Scientific Program
Keynote Speakers
- Janet Bavelas, University of Victoria (Canada)
Applying Basic Research on Face-to-face Dialogue to Psychotherapeutic and Medical Interactions
Recent basic research on face-to-face dialogue can inform teaching, practice, and research in both psychotherapy and medical consultations. Although communication is fundamental to these encounters, the prevailing assumptions about communication tend to come more from unquestioned popular notions than from empirical research. This keynote address will review some important findings that are replacing older ideas of communication:
- Dialogue processes occur at a moment-by-moment level and therefore require microanalysis rather than global inferences.
- Verbal and nonverbal communication in face-to-face dialogue are highly integrated--not functionally separate channels.
- Dialogue is collaborative and reciprocal, not alternating performances by individuals; the participants co-construct their dialogue rather than simply exchanging information.
The presentation will include both experimental research findings and video examples from the speaker’s ongoing research on psychotherapeutic and medical communication.
- Jim Blascovich, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Virtual Reality: Remaking Human Existence
Humans are neurophysiologically wired for virtual experiences and history has
shown that people have been availing themselves of such experiences for eons.
Humans are also gregarious social beings. Over the past few thousand years,
humans have continuously invented and reinvented media technologies that allow
us to connect more easily with others, real and virtual, living and dead.
Paradigm shifts for social interaction have been stimulated by these inventions.
Story telling, art and theater, manuscripts and the printing press, still and
moving photography, radio and television have each exponentially increased our
abilities to interact with each other. Digital virtual environment technology
promises another quantum leap. This address will discuss how digital virtual
reality can enable great advances in the quality and productivity of social
interactions, but can also bring with it great Orwellian and Huxleyian dangers.
- Art Graesser, University of Memphis, USA
Learning with Animated Conversational Agents
AutoTutor is an intelligent computer tutor that helps students learn by
holding a conversation in natural language. AutoTutor has an animated
conversational agent that guides the conversation by asking difficult
questions and prompting the student to do the talking or action, as opposed
to merely delivering information to the student in a lecture. AutoTutor’s
learning objectives are pitched at deeper levels of reasoning, explanations,
and mastery of complex systems, as opposed to shallow levels (such as memorizing
definitions and facts). AutoTutor helps learning by nearly a letter grade,
compared to suitable control conditions. We have recently explored the emotions
that learners experience while learning with AutoTutor, such as flow (engagement),
delight, confusion, frustration, boredom, and surprise. This presentation will describe
AutoTutor and some other learning environments with agents developed at the Institute
for Intelligent Systems: MetaTutor, AutoCommunicator, Guru, ARIES, iSTART,
Writing-Pal, iDRIVE, and HURA Advisor.
A large landscape of pedagogical strategies can be implemented with ensembles of
agents that engage in dialogues and trialogues with the learner.
Invited Symposia
- Guy Bodenmann, University of Zurich
"Social interactions in the clinical setting"
- Ulrike Ehlert, University of Zurich
"Biological basis of social interactions"
- Petra Klumb, University of Fribourg
"Social interactions at work"
- Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, University of Neuchatel "Social interactions and learning"
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