Smiling in the Face and Voice of Avatars and Robots: Evidence for a ‘smiling McGurk Effect’Show others and affiliations
2024 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, E-ISSN 1949-3045, Vol. 15, no 2, p. 393-404Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Multisensory integration influences emotional perception, as the McGurk effect demonstrates for the communication between humans. Human physiology implicitly links the production of visual features with other modes like the audio channel: Face muscles responsible for a smiling face also stretch the vocal cords that result in a characteristic smiling voice. For artificial agents capable of multimodal expression, this linkage is modeled explicitly. In our studies, we observe the influence of visual and audio channels on the perception of the agents' emotional expression. We created videos of virtual characters and social robots either with matching or mismatching emotional expressions in the audio and visual channels. In two online studies, we measured the agents' perceived valence and arousal. Our results consistently lend support to the ‘emotional McGurk effect' hypothesis, according to which face transmits valence information, and voice transmits arousal. When dealing with dynamic virtual characters, visual information is enough to convey both valence and arousal, and thus audio expressivity need not be congruent. When dealing with robots with fixed facial expressions, however, both visual and audio information need to be present to convey the intended expression.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2024. Vol. 15, no 2, p. 393-404
Keywords [en]
Face recognition, Faces, Human-Likeness, multisensory integration, Muscles, Robots, smiling, Social robots, Videos, virtual agent, Visualization, Behavioral research, Muscle, Virtual reality, Audio channels, Face, Human likeness, McGurk effect, Video, Visual channels
National Category
Human Computer Interaction
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-328339DOI: 10.1109/TAFFC.2022.3213269ISI: 001236687600001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85139846163OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-328339DiVA, id: diva2:1764022
Note
QC 20230608
2023-06-082023-06-082024-06-17Bibliographically approved