Flexibility and adaptability are desirable features of cognitive technical systems. However, in c... more Flexibility and adaptability are desirable features of cognitive technical systems. However, in comparison to humans, the development of these features for technical systems is still at the beginning. One approach to improve their realization is to study human cognitive processes and to develop appropriate algorithms, which can be transferred and implemented into technical systems. One example for a typical task common to humans and robots is to find a specific task-relevant object (or target) among other similar but task-irrelevant objects (or distractors). Although this task is quite demanding, humans are doing well in finding task-relevant objects even in unknown environments by applying specific search strategies. For example, when an object is located in a familiar rather than in a new context, humans use the context information to localize the object without recognizing the context as familiar. This phenomenon is known as contextual cueing: it is supposed that implicitly learned context information of the environment, i.e. the spatial layout of objects and their relations, guides visual-spatial attention to the target location and thus helps to localize the task-relevant object.
RO-MAN 2007 - The 16th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2007
... factors. ... In ergonomic research settings, eye tracking has been used to identify non-optim... more ... factors. ... In ergonomic research settings, eye tracking has been used to identify non-optimal aspects of human-machine interface, delineating expert ... For example, by analyzing the influence of object properties, task characteristics and task context with dwell times and frequencies ...
The present paper describes a scenario for examining mechanisms of movement coordination in human... more The present paper describes a scenario for examining mechanisms of movement coordination in humans and robots. It is assumed that coordination can best be achieved when behavioral rules that shape movement execution in humans are also considered for human-robot interaction. Investigating and describing human-human interaction in terms of goal-oriented movement coordination is considered an important and necessary step for designing
In daily life and at work people are confronted with complex information. Especially elderly or d... more In daily life and at work people are confronted with complex information. Especially elderly or disabled users might be overburdened by the amount of information and distracted by irrelevant items. Due to this, they possibly fail to find and select relevant items in visual search. This could be demotivating for the use of media like the internet or could result
Advances in Cognitive Neurodynamics ICCN 2007, 2008
We present a scenario for examining mechanisms of goal-oriented movement coordination in humans. ... more We present a scenario for examining mechanisms of goal-oriented movement coordination in humans. Our aim is to determine behavioral rules and constraints that shape movement execution. Therefore, trajectories of hand and finger movements are recorded while participants perform a simple construction task. We measure different parameters of reaching and grasping and compare performance in a single-person versus a two-person condition.
... The authors would like to thank their research partners Alexander Bannat, Florian Friesdorf, ... more ... The authors would like to thank their research partners Alexander Bannat, Florian Friesdorf, Cordula Vesper, Frank Wallhoff and Mathey ... Wiedenmaier, S., Oehme, O., Schmidt, L., Luczak, H.: Augmented Reality (AR) for Assembly Processes: Design and Experimental Evaluation ...
2008 ECSIS Symposium on Learning and Adaptive Behaviors for Robotic Systems (LAB-RS), 2008
The present study examines how humans adapt their movements when interacting with another person.... more The present study examines how humans adapt their movements when interacting with another person. Different parameters of pick-and-place movements of the same person are compared in situations where the person works alone (intrapersonal coordination) and when the person is working with a partner (interpersonal coordination). Results show an overall increase in movement speed during the interpersonal condition and a reduced
Manual assembly conducted by skilled human workers is of outstanding relevance for flexible produ... more Manual assembly conducted by skilled human workers is of outstanding relevance for flexible production with high precision. Nevertheless, due to capacity limitations humans need to be supported during the working process in order to reduce mental workload and for enhancement of performance. Cognitive technical systems are able to do so by adapting the process of production to the properties of human cognitive processes which are relevant in manual assembly. During manual assembly tasks workers are confronted with various sources of information and have to switch rapidly between different tasks. The complexity of task execution can be reduced by appropriate information presentation and planning of work steps. Firstly, information processing during the working process can be supported by attentional guidance while reducing search times and accelerating assembly execution. Secondly, as there exist many possible assembly sequences for one product the optimal order of single assembly steps has to be found and interferences from previous task steps have to be minimized. The article describes two scenarios for the investigation of attention allocation as well as for the investigation of task sequences and gives a summary of results achieved so far.
