondences to have addressed this issue. We argue that answering the question will require researchers to be more precise in terms of defining what exactly automaticity entails. Furthermore, one’s answer to the automaticity question may also hinge on the answer to a second question: Namely, whether crossmodal correspondences are all ‘of a kind’, or whether instead there may be several different kinds of crossmodal mapping . Different answers to the automaticity question may then be revealed depending on the type of correspondence under consideration. We make a number of suggestions for future research that might help to determine just how automatic crossmodal correspondences really are. (shrink)

Two protechnology arguments, the “hopeful principle” and the “automatic escalator”, often used in bioethics, are identified and critically analysed in this paper. It is shown that the hopeful principle is closely related to the problematic precautionary principle, and the automatic escalator argument has close affinities to the often criticised empirical slippery slope argument. The hopeful principle is shown to be really hopeless as an argument, and automatic escalator arguments often lead nowhere when critically analysed. These arguments should therefore only be (...) used with great caution. (shrink)

The SALOMON project is a contribution to the automatic processing of legal texts. Its aim is to automatically summarise Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future cases. Therefore, techniques are developed for identifying and extracting relevant information from the cases. A broader application of these techniques could considerably simplify the work of the legal profession.A double methodology was used when developing SALOMON: the cases are processed by employing additional knowledge to interpret (...) structural patterns and features on the one hand and by way of occurrence statistics of index terms on the other. As a result, SALOMON performs an initial categorisation and structuring of the cases and subsequently extracts the most relevant text units of the alleged offences and of the opinion of the court. The SALOMON techniques do not themselves solve any legal questions, but they do guide the user effectively towards relevant texts. (shrink)

Contemporary feminist critics have often described Surrealism as a misogynist movement. In Automatic Woman, Katharine Conley addresses this issue, confirming some feminist allegations while qualifying and overturning others. Through insightfuløanalyses of works by a range of writers and artists, Conley develops a complex view of Surrealist portrayals of Woman. Conley begins with a discussion of the composite image of Woman developed by such early male Surrealists as Andrä Breton, Francis Picabia, and Paul Eluard. She labels that image ?Automatic Woman??a term (...) that comprises views of Woman as provocative and revolutionary but also as a depersonalized object largely devoid of individuality and volition. This analysis largely confirms feminist critiques of Surrealism. The heart of the book, however, examines the writings of Leonora Carrington and Unica Z_rn, two women in the Surrealist movement whose works, Conley argues, anticipate much contemporary feminist art and theory. In concluding, Conley shows how Breton?s own views on women evolved in the course of his long career, arriving at last at a position far more congenial to contemporary feminists. Automatic Woman is distinguished by Katharine Conley?s judicious understanding of how women?and the image of Woman?figured in Surrealism. The book is an important contemporary account of a cultural movement that continues to fascinate, influence, and provoke us. (shrink)

This article describes a method of automatically detecting, counting and classifying logs on a timber truck using a photograph. An image-processing algorithm is developed to process the photograph to calculate an estimate of the number of logs present and their respective diameters. The algorithm uses color information in multiple color spaces as well as geometrical operators to segment the image and extract the relevant information. This information enables the sawmill to better plan internal logistics and production in advance of the (...) truck’s arrival time. The algorithm is robust with respect to external factors such as varying lighting conditions and camera angle, but some inaccuracies remain, mainly caused by logs being occluded or covered in mud or snow. (shrink)

We discuss here one of our projects, aimed at developing an automatic facial expression interpreter, mainly in terms of signaled emotions. We present some of the relevant findings on facial expressions from cognitive science and psychology that can be understood by and be useful to researchers in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. We then give an overview of HCI applications involving automated facial expression recognition, we survey some of the latest progresses in this area reached by various approaches in computer (...) vision, and we describe the design of our facial expression recognizer. We also give some background knowledge about our motivation for understanding facial expressions and we propose an architecture for a multimodal intelligent interface capable of recognizing and adapting to computer users¿ affective states. Finally, we discuss current interdisciplinary issues and research questions which will need to be addressed for further progress to be made in the promising area of computational facial expression recognition. (shrink)

