Papers by Dawid Ratajczyk
International Journal of Social Robotics
The uncanny valley hypothesis (UVH) suggests that almost, but not fully, humanlike artificial cha... more The uncanny valley hypothesis (UVH) suggests that almost, but not fully, humanlike artificial characters elicit a feeling of eeriness or discomfort in observers. This study used Natural Language Processing of YouTube comments to provide ecologically-valid, non-laboratory results about people’s emotional reactions toward robots. It contains analyses of 224,544 comments from 1515 videos showing robots from a wide humanlikeness spectrum. The humanlikeness scores were acquired from the Anthropomorphic roBOT database. The analysis showed that people use words related to eeriness to describe very humanlike robots. Humanlikeness was linearly related to both general sentiment and perceptions of eeriness—-more humanlike robots elicit more negative emotions. One of the subscales of humanlikeness, Facial Features, showed a UVH-like relationship with both sentiment and eeriness. The exploratory analysis demonstrated that the most suitable words for measuring the self-reported uncanny valley eff...
2019 Signal Processing: Algorithms, Architectures, Arrangements, and Applications (SPA), 2019
Electrodermal activity (EDA) is commonly utilized as a tool for validating psychological construc... more Electrodermal activity (EDA) is commonly utilized as a tool for validating psychological constructs such as emotions, affect, or cognitive load. The assumptions underlying EDA signal usefulness for psychological research is still being debated. There is a need of one, coherent methodological framework which convincingly explains the correspondence between the outcomes expected by the theory, and the actual features of the signal obtained from experiments. Thus, the scope of our work was to estimate what signal analysis workflow, and which signal features are the most appropriate for studying psychological and/or cognitive factors. We designed an experiment to detect the presence of the cognitive load during performing a task (as compared to no-task condition). The obtained data represented one of the three cognitive states: 1) baseline rest (listening to the sounds of the forest); 2) faster breathing (cognitively easy, but forcing EDA response); and 3) playing a video game (a demand...
Case Studies in Thermal Engineering, 2021
The aim of the paper was to evaluate joint electrodermal and thermal measurements of the user's e... more The aim of the paper was to evaluate joint electrodermal and thermal measurements of the user's emotional reaction for visual stimuli in the form of a simple game. The idea is to design a noninvasive measurement protocol for future studies with this type of stimuli. 14 participants took part in the study (of which 9 were women, mean age 25.36 ± 7.51 years). Our findings are that while EDA measurements provide a valuable feedback about the emotional response and the cognitive load, the reaction of temperature response is to slow and to weak to properly measure the response for our stimuli.
Homo Ludens, 2019
The uncanny valley is an idea proposed by Masahiro Mori (1970) regarding negative emotions presen... more The uncanny valley is an idea proposed by Masahiro Mori (1970) regarding negative emotions present in contacts with almost humanlike characters. In the beginning, it was considered only in the context of humanoid robots, but this context was broadened by the development of highly realistic animations and video games. Particularly evident are players’ interests in the uncanny valley. Recently there have been a growing number of reports from empirical studies regarding participants’ perception of highly realistic characters. In the paper, a review of publications concerning the uncanny valley hypothesis in video games is presented, as are deliberations about the impact of the uncanny valley on the game industry. According to the results, there is a need to recognise which attributes of virtual characters cause the uncanny valley effect.
Bio-Algorithms and Med-Systems, 2019
The uncanny valley (UV) hypothesis suggests that the observation of almost human-like characters ... more The uncanny valley (UV) hypothesis suggests that the observation of almost human-like characters causes an increase of discomfort. We conducted a study using self-report questionnaire, response time measurement, and electrodermal activity (EDA) evaluation. In the study, 12 computer-generated characters (robots, androids, animated, and human characters) were presented to 33 people (17 women) to (1) test the effect of a background context on the perception of characters, (2) establish whether there is a relation between declared feelings and physiological arousal, and (3) detect the valley of the presented stimuli. The findings provide support for reverse relation between human-likeness and the arousal (EDA). Furthermore, a positive correlation between EDA and human-likeness appraisal reaction time upholds one of the most common explanations of the UV – the categorization ambiguity. The absence of the significant relationship between declared comfort and EDA advocates the necessity of...
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Papers by Dawid Ratajczyk