3,611 research outputs found

    Design of Cognitive Interfaces for Personal Informatics Feedback

    Get PDF

    Social touch in human–computer interaction

    Get PDF
    Touch is our primary non-verbal communication channel for conveying intimate emotions and as such essential for our physical and emotional wellbeing. In our digital age, human social interaction is often mediated. However, even though there is increasing evidence that mediated touch affords affective communication, current communication systems (such as videoconferencing) still do not support communication through the sense of touch. As a result, mediated communication does not provide the intense affective experience of co-located communication. The need for ICT mediated or generated touch as an intuitive way of social communication is even further emphasized by the growing interest in the use of touch-enabled agents and robots for healthcare, teaching, and telepresence applications. Here, we review the important role of social touch in our daily life and the available evidence that affective touch can be mediated reliably between humans and between humans and digital agents. We base our observations on evidence from psychology, computer science, sociology, and neuroscience with focus on the first two. Our review shows that mediated affective touch can modulate physiological responses, increase trust and affection, help to establish bonds between humans and avatars or robots, and initiate pro-social behavior. We argue that ICT mediated or generated social touch can (a) intensify the perceived social presence of remote communication partners and (b) enable computer systems to more effectively convey affective information. However, this research field on the crossroads of ICT and psychology is still embryonic and we identify several topics that can help to mature the field in the following areas: establishing an overarching theoretical framework, employing better research methodologies, developing basic social touch building blocks, and solving specific ICT challenges

    Subtle interactions for distress regulation: efficiency of a haptic wearable according to personality

    Full text link
    The incorporation of empathic systems in everyday life draws a lot of attention from society. Specifically, the use of wearables to perform stress regulation is a growing field of research. Among techniques explored, the haptic emulation of lowered physiological signals has been suggested to be promising. However, some discrepancies remain in empirical research focusing on such biofeedback (BF) regarding their efficacy, and the mechanisms underlying the effects of these wearables remains unclear. Moreover, the influence of individual traits on the efficiency of BF has been marginally studied, while it has been shown that personality could impact both stress and its regulation. The aim of this study is to investigate the outcome of interactions with these technologies from a psycho-physiological standpoint, but also to explore whether personality may influence its efficiency when other interaction devices are present. Participants had to play a challenging game while a lowered haptic BF of their heart rate was induced on their wrist. Results showed variable efficiency of the wearable among the participants: a subjective relaxation was evident for the participants exhibiting the highest neurotic and extraverted traits score. Our results highlight the plurality of the modes of action of these techniques, depending on the individual and on the level of stress to regulate. This study also suggests that tailoring these regulation methods to individual characteristics, such as personality traits, is important to consider, and proposes perspectives regarding the investigation of stress and regulation systems embedded in wearables

    General characteristics of anticipated user experience (AUX) with interactive products

    Get PDF
    Providing a positive user experience (UX) has become the key differentiator for products to win a competition in mature markets. To ensure that a product will support enjoyable experiences for its users, assessment of UX should be conducted early during the design and development process. However, most UX frameworks and evaluation techniques focus on understanding and assessing user’s experience with functional prototypes or existing products. This situation delays UX assessment until the late phases of product development which may result in costly design modifications and less desirable products. A qualitative study was conducted to investigate anticipated user experience (AUX) to address this issue. Twenty pairs of participants were asked to imagine an interactive product, draw their product concept, and anticipate their interactions and experiences with it. The data was analyzed to identify general characteristics of AUX. We found that while positive AUX was mostly related to an imagined/desired product, negative AUX was mainly associated with existing products. It was evident that the pragmatic quality of product was fundamental, and significantly influenced user’s anticipated experiences. Furthermore, the hedonic quality of product received more focus in positive than negative AUX. The results also showed that context, user profile, experiential knowledge, and anticipated emotion could be reflected in AUX. The understanding of AUX will help product designers to better foresee the users’ underlying needs and to focus on the most important aspects of their positive experiences, which in turn facilitates the designers to ensure pleasurable UX from the start of the design process

    Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

    Get PDF
    Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

    Emotional Responses to Multisensory Environmental Stimuli: A Conceptual Framework and Literature Review.

    Get PDF
    How we perceive our environment affects the way we feel and behave. The impressions of our ambient environment are influenced by its entire spectrum of physical characteristics (e.g., luminosity, sound, scents, temperature) in a dynamic and interactive way. The ability to manipulate the sensory aspects of an environment such that people feel comfortable or exhibit a desired behavior is gaining interest and social relevance. Although much is known about the sensory effects of individual environmental characteristics, their combined effects are not a priori evident due to a wide range of non-linear interactions in the processing of sensory cues. As a result, it is currently not known how different environmental characteristics should be combined to effectively induce desired emotional and behavioral effects. To gain more insight into this matter, we performed a literature review on the emotional effects of multisensory stimulation. Although we found some interesting mechanisms, the outcome also reveals that empirical evidence is still scarce and haphazard. To stimulate further discussion and research, we propose a conceptual framework that describes how environmental interventions are likely to affect human emotional responses. This framework leads to some critical research questions that suggest opportunities for further investigation

    Linking pain and the body: neural correlates of visually induced analgesia

    Get PDF
    The visual context of seeing the body can reduce the experience of acute pain, producing a multisensory analgesia. Here we investigated the neural correlates of this “visually induced analgesia” using fMRI. We induced acute pain with an infrared laser while human participants looked either at their stimulated right hand or at another object. Behavioral results confirmed the expected analgesic effect of seeing the body, while fMRI results revealed an associated reduction of laser-induced activity in ipsilateral primary somatosensory cortex (SI) and contralateral operculoinsular cortex during the visual context of seeing the body. We further identified two known cortical networks activated by sensory stimulation: (1) a set of brain areas consistently activated by painful stimuli (the so-called “pain matrix”), and (2) an extensive set of posterior brain areas activated by the visual perception of the body (“visual body network”). Connectivity analyses via psychophysiological interactions revealed that the visual context of seeing the body increased effective connectivity (i.e., functional coupling) between posterior parietal nodes of the visual body network and the purported pain matrix. Increased connectivity with these posterior parietal nodes was seen for several pain-related regions, including somatosensory area SII, anterior and posterior insula, and anterior cingulate cortex. These findings suggest that visually induced analgesia does not involve an overall reduction of the cortical response elicited by laser stimulation, but is consequent to the interplay between the brain's pain network and a posterior network for body perception, resulting in modulation of the experience of pain

    Towards a Novel Generation of Haptic and Robotic Interfaces: Integrating Active Physiology in Human-Robot Interaction

    Get PDF
    Haptic interfaces are special robots that interact with people to convey touch-related information. In addition to such a discriminative aspect, touch is also a highly emotion-related sense. However, while a lot of effort has been spent to investigate the perceptual mechanisms of discriminative touch and to suitably replicate them through haptic systems in human robot interaction (HRI), there is still a lot of work to do in order to take into account also the emotional aspects of tactual experience (i.e., the so-called affective haptics), for a more naturalistic human-robot communication. In this paper, we report evidences on how a haptic device designed to convey caress-like stimuli can influence physiological measures related to the autonomous nervous system (ANS), which is intimately connected to evoked emotions in humans. Specifically, a discriminant role of electrodermal response and heart rate variability can be associated to two different caressing velocities, which can also be linked to two different levels of pleasantness. Finally, we discuss how the results from this study could be profitably employed and generalized to pave the path towards a novel generation of robotic devices for HRI
    • …
    corecore