Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing

Social cognition focuses on how people process store and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions. On the other hand the term cognitive computing is generally used to refer to new hardware and/or software that mimics the functioning of the human brain and helps to improve human decision-making. In this sense it is a type of computing with the goal of discovering more accurate models of how the human brain/mind senses reasons and responds to stimuli. Socio-Cognitive Computing should be understood as a set of theoretical interdisciplinary frameworks methodologies methods and hardware/software tools to model how the human brain mediates social interactions. In addition Affective Computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize interpret process and simulate human affects a fundamental aspect of socio-cognitive neuroscience. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science electrical engineering psychology and cognitive science. Physiological Computing is a category of technology in which electrophysiological data recorded directly from human activity are used to interface with a computing device. This technology becomes even more relevant when computing can be integrated pervasively in everyday life environments. Thus Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing systems should be able to adapt their behavior according to the Physiological Computing paradigm. This book integrates proposals from researchers who use signals from the brain and/or body to infer peoples intentions and psychological state in smart computing systems. The design of this kind of systems combines knowledge and methods of ubiquitous and pervasive computing as well as physiological data measurement and processing with those of socio-cognitive and affective computing.