This article discusses a challenge to the traditional intentional-causalist conceptions of action and intentionality as well as to our everyday and legal conceptions of responsibility, namely the psychological discovery that the greatest part of our alleged actions are performed automatically, that is unconsciously and without a proximal intention causing and sustaining them. The main part of the article scrutinizes several mechanisms of automatic behavior, how they work, and whether the resulting behavior is an action. These mechanisms include actions caused by (...) distal implementation intentions, four types of habit and habitualization, mimicry, and semantically induced automatic behavior. According to the intentional-causalist criterion, the automatic behaviors resulting from all but one of these mechanisms turn out to be actions and to be intentional; and even the behavior resulting from the remaining mechanism is something we can be responsible for. Hence, the challenge, seen from close up, does not really call the traditional conception of action and intentionality into question. (shrink)

As a theory of skill acquisition, the instance theory of automatization posits that, after a period of training, algorithm‐based performance is replaced by retrieval‐based performance. This theory has been tested using alphabet‐arithmetic verification tasks (e.g., is A + 4 = E?), in which the equations are necessarily solved by counting at the beginning of practice but can be solved by memory retrieval after practice. A way to infer individuals’ strategies in this task was supposedly provided by the opportunistic‐stopping phenomenon, according (...) to which, if individuals use counting, they can take the opportunity to stop counting when a false equation associated with a letter preceding the true answer has to be verified (e.g., A + 4 = D). In this case, such within‐count equations would be rejected faster than false equations associated with letters following the true answers (e.g., A + 4 = F, i.e., outside‐of‐count equations). Conversely, the absence of opportunistic stopping would be the sign of retrieval. However, through a training experiment involving 19 adults, we show that opportunistic stopping is not a phenomenon that can be observed in the context of an alphabet‐arithmetic verification task. Moreover, we provide an explanation of how and why it was wrongly inferred in the past. These results and conclusions have important implications for learning theories because they demonstrate that a shift from counting to retrieval over training cannot be deduced from verification time differences between outside and within‐count equations in an alphabet‐arithmetic task. (shrink)

Paul C. Johnson begins his new work, Automatic Religion, with the observation that two of the capacities commonly taken to distinguish humans from nonhumans-free will and religion-are fundamentally opposed. Free will enjoys a central place in our ideas of spontaneity, authorship, and the conscious weighing of alternatives. Meanwhile, religion is less a quest for agency than a series of practices--possession rituals being the most spectacular though by no means the only examples--that temporarily relieve individuals of their will. What, then, is (...) agency and why has it occupied such a central place in theories of the human? Based on a dozen years of archival and ethnographic research in Brazil and France, this book tests the boundaries between humans and non-humans in an unlikely series of episodes from the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when ideas related to automatism lurched into motion on multiple tracks and, not incidentally, "religion" as a topic of study was being born. Brazil provided a particularly fertile place for reflection as the nearest site of what Europeans and Euro-Americans too often, too naïvely, and too imperially saw as raw nature, and thus also a laboratory of the human. In this context, the French would call Brazil's people monkeys; its slaves were called automatons; and Afro-Brazilian spirit possession priests were classed in the terms of French psychiatry's newly minted terms, dissociation and hysteria. Johnson shows not just how automatons can take on unexpectedly human-like lives when animated but also traces how certain groups have been excluded as less-than-human. In so doing, Johnson reanimates one of the most mysterious and yet foundational questions of trans-Atlantic thought-what is agency? (shrink)

In the current study, late Chinese–English bilinguals performed a facial expression identification task with emotion words in the task-irrelevant dimension, in either their first language or second language. The investigation examined the automatic access of the emotional content in words appearing in more than one language. Significant congruency effects were present for both L1 and L2 emotion word processing. Furthermore, the magnitude of emotional face-word Stroop effect in the L1 task was greater as compared to the L2 task, indicating that (...) in L1 participants could access the emotional information in words in a more reliable manner. In summary, these findings provide more support for the automatic access of emotional information in words in the bilinguals’ two languages as well as attenuated emotionality of L2 processing. (shrink)