Peter Khooshabeh

Army Research Laboratory | ALC · Human Research and Engineering Directorate (HRED)

Adaptive training adjusts a training task with the goal of improving learning outcomes. Adaptive training has been shown to improve human performance in attention, working memory capacity, and motor control tasks. Additionally, correlations have been observed between neural EEG spectral features (4–13 Hz) and the performance of some cognitive tasks...

Need for cognition (NFC) and regulatory focus (RF) are important variables with individual differences relevant to motivation and goal pursuit. These constructs are widely used in the literature, often separately; no work has simultaneously examined the need for cognition scale (NCS) and Lockwood’s general regulatory focus measure (GRFM). Here, we...

Error-related negativity (ERN), an electroencephalogram (EEG) component following an erroneous response, has been associated with the subjective motivational relevance of error commission. A smaller EEG event, the correct response negativity (CRN), occurs after a correct response. It is unclear why correct behavior evokes a neural response similar...

Teaching and training are increasingly moving from real world venues to computerized environments, with human instructors often being replaced or joined by virtual pedagogical agents. While system fidelity and immersive properties of virtual learning environments are frequently discussed in the literature, less often addressed is the fidelity of th...

Virtual reality and immersive technologies are used in a variety of learning and training applications. However, higher levels of immersion do not always improve learning. The mixed results in the literature may partly arise from the use of between-subjects designs, insufficient time intervals between sessions in within-subjects designs, and/or ove...

The scientific study of teamwork in the context of long-term spaceflight has uncovered a considerable amount of knowledge over the past 20 years. Although much is known about the underlying factors and processes of teamwork, much is left to be discovered for teams who operate in extreme isolation conditions during spaceflights. Thus, special consid...

The effects of immersive technology on learning have been mixed. It is therefore important to determine the factors that affect when and why immersive technologies are and are not effective. One psychological construct proposed to explain why higher levels of immersive technology may lead to better learning compared to lower immersion is presence,...

Spatial navigation and spatial learning are important skills with implications for many different fields, and can be trained in Virtual Environments (VEs). Research in these areas presents a critical challenge: how to best design tests of knowledge transfer to measure learning from the VEs. Additionally, spatial learning tasks and VEs can be implem...

The current study examines cooperation and cardiovascular responses in individuals that were defected on by their opponent in the first round of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this scenario, participants were either primed with the emotion regulation strategy of reappraisal or no emotion regulation strategy, and their opponent either expressed...

High fidelity military simulators have been a vital part of training and developing warfighters over the last eighty plus years. As military simulator technologies have evolved, continued emphasis tends toward high fidelity as a means to create the most extreme environments that offer novices opportunities to employ a broad spectrum of cognitive an...

We explored how users perceive virtual characters that performed the role of a counseling interviewer, while presenting different levels of social class, as well as single or multi-tasking behavior. To investigate this subject, we designed a 2x2 experiment (tasking type and social class of the virtual counseling interviewer). In the experiment, par...

The current study was motivated to understand the relationship between the external behavior and inner affective state of two team members ("instructor"-"defuser") during a demanding operational task (i.e., bomb defusion). In this study we assessed team member's verbal responses (i.e., length of duration) in relation to their external as well as in...

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) contend that moral judgments are built on a universal set of basic moral intuitions. A large body of research has supported many of MFT’s and the MIME’s central hypotheses. Yet, an important prerequisite of this research—the ability to extract latent moral conte...

The cyber domain of military operations presents many challenges. A unique element is the social dynamic between cyber operators and their leadership because of the novel subject matter expertise involved in conducting technical cyber tasks, so there will be situations where senior leaders might have much less domain knowledge or no experience at a...

Storytelling is a universal activity, but the way in which discourse structure is used to persuasively convey ideas and emotions may depend on cultural factors. Because first-person accounts of life experiences can have a powerful impact in how a person is perceived, the storyteller may instinctively employ specific strategies to shape the audience...

It is commonly known that a relationship exists between the human voice and various emotional states. Past studies have demonstrated changes in a number of vocal features, such as fundamental frequency f0 and peakSlope, as a result of varying emotional state. These voice characteristics have been shown to relate to emotional load, vocal tension, an...

