Title: Toward affective HCI: affective engagement to emotional facial expressions of embodied social agents
Speaker: Dr. Ahyoung Choi / Institute of Creative Technology, USC, USA
Date: April 17, 2012
Time: 9:00 - 10:15am
Location: Laughlin Hall (KAIST GSCT)
 
Abstract
In this talk, I will discuss sensing methods as well as algorithms for the recognition of affective engagement in physiological responses that are important for maintaining engagement and belief between a human and an agent.
 
Previous research illustrates that people can be influenced by the emotional displays of computer-generated agents. What is less clear is if these influences arise from cognitive or affective process (i.e., do people use agent displays as information or do they provoke user emotions). To unpack these processes we examine the decisions and physiological reactions of participants (heart rate and electrodermal activity) when engaged in a decision task (prisoner’s dilemma game) with emotionally-expressive agents. Our results replicate findings that people’s decisions are influenced by such emotional displays, but these influences differ depending on the extent to which these displays provoke an affective response. Specifically, we show that an individual difference known as electrodermal lability predicts the extent to whether people will engage affectively or strategically with such agents, and thereby better predicts their decisions. We discuss implications for designing agent facial expressions to enhance social interaction between humans and agents.
 
Bio
Ahyoung Choi received her BS in Electronics Engineering from Ewha Womans Univ. (Seoul, Korea) in 2004. She received her MS and Ph. D. in Information and Communications from GIST (Gwangju, Korea) in 2005 and 2011, respectively. She is currently working at Institute of Creative Technology, University of Southern California, USA. The main thrust of her research has been human computer interaction, context awareness, affective computing, CT and its application to agents, interfaces, especially those using social behavior, emotion, and physiological response.