Humans have developed various mechanisms to optimize interaction with the environment. Optimizati... more Humans have developed various mechanisms to optimize interaction with the environment. Optimization of action planning requires efficient selection of action-relevant features. Selection might also depend on the environmental context in which an action takes place. The present study investigated how action context influences perceptual processing in action planning. The experimental paradigm comprised two independent tasks: (1) a perceptual visual search task and (2) a grasping or a pointing movement. Reaction times in the visual search task were measured as a function of the movement type (grasping vs. pointing) and context complexity (context varying along one dimension vs. context varying along two dimensions). Results showed that action context influenced reaction times, which suggests a close bidirectional link between action and perception as well as an impact of environmental action context on perceptual selection in the course of action planning. Such findings are discussed in the context of application for robotics.
Visual search for a target object is faster if the target is embedded in a repeatedly presented i... more Visual search for a target object is faster if the target is embedded in a repeatedly presented invariant configuration of distractors (‗contextual cueing'). It has also been shown that the homogeneity of a context affects the efficiency of visual search: targets receive prioritized processing when presented in a homogeneous context compared to a heterogeneous context, presumably due to grouping processes at early stages of visual processing. The present study investigated in three Experiments whether context homogeneity also affects contextual cueing. In Experiment 1, context homogeneity varied on three levels of the task-relevant dimension (orientation) and contextual cueing was most pronounced for context configurations with high orientation homogeneity. When context homogeneity varied on three levels of the task-irrelevant dimension (colour) and orientation homogeneity was fixed, no modulation of contextual cueing was observed: high orientation homogeneity led to large contextual cueing effects (Experiment 2) and low orientation homogeneity led to low contextual cueing effects (Experiment 3), irrespective of color homogeneity. Enhanced contextual cueing for homogeneous context configurations suggest that grouping processes do not only affect visual search but also implicit learning. We conclude that memory representation of context configurations are more easily acquired when context configurations can be processed as larger, grouped perceptual units. However, this form of implicit perceptual learning is only improved by stimulus homogeneity when stimulus homogeneity facilitates grouping processes on a dimension that is currently relevant in the task.
At work and at leisure people perform various visual search tasks, e.g. they search for a particu... more At work and at leisure people perform various visual search tasks, e.g. they search for a particular icon in software tools, on Web sites or on mobile phones. With an increasing number of items, visual search becomes difficult. Recently, it has been suggested that the so-called contextual cueing effect, which is known from psychological experiments, can be applied to improve visual search performance. Contextual cueing leads to decreased search times for target objects within familiar context configurations. It is assumed that associations between context configurations and target locations are learned implicitly and then used to guide the allocation of attention to the relevant object. In accordance with demands for interface consistency, this mechanism could be interesting for the development of user interfaces. The present study investigated which object features (e.g. color or orientation) can establish the learning process. The results show that implicit learning of color and orientation arrangements are possible, but the transfer to configuration with changed features depends on the recent learning history. Implications of these results are discussed with respect to the design of user interfaces.
RO-MAN 2008 - The 17th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2008
This contribution introduces a concept for human-machine interaction in a working environment. A ... more This contribution introduces a concept for human-machine interaction in a working environment. A foot pedal based interface was applied for the investigation of capabilities and bottlenecks in human information processing as well as for the user-controlled timing of relevant information presentation. The use of the interaction concept was tested within an experimental study, where complexity of a manual assembly task was varied in order to manipulate respective processing resources. Results were interpreted regarding the development of an assistive system in production environments and regarding the optimization of human-machine interaction in general.
