School of Liberal Arts

This paper seeks to argue that advances in the study of freewill and responsibility are directly relevant to jurisprudence. Following Daniel Dennett attempts to discredit the existence of freewill with the help of experiments can be checked by arguing that freedom should be understood as something that has evolved over time rather than being a pre-existent feature of our species. The major function served by freedom is to ensure responsibility for actions. This understanding of freedom as something that evolved to enhance responsibility suggests that freedom can be developed further. This can be understood as enhancing the ability to follow social norms by overcoming factors that limit responsibility. Jurisprudence has to take into account the ability to follow norms as a variable, even within the category of adults, and treat violations accordingly. Further, efforts to enhance the capacity to be free from habitual reactions need to be made part of education, and the state has to focus on this aspect without which the task of ensuring adherence to law of citizens will remain incomplete.

Purpose: This study examines information processing during consumer decision making on online platforms as influenced by gender differences and psychological tendencies. Further exploration is ‘how much information is too much information; leading to infobesity.’ Methodology: The methodology to address the objective included the questionnaires for assessment of psychological tendencies and naturalistic experiments to measure decision making in online conditions. An online marketplace prototype was created for mobile purchase, named ‘mobile bazaar,’ and another for hotel booking, named ‘backpackers.’ The prototype was designed in such a way that the manipulation of information presented to the participant is possible. Participants were recruited with purposive and snowball sampling method depending upon their willingness and familiarity with online market platforms. Final data were collected from Three hundred sixty-eight participants during the period of October 2017-March 2018. The data from questionnaires and the computerized task was scored and analyzed with SPSS version 21 with t-test, chi-square and logistic regression analysis methods. Main findings: The present study shows the influence of psychological tendencies (i.e., need for closure, exploratory tendencies, and uncertainty avoidance) and gender difference in decision making. Female seems to follow ‘process less to process better’ strategy, whereas, men seem to follow ‘process more to get better’ strategy. The findings also provided input to the debate of information measurement in consumer research. Implications: Understanding decision making features of Indian consumers can not only contribute to the understanding of the naturalistic decision-making process itself but also can provide inputs to the market researchers, designers, and policymakers. Novelty /originality of the study: The study was novel in terms of its use of the online marketplace prototype as a naturalistic decision making study method. This method allowed the researchers to examine participants' behavior (of information processing and decision making) in real like scenarios and yet had the luxury of manipulation of presenting information as per research design. Therefore the findings of present study will have more generalizability.

Subject identification is essential in smart environments. Identification of differently disguised human subjects through visual surveillance methods is extremely challenging. Subject may use various artifacts to defy methods based on body shape and size matching. The radio imaging through wireless sensing is ubiquitous, device-free and privacy-preserving. This paper is based on our observation when a subject is placed in-between the line-of-sight of a closely placed pair of wireless nodes. A radio shadow is observed at the receiver due to interaction of the subject with signals. We observed that the subject can be identified by comprehensive analysis of the received radio shadow and its derivative signatures. Wi-Bioscan is the first ever system to find uniqueness among human radio shadows to identify the subject even if it is disguised in four different ways. During our investigation, we evaluated Wi-BioScan system for different indoor/outdoor locations. System is ubiquitous and scalable due to its feature of location independence and generation of a rich template. The method is also robust against surrounding dynamics such as other human presence and object movements.

The idea of the self plays a pivotal role in human life. The most common way of conceptualizing the self may be called the free-floating or separative self. This amounts to treating the self as something away from the web of life and as something in need of protection and aggrandizement. Another major characteristic of the free-floating self is the belief in free will. There have been many studies questioning the empirical validity of free will, and this takes cudgels against the free-floating self-conception also. Even though some traits associated with this kind of self-conception might have had evolutionary advantages, it is not difficult to see that the moorings of many human problems can be traced to the separative self-conception. Therefore, efforts need to be made to develop an alternate way of understanding the self. It is contended in this chapter that the conception of the free-floating self is primarily a case of gut feeling of certainty and our present environment is conducive to overcome this inveterate way of understanding ourselves.

Embodied approach to cognition has taken roots in cognitive studies with developments in diverse fields such as robotics, artificial life and cognitive linguistics. Taking cue from the metaphor of a Watt governor, this approach stresses on the coupling between the organism and the environment and the continuous nature of the cognitive processes. This results in questioning the viability of computational–representational understanding of mind as a comprehensive theory of cognition. The paper, after giving an overview of embodied approach based on some examples from conceptual metaphor theory, looks into a special case of Orwell’s problem in cognitive science. The problem is that there is so much evidence for embodiment to be true, yet there is little understanding of the same. I shall try to solve this problem by pointing out that it is our inveterate habits of perceiving ourselves that makes the embodied approach appear implausible. Studies on free will as well as the importance of the unconscious in overall cognitive processing raise challenging questions on our self-conception. A revision in the self-conception in the light of these findings will pave the way for a better appreciation of the embodied approach to cognition.

