Please join Bilkent University’s Psychology Department next Tuesday for the visit of Prof. Cengiz Acarturk.
Speaker: Cengiz Acarturk, Jagiellonian University
“Psychological Perspectives on Human-Agent Interaction”
Date: Tuesday, 4 April 2023
Time: 12:30
Room: C Amphi
Abstract:
Research in psychology on human social interaction spans multiple domains, from the study of psychological and biological factors that drive social behaviour, to cultural and environmental influences. From a methodological perspective, the study of social interaction between humans frequently employ eye tracking, a prominent tool for gaining insight into various aspects of cognitive processes, such as attention, decision making and learning. Recently, human social interaction has expanded in multiple fronts. Artificial cognitive agents has been getting widespread in physically embodied forms (robots), virtual forms (avatars), and more recently in unembodied forms (conversational agents). Although computer science, engineering, and linguistics have extensively studied the interaction between humans and these agents, psychology has only recently begun to explore this phenomenon. Given the robust methodological underpinnings in the study of social interaction between humans, psychology research provides an ideal scientific environment for conducting systematic research in those novel research domains. This talk will present ongoing research on the interaction between natural and artificial cognitive agents (humans and robots, avatars, conversational agents), and a research agenda for future and emerging fields in psychology.
About the speaker:
Cengiz Acarturk received Ph.D. from Hamburg University in 2010, from Hamburg University Department of Informatics, Knowledge and Language Processing Institute under the Center for Intelligent Systems and Robotics. He worked as a faculty member at the Cognitive Science Department of the Middle East Technical University. He joined the Cognitive Science Department of Jagiellonian University in 2021. He has been involved in national and international projects that investigated cognitive aspects of interaction and communication in natural and artificial cognitive agents. His current research interests cover human-agent interaction, eye tracking methodology, and oculomotor control in reading.