6 research outputs found
Investigating and Modeling Human Perceptual and Motor Mechanisms with Application in Rehabilitation through Human-Robot Interaction
No full textThis thesis investigates the role of prior experience in human sensory and motor behavior in individual and interactive contexts. The final aim of this research project is to describe human behavior through quantitative models and subsequently develop novel robotic technologies that could support humans in their everyday life. To address this objective, the first study of the thesis has the goal of studying and modeling the role of prior experience in
perceptual and motor mechanisms during an interaction. To cope with sensory uncertainty, human perception takes into account previous sensory experience, and potentially leads individuals to divergent percepts. Therefore, how can humans efficiently coordinate in joint actions? This thesis presents the implementation of a novel controllable and repeatable setup, developed for the exploration of perceptual and motor processes intervening during the temporal coordination with the humanoid robot iCub. Thanks to the development of this interactive environment, a perceptual task of interval timing estimation was realized to monitor participants' and the artificial agent's perceptual and motor behavior at each instant of their interaction. Results revealed that participants managed to coordinate in time with their artificial companion, by shifting their temporal estimations towards their partner’s perceptual model. The presence or absence of their interactive agent's motor feedback produced different effects on individuals' perceptual mechanisms. The presence of the robot's motor behavior induced 30 participants to imitate their companion's kinematics, leading towards the generation of separate representations of their own and the robot’s perceptual model. On the contrary, the lack of the robot's motor cues induced 32 participants to integrate the estimations from the previous interaction into their own perceptual model. Even more interestingly, by applying Bayesian techniques to perceptual responses, human perceptual estimations were successfully predicted after the interactive sessions in the presence or the lack of their partner’s kinematics. However, prior experience influences not only the magnitude estimation of sensory stimuli, but also their association with a reward. Therefore, the second study of this thesis aims to investigate the role of prior experience in the perception
of reward-related stimuli in an individual setting with healthy and pathological populations, with the final goal of deepening the understanding of human perceptual behavior. In particular, a visual search experiment was conducted with 19 healthy individuals and 24 pathological gamblers. Since reward-related distractors have been demonstrated to delay participants’ reaction time, it was investigated if prior experience could differently affect pathological gamblers’ perceptual processes in presence of reward-related stimuli. Compared to the healthy population, pathological gamblers delayed their response in the presence of reward-related stimuli, independently of their associated value. Due to their uncontrolled impulse to gamble, pathological individuals did not vary their perceptual strategy, after an improvement in performance during the first part of the experiment. After investigating perceptual and motor mechanisms in different contexts, the third study of this thesis aims to induce motor imitation processes underlying human-robot interaction, with the final goal of influencing patients’ prior motor skills in a rehabilitation setting. Therefore, a novel clinical system was developed to exploit the interaction with the humanoid robot NAO during rehabilitative sessions. The system aimed to track participants’ movement and assess their performance through clinical labels, with the final goal of supporting patients’ motor skills, affected by cerebral palsy. Thanks to an effective communication with the system, the robot was endowed with the capability of providing patients with clinical feedback, according to their performance. Once the development of the system was completed, its validity and functioning were tested on 11 physical therapists and rehabilitation specialists. To conclude, the significant results of this thesis will contribute to develop bio-inspired adaptive models, aimed at having a complete understanding of human perceptual and motor behavior and monitoring related anomalies to prevent pathologies. Moreover, adaptive skills will endow robots with the ability of tailoring their behavior, to support humans in their daily tasks and improve their quality of life
A Controllable and Repeatable Method to Study Perceptual and Motor Adaptation in Human-Robot Interaction
No full text<p>Human perception and motion are continuously influenced by prior experience. However, when humans have to share the same space and time, different previous experience could lead towards opposite percepts and actions, consequently failing in coordination. This study presents a novel experimental setup that aims at exploring the interplay between human perceptual mechanisms and motor strategies during human-robot interaction. To achieve this goal, we developed a complex system to enable the realization of an interactive perceptual task, where the participant has to perceive and estimate temporal durations together with iCub, with the goal of coordinating with the robotic partner. Results show that the experimental setup continuously monitor how participants implement their perceptual and motor behavior during the interaction with a controllable interacting agent. Therefore, it will be possible to produce quantitative models describing the interplay between perceptual and motor adaptation during an interaction.</p>
A pilot study towards the implementation of perceptual and motor adaptation in robots
No full textThe aim of our study is to understand the
perceptual and motor mechanisms of adaptation underlying
human-robot interaction. Our long-term goal is to develop
novel models of adaptation that could be implemented in robots
