In today’s digital era, multimedia integrates text, audio, and video to evoke emotions in entertainment and education. However, understanding how components, particularly music and animation, affect emotional responses remains incomplete. Twelve participants were presented with: (1) music, (2) silent animation, and (3) musical animation. Emotional responses were assessed using self-ratings and physiological measures, including EEG and HRV. Behavior-wise, the results suggested that music could primarily evoke perceived emotions more positively than other conditions, but silent animation did not seem to affect them. Physiologically, music led to increased relaxation, indicated by higher alpha power and HF. Additionally, silent animation evoked greater active attention levels, as reflected in higher beta power, LF, and LF/HF ratio. Our results, however, did not find significant effects between music and musical animation. Overall, these results supported the idea that audio stimuli can evoke more potent affective responses than visual stimuli within positive contexts.

As tactile evaluation is an important assessment indicator for consumer product developments, the importance of objective tactile evaluation is increasing. However, individual differences among subjects in tactile research has not been sufficiently investigated. This paper focuses on individual differences in tactile perception and proposes a method for quantifying the similarity with a developed index. We compared three representative indicators, Euclidean distance, cosine similarity, and their hybrid index, for measuring the similarity in sensory evaluation data for tactile sensation of aluminum plates. Comparison of the conventional 2 indices revealed that opposite tactile sensations were observed, leading to the misjudgment of similarity between subjects. While, the proposed hybrid index provided better clustering of the subjects, resulting in extracting more accurate tactile factors than those obtained with the conventional indicators.

A novel visual neurophysiology experimental system, utilizing a single computer and one data acquisition system (DAQ), is introduced. Matlab-PsychToolbox manages visual stimuli and behavioral control, while the DAQ, with its powerful computational capability, handles neural recording and real-time analysis. Additional analysis, such as calculating the peri-stimulus time histogram, is conducted in a second instance of Matlab. Variables are synchronized across these applications within a 1 ms. The parallel execution of two Matlabs allows for precise real-time control and simultaneous resource-consuming analysis. The system exhibited adequate temporal performance for visual neurophysiology experiments, and operated stably for over 2000 hours in experiments involving awake macaque monkeys.

This study investigates the influence of the appearance of UGV delivery robots on Perceived Safety by comparing four variations of robot shapes using slants. The experiment was performed by presenting the robot shapes in a virtual environment by using a Virtual Reality headset (VR) and a computer screen (PC). We analyzed four participant groups: (1) Brazilians and (2) Japanese living in Japan using VR, (3) Brazilians living in Japan and (4) Brazilians living in Brazil using PC. In an exploratory approach, we investigated how Perceived Safety was influenced by nationality, country of residence, gender, field of study, preference for robot shape, and previous contact with robots. Perceived Safety was assessed using Kansei and Magnitude scores. Results indicate that while nationality did not affect perceived safety, living in a different country did. Additionally, both front and back slants positively influenced perceived safety compared to robots without slants.

Spatial frequency is the most basic element among all visual constructs and can be quantified as a frequency characteristic. However, it is a parameter that lacks clearly identifiable emotional information. Therefore, this study introduced the Implicit Association Test to assess the potential implicit link between spatial frequency and cognitive functions. To estimate the influence of spatial frequency, we used a dummy target in the form of a square or a rhomboid and placed a spatial frequency of image as the target’s background. The reaction time and the Implicit Association Test scores were measured for a comprehensive overview of how they affect the observer’s subconscious mental processing, based on the spatial frequency of the background. We also used electroencephalogram to measure the neural activity. The association between behavioral indexes-reaction time and the Implicit Association Test score-and neural responses-theta/gamma oscillation-showed that spatial frequency of images placed against the background influenced implicit biases.

The noninverted triangle is generally regarded as more stable than the inverted one. The perception of stability/instability may vary when it is moving. Triangles moving in their pointing direction might be perceived as naturally moving and especially stable, which can lead to preferred and facilitated processing. We conducted three experiments in which noninverted and inverted triangles moved upwards or downwards. The results showed that participants preferred triangles moving in their pointing direction over those moving against their pointing direction and were faster in selecting and finding triangles with compatible than incompatible movement. These results can be explained by stimulus-response compatibility, which means that responses to stimuli are faster and more accurate when the properties of the stimulus and response are compatible than when they are not. The results help improve human-object interactions in different contexts like car driving, user interfaces, or virtual reality.

