Claude Frasson

Université de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Computer Science and Operations Research

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease which spreads increasingly, and subjective cognitive decline (SCD) is an early state of this disease. With the absence of efficient pharmacological treatment, non-pharmacological treatments may be the solution to slow down the progress of the disease. We propose a cognitive priming syst...

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) is an early state of Alzheimer’s Disease. As this disease continues to spread, there is still no efficient pharmacological treatment to stop it. Non-pharmacological treatment may be effective to slow down the progression of the disease. We propose in this paper a cognitive priming system which projects the name of...

Today, airplane transportation plays a significant role in the widespread movement of people and in the commercial activity of nations. Modern air travel can make remarkable progress by enhancing cultural and social services, growing economic activities, enhancing regional employment levels, and expanding tourism. The aviation industry has develope...

Effective learning is highly affected by attention levels. Hence, Intelligent Tutoring Systems and other technologies for learning should be able to monitor the attention levels of learners and detect distractions in real-time to improve the learning process. We study the feasibility of detecting and monitoring visual distraction of participants, w...

Aircraft pilots are constantly undergoing situations where they must process significant amounts of data in very small periods of time, which may lead to mistakes. We have created a deviation detection system that is capable of auditing the cockpit in real time to detect actions that have been incorrectly added, omitted, or done out of sequence. Th...

Mental fatigue happens when a cognitive activity is maintained without the availability of adequate intellectual capabilities. This leads to change in mood, motivation, and temporary deterioration of various cognitive functions involved in goal-directed behavior. In this paper, we present our framework to successfully generate and measure mental fa...

An aircrew’s behaviour greatly affects aviation safety and efficiency, especially in emergency situations. Considering vision is the primary method by which pilots acquire information, the way in which they distribute their attention greatly influences the amount of information they acquire. The purpose of this study was to examine pilots’ attentio...

La fatigue mentale est un état complexe qui résulte d'une activité cognitive prolongée. Les symptômes de la fatigue mentale peuvent englober des changements d'humeur, de motivation et une détérioration temporaire des diverses fonctions cognitives impliquées dans un comportement orienté vers un but. D'importantes recherches ont été menées pour mettr...

Most of the time, during high workload the available attention resource is less than the need. Thus, attention should be intently managed particularly for pilots operating aircrafts. In such situations work processes are accompanied by stress, time pressure and disruption, resulting in wasted human resources and physical and safety problems in pilo...

The main goal of this paper is to set up a model of piloting tasks (the Attentional Task Model) which require attention for operating an aircraft. This model serves as a tool to predict attentional measurements with each task of a complete list of piloting actions. The main objective of this Attentional Task Model is to provide attention scores for...

This paper presents an experimental study that analyzes learners’ visual behaviour and brain activity in clinical reasoning. An acquisition protocol was defined to record eye tracking and EEG data from 15 participants as they interact with a computer-based learning environment called Amnesia, a medical simulation system that assesses the analytical...

Human pose estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision and shares all the difficulties of object detection. This task is particularly problematic when it comes to the estimation of the human pose in three dimensions. In fact, while the perception of an object in three dimensions is easy for humans due to the mastering of 3D mental model...

Speech is a dominant way of communication among humans which carries both information and emotion of the speaker. A wide variety of applications can utilize the emotions in the speech for serving humans’ needs more efficiently. Regarding the classification nature of a voice emotion recognition system, using machine learning algorithms is a practica...

Objectives: Immersive virtual reality has tremendous potential to improve cognition in populations with cognitive impairment. We conducted a feasibility and proof-of-concept study to assess the potential of virtual reality and electroencephalography, with or without an intelligent agent, that adapts the presented material to the emotions elicited b...

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is one of the most crucial diseases of our century affecting millions of persons every year. Negative emotions such as anxiety, frustration, and apathy are common in AD patients which reduce their wellbeing significantly. Virtual Reality is a means of providing the patients with a sense of presence in an environment that is...

Amusement can help modulate psychological disorders and cognitive functions. Unfortunately, algorithms classifying emotions still combine multiple positive emotions into a unique emotion, namely joy, making it hard to use amusement in a real-life setting. Here we train a Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) on electroencephalography (EEG) to predict amuse...