Synchronization occurs frequently in human behaviour: Everybody has experienced that in a group o... more Synchronization occurs frequently in human behaviour: Everybody has experienced that in a group of people walking pace tends to equalize. The phenomenon of synchrony has been established in the literature in tasks which have little in common with daily life such as pendulum swinging and chair rocking. We extend the knowledge about human movement synchronization by showing that it also
Texture segmentation is usually regarded as a fast, early, automatic, preattentive process. Never... more Texture segmentation is usually regarded as a fast, early, automatic, preattentive process. Nevertheless, naive participants in texture segmentation tasks are usually not able to perform the task explicitly when the textures are presented rather briefly (49 ms) and subsequently masked. In two experiments it was investigated whether texture stimuli were, nevertheless, automatically segmented under these conditions. By using a priming paradigm, the processing of the texture stimuli was measured indirectly via their influence on a subsequently presented imperative stimulus. Priming effects were found for experienced and naive participants, although novices could not respond overtly to the textures in a subsequent forced-choice task. Although textures influenced subsequent stimulus processing, an analysis of the simultaneously recorded lateralized readiness potential (LRP) showed that they did not cause automatic response activation. The existence of priming effects of textures without participants' ability to overtly respond to them can be regarded as evidence for the automatic segmentation of texture stimuli.
Four experiments are reported that investigated visual event integration by using a variant of th... more Four experiments are reported that investigated visual event integration by using a variant of the missing element paradigm. Good performance on this task depends on whether two brief successive stimulus displays are perceived as (or integrated into) one single event. We replicated the classic finding of greater accuracy with shorter duration of the first stimulus and ruled out an attention-related account thereof. In a subsequent electrophysiological experiment we found that successful event integration increased the amplitude of the N1, N2, and late P3 components of the event-related potential and decreased early P3 amplitude. No effect on the P1 was observed. The results provided evidence for an early onset of event integration in time and demonstrated the existence of electrophysiological markers of episodic integration. The implications of these results are related to studies on feature-specific integration and early attentional processes.
Threat stimuli are considered to be processed with higher priority due to an automatic threat det... more Threat stimuli are considered to be processed with higher priority due to an automatic threat detection system that enables rapid shifts of attention. However, direct evidence is still missing. The present study used the face-in-the-crowd task and event-related potentials to find evidence for the functionality of attention shifts in threat detection. The threat detection advantage was replicated in the behavioral results. An N2pc was observed that was more pronounced and earlier for angry compared to happy faces, suggesting differential attention allocation underlying the threat detection advantage. A larger sustained posterior contralateral negativity indicated that angry faces also gained more enhanced subsequent processing. An early posterior negativity observed 160 ms after stimulus onset revealed early emotion-specific processing that may have caused differences in attention allocation toward threatening stimuli.
Finding a target in repeated search displays is faster than finding the same target in novel ones... more Finding a target in repeated search displays is faster than finding the same target in novel ones (contextual cueing). It is assumed that the visual context (the arrangement of the distracting objects) is used to guide attention efficiently to the target location. Alternatively, other factors, e.g., facilitation in early visual processing or in response selection, may play a role as well. In a contextual cueing experiment, participant's electrophysiological brain activity was recorded. Participants identified the target faster and more accurately in repeatedly presented displays. In this condition, the N2pc, a component reflecting the allocation of visual-spatial attention, was enhanced, indicating that attention was allocated more efficiently to those targets. However, also response-related processes, reflected by the LRP, were facilitated, indicating that guidance of attention cannot account for the entire contextual cueing benefit.
Reaction times (RT) to targets are faster in repeated displays relative to novel ones when the sp... more Reaction times (RT) to targets are faster in repeated displays relative to novel ones when the spatial arrangement of the distracting items predicts the target location (contextual cueing). It is assumed that visual-spatial attention is guided more efficiently to the target resulting in reduced RTs. In the present experiment, contextual cueing even occurred when the target location was previously peripherally cued. Electrophysiologically, repeated displays elicited an enhanced N2pc component in both conditions and resulted in an earlier onset of the stimulus-locked lateralized readiness potential (s-LRP) in the cued condition and in an enhanced P3 in the uncued condition relative to novel displays. These results indicate that attentional guidance is less important than previously assumed but that other cognitive processes, such as attentional selection (N2pc) and response-related processes (s-LRP, P3) are facilitated by context familiarity.
