Project NEMO: Working Towards Empathy-

enabling Digital Environments

@katrisaarikiviPresented at the Digital International Collaboration in Education seminar arranged by the Finnish Ministry

of Education and Culture on May 26th

1. The importance of collaboration and collective intelligence

2. The neuroscientific perspective to empathy and interaction

3. Collaboration and empathy in the digital realm?

1. The importance of collaboration and collective intelligence

2. The neuroscientific perspective to empathy and interaction

3. Collaboration and empathy in the digital realm?

People come together to survive and flourish.

The ability to collaborate has always been important for the human species, it is important now, and in the future, its

importance will only increase.

Zaki & Ochsner (2012) “Compared to other animals, humans are slow, small, and weak” Evolution may have favored the skills that permit cooperation.

For humans, collaboration has been a survival skill

By Mariano - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=265811

By NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA (Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Together is how we continue to attain the greatest things and solve the biggest problems.

In the future, the importance of skills for collaboration will only increase.

In the future, people will focus on tasks in which we are better than

the "robot".

These tasks require skills in which human intelligence still surpasses the artifical. The most important of these is empathy.

Collective intelligence also happens to be our best shot at solving the big problems we are

facing in this time.

By No machine-readable author provided. Mbz1 assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2388690

Yes, really

Collective intelligence best explains a team’s problem-solving capability.

How does collective intelligence emerge?

"The key to high performance lay not in the content of a team’s discussions but in the manner in which it was

communicating."Pentland, A., https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams

• Short speeches, no monologues

• Empathy (the Reading the mind in the eyes test)

• Responsiveness towards others

• Everyone gets a turn to speak

1. The importance of collaboration and collective intelligence

2. The neuroscientific perspective to empathy and interaction

3. Collaboration and empathy in the digital realm?

EMOTIONS

THOUGHTS

ACTIONS

Zaki & Ochsner, 2012

We are all mentalists

Emotions are highly contagious

Humans are altruistic by

nature

Things that increase empathy

• Reading literary fiction (Kidd et al., 2013)• Playing Rock Band together (Martin et al., 2015)• Moving together in synchrony:

bouncing (Cirelli et al., 2014)clapping (Hove et al., 2013)

rocking in rocking chairs (Valdesolo et al., 2010)

The two-brain perspective“Cognition materializes in interpersonal space”

• The greater the extent of neural coupling between a speaker and listener, the better the understanding. Stephens et al., 2010

• Rhythmic activity of brains synchronizes during interaction. Dumas et al., 2010; Müller et al., 2013

1. The importance of collaboration and collective intelligence

2. The neuroscientific perspective to empathy and interaction

3. Collaboration and empathy in the digital realm?

We are living in a connected world.

The internet carries within it a promise of the possibility for global

collective intelligence.

But does collective intelligence emerge online? Could it happen more?

Collective intelligence does emerge online.

And there too, empathy supports it’s emergence.

There’s just one problem…

Empathy is weaker online than in face-to-face situations.

Why?

Because digital systems are not designed to take human emotions into consideration.

As a result, the tools we have for expressing our emotions are severely lacking in quality.

And when emotional information is not transmitted, it does not touch us.

Without these signals, it becomes easy to misunderstand, and even mistreat others.

Our project NEMO focuses on creating new, better ways of transferring emotion information online and

on seeking other ways to support better online interaction and the emergence of collective

intelligence.

The project combines • basic research• content development together with professionals

working in children’s media (the kids’ show Pikku Kakkonen in Finland)

• arranging hackathons (Emotion Hack Day) bringing scientists and developers together to create and try out quick solutions and applications

Research questions include:• What is the significance of inter-brain synchronization for joint

learning or problem-solving?• What is the role of emotional states in the emergence of this

synchronization?• Does synchronization of the brain’s oscillatory activity happen

online?• If not, could we make it happen? • Could we create emotion contagion online by acquiring emotion-

related information with sensor technology / computer vision algorithms?

• Could a better sense of shared context e.g. in video conferencing situations increase emotion contagion / inter-brain synchronization and support joint problem-solving capability?

katri.saarikivi@helsinki.fi @NEMO_hki Team NEMO

emotionhackday.com @emotionhackday