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, or technologies that use online brain signal processing, have a great promise to improve human interactions with computers, their environment, and even other humans. Despite this promise, there are no current serious BCI technologies in widespread use, due to the lack of robustness in BCI technologies. T...

We explored the social influence of humor in a virtual human counselor's self-disclosure while also varying the ethnicity of the virtual counselor. In a 2 × 3 experiment (humor and ethnicity of the virtual human counselor), participants experienced counseling interview interactions via Skype on a smartphone. We measured user responses to and percep...

Team cohesion has been suggested to be a critical factor in emotional resilience following periods of stress. Team cohesion may depend on several factors including emotional state, communication among team members and even psychophysiological response. The present study sought to employ several multimodal techniques designed to investigate team beh...

In this study, we explored how interacting with a virtual agent under stressful conditions affected situational awareness as assessed by a theory of mind task. Volunteers played a negotiation game in which an embodied, digital virtual agent both displayed an angry, happy, or neutral facial expression and played either cooperatively or competitively...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2016, held in Los Angeles, CA, USA, in September 2016. The 12 full papers, 18 short papers, and 37 demo and poster papers accepted were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. IVA 2016 also includes three workshops: Workshop on...

This paper investigates how expressions of emotion affect persuasiveness when the expresser and the recipient have different levels of power. The first study demonstrates that when the recipient overpowers the expresser, emotional expressions reduce persuasion. A second study reveals that power and perceived appropriateness of emotional expressions...

There has been recent interest on the impact of emotional expressions of computers on people’s decision making. However, despite a growing body of empirical work, the mechanism underlying such effects is still not clearly understood. To address this issue the paper explores two kinds of processes studied by emotion theorists in human-human interact...

A number of educational fields are introducing computer visualizations into their curricula, yet our understanding of the cognitive phenomena underlying learning from these materials is relatively limited. We examined how learners used an interactive 3D computer visualization to comprehend spatial relations in a virtual anatomy-like structure. Our...

This chapter examines human factors associated with using interactive three-dimensional (3D) visu- alizations. Virtual representations of anatomical structure and function, often with sophisticated user control capabilities, are growing in popularity in medicine for education, training, and simulation. This chapter reviews the cognitive science lit...

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, or technologies that use online brain signal processing, have a great promise to improve human interactions with computers, their environment, and even other humans. Despite this promise, there are no current serious BCI technologies in widespread use, due to the lack of robustness in BCI technologies. T...

Aspects of language, such as accent, play a crucial role in the formation and categorization of one’s cultural identity. Recent work on accent emphasizes the role of accent in person perception and social categorization, demonstrating that accent also serves as a meaningful indicator of an ethnic category. In this article, we investigate whether th...

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computer graphics digital technologies have contributed to a relative increase of realism in virtual characters. Preserving virtual characters’ communicative realism, in particular, joined the ranks of the improvements in natural language technology and animation algorithms. This paper focuses on cultura...

What happens when a Virtual Human makes a mistake? In this study we investigate the impact of a VH’s conversational mistakes in the context of persuasion. Users interacted with a VH that told persuasive information, and they were given the option to use the information to complete a problem-solving task. The VH occasionally made mistakes such as no...

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that imagery ability and figural complexity interact to affect the choice of mental rotation strategies. Participants performed the Shepard and Metzler (1971) mental rotation task. On half of the trials, the 3-D figures were manipulated to create "fragmented" figures, with some cubes missing. Good imagers were...

The Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology is a decade-old endeavor to expose pre-college young women and underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities to the fields of computer science and engineering, and prepare them for rigorous, university-level study. We have served more than 150 students, and graduated more than 65 s...

We study whether a virtual agent that delivers humor through verbal behavior can affect an individual's proxemic behavior towards the agent. Participants interacted with a virtual agent through natural language and, in a separate task, performed an embodied interpersonal interaction task in a virtual environment. The study used minimum distance as...

The goal here was to determine whether computer interfaces are capable of social influence via humor. Users interacted with a natural language capable virtual agent that told persuasive information, and they were given the option to use information from the dialogue in order to complete a problem-solving task. Individuals interacting with an ostens...

Three experiments examined how cognitive abilities and qualities of external visualizations affected performance of a mental visualization task; inferring the cross-section of a complex three-dimensional object. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of animations designed to provide different task-relevant views of the external object. Experiment 2...

