Computer-based interactive video systems

Computer-controlled interactive video instruction provides an instructional technique that overcomes many of the shortcomings of using the computer alone as an instructional device. Students who have used interactive video modules have been shown to better retain the material presented and to enjoy the course more than students not using the video modules.     

Assessment of fun in interactive systems: A survey

Fun is fundamental in life, since it fosters interaction and learning. But the design of fun is not trivial since it is subjective: it depends upon context, preferences and the history of users. That is why assessment is an important issue in the design process. Traditional assessment methods involve observation and inquiring of users while interacting, while more recent methods involve data collection and physiological measurements. This article presents a survey on the existing methods for the assessment of fun from its constituent elements – attention, flow, immersion and emotion.     

The interactive evolution of human communication systems

This paper compares two explanations of the process by which human communication systems evolve: iterated learning and social collaboration. It then reports an experiment testing the social collaboration account. Participants engaged in a graphical communication task either as a member of a community, where they interacted with seven different partners drawn from the same pool, or as a member of an isolated pair, where they interacted with the same partner across the same number of games. Participants' horizontal, pair-wise interactions led "bottom up" to the creation of an effective and efficient shared sign system in the community condition. Furthermore, the community-evolved sign systems were as effective and efficient as the local sign systems developed by isolated pairs. Finally, and as predicted by a social collaboration account, and not by an iterated learning account, interaction was critical to the creation of shared sign systems, with different isolated pairs establishing different local sign systems and different communities establishing different global sign systems.     

Psychological performance assessment via interactive voice response systems

Two experiments examined the feasibility of psychological assessment using interactive voice response (IVR) technology and the potential sensitivity of such assessments to alcohol and fatigue effects. In Experiment 1, 10 subjects performed a 12-min battery of six IVR-administered tasks, Monday through Friday, over 2 weeks. Minimal learning effects were evident during training. Repeated administrations indicated high test-retest reliabilities. In Experiment 2 (double-blind, alcohol/placebo crossover design), 7 subjects were tested every 2 h over a 24-h period during two experimental sessions (peak blood alcohol concentrations =80 mg/dL). Several IVR-administered tasks were sensitive to alcohol impairment, but not as sensitive as laboratory-based measures specifically designed to assess alcohol impairment. Little evidence for fatigue-related impairment was obtained. The results support optimism for the potential to assess psychomotor and cognitive functioning distally via telephony; however, further refinement and validation of the methods are needed.     

Classical conditioning,awareness, and brain systems

Memory is composed of several different abilities that are supported by different brain systems. The distinction between declarative (conscious) and nondeclarative (non-conscious) memory has proved useful in understanding the nature of eyeblink classical conditioning – the best understood example of classical conditioning in vertebrates. In delay conditioning, the standard procedure, conditioning depends on the cerebellum and brainstem and is intact in amnesia. Trace conditioning, a variant of the standard procedure, depends additionally on the hippocampus and neocortex and is impaired in amnesia. Recent studies have sharpened the contrast between delay and trace conditioning by exploring the importance of awareness. We discuss these new findings in relation to the brain systems supporting eyeblink conditioning and suggest why awareness is important for trace conditioning but not for delay conditioning.     

Sensory substitution and the human-machine interface

Recent advances in the instrumentation technology of sensory substitution have presented new opportunities to develop systems for compensation of sensory loss. In sensory substitution (e.g. of sight or vestibular function), information from an artificial receptor is coupled to the brain via a human-machine interface. The brain is able to use this information in place of that usually transmitted from an intact sense organ. Both auditory and tactile systems show promise for practical sensory substitution interface sites. This research provides experimental tools for examining brain plasticity and has implications for perceptual and cognition studies more generally.     

The interactive effects of recruitment practices and product awareness on job seekers' employer knowledge and application behaviors

In this article, the author draws on research from the literature on marketing and recruitment to identify how recruitment practices and company product awareness are related to job seekers' application behaviors through 3 aspects of job seekers' employer knowledge. Based on results from a within-subject design with data from 123 recruiting companies and 456 student job seekers, the author's findings suggest that the relationships between recruitment strategies and application intentions and decisions are moderated by product awareness. Specifically, low-information recruitment practices are significantly and positively related to application behaviors through employer familiarity and employer reputation when product awareness is low. In contrast, high-information recruitment practices are related to job seekers' application behaviors through employer reputation and job information when product awareness is high.     

