Event Processing through naming: Investigating event focus in two people with aphasia

Some people with aphasia may have trouble with verbs because of fundamental difficulties in processing situations in a way that maps readily onto language. This paper describes a novel assessment, the Order of Naming Test, that explores the conceptual processing of events through the order in which people name the entities involved. The performance of non-brain damaged control participants is described. The responses of two people with non-fluent aphasia are then discussed. Both 'Helen' and 'Ron' showed significant difficulty with verbs and sentences. Ron also had trouble on a range of tasks tapping aspects of event processing, despite intact non-verbal cognition. While Helen's performance on the Order of Naming Test was very similar to the controls, Ron's differed in a number of respects, suggesting that he was less focused on the main participant entities. However, certain aspects of his response pointed at covert event processing abilities that might be fruitfully exploited in therapy

First Person vs. Third Person Perspective in Digital Games: Do Player Preferences Affect Immersion?

Contemporary digital game developers offer a variety of games for the diverse tastes of their customers. Although the gaming experience often depends on one's preferences, the same may not apply to the level of their immersion. It has been argued whether the player perspective can influence the level of player's involvement with the game. The aim of this study was to research whether interacting with a game in first person perspective is more immersive than playing in the third person point of view (POV). The set up to test the theory involved participants playing a role-playing game in either mode, naming their preferred perspective, and subjectively evaluating their immersive experience. The results showed that people were more immersed in the game play when viewing the game world through the eyes of the character, regardless of their preferred perspectives

The Placebo Effect in Digital Games

Play-testing of digital games is a crucial part of any game development process, used to gather feedback about the game and correct any existing and potential flaws with the design. However, due to the nature of human subject testing, the feedback being collected in such experiments is prone to biases. Players' expectations play a great role in dictating their gaming experience, which means the information players receive before trying a new game, as well as the knowledge they already possess, may affect their perception and experience of the game. Two studies were conducted in order to evaluate how priming players to expect a game technology can positively influence their experience. The results supported the hypothesis that even basic instructions can change players' perception of the game, and lead to a higher level of perceived immersion when knowing that the game contains an improved feature, the adaptive artificial intelligence (AI), while it is not present in the game

Adaptation in Digital Games: The Effect of Challenge Adjustment on Player Performance and Experience

Good gaming experiences hinge on players being able to have a balance between challenge and skill. However, achieving that balance is challenging, so dynamic difficulty adjustment offers the opportunity to provide better gaming experiences through adapting the challenge in the game to suit an individual’s capabilities. The risk though is that in adapting the difficulty, players do not get a true sense of challenge, but rather some tailored, perhaps watered down experience. In this note, we report on a study, in which we used time manipulation as a method of simple adaptation in order to explore its effect on player experience (PX) and performance. Volunteers played a game in which the timer was adjusted based on their performance in the game, however they were not aware of the feature. The results showed that players in the experimental group found the game more immersive. This provides empirical support that dynamic difficulty adjustment could be used to improve the PX

Escaping the Trap of too Precise Topic Queries

At the very center of digital mathematics libraries lie controlled vocabularies which qualify the {\it topic} of the documents. These topics are used when submitting a document to a digital mathematics library and to perform searches in a library. The latter are refined by the use of these topics as they allow a precise classification of the mathematics area this document addresses. However, there is a major risk that users employ too precise topics to specify their queries: they may be employing a topic that is only "close-by" but missing to match the right resource. We call this the {\it topic trap}. Indeed, since 2009, this issue has appeared frequently on the i2geo.net platform. Other mathematics portals experience the same phenomenon. An approach to solve this issue is to introduce tolerance in the way queries are understood by the user. In particular, the approach of including fuzzy matches but this introduces noise which may prevent the user of understanding the function of the search engine. In this paper, we propose a way to escape the topic trap by employing the navigation between related topics and the count of search results for each topic. This supports the user in that search for close-by topics is a click away from a previous search. This approach was realized with the i2geo search engine and is described in detail where the relation of being {\it related} is computed by employing textual analysis of the definitions of the concepts fetched from the Wikipedia encyclopedia.Comment: 12 pages, Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics 2013 Bath, U

Subjective information visualizations

Information Visualizations (InfoViz) are systems that require high levels of cognitive processing. They revolve around the notion of decoding and interpreting visual patterns in order to achieve certain goals. We argue that purely designing for the visual will not allow for optimum experiences since there is more to InfoViz than just the visual. Interaction is a key to achieving higher levels of knowledge. In this position paper we present a different perspective on the underlying meaning of interaction, where we describe it as incorporating both the visual and the physical activities. By physical activities we mean the physical actions upon the physical input device/s. We argue that interaction is the key element for supporting users’ subjective experiences hence these experiences should first be understood. All the discussions in this paper are based upon on going work in the field of visualizing the literature knowledge domain (LKDViz)

Haptic Experience and the Design of Drawing Interfaces

Haptic feedback has the potential to enhance users’ sense of being engaged and creative in their artwork. Current work on providing haptic feedback in computer-based drawing applications has focused mainly on the realism of the haptic sensation rather than the users’ experience of that sensation in the context of their creative work. We present a study that focuses on user experience of three haptic drawing interfaces. These interfaces were based on two different haptic metaphors, one of which mimicked familiar drawing tools (such as pen, pencil or crayon on smooth or rough paper) and the other of which drew on abstract descriptors of haptic experience (roughness, stickiness, scratchiness and smoothness). It was found that users valued having control over the haptic sensation; that each metaphor was preferred by approximately half of the participants; and that the real world metaphor interface was considered more helpful than the abstract one, whereas the abstract interface was considered to better support creativity. This suggests that future interfaces for artistic work should have user-modifiable interaction styles for controlling the haptic sensation

InfoVis experience enhancement through mediated interaction

Information visualization is an experience in which both the aesthetic representations and interaction are part. Such an experience can be augmented through close consideration of its major components. Interaction is crucial to the experience, yet it has seldom been adequately explored in the field. We claim that direct mediated interaction can augment such an experience. This paper discusses the reasons behind such a claim and proposes a mediated interactive manipulation scheme based on the notion of directness. It also describes the ways in which such a claim will be validated. The Literature Knowledge Domain (LKD) is used as the concrete domain around which the discussions will be held

Challenges of evaluating the information visualization experience

Information Visualisation (InfoVis) is defined as an interactive visual representation of abstract data. We view the user’s interaction with InfoVis tools as an experience which is made up of a set of highly demanding cognitive activities. These activities assist users in making sense and gaining knowledge of the represented domain. Usability studies that involve a task-based analysis and usability questionnaires are not enough to capture such an experience. This paper discusses the challenges involved when it comes to evaluating InfoVis tools by giving an overview of the activities involved in an InfoVis experience and demonstrating how they affect the visualisation process. The argument in this paper is based on our experiences in designing, building and evaluating an academic literature visualisation tool