animals and nurturing

Found on The Animals Life Blog

some articles on cuteness...

"Hello Kitty: One Nation Under Cute" from Psychology Today online.

The article discusses on the relationship between Japan's obsession of cuteness and broader social attitudes. The explanations seem very Freudian.

Some collected images

That's so C U T E

photos drawn from cuteoverload!

So a trip to Petco this past weekend inspired me to research and explore the topic of cuteness. Cuteness did not happen by accident. Rather, it's an evolutionary adaptation that helped certain creatures survive. It's been found that infants with cute features receive more positive care from their caregivers. It's not just infant human babies but also baby animals and birds.

Links shared last Thursday

I brought in a couple of links to online blogs that I like to browse...

inhabitat

notcot

MIT's "Artificial Emotional Creature Project"

This is an old paper/talk presented by someone from MIT in the late 90s. The concepts about machines and robots are quite interesting and many questions about attachment and relationships between man and artificial objects are raised in this paper. It was helpful in getting me started in asking questions.

Here's the introduction:
"A human understands people or objects through interaction. The more and longer they interact, the deeper the human understands the other. Long interaction can result in attachment and desire for further interactions. It may also result in boredom. Interaction stimulates humans, and generates motivations for behaviors. There can be cases in which behaviors are not rational.

Objects with which humans interact include natural objects, animals and artifacts. Studies on interaction between human beings and animals show positive effects on psychology, development of children, and so on. Artifacts that affect people in mentally can be called "aesthetic objects". Such effects are subjective and could not be measured simply in terms of objective measures such as accuracy, energy and time.

Machines are also artifacts. Different from the aesthetic objects, machines have been designed and developed as tools for human beings while being evaluated in terms of objective measures. Machines are passive basically because human beings give them goals. Machines will not be active as long as they are tools for human beings.

However, if a machine were able to generate its motivation and behave voluntarily, it would have much influence to an interacting human. At the same time, the machine should not be a simple tool for humans nor be evaluated only in terms of objective measures. Subjective evaluation is important. For a human, multi-modal stimulation should be influential. People interacting with the machine or observing the interaction may consider the machine as an artificial creature. Behaviors of the machine may be interpreted as emotional.

There are many studies on human-machine interaction. Here, we don't discuss studies on human factors in controlling machines used as tools. In other studies, machines recognize human gestures or emotions by sensory information, and then act or provide some information to the human. However, modeling gestures or emotions is very difficult because these depend on the situation, context and cultural background of each person.

Concerning action by a machine toward a human, an artificial creature in cyber space can give only visual and auditory information to a human. A machine with a physical body is more influential on human mind than a virtual creature.

Considerable research on autonomous robots has been carried out. Their purposes are various such as navigation, exploration and delivery in structured or unstructured environments while the robots adapt to the environments. Also, some robots have been developed to show some emotional expressions by face or gestures. However, even though such robots have physical bodies, most of them are not intended to interact physically with a human.

We have been building pet robots as examples of artificial emotional creatures since 1995. The pet robots have physical bodies and behave actively while generating motivations by themselves. They interact with human beings physically. When we engage physically with a pet robot, it stimulates our affection. Then we have positive emotions such as happiness and love or negative emotions such as anger, sadness and fear. Through physical interaction, we develop attachment to the pet robot while evaluating it as intelligent or stupid by our subjective measures."


To read the rest, go here.


I've also attached a picture of a person interacting with one of Sony's pet robot products. Should machines try to emulate pets so literally? It really doesn't appeal to me...