to enhance human-robot collaboration. Realizing adaptive
robots would be fundamental not only in the biomedical field for
assistance and rehabilitation, but also in industrial settings to
improve human-robot cooperation. In the current paper, we
present a pilot experiment aimed at exploring perceptual and
motor strategies adopted by participants who try to adapt their
perception to that of a robot with different prior sensory
experience
A pilot study towards the implementation of perceptual and motor adaptation in robots
No full textThe aim of our study is to understand the
perceptual and motor mechanisms of adaptation underlying
human-robot interaction. Our long-term goal is to develop
novel models of adaptation that could be implemented in robots
to enhance human-robot collaboration. Realizing adaptive
robots would be fundamental not only in the biomedical field for
assistance and rehabilitation, but also in industrial settings to
improve human-robot cooperation. In the current paper, we
present a pilot experiment aimed at exploring perceptual and
motor strategies adopted by participants who try to adapt their
perception to that of a robot with different prior sensory
Experience
1
No full textThis contribution intends to examine Giambattista Vico’s De rebus gestis Antonj Caraphaei (Naples, Felice Mosca, 1716), which is a biography of Antonio Carafa (1642-1693), marshal in the service of Leopold I of Habsburg, engaged in the 1670s and 1680s fight against the Turks in the eastern part of the empire. In the battlefields between Austria, Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia, the struggle with the Turks was transformed into a “just war” between Christians and Muslims while, at the same time, Catholics and Protestants fought each other in the clashes with the Hungarian rebel Imre Thököly. Within the context of the rhetorical constraints of historical narration, Vico reflected on the presence of foreigners within and at the borders of Europe, describing their attitudes and behaviours, and raised questions about what consequences their presence could cause in terms of ‘Reason of State’. As Vico himself testified in his own autobiography, Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo (1723-1731), the reading of Ugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis helped him prepare Carafa’s biography, supported by the Tacitean themes that were extremely influential in European political discourses between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through a rhetorical-narrative analysis focusing on the ways of organizing the narrator’s voice, the point of view and the representation of the characters, this essay will show what traits of the adversary emerge from the story
REVIEW OF RIJEKA’S WRITER GINO ANTONY’S (CAVALIERE DI GARBO) WORKS THROUGH A PRESS SECTION OF ITALIAN PERIODICALS
No full textGino Antony (Antoni ili Antonj) (Trst, 1877. – Casalecchio sul Reno, 1948.) bio je pjesnik, prozaist i dramski pisac. Premda se rodio u Trstu, smatrao se adoptivnim Riječačninom, jer je u Rijeci proživio gotovo cijeli život. Još je kao student u Sieni izdao zbirku novela Fiori di campo (1899), a u Rijeci je započeo objavljivati u La Voce del Popolo gdje je kao vrstan poznavalac gradskih prilika i uspješni pisac elzevira obrađivao različite teme iz gradskog života. Njegov glavni interes bio je vezan uz kazalište i glazbu. Bio je animator kulturno-
-umjetničkog društva Società Filarmonico-drammatica, središta iz kojeg je isijavao riječki kulturni iredentizam. Napisao je pet komedija na talijanskome jeziku: Eroi senza gloria (1904), Poveri illusi (1905), La prima e l’ultima (1905), Aria nuova (1905) i Anime schiave (1906). Također je napisao dvije dijalektalne komedije (El ritorno i El zogo) koje nažalost nisu nikada izdane.
Antony je, međutim, bio poznatiji kao dijalektalni pjesnik. Tako je preuzeo pseudonim „Cavaliere di Garbo” i kod tiskara Battare (1907) objavio dijalektalnu zbirku Sonetti fiumani koji predstavljaju njegov najvažniji doprinos povijesti riječke književnosti. Njegovi soneti često su objavljivani u riječkome tisku toga doba i velik dio njih nadahnut je dnevnom politikom. U njima autor vješto koristi različite registre: opisni, sentimentalni, nostalgični i kritički, u nekoj vrsti iskrivljenog ili pročišćenog dijalekta.
Budući da nam danas nisu dostupna sva pisana djela Gina Antonyja, cilj je ovoga rada pružiti uvid u stvaralački opus toga pisca kroz presjek riječkoga tiska tog razdoblja.Gino Antony (Trieste, 1877 – Casalecchio sul Reno, 1948) was a poet, prose writer and playwright. Although he was born in Trieste, he was considered an adoptive of Rijeka as he had lived there almost all his life. As a student in Siena he published a collection of poems Fiori di campo (1899). In Rijeka he started publishing texts in ‘La Voce del Popolo’ in which he described urban conditions and he was a successful writer of ‘elzevirs’ dealing with different topics of urban life. His main interest was related to the theatre and music. He was an animator of the arts club Società Filarmonico-drammatica, the centre from which Rijeka cultural irredentism radiated. He wrote five comedies in Italian: Eroi senza gloria (1904), Poveri illusi (1905), La prima e l’ultima (1905), Aria nuova (1905) and Anime schiave (1906). He also wrote two dialectal comedies (El ritorno and El zogo) that, unfortunately, were never published.
However, Antony was better known as a dialectal poet. So he took the pseudonym ‘Cavaliere di Garbo’, and the editor Battara (1907) published his dialectal collection Sonetti fiumani which represents his most significant contribution to the history of Rijeka literature. His sonnets were often published in the Rijeka press of that time, and a great many of them were inspired by the daily politics. In them, the author masterfully uses different registers: descriptive, sentimental, nostalgic, and critical, in a kind of distorted or purified dialect.
Since not all of Gino Antony’s works are available today, the aim of this paper is to provide an insight into his works through a press section of Italian periodicals from this period
