Recognizing Emotion in Virtual Agent, Synthetic Human, and Human Facial Expressions

Abstract:  A growing interest in the HCI community is the design and development of embodied agents in virtual environments. For virtual environments where social interaction is needed, an agent’s facial expression may communicate emotive state to users both young and old. However, younger and older adults differ in how they label human facial expressions (Ruffman et al., 2008). Such possible age-related differences in labeling virtual agent expressions may impact the user’s social experience in a virtual environment. The purpose of the current research was to investigate age-related differences in emotion recognition of several on-screen characters of varying degrees of human-likeness. Participants performed a recognition task with three characters demonstrating four basic emotions or neutral. The results indicated age-related differences for all character types. Older adults commonly mislabeled the human and synthetic human emotions of anger, fear, sadness, and neutral. For the virtual agent face, older adults commonly mislabeled the emotions of anger, fear, happiness, and neutral.

Sara McBride is a 4th year graduate student in the Human Factors and Aging Laboratory. She is currently completing the requirements for a Ph.D. in Engineering Psychology. Her main  research interests include understanding how people interact with complex automated systems, and the factors that can make this interaction more successful.

Effects of Age-of-Flight on Situation Awareness in En Route Air Traffic Control 

Abstract:  The purpose of this study was to examine how situation awareness (SA) changes in en route air traffic control throughout the course of a flight.  Sixteen participants were recruited from Georgia Institute of Technology.  Participants were trained for five weeks on a low fidelity air traffic control simulator (NextSim).  During the five weeks of training, situation awareness was measured during four sessions.  Participants were queried about protagonist information (speed and altitude) or intentionality information (destination).  Queries were asked about flights which had been on the screen for 30-45 seconds (entering flights), flights which had been on the screen for a minimum of 90 seconds (middle flights), or no flights had the characteristic.  Questions regarding protagonist information were answered more quickly than questions regarding intentionality for all ages-of-flights.  However, questions regarding protagonist information improved for middle flights compared to entering flights while questions regarding intentionality were worse for middle flights compared to entering flights.  These results indicate that altitude and speed become more important, and that destination becomes less important, as a flight moves through the sector.  Therefore, interventions designed to improve SA should take into account the age-of-flight and characteristic trying to be improved.

Eric Stearman received his B.S. in Psychology from the University of Central Florida.  Eric is currently a second year graduate student in the Engineering Psychology program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  His current research focuses on situation awareness and monitoring in air traffic control including the proposed NextGen environment.