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Audience‐Contingent Variation in Action Demonstrations for Humans and Computers
Author(s) -
Herberg Jonathan S.,
Saylor Megan M.,
Ratanaswasd Palis,
Levin Daniel T.,
Wilkes D. Mitchell
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1080/03640210802022579
Subject(s) - action (physics) , variation (astronomy) , perception , toddler , psychology , cognitive psychology , computer science , cognitive science , developmental psychology , neuroscience , quantum mechanics , astrophysics , physics
People may exhibit two kinds of modifications when demonstrating action for others: modifications to facilitate bottom‐up, or sensory‐based processing; and modifications to facilitate top‐down, or knowledge‐based processing. The current study examined actors' production of such modifications in action demonstrations for audiences that differed in their capacity for intentional reasoning. Actors' demonstrations of complex actions for a non‐anthropomorphic computer system and for people (adult and toddler) were compared. Evidence was found for greater highlighting of top‐down modifications in the demonstrations for the human audiences versus the computer audience. Conversely, participants highlighted simple perceptual modifications for the computer audience, producing more punctuated and wider ranging motions. This study suggests that people consider differences in their audiences when demonstrating action.