Trash-Talking Robot

Trash Talk: Disparaging, taunting or boastful comments especially between opponents trying to intimidate each other (Merriam-Webster). OK, but what if your trash-talking opponent is a robot?

Welcome back. Looking ahead to our future with robots, researchers with Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study of the effect of linguistic nuances and social behavior on human-robot interactions.

Rather than add to the large body of work on cooperative interactions (e.g., robots assisting humans), they examined the case of robots and humans having different or even conflicting objectives. This would occur, for example, if a sales robot is programmed to convince a human customer to buy a specific item, but the customer thinks other items would be better.

The question addressed by the study was how would an opponent’s comments about one’s game playing ability impact a human if the opponent were a robot?

Pepper, the humanoid robot that voiced encouraging and discouraging comments during a strategic game with humans (www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/pepper).

Let the Games Begin
The researchers enlisted 40 participants to compete against a humanoid robot in a strategic game (Stackelberg Security Game). The participants were not initially advised of the true purpose of the study. Each participant played two practice rounds of the game without the robot, then 35 rounds with the robot.

During the 35 rounds, the robot played with optimal strategy and offered expressive verbal commentary either encouraging or discouraging its human opponent. Whether encouraging or discouraging, the comments had nothing to do with the participant’s actual performance.

A selected group of the participants also played another 35 rounds, during which the robot’s comments were opposite to its comments during the first 35 games with those participants; encouraging comments became discouraging and vice versa. 

Examples of the robot’s encouraging and discouraging
comments when playing a strategic game with human
opponents (from arxiv.org/pdf/1910.11459.pdf).

The researchers collected a variety of data on the participants’ game strategy and their perceptions of the task, their performance and the robot. These included a pre-task questionnaire of demographic information, familiarity with robots and technology, and emotional state; records of actions taken during the game; a post-task questionnaire; a post-game verbal semi-structured interview (video recorded); and, for some participants, video of the participant playing the game against the robot.

Did the Robot’s Comments Matter?
The study found that, overall, the robot’s comments strongly influenced the participants’ feelings in the two-opponent, competitive interaction. This occurred regardless of the participants’ level of technical sophistication.

Discouraging comments caused the humans to play the game less rationally and perceive the robot more negatively--as being less optimistic, cheerful, cooperative and cute. In contrast, encouraging comments caused the humans to play the game more rationally and perceive the robot in a more positive manner.

In all, 30% of the participants labeled the robot’s goal as “distraction,” but they excused the robot, blaming its behavior on how it was programmed.

Wrap Up
The researchers suggest their findings may be useful for robot designers. The robot’s ability to prompt responses could have implications for automated learning, mental health treatment and even the use of robots as companions.

Game developers can also use the results to develop more interactive opponents and increase the sense of engagement.

Placing importance on the humanoid aspect of the robot in their study, the researchers posit that nonverbal modes of expression in competitive settings should be investigated in future work.

Won’t it be swell when robots as well as people start giving us a hard time? Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of effect of robot’s comments on human game opponents in Proc. of 28th IEEE Int’l. Conf. on Robot Human Interactive Communication: arxiv.org/pdf/1910.11459.pdf
Article on study on EurekAlert! website: www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-11/cmu-tth111819.php

Retail Pricing Strategy

Gas station prices,
April 2017
(photo by Vicki)

Detergent, $8.99; light bulbs, $7.99; ibuprofen, $4.99; hangers, $2.49; television, $499.99; video game, $49.99; smart watch, $199.95, men’s boxer briefs, $14.98; strip steak, $7.99/lb…must I go on? Oh wait. How about gasoline? Does anyone even see the 9/10?

Forgive me. Welcome back. Retail pricing is one of my pet peeves. (Surprise! I have lots of those.)

When I was about 10, I asked my father, who owned a retail store, why prices ended in 99 cents or 98 cents or 95 cents. Why didn’t he charge an even dollar? I don’t remember his answer, but it couldn’t have been very convincing as I’m still wondering. I finally decided to dig a little.

It’s Not New
Nowadays, pricing items slightly below the whole number goes by different names, most often psychological pricing or charm pricing.

Business historians haven’t been able to pin down when the practice began, though advertisements applying the strategy have been around since at least the late 1800s. 
 

