Noriyuki Matsuda

THE COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE OF RISK: PANCULTURAL UNITY OR CULTURAL SHAPING?

The intention of this study has been to test the hypothesis of “universalism of risk perception” using several student samples from the United States and Japan. The main objective was to reveal hidden patterns of risk perception based on psychometric characteristics among and between the different samples. In particular, the study was designed to demarcate between pancultural and culturally variant features of the cognitive processes of risks. One key element was the careful selection of a comparative culture. A comparison between Japan and a Western culture provides one of the most stringent tests of the hypotheses guiding the research program. Another key element was the development of a comparative instrument, in Phase I, which met a number of language translation criteria and tests of face validity.

Visualization of music performance as an aid to listener's comprehension

We present a new method for visualizing musical expressions with a special focus on the three major elements of tempo change, dynamics change, and articulation. We have represented tempo change as a horizontal interval delimited by vertical lines, while dynamics change and articulation within the interval are represented by the height and width of a bar, respectively. Then we grouped local expression into several groups by k-means clustering based on the values of the elements. The resulting groups represented the emotional expression in a performance that is controlled by the rhythmic and melodic structure, which controls the gray scale of the graphical components. We ran a pilot experiment to test the effectiveness of our method using two matching tasks and a questionnaire. In the first task, we used the same section of music, played by two different interpretations, while in the second task, two different sections of a performance were used. The results of the test seem to support the present approach, although there is still room for further improvement that will reflect the subtleties in performance.

Graphical expression of the mood of music

We propose a graphical method to express what a music performance is intended to create in the minds of the audience. Our graphical approach overcomes the problems associated with verbal labeling. Besides playing a melody and harmony, a music player tries to produce certain feelings in the audience by manipulating tempo, rhythm, articulation and dynamic changes. Despite the linear nature of music, the produced mood does not necessarily preserve the temporal sequence, and is mentally representable in different forms. As a first approximation to such a representation, we have developed a method involving a plane on which the musical expression elements are projected. First, expression elements for all notes in a musical section are derived. They are then arranged according to the importance of notes in consideration of the musical structure.

Effect of visual representation in recognizing emotion expressed in a musical performance

We have conducted a series of experiment to investigate the potential of music communication based on emotion for hearing-impaired people and people with hearing abilities. The purpose of the experiments is to design a performance assistance system to enable hearing-impaired people to enjoy taking part in a music ensemble. In this paper, we describe an experiment on recognizing emotion in two media: moving images of a professional percussionist giving an improvised performance and the sounds extracted from the performance. The experiment was designed to investigate whether the image of a performance is important in recognizing emotion in the performance. The result showed that there was no significant difference in recognition of emotion between the two media. Our results were consistent with those of previous experiments: (1) there was no significant difference in recognizing emotion between hearing-impaired people and people with hearing abilities, and (2) ldquofearrdquo was the least recognized of the four emotions.

Using Network Analysis to Discover Cooperation Opportunities in Inter-organizational Networks

In a network of organizations, members are often faced with the problem of choosing partners for closer cooperation within this network. Consequently, network members collect information about potential partners to reach informed decisions about for instance starting new joint development projects or harvesting best practices. The large amounts of information involved in these decision processes obscure possibilities, and choices are made ad hoc. In this paper, we present an approach that uses techniques from network analysis to support organizations in processing and understanding this information. Central in our approach are network visualizations that help in comparing gaps between the aspired and current development levels of the processes of the member organizations. The advantage of our approach, which we validated via expert interviews, is that such visualizations are generated semi-automatically and offer an overall view of the current and aspired situation in the network without losing the ability to pinpoint particular, individual processes of interest.

Scan-path analysis by the string-edit method considering fixation duration

Dynamic aspects of eye-tracking data are important but difficult to analyze. With string based approaches, a sequence of fixations is analyzed, however, fixation duration is not addressed. Cristino et al. recently proposed to re-code a scan-path with a long fixation by repeating the code. The modified scan path includes both fixation duration and sequence of fixations. In studying multiple records by the string-edit method enhanced with cost functions, we compared the performance of the modified coding against the ordinary one. Furthermore, we derived representative scan paths to examine the distance among the web pages used as stimuli. The usefulness of our approach is demonstrated.

Frequent pattern mining of eye-tracking records partitioned into cognitive chunks

Assuming that scenes would be visually scanned by chunking information, we partitioned fixation sequences of web page viewers into chunks using isolate gaze point(s) as the delimiter. Fixations were coded in terms of the segments in a 5 × 5 mesh imposed on the screen. The identified chunks were mostly short, consisting of one or two fixations. These were analyzed with respect to the within- and between-chunk distances in the overall records and the patterns (i.e., subsequences) frequently shared among the records. Although the two types of distances were both dominated by zero- and one-block shifts, the primacy of the modal shifts was less prominent between chunks than within them. The lower primacy was compensated by the longer shifts. The patterns frequently extracted at three threshold levels were mostly simple, consisting of one or two chunks. The patterns revealed interesting properties as to segment differentiation and the directionality of the attentional shifts.

Emotion-intending drawings

We are building a musical performance assistance system that uses visual information to supplement the musical communication among deaf and hard-of-hearing people playing music together, enabling them to enjoy music communication playing music representing a certain emotion. We previously collected drawings for which the drawer had an emotion in mind in order to improve the communication in our system, which presents them to the players to enable them to focus on expressing a specific emotion. We thus need to better understand the properties of images that relate to an emotion. After computing the principal components of the image properties, we clustered the drawings into groups representing one of four emotions. We also asked viewers to categorize them on the basis of the emotion they elicited in the viewer. The results showed that the viewers based their judgment on the specific meaning of the drawing rather than the shape, if the shape of drawings was not abstract. The drawings intended to represent fear were well grouped by clustering, while the viewers categorized them as either fear or sadness. The results imply that we can add new drawings with intended emotions to our system as long as their image properties meet our analysis.