Our project aims at supporting the creation of sustainable and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships through the creation of embodied robots with face recognition and natural language dialogue capabilities, which exploit and publish social information available on the web (Facebook). Our main underlying experimental hypothesis is that such relationships can be significantly enhanced ...

Although children's initial perceptions and judgments about sociomoral situations are being actively explored, little is known about what children remember about them. In four experiments testing over 400 children, we investigated children's memories for small acts of giving and taking. When asked to recall their own giving and taking, children were relatively accurate following a number of del...

The social contagion paradigm has demonstrated false memories occur for items when they are suggested to the participant during a collaborative recall phase. The current experiment examined the effect of perceptual elaboration (generation of sensory and elaborative details) and re-study (repeated encoding) on false memories in the social contagion paradigm. Participants either performed a perce...

Memories can be altered by negative or arousing experiences due to the activation of the stress-responsive sympatho-adrenal-medullary axis (SYM). Here, we used a neutral declarative memory that was acquired during multi-trial training to determine the effect of a threatening event on memory without emotional valence. To this end, participants received a new threatening social protocol before le...

The European project Campiello (ESPRIT LTR # 25572), as part of its methodology, is conducting an experiment of social observation and intervention regarding the process of community making in Venice, with a special focus on the role of memory collection and ri-elaboration in such a process. In this paper the social observation is presented describing its context, a particular local community i...

The present research explores a new mechanism for ease of retrieval effects in social judgment. It is suggested that in the most common ease of retrieval paradigm, when it is difficult for people to generate or retrieve the specific type of cognition requested (e.g., positive thoughts about an issue or memories of assertive behavior), they are more likely to spontaneously generate or retrieve u...

Autobiographical memories are thought to serve three basic functions: self-definition, social connection, and directing future behavior. Previous research suggests that the function a memory comes to serve may differ by the type of event recalled (e.g., single unique events vs. repeated or recurring events). In two studies, we compared memories for different event types on function served. Resu...

Children's abilities to reframe their memories of events after hearing another child's perspective of the same events were examined, and links between memory reframing, cognitive ability, and social competence were explored. Nine- to 11-year-olds (N = 79) were told to imagine that the events in a narrated story happened to them. Next, they heard another story that described either the same even...

The constantly growing amount of Web content and the success of the Social Web lead to increasing needs for Web archiving. These needs go beyond the pure preservation of Web pages. Web archives are turning into “community memories” that aim at building a better understanding of the public view on, e.g., celebrities, court decisions and other events. Due to the size of the Web, the traditional “...

Our species stands before the unprecedented challenge to fundamentally change its ways in order to avoid the potential catastrophe that would make our world inhabitable and the dangerous tensions that inevitably arise when food, energy and other resources become scarce. This paper raises the question what computer science can contribute to help foster this change. It focuses on community memori...