The study investigates two different ways of guiding the addressee of an explanation - an explainee, through action demonstration: contrastive and non-contrastive. Their effect was tested on attention to specific action elements (goal) as well as on event memory. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants were shown different motion videos that were either contrastive or non-contrastive with respect to the segments of movement presentation. Given that everyday action demonstration is often multimodal, the stimuli were created with respect to their visual and verbal presentation. For visual presentation, a video combined two movements in a contrastive (e.g., Up-motion following a Down-motion) or non-contrastive way (e.g., two Up-motions following each other). For verbal presentation, each video was combined with a sequence of instruction descriptions in the form of negative (i.e., contrastive) or assertive (i.e., non-contrastive) guidance. It was found that a) attention to the event goal increased for this condition in the later time window, and b) participants’ recall of the event was facilitated when a visually contrastive motion was combined with a verbal contrast.

Social learning takes place within an interactional loop. The contributions of this Special Issue exemplify approaches capturing the microdynamics of interaction to provide us with insights into the adaptation and learning processes. © 2013 IEEE.

This is a joint work of two labs that offers a perspective ondevelopment and learning, which complements theconference’s focus on “changes in representation andprocessing abilities in development”. Strong background inecological psychology allowed us to recognize the richnessand multilayered structuring of infants’ environment, whichactively engages them and to which infants tune their action-perception. We conceptualize this environment as reliable“social physics”, constituted of predictable, enacted socialevents, in which infants learn to participate. Using bothtraditional (qualitative and quantitative) and dynamicalsystems methods, we show the structuring of such events onmultiple timescales and levels and how participating in themsculpts the child’s agency in the social world. We show howthis background allows a fresh look on language acquisitionand how it informs computational modelling of languageemergence and models of human-robot interaction.

In novel situations, the productive communicative behavior of shy children can require more time than that of their less shy peers. Investigating 14 preschoolers, we asked which situational demands and changes contribute to the individual processing. Whereas children's shyness was measured by a standardized questionnaire given to caregivers, their processing of situational demands was measured by their nonverbal turn-timing over two sessions with a social robot. We focused on how children respond to their partner when the situation changes in comparison to a familiar one. Our results, based on grouping children by shyness level, indicate that while differences in turn-timing were not significant, shy children's turn-timing was consistently characterized by higher latencies compared to the less shy children across sessions and tasks, particularly when introduced to a new task. Correlational analysis, accounting for the full shyness spectrum, confirmed this trend. Findings clarify how children perceive a situation and situational changes.

The process of adaptation to the partner in the course of an interaction is still not well understood. In the case of explanatory dialogues, to provide satisfying explanations, explainers have to consider the needs of the explainees. This requires mental representations of the explainees, i.e., “partner models”. Little is known about whether and how modifications of partner models during an explanation take place. We assumed that they get informed by the interactive behaviour of the explainee and investigated partner models in relation to explainees' verbal moves. A total of 59 dyadic explanations were investigated in an observation study. The comparison of the partner models before and after the explanation showed changes regarding, e.g., knowledge, interest in the explanation, cooperation, and mood. Moves such as questions as well as summarising and paraphrasing information given by the explainees were associated with the partner model dimensions interest in the explanation and co-construction.

Research about explanation processes is gaining relevance because of the increased popularity of artificial systems required to explain their function or outcome. Following an interactive approach, not only explainers but also explainees contribute to successful interactions. However, little is known about how explainees actively guide explanation processes and how their involvement relates to learning. We explored the occurrence and type of explainees’ questions in 20 adult–adult explanation dialogues about unknown present and absent objects. Crucially, we related the question types to the explainees’ subsequent recall of the unknown object labels. We found that explainees asked different types of questions, especially about the object’s label and facts. Questions about the object’s function were asked more when objects were present. In addition, requests for labeling were linked to better recall. The results contribute to designing explainable AI that aim to provide relevant explanations and to further experimental approaches to study explanations.

People use speech and gesture together when describing an event or action, where both modalities have different expressiveopportunities (Kendon, 2004). One question is how the two modalities are semantically coordinated, i.e. how meaning isdistributed across speech and accompanying gestures. While this has been studied only for adult speakers so far, here, wepresent a study on how young children (4 years of age) semantically coordinate speech and gesture, and how this relatesto their cognitive and (indirectly) their verbal skills. Results indicate significant positive correlations between cognitiveskills of the children and gesture-speech coordination. In addition, high cognitive skills correlate with the number ofsemantically relevant child descriptions revealing a link between verbal and cognitive skills.