Effects of Augmented Reality Object and Texture Presentation on Walking Behavior

Human sensory adaptation to the ecological structure of environmental statistics

Humans acquire sensory information via fast, highly specialized detectors: For example, edge detectors monitor restricted regions of visual space over timescales of 100-200 ms. Surprisingly, this study demonstrates that their operation is nevertheless shaped by the ecological consistency of slow global statistical structure in the environment. In the experiments, humans acquired feature information from brief localized elements embedded within a virtual environment. Cast shadows are important for determining the appearance and layout of the environment. When the statistical reliability of shadows was manipulated, human feature detectors implicitly adapted to these changes over minutes, adjusting their response properties to emphasize either "image-based" or "object-based" anchoring of local visual elements. More specifically, local visual operators were more firmly anchored around object representations when shadows were reliable. As shadow reliability was reduced, visual operators disengaged from objects and became anchored around image features. These results indicate that the notion of sensory adaptation must be reframed around complex statistical constructs with ecological validity. These constructs far exceed the spatiotemporal selectivity bandwidth of sensory detectors, thus demonstrating the highly integrated nature of sensory processing during natural behavior.

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.

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.