Macy ad from 1880s (from www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/weekinreview/08arango.html?)

Among reasons suggested for adopting the strategy are the obvious, to compete with other vendors, and one you’d never guess, to ensure the cashier would open the cash register to give change and not just keep the dollar. Although I can understand how cash registers, invented in 1897, might facilitate accounting and inventory control, I don’t see why the cashier couldn’t occasionally take the change from his or her pocket and avoid ringing the cashier bell. 

Ad for tombstone,
Sears Roebuck & Co.
catalog #110, 1900.

It Helps Sell More
As any business or marketing major can probably tell you, pricing strategies are one of many ways to increase sales. That pricing items slightly below the next whole dollar works is supported by numerous studies. The most commonly proposed explanation is that consumers read from the left and tend to drop off or pay less attention to the rightmost digits.

Researchers from Union College and Rutgers University provided direct evidence for this explanation in a 2005 study. In different trials, the researchers had 122 test participants estimate how many items of different prices could be purchased for $73. The participants thought they could buy significantly more items priced with 99-cent endings than items with comparable 00 ending prices.

Analysis of estimation errors indicated that the participants treated a substantial proportion of items with 99-cent ending as if their costs were up to a dollar less than they actually were, thus reflecting a pattern consistent with the drop-off explanation. As expected, increased motivation to come up with better estimates moderated the effect.

Despite my focus on two-digit endings, prices with a single 9 ending are common and highly effective as was shown, for example, in a 2003 study by researchers from the University of Chicago and MIT. In one of their three field experiments to test the 9 ending, they priced a women’s clothing item at $34, $39 and $44. The item sold best at $39.

Wrap Up
Psychological pricing has been inescapable for so many years, why should it bother me? Mostly, I suppose, because I feel the vendor is treating me like a fool. I do that well enough on my own, without the help of the price of salami ($5.99/lb).
 

Part of a supermarket
circular, April 2017.

The attempt to drive sales is so obvious, it’s just a distraction. If I’m comparing prices, I’ve always rounded the price to the next whole number, though in a supermarket, I can now rely on unit pricing.

Anyway, as my pet peeves go, this one isn’t as bad as people saying no problem instead of you’re welcome, which I addressed in an earlier post, Linguistic Longings. But I do wish we could make it go away. I’d ask you to join me in a boycott, except there would be nowhere to shop. Oh well, thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Example reading on psychological pricing:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing
www.livescience.com/33045-why-do-most-prices-end-in-99-cents-.html
marketing-bulletin.massey.ac.nz/V8/MB_V8_N1_Holdershaw.pdf
www.amazon.com/Priceless-Myth-Fair-Value-Advantage/dp/0809078813
Union College and Rutgers University study in Psychology and Marketing journal: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mar.20084/abstract
University of Chicago and MIT study in Quantitative Marketing and Economics journal: link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1023581927405

Don’t Want to Know

Welcome back. Did you happen to see my blog post of a few weeks ago, Political Fact Checking? I summarized a study of how partisanship and prior beliefs influence the way people process political misinformation, specifically Donald Trump’s false statements during the presidential primaries. The results suggested that politicians can spread misinformation without losing supporters.

Avoiding information. (Modified
from photo on multiple websites)

I ask if you saw the post, because there’s a recent study I thought provided further insight on the topic. Investigators from Carnegie Mellon University examined how and why people purposely avoid information as well as some of the consequences. 

Their assessment, which was based on review of research published in economics, psychology and other fields, focused on active avoidance--when the individual is aware the information is available and either has avoided or would avoid free access to it.

Information Avoidance Methods
The investigators categorized the principal tactics used to avoid information, presented here with examples.

   Physical Avoidance -- avoiding certain newspapers, TV or radio shows or conversations with specific people; not returning for results of medical tests (e.g., HIV AIDS).
   Inattention -- seeing a headline and deciding not to read the article, or reading the article and choosing not to think about it.
   Biased Interpretation -- weighing and interpreting information in a manner that supports what they believe and denigrating evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
   Forgetting -- deliberately and selectively failing to review negative information and, in time, forgetting it. (Notably, forgetting may help people deal with bad experiences.)
   Self-Handicapping -- choosing tasks that are too easy or too difficult or taking actions that undermine their performance to avoid information about their own abilities.