Flexibility and adaptability are desirable features of cognitive technical systems. However, in c... more Flexibility and adaptability are desirable features of cognitive technical systems. However, in comparison to humans, the development of these features for technical systems is still at the beginning. One approach to improve their realization is to study human cognitive processes and to develop appropriate algorithms, which can be transferred and implemented into technical systems. One example for a typical task common to humans and robots is to find a specific task-relevant object (or target) among other similar but task-irrelevant objects (or distractors). Although this task is quite demanding, humans are doing well in finding task-relevant objects even in unknown environments by applying specific search strategies. For example, when an object is located in a familiar rather than in a new context, humans use the context information to localize the object without recognizing the context as familiar. This phenomenon is known as contextual cueing: it is supposed that implicitly learned context information of the environment, i.e. the spatial layout of objects and their relations, guides visual-spatial attention to the target location and thus helps to localize the task-relevant object.
RO-MAN 2007 - The 16th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2007
... factors. ... In ergonomic research settings, eye tracking has been used to identify non-optim... more ... factors. ... In ergonomic research settings, eye tracking has been used to identify non-optimal aspects of human-machine interface, delineating expert ... For example, by analyzing the influence of object properties, task characteristics and task context with dwell times and frequencies ...
The present paper describes a scenario for examining mechanisms of movement coordination in human... more The present paper describes a scenario for examining mechanisms of movement coordination in humans and robots. It is assumed that coordination can best be achieved when behavioral rules that shape movement execution in humans are also considered for human-robot interaction. Investigating and describing human-human interaction in terms of goal-oriented movement coordination is considered an important and necessary step for designing
In daily life and at work people are confronted with complex information. Especially elderly or d... more In daily life and at work people are confronted with complex information. Especially elderly or disabled users might be overburdened by the amount of information and distracted by irrelevant items. Due to this, they possibly fail to find and select relevant items in visual search. This could be demotivating for the use of media like the internet or could result
Advances in Cognitive Neurodynamics ICCN 2007, 2008
We present a scenario for examining mechanisms of goal-oriented movement coordination in humans. ... more We present a scenario for examining mechanisms of goal-oriented movement coordination in humans. Our aim is to determine behavioral rules and constraints that shape movement execution. Therefore, trajectories of hand and finger movements are recorded while participants perform a simple construction task. We measure different parameters of reaching and grasping and compare performance in a single-person versus a two-person condition.
... The authors would like to thank their research partners Alexander Bannat, Florian Friesdorf, ... more ... The authors would like to thank their research partners Alexander Bannat, Florian Friesdorf, Cordula Vesper, Frank Wallhoff and Mathey ... Wiedenmaier, S., Oehme, O., Schmidt, L., Luczak, H.: Augmented Reality (AR) for Assembly Processes: Design and Experimental Evaluation ...
2008 ECSIS Symposium on Learning and Adaptive Behaviors for Robotic Systems (LAB-RS), 2008
The present study examines how humans adapt their movements when interacting with another person.... more The present study examines how humans adapt their movements when interacting with another person. Different parameters of pick-and-place movements of the same person are compared in situations where the person works alone (intrapersonal coordination) and when the person is working with a partner (interpersonal coordination). Results show an overall increase in movement speed during the interpersonal condition and a reduced
Manual assembly conducted by skilled human workers is of outstanding relevance for flexible produ... more Manual assembly conducted by skilled human workers is of outstanding relevance for flexible production with high precision. Nevertheless, due to capacity limitations humans need to be supported during the working process in order to reduce mental workload and for enhancement of performance. Cognitive technical systems are able to do so by adapting the process of production to the properties of human cognitive processes which are relevant in manual assembly. During manual assembly tasks workers are confronted with various sources of information and have to switch rapidly between different tasks. The complexity of task execution can be reduced by appropriate information presentation and planning of work steps. Firstly, information processing during the working process can be supported by attentional guidance while reducing search times and accelerating assembly execution. Secondly, as there exist many possible assembly sequences for one product the optimal order of single assembly steps has to be found and interferences from previous task steps have to be minimized. The article describes two scenarios for the investigation of attention allocation as well as for the investigation of task sequences and gives a summary of results achieved so far.
