Paul Hemeren - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Paul Hemeren
This article is part of the Proceedings of the 6th Annual International Cycling Safety Conference... more This article is part of the Proceedings of the 6th Annual International Cycling Safety Conference held in Davis, California, USA on September 20th through 23rd in the year 2017.<br><br>Paper ID: 99
Frontiers in Psychology, 2011
The purpose of the present experiment is to further understand the effect of levels of processing... more The purpose of the present experiment is to further understand the effect of levels of processing (top-down vs. bottom-up) on the perception of movement kinematics and primitives for grasping actions in order to gain insight into possible primitives used by the mirror system. In the present study, we investigated the potential of identifying such primitives using an action segmentation task. Specifically, we investigated whether or not segmentation was driven primarily by the kinematics of the action, as opposed to high-level top-down information about the action and the object used in the action. Participants in the experiment were shown 12 point-light movies of object-centered hand/arm actions that were either presented in their canonical orientation together with the object in question (top-down condition) or upside down (inverted) without information about the object (bottom-up condition). The results show that (1) despite impaired high-level action recognition for the inverted actions participants were able to reliably segment the actions according to lower-level kinematic variables, (2) segmentation behavior in both groups was significantly related to the kinematic variables of change in direction, velocity, and acceleration of the wrist (thumb and finger tips) for most of the included actions. This indicates that top-down activation of an action representation leads to similar segmentation behavior for hand/arm actions compared to bottom-up, or local, visual processing when performing a fairly unconstrained segmentation task. Motor primitives as parts of more complex actions may therefore be reliably derived through visual segmentation based on movement kinematics.
Robots, in particular humanoid (service) robots, are artificial systems which can reasonably be e... more Robots, in particular humanoid (service) robots, are artificial systems which can reasonably be expected to interact with non-expert humans in their application domains. The onus therefore has to be on the design of the robot to
Lexicalization of natural actions and cross-linguistic
Previous findings from studies of biological motion perception suggest that access to stored high... more Previous findings from studies of biological motion perception suggest that access to stored high-level knowledge about action categories contributes to the fast identification of actions depicted in point-light displays of biological motion. Three priming experiments were conducted to investigate the automatic access to stored categorical level information in the visual processing of biological motion and the extent to which this access varies as a function of action orientation. The results show that activation of categorical level information occurs even when participants are given a task that does not require access to the categorical nature of the actions depicted in point-light displays. The results suggest that the visual processing of upright actions is indicative of Hochstein and Ahissar’s notion of vision at a glance, whereas inverted actions indicate vision with scrutiny. [Key words: visual processing, biological motion, view-dependence, conceptual knowledge]
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
The affective motion of humans conveys messages that other humans perceive and understand without... more The affective motion of humans conveys messages that other humans perceive and understand without conventional linguistic processing. This ability to classify human movement into meaningful gestures or segments plays also a critical role in creating social interaction between humans and robots. In the research presented here, grasping and social gesture recognition by humans and four machine learning techniques (k-Nearest Neighbor, Locality-Sensitive Hashing Forest, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine) is assessed by using human classification data as a reference for evaluating the classification performance of machine learning techniques for thirty hand/arm gestures. The gestures are rated according to the extent of grasping motion on one task and the extent to which the same gestures are perceived as social according to another task. The results indicate that humans clearly rate differently according to the two different tasks. The machine learning techniques provide a simila...
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour
Driver adherence to recommendations from support systems improves if the systems explain why they... more Driver adherence to recommendations from support systems improves if the systems explain why they are given: a simulator study Thill, S
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour
Driver adherence to recommendations from support systems improves if the systems explain why they... more Driver adherence to recommendations from support systems improves if the systems explain why they are given: a simulator study Thill, S
Previous findings from studies of biological motion perception suggest that access to stored high... more Previous findings from studies of biological motion perception suggest that access to stored high-level knowledge about action categories contributes to the fast identification of actions depicted in point-light displays of biological motion. Three priming experiments were conducted to investigate the automatic access to stored categorical level information in the visual processing of biological motion and the extent to which this access varies as a function of action orientation. The results show that activation of categorical level information occurs even when participants are given a task that does not require access to the categorical nature of the actions depicted in point-light displays. The results suggest that the visual processing of upright actions is indicative of Hochstein and Ahissar's notion of vision at a glance, whereas inverted actions indicate vision with scrutiny.
Lund University Cognitive Studies, 2008
Action categories constitute a domain of categoriza-tion that has received relatively little atte... more Action categories constitute a domain of categoriza-tion that has received relatively little attention in studies of categorization. Not only do we have the ability to see certain things as cups, cars, trees or dogs, for example, but we can also recognize patterns of movement as running, walking, kicking or jumping. In addition to having categories for objects, a significant aspect of daily activity is perceiving and categorizing the actions of other individuals. Further-more, given the cognitive primacy of basic-level categories and the significant role perception plays in the formation of such categories (e. g., Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson and Boyes-Braem, 1976a), it may very well be the case that basic-level perceptual criteria can be applied to, at least, a somewhat limited domain of action categories.