Information Avoidance Consequences
I doubt you would have any difficulty coming up with a list of consequences of avoiding information. The effect on decision making topped the investigators’ and probably anyone’s list, whether it’s not reading calories on a label or potentially useful feedback.

Media bias is another significant consequence. Media outlets have incentive to provide biased coverage that aligns with the perspective of their target audience. Nowadays it’s easy to load up on information while avoiding perspectives that challenge one’s existing views.

Among other consequences the investigators discuss are groupthink, when people adopt the shared belief rather than collect their own information; spread of disease could occur if people avoid being tested out of fear they have a contagious disease, or the related ethical transgression if one avoids being tested so as to not confront the dilemma of sharing bad new the test might reveal; and climate change denial, where rejection of a near-unanimous scientific consensus almost by definition requires information avoidance.

Wrap Up
People avoid information that threatens their happiness and wellbeing, which are intertwined with their beliefs. “Not knowing” proffers plausible deniability; knowing might make them feel bad.

Thinking about the earlier blog post on political fact-checking, I would expect those who did not support Trump during the primary would have fact-checked much of what he said because the results often made them happy.

In contrast, I would expect Trump supporters to have avoided fact-checking, certainly, because they trusted their candidate, but also because discovering he was wrong would have made them feel bad. Of course, there had to be those who just didn’t care.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Carnegie Mellon study in Journal of Economic Literature:
www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20151245
Article on study on ScienceDaily website: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170310121732.htm

Distractions Revisited

Welcome back. Here’s one to ponder. You know how I’ve been going on about aging and distractions? That getting old reduces the ability to ignore distractions (Brain Focusing with Sound). That the learning decline may be due to a reduced ability to ignore irrelevant information (i.e., we take in too much), not to a reduced ability to learn (Age Learning Decline).

Well, a recently published paper from investigators at the University of Toronto and Harvard kind of turned that around. They reviewed behavioral and neuroimaging studies on the subject and concluded that the reduction in cognitive abilities that accompany aging can sometimes be advantageous. I’ll explain.

Cognitive Control
Let’s start with the idea of cognitive control, how well one can focus attention and suppress distractions.

Lower cognitive control, older adults
playing a video game, where higher
cognitive control, young adults excel.
(Photo from multiple websites.)

Clearly, individuals with high cognitive control will excel on explicit, goal-driven tasks that require selective attention and a narrow focus on specific, targeted information. They do a better job at storing relevant information in their memory and managing interference from competing memories.

But what if the task to be accomplished isn’t goal-driven? What if you’ve got a stimulus-driven task? One that would benefit from processing and extracting knowledge derived from a variety of sources--information that was previously irrelevant? Accomplishing these tasks will normally benefit from a broader focus. In fact, completion of these tasks might even be hindered by greater cognitive control, because non-targeted, formerly irrelevant information would have been suppressed, ignored.

Get it? Reduced cognitive control might be more effective when dealing with non-goal-driven tasks. Which is to say, older adults, with their lower cognitive control, might do better than younger adults, who normally have higher cognitive control.

Advantages of Reduced Cognitive Control
Breaking it down, the researchers judge that lower cognitive control seems to help on tasks that might use previously acquired environmental information, learning regularities and creative problem solving.

Reduced cognitive control offers older adults the opportunity to learn more about the world around them. They tend to take in more information about how items and events vary together in time and space. This might allow easier inferences regarding cause and effect. Overall, the greater ability to extract structure and patterns over time and changing contexts should contribute to more prudent decision-making.

It’s interesting that older adults are more likely to opt for simple strategies over complex strategies. One study showed that lower cognitive control individuals did better than those with higher cognitive control on math problems solvable with simple, computationally straightforward strategies. They fixated less on applying more complex algorithms.

On open-ended tasks that benefit from spontaneous thought, older adults’ lower cognitive control may increase their creativity and ability to solve insight problems. But don’t carry that too far. Creativity typically relies on both generating and evaluating cool ideas, and evaluating normally benefits from higher cognitive control.