There is an increasing number of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Negative emotions are not only one of the symptoms of AD, but also the accelerator of the disease. Animal therapy can have a positive impact on the negative emotions of patients, but it has strict requirements for both environments and animals. In this study, we aim to explore the ef...

Subjective cognitive decline is an early state of Alzheimer’s Disease which affects almost 10 million people every year. It results from negative emotions such as frustration which are more present than healthy adults. For this reason, our work focuses on relaxing subjective cognitive decline patients using virtual reality environments to improve t...

From an image of a person, we can easily guess the 3D coordinates of the body parts. This is because we have acquired a 3D mental model from observing humans and interacting with them. This capacity easily achievable for humans is not systematic when it comes to computers. In this paper, we describe an approach that aims at estimating poses from vi...

The recent blocking of President Trump’s twitter account has raised awareness of the danger of the impact of fake news and the importance of detecting it. Indeed, if one can doubt information, ignoring what is true or false it can lead to a loss of confidence in the decisions and other dangers. The objective of this paper is to propose an automatic...

In this study we built a deep-learning model based on EEG data to recognize the confusion of the player. The model was constructed from the EEG data of 20 participants and their confusion measured using a camera-based emotion recognition system (Facereader 7.1) while playing adventure 3D game. We asked the participants to identify their emotions wh...

This paper reports the results of voice emotion recognition in real time using machine learning models. The models are trained with some commonly used and well-known audio emotion datasets together with a custom dataset. This custom dataset was recorded from non-actor and non-expert people who were trying to imagine themselves in scenarios leading...

It is of great importance to detect users’ confusion in a variety of situations such as orientation, reasoning, learning, and memorization. Confusion affects our ability to make decisions and can lower our cognitive ability. This study examines whether a confusion recognition model based on EEG features, recorded on cognitive ability tests, can be...

This paper presents a framework for adapting game elements to the player’s affective state and the integration of the framework in a virtual reality environment for moral development. These game elements include gestural and facial expressions of avatars during dialogues with the player, background music, the score, game mechanics, aesthetics and l...

Alzheimer’s disease affects millions of persons every year. Negative emotions such as stress and frustration have a negative impact on memory function and Alzheimer's patients experience more negative emotions than healthy adults. Non-pharmacological treatment such as immersion in virtual environments could help Alzheimer patients by reducing their...

Alzheimer's disease affects almost ten million people every year. Negative emotions such as frustration and anxiety can have impact on brain capability in terms of memory functions. Alzheimer's patients experience more negative emotions than healthy older adults. Non-pharmacological treatment such as animal therapy could help Alzheimer patient but...

Studies support cognitive training as a potentially efficient method to postpone cognitive decline in persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Virtual reality (VR) based serious games have found application in this field due to high level of immersion and interaction possible with the environment. We propose a fully immersive virtual reality 3...

There have been significant efforts in the direction of improving accuracy in detecting human action using skeleton joints. Determining actions in a noisy environment is still challenging since the Cartesian coordinate of the skeleton joints provided by depth sense camera depends on camera position and skeleton position. In a few of the human-compu...

In an attempt to make the therapeutic aspect less aversive, more attractive and engaging, virtual reality, an increasingly popular application in healthcare, offers an interesting alternative to pharmacological treatments. Positive emotions may improve the cognitive abilities of people suffering from cognitive impairment. Virtual reality can provid...

Patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) exhibit an impairment in performing tasks related to spatial navigation. Tasks which require navigational skills by building a cognitive map of the surrounding are found effective in cognitive training. In this paper we investigated the effect of cognitive training using a fully immersive 3D VR orien...

With Alzheimer’s disease becoming more prevalent, finding effective treatment is imperative. While no pharmacological treatment has yet proven to be efficient, we explore how technology can be integrated into non-pharmacological intervention to enhance its benefits. We propose a new and unique version of Music Therapy, an already existing therapy k...

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting nearly 9.9 million new people every year. The disease provokes important memory and cognitive impairment, eventually causing individuals to forget their loved ones and rendering them completely dependent on their caretakers. Alzheimer’s patients typically experience more negative em...

