Prior expectation affects posterior perceptual experience. This psychological effect is called expectation effect. In this paper, we proposed computational model of the expectation effect. The model consists of three statistic distributions, prior, likelihood, and posterior. We assumed that a combination of prior and likelihood estimates the posterior that represents posterior perceptual experience using Bayes' inference and efficient coding hypothesis. Based on the proposed model, we formalized the expectation effect as a function of three parameters:expectation error, uncertainty, and external noise. We conducted both computer simulation and experiment using size-weight illusion to examine the characteristics of expectation effect. We investigated the effects of the three parameters on intensity of expectation effect and the conditions of two types of expectation effect, i.e. contrast and assimilation. From the result of both simulations and experiments, we found following characteristics of the expectation effect. 1) Assimilation shifts to contrast as expectation error increased. 2) Uncertainty decreased intensity of both assimilation and contrast effect. 3) External noise increase assimilation and decrease contrast.

In this study, a functional sound that a driver can't feel annoying was studied for the awareness maintenance in highway driving. Initially, psychological effects of functional sounds adding a sine wave to an engine noise measured at car interior of sedan type in driving were studied. Next, two sine waves were added to the engine noise, and then the proper balance of sound pressure level (SPL) was grasped in consideration of the comfortable sound quality. Furthermore, a task evaluation and a subjective evaluation about the effect of the awareness maintenance of using the above functional sound were studied. As a result, the effect of awareness maintenance increased about 10 % in condition under SPL +1 dB(A) to the engine noise . Finally, the effect of the awareness maintenance was clarified due to the above functional sound was applied to another engine noise at car interior of SUV type.

We evaluated the effects of disparity conditions such as degree of crossed/uncrossed disparity on the preference occurring during the cognitive process of preference judgment by using psychological and physiological indices. First, we performed paired comparisons of 20 novel shapes without disparity in order to select eight stimuli with minimum bias during preference judgment. Second, we investigated the effects of parallax characteristics on the feeling of preference by using 24 stimuli created by adding three disparity conditions (0.3°, -0.3° and -1.1°) to the eight previously determined stimuli. Moreover, psychological indices were determined by paired comparisons of preference judgment and physiological indices were determined by measurements of eye movement, eye fixation time, and view count during the process of preference judgment. The paired comparisons showed that the participants preferred higher crossed disparity and higher parallax angles. The eye movement measurements showed that eye fixation time and view count increased during conditions of crossed disparity rather than uncrossed disparity, and this increase was directly proportional to the degree of parallax angle. We argue that the reasons for this may be related to the attraction of the crossed disparity and the familiarity and novelty that complements the addition of parallax.

Humans communicate emotions by both their faces and voices. The emotions are generally congruent but they sometimes conflict across modalities. We investigated the perception of such emotionally congruent and conflicting expressions through the lens of two-dimensional emotion space (2DES). As experimental stimuli, we audioand video-recorded a male actor's expressions that portrayed four emotions: happy, angry, sad, and relaxed. Participants were exposed to 16 combinations of faces and voices and rated their perceived degree of valence (positive?negative) and activity (high?low), for each of which the reaction time was recorded. Participants also chose what emotion the actor expressed. Results showed the perceptual inconsistency across valence and activity. For the valence, the participants perceived negative emotions when watching a negative face, even with a positive voice. Such perceptual bias between modalities has not been shown for activity ratings. These results suggest that the mechanism that supports human cross-modal processing differs as a function of the dimension of emotion. The future directions of research are discussed through our proposed model of the audio-visual perception of emotions.

We propose a new method for a car driver to help maintain alertness, which is based on a visual feedback of point of gaze (POG) and arousal level. History of horizontal and vertical POG (hvPOG) or horizontal POG (hPOG) is presented using position, brightness and color of visual stimuli. The color is determined by arousal level estimated with percentage of eye closure (PERCLOS). In order to evaluate the effect of the proposed method time courses of PERCLOS, reaction time to a visual target and subjective sleepiness during viewing a car driving movie were investigated for 9 subjects in conditions with a visual feedback of hvPOG (FB1) and hPOG (FB2), and without any feedback (control). Mean PERCLOS for 9 subjects tended to increase with time in all three conditions. The PERCLOS significantly exceeded the value of 5% for 10 out of 20 minutes in control condition, while that was not the case in FB1 and FB2 condition. Compared with the control condition, mean reaction time was significantly shorter (FB1:714 [ms], FB2:713 [ms] and control:804 [ms]) and the subjects reported weaker sleepiness in FB1 and FB2. These results show that the proposed method is effective to extend alertness.

Affect extraction in personal fabrication will become indispensable in enhancing the recent advances in the field, because we can provide that information to the fabricators and let the fabricators enjoy the experience. In this study, we proposed an extraction method of affect in personal fabrication based on Laban Movement Analysis using the motion data of fabricators. First, we performed an experiment to measure human movement by using motion capture system and asked its participant to look back their affects. Then, we proposed an extraction method of affect by defining the amount of characteristics of Laban Movement Analysis, and by utilizing decision tree (j48). As a result of evaluation, the average of the correctly extracted affects was approximately 60%. This result shows that proposed method can be a estimation tool of affect by using only human movements.