How is shape represented during spatial tasks such as mental rotation? This research investigated the format of mental representations of 3-D shapes during mental rotation. Specifically, we tested the extent to which visual information, such as color, is represented during mental rotation using methods ranging from reaction time studies, verbal pro...

Previous research, which has used images of real human faces and mostly from the same facial expression database [Matsumoto and Ekman 1988], has shown that individuals perceive emotions universally across cultures. We conducted an experiment to determine whether culture affects the perception of emotions rendered on virtual faces. Specifically, we...

In two studies with a total of 324 participants, dentistry students were assessed on psychometric measures of spatial ability, reasoning ability, and on new measures of the ability to infer the appearance of a cross-section of a three-dimensional (3-D) object. We examined how these abilities and skills predict success in dental education programs,...

Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and compared...

In four experiments participants were allowed to manipulate a virtual 3-D object in order to infer and draw 2-D cross sections of it. Key differences between the experiments were the interface and degree of interactivity available. Two experiments used a three degrees-of-freedom inertia tracking device allowing unconstrained interactions and the ot...

Computer-aided design (CAD) is a challenging domain of end-user programming because it involves complex spatial transformations of 3-dimensional (3-D) objects. Here we provide evidence that shows that the ability to perform spatial transformations of novel abstract 3-D objects can be augmented when additional information is presented in an external...

To examine the information content of mental representations of three-dimensional objects, 21 participants performed a mental rotation task with the classic Shepard and Metzler (1971) figures. We compared conditions in which the figures were monochromatic, a condition in which they were colored consistently, and a condition in which they were color...

Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and compared...

This chapter examines human factors associated with using interactive three-dimensional (3D) visualizations. Virtual representations of anatomical structure and function, often with sophisticated user control capabilities, are growing in popularity in medicine for education, training, and simulation. This chapter reviews the cognitive science liter...

Autonomic Computing lays out a vision of information technology in which systems manage themselves based on policies. As a result, policies are the new currency of interaction between people and computers, creating a new paradigm for interaction with autonomic systems. In this paradigm, interaction shifts (1) from low-level to high-level monitoring...

We present a human-centered gestural system for musical improvisation, MIND. We demonstrate the relationship between music composition and programming. Preliminary field data from contextual inquiries in an elderly care setting suggest that the MIND system would be accessible to this population. A benefit of the system is the multimodal interaction...

In this article we attempt a closer examination of the no visibility as it has been used within the ubiquitous computing comm seek to tease apart various understandings of invisibility as an emer ute of technology use, examining what true "invisible technology" m what ways it is beneficial, and how it might be designed for. We theoretical model con...

We studied the effects of varying the fidelity and automation levels of a Ubicomp application prototype. Our results show that the interactive prototype captured the same usability issues that the paper prototype studies did and more. We found that paper prototyping is insufficient for supporting unique Ubicomp requirements, such as scalability, bu...

We studied the effects of varying the fidelity and automation levels of a Ubicomp application prototype. Our results show that the interactive prototype captured the same usability issues that the paper prototype studies did and more. We found that paper prototyping is insufficient for supporting unique Ubicomp requirements, such as scalability, bu...

Eight individuals participated in an experiment requiring them to identify the position of a viewer on a map given the viewer's egocentric perspective of the space. Performance data indicated that response times decreased significantly over the course of the experiment, but accuracy did not improve. An analysis of eye tracking data showed that the...

In this paper we describe an affective, learner-centered framework for building learning technologies. Specifically, we outline an ontology of social effects that includes the necessary and sufficient criteria that virtual human technologies need to have in order to design compelling training and learning applications focused on teaching tacit, sof...

Language plays a crucial role in the formation and categoriza-tion of one's ethnic identity. Recent work on linguistic accent emphasizes the role of accent in person perception and social categorization, demonstrating that accent serves as a mean-ingful ethnic category indicator. In this paper, we examine whether accent can be used to implement soc...

In this paper, we examine whether embodied conversational agents can be used to implement socio-cultural markers. We investigate whether the accent of a virtual character, as a marker for culture, can cause cultural frame-shifts in individuals. We report an experiment, per-formed among bicultural and monocultural individuals, in which we test the a...