Falls have always been source of injuries and fatalities. There can be various reasons for falls from medical conditions to loss of balance. Fall detection in the labs is based on video recordings while ubiquitous methods utilize inertial sensors. These methods require a lot of data processing consequently much power is utilized. In this paper, we propose a fall detection method which does not require inertial sensing nodes thus reduces computation and power requirements. Previous methods have either used received signal strength as monitoring parameter which is quite unstable or uses ambient monitoring points sensing through which remains disturbed by environmental noise and obstacles. We are proposing a novel ubiquitous wireless nodes deployment on the subject's body to minimize noise interferences. Fall has been detected using wireless sensing physical layer channel state information (CSI). The human body acts as an obstacle for the wireless signals generating unique signature with respect to the activity performed which can be estimated using CSI. This CSI information is available in new 802.11n WLAN NICs. We argue that this signature should be best observed when both the sender and receiver nodes are deployed on the body due to minimum environmental interference. We have trained the system to identify these signatures and detect falls. We have also been able to differentiate falls from fall like activities such as squatting and sitting on chair with sufficient accuracy.

Trust plays a crucial role in establishing and retaining relationships. Sociopsychological analysis identifies three major constructs, such as ability, benevolence and integrity, upon which trust is being built up. On a similar note, in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), it is indispensable to have trust among nodes since nodes collectively sense physical parameters and send them to the base station. The nodes, however, can behave fraudulently and send bad information, mostly due to hardware and software faults. Taking inspiration from the sociopsychological account, the present paper introduces a novel model for computing trust of sensor nodes. Additionally, the immune inspired model is suggested for removing fraudulent nodes whose trust ratings fall below the threshold. Roles of the three factors, viz. ability, benevolence and integrity, are examined in WSN domain. The proposed model proves itself to be more advantageous than other methods that adopt machine learning and neural network models in performance metrics such as detection time, reliability, scalability, efficiency and complexity. Proposed work has been implemented on LabVIEW platform and the results substantiate the reliability of the proposed mathematical model.

A major stumbling block in understanding the full significance of embodiment is the reflexive self-conception characterised by free-floating nature. The paper, in the initial sections, looks into the sensory motor approach to phenomenal consciousness and the approach to the study of vision where the world is treated as an external memory. Subsequently, the paper argues that the difficulty in exploring the sensory motor approach to phenomenal consciousness stems from the free-floating self-conception humans is endowed with. The assumption that experiences are internal can make us closed to the role external factors play in constituting experience.  Accordingly, a revision in the self-conception carries the possibility of conceptualising experience in a different manner.

Purpose: The paper seeks to explore the interrelation among the phenomena of wandering mind, free-floating self and intuitive dualism. Further, the paper aims at looking at the possibility of revising the self-conception by changing the wandering nature of mind. Method: The paper proceeds by demonstrating the existence of the wandering mind and the presence of a particular kind of reflexive self-conception and then contends that reflexive self-conception, characterised in terms of free-floating nature of the self, can be understood to be the result of intuitive dualism along with the wandering mind. Result and Discussion: The relationship between wandering mind and reflexive self-conception brings out the possibility of revising the reflexive self-conception through practices such as mindfulness because it opens ways to reflexively realise embodiment and reduces the wandering nature of mind. This can possibly give rise to a different kind of self-conception that is more holistic in outlook and is less separative or free-floating.

Perpetrators of infidelity have to deal with the consequences of their actions, guilt, and regret being a few out of the many. Differences in these outcomes could be based on the kind of infidelity (emotional or sexual) they were involved in and the process of infidelity (spontaneous or planned) they have gone through. To explore the difference, the present study collected data on 196 adults (male = 97, female = 99; Mage= 24.54 years) who had cheated on their romantic partners. Out of the total, 136 participants were involved in self-reported sexual infidelity, and 60 participants were involved in emotional infidelity; 147 participants reported spontaneous infidelity and only 49 participants reported that the process was planned. Results showed that the process of infidelity (spontaneous/planned) significantly affects post-infidelity guilt. However, no role of type of infidelity (emotional/sexual) was found. Furthermore, results showed a significant interaction effect between the type and the process of infidelity on guilt and regret. Sexual-spontaneous infidelity provoked the highest guilt and regret, whereas sexual-planned infidelity led to the slightest guilt and regret. The findings that the emotional consequences of infidelity depend on its nature will help in understanding the aftermaths of infidelity and could apply to helping the perpetrators.