Wrap Up
Although I appreciate there apparently being some advantages to having reached my present lower cognitive control state, I wouldn’t have minded spending more years with higher cognitive control. Perhaps my level of cognitive control was never high enough to reduce my creative thoughts, but I certainly thought my thoughts were more creative in my youth. Of course, I may not be remembering correctly. I suppose those thoughts are all irrelevant now.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Cognitive control study in Trends in Cognitive Sciences journal:
www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(16)30155-3
Article on study on Science Daily website:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161115150726.htm

Washing Dishes Mindfully

Mindfulness thoughts. (Multiple websites)

Welcome back. Vicki is reading a book on mindfulness. A year ago, I told her how impressed I was by a 60 Minute report she missed on the topic. I considered blogging about it, but there was so much available, I let it go. Then I saw a recent study on washing dishes mindfully. How could I let that go?  

Mindfulness Background 

Some key points of mindfulness.
(Multiple websites)

Being an admirer not a practitioner of mindfulness, I can only relay what others have said. That’s particularly relevant as it pertains to what mindfulness is, which seems rather nebulous: Being aware of your thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and surroundings, living in the moment and awakening to experience.

Mindfulness traces to Buddhist tradition--the word itself is from an element of Buddhist practice. Mindfulness-based therapeutic applications for psychological conditions have developed since the 1970s. Most notable is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, which was designed to assist with pain and a range of conditions and life issues. That and similar programs are now widely used in schools, prisons, hospitals, veterans’ centers and other settings.

Research on the topic, underway for 30 years, stepped-up the past decade. Typical of the findings, last spring, researchers from the Netherlands’ Erasmus University Medical Center, Harvard University and Harvard’s Medical School and School of Public Health published a comprehensive review of the effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy programs. They reported that the programs “alleviate symptoms, both mental and physical, in the adjunct treatment of cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic pain, depression, anxiety disorders and in prevention in healthy adults and children.”

Dishwashing Study

The dishwashing study was conducted by researchers from Florida State and Utah universities to investigate whether such an informal contemplative practice could promote the state of mindfulness and its related phenomena. They noted that research has concentrated on interventions which combine formal and informal practices to foster mindfulness, yet experimental investigation of informal practices has lagged, despite the goal of integrating mindfulness with life’s activities.

For their study, the researchers enlisted 51 undergraduates (33 females). After baseline testing, participants were randomly assigned to read either a descriptive dishwashing passage (25 students) or a mindfulness dishwashing passage, both of similar length (about 228 words) and reading difficulty.

The descriptive dishwashing passage gave explicit instructions, from filling the sink with water to adding soap to the order in which dishes should be washed. The mindfulness dishwashing passage, adapted from a 1975 introduction to meditation, described the importance of presence (“While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes…Why put so much stress on a simple thing?…The fact that I am standing there and washing is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions…”)

Participants then wrote and explained their interpretation of the passage and were timed as they washed the same prearranged set of 18 clean dishes. After dishwashing, participants completed standard self-reporting scales of mindfulness and affect, before being asked to recall features of their experience (number of dishes, soap smell, how long it took).

Those who followed the descriptive instructions showed no affective change; however, those who washed dishes mindfully reported significantly increased state of mindfulness and inspiration and significantly decreased nervousness, in addition to overestimating the dishwashing time.

Wrap Up

Warren and Vicki washing dishes?
No. We have no aprons.
(Multiple websites)

After reviewing mindfulness for this blog post, I’m even more impressed than I was on first look, though it’s not something I feel pressed to practice since retiring. Oh, I worry about this or that--family, health, finances, the world situation, running out of milk, but I’ve been addressing those sorts of things for years, know what I can and can’t affect and usually find the humor in life. And lacking a dishwasher, I wash dishes as I go and am always inspired. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.

