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Learning via Facial Expressions

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In our electronic era online tutoring and even degrees are becoming more and more reputable and sought after.  A few years ago this type of learning was thought to be less beneficial than the traditional classroom/teacher setting.

Is it just as effective to learn online as it is in the classroom?

New software has been developed that aims at bridging the gaps between human interaction and technology.

Researchers at North Carolina State University  have created a new program coined “JavaTutor” that tracks how students feel as well as the effectiveness of online courses via facial expressions.

With growing classroom sizes (in both college and grammar school) and a variety of skill levels in each class, many teachers have a difficult time delineating which students are really getting the material and which are lost.  This new technology could alleviate that problem for online schools, tutoring companies and regular classrooms by acclimating learning and online courses to the lifestyle of today’s youth.

Are online courses more acclimated to today’s youth’s life styles ? – See more at: http://www.humintell.com/?p=25938&preview=true#sthash.wwlaMfjy.dpuf
Are online courses more acclimated to today’s youth’s life styles ? – See more at: http://www.humintell.com/?p=25938&preview=true#sthash.wwlaMfjy.dpuf

PsychCentral reported that 65 college students were tracked using this automated Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT) to evaluate their facial expressions as they were engaged in a one-on-one online tutoring session.  The students were tested before and after each tutoring session as well as asked their feedback on how effective they felt the tutorial was as well as how much they learned.

“The program, JavaTutor, will not only respond to what a student knows, but to each student’s feelings of frustration or engagement.  This is important because research shows that student emotion plays an important role in the learning process.”

Data from CERT as well as student assessments and test scores were used in creating models to predict how effective a tutoring session was based on the student’s facial expressions that indicated feeling’s of frustration or engagement.

MIT Technology Review also commented that ‘this hints at what could prove to be a broader revolution in the application of emotion-sensing technology.  Computers and other devices that identify and respond to emotion—a field of research known as “affective computing”—are starting to emerge from academia.’

The Computerized Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT) was able to identify facial movements associated with learning-centered emotions, such as frustration or concentration and the automated program’s findings were consistent with expert human assessments more than 85% of the time.

Co-author of the study Kristy Boyer, Ph. D. noted, “This work is part of a larger effort to develop artificial intelligence software to teach students computer science.”

If JavaTutor technology proves to be effective for online tutoring sessions this could have huge implications for schools across the nation.  Many schools fall short of test score expectations and as a result of that they are labeld Title 1 schools and must offer their students free tutoring sessions that are paid for by the state.

If this software engages and teaches material effectively it could replace expensive tutors throughout the nation and have a huge impact on middle schools, high schools, adult education as well as college courses.

What do You Think of Online Tutoring/College Courses? Can they be just as effective as teacher/classroom instruction?

Infants Recognize Emotions

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A recent article by Popular Science  reports on a new study from Psychology professor Ross Flom and colleagues that found babies are able to read each other’s emotional expressions as early as 5 months old.  The study which was published in Infancy journal comes right after similar research  published by Flom on infants’ ability to understand the moods of dogs, monkeys and classical music .

Flom explains that while babies are unable to communicate through language they do learn how to communicate through affect, or emotion.  This implies that not only can they read emotional expressions of their infant peers, but they can perceive and associate changes in those expressions as well.  Flom points out, “… it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect.”   This change in affect is where babies are able to “read” each other while most adults are left scratching their heads.

The study, held at Brigham Young University which was co-authored by Professor Lorraine Bahrick  and  graduate student Mariana Vaillant-Molina from Florida International University, looked at 40 babies ranging from 3.5 to 5 months old.

The study placed baby participants in front of two monitors.  One displayed a video of a happy baby and the other displayed a video of an unhappy baby.  While the babies were placed in front of the monitors, researchers played audio from a third baby.  The audio was either of a happy, laughing baby or of a sad, crying baby.

Researchers noticed that when the audio reflected happy baby noises the infants focused on the happy baby video and when the audio was sad they looked more to the sad video.

Past studies found that babies (not infants) are able to perceive facial expressions of emotion in familiar adults at 6 months and all other adults by 7 months.  However, this study takes it a step further documenting that infants as young as 5 months (but not as young as 3.5 months) have the capability to perceive and recognize emotional expressions in other infants

Flom substantiates, “These findings add to our understanding of early infant development by reiterating the fact that babies are highly sensitive to and comprehend some level of emotion.” Flom goes on to say, “Babies learn more in their first 2 1/2 years of life than they do the rest of their lifespan, making it critical to examine how and what young infants learn and how this helps them learn other things.”

Flom would like to take his recent findings a step further by testing whether infants younger than 5 months are able to demonstrate this same level of perception by watching and hearing clips of themselves.

What do you think? Will babies be able to read emotion even earlier if it’s their own?

Facial Cues that Do & Don’t Indicate Lying

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4GWAR, the nations counter terrorism, homeland security and  new technologies blog recently did an article on Humintell’s Director, Dr. David Matsumoto and his speech at a Human Geography Conference outside of Washington D.C.

The article’s focus was on the “geography” of  the human and that role in deception detection.  Human geography is a multi-discipline study of not only the physical nature of the earth but the people who live on it and how they relate among themselves and with others along political, economic, cultural, linguistic, geographic lines.

Dr. Matsumoto pointed out in this conference as well as many times before that there are literally hundreds of studies that indicate the average individual (and sometimes even the improperly trained expert) can only detect real deception about 50% of the time.

“Bottom line: we’re no better [at it] than flipping a coin,” Matsumoto said.  One good way to delve into a more in depth conversation with a witness or suspect is to ask the same types of questions in varying ways (referring to the event in question) and closely watch their facial expressions, more specifically their microexpressions.

This is very tricky and can take, even the expert, years to become proficient in such techniques.  However, these microexpressions are only indicators that there could be more to the story than is being revealed not that there is concrete evidence of deception.

For instance, if your interrogating someone and say, “Were you at the victims house the night of the murder?” and they display a microexpression of fear followed by disgust, then there is probably more to the story then they are verbally revealing and that, that particular line of questioning should be explored more.

“There is no such thing as a Pinocchio response,” Matsumoto, founder and director of the Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory at San Francisco State, stated, “There’s no set of behaviors that reliably differentiate between who’s telling the truth and who isn’t.“

Typical Deception Myths to Avoid:

1.  Liars avoid eye contact.

2. Deceivers look up and to the left or the right when they are telling a lie.

3.  Liars scratch their nose often.

In a similar article on deception and new technologies, Biometric Update.com reveals the new wave in understanding a person’s emotional state.

Emotient, which specializes in facial expression analysis, and iMotions, an eye-tracking and biometric software platform company, have announced that Procter and Gamble, The United States Air Force and Yale University are its first customers for a newly integrated platform that combines facial expressions recognition and analysis, eye-tracking, EEG and GSR technologies.

This new technology is being designed for a variety of fields such as gaming, scientific, academic and marketing research.

Add to the deception myths or just point out what you think is most important in deception detection!