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The current study explores the dynamics of interpersonal collision avoidance during an everyday coordination task. The task was a full body adaptation of the collision avoidance arm-movement task employed by Richardson et al. (2015) and required pairs of co-actors to avoid colliding into one another as they moved back and forth within a collaborative workspace. Specifically, participants were required to serve drinks to humanoid customers in a virtual bar where they needed to move back and forth between drink service and refill stations. As expected, stable patterns of movement coordination emerged between co-actors, with one participant in a pair exhibiting a more circular movement trajectory between the service and refill locations, while the second participant in a pair exhibited a more straight-line trajectory between the two locations. Consistent with the results of Richardson et al., (2015), this pattern was observed across nearly all pairs, indicating that the same dynamical processes governing simple hand-arm coordination tasks also regulate more complex, full-body and naturalistic goal-directed interpersonal coordination tasks.

Deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) methods can train artificial agents (AAs) to reach or exceed human-level performance. However, in multiagent contexts requiring competitive behavior or where the aim is to use AAs for human training, the qualitative behaviors AAs adopt may be just as important as their performance to ensure representative training. This paper compares human behaviors and performance when competing against either a human expert or an AA opponent trained using Deep RL on a 2-dimensional version of Pong. Results show that participants were not sensitive to the movement differences between the human expert and AA. Further, the participants did not alter their behaviors, except to compensate for differences in the environmental states caused by the opponents. The paper concludes with discussion on the potential impacts of AA training on human behavior with regard to representative design in the areas of skill development and team training.

In many team-based activities, members search for information to gain situational awareness and thereby structure their own behavior. The extent to which members are coupled and in control of their surrounding environment can be accessed via the fluctuations of their searching behaviors. To facilitate prospective control, assistive technologies such as a head-up display (HUD) can alleviate the demands of search and facilitate team performance. This study investigated how three-person teams divided their labor and structured their search behavior when playing a multiplayer search-and-retrieval task where first-person visibility and access to a HUD were manipulated. Results showed that access to task relevant information facilitated performance and division of labor, and increased prospective control of searching behaviors, as indexed by detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). Over multiple sessions, teams learned to use the HUD to structure their behavior to achieve the task goal. Results indicate the potential in using DFA for monitoring prospective control in team contexts.

Altering an individual’s identity during virtual tasks, such that it is incongruent with their own identity, can reduce unconscious biases and increase empathy and prosocial behavior. While such virtual embodiment has been investigated for race, age, and socioeconomic status, the question remains whether immersive perspective taking reduces implicit gender bias. Accordingly, we investigated the effect of gendered embodiment on gender bias related to the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and math fields. Undergraduate students (N=65) undertook a simulated virtual interview task, which included the rating and selection of male and female candidates. Females were significantly more empathetic than males. Greater empathy predicted higher candidate ratings, except for competence of the female candidate. Preliminary findings establish foundations for future comparative studies and contribute to elucidating the nature of empathy during and after virtual perspective taking, such that it may have a greater impact on males for modulating gender bias.

Team interaction involves the division of labor and coordination of actions between members to achieve a shared goal. Although the dynamics of interactions that afford effective coordination and performance have been a focus in the cognitive science community, less is known about how to generate these flexible and adaptable coordination patterns. This is important when the goal is to design artificial agents that can augment and enhance team coordination as synthetic teammates. Although previous research has demonstrated the negative impact of model-based agents on the pattern of interactions between members using recurrence quantification methods, more recent work utilizing deep reinforcement learning has demonstrated a promising approach to bootstrap the design of agents to team with humans effectively. This paper explores the impact of artificial agent design on the interaction patterns that are exhibited in human-autonomous agent teams and discusses future directions that can facilitate the design of human-compatible artificial agents.