Humans have developed various mechanisms to optimize interaction with the environment. Optimizati... more Humans have developed various mechanisms to optimize interaction with the environment. Optimization of action planning requires efficient selection of action-relevant features. Selection might also depend on the environmental context in which an action takes place. The present study investigated how action context influences perceptual processing in action planning. The experimental paradigm comprised two independent tasks: (1) a perceptual visual search task and (2) a grasping or a pointing movement. Reaction times in the visual search task were measured as a function of the movement type (grasping vs. pointing) and context complexity (context varying along one dimension vs. context varying along two dimensions). Results showed that action context influenced reaction times, which suggests a close bidirectional link between action and perception as well as an impact of environmental action context on perceptual selection in the course of action planning. Such findings are discussed in the context of application for robotics.
Visual search for a target object is faster if the target is embedded in a repeatedly presented i... more Visual search for a target object is faster if the target is embedded in a repeatedly presented invariant configuration of distractors (‗contextual cueing'). It has also been shown that the homogeneity of a context affects the efficiency of visual search: targets receive prioritized processing when presented in a homogeneous context compared to a heterogeneous context, presumably due to grouping processes at early stages of visual processing. The present study investigated in three Experiments whether context homogeneity also affects contextual cueing. In Experiment 1, context homogeneity varied on three levels of the task-relevant dimension (orientation) and contextual cueing was most pronounced for context configurations with high orientation homogeneity. When context homogeneity varied on three levels of the task-irrelevant dimension (colour) and orientation homogeneity was fixed, no modulation of contextual cueing was observed: high orientation homogeneity led to large contextual cueing effects (Experiment 2) and low orientation homogeneity led to low contextual cueing effects (Experiment 3), irrespective of color homogeneity. Enhanced contextual cueing for homogeneous context configurations suggest that grouping processes do not only affect visual search but also implicit learning. We conclude that memory representation of context configurations are more easily acquired when context configurations can be processed as larger, grouped perceptual units. However, this form of implicit perceptual learning is only improved by stimulus homogeneity when stimulus homogeneity facilitates grouping processes on a dimension that is currently relevant in the task.
At work and at leisure people perform various visual search tasks, e.g. they search for a particu... more At work and at leisure people perform various visual search tasks, e.g. they search for a particular icon in software tools, on Web sites or on mobile phones. With an increasing number of items, visual search becomes difficult. Recently, it has been suggested that the so-called contextual cueing effect, which is known from psychological experiments, can be applied to improve visual search performance. Contextual cueing leads to decreased search times for target objects within familiar context configurations. It is assumed that associations between context configurations and target locations are learned implicitly and then used to guide the allocation of attention to the relevant object. In accordance with demands for interface consistency, this mechanism could be interesting for the development of user interfaces. The present study investigated which object features (e.g. color or orientation) can establish the learning process. The results show that implicit learning of color and orientation arrangements are possible, but the transfer to configuration with changed features depends on the recent learning history. Implications of these results are discussed with respect to the design of user interfaces.
RO-MAN 2008 - The 17th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2008
This contribution introduces a concept for human-machine interaction in a working environment. A ... more This contribution introduces a concept for human-machine interaction in a working environment. A foot pedal based interface was applied for the investigation of capabilities and bottlenecks in human information processing as well as for the user-controlled timing of relevant information presentation. The use of the interaction concept was tested within an experimental study, where complexity of a manual assembly task was varied in order to manipulate respective processing resources. Results were interpreted regarding the development of an assistive system in production environments and regarding the optimization of human-machine interaction in general.
