Subliminal Cues While Teaching: HCI Technique for Enhanced Learning

Abstract

This paper presents results from an empirical study conducted with a subliminal teaching technique aimed at enhancing learner's performance in Intelligent Systems through the use of physiological sensors. This technique uses carefully designed subliminal cues (positive) and miscues (negative) and projects them under the learner's perceptual visual threshold. A positive cue, called answer cue, is a hint aiming to enhance the learner's inductive reasoning abilities and projected in a way to help them figure out the solution faster but more importantly better. A negative cue, called miscue, is also used and aims at obviously at the opposite (distract the learner or lead them to the wrong conclusion). The latest obtained results showed that only subliminal cues, not miscues, could significantly increase learner performance and intuition in a logic-based problem-solving task. Nonintrusive physiological sensors (EEG for recording brainwaves, blood volume pressure to compute heart rate and skin response to record skin conductivity) were used to record affective and cerebral responses throughout the experiment. The descriptive analysis, combined with the physiological data, provides compelling evidence for the positive impact of answer cues on reasoning and intuitive decision making in a logic-based problem-solving paradigm.

Influence of subliminal cueing on visual search tasks

“…For a computerized quiz, Chalfoun and Frasson used subliminal messages to support learning solution strategies. Using subliminal messages resulted in 44 % less errors [3,4].…”

Subliminal Cueing of Selection Behavior in a Virtual Environment

“…Examples of research include subliminal cueing in support of online help in a desktop-computer text-editing task application (Wallace, Flanery, & Knezek, 1991), just-in-time memory support using subliminal cues delivered in a head-mounted display (DeVaul et al, 2003), application in a tutoring system (Chalfoun & Frasson, 2011), and aid for visual search tasks (e.g., McNamara, Bailey, & Grimm, 2008;Bailey, McNamara, Sudarsanam, & Grimm, 2009).…”

A Review of the Research on Subliminal Techniques for Implicit Interaction in Symbiotic Systems

“…In another study [13], visual masking was applied in the context of a virtual tutoring system. The results showed that subliminal cueing elicited better performances as well as better affective states throughout the lesson.…”

“…To briefly sum up, subliminal stimulation seems to be suitable for a variety of uses in concrete scenarios as those of memory retrieval [9] and problem solving [13] to bias decisionmaking in selection behavior [5,16] and navigation tasks [4]. In the specific context of symbiotic systems, such potential can be exploited to assist the user during critical phases or to manage his interaction without interrupting the task at hand [3] or generating mental workload [8,9].…”