Research paper on dishwashing in Mindfulness journal and on ResearchGate:
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-014-0360-9
www.researchgate.net/publication/281608722_Washing_Dishes_to_Wash_the_Dishes_Brief_Instruction_in_an_Informal_Mindfulness_Practice
Article on dishwashing study on Time website:
time.com/4056280/washing-dishes-stress-relief-mindfulness/?xid=newsletter-brief
Source of study’s mindfulness dishwashing passage (see pp 3-4):
terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/Thich%20Nhat%20Hanh%20-%20The%20Miracle%20of%20Mindfulness.pdf
60 Minutes Mindfulness report, 14 Dec 2014; rebroadcast 6 Sep 2015:
www.cbsnews.com/news/mindfulness-anderson-cooper-60-minutes-2/
Mindfulness background:
www.psychologytoday.com/basics/mindfulness
www.pbs.org/thisemotionallife/blogs/practicing-mindfulness
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness
Research review of mindfulness in PLOS One journal:
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124344

Distractions Addendum

As I noted in last Friday’s blog post, Brain Focusing with Sound, TV talkers can distract me when I’m trying to read the TV news tape. But there are so many other ways to be distracted, not only when driving.

Was this a test during canine training or did the cat just happen to wander by? (Photo from multiple websites.)

Preventing…uh…“distractions” during exams in India (left) and Thailand was accomplished with blinders. (Photos from multiple websites; Thai photo was originally posted on Facebook.)

There are inventive ways that you can prevent distractions while working on computers and they even increase your privacy. (Photos from multiple websites.)

Although far from funny, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), formerly “ADD,” lends itself to some pretty funny exaggerations. (Multiple websites.)

Exaggerations can become particularly funny when they combine different psychological disorders, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. (By the way, I’ve already blogged about Political Correctness Revisited.) (Multiple websites.)

Brain Focusing with Sound

Welcome back. Two or three years ago, I wrote, complaining about Loud Commercials. (I know; it’s hard to keep track of my complaints.) I was objecting to the ramp up in amplitude when certain radio commercials came on before my predawn jogging.

There I would be, stretching on my floor mat or hands gripping free weights, listening to the news-weather-traffic, when WHAM!--a thunderous car commercial would rattle the room. As I wrote, the FCC was preparing to establish new rules for television, not radio.

Well, forget radio. I can’t find a predawn news-weather-traffic radio station here in the Wisconsin hinterlands, if there is one. Now, I turn on the TV before jogging and bounce around different channels trying to quench my thirst for news. (There is no local weather report and there is no traffic.)

But I’ve got a new problem. On some stations, it’s worth listening to the news; on other stations, I’m only interested in reading the news tape, though I’m not able to see the screen from every exercise position. This brings me to the real problem:  

Actually, it’s only sound that
can distract me from reading.
(Multiple websites)

As I get older, I have a harder time ignoring distractions. If I leave the volume up, I sometimes have a difficult time trying to read (i.e., comprehend) the news tape.

I may be the only old guy nutty enough to be exercising before dawn, but apparently, aging is associated with deficits in the ability to ignore distractions--or at least that’s how the abstract of a recently reported study begins. The study may have demonstrated a strategy to help address this problem.

Brain Training

To test a cognitive-training approach for reducing one’s susceptibility to distractions, investigators from the University of California, San Francisco, and McGill University conducted parallel auditory experiments with humans and older rats.

In 12 half-hour training sessions over several weeks, 47 older adults (average age 69) were trained to identify specific tones (audio frequencies) through reinforcement feedback and then to distinguish those tones from progressively similar, distracting tones.

The training resulted in enhanced discrimination abilities, with accompanying improvements in memory and attention spans.

One measure of improvement was provided by electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements of the older adults’ brain activity (frontal theta), which showed reduced responses to the distracting tones.

A measure of improvement that registered better with me was obtained by giving the participants a test of distractibility before and after the training. Compared with 15 younger participants (average age 24) who had not received any training, the seniors scored 14% worse before the training and 31% better after the training.

Although you might not be as impressed with cross-species results, the experimental findings were similar for rats.

Wrap Up

One possible cloud over the study is that the investigators are financially involved with the training strategy. As I wrote earlier (Research Sponsor Bias), when there is such involvement, it is critical that the research be structured to avoid possible bias. In the absence of information to the contrary and given the peer review process for publication, I’ll assume that was done.

I certainly hope so since, in an effort to expand their target audience, the investigators are reportedly conducting similar studies with children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Me? I can adjust the volume; but getting kids off meds would be quite a breakthrough. 

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.

Research report in Neuron journal:
www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273%2814%2900954-4
Articles on study on Yahoo News (Reuters) and Science Daily websites:
news.yahoo.com/seniors-might-trained-ignore-distractions-223905206.html
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141120123138.htm