Perception of Basic Emotions from Facial Expressions of Dynamic Virtual Avatars

Faita, Claudia; Vanni, F.; Lorenzini, Cristian; Carrozzino, Marcello; Tanca, Camilla; Bergamasco, Massimo

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-22888-4_30

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…For example, the present study used photorealistic facial animations as stimuli, whose ecological validity remains unknown. Yet, several studies have shown that emotional expressions from both static (Dyck et al, 2008) and dynamic virtual computer-animated avatars (Faita et al, 2015) are comparable to those from real human emotions in terms of recognition accuracy and other social judgments, including the ability to replicate impairments found in clinical populations (Dyck, Winbeck, Leiberg, Chen, & Mathiak, 2010). Moreover, this set of stimuli is known to be sufficiently sensitive to reveal the existence of cultural and individual differences in how information from faces is extracted in order to make emotional judgments (Jack & Schyns, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion perception in habitual players of action video games.

Pichon

Bediou

Antico

et al. 2021

Emotion

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Action video game players (AVGPs) display superior performance in various aspects of cognition, especially in perception and top-down attention. The existing literature has examined these performance almost exclusively with stimuli and tasks devoid of any emotional content. Thus, whether the superior performance documented in the cognitive domain extend to the emotional domain remains unknown. We present 2 cross-sectional studies contrasting AVGPs and nonvideo game players (NVGPs) in their ability to perceive facial emotions. Under an enhanced perception account, AVGPs should outperform NVGPs when processing facial emotion. Yet, alternative accounts exist. For instance, under some social accounts, exposure to action video games, which often contain violence, may lower sensitivity for empathy-related expressions such as sadness, happiness, and pain while increasing sensitivity to aggression signals. Finally, under the view that AVGPs excel at learning new tasks (in contrast to the view that they are immediately better at all new tasks), the use of stimuli that participants are already experts at predicts little to no group differences. Study 1 uses drift-diffusion modeling and establishes that AVGPs are comparable to NVGPs in every decision-making stage mediating the discrimination of facial emotions, despite showing group difference in aggressive behavior. Study 2 uses the reverse inference technique to assess the mental representation of facial emotion expressions, and again documents no group differences. These results indicate that the perceptual benefits associated with action video game play do not extend to overlearned stimuli such as facial emotion, and rather indicate equivalent facial emotion skills in AVGPs and NVGPs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion perception in habitual players of action video games.

Pichon

Bediou

Antico

et al. 2021

Emotion

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“…We also did the same for the character models implemented in the maze, as people's facial appearances can produce stable impressions of trustworthiness [18][19][20][21], similarly to social information [22,44]. As such, we selected characters from the Microsoft Rocketbox virtual avatar library (https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-Rocketbox) who had previously been shown to be emotionally neutral in their default expressions [45].…”

Section: Stimulus Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring trust with the Wayfinding Task: Implementing a novel task in immersive virtual reality and desktop setups across remote and in-person test environments

Clements,

Brübach,

Glazov

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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Trust is a key feature of social relationships. Common measures of trust, questionnaires and economic games, lack ecological validity. Hence, we sought to introduce an immersive, virtual reality (VR) measure for the behavioral assessment of trust across remote and in-person settings, building on the maze task of Hale et al. (2018). Our ‘Wayfinding Task’ consists of an interconnected urban environment for participants to navigate on the advice of two characters of differing trustworthiness. We present four studies implementing the Wayfinding Task in remote and in-person testing environments and comparing performance across head-mounted display (HMD)-based VR and desktop setups. In each study, the trustworthiness of two virtual characters was manipulated, through either a fact sheet providing trustworthiness information, or a behavior-based trustworthiness manipulation task termed the Door Game, based on Van der Biest et al., 2020. Participants then completed the Wayfinding Task. Overall, we found that participant behavior in the Wayfinding Task reflected the relative trustworthiness of the two characters; in particular, the trustworthy character was approached more often for advice, reflecting data from our Door Game. We found mostly null results for our novel outcome measure, interpersonal distance. Remote testing successfully achieved these effects. While HMD-based VR and desktop setups both showed these effects, there was a stronger effect of trustworthiness in the HMD VR version of the task. These results have implications for the measurement of trust in behavioral settings and the use of remote and VR-based testing in social experiments.

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“…Faita and colleagues 65 investigated the correlation between dynamism and realism of virtual faces performing facial expressions. In their study, two groups with different expertise in virtual reality were asked to associate a score 1-5 to each of the emotion rendered on the virtual character.…”

Section: Virtual Charactersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of dynamics and speech on understanding humanoid facial expressions

Lazzeri

Mazzei

Moussa

et al. 2018

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems

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Human communication relies mostly on nonverbal signals expressed through body language. Facial expressions, in particular, convey emotional information that allows people involved in social interactions to mutually judge the emotional states and to adjust its behavior appropriately. First studies aimed at investigating the recognition of facial expressions were based on static stimuli. However, facial expressions are rarely static, especially in everyday social interactions. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that the dynamics inherent in a facial expression could be fundamental in understanding its meaning. In addition, it has been demonstrated that nonlinguistic and linguistic information can contribute to reinforce the meaning of a facial expression making it easier to be recognized. Nevertheless, few studies have been performed on realistic humanoid robots. This experimental work aimed at demonstrating the human-like expressive capability of a humanoid robot by examining whether the effect of motion and vocal content influenced the perception of its facial expressions. The first part of the experiment aimed at studying the recognition capability of two kinds of stimuli related to the six basic expressions (i.e. anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise): static stimuli, that is, photographs, and dynamic stimuli, that is, video recordings. The second and third parts were focused on comparing the same six basic expressions performed by a virtual avatar and by a physical robot under three different conditions: (1) muted facial expressions, (2) facial expressions with nonlinguistic vocalizations, and (3) facial expressions with an emotionally neutral verbal sentence. The results show that static stimuli performed by a human being and by the robot were more ambiguous than the corresponding dynamic stimuli on which motion and vocalization were associated. This hypothesis has been also investigated with a 3-dimensional replica of the physical robot demonstrating that even in case of a virtual avatar, dynamic and vocalization improve the emotional conveying capability.

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Perception of Basic Emotions from Facial Expressions of Dynamic Virtual Avatars

Cited by 7 publications

References 22 publications

Emotion perception in habitual players of action video games.

Emotion perception in habitual players of action video games.

Measuring trust with the Wayfinding Task: Implementing a novel task in immersive virtual reality and desktop setups across remote and in-person test environments

The influence of dynamics and speech on understanding humanoid facial expressions

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