The Embodied User: Corporeal Awareness and Media Technology

Human beings are proficient users of tools and technology. We can acquire the skills necessary to hit a nail accurately with a hammer, or to drive a car safely through a crowded city. A few of us can even learn to play Vivaldi's Le Quattro Stagioni fluently on the violin. At times, our interactions with a technological artifact appear so effortless, that the distinction between the artifact and the body starts to fade. People with a visual impairment, for example, often report to feel their sensations at the tip of their canes rather than their fingers. Likewise, car drivers sometimes claim that the car becomes an extension of their own body; as if their bodily boundaries have somehow shifted toward the outer boundaries of the car. In our opinion, human tool use can best be understood withing an embodied/situated cognition framework (i.e., the embodied user). Questions are: What does it mean to be embodied? What is the role of human embodiment in the various ways in which tools can become "part" of our body? What can we learn from experimentally induced bodily illusions, such as the rubber-hand (see below), with respect to improving media technologies?

The rubber-hand illusion

In the "rubber-hand illusion" which Botvinick and Cohen (1998) where the first to report in Nature, a person senses a fake hand to be an actual part of his or her body; as if it is his or her own. This illusion is induced by stimulating a person's concealed hand in precise synchrony with a visible fake one. The rubber-hand illusion illustrates that our bodily boundaries are placid rather than rigid, and that they are continuously updated on the basis of available sensorymotor information. To get a grasp of the astonishing effect of a distorted sense of body ownership, see this movie (Windows Media File, 2.82 MB, author unknown). In our research, we aim to determine the personal factors (e.g., the characteristics of an individual's psychological makeup) and situational factors (e.g., the appearance of the foreign object) that constrain or facilitate the development of a vivid rubber-hand illusion.

Mediated Social Touch

Touching is an important part of our social interaction repertoire. In recent years several designers and researchers have developed prototypes that allow for mediated social touch; enabling people to touch each other over a distance by means of tactile feedback technology. Such prototypes commonly consist of relative simple tactile displays, such as vibration motors. Question is: Is such electromechanical stimulation perceived of as real human touch? That is, is the system of social norms and expectations that defines unmediated touch also operative in mediated situations in which human touch is replaced by electromechanical stimulation. We test this assumption empirically by examining response similarities between real and mediated touch. Such experiments point toward ways in which mediated social touch technology might be improved (e.g., by adding visual feedback). At the same time, research on the social psychology of touch might benefit from mediated social touch (e.g., the technological mediation of touch allows researchers to isolate the touch acts from all other nonverbal cues with which they are naturally confounded).This research is part of the PASION project, which is funded by the EC (IST-6-27654) within the 6th Framework FET Programme.

Measuring Academic Ambitions

The aim of this project is to measures the attitudes of academic staff with respect to the academic competences that university students should attain. It employs Campbell's paradigm of attitude measurement to scale the different competence dimensions or competence areas as defined in Criteria for Academic Bachelor’s and Master’s Curricula booklet as developed by the three Dutch technical universities.

Privacy Need Measurement

The aim of this research is to measures people's privacy needs with the goal-directed behavior approach. According to Irwin Altman's influential theory of privacy regulation, people aim to maintain an optimal amount of social exchange with others; either increasing or decreasing their social interactions if suboptimal levels of social exchange are encountered. Altman's theory thus predicts two privacy goals, achieved by different behavioral means: The need for privacy, and the need for socializing. The goal-directed behavior approach does not require a respondent's introspection into his or her privacy needs, but is based on the idea that people's needs for privacy and social interaction can be assessed by a systematic inspection of the behavioral efforts they engage in to satisfy their individual needs. For example, an office worker who goes to his or her own room to be more private, but refrains form closing the office door, presumably, does not experience a high need for privacy. In contrast, an office worker who often calls in ill, and when at the office, asks colleagues to more quiet, keeps his or her office door closed, and has lunch alone, must have a high need for privacy.