Our project is aiming to develop an active listener agent who provides mental care to its users. This is a task even difficult for humans and thus there exists an issue: whether it is possible to build such an agent. In addition, numeric metrics representing the state of the active listening conversation are required for the decision making of the agent. We propose a model representing the dynamics of the attitude and mood of the two participants of active listening conversation and verified the possibility of building an active listener agent with empirical results. We analyzed the corpus collected in a human-human dyadic conversation experiment from three view points, the speaker (potential user), the listener (the role that the agent will play), and an observer who did not participate the conversation (who is supposed to be able to observe the conversation from a more objective view). Encouraging results that suggest the possibility of the development of an active listener agent were found in the analysis: the attitude of the listener can have an influence on the speaker's mood, the third person can detect speaker's attitude, and the mood of the speaker can be potentially observed by another person. Finally, we show that the subjective evaluation on the speakers' attitude can be estimated by low-level features like smiles, head nods, and speech state.

This paper proposes a new visualization method for fluctuating gazing points using future lines to assist in following subjects' gazing points. We have conducted experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of this method. From the results of the experiments, the time lag following gazing points was shortened by the method. In addition, surveys for the gazing points' followers were conducted, and results showed that future lines were considered to positively impact their tasks related to following gazing points. These results revealed that the proposed method of adding the future lines contributes to the improvement of gazing points' followability.

This paper indicates the influence of evaluating impression task on cerebral activity. Conventional studies have asked subjects to evaluate impression given by stimulus to analyze the relationship between feeling impression and brain activity. But, there is possibility that the data about this activity acquired in such the experimental design is influenced by executing evaluating task. We surveyed this influence by comparing cerebral activity of subjects evaluating politeness of customer service actions and subjects not evaluating. Result showed that the concentration of oxidized hemoglobin in blood flow at near the frontal pole was increased every time subjects evaluate impression. On the other hand, there is not tendency like this in case of subjects not evaluating. The frontal pole is reported that this region is associated with thinking back on making the decision by the study using monkey. It means that the data of brain activity acquired in the experimental design which subjects have to evaluate impression might be inadequate to analyze relationship between feeling impression and brain activity precisely. This paper suggests that subjects must not be given evaluation task or removal of noise caused by task from the data is need, if you analyze brain activity reacting to given impression.

The existing vibration feedback patterns on touchscreen devices are simple. Similar patterns are adopted for different contexts. Designing appropriate patterns suitable for specific contexts is a meaningful issue. In order to design new patterns, this study investigated the impression of user-generated vibration patterns. We first collected various types of user-defined patterns. Then, the impressions of the collected patterns were quantified by subjective evaluations. The relationship between the impressions and vibration pattern features was analysed. The results reveal features relevant to user impression. This study presents design guidelines for vibration patterns based on these results.

In this study, to clarify the relation between utterance and body movements of speakers in greeting, we have conducted the experiment of greeting by two persons. After the experiment, the relation between utterance and body movement durations was analyzed. As a result, high synchronization between speakers was observed in all experimental condition. However, in the condition of different social standings, there was little synchronization between utterance and body movement rhythm in subjects. From these results, we discussed about mechanism of synchronization between utterance and body movement in greeting.

With the objective of developing a persuasive voice-interaction system for making presentations to large groups, we analyzed the nonverbal characteristics, especially the prosody and face motion, of 35 Japanese speakers and used the results to model the persuasive prosody and face motion for the system. In regards to prosody, the maximum and average voice pitches of the persuasive speakers were high and the dynamic range of the persuasive speakers' voice pitches was wide. Additionally, the maximum and average lengths of silent pauses of the persuasive speakers were long and the dynamic range of silent pause lengths of the persuasive speakers was wide. In regards to face motion, we found that the persuasive speakers mainly moved their faces from side to side and sparingly moved their faces during utterances. We have reproduced these nonverbal characteristics of prosody and face motion by synthesized voice and computer-generated (CG) animation and confirmed that these characteristics enhanced speakers' persuasiveness.

This paper proposes a navigation system using head-up display technology for motorcycle. Indicated in earlier studies, motorcycle riders are acknowledged to perform characterful viewpoint movement while driving. Since currently provided navigation systems designed to attach a display to the handle bar does not take in consideration about this viewpoint movement, it is known that riders face difficulties to look at the attached display while driving. To solve this issue, we introduce the head-up display technology to be used as a display device for navigation system. To confirm the use of the head-up display, we developed a head-up display to evaluate the effective position to present information. For the evaluation environment, we used the immersive motorcycle simulator attached with the head-up display. Utilizing the simulator, we conducted an experiment to navigate the rider by presenting direction information like arrows in 9 different positions on the head-up display. We recorded the rider's viewpoint movement using the eye-mark recorder, and measured the duration of time spent looking at the presented information. The experimental results indicated showing navigation information on the lower right or lower left positions are effective when navigating the rider using the head-up display.

This research designs communication protocol that meets conditions of agriculture supports in rural areas, and implements the communication environment by extracting its field issues comprehensively and considering solutions. In the context of agriculture supports in rural areas, there exist several issues such as requirement of timely knowledge transfer with high translation quality, and multilingual communication between youths and experts where gaps of language ability and expertise should be considered. The result from the field experiment of agriculture knowledge transfer between Vietnamese farmers and Japanese agricultural experts shows the followings: 1) Timely knowledge transfer was realized as 98.7% of the questions from youths were answered by experts in time, 2) The translation quality was high enough that most information was translated, 3) The gap of language ability and expertise between youths and experts were filled. Modification of messages to be comprehensive to youths, and facilitation of interactivity by adding greeting words, were observed in more than 20% of the answer messages.