Acta Psychologica, 1996
Swedish and English (American) speaking subjects were given a superordinate description for a gen... more Swedish and English (American) speaking subjects were given a superordinate description for a general class of actions that depict bodily movement. Based on a listing task similar to the one used in , the subjects were instructed to list all the actions that conformed to the superordinate. The results of the task indicate graded structure for the superordinate category as well as hierarchical relations between a basic and subordinate level as shown by measures of response frequencies and mean ordinal positions. These measures also correlated highly between the Swedish and American samples for the most frequently listed verbs, indicating a strong degree of cross-cultural stability. In an additional test of this stability, the ordinal positions of the verbs were used as proximity data in multidimensional scaling analyses in order to obtain a measure of the semantic distance between the different verbs. A correlation between the Swedish and American samples, using the derived distances for all possible pairs of the verbs, revealed a significant degree of stability. Furthermore, groupings of locomotory and vocal actions in the 3-dimensional multidimensional scaling solutions showed a tendency towards a much stronger stability. A speculative account of these results is proposed in terms of the physical constraints in human motion and the frequency of performing or seeing others perform actions around us.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012
2015 International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2015
The work presented in this paper builds on previous research which analysed human action segmenta... more The work presented in this paper builds on previous research which analysed human action segmentation in the case of simple object manipulations with the hand (rather than larger-scale actions). When designing algorithms to segment observed actions, for instance to train robots by imitation, the typical approach involves non-linear models but it is less clear whether human action segmentation is also based on such analyses. In the present paper, we therefore explore (1) whether linear models built from observed kinematic variables of a human hand can accurately predict human action segmentation and what kinematic variables are the most important in such a task. In previous work, we recorded speed, acceleration and change in direction for the wrist and the tip of each of the five fingers during the execution of actions as well as the segmentation of these actions into individual components by humans. Here, we use this data to train a large number of models based on every possible training set available and find that, amongst others, the speed of the wrist as well as the change in direction of the index finger were preferred in models with good performance. Overall, the best models achieved R 2 values over 0.5 on novel test data but the average performance of trained models was modest. We suggest that this is due to a suboptimal training set (which was not specifically designed for the present task) and that further work be carried out to identify better training sets as our initial results indicate that linear models may indeed be a viable approach to predicting human action segmentation.
2014 IEEE International Inter-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA), 2014
This article is part of the Proceedings of the 6th Annual International Cycling Safety Conference... more This article is part of the Proceedings of the 6th Annual International Cycling Safety Conference held in Davis, California, USA on September 20th through 23rd in the year 2017.<br><br>Paper ID: 99
Frontiers in Psychology, 2011
The purpose of the present experiment is to further understand the effect of levels of processing... more The purpose of the present experiment is to further understand the effect of levels of processing (top-down vs. bottom-up) on the perception of movement kinematics and primitives for grasping actions in order to gain insight into possible primitives used by the mirror system. In the present study, we investigated the potential of identifying such primitives using an action segmentation task. Specifically, we investigated whether or not segmentation was driven primarily by the kinematics of the action, as opposed to high-level top-down information about the action and the object used in the action. Participants in the experiment were shown 12 point-light movies of object-centered hand/arm actions that were either presented in their canonical orientation together with the object in question (top-down condition) or upside down (inverted) without information about the object (bottom-up condition). The results show that (1) despite impaired high-level action recognition for the inverted actions participants were able to reliably segment the actions according to lower-level kinematic variables, (2) segmentation behavior in both groups was significantly related to the kinematic variables of change in direction, velocity, and acceleration of the wrist (thumb and finger tips) for most of the included actions. This indicates that top-down activation of an action representation leads to similar segmentation behavior for hand/arm actions compared to bottom-up, or local, visual processing when performing a fairly unconstrained segmentation task. Motor primitives as parts of more complex actions may therefore be reliably derived through visual segmentation based on movement kinematics.
