The opportunity of purposeless information searching, such as browsing purposeful information, is increasing. The promotion of interest to products and services by utilizing these opportunities is also focused. Thus, a new concept for information design that is not “efficiency of information searching” but “continuousness of information searching” is expected. It has been suggested that searching for information without a defined purpose or use is based on intrinsic motivation. And according to the optimal stimulation level theory, there is a U-shaped relationship between intrinsic motivation and the stimulation level. On the basis of this theory, we hypothesized that the continuousness of information is enhanced in an environment where the user can enjoy information searching at an optimal stimulation level. In this study, we attempted to specify the requirements for the information design method on the basis of the above mentioned hypothesis, and verify the effectiveness of the method. In the experiment, participants tried information browsing. Following an analysis of the relationship between the stimulation level and participants’ physiological and psychological responses, although it is just a guide, the following has been clarified. When the stimulation level of the most familiar information was defined as 0 and that of the least familiar information was defined as 1, the optimal stimulation level existed around at 0.3 to 0.4. Moreover, the stimulation level of 0.15 to 0.8 was also effective for enhancing the participants’ intrinsic motivation for information searching. In addition, it was found that their intrinsic motivation increased when the gap in the stimulation level between the previous information piece and the next one was 0 to 0.15 or −0.5 to −0.35. Furthermore, we conducted an experiment to verify if the information browsing continued for longer periods of time when the above findings were applied to a browsing site, and confirmed the effectiveness.

In this study, we focused on the problem of existing smart speakers that natural conversation is not accomplished due to restrictions of the dialogue structure. In order to solve the problem, we proposed the method using gaze instead of wake-word based on sociological knowledge about "Initiation talk". We developed the smart speaker "Tama", that have the cameras to detect the user’s gaze and the robotic head to show the gaze for users. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, we conducted an experiment using the "Tama". For the evaluation, we compared three conditions: wake word condition, gaze detection condition , and mutual gaze condition. Experimental results showed that the usability of the system and the sense of conversation are improved when using gaze input / output.

How do we interact with mechanical systems? Users command something, and the systems always accept and react it. In other words, it is a "Leader-follower" relationship. Thinking about a scene where you walk in a park with your friend, on the other hand, there are neither a definite leader nor a follower. They co-adjust the walking direction and the pace by considering each other from implicit body movements. We named the relationship that people co-adjust each other "Side-to-side relationship." In this research, we attempt to construct "Side-to-side relationship" between a human and a robot by utilizing a robot platform "Mako-no-te" that can walk hand in hand with its human partner. We conducted an experiment with three conditions; human leading condition, robot leading condition, and co-adjusting condition. As a result, the robot of the co-adjusting condition was evaluated more favorable, active, and lifelike than one of other conditions.

We have developed a speech-driven embodied entrainment computer graphics character called ”InterActor” which generates automatically communicative motions such as nodding from the rhythm of speech, and have demonstrated the effectiveness of the system for supporting embodied communication. However, though conventional InterActor activates embodied interaction, it does not have expressions accompanying time transition such as accumulation of utterances and delimitation of speech. Visualizing user’s speech transition over time would be effective for motivating user’s utterances. In this paper, in order to increase user’s motivation to speech, we develop an utterance transmission / accumulation expression system by using InterActors expressing each function of speaker and listener that expresses the transmission of the utterances from the speaker character to the listener character and the accumulation to the listener character by expansion accompanying nodding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in free conversation experiments. Furthermore, in order to realize the responses that urge more continuous utterances by eliminating difficulty of speaking due to excessive expansion of the listener character, we construct a system that supports delimitation of dialogue by changing listener characters, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in free conversation experiments.

We explore how improvisation training enhances persons’ communication abilities on group discussion. We firstly design a 50-minitue improvisation communication training program based on major features of group discussion and existing practices of conventional improvisation training. We then conduct a study for 8-person groups. We compare two improvisation conditions, with and without improvisation training and two order conditions, before and after training (or break in without improvisation condition) in both of subjective and quantitative measurements. Results suggest that the improvisation training program designed in this work increases member’s expressiveness, assertiveness, and group satisfaction. They also suggest that the training program tends to increase total speaking time and gestures during the group discussions. Based on the results, we discuss limitations and future work towards establishing improvisation-based communication training method.

Human errors of operators’ decision making may have significant influence on the reliability of sociotechnical systems. Time pressure is one of the influencing factors affecting the possibility of human errors. In the present study, the effect of time pressure on the strategic decision making has been investigated using a simple but strategic task. As a result, it has been demonstrated that the strategy of participants has changed under the highly time pressured situation, implying that heuristic approaches leading to incorrect answers may have been adopted. The participants tended to try as many options as they found in the cases, but they could not decide a correct choice as correct one because of lack of time for repeated evaluation. In addition, such evaluated choices would have not been checked again under the highly time pressured conditions. In other words, once the correct choice has been evaluated but missed, the choice would not be evaluated again in the highly time-pressured situation. This may be an essential mechanism of decision-error demonstrated in the present experiment. If there has been enough time to evaluate options on the other hand, the participants have been able to choose correct answer even if they have not been able to realize the correct choice in the first choice. This implies that keeping sufficient time to acquire higher situation awareness is quite important for reliable strategic decision making.

Flick text entry on smartphones is so popular that a majority of users prefer it to the more conventional QWERTY keyboard. Yet, the typing speed and accuracy of such text entry varies greatly depending on the individual. Focusing on eye-gaze behavior, we analyzed typing data of 33 individuals recorded with a touch logger and eye tracking data of 31 individuals recorded with a glass-type eye tracker to clarify what causes the individual variability. Correlation analysis revealed the following four findings. 1) The typing speed and the reciprocal of time interval from a release to the next landing showed a high correlation over 0.90. 2) The higher the gazing ratio at the keyboard was, the slower the typing speed and the higher the accuracy tended to be. 3) Some expert users achieved a fast typing speed and a high accuracy. 4) The majority of errors were landing errors to adjacent keys. On the basis of these findings, we propose a keyboard layout that considers eye gaze.