Carlos C. L. Silva

• MSc in Experimental Psychology; PhD in Informatics
• University of Minho

Due to their different propagation times, visual and auditory signals from external events arrive at the human sensory receptors with a disparate delay. This delay consistently varies with distance, but, despite such variability, most events are perceived as synchronic. There is, however, contradictory data and claims regarding the existence of com...

The negative impact of noise on human health is well established and a high percentage of environmental noise is related with traffic sources. In this study, we compared annoyance judgments of real and virtual traffic sounds. Virtual sounds were generated through an auralization software with input from close proximity tyre/road noise measurements...

Previous research has associated men’s physical features such as height and Shoulder-to-Hip Ratio (SHR) with dominance. Proxemics literature has suggested that the interpersonal space (comfort distance) increases in threatening and uncomfortable situations and decreases in unthreatening and comfortable situations. In the current study, we aimed to...

Use error is one of the leading causes of medical device incidents. It is crucial for all stakeholders to have a unified means to better understand, classify, communicate, and prevent/avoid medical device use errors. In this paper, we present our ongoing work on developing a new use error taxonomy for medical devices that has the potential to enabl...

Objective The aim of the study was the development and evaluation of a Descriptive Cognitive Model (DCM) for the identification of three types of usability issues in a low-code development platform (LCDP). Background LCDPs raise the level of abstraction of software development by freeing end-users from implementation details. An effective LCDP req...

Surface textures play an important role in the perception of consumer products. In car interiors, they are a major contributor to the perceived quality of a vehicle. However, limited attention has been paid to the affective responses elicited by touch and observation of a textured surface. Here we report an investigation in which Kansei Engineering...

Virtual reality is becoming an important tool for studying the interaction between pedestrians and road vehicles, by allowing the analysis of potentially hazard situations without placing subjects in real risk. However, most of the current simulators are unable to accurately recreate traffic sounds that are congruent with the visual scene. This has...

The controlled study of pedestrians’ crossing decision-making is relevant to the search for better safety conditions for this class of vulnerable road users. Several risk factors have been identified in the literature related to the crosswalks’ surrounding environment, the socio-demographic characteristics of the pedestrians crossing the road and t...

Recently, several studies on pedestrian safety and particularly those addressing pedestrian crossing behaviour and decision-making, have been performed using virtual reality systems. The use of simulators to assess pedestrian behaviour is conditioned by the feeling of presence and immersion, for which the sound is a determining factor. This paper p...

1 Abstract Virtual reality is becoming an important tool for studying the interaction between pedestrians and road vehicles, by allowing the analysis of potentially hazard situations without placing subjects in real risk. However, most of the current simulators are unable to accurately recreate traffic sounds that are congruent with the visual scen...

Transportation noise is considered today a major environmental risk factor and an important public health issue, especially in urban settings. Road, railway, and aircraft transports can produce high levels of continuous or intermittent noise, which, upon continued exposure, may have both short- and long-term impacts. Relevant short-term impacts are...

When crossing a road, pedestrians must detect traffic, combine data coming from different perceptual modalities, evaluate the time envelope for safely cross the street, and monitor the position of oncoming vehicles to perform corrective actions if needed. This study analyzed the influence of noise emitted by vehicles, or its absence, on pedestrians...

The successful introduction of self-driving technology may depend on the ability of the vehicles’ human-machine interface to convey trust to the vehicle occupants. Using a driving simulator, in this experiment we aimed to evaluate drivers’ trust on an autonomous system, depending on the feedback the vehicle provided by an assistive cluster’s interf...

Use error is one of the leading causes of medical device incidents. It is crucial for all stakeholders to have a unified means to better understand , classify, communicate, and prevent/avoid medical device use errors. In this paper, we present our ongoing work on developing a new use error taxonomy for medical devices that has the potential to enab...

When people walk side-by-side, they often synchronize their steps. To achieve this, individuals might cross-modally match audiovisual signals from the movements of the partner and kinesthetic, cutaneous, visual and auditory signals from their own movements. Because signals from different sensory systems are processed with noise and asynchronously,...

Perceptual judgments are an essential mechanism for our everyday interaction with other moving agents or events. For instance, estimation of the time remaining before an object contacts or passes us is essential to act upon or to avoid that object. Previous studies have demonstrated that participants use different cues to estimate the time to conta...

Pooled dataset of study with the variables used for analysis. (CSV)

The development of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) environments raises several challenges in terms of their evaluation. Ubicomp virtual reality prototyping tools enable users to experience the system to be developed and are of great help to face those challenges, as they support developers in assessing the consequences of a design decision in the ea...

One of the major challenges in the development of an immersive system is handling the delay between the tracking of the user's head position and the updated projection of a 3D image or auralised sound, also called end-to-end delay. Excessive end-to-end delay can result in the general decrement of the " feeling of presence " , the occurrence of moti...

Background / Purpose: The main goal of this experiment is to accurately define absolute spatial thresholds for a correct unity judgment between an auditory and a visual stimulus. Furthermore, we also want to explore if those limits are dependent or independent from the stimuli distance. Main conclusion: We successfully measure the spatial JNDs...

Understanding the mechanisms underlying audiovisual perception is crucial for the development of interactive audiovisual immersive environments. Some human perceptual mechanisms pose challenging problems that can now be better explored with the latest technology in computer-generated environments. Our main goal is to develop an interactive audiovis...

Understanding the mechanisms underlying audiovisual perception is crucial for the development of interactive audiovisual immersive environments. Some human perceptual mechanisms pose challenging problems that can now be better explored with the latest technology in computer-generated environments. Our main goal is to develop an interactive audiovis...

Understanding how users will respond to new in-vehicle technologies can be a crucial factor in the success of future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) implementations. This study's main goal was to evaluate the social acceptability of different ITS that varied in the control and monitoring levels over vehicle parameters and driver's performa...

The perception of sound distance has been sparsely studied so far. It is assumed to depend on familiar loudness, reverberation, sound spectrum, and parallax, but most of these factors have never been carefully addressed. Reverberation has been mostly analyzed in terms of ratio between direct and indirect sound, and total duration. Here we were inte...

Audiovisual perception is still an intriguing phenomenon, especially when we think about the physical and neuronal differences underlying the perception of sound and light. Physically, there is a delay of ∼3 ms/m between the emission of a sound and its arrival to the observer but, on the other hand, we know that acoustic transduction is a very fast...