Mariano Luis Alcañiz Raya

Universitat Politècnica de València | UPV · Institute for Research and Innovation in Bioengineering (i3B)

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder may present social-communicative and behavioral deficits. Recently, research on treatment and diagnosis has shifted its focus to the application of new technologies. Among them is virtual reality, which guarantees a high sense of realism to the experience and allows the implementation of a virtual agent tha...

To date, odor research has primarily focused on the behavioral effects of common odors on consumer perception and choices. We report a study that examines, for the first time, the effects of human body odor cues on consumer purchase behaviors. The influence of human chemosignals produced in three conditions, namely happiness, fear, a relaxed condit...

This study aimed to evaluate the viability of a new procedure based on machine learning (ML), virtual reality (VR), and implicit measures to discriminate empathy. Specifically, eye-tracking and decision-making patterns were used to classify individuals according to their level in each of the empathy dimensions, while they were immersed in virtual e...

Currently, in the context of leadership, there is an important compromise between training activities and evaluation methods with training focused on the skills of the 21st century (such as tenacity, resilience, social empathy, and creative problem‐solving) while the evaluation continues to focus on 20th‐century methodologies. As regards leadership...

Marketing scholars and practitioners see extended reality (XR0 as a new tool for both producing optimal consumer experiences and studying consumer behavior aspects. This chapter will explore the use of XR technologies for consumer behavior research. It analyzes XR as a very promising tool to examine various customer behavioral patterns in dynamic,...

To date, odor research has primarily focused on the behavioral effects of common odors on consumer perception and choices. We report a study that examines, for the first time, the effects of human body odor cues on consumer purchase behaviors. The influence of human chemosignals produced in three conditions, namely happiness, fear, a relaxed condit...

The assessment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is based on semi-structured procedures addressed to children and caregivers. Such methods rely on the evaluation of behavioural symptoms rather than on the objective evaluation of psychophysiological underpinnings. Advances in research provided evidence of modern procedures for the early assessment o...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the viability of a new selection procedure based on machine learning (ML) and virtual reality (VR). Specifically, decision-making behaviours and eye-gaze patterns were used to classify individuals based on their leadership styles while immersed in virtual environments that represented social workplace situation...

Despite the fact that psychological assessment techniques commonly used in pencil and paper are a strategy chosen due to their adequate validity, there are some important limitations that can be overcome by recent advances in Virtual Reality (VR), allowing the assessment of psychological constructs in immersive environments, as a type of ecological...

El presente estudio quiso evaluar en una muestra de niños con trastorno del espectro autista (TEA) la usabilidad de un juego interactivo en realidad virtual, que es parte de una aplicación ecológica y basada en medidas objetivas para el diagnóstico temprano del autismo. Seis niños TEA entre los 3 y 6 años (edad media en meses: 55,83±10,57) fueron t...

Virtual reality (VR) is a useful tool to study consumer behavior while they are immersed in a realistic scenario. Among several other factors, personality traits have been shown to have a substantial influence on purchasing behavior. The primary objective of this study was to classify consumers based on the Big Five personality domains using their...

Individuals with autistic spectrum disorder are often described as having communication, social, emotional, nd behavioral impairments. They are often isolated and passive, with few opportunities for positive and constructive interaction with the outside world. Moreover, they may exhibit withdrawn, stereotyped and disruptive behaviors. The aforement...

The core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) mainly relate to social communication and interactions. ASD assessment involves expert observations in neutral settings, which introduces limitations and biases related to lack of objectivity and does not capture performance in real-world settings. To overcome these limitations, advances in techno...

Scholars are increasingly using electrodermal activity (EDA) to assess cognitive-emotional states in laboratory environments, while recent applications have recorded EDA in uncontrolled settings, such as daily-life and virtual reality (VR) contexts, in which users can freely walk and move their hands. However, these records can be affected by major...

Background Functional impairments derived from the non-use of severely affected upper limb after stroke have been proposed to be mitigated by action observation and imagination-based techniques, whose effectiveness is enhanced when combined with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Preliminary studies in mildly impaired individuals in th...

Many affective computing studies have developed automatic emotion recognition models, mostly using emotional images, audio and videos. In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has been also used as a method to elicit emotions in laboratory environments. However, there is still a need to analyse the validity of VR in order to extrapolate the results it...

The use of eye tracking (ET) and head tracking (HT) in head-mounted displays allows for the study of a subject’s attention in virtual reality environments, expanding the possibility to develop experiments in areas such as health or consumer behavior research. ET is a more precise technique than HT, but many commercial devices do not include ET syst...

