Dean Petters' Homepage

Much of this research originated in my PhD with Computational modelling of Infant Secure-base behaviour using Autonomous and Multi-agent systems I did my PhD in Cognitive Science under the supervision of Aaron Sloman (Professor of Cognitive Science). My PhD research was multidisciplinary, using software agents to do psychological research. Since it involved no empirical studying of real humans it was a kind of theoretical psychology. It involved designing and building agents which attempted to capture aspects of: infant secure-base behaviour; and individual differences in infant-carer attachment relationships. Since finishing my PhD I have continued this line of research and extended it. I have considered alternative information processing approaches for modeling attachment phenomena and also assessed the prospects for attachment relationships between humans and artefacts designed to attach to humans.

Future aims:

to develop a diverse set of simulations which possess control states that are functionally equivalent to emotional or other kinds of control states that are believed to exist in human adults.
port a subset of the sim-agent toolkit to the Java programming language so that the simulations become more accessible to researchers outside of the AI community.
attempt to capture in agent-based simulations other interesting behavioural phenomena seen in the first year of life. This might include extending my current simulations or using alternative cognitive architectures and toolkits for cognitive modelling
to develop the attachment scenarios from my PhD to incorporate more complex naturalistic secure base behaviours;

Research in HCI

I am currently employed as a Post Doctoral Fellow on the NEXT-TELL research project. I will be involved in creating systems that model student learning, and allow these learner models to be 'opened'. Open Learner Models allow students, teachers and others access to these models so that the models can be changed through negotiation or the learner model can feedback to teaching practice. My role is also concerned with designing and implementing visualisations for interaction patterns that occur during learning activities. These visualisations must provide useable information for teachers as well as researchers.

I am collaborating with Prof Everett Waters and Dr Felix Schönbrodt, on research which assesses the possibility of creating robots or other artefacts which are designed to form attachment relationships with humans.

Selected publication:

D. Petters, E. Waters, and F. Schönbrodt, (2010). Strange Carers: Robots as Attachment Figures and Aids to Parenting. Interaction Studies: Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems. 11:2, 246-252.
(Preprint of target article: Sharkey, N., and Sharkey, A. The crying shame of robot nannies: an ethical appraisal. can be downloaded from here )

In a project at the University of Birmingham I was involved with using Collaborative Virtual Reality Environments to facilitate the development of social competencies in typically developing and autistic children. My contribution to this work involved the construction of behavioural scenarios for activities which would scaffold the learning of social competencies and allow automated assessment of learning progress.

Selected publication:

D. Petters (2009). A task taxonomy for activities to help typically developing and autistic children develop social competencies within Virtual Reality Environments. Presented at Technical Development Workshop (available on request)

Since working as a High School Science Teacher I have been interested in programmed learning; ways to enhance learning using technology; and ways to use technology to develop pedagogy planning.

Selected presentation:

D. Petters (2010). Proposed Plan for the Summative Evaluation of a Technology Enhanced Learning Project

Research in Vision

Visual Object Recognition, Geon Theory

I am currently collaborating with Dr Martin Jüttner (Aston University), Prof Jules Davidoff (Goldsmiths College, University of London). and Prof John Hummel (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on research which I started doing as a Research Fellow in the Cognitive and Perceptual Systems Research Group in the Psychology Department of Aston University.

This research involves investigating how holistic (view-dependent) and configural (view-independent) forms of object recognition develop from age seven through adolescence to adult levels of performance. My part in the project has involved carrying out experiments and running computational simulations. Experiments were designed, implemented, and calibrated with Martin Jüttner at Aston University, and were carried out in primary and secondary schools in the Birmingham and Worcestershire areas. The simulation work is ongoing and has been carried out with John Hummel. It is concerned producing and evaluating an adolescent variant of the geon based JIM3 simulation of object recognition.

I am currently using the Jim3 simulation to model our developmental findings with animal and artefact stimuli. Preliminary results show that weakening Jim3's ability to form metric relations produces a pattern of simulation results similar to that which we found in our empirical testing of adolescents.

Attention

I am interested in how attention can be modelled as an emergent phenomenon, and would like to extend this approach to attention to simulations of object recognition. This would entail showing how of object recognition.

Recent Academic Teaching posts

Home page for Dr Dean Petters

Links to groups and societies I am a member of or associated with

Research in Emotion and Attachment Theory.

Research in HCI

Research in Vision

Visual Object Recognition, Geon Theory

Attention

Recent Academic Teaching posts

Tutoring in Psychology with the Open University

Lecturing in Psychology at Newman University College, 2010-2011

Lecturing in AI and Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham

Bits and pieces to download or view