Abstract:
Today, the multimedia interaction domain is a developed area not only focusing on the
presentation of information to the human user, but also get the human involved in computer
modeled realworld
scenarios, such as computer games and elearning.
In this relation, the
computer can only process symbolic information and the knowledge is representation
oriented. However, humans are biological creations having basically three different aspects:
brain activation, cognitive behavior and emotional reaction. Currently, under human computer
interactions, only the cognitive behavior of the human is recognized by the computer. As a
result, humans do not show the same involvement when they are attached to real world
activities and when the activities are decided by the computer. In multimedia computing, this
problem is termed as perceptionsemantic
gap, arguing the main reason for this problem is the
semantic incompatibility between the knowledge representation of the computer and the
internal representation of the human user. However, modern cognitive science explains that
human behavior can not be described without considering the emotional reaction revealing
many relationships between cognition and emotion. Therefore, researchers are trying to
recognize emotions using facial expressions of the human user. However, this approach does
not provide a correct relationship, because the facial muscles are under conscious control of
the subject, so the expressions can easily be faked. Psychophysiological explanations of
emotional reaction describes better relationships between a person's true psychological
behavior and his/her bodily (physiological) changes. Therefore, the work of this research tries
to capture these bodily signals to determine the emotional involvement of the subject.
Humans exist in a world with unlimited knowledge dynamics. Therefore, selective attention
helps humans to filter out unwanted information from their senses. The visual attention plays
an important role in this effort, because it gives a directional focus to the attended information
in the outside world. Therefore, the research tries to capture the visual attention using
biopotentials generated as a result of eye movement activity of the subject, which is a lowcost
solution compared to sophisticated and expensive techniques used today that returns the
actual spacial coordinates of the eye focus.
iv
The attention and most other cognitive aspects of the human are controlled by a mental
phenomenon called the consciousness. Yet, the consciousness is beyond any scientific
explanation and can only be linked with cognitive emotional aspects using philosophical
models. Therefore, the study also includes a proposal of a coherent model of human psyche
which is then used to develop a psychophysiological evaluation framework that can be used to
determine discrete levels of involvement of a subject to a multimedia interaction. Results of
the experiments show the validity of the