The authors have been working on the estimation of emotions from body movements in personal fabrication tasks. Body movements express emotions，and these expressions vary among individuals. This is one of reasons why emotion estimation with body movements is difficult. Here，the authors assume that there are emotion expression types，and people of each type share emotion expression somewhat. In this study，the authors propose a novel extraction method of emotional body expression types by body movements. We propose a method to classify expression types only by body movements，which is based on the concept of sensitivity analysis. In addition, we perform an experiment to measure body movements and emotions in fabrication task and analyze extract expression types. Finally，we evaluate accuracy of estimation considering emotional expression types to evaluate the method. The accuracy of estimations was on average 67.98%，which was approximately 17% higher than the estimation without considering expression types. The results suggest that the proposed method is useful for emotion estimation.

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We propose a novel method for inferring state transitions from non participants to participants in free-style conversational interaction using physical behaviors acquired from cameras and a microphone. The existing methods do not consider non-participants and bystanders who play important roles in the interaction. In the research field of cognitive science, the existing methods consider the psychological aspects of changing from the non-participants to the participant. However, the existing methods cannot be easily implemented because inferring the psychological aspects is a very difficult task. Instead of using the psychological aspects, our method exploits physical behaviors such as standing position, facial direction, and audio direction. We analyzed the parameters of the behaviors to increase the performance of inferring the state transitions using datasets collected in the poster presentations.

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With respect to collaborative physical tasks, gaze and gestures play significant roles when referring to physical objects. In video-mediated communication, however, such nonverbal cues become "ineffectual" when they are presented via a 2D monitor, making video-mediated collaborative physical tasks inefficient. This study focuses on gaze cues to support remote collaborative physical tasks using a mobile terminal and uses an eye-shaped display, "ThirdEye," a simple add-on display that represents a remote participant's gaze direction. ThirdEye is expected to be especially effective when used with mobile terminals. We investigated whether the ThirdEye’s gaze shift is effective in leading a local observer's attention toward objects in the local environment, even when ThirdEye is presented with the actual face image of a remote person. Experimental results show that ThirdEye can lead the local participant’s attention to intended objects faster than without ThirdEye.

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The purpose of the present study is to elucidate a neural substrate of specific skills of air traffic control operator to manipulate spatial information. For this purpose, we used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure cortical activities during mental imagery task that asked participants to construct a 3d-object by imagination. And, actual air traffic control operators participated as a skilled group and age- and IQ- matched healthy volunteers participated as a control group to depict a difference of cortical activity during manipulation of spatial information between groups. The fMRI result demonstrated that the skilled group showed higher performance to the task, and significant increase of cortical activation on the left inferior frontal gyrus, and medial part of prefrontal cortex, compared with the control group. This result suggested that the differential activation may reflect the working memory performance, the air traffic control operator may use different strategy to utilize working memory to take advantage of 3d-object information.

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The huge and complex socio-technical system that supports our daily lives sometimes requires operators to respond to unexpected events not described in the procedure manual. To elucidate the neural basis of this ability, 18 university students were trained to operate the simulator of such a system, and brain activity during the response to unexpected events was measured using functional MRI. We examined the relationship between the brain activity and two indices of the ability: the task performance and problem-solving-oriented personal trait. Brain activation during the response to unexpected event in contrast to that to expected event was associated with low task performance in the bilateral putamen, hippocampus, and the left inferior frontal gyrus, potentially reflecting a tendency to depend on procedure manuals. The activation was associated with low scores in the problem-solving-oriented personal trait in the motor-related areas, suggesting its relevance to the rigidity and inefficiency of the response strategy. Brain activation during the response to unexpected event relative to the baseline activity was associated with low task performance in the left inferior parietal lobule, likely reflecting the difficulty of the task for the participants. Over all, the findings represent the different aspects of inappropriate or inefficient responses to unexpected events. The elucidation of the neural basis of high response ability may require the development of new cognitive models or analytical approaches.

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The purpose of this study is to clarify the effectiveness of the new mitigation method for slouching posture of we suggest, aiming at the development of improvement training of the posture. We have used Kinect to measure the elderly’s slouching posture, and proposed a method to utilize it for maintaining their health. In this paper, we propose a new method to mitigate slouching posture during walking with the laser pointer by hand, keeping the laser light to the target in the front direction, called laser pointer task (LP task), and clarify the effectiveness of the method by the experimental analysis. As a result, posture distortion and body wobble of the elderly are reduced during the performance of LP task, and such effects are realized by feedback information indicated as the movement of the pointer on the target. This result suggest that the proposed LP task is effective as a safety mitigation method of slouching posture.

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