External human-machine interfaces: Effects of message perspective

Future automated vehicles may be equipped with external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs). Currently, little is known about the effect of the perspective of the eHMI message on crossing decisions of pedestrians. We performed an experiment to examine the effects of images depicting eHMI messages of different perspectives (egocentric from the pedestrian’s point of view: WALK, DON’T WALK, allocentric: BRAKING, DRIVING, and ambiguous: GO, STOP) on participants’ (N = 103) crossing decisions, response times, and eye movements. Considering that crossing the road can be cognitively demanding, we added a memory task in two-thirds of the trials. The results showed that egocentric messages yielded higher subjective clarity ratings than the other messages as well as higher objective clarity scores (i.e., more uniform crossing decisions) and faster response times than the allocentric BRAKING and the ambiguous STOP. When participants were subjected to the memory task, pupil diameter increased, and crossing decisions were reached faster as compared to trials without memory task. Regarding the ambiguous messages, most participants crossed for the GO message and did not cross for the STOP message, which points towards an egocentric perspective taken by the participant. More lengthy text messages (e.g., DON’T WALK) yielded a higher number of saccades but did not cause slower response times. We conclude that pedestrians find egocentric eHMI messages clearer than allocentric ones, and take an egocentric perspective if the message is ambiguous. Our results may have important implications, as the consensus among eHMI researchers appears to be that egocentric text-based eHMIs should not be used in traffic.     

Speaker identification using multi-modal i-vector approach for varying length speech in voice interactive systems

The development in the interface of smart devices has lead to voice interactive systems. An additional step in this direction is to enable the devices to recognize the speaker. But this is a challenging task because the interaction involves short duration speech utterances. The traditional Gaussian mixture models (GMM) based systems have achieved satisfactory results for speaker recognition only when the speech lengths are sufficiently long. The current state-of-the-art method utilizes i-vector based approach using a GMM based universal background model (GMM-UBM). It prepares an i-vector speaker model from a speaker’s enrollment data and uses it to recognize any new test speech. In this work, we propose a multi-model i-vector system for short speech lengths. We use an open database THUYG-20 for the analysis and development of short speech speaker verification and identification system. By using an optimum set of mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC) based features we are able to achieve an equal error rate (EER) of 3.21% as compared to the previous benchmark score of EER 4.01% on the THUYG-20 database. Experiments are conducted for speech lengths as short as 0.25 s and the results are presented. The proposed method shows improvement as compared to the current i-vector based approach for shorter speech lengths. We are able to achieve improvement of around 28% even for 0.25 s speech samples. We also prepared and tested the proposed approach on our own database with 2500 speech recordings in English language consisting of actual short speech commands used in any voice interactive system.     

Attention and awareness in synchrony

Interactions between functional areas are often considered to account for subtle aspects of cognitive functions, although direct experimental evidence is scarce. A recent study by Gross et al. relates the strength of synchrony between human parietal, frontal and occipital regions to the availability of attentional resources. These results support the current view that attention and awareness emerge from dynamic interactions in distributed networks.     

Balancing awareness: Vestibular signals modulate visual consciousness in the absence of awareness

The processing of visual and vestibular information is crucial for perceiving self-motion. Visual cues, such as optic flow, have been shown to induce and alter vestibular percepts, yet the role of vestibular information in shaping visual awareness remains unclear. Here we investigated if vestibular signals influence the access to awareness of invisible visual signals. Using natural vestibular stimulation (passive yaw rotations) on a vestibular self-motion platform, and optic flow masked through continuous flash suppression (CFS) we tested if congruent visual–vestibular information would break interocular suppression more rapidly than incongruent information. We found that when the unseen optic flow was congruent with the vestibular signals perceptual suppression as quantified with the CFS paradigm was broken more rapidly than when it was incongruent. We argue that vestibular signals impact the formation of visual awareness through enhanced access to awareness for congruent multisensory stimulation.     

