Robots facilitate human language production

Beyond speaking: neurocognitive perspectives on language production in social interaction

The human faculty to speak has evolved, so has been argued, for communicating with others and for engaging in social interactions. Hence the human cognitive system should be equipped to address the demands that social interaction places on the language production system. These demands include the need to coordinate speaking with listening, the need to integrate own (verbal) actions with the interlocutor's actions, and the need to adapt language flexibly to the interlocutor and the social context. In order to meet these demands, core processes of language production are supported by cognitive processes that enable interpersonal coordination and social cognition. To fully understand the cognitive architecture and its neural implementation enabling humans to speak in social interaction, our understanding of how humans produce language needs to be connected to our understanding of how humans gain insights into other people's mental states and coordinate in social interaction. This article reviews theories and neurocognitive experiments that make this connection and can contribute to advancing our understanding of speaking in social interaction. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Face2face: advancing the science of social interaction'.

Information Security in Medical Robotics: A Survey on the Level of Training, Awareness and Use of the Physiotherapist

Cybersecurity is becoming an increasingly important aspect to investigate for the adoption and use of care robots, in term of both patients' safety, and the availability, integrity and privacy of their data. This study focuses on opinions about cybersecurity relevance and related skills for physiotherapists involved in rehabilitation and assistance thanks to the aid of robotics. The goal was to investigate the awareness among insiders about some facets of cybersecurity concerning human-robot interactions. We designed an electronic questionnaire and submitted it to a relevant sample of physiotherapists. The questionnaire allowed us to collect data related to: (i) use of robots and its relationship with cybersecurity in the context of physiotherapy; (ii) training in cybersecurity and robotics for the insiders; (iii) insiders' self-assessment on cybersecurity and robotics in some usage scenarios, and (iv) their experiences of cyber-attacks in this area and proposals for improvement. Besides contributing some specific statistics, the study highlights the importance of both acculturation processes in this field and monitoring initiatives based on surveys. The study exposes direct suggestions for continuation of these types of investigations in the context of scientific societies operating in the rehabilitation and assistance robotics. The study also shows the need to stimulate similar initiatives in other sectors of medical robotics (robotic surgery, care and socially assistive robots, rehabilitation systems, training for health and care workers) involving insiders.

Mental chronometry of speaking in dialogue: Semantic interference turns into facilitation

Numerous studies demonstrate that the production of words is delayed when speakers process in temporal proximity semantically related words. Yet the experimental settings underlying this effect are different from those under which we typically speak. This study demonstrates that semantic interference disappears, and can even turn into facilitation, when semantically related words are embedded in a meaningful communicative exchange. Experiment 1 and 3 (each N = 32 university students) implemented a picture-word interference task in a game played between two participants: one named the distractor word and, after a stimulus-onset-asynchrony of -150 ms or -650 ms, the other named a semantically related or unrelated target picture. Semantic interference reappeared with identical experimental parameters in a single-person picture-word interference setting (Experiment 2, N = 32). We conclude that the inhibitory context effects leading to semantic interference in single-subject settings are attenuated whereas facilitatory effects are enhanced in communicative settings.