Talk

Are there emotional episodes that lack phenomenal consciousness? I first provide an overview of some seemingly compelling pieces of evidence in favor of Unconscious Emotion, explaining their key limitations. Then, I analyze a study by Winkielman et al. (2005b) that shows behavior indicative of an emotional change while subjects’ reports do not indicate such a change. While I take this to be the best putative evidence for unconscious emotion, I argue that an explanation of subjects’ behavior in terms of unconscious emotion is not superior to an explanation that posits that subjects’ emotional experience changed but subjects fail to notice or verbalize this change. From this, I conclude that we should either be agnostic about the existence of unconscious emotional episodes or form our view based on independent background commitments regarding the methodology or nature of consciousness or emotion. To facilitate the latter strategy, I survey the resulting theoretical landscape, exploring the main theoretical options with respect to mutual inconsistencies, relations of evidential support, and noteworthy implications.

What is perception? The most intuitive and influential answer to this question has long been the one given by David Marr: To see the world is “to know what is where by looking” — to transform light into representations of objects and their features, located somewhere in space. But is this all that perception delivers? Consider the figure to the right; certainly you see some colored shapes, as well as where they are located. Yet, beyond this, you may also see how they relate to one another: The green piece can fit into the others, and even create a new object with a shape of its own.
In this talk, I present evidence that perception extracts relations between objects in much the same way as it processes the objects themselves, and that these relations are abstract, structured, and surprisingly sophisticated. We’ll explore (and experience) the perception of several sophisticated relations between objects, including combining, supporting, containing, covering, and fastening — as well as relational “illusions” in which objects appear to interact with mysteriously invisible entities. Together, this work suggests that we see not only “what” and “where”, but also “how”.

Abstract: Trust is one of the most popular concepts in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI)—but also one of the most misunderstood. In this talk, we argue that HRI research has oversimplified trust by treating perceived trustworthiness as a stand-in for trust itself, often ignoring the risk and vulnerability that make trust meaningful in the first place. By revisiting trust theory, measurements, and common research
paradigms, we uncover key “trust issues” in HRI and propose ways to build more rigorous and insightful future research on trust in HRI.