Since 2020, the worldwide coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been reported to have increased the frequency of adverse mental health and stress-related conditions, including, depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, and substance use (Pfefferbaum and North, 2020;Xionget al., 2020;Niles et al., 2021). Changes in lifestyle behaviors, social isolatio...

Background The significance of national tourism in the global data highlights the importance of studying the characteristics of Spanish tourists that show interest in visiting Valencia (Spain). Personality traits might influence tourism behavior, and their importance has scarcely been addressed in the prior tourism literature. Objectives We aimed...

In this article, we introduce three-dimensional Serious Games (3DSGs) under an evidence-centered design (ECD) framework and use an organizational neuroscience-based eye-tracking measure to capture implicit behavioral signals associated with leadership skills. While ECD is a well-established framework used in the design and development of assessment...

A tool for human pose estimation and quantification using consumer-level equipment is a long-pursued objective. Many studies have employed the Microsoft Kinect v2 depth camera but with recent release of the new Kinect Azure a revision is required. This work researches the specific case of estimating the range of motion in five upper limb exercises...

Virtual reality (VR) in retailing (V-commerce) has been proven to enhance the consumer experience. Thus, this technology is beneficial to study behavioral patterns by offering the opportunity to infer customers’ personality traits based on their behavior. This study aims to recognize impulsivity using behavioral patterns. For this goal, 60 subjects...

Music affects viewers’ responses to advertisements. In this study we present the findings of an experiment that investigates the emotional and cognitive reactions of subjects’ brains during exposure to television advertisements with music congruent, and incongruent, with the advertisement content. We analyze the electroencephalography signals and e...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a major global problem. Neuropsychological studies have shown that AUD causes deficits in executive functions (EFs), a set of higher order cognitive skills that govern individual behavior in everyday situations. Many standardized neuropsychological tests are used to evaluate EF. These are reliable and valid but have li...

Risk taking (RT) is a component of the decision-making process in situations that involve uncertainty and in which the probability of each outcome – rewards and/or negative consequences – is already known. The influence of cognitive and emotional processes in decision making may affect how risky situations are addressed. First, inaccurate assessmen...

Motivation is an essential component in mental health and well-being. In this area, researchers have identified four psychological needs that drive human behavior: attachment, self-esteem, orientation and control, and maximization of pleasure and minimization of distress. Various self-reported scales and interviews tools have been developed to asse...

This study compares cognitive and emotional responses to 360-degree vs. static (2D) videos in terms of visual attention, brand recognition, engagement of the prefrontal cortex, and emotions. Hypotheses are proposed based on the interactivity literature, cognitive overload, advertising response model and motivation, opportunity, and ability theoreti...

Risk taking (RT) measurement constitutes a challenge for researchers and practitioners and has been addressed from different perspectives. Personality traits and temperamental aspects such as sensation seeking and impulsivity influence the individual’s approach to RT, prompting risk-seeking or risk-aversion behaviors. Virtual reality has emerged as...

In recent years, the benefits of both Augmented Reality (AR) technology and infrared thermography (IRT) have been demonstrated in the industrial maintenance sector, allowing maintenance operations to be carried out in a safer, faster, and more efficient manner. However, there still exists no solution that optimally combines both technologies. In th...

Facial information is processed by our brain in such a way that we immediately make judgments about, for example, attractiveness or masculinity or interpret personality traits or moods of other people. The appearance of each facial feature has an effect on our perception of facial traits. This research addresses the problem of measuring the size of...

Emotions play a critical role in our daily lives, so the understanding and recognition of emotional responses is crucial for human research. Affective computing research has mostly used non-immersive two-dimensional (2D) images or videos to elicit emotional states. However, immersive virtual reality, which allows researchers to simulate environment...

Fixation identification is an essential task in the extraction of relevant information from gaze patterns; various algorithms are used in the identification process. However, the thresholds used in the algorithms greatly affect their sensitivity. Moreover, the application of these algorithm to eye-tracking technologies integrated into head-mounted...

Attention deficits are among the most common cognitive impairments observed after experiencing stroke. However, a very limited number of studies have investigated the effectiveness of interventions that specifically focus on the rehabilitation of attention deficits among subjects with impaired attention. Although several interventions have included...

