Special Tracks

ACII 2019 invited contributions (papers and abstracts) to the following special tracks:
(A collection of Special Track abstracts is available here: Special Track abstracts)
 

Neural and Psychological Models of Affect

Organizers:

Luke Chang (Dartmouth College), Giorgio Coricelli (University of Southern California)

The organizers together bring expertise from the areas of psychology, economics, reinforcement-learning, neuroeconomics, and cognitive/affective/social neuroscience.
 

Description:

Computational models of emotion have emerged from the intersection between psychology and other disciplines such as computer science, economics, and neuroscience. These models have attempted to formalize how emotions arise from interacting with the environment and impact subsequent behavioral actions. For example, value associated with specific actions can change based on expectation violations (e.g., reward prediction error), beliefs about counterfactual information (e.g., regret), and beliefs about others beliefs (e.g., guilt). These types of models can be used by neuroscientists to characterize how these processes might be encoded in the brain. More recently, neuroscientists have also attempted to identify how affective information might be represented in the brain in the absence of a formal encoding model by decoding a specific affective state from brain activity using supervised learning techniques.
In the spirit of this rich tradition of interdisciplinary work, the 8th International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2019) invites papers and abstracts to The Neural and Psychological Models of Affect track on research topics focused on understanding how affect is computed in both our minds and brains. Topics of interest might include: computational models of affect from a psychological perspective, modeling affect and emotion using learning and decision-making frameworks, and understanding how affect might be encoded and decoded from brain signals measured using neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI, fNIRS, PET, EEG/iEEG,ECOG, or MEG). The goal of the neural and psychological models of affect track is to provide an opportunity for continued interaction and cross-fertilization between the ACII community and researchers from the broader psychology and neuroscience communities studying affective science.


 

Technological and Biological Bodies in Dialogue: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Multisensory Embodied Emotion and Cognition

Organizers:

Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, Stacy Marsella, Aneesha Singh, Katherine Isbister, Katerina Fotopoulou

The organizers together bring experience and views from the areas of affective computing, human-computer interaction and cognitive, affective and social neuroscience. They have already run special interest groups and workshops at conferences on the topic, including CHI 2016, Ubicomp 2016, and World Usability Day 2017.
 

Description:

The last two decades have seen a paradigm shift in our understanding of human cognition and interaction in relation to the role of one’s own body. The once prevailing assumption that the human mind can be understood by examining exclusively cognitive functions and their neural correlates has received considerable criticism. A diverse and growing community of researchers claim that mental abilities are embedded in the acting, sensing and feeling BODY, and are subject to intricate couplings between organisms and their social and technological environments. In parallel, methodological advances in neuroscience, human-computer interaction (HCI), robotics, virtual reality and wearables allow the investigation of the role of the body in cognition and interaction in unprecedented ways. Increasingly cheap and ubiquitous body sensing and feedback technologies offer up new opportunities and ways to alter or enhance body perception but the aims and focus of these investigations may differ between disciplines. For instance, sensory-driven changes in body perception may be used to enhance user engagement and presence in games, and also to increase body awareness for sports or physical rehabilitation and to address psychological and emotional barriers related to body perception in certain medical conditions, or to explore new artistic avenues.