Eye tracking can evaluate brand logos, but conventionally it has focused only on overt attention to logos. However, it is necessary to also focus on covert attention. We conducted gaze analysis with fixations in the central visual fields corresponding to the fovea and foveola. A Go/No-go task was utilized to examine whether the target logo was detected behaviorally either within or outside the fixation area. The difference between correct viewings of the logo within the fixation area and those outside it was compared for each logo. The results revealed significant differences among logos in several combinations, suggesting that logos with higher visual recognizability can be correctly recognized even when they are presented outside the fixation area through covert attention. The covert eye-tracking (CovET) system could provide a useful method for evaluating the visual recognizability of logos and possibly other commercial targets of interest, thereby serving as a promising neuromarketing tool.

Implicit attitudes and preferences can be dynamic and context-dependent, evolving over time and in different situations. In this study, we point out 4 main topics: Implicit attitudes, preferences, decision-making system, and computational social science, to introduce a new approach to developing a decision-making system. As a comprehensive review, we set the 3 research questions as the main considerations for this study. We collected 903,451 articles using 3 major database sources (ScienceDirect, ACM Digital Library, and IEEE Xplore), screened 5 times with different viewpoints, and surveyed 14 articles to answer the research questions. As a result of the comprehensive review, we conclude that it shows the possibility of enhancing the decision-making system with implicit attitudes and preferences in a computational social science manner.

Sense of agency is the sense that one is the cause of an action and controls the events in the outside world. We propose a mathematical model that explains the sense of agency using information theoretic free energy. The model predicts that the prediction error and uncertainty interactively affect the sense of agency. In an experiment in which the prediction error and observation uncertainty were manipulated using response delay and number of sensory signals from different sensory modalities, we observed an interaction between response delay and number of sensory signals. The results support the model prediction suggesting that, when the prediction error is sufficiently small, uncertainty reduces the sense of agency; by contrast, when the prediction error is sufficiently large, uncertainty increases the sense of agency. These model-based findings provide a guide for optimizing operational response to prevent lack of sense of agency when the response delay varies.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a popular online movie content known for its properties of tingling effects. Creating ASMR content for each user is important because there are individual content preferences. An Interactive Genetic Algorithm (IGA) is a method to search for media content suited to each user’s feelings. This study proposes that the IGA adjusts the number of source sounds with a duplication rule. The adjustment is expected to dedicate the effective search because the proposed approach can produce various sounds. The efficiency of the proposed IGA is investigated with a listening experiment. As a result, increases in evaluation values were observed. The number of source sounds played by the system was also investigated.

Improving users’ subjective impression of agents is essential for promoting continuous interaction between the agent and users and, consequently, demonstrating the agent’s original performance. We aim to realize that by imitating humans’ perceptible behaviors to lead them to imagine the agent’s inner state. As one of such perceptible behaviors, we focus on humans’ styles of expressing their opinions to others. A human often expresses several opinions at one time. Such behavior can be interpreted as a sign of hesitation in deciding and is expected to work as clues to lead people to imagine the person’s mind. In this paper, we implement the styles of expressing opinions simultaneously based on the theory of motivational conflicts into the agent and investigate the effects of the expression styles on the subjective impression through an evaluation experiment. Experimental results reveal that these styles have different effects on the impression of the agent.

We often listen to music pieces during their tasks with expectations to make the listers happy and contribute to good performance. However, previous studies revealed that the singer’s voice interrupts the linguistic task because realizing the lyrics consumes brain resources. The authors hypothesize that the difference in the voice volume affects the listener’s subjective evaluations and linguistic tasks. Twenty-one Japanese students participated in the listening experiments. They performed the linguistic task while listening to four kinds of music pieces based on a famous music piece with Japanese lyrics. Four music stimuli were composed as follows: (1) only musical instruments without voice; (2) the volume of singing voices was lower than instruments; (3) the singing voices and instruments were at the same level of volume; (4) the volume of voice was larger than instruments. The experimental results showed a significant effect on the subjective easiness of the linguistic task.