Shwu-Lih Huang

Role of lateral habenula in the regulation of exploratory behavior and its relationship to stress in rats

The lateral habenula is a major station conveying information between the limbic forebrain and midbrain. Bilateral lesions of the lateral habenula were found to increase exploratory behavior, including locomotor activity, rearing and hole-poke responses in rats. These effects were not due to an augmentation of general motor function, since the animals performance on the Rota-rod treadmill was not significantly changed by the same manipulation. Lateral habenular lesion was also found to potentiate the effects of footshock stress on exploratory behavior in an open field. It is suggested that the lateral habenula probably plays an inhibitory role in the expression of certain emotion-related behaviors under normal and stressful situations.

Task-irrelevant angry faces capture attention in visual search while modulated by resources.

We investigated the attentional capture effect of emotional faces under sufficient or restricted attentional conditions. In a modified visual search paradigm, three kinds of schematic faces (angry, happy, and neutral) served as stimuli. Participants were instructed to search for a target face indicated by a dot and to respond to the dots position. In this design, the emotional content of the face is task-irrelevant and does not need to be attended. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that having an angry face as the target face elicited a faster response than did the neutral target face, and when the angry face is used as a distractor, the response to the target was delayed compared to the response with no such distractor. Experiment 2 included inverted faces to decrease emotional content; results showed that inversion of the faces reduced the effect of angry faces on the search performance. When attention was cued to a specific area in Experiment 3, the effect of angry faces outside of the cued area became weaker. In conclusion, the results indicate that a task-irrelevant angry face can capture attention beyond top-down control, but this effect is modulated by the availability of attentional resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).

The influence of attention levels on psychophysiological responses.

This study aimed to examine which brain oscillatory activities and peripheral physiological measures were influenced by attention levels. A new experimental procedure was designed. Participants were asked to count the number of target events while viewing eight moving white circles. An event occurred when two of the circles changed from white to red or blue. In the low-attention task, similar to a feature search, the target events were defined by color only. In the high-attention task, similar to a conjunction search, the target events were defined by both color and size. In the control task, participants were asked to passively watch the series of events while remembering a number. Based on Feature Integration Theory, our high-attention task would demand more attentional investment than the low-attention task. Given the identical visual stimuli and requirement of keeping a number in working memory for all three tasks, the changes in brain oscillatory activities can be attributed to attention level rather than to perceptual content or memory processes. Peripheral measures such as heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), respiration rate, eye blinks, and skin conductance level were also evaluated. In comparing the high-attention task with the low-attention task, theta synchronization at the Fz, Cz, and Pz electrodes as a group, alpha2 desynchronization at the Fz, Cz, Pz, and Oz electrodes as a group, and a decrease in the low-frequency component and ratio measure of HRV were evident. These measures are considered to be promising indices for discriminating between attention levels.

Evaluating Emotive Character Animations Created with Procedural Animation

How to create effective body animations for virtual agents with emotions remains the state of the art for human animators and a great challenge for computer scientists. In this paper, we propose to use a model of hierarchal parameters to represent body animations: emotional , style , motion, and procedural parameters. Based on this model, we have created motions for a virtual character with generic animation procedures and mapped these procedural parameters into style parameters as proposed in the literature. The expressiveness of the generated animations was verified through experiments in our previous work. In this paper, we further report the results of two experiments attempting to verify how the style parameters are mapped into various emotions. The results reveal that the participants can successfully distinguish emotions based on the manipulation of style parameters for neutral motions such as walking. When these style parameters were used for emotive motions, including pounding, shivering, flourishing and crestfallen, the generated animations were even more effective for intended contexts.

Verification of Expressiveness of Procedural Parameters for Generating Emotional Motions

Body movements are crucial for emotion expression of a virtual agent. However, the perception of expressiveness of an animation has always been a subjective matter. Research in psychology has asked professional actors to perform emotional motions to study how body gestures deliver emotions [2]. In this work, we aim to design an animation system that can generate human body motions in a more systematic manner and then study the expressiveness of the generated animation as a preceding step for the study of the relation between motion and emotion.

Association between the behavioral and neurochemical effects of amphetamine: Hemispheric asymmetry study☆

Effects of amphetamine on concentrations of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin in several monoamine-containing cell body and terminal regions were examined left and right separately in rats. Results suggest that amphetamine reduced the L-R asymmetry of most of these measures, and this effect is more significant in the cell body than in the terminal regions. Behaviorally, amphetamine also decreased L-R asymmetry of the spontaneous turning behavior in rats and this latter effect is most closely associated with the reductions of dopamine and norepinephrine asymmetries in the substantia nigra and reduction of norepinephrine asymmetry in the locus coeruleus.

An Experimental Platform Based on MCE for Interactive TV

In this paper, we propose an experimental platform for the design of interactive TV. On this platform, designers are allowed to emulate broadcasting programs, define control functions, collect user interaction data, and incorporate external application systems. We also use several examples to demonstrate that through this platform one can easily add new functions and set up psychological experiments for evaluating these new functions. Two experiments have been conducted and their preliminary results are reported.

Perceiving a part and the whole of narrative scenes with interactive processing between character and surroundings

ABSTRACT Visual recognition is a fast and accurate process. This study adopted a progressive revelation task which demonstrated the dynamic visual process to investigate narrative scene perception. Experiment 1 examined the recognition of character and surroundings that are presented in isolation. The results demonstrated an accumulation of perceptual evidence for recognition as a psychometric function, and character identification was found to be superior to surroundings identification (character advantage effect). Experiment 2 examined the character and surroundings identification in isolated and concurrent presentations. The results showed that less accumulated evidence was required for the concurrent condition than for the isolated condition in the surroundings identification but not in the character identification. The character advantage effect only appeared in the isolated condition. In Experiment 3, both the character and surroundings in semantically consistent or inconsistent scenes were reported. The results showed that consistency effects appeared in both character and surroundings reporting, and the character advantage effect appeared in both consistent and inconsistent conditions. Overall, the results of the present study, which have high ecological validity, supported the existence of an interactive relationship between the visual processing of character and surroundings in narrative scene perception.

The Design and Study of a Serious Game for Attention Training of the Older Adults

In this research, we have designed a parameterizable serious game on tablet computer to study how such a system can improve the attention of the older adults. In the experiments, we have adopted two types of tests: Visual Search (VS) and Attention Network Test (ANT) as the pretests and posttests. In the game sessions, we have incorporated visual search exercises in the game to provide attention trainings for the older adults. The experimental results show that some cognitive abilities of the participants can be significantly improved, and most of the subjects are willing to continue to play the game after the experiments. The design of our serious game succeeded in achieving the goal of attention training for the older adults.

Using intelligent 3D animated character as the interface for interactive digital TV system

In this research, we propose to incorporate intelligent 3D character into interface design to enhance the user experience on the interactive digital TV system. Based on the smart interactive digital TV system, call SITV, developed in our previous work, we consider several interactive scenarios in the design of the intelligent 3D animated character. We propose to design our intelligent 3D character with the concepts of mobility and expressiveness on body motion such that appropriate emotions can be presented according to TV watching scenarios and character configurations. We have designed experiments to evaluate different types of user interface design for various scenarios. We have found that although the interface with animated character can attract the attention of the user and enhance interactivity, the text-based dialog box interface is still the easiest to understand. We also have found that when the freshness of the new interface with animated character decays after some time of use, it is crucial for an animated character to have expressive motions.