Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Babies Laughter Explained

You may have seen the video below, of a baby laughing hysterically, on YouTube but do you know why such a simple act is so funny to the baby?

In this video brought to us by the Discovery Channel, Dr. Alan Sroufe fills us in on the joke.

According to Dr. Sroufe, babies begin to laugh at around 4 months old and are usually in hysterics over things that are physically vigorous.  Older babies, however, laugh at things that are a little more complex.  Here the baby finds the ripping of the paper so funny because it’s not something she would normally see.  In the video,  Dr. Sroufe states that “Most things that make babies laugh when they are older are these incongruities.”

For more information on babies and their emotional and physical growth you can read our past blogs, “Baby Face” and “Face Development in the Womb“

Click here to view the embedded video.

Learning via Facial Expressions

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Photo courtesy StockVault

In our electronic era online tutoring and even degrees are becoming more and more reputable and sought after.  A few years ago this type of learning was thought to be less beneficial than the traditional classroom/teacher setting.

Is it just as effective to learn online as it is in the classroom?

New software has been developed that aims at bridging the gaps between human interaction and technology.

Researchers at North Carolina State University  have created a new program coined “JavaTutor” that tracks how students feel as well as the effectiveness of online courses via facial expressions.

With growing classroom sizes (in both college and grammar school) and a variety of skill levels in each class, many teachers have a difficult time delineating which students are really getting the material and which are lost.  This new technology could alleviate that problem for online schools, tutoring companies and regular classrooms by acclimating learning and online courses to the lifestyle of today’s youth.

Are online courses more acclimated to today’s youth’s life styles ? – See more at: http://www.humintell.com/?p=25938&preview=true#sthash.wwlaMfjy.dpuf
Are online courses more acclimated to today’s youth’s life styles ? – See more at: http://www.humintell.com/?p=25938&preview=true#sthash.wwlaMfjy.dpuf

PsychCentral reported that 65 college students were tracked using this automated Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT) to evaluate their facial expressions as they were engaged in a one-on-one online tutoring session.  The students were tested before and after each tutoring session as well as asked their feedback on how effective they felt the tutorial was as well as how much they learned.

“The program, JavaTutor, will not only respond to what a student knows, but to each student’s feelings of frustration or engagement.  This is important because research shows that student emotion plays an important role in the learning process.”

Data from CERT as well as student assessments and test scores were used in creating models to predict how effective a tutoring session was based on the student’s facial expressions that indicated feeling’s of frustration or engagement.

MIT Technology Review also commented that ‘this hints at what could prove to be a broader revolution in the application of emotion-sensing technology.  Computers and other devices that identify and respond to emotion—a field of research known as “affective computing”—are starting to emerge from academia.’

The Computerized Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT) was able to identify facial movements associated with learning-centered emotions, such as frustration or concentration and the automated program’s findings were consistent with expert human assessments more than 85% of the time.

Co-author of the study Kristy Boyer, Ph. D. noted, “This work is part of a larger effort to develop artificial intelligence software to teach students computer science.”

If JavaTutor technology proves to be effective for online tutoring sessions this could have huge implications for schools across the nation.  Many schools fall short of test score expectations and as a result of that they are labeld Title 1 schools and must offer their students free tutoring sessions that are paid for by the state.

If this software engages and teaches material effectively it could replace expensive tutors throughout the nation and have a huge impact on middle schools, high schools, adult education as well as college courses.

What do You Think of Online Tutoring/College Courses? Can they be just as effective as teacher/classroom instruction?

Infants Recognize Emotions

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Photo Courtesy of StockVault

A recent article by Popular Science  reports on a new study from Psychology professor Ross Flom and colleagues that found babies are able to read each other’s emotional expressions as early as 5 months old.  The study which was published in Infancy journal comes right after similar research  published by Flom on infants’ ability to understand the moods of dogs, monkeys and classical music .

Flom explains that while babies are unable to communicate through language they do learn how to communicate through affect, or emotion.  This implies that not only can they read emotional expressions of their infant peers, but they can perceive and associate changes in those expressions as well.  Flom points out, “… it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect.”   This change in affect is where babies are able to “read” each other while most adults are left scratching their heads.

The study, held at Brigham Young University which was co-authored by Professor Lorraine Bahrick  and  graduate student Mariana Vaillant-Molina from Florida International University, looked at 40 babies ranging from 3.5 to 5 months old.

The study placed baby participants in front of two monitors.  One displayed a video of a happy baby and the other displayed a video of an unhappy baby.  While the babies were placed in front of the monitors, researchers played audio from a third baby.  The audio was either of a happy, laughing baby or of a sad, crying baby.

Researchers noticed that when the audio reflected happy baby noises the infants focused on the happy baby video and when the audio was sad they looked more to the sad video.

Past studies found that babies (not infants) are able to perceive facial expressions of emotion in familiar adults at 6 months and all other adults by 7 months.  However, this study takes it a step further documenting that infants as young as 5 months (but not as young as 3.5 months) have the capability to perceive and recognize emotional expressions in other infants

Flom substantiates, “These findings add to our understanding of early infant development by reiterating the fact that babies are highly sensitive to and comprehend some level of emotion.” Flom goes on to say, “Babies learn more in their first 2 1/2 years of life than they do the rest of their lifespan, making it critical to examine how and what young infants learn and how this helps them learn other things.”

Flom would like to take his recent findings a step further by testing whether infants younger than 5 months are able to demonstrate this same level of perception by watching and hearing clips of themselves.

What do you think? Will babies be able to read emotion even earlier if it’s their own?