Deduction without awareness

We investigated whether two basic forms of deductive inference, Modus Ponens and Disjunctive Syllogism, occur automatically and without awareness. In Experiment 1, we used a priming paradigm with a set of conditional and disjunctive problems. For each trial, two premises were shown. The second premise was presented at a rate designed to be undetectable. After each problem, participants had to evaluate whether a newly-presented target number was odd or even. The target number matched or did not match a conclusion endorsed by the two previous premises. We found that when the target matched the conclusion of a Modus Ponens inference, the evaluation of the target number was reliably faster than baseline even when participants reported that they were not aware of the second premise. This priming effect did not occur for any other valid or invalid inference that we tested, including the Disjunctive Syllogism. In Experiment 2, we used a forced-choice paradigm in which we found that some participants were able to access some information on the second premise when their attention was explicitly directed to it. In Experiment 3, we showed that the priming effect for Modus Ponens was present also in subjects who could not access any information about P(2). In Experiment 4 we explored whether spatial relations (e.g., "a before b") or sentences with quantifiers (e.g., "all a with b") could generate a priming effect similar to the one observed for Modus Ponens. A priming effect could be found for Modus Ponens only, but not for the other relations tested. These findings show that the Modus Ponens inference, in contrast to other deductive inferences, can be carried out automatically and unconsciously. Furthermore, our findings suggest that critical deductive inference schemata can be included in the range of high-level cognitive activities that are carried out unconsciously.     

Auditory awareness negativity is an electrophysiological correlate of awareness in an auditory threshold task

One theory of visual awareness proposes that electrophysiological activity related to awareness occurs in primary visual areas approximately 200 ms after stimulus onset (visual awareness negativity: VAN) and in fronto-parietal areas about 300 ms after stimulus onset (late positivity: LP). Although similar processes might be involved in auditory awareness, only sparse evidence exists for this idea. In the present study, we recorded electrophysiological activity while subjects listened to tones that were presented at their own awareness threshold. The difference in electrophysiological activity elicited by tones that subjects reported being aware of versus unaware of showed an early negativity about 200 ms and a late positivity about 300 ms after stimulus onset. These results closely match those found in vision and provide convincing evidence for an early negativity (auditory awareness negativity: AAN), as well as an LP. These findings suggest that theories of visual awareness are also applicable to auditory awareness.     

Justification and awareness

In Justification Without Awareness, Michael Bergmann attacks Internalism and Mentalism. His attack on Internalism refutes some versions of an awareness requirement for justification but leaves another standing and well-motivated. His attack on Mentalism, while successful, leaves us with a difficult question—what non-mental features play a role in determining justification?—that his own externalist theory fails to answer correctly.     

Situation awareness as a function of frame of reference, computer-graphics eyepoint elevation, and geometric field of view

The purpose of this study was to determine how 3 variables for the design of a "heads-down" spatial display--the frame of reference (pilot's eye vs. God's eye), geometric field of view, and elevation of the computer graphics eyepoint--influenced situation awareness. Thirteen flight-naive subjects each flew a simulated F-16 over a computer-generated flight environment to lock onto and intercept a series of sequentially appearing targets. The flight scene consisted of both an "out-the-window" view and a computer-generated heads-down spatial display showing an airplane symbol superimposed on a perspective view of the flight environment. During the interactive phase of the experiment, root mean square flight-path error, target lock-on time, and target acquisition time were measured. After the interactive phase of the study was completed, subjects were required to mark the location of the targets from memory on a computer-generated top-down view of the flight scene in an attempt to reconstruct the spatial mental model which subjects formed of the flight environment. The results for the interactive phase of the study indicated that performance was superior using the pilot's-eye display. However, for the spatial reconstruction task, performance was better using the God's-eye display. It was also shown that the ability to maintain the optimal flight-path using the more top-down view of the scene (600 eyepoint) was superior to the 300 eyepoint elevation. Implications of the results for the design of spatial instruments are discussed.     

Contingency awareness in premature infants.

Infants of low birthweight were placed in an artificial contingency situation in which leg movement produced movement of an overhead mobile. When compared with 5 non-contingent controls, these 5 infants showed an increase in frequency of kicks and in the amount of time spent focusing on the mobile.