Risk taking (RT) is an essential component in decision-making process that depicts the propensity to make risky decisions. RT assessment has traditionally focused on self-report questionnaires. These classical tools have shown clear distance from real-life responses. Behavioral tasks assess human behavior with more fidelity, but still show some lim...

Speech is the most natural way for human communication, carrying the emotional state of the speaker that plays an important role in social interaction. Currently, many instant messaging apps offer the possibility of exchanging voice audios with other users. As a result, a great amount of voice data is generated every day, representing a new challen...

Eye tracking (ET) is becoming a popular tool to study the consumer behavior. One of the significant problems that arise with ET integrated into 3D virtual reality is defining fixations and saccades, which are essential part of feature extraction in ET analysis and have a critical impact on higher level analysis. In this study, the ET data from 60 s...

In consumer behavior studies, several signals like head position and eye-tracking, which are mostly unstructured, are recorded. Hence, the first step in these studies is to extract structured features. In feature extraction, segmenting the space into several Areas of Interests (AOI) can be beneficial. In this regard, these features are computed whe...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is mostly diagnosed according to behavioral symptoms in sensory, social, and motor domains. Improper motor functioning, during diagnosis, involves the qualitative evaluation of stereotyped and repetitive behaviors, while quantitative methods that classify body movements’ frequencies of children with ASD are less addre...

A defining virtual reality (VR) metric is the sense of presence, a complex, multidimensional psychophysical construct that represents how intense is the sensation of actually being there, inside the virtual environment (VE), forgetting how technology mediates the experience. Our paper explores how locomotion influences presence, studying two differ...

Objective Sensory processing is the ability to capture, elaborate, and integrate information through the five senses and is impaired in over 90% of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The ASD population shows hyper–hypo sensitiveness to sensory stimuli that can generate alteration in information processing, affecting cognitive and social...

It has been observed that the stratification of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) generated by the current scales is not effective for the personalization of early treatments. The clinical evaluation of ASD requires its consideration as a continuum of deficits, and there is a need to identify biologically significant parameters (biomarkers) that have...

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are two novel graphics immersive techniques (GIT) that, in the last decade, have been attracting the attention of many researchers, especially in psychological research. VR can provide 3D real-life synthetic environments in which controllers allow human interaction. AR overlays synthetic elements to t...

Virtual reality is a powerful tool in human behaviour research. However, few studies compare its capacity to evoke the same emotional responses as in real scenarios. This study investigates psycho-physiological patterns evoked during the free exploration of an art museum and the museum virtualized through a 3D immersive virtual environment (IVE). A...

The ability of virtual reality (VR) to recreate controlled, immersive, and interactive environments that provide intensive and customized exercises has motivated its therapeutic use after stroke. Interaction and bodily presence in VR-based interventions is usually mediated through virtual selves, which synchronously represent body movements or resp...

Abstract This work describes a new hybrid method for accurate iris segmentation from full-face images independently of the ethnicity of the subject. It is based on a combination of three methods: facial key-point detection, integro-differential operator (IDO) and mathematical morphology. First, facial landmarks are extracted by means of the Chehra...

Background: Gait is usually assessed by clinical tests, which may have poor accuracy and be biased, or instrumented systems, which potentially solve these limitations at the cost of being time-consuming and expensive. The different versions of the Microsoft Kinect have enabled human motion tracking without using wearable sensors at a low-cost and...

The validity of environmental simulations depends on their capacity to replicate responses produced in physical environments. However, very few studies validate navigation differences in immersive virtual environments, even though these can radically condition space perception and therefore alter the various evoked responses. The objective of this...

Marketing scholars and practitioners are showing increasing interest in Extended Reality (XR) technologies (XRs), such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), as very promising technological tools for producing satisfactory consumer experiences that mirror those experienced in physical stores. However, most of the s...

Navigation metaphors in Virtual Reality environments have consistently challenged researchers and developers due to the difficulty of implementing locomotion techniques with high levels of comfort, sense of presence, efficacy and able to fit different narrative environments. In this context, several studies have linked cybersickness to the performa...

The development of virtual reality (VR), together with other technological innovations will shape the future of e-retailing. This research studies the effectiveness of different VR formats and devices in a virtual store environment, namely V-commerce. This study proposes and test a conceptual model that analyses the relations between sense of prese...

Evaluating user behaviour in Virtual Reality is a challenge for every researcher involved in designing and executing experiments in immersive environments. Behavioural information could lead to relevant findings in presence, engagement or, for example, the mood of the player during a VR experience. Saving this kind of information and exploding it i...