Thursday Things: Googly Eyes Edition

13 October 2022. Vol 4 No 41 By Dan McGirt. #166

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Gratuitous dog wearing googly eyes image. Photo by Jane Almon on Unsplash

Googly Eyes Make Everything Better

Let’s get to it — autonomous cars are scary for many reasons, one of which is not knowing if they will stop for pedestrians crossing the street. Granted, they probably do a better job at that than human drivers. But who knows what kind of “trolley problem” algorithm the AI driving the car is running? Also when the machine uprising begins those fleets of self-driving taxis will become self-driving death machines for anyone caught outside.

But until that happens, we still have the problem of judging whether it is safe to cross the street when confronted with a self-driving car. Even if you’ve got the walk signal, assuming there is one, you still have to decide whether an oncoming car is going to yield. If there is a human driver you can judge whether the driver has seen you and is planning to stop.¹ In part we do that by making eye contact with the driver, or assessing where the driver is looking.

But what if it’s a robot car? How do you know if the AI sees you? How do you know if it’s going to stop?

Googly eyes to the rescue!

Googly eyes on self-driving cars reduce accidents, study claims

Self-driving cars fitted with large animated eyes could prevent road accidents, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University in Japan attached robotic eyes to the front of a golf cart in order to test whether pedestrians made safer decisions when crossing the road.

The manually-controlled eyes were designed to indicate whether or not the autonomous system had registered the presence of the pedestrian, and therefore was slowing down or stopping.

Gizmodo also has the story at Animated Googly Eyes Could Make Autonomous Cars Safer For Pedestrians

Long story short, researchers found that the googly eyes were an effective means of conveying to pedestrians whether the car had registered their presence, thus informing their street-crossing decisions.

“The results showed that the eyes can reduce potential traffic accidents and that gaze direction can increase pedestrians’ subjective feelings of safety and danger.”

The idea was to create an artificial replacement for eye contact, which can be a crucial means of communication between drivers and pedestrians when avoiding potentially dangerous situations.

Naturally this research was conducted in Japan, because where else but the in home of absurdly large-eyed anime characters would they think to put googly eyes on cars?²

The experiment also revealed this gem of a finding:

The researchers were surprised to find that male participants tended to make more dangerous decisions about crossing the road, choosing to cross when the cart made no indication it was going to stop, while female participants erred on the side of caution, often choosing not to cross when the cart was actually coming to a stop.

Japanese researchers are touchingly naïve. How on earth is this a surprise?

Anyway, we can all rest easy now knowing that the self-driving cars can see us and maybe, just maybe, that eye contact will make them hesitate to run us down without mercy or remorse when the robot revolution arrives.

Okay, I’ll quit talking and just show you the googly-eyed cars already:

You can find the research paper here: Can Eyes on a Car Reduce Traffic Accidents?

Paging Mrs. Frisby

Do you remember Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH? This was a beloved children’s book published in 1971. It won several awards, including the Newbery Medal. I don’t know if kids still read it today, but it was popular when I was a child because it was full of talking animals, including superintelligent rats who had escaped from the laboratories of NIMH.

I’ll admit, that as a grade school reader I had no idea that NIMH was the National Institute of Mental Health or that the book was inspired by decades of research done there on rat and mouse population dynamics. I thought it was some made up magical place like Narnia, but for rats.

NIMH was real, however. And the charming story for children about Mrs. Frisby, a mouse, seeking the aid of the intelligent rats to help her move her home out of the way of impending destruction by the farmer’s plow was also a parable about ethics in medical research and 1970s anxieties about technological development. That went over my young head, however, because talking animals!

It also seems to have gone over the heads of today’s scientists. Because someone thought this was a good idea:

Scientists grow human brain cells in rats to study diseases

Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.

What?

The research builds upon the team’s previous work creating brain “organoids,” tiny structures resembling human organs that have also been made to represent others such as livers, kidneys, prostates, or key parts of them.

Sounds very Dr. Frankenstein. Tiny organs in petri dishes. But surely you wouldn’t make a brain in a jar?

To make the brain organoids, Stanford University scientists transformed human skin cells into stem cells and then coaxed them to become several types of brain cells. Those cells then multiplied to form organoids resembling the cerebral cortex, the human brain’s outermost layer, which plays a key role in things like memory, thinking, learning, reasoning and emotions.

They made a brain in a jar. Or a brainoid. Either way.

Hey! I know! Let’s implant these human brainoids in rats!

Scientists transplanted those organoids into rat pups 2 to 3 days old, a stage when brain connections are still forming. The organoids grew so that they eventually occupied a third of the hemisphere of the rat’s brain where they were implanted. Neurons from the organoids formed working connections with circuits in the brain.

Because what could possibly go wrong? It’s not like rat with human brain cells occupying a third of their brains would ever figure out how to escape their cages, disappear into the sewers, form an advanced technological society underground, and then declare war on humanity in retaliation for our centuries of exterminating rats and / or using them as literal lab rats in our scientific experiments.

That won’t happen.

Right?

“Soon, humans. Soon.” Photo by slyfox photography on Unsplash

Feeling the Music

How does music affect you? People experience music in different ways and with different levels of intensity. Some of us feel the need to have music playing all the time, like a perpetual music soundtrack for our lives. Which, in an age of mobile phones, streaming services, and Bluetooth headsets, is entirely doable. Others, like me, are just as content, if not more so, with silence or simply hearing the ambient background noise of the world.

We choose music to reflect our mood, or to change it. But just what determines why music affects different people differently? Researchers have ideas!

Can you ‘feel’ the music? You’re probably an empathetic person

Kind of a spoiler headline there, Psyche. But here’s the gist:

Most people don’t often think about the relationship between empathy and musical experiences, but there is good reason to. Scholars have long speculated that music and empathy have a similar function in human social evolution, and that they might have arisen through similar (if not the same) neurocognitive architecture that evolved to bring people together. Indeed, music is often thought of as a form of social communication, as evidenced by its involvement in every human culture throughout known human history. Accounting for the relationship between empathy and the experience of music could have major implications for how we understand the function of music in our world, and possibly in our evolutionary past. And if social empathy (feeling or inferring another person’s emotions in interpersonal interactions) is closely related to musical empathy (feeling or inferring emotions communicated via music), then the deliberate modulation of one may affect the other.

Deep stuff. Psychologists did some experiments to measure “empathic accuracy” (which honestly sounds like a D&D character stat, but is apparently a real thing) of test subjects exposed various kinds of music — happy, sad, angry. (You can listen to clips of the music used in the experiment if you click over to the full article.)

The researchers found “that people who more accurately understood the emotional states of others when watching them speak, and those who felt more in tune with them, also tended to show more empathic accuracy and affect sharing, respectively, when listening to musical performances.”

So there does seem to be a link between empathy and how one responds to music, which has all sorts of interesting implications for neuroscientists, psychologists, musicians, and you, the listener at home.

Of course, further research is needed, such as “examining whether there is overlapping neural activation in brain regions that are engaged when empathising with people and with music.” Yeah, get on that, scientific researchers.

You can find the underlying research report here: Initial evidence for a relation between behaviorally assessed empathic accuracy and affect sharing for people and music.

Thank you for reading!

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1. Well, assuming you’re paying attention at all and aren’t looking down at your phone while you cross the street. But that’s a whole other topic.

2. Disney, that’s where.