Synchronization occurs frequently in human behaviour: Everybody has experienced that in a group o... more Synchronization occurs frequently in human behaviour: Everybody has experienced that in a group of people walking pace tends to equalize. The phenomenon of synchrony has been established in the literature in tasks which have little in common with daily life such as pendulum swinging and chair rocking. We extend the knowledge about human movement synchronization by showing that it also
Texture segmentation is usually regarded as a fast, early, automatic, preattentive process. Never... more Texture segmentation is usually regarded as a fast, early, automatic, preattentive process. Nevertheless, naive participants in texture segmentation tasks are usually not able to perform the task explicitly when the textures are presented rather briefly (49 ms) and subsequently masked. In two experiments it was investigated whether texture stimuli were, nevertheless, automatically segmented under these conditions. By using a priming paradigm, the processing of the texture stimuli was measured indirectly via their influence on a subsequently presented imperative stimulus. Priming effects were found for experienced and naive participants, although novices could not respond overtly to the textures in a subsequent forced-choice task. Although textures influenced subsequent stimulus processing, an analysis of the simultaneously recorded lateralized readiness potential (LRP) showed that they did not cause automatic response activation. The existence of priming effects of textures without participants' ability to overtly respond to them can be regarded as evidence for the automatic segmentation of texture stimuli.
Four experiments are reported that investigated visual event integration by using a variant of th... more Four experiments are reported that investigated visual event integration by using a variant of the missing element paradigm. Good performance on this task depends on whether two brief successive stimulus displays are perceived as (or integrated into) one single event. We replicated the classic finding of greater accuracy with shorter duration of the first stimulus and ruled out an attention-related account thereof. In a subsequent electrophysiological experiment we found that successful event integration increased the amplitude of the N1, N2, and late P3 components of the event-related potential and decreased early P3 amplitude. No effect on the P1 was observed. The results provided evidence for an early onset of event integration in time and demonstrated the existence of electrophysiological markers of episodic integration. The implications of these results are related to studies on feature-specific integration and early attentional processes.
Threat stimuli are considered to be processed with higher priority due to an automatic threat det... more Threat stimuli are considered to be processed with higher priority due to an automatic threat detection system that enables rapid shifts of attention. However, direct evidence is still missing. The present study used the face-in-the-crowd task and event-related potentials to find evidence for the functionality of attention shifts in threat detection. The threat detection advantage was replicated in the behavioral results. An N2pc was observed that was more pronounced and earlier for angry compared to happy faces, suggesting differential attention allocation underlying the threat detection advantage. A larger sustained posterior contralateral negativity indicated that angry faces also gained more enhanced subsequent processing. An early posterior negativity observed 160 ms after stimulus onset revealed early emotion-specific processing that may have caused differences in attention allocation toward threatening stimuli.
Finding a target in repeated search displays is faster than finding the same target in novel ones... more Finding a target in repeated search displays is faster than finding the same target in novel ones (contextual cueing). It is assumed that the visual context (the arrangement of the distracting objects) is used to guide attention efficiently to the target location. Alternatively, other factors, e.g., facilitation in early visual processing or in response selection, may play a role as well. In a contextual cueing experiment, participant's electrophysiological brain activity was recorded. Participants identified the target faster and more accurately in repeatedly presented displays. In this condition, the N2pc, a component reflecting the allocation of visual-spatial attention, was enhanced, indicating that attention was allocated more efficiently to those targets. However, also response-related processes, reflected by the LRP, were facilitated, indicating that guidance of attention cannot account for the entire contextual cueing benefit.
Reaction times (RT) to targets are faster in repeated displays relative to novel ones when the sp... more Reaction times (RT) to targets are faster in repeated displays relative to novel ones when the spatial arrangement of the distracting items predicts the target location (contextual cueing). It is assumed that visual-spatial attention is guided more efficiently to the target resulting in reduced RTs. In the present experiment, contextual cueing even occurred when the target location was previously peripherally cued. Electrophysiologically, repeated displays elicited an enhanced N2pc component in both conditions and resulted in an earlier onset of the stimulus-locked lateralized readiness potential (s-LRP) in the cued condition and in an enhanced P3 in the uncued condition relative to novel displays. These results indicate that attentional guidance is less important than previously assumed but that other cognitive processes, such as attentional selection (N2pc) and response-related processes (s-LRP, P3) are facilitated by context familiarity.
Uploads
Papers by Anna Schubö