Robots, in particular humanoid (service) robots, are artificial systems which can reasonably be e... more Robots, in particular humanoid (service) robots, are artificial systems which can reasonably be expected to interact with non-expert humans in their application domains. The onus therefore has to be on the design of the robot to
Lexicalization of natural actions and cross-linguistic
Previous findings from studies of biological motion perception suggest that access to stored high... more Previous findings from studies of biological motion perception suggest that access to stored high-level knowledge about action categories contributes to the fast identification of actions depicted in point-light displays of biological motion. Three priming experiments were conducted to investigate the automatic access to stored categorical level information in the visual processing of biological motion and the extent to which this access varies as a function of action orientation. The results show that activation of categorical level information occurs even when participants are given a task that does not require access to the categorical nature of the actions depicted in point-light displays. The results suggest that the visual processing of upright actions is indicative of Hochstein and Ahissar’s notion of vision at a glance, whereas inverted actions indicate vision with scrutiny. [Key words: visual processing, biological motion, view-dependence, conceptual knowledge]
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
The affective motion of humans conveys messages that other humans perceive and understand without... more The affective motion of humans conveys messages that other humans perceive and understand without conventional linguistic processing. This ability to classify human movement into meaningful gestures or segments plays also a critical role in creating social interaction between humans and robots. In the research presented here, grasping and social gesture recognition by humans and four machine learning techniques (k-Nearest Neighbor, Locality-Sensitive Hashing Forest, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine) is assessed by using human classification data as a reference for evaluating the classification performance of machine learning techniques for thirty hand/arm gestures. The gestures are rated according to the extent of grasping motion on one task and the extent to which the same gestures are perceived as social according to another task. The results indicate that humans clearly rate differently according to the two different tasks. The machine learning techniques provide a simila...
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour
Driver adherence to recommendations from support systems improves if the systems explain why they... more Driver adherence to recommendations from support systems improves if the systems explain why they are given: a simulator study Thill, S
Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour
Driver adherence to recommendations from support systems improves if the systems explain why they... more Driver adherence to recommendations from support systems improves if the systems explain why they are given: a simulator study Thill, S
Previous findings from studies of biological motion perception suggest that access to stored high... more Previous findings from studies of biological motion perception suggest that access to stored high-level knowledge about action categories contributes to the fast identification of actions depicted in point-light displays of biological motion. Three priming experiments were conducted to investigate the automatic access to stored categorical level information in the visual processing of biological motion and the extent to which this access varies as a function of action orientation. The results show that activation of categorical level information occurs even when participants are given a task that does not require access to the categorical nature of the actions depicted in point-light displays. The results suggest that the visual processing of upright actions is indicative of Hochstein and Ahissar's notion of vision at a glance, whereas inverted actions indicate vision with scrutiny.
Lund University Cognitive Studies, 2008
Action categories constitute a domain of categoriza-tion that has received relatively little atte... more Action categories constitute a domain of categoriza-tion that has received relatively little attention in studies of categorization. Not only do we have the ability to see certain things as cups, cars, trees or dogs, for example, but we can also recognize patterns of movement as running, walking, kicking or jumping. In addition to having categories for objects, a significant aspect of daily activity is perceiving and categorizing the actions of other individuals. Further-more, given the cognitive primacy of basic-level categories and the significant role perception plays in the formation of such categories (e. g., Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson and Boyes-Braem, 1976a), it may very well be the case that basic-level perceptual criteria can be applied to, at least, a somewhat limited domain of action categories.
Acta Psychologica, 1996
Swedish and English (American) speaking subjects were given a superordinate description for a gen... more Swedish and English (American) speaking subjects were given a superordinate description for a general class of actions that depict bodily movement. Based on a listing task similar to the one used in , the subjects were instructed to list all the actions that conformed to the superordinate. The results of the task indicate graded structure for the superordinate category as well as hierarchical relations between a basic and subordinate level as shown by measures of response frequencies and mean ordinal positions. These measures also correlated highly between the Swedish and American samples for the most frequently listed verbs, indicating a strong degree of cross-cultural stability. In an additional test of this stability, the ordinal positions of the verbs were used as proximity data in multidimensional scaling analyses in order to obtain a measure of the semantic distance between the different verbs. A correlation between the Swedish and American samples, using the derived distances for all possible pairs of the verbs, revealed a significant degree of stability. Furthermore, groupings of locomotory and vocal actions in the 3-dimensional multidimensional scaling solutions showed a tendency towards a much stronger stability. A speculative account of these results is proposed in terms of the physical constraints in human motion and the frequency of performing or seeing others perform actions around us.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012
2015 International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2015
The work presented in this paper builds on previous research which analysed human action segmenta... more The work presented in this paper builds on previous research which analysed human action segmentation in the case of simple object manipulations with the hand (rather than larger-scale actions). When designing algorithms to segment observed actions, for instance to train robots by imitation, the typical approach involves non-linear models but it is less clear whether human action segmentation is also based on such analyses. In the present paper, we therefore explore (1) whether linear models built from observed kinematic variables of a human hand can accurately predict human action segmentation and what kinematic variables are the most important in such a task. In previous work, we recorded speed, acceleration and change in direction for the wrist and the tip of each of the five fingers during the execution of actions as well as the segmentation of these actions into individual components by humans. Here, we use this data to train a large number of models based on every possible training set available and find that, amongst others, the speed of the wrist as well as the change in direction of the index finger were preferred in models with good performance. Overall, the best models achieved R 2 values over 0.5 on novel test data but the average performance of trained models was modest. We suggest that this is due to a suboptimal training set (which was not specifically designed for the present task) and that further work be carried out to identify better training sets as our initial results indicate that linear models may indeed be a viable approach to predicting human action segmentation.
2014 IEEE International Inter-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA), 2014