Background: Recess has been shown to increase total daily energy expenditure, which may favorably impact body mass index by decreasing adiposity. This study examines associations between recess participation and adiposity. Methods: The study sample included male (N = 1434) and female (N = 1409) children 5 to 11 years of age participating in the 2013-2016 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Overweight and obesity were defined using age- and sex-specific percentiles. Recess participation interview questions were answered via proxy response. Results: Compared to a referent group participating in recess 5 days/week for >30 minutes/day and independent of demographic and behavioral factors, analysis revealed significantly greater odds of obesity in females reporting no recess participation (odds ratio 1.80; 95% confidence interval, 1.03-3.15, p = 0.03). Furthermore, minority females were consistently found to possess greater odds of overweight and obesity independent of recess participation time. Only Mexican American boys were found to have greater odds of obesity independent of participation recess time. Conclusions: In a large nationally representative sample of US children, reporting no recess was associated with significantly greater odds of obesity in females. Minority females were also more likely to be overweight and obese and Mexican American boys are more likely to be obese independent of recess participation time.

The purpose of this explanatory mixed methods study was to understand how 9th grade honors and general education language arts students made course enrollment decisions through the lens of the Expectancy-Value (E-V) theory. A survey was administered to 9th grade students (N = 118) attending a public high school with the overall mean score indicating fairly high reading motivation. A point biserial correlation analysis was conducted next to determine any significant correlations between course selection and the E-V expectancies for success and task values. Attainment was the only task value reporting a positive and statistically significant correlation. Six students with either high, medium, or low reading motivation were interviewed from which four themes emerged: expectancy for success and reader identity, utility and usefulness of reading in the future, cost and enjoyment associated with reading, and attainment and course enrollment decisions. Implications and recommendations for educators and researchers are provided.

Superintendents, personnel directors and school boards across the nation are faced with a growing problem of locating high caliber replacements for the exodus of school principals that began as we entered the decade of the 1990s. This departure, which began as natural attrition due to age and retirement, has been accelerated by several other factors including working conditions, educational reform and lack of funding for educators and educational programs. Since principals are critical to school success and student performance an examination of principal selection strategies is critical, particularly the planning needed to find the best applicants. There are several selection strategies that superintendents and school boards can use to recruit and employ the best candidates available, including "grow your own" prospective principals.

Changes in affect over time have been associated with health outcomes. However, previously utilized measurement methods focus on variability of affect (e.g., standard deviation, root mean squared successive difference) and ignore the more complex temporal patterns of affect over time. These patterns may be an important feature in understanding how the dynamics of affect relate to health. Recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) may help alleviate this problem by assessing temporal characteristics unassessed by past methods. RQA metrics, such as determinism and recurrence, can provide a measure of the predictability of affect over time, indexing how often patterns within affective experiences repeat. In Study 1, we first contrasted RQA metrics with commonly used measures of variability to demonstrate that RQA can further differentiate among patterns of affect. In Study 2, we analyzed the associations between these new metrics and health, namely, depressive and somatic symptoms. We found that RQA metrics predicted health above and beyond mean levels and variability of affect over time. The most desirable health outcomes were observed in people who had high mean positive affect, low mean negative affect, low affect variability, and high affect predictability. These studies are the first to demonstrate the utility of RQA for determining how temporal patterns in affective experiences are important for health outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Interpersonal coordination is essential for successfulcooperative action. Beyond synchronized joint action toachieve a goal such as moving furniture, humans tend tospontaneously coordinate movement in everyday action (i.e.,coordinated limb movement during walking). Furthermore,these actions are said to arise from the interaction dominantdynamics between agents and foment cooperative behavior. Assuch, existing research demonstrates that closer affiliation isassociated with entrainment of physiological signals includingheart beat and rhythmic limb movement. Considering the rolesocial stigmatization plays in disrupting social interaction, thepresent research investigated the impact of concealable stigmadisclosure (depression diagnosis or bisexual identity)—as aperturbation to a nonlinear dynamical system—oninterpersonal coordination and affiliation. Study 1 resultsdemonstrate that depression disclosure may lead to more socialdistancing in a collision avoidance walking task compared tobisexual and neutral disclosures. In study 2, interactionimproved affiliation regardless of disclosure type.