Using Noninvasive Brain Measurement to Explore the Psychological Effects of Computer Malfunctions on Users during Human-Computer Interactions

In today’s technologically driven world, there is a need to better understand the ways that common computer malfunctions affect computer users. These malfunctions may have measurable influences on computer user’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses. An experiment was conducted where participants conducted a series of web search tasks while wearing functional nearinfrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and galvanic skin response sensors. Two computer malfunctions were introduced during the sessions which had the potential to influence correlates of user trust and suspicion. Surveys were given after each session to measure user’s perceived emotional state, cognitive load, and perceived trust. Results suggest that fNIRS can be used to measure the different cognitive and emotional responses associated with computer malfunctions. These cognitive and emotional changes were correlated with users’ self-report levels of suspicion and trust, and they in turn suggest future work that further explores the capability of fNIRS for the measurement of user experience during human-computer interactions

Chasing the Chatbots: Directions for Interaction and Design Research

Big tech-players have been successful in pushing the chatbots forward. Investments in the technology are growing fast, as well as the number of users and applications available. Instead of driving investments towards a successful diffusion of the technology, user-centred studies are currently chasing the popularity of chatbots. A literature analysis evidences how recent this research topic is, and the predominance of technical challenges rather than understanding users’ perceptions, expectations and contexts of use. Looking for answers to interaction and design questions raised in 2007, when the presence of clever computers in everyday life had been predicted for the year 2020, this paper presents a panorama of the recent literature, revealing gaps and pointing directions for further user-centred research

How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket

Hohwy (Hohwy 2016, Hohwy 2017) argues there is a tension between the free energy principle and leading depictions of mind as embodied, enactive, and extended (so-called ‘EEE1 cognition’). The tension is traced to the importance, in free energy formulations, of a conception of mind and agency that depends upon the presence of a ‘Markov blanket’ demarcating the agent from the surrounding world. In what follows I show that the Markov blanket considerations do not, in fact, lead to the kinds of tension that Hohwy depicts. On the contrary, they actively favour the EEE story. This is because the Markov property, as exemplified in biological agents, picks out neither a unique nor a stationary boundary. It is this multiplicity and mutability– rather than the absence of agent-environment boundaries as such - that EEE cognition celebrates

Detecting emotions through non-invasive wearables

Current research on computational intelligence is being conducted in order to emulate and/or detect emotional states using specific devices such as wristbands or similar wearables. In this sense, this paper proposes the use of intelligent wristbands for the automatic detection of emotional states in order to develop an application which allows us to extract, analyse, represent and manage the social emotion of a group of entities. Nowadays, most of the existing approaches are centred in the emotion detection and management of a single entity. The designed system has been developed as a multi-agent system where each agent controls a wearable device and is in charge of detecting individual emotions based on bio-signals

A theoretical and practical approach to a persuasive agent model for change behaviour in oral care and hygiene

There is an increased use of the persuasive agent in behaviour change interventions due to the agent‘s features of sociable, reactive, autonomy, and proactive. However, many interventions have been unsuccessful, particularly in the domain of oral care. The psychological reactance has been identified as one of the major reasons for these unsuccessful behaviour change interventions. This study proposes a formal persuasive agent model that leads to psychological reactance reduction in order to achieve an improved behaviour change intervention in oral care and hygiene. Agent-based simulation methodology is adopted for the development of the proposed model. Evaluation of the model was conducted in two phases that include verification and validation. The verification process involves simulation trace and stability analysis. On the other hand, the validation was carried out using user-centred approach by developing an agent-based application based on belief-desire-intention architecture. This study contributes an agent model which is made up of interrelated cognitive and behavioural factors. Furthermore, the simulation traces provide some insights on the interactions among the identified factors in order to comprehend their roles in behaviour change intervention. The simulation result showed that as time increases, the psychological reactance decreases towards zero. Similarly, the model validation result showed that the percentage of respondents‘ who experienced psychological reactance towards behaviour change in oral care and hygiene was reduced from 100 percent to 3 percent. The contribution made in this thesis would enable agent application and behaviour change intervention designers to make scientific reasoning and predictions. Likewise, it provides a guideline for software designers on the development of agent-based applications that may not have psychological reactance

Using non-invasive wearables for detecting emotions with intelligent agents

This paper proposes the use of intelligent wristbands for the automatic detection of emotional states in order to develop an application which allows to extract, analyze, represent and manage the social emotion of a group of entities. Nowadays, the detection of the joined emotion of an heterogeneous group of people is still an open issue. Most of the existing approaches are centered in the emotion detection and management of a single entity. Concretely, the application tries to detect how music can influence in a positive or negative way over individuals’ emotional states. The main goal of the proposed system is to play music that encourages the increase of happiness of the overall patrons.This work is partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and the FPI grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon. This work is supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (A. Cost

Commodified Desire: Negotiating Asian American Heteronormativity

This essay examines H.T. Tsiangs proletariat novel And China Has Hands and positions it within the diasporic network that it emerged from and suggest that, by satisfying the needs of capital by providing a constant source of labor, segregated Chinese spaces became, in Rodrick Fergusons words, the locations for possible critiques of state and capital..[because it did] not rely on normative prescriptions to assemble labor. Thus, if industrial imperialism helped create the terms by which heteronormative patriarchy became the norm, it also helped produce social formations that necessarily deviated from heteronormative familial relationships. Elaborating, I suggest that the novels basic logic relies on a strict adherence to a Marxist understanding of the reification of the commodity fetish in intimacy. I claim that, due to its rigidly Marxist reading, the novels logic problematically inscribes heteronormativity as a normative network of intimacy, even as it attempts to critique the heteropatriarchal nature of capitalist intimacy. Following Kevin Floyds recent attempt to rethink the categories of totality and reification, I also argue that, by shifting the focus away from the reification of the commodity fetish, And China Has Hands resolves itself by pointing to the impossibility of heteronormativity for Asian American men