Les émotions négatives (frustration, anxiété, apathie) sont des symptômes fréquemment retrouvés dans la maladie d’Alzheimer. Il est important de réduire ces symptômes afin de permettre notamment un meilleur accès aux capacités mémorielles et cognitives. L’immersion en réalité virtuelle permet de diminuer et d’isoler contre les stimuli externes qui...

There is increasing evidence that learners' affective and cognitive states play a key role in the learning process. This suggests that systems which are able to detect these states can dynamically use adapted strategies to increase the pace of the learners' skill acquisition and improve their learning experience. In this work, we present a novel ap...

Users’ performance is known to be impacted by their emotional states. To better understand this relationship, different situations could be simulated during which the users’ emotional reactions are analyzed through sensors like eye tracking and EEG. In addition, virtual reality environments provide an immersive simulation context that induces high-...

Interaction with games can induce emotional reactions which could have an impact on players’ game experience and performance. Physiological sensors such as EEG and eye tracking represent an important mean to track these emotional reactions. In addition, virtual reality isolates the players from the external environment, strengthening the emotional...

The purpose of this work is to analyze the learners’ visual and brain behaviors during clinical reasoning. An experimental study was conducted to record gaze and EEG data of 15 novice medical students as they interacted with a computer-based learning environment in order to treat medical cases. We describe our approach to track the learners’ reason...

Users’ performance is known to be impacted by their emotional states. To better understand this relationship, different situations could be simulated during which the users’ emotional reactions are analyzed through sensors like eye tracking and EEG. In addition, virtual reality environments provide an immersive simulation context that induces high...

In this paper, we aim to predict students' learning performance by combining two-modality sensing variables, namely eye tracking that monitors learners' eye movements and elec-troencephalography (EEG) that measures learners' cerebral activity. Our long-term goal is to use both data to provide appropriate adaptive assistance for students to enhance...

Abstract This paper reports on the feasibility of using eye tracking as a tool for students’ performance assessment in a medical serious game. We are particularly interested in analyzing the relationship between learners’ visual behaviour and their performance while solving medical cases. The objective of this study is twofold. First, we analyze ho...

Prediction of emotions is important for understanding human be-havior and modeling users in learning environments. In this paper,we present a deep multi-modal architecture for emotions predic-tion, which takes advantage of deep learning, user multimodal dataand the hierarchy of human memory. The architecture consists ofthe combination of Long Short...

The performance and reactions of an individual in urgent situations vary according to his emotional states, which are subject to sudden changes. In medical situation, when patient’s life is in danger, the doctor’s emotional states are provoked and could affect his decisions. Virtual reality environments represent immersive situations in which we ca...

Physiological measurements such as brain activity (EEG), electrodermal skin ac-tivity (EDA), and eye tracking helps understand and assess the physiological process of emotions. The use of virtual reality (VR) provide interactive systems that offer to the user a high sense of presence and immersion in the virtual world. Our goal is to analyze the be...

Interacting with a virtual reality environment can provoke af-fective reactions that have an impact on user’s performance. Physiological sensors help to detect these affective states, which could be ideally controlled and adapted in order to pro-vide the best impact aimed by the game. In this paper, we propose to track users’ affective states and u...

Argumentative persuasion usually employs one of the three persuasion strategies: Ethos, Pathos or Logos. Several approaches have been proposed to model persuasive agents, however, none of them explored how the choice of a strategy impacts the mental states of the debaters and the argumentation process. We conducted a field experiment with real deba...

It has long been shown that there is a close relationship between eye movement, human cognition and brain activity. The present work seeks to explore this relationship by investigating the students’ saccadic eye movement sequences in a problem solving task. We aim to assess students’ reasoning process in a clinical problem solving task using studen...

In this paper, we present a solution for computer assisted emotional analysis of game session. The proposed approach combines eye movements and facial expressions to annotate the perceived game objects with the expressed dominate emotions. Moreover, our system EMOGRAPH (Emotional Graph) gives easy access to information about user experience and pre...

The current study aims to measure the goal orientations motivation in different scenes of a video-game. The evaluation of player experience was done with both subjective measures through questionnaire and objective measures through brain wave activity (electroencephalography - EEG). We used GameFlow questionnaire to characterize the player’s master...

Abstract. Humans’ cognitive and affective states are constantly subject to regular and sudden changes. The origins of these changes are multiple and unpredictable. Virtual Reality (VR) game environments could represent an immersive unconstrained experimental context in which game designers could control a wide range of parameters that act on these...

