11,588 research outputs found
Examining the utility of affective response in search of personal lifelogs
Personal lifelog archives contain digital records captured from an individual’s daily life, for example emails, documents edited, webpages downloaded and photographs taken. While capturing this information is becoming increasingly easy, subsequently locating interesting items from within these archives is a significant challenge. One potential source of information to identify items of importance to an individual is their affective state during the capture of the information. The strength of an individual’s affective response to their current situation can often be gauged from their physiological response. For this study we explored the utility of the following biometric features to indicate significant items:
galvanic skin response (GSR), heart rate (HR) and skin temperature (ST). Significant or important events tend to raise an individual’s arousal level, causing a measurable biometric response. We examined the utility of using biometric response to identify significant items and for re-ranking traditional information retrieval (IR) result sets. Results obtained indicate that skin temperature is most useful for extracting interesting items from personal archives containing passively captured images, computer activity and SMS messages
Measuring children's search behaviour on a large scale
Children often experience problems during information-seeking using traditional search interfaces and search technologies, that are designed for adults. This is because children engage with the world in fundamentally different ways than adults. To design search technologies that support children in effective and enjoyable information-seeking, more research is needed to examine children’s specific skills and needs concerning information-seeking. Therefore, we developed an application that can monitor children’s search behaviour on a large scale. In this paper, we present the steps taken to develop this application. The basis of the application is UsaProxy, an existing system that is used to monitor the user’s usage of websites. We have increased the accuracy of UsaProxy and have developed an application that is able to extract useful information from UsaProxy’s log files
Towards responsive Sensitive Artificial Listeners
This paper describes work in the recently started project SEMAINE, which aims to build a set of Sensitive Artificial Listeners – conversational agents designed to sustain an interaction with a human user despite limited verbal skills, through robust recognition and generation of non-verbal behaviour in real-time, both when the agent is speaking and listening. We report on data collection and on the design of a system architecture in view of real-time responsiveness
Life Stories and Mental Health: The Role of Identification Processes in Theory and Interventions
The goal of this article is to explore the relations between narratives and mental health from a psychological perspective. We argue that a process of identification with personal experiences underlies narrative structures that are known to be related to mental health. Overidentification and underidentification are described as general processes underlying mental health problems. Gerontological insights in reminiscence and life review and cognitive psychological studies on autobiographical memories validate this claim. Practical applications in mental health care provide even further evidence for the role of identification processes in mental health and how they can be targeted in intervention
Self-defining Memories, Scripts, and the Life Story: Narrative Identity in Personality and Psychotherapy
An integrative model of narrative identity builds on a dual memory system that draws on episodic memory and a long-term self to generate autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memories related to critical goals in a lifetime period lead to life-story memories, which in turn become self-defining memories when linked to an individual\u27s enduring concerns. Self-defining memories that share repetitive emotion-outcome sequences yield narrative scripts, abstracted templates that filter cognitive-affective processing. The life story is the individual\u27s overarching narrative that provides unity and purpose over the life course. Healthy narrative identity combines memory specificity with adaptive meaning-making to achieve insight and well-being, as demonstrated through a literature review of personality and clinical research, as well as new findings from our own research program. A clinical case study drawing on this narrative identity model is also presented with implications for treatment and research
Search Process as Transitions Between Neural States
Search is one of the most performed activities on the World Wide
Web. Various conceptual models postulate that the search process
can be broken down into distinct emotional and cognitive states
of searchers while they engage in a search process. These models
significantly contribute to our understanding of the search process.
However, they are typically based on self-report measures, such as
surveys, questionnaire, etc. and therefore, only indirectly monitor
the brain activity that supports such a process. With this work,
we take one step further and directly measure the brain activity
involved in a search process. To do so, we break down a search
process into five time periods: a realisation of Information Need,
Query Formulation, Query Submission, Relevance Judgment and
Satisfaction Judgment. We then investigate the brain activity between
these time periods. Using functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (fMRI), we monitored the brain activity of twenty-four participants
during a search process that involved answering questions
carefully selected from the TREC-8 and TREC 2001 Q/A Tracks.
This novel analysis that focuses on transitions rather than states
reveals the contrasting brain activity between time periods – which
enables the identification of the distinct parts of the search process
as the user moves through them. This work, therefore, provides an
important first step in representing the search process based on the
transitions between neural states. Discovering more precisely how
brain activity relates to different parts of the search process will
enable the development of brain-computer interactions that better
support search and search interactions, which we believe our study
and conclusions advance
The brain is a prediction machine that cares about good and bad - Any implications for neuropragmatics?
Experimental pragmatics asks how people construct contextualized meaning in communication. So what does it mean for this field to add neuroas a prefix to its name? After analyzing the options for any subfield of cognitive science, I argue that neuropragmatics can and occasionally should go beyond the instrumental use of EEG or fMRI and beyond mapping classic theoretical distinctions onto Brodmann areas. In particular, if experimental pragmatics ‘goes neuro’, it should take into account that the brain evolved as a control system that helps its bearer negotiate a highly complex, rapidly changing and often not so friendly environment. In this context, the ability to predict current unknowns, and to rapidly tell good from bad, are essential ingredients of processing. Using insights from non-linguistic areas of cognitive neuroscience as well as from EEG research on utterance comprehension, I argue that for a balanced development of experimental pragmatics, these two characteristics of the brain cannot be ignored
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