Humans have the fascinating capacity to understand, and anticipate the actions of other humans in the same space, without requiring verbal communication. This ”intention reading” capacity is underpinned by a common motor-repertoire that is shared by all humans, and afforded by a subtle coordination of eye-head-arm movements that encodes the cues and signals that will ultimately be deciphered by...

Humans have a strong sense of who should be punished, when, and how. Many features of these intuitions are consistent with a simple adaptive model: Punishment evolved as a mechanism to teach social partners how to behave in future interactions. Yet, it is clear that punishment as practiced in modern contexts transcends any biologically evolved mechanism; it also depends on cultural institutions...

Preliminary Sermon: Humans will be Humans; The Medium is the Message The famous Catalan numbers (see [Sl1]), count zillions of combinatorial families (see [St]) and many humans have fun trying to find ‘nice’ bijections between family A and family B. While this may be fun for a while, sooner or later this game gets old, especially since the real reason Catalan numbers are so ubiquitous is their ...

Humans navigate crowded spaces such as a university campus by following common sense rules based on social etiquette. In this paper, we argue that in order to enable the design of new target tracking or trajectory forecasting methods that can take full advantage of these rules, we need to have access to better data in the first place. To that end, we contribute a new large-scale dataset that co...

We discuss, in this paper, the design of a life-like agent interface that considers the social aspects in human-agent interaction. The underlying hypothesis of the design is that human social behaviors toward life-like agents are on a par with those toward humans. Humans tend to sympathize with and follow other humans based on their affiliation needs. Therefore, it should be with life-like agen...

Humans have the ability to mentally travel forward and back in time. They can retrieve vivid memories of past events (episodic memories) and can imagine the future (planning). Although it has been suggested that this is a uniquely human ability, the evidence for subjective time travel in humans is typically based on verbal report and elaboration. Such evidence cannot be obtained from animals. H...

Humans evolved in populations structured in groups that extended beyond the nuclear family. Individuals interacted with each other within these groups and there was limited migration and sometimes conflicts between these groups. Suppose that during this evolution, individuals transmitted their behaviors or preferences to their (genetic or cultural) offspring, and that material outcomes resultin...