A Method for Behavior Change Support by Controlling Psychological Effects on Walking Motivation Caused by Step Count Log Competition System

Unconscious Other's Impression Changer: A Method to Manipulate Cognitive Biases That Subtly Change Others' Impressions Positively/Negatively by Making AI Bias in Emotion Estimation AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for human emotion estimation, such as facial emotion estimation, has been actively studied. On the other hand, there has been little research on unconscious phenomena in cognition and psychology (i.e., cognitive biases) caused by viewing AI emotion estimation information. Therefore, this study verifies RQ "Do people have a cognitive bias in which impressions of others (i.e., how to see and feel about others) are changed by viewing biased AI's emotion estimation information? If it exists, can impression manipulation methods that intentionally use this cognitive bias be realized?" The proposed method for verification makes the emotion estimation system biased so as to estimate emotion more positively/negatively than AI without bias. A prototype system was implemented. Evaluation using video showed that the presentation of biased emotion estimation information causes a phenomenon that quickly and unconsciously changes the way people see and feel others' impressions, which supported the RQ. Specifically, viewing information that estimated others' emotions more positively/negatively caused the phenomenon in which the user's self-judgment was overridden and others' impressions of emotions, words, and actions were perceived more positively/negatively. The existence of this phenomenon and method indicates that biased emotion estimation AI has the potential to both cause adverse effects on people and support people for good purposes through the manipulation of their impressions. This study provides helpful insights for the design and use of emotion estimation AI considering cognitive biases.

Unconscious load changer: Designing method to subtly influence load perception by simply presenting modified myoelectricity sensor information

Systems of presenting myoelectricity sensor information allow users to understand the body's load for various purposes, such as medical rehabilitation and sports training. If there is a method to create the psychological phenomenon of unconsciously increasing or decreasing a user's load perception simply by changing how to present the myoelectricity sensor values, it will help design a more effective system. Therefore, we propose a method to manipulate load perception by presenting modified myoelectricity sensor information. The proposed method aims to induce higher or lower load perception by modifying the actual myoelectric value to a higher or lower value. We implemented a prototype system and evaluated our method for the two types of load perception of weight perception and fatigue perception when handling objects. The result showed that most subjects unconsciously increased or decreased their load perception to match the presented myoelectric value, while the minority subjects got the opposite response from the majority subjects. This result indicates the feasibility of user assistance systems that use this phenomenon for a good purpose, such as systems that slightly reduce the load perception during physical activity. On the other hand, this result also indicates the feasibility of systems that use this phenomenon for a bad purpose, such as systems that increase user's fatigue to harm user's activity. This study provides helpful findings for designing and using sensor information presentation systems considering the psychological phenomenon.

Exploring Tactile Stimuli from a Wrist-Worn Device to Manipulate Subjective Time Based on the Filled-Duration Illusion

There are situations where manipulating subjective time would be desirable, such as reducing waiting time, and there are many studies to manipulate subjective time. However, it is not easy to use previous methods in various situations because most of them use visual and auditory information. This study proposes a method to manipulate the subjective time by the tactile stimuli from wrist-worn devices. We designed three types of tactile stimuli presentation methods that change the number, the duration, and the time interval of the stimuli. The evaluation result clarified the elements of the tactile stimuli that intentionally changed the subjective time and confirmed that our method can change the subjective time by about 23% (from -6% to +17%). Since few studies have focused on the phenomenon in which the subjective time changes depending on the tactile stimuli from information devices, our findings can contribute to designing information devices and user experiences.

Mindless Memorization Booster: A Method to Influence Memorization Power Using Attention Induction Phenomena Caused by Visual Interface Modulation and Its Application to Memorization Support for English Vocabulary Learning

Memorization is necessary for various fields, such as language learning in the field of education. While memorization learning is often tedious and demotivating due to requiring conscious effort, few support approaches improve memorization unconsciously with low conscious effort. In this study, we propose a method, Mindless Memorization Booster, which improves users’ memorization unconsciously by visual stimuli of modulating the visual interface. This method is based on previous findings that the modulation of perceptual stimuli arouses attention/concentration. When the user looks at the memorization target, the proposed method presents a change in visual interface (e.g., changes in memorization target size, background color, and visual icon movement) to cause a psychological phenomenon of affecting the user’s attention and concentration, aiming at enhancing the memorization unconsciously. A prototype system of the proposed method was implemented for an English vocabulary memorization learning application. The evaluation results showed that the user’s memorization result was affected by the proposed method, and the speed of recall (i.e., outputs of the memorization word from the brain) increased by about 1 s per one memorization word without causing a negative affection on the number of correct answers for memorization. This result indicated the feasibility of the proposed method for memorization learning support. Our findings are helpful for designing visual information interfaces that consider the phenomena affecting the user’s memorization and promote memorization learning unconsciously.