This paper presents part of an on-going project to integrate perception, attention, drives, emotions, behavior arbitration, and expressive acts for a robot designed to interact socially with humans. We present the design of a visual attention system based on a model of human visual search behavior from Wolfe (1994). The attention system integrates perceptions (motion detection, color saliency, ...

Many animals engage in many behaviors that reduce their exposure to pathogens. Ants line their nests with resins that inhibit the growth of fungi and bacteria (Chapuisat, Oppliger, Magliano, & Christe, 2008). Mice avoid mating with other mice that are infected with parasitic protozoa (Kavaliers & Colwell, 1995). Animals of many kinds—from physiologically primitive nematode worms to neurological...

Adolescents with depression who participate in behavioral activation therapy may find it hard to be motivated perform tasks at home that their therapists recommend. We describe the initial design and usability evaluation of a device (“PlantBot”) could used remind young adults therapy-related tasks. The prototype features electronics two-layer base, fake plant on top supported using Amazon Echo ...

As amount of activities available for users and their variety have grown, personalised recommendation of activities sequences has become an important challenge. However, most of recommender systems do not consider temporal constraints of activities, making the recommendation hard for user to follow. In this article, we describe a novel approach for recommendation of competing activities limited...

The development of communication in a population of agents is viewed as the behavior of a dynamical system. A deterministic communication system is shown, both experimentally and theoretically, to have point attractors that correspond to perfect communication. However, the determinism required for the presence of point at-tractors impedes the development of communication. A corresponding attrac...

Neurochemicals such as serotonin convey information about behavioral context to sensory processing. In the auditory system, serotonin modulates the responses of neurons in the inferior colliculus (IC) to acoustic stimuli, including communication vocalizations. Levels of extracellular serotonin in the IC can change rapidly in response to stressful situations such as social challenge and limited ...