ASU Scholarship Showcase

Human team members show a remarkable ability to infer the state of their partners and anticipate their needs and actions. Prior research demonstrates that an artificial system can make some predictions accurately concerning artificial agents. This study investigated whether an artificial system could generate a robust Theory of Mind of human teammates. An urban search and rescue (USAR) task environment was developed to elicit human teamwork and evaluate inference and prediction about team members by software agents and humans. The task varied team members’ roles and skills, types of task synchronization and interdependence, task risk and reward, completeness of mission planning, and information asymmetry. The task was implemented in MinecraftTM and applied in a study of 64 teams, each with three remotely distributed members. An evaluation of six Artificial Social Intelligences (ASI) and several human observers addressed the accuracy with which each predicted team performance, inferred experimentally manipulated knowledge of team members, and predicted member actions. All agents performed above chance; humans slightly outperformed ASI agents on some tasks and significantly outperformed ASI agents on others; no one ASI agent reliably outperformed the others; and the accuracy of ASI agents and human observers improved rapidly though modestly during the brief trials.

The current study examined heterogeneity in emerging adult children's routine and self-disclosure to parents using mixture modeling and explored predictors and outcomes associated with the patterns of disclosure. Participants consisted of 449 emerging adults (49% male, 68% European American, 65% college students, 33% single-parent families) who completed questionnaires every year across three waves (Mage at Time 1 = 18.4 years). Latent profile analyses suggested that large groups of emerging adults reported moderate levels of routine disclosure and low levels of self-disclosure to both mothers (79%) and fathers (36%), while other groups (20%) reported high levels of routine and self-disclosure to both parents. Profile membership was associated with predictors (parental autonomy granting, self-disclosure to friend, gender, family structure, college attendance) at Time 1 and outcomes (delinquency, depression, and prosocial behavior) at Time 3. Implications regarding the continued parent-child relationship and disclosure to parents in the third decade of life are discussed.