Relaxation techniques can relieve us from stress, anxiety, pain and maladies. Many researchers succeed in relaxing subjects by various methods. However, few concerned about the ability of relaxation. Hence, the main goal of this study is to help people relax faster. We developed a virtual reality neurofeedback relaxation training system, called Vir...

Detecting the real-time human emotions became recently one important issue in Artificial Intelligent (AI). Numbers of research on emotional facial expressions, the effect of emotion on heart rate, eye movement and the evolution of emotions with the time show the interest of this topic. This paper presents a method for observing the human’s emotiona...

In this paper we aim to assess students’ reasoning in a clinical problem-solving task. We propose to use students’ eye movements to measure the scan path followed while resolving medical cases, and a sequence alignment method, namely, the pattern searching algorithm to evaluate their analytical reasoning. Experimental data were gathered from 15 par...

In everyday life discussion, people try to persuade each other about the goodness of their viewpoint regarding a certain topic. This persuasion process is usually affected by several elements, like the ability of the speaker in formulating logical arguments, her confidence with respect to the discussed topic, and the emotional solicitation that cer...

Intuitive reasoning relies on intuition, experience and affective judgment in order to resolve problems and acquire knowledge. This form of intelligence, based on unconscious learning, provides fast access to knowledge and is most of the time filled from learning by experience. Virtual Reality (VR) is a way to offer environments in which a user can...

Argumentation is a mechanism to support different forms of reasoning such as decision making and persuasion and always cast under the light of critical thinking. In the latest years, several computational approaches to argumentation have been proposed to detect conflicting information, take the best decision with respect to the available knowledge,...

Nowadays, millions of users use many social media systems every day. These services produce massive messages, which play a vital role in the social networking paradigm. As we see, an intelligent learning emotion system is desperately needed for detecting emotion among these messages. This system could be suitable in understanding users’ feelings to...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Brain Function Assessment in Learning, BFAL 2017, held in Patras, Greece, in September 2017. The 16 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks and 6 posters were carefully selected from 28 submissions. The BFAL conference aims to reg...

A growing body of work on intelligent tutoring systems, affective computing, and artificial intelligence in education is exploring creative, technology-driven approaches to enhance learners’ experience of adaptive, positively-valenced emotions while interacting with advanced learning technologies. Despite this, there has been no published work to d...

Recognize learner’s emotion during a learning session is very important task for intelligent tutoring system and help in improving learners’ interactions and understanding their preferences. This paper proposes a text-based emotion recognition approach that uses personal text data to recognize learner’s current emotion. The proposed approach employ...

The current study focuses on building a real-time emotions model to automatically detect emotions directly from brain signals. This model analyses the learner’s emotional state which is very useful to intelligent tutoring systems. An experiment was conducted to record neural activity and facial micro-expressions of participants while they are looki...

In this paper we present a serious game, Lewispace, where we focus on measuring and using Electroencephalograms in order to detect how the learner reasons in the game. We track learner's reasoning according to different regions of the brain. Four standard lobes were taken into consideration: frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal. Each lobe was...

Providing an adequate help to a learner remains a challenge. In this paper we aim to find how to provide learners with real time help in an educational game. Detecting that a player is engaged or motivated is a good sign that he is progressing. For these reasons we need to assess learner's states while learning. In this study we gather a variety of...

Learners' performances in intelligent tutoring systems or e-learning environments depend on various factors such as the nature of the task presented, their cognitive and affective abilities, etc. In this paper, we focus on studying in detail the variation of these different factors and more specifically the electroencephalogram (EEG metrics) and ho...

In this paper, we present a novel work about predicting the facial expressions from physiological signals of the brain. The main contributions of this paper are twofold. a) Investigation of the predictability of facial micro-expressions from EEG. b) Identification of the relevant features to the prediction. To reach our objectives, an experiment wa...

Plusieurs approches ont été adoptées en matière d'architecture de systèmes tutoriels intelligents (STI). Certaines se sont penchées davantage sur des aspects spécifiques aux composantes d'un STI en se limitant à des domaines d'enseignement restreints et à une planification simple. Nous pensons